What Do I Think?

So what do I think about the world? Is it heading in the right direction or is it doomed? How can we either keep it going in the right direction or prevent it from collapsing? The truth is, I don't know yet.

I started this blog to present my views on Tracinski's "What Went Right?" series. Part of the purpose of this blog was to better understand his theory by writing about it. Since his view is different from the common, modern-day Objectivist view, I also needed to understand that view which has its origins in the writing of Ayn Rand, in particular the essay For the New Intellectual, so I'm writing about that too.

I don't fully understand either view at this point, so I don't know what I think. I find good points in both theories, and there are points in both that don't feel right to me, but I know that's not a reason to disregard them--it's a reason to study them more.

Here are the two viewpoints, as I understand them today:

• Ayn Rand (writing 1960-1981): America has been on the wrong path since the 1930s due, ultimately, to bad philosophy from the university philosophy departments. The only way to change course is for New Intellectuals to learn a philosophy for living on earth and to promote it, in particular to defend capitalism on moral grounds.
• Robert Tracinski (analyzing the years 1980-present): The culture has not accepted a philosophy for living on earth, yet we have not collapsed. The forces of global capitalism, education in science and technology, and representative government have caused many people to adopt an implicit philosophy for living on earth in a bottom-up approach. This is what has saved us.

I suppose the easiest way to settle the question of who is right it to build a time machine and go one hundred years in the future. Did the world fall into countless dictatorships after a world-wide economic collapse? Or did the world continue to improve, with Africa becoming a first-world continent? I'll let you know what I find when I get back.

Making Philosophy Professors Obsolete

In For the New Intellectual, written in 1960, Ayn Rand calls for a new type of intellectual who will defend capitalism on moral grounds and thus finish the job started by the Founding Fathers: the establishment of a fully free, capitalist society. As already discussed, she showed that in a capitalist society, the culture gets its philosophical ideas from the university which gets them from the professional philosophers. However, in calling for a new type of intellectual, Ayn Rand clearly believed that other sources of philosophical ideas were valid; after all, she chose to first present her philosophy of Objectivism in the form of her novels: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Now, 50 years since she wrote For the New Intellectual, we have even more avenues to learn philosophy thanks to the dramatic advancements in technology. This post will review those advancements and how they personally helped me to learn a philosophy for living on earth. The new sources are the following (dates are estimates of when the technology became popular):

• Television (1963)
• The internet, academia version (1986)
• Talk Radio (1987)
• "Big-Box" bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble (1997)
• Amazon.com (2001)
• Google (2004)
• YouTube (2005)
• Wikipedia (2006)
• Kindle (2007)
• Khan Academy? (2009)

In 1960, television was not yet a regular source of news and commentary like it is today. It wasn't until 1963 that a full half-hour news show was broadcast, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. However, as the new medium became more popular, Ayn Rand used it to promote her philosophy, appearing on popular shows such as Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue. I have found several good shows promoting free markets such as John Stossel's specials and Penn & Teller's B.S. And even when popular shows like Lost and Mad Men show the "bad guys" reading or discussing Ayn Rand, I believe the exposure only helps to spread good ideas even though that may not be the intent.

I first learned of Ayn Rand from the early internet. I was at the University of Illinois in 1993 and we had a Silicon Graphics workstation running Unix. In those days, which was before e-mail, you could "talk" to someone on another computer even if they were in a different city (which was amazing back then!). A former post-doc who had left Illinois logged onto the computer I was using and started a "talk" session with me (which was really just typing back and forth). We weren't good friends and I think we were both "talking" just to use the new internet technology. I mentioned that I was reading The Brothers Karamazov and bragged that it was 800 pages long. He wrote back that that was nothing--he had just finished Atlas Shrugged which was almost 1200 pages long! He didn't say it was a great book and that it changed his life (I don't think it did), just that it was really long! I asked him what it was about and he said something about being an ode to capitalism. That was enough to intrigue me so I decided to check it out after I'd finished The Brothers Karamazov. Later on, I also used the early internet to read and post to the Usenet group alt.philosophy.objectivism. I ended up not learning much from this free-for-all discussion of Objectivism, except perhaps to reinforce the fact that the best source of Ayn Rand's ideas is Ayn Rand herself. However, it was useful in that it raised a lot of questions which prompted me to look for answers.

It wasn't until 1987 that political talk radio took off because that was when the Reagan administration put an end to the Fairness Doctrine. Up until that point, radio shows were required to present "both sides of the argument," and this had the effect that no sides were presented. Rush Limbaugh is the most famous talk show host and he has, from time to time, discussed philosophical issues and has even read from articles by Robert Tracinski. But the most philosophical show has been The Leonard Peikoff Show which I was able to listen to for most of 1995 while I was at UCLA. One of my favorite shows was Is Perfection Possible?.

After I had heard about Atlas Shrugged, it was fortunate that the campus bookstore at the University of Illinois had a copy (next to a copy of Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand). This was before the "big-box" bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble were everywhere. I would later visit many of these book stores looking for more books by Ayn Rand and on philosophy in general. These large book stores, which had entire Philosophy sections, helped spread Ayn Rand's ideas by carrying not only Atlas Shrugged but also The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Philosophy: Who Needs It.

I just love amazon.com. No longer do we need to search multiple Borders or Barnes & Noble stores (or worse, used book stores!) trying to find the books we want only to be disappointed that they don't carry them. Almost any book we want to read can be ordered within minutes on amazon.com. It is unlikely that I would have found The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in a bricks-and-mortar store, but, as I can see when I search for it on amazon.com, I purchased this book from them on February 25, 2006. And I'm glad I read this book as discussed in this previous post. Another great thing about amazon.com are the reviews, for example this excellent critique from John McCaskey on The Logical Leap.

The ability to search the bulk of the world's knowledge and return results in less that a second is simply amazing. A Google search for "Ayn Rand" just now popped up "About 16,300,000 results (0.25 seconds)." The number five result was a news story entitled "Obamacare Makes Ayn Rand Look Prescient," an article I read because of the Google search. This is the beauty of Google. For people new to Ayn Rand, Google is an incredible resource to learn more about her and her philosophy. Perhaps they heard that Ayn Rand was part of the red scare in the fifties. They can type in "ayn rand mccarthyism" and the first link goes directly to a transcript of Ayn Rand's testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee from January 1945. Simply amazing!

For people who would rather watch videos than read a book (which is not me!), YouTube has lots of first-hand material from Ayn Rand. In addition to the Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue interviews linked to above, one can also easily find interviews with Mike Wallace, Tom Snyder and others. Surprising to me, there's even a video from an ethics class at Marist College teaching Ayn Rand's theory of egoism. I haven't used YouTube as much as the other technologies to learn about Ayn Rand's philosophy, but it's nice to see some of these old interviews.  And it is certainly a good opportunity to introduce people to Ayn Rand and her ideas.

I use Wikipedia all the time. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly unbiased and accurate for a free encyclopedia. Entries on Ayn Rand and Objectivism are pretty good considering how controversial she is. For someone new to Ayn Rand, it's nice to have a Bibliography of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and this was even useful to me, after studying her philosophy for 20 years, in that I found new information about her such as Memories of Ayn Rand by John Hospers, a philosophy professor at Brooklyn college and later at the University of Southern California. (Until one minute ago, I didn't know where he taught. But I found out from his Wikipedia page!) Wikipedia is a good place to start to get the basics and to get reasonably unbiased information on topics such as Libertarianism and the Objectivist Movement.

One of the reasons I love amazon.com is because they invented the Kindle. Is it an exaggeration to say that the Kindle and other e-readers are an invention as important as the Gutenberg printing press? Perhaps. But in terms of the ability to spread ideas easily, the Kindle is more powerful than the printing press. More than one million books are available on Kindle, and while it's not quite up to the Library of Congress (over 22 million books), it is constantly expanding. One of the great features of the Kindle is the "Send sample now" button where you can try out a book for free. I used this feature to skip over Human Action and to read George Reisman's Capitalism instead (as described here). It's wonderful that anyone with a Kindle (or just a computer) can download the sample of Atlas Shrugged or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and quickly judge for themselves if Ayn Rand has anything useful to say.

Khan Academy is a free, on-line education site with college-level lectures primarily on math and science. I believe on-line education is the future, and Khan Academy is a great start. They don't yet have a philosophy section, but that just means there's an opportunity for another person or organization to make their own on-line courses on a philosophy for living on earth. On-line universities also have the potential to teach people more about economics and what capitalism actually is. A misunderstanding of economics and capitalism is currently a problem with some Khan Academy lectures such as "When Capitalism is great and not-so-great." But Khan Academy has shown that on-line education is a viable option for education. On-line universities are probably the best chance we have to finally make the university philosophy professors obsolete (that is, until they start teaching something useful).

In 1960, Ayn Rand wrote in For the New Intellectual: "When the intellectuals rebelled against the 'commercialism' of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality." Fifty years ago, the universities had a monopoly on philosophical ideas which is why most of the history of capitalism has been a "top-down" approach from the university professors down through many layers ultimately to the man in the street. But this is no longer the case. Today's honest, active mind has access to an incredible marketplace of ideas which is constantly expanding. The New Intellectuals of today should continue spreading the right ideas by all avenues available to them.

Transmitting Ideas from the Ivory Tower

In a previous post, I cited a quote by Ayn Rand from For the New Intellectual which seemed to suggest that history is determined by philosophers because they transmit ideas in a "top-down" approach. The full quote is:

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the "ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called "humanities," but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man's means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. (p. 26)

In that previous post, I mentioned that I thought Rand only intended this quote to pertain to the modern era since she also identifies businessmen along with philosophers as "twin-motors of progress." I want to expand on this interpretation because recently I reread Tracinski's article Anthemgate where he comments on the quote above.

In my original presentation of my ["What Went Right?"] series, I chose not to spend a lot of time demonstrating the pervasiveness of this ["top-down"] approach, largely because I wanted to focus attention on my own positive theory, rather than on my criticisms of other Objectivists. It turns out this attempt was somewhat naïve; I did not realize that in the authority-centered system of the Objectivist movement, the most important issue would not be the evidence I provided for my own theory, but rather my deviation from the accepted philosophical authorities.

In the current context, therefore, it seems appropriate to return to this issue and take it head-on. Reluctantly, I have concluded that the error does go back to Ayn Rand, particularly this analogy from her essay "For the New Intellectual": [here he gives the quote above]

I agree with much of what Tracinski wrote in "What Went Right." I agree that Objectivists have had a "doom mentality" for the last fifty years and that much of it springs from the quote from Ayn Rand above. However, I believe Ayn Rand is being taken out of context.

To understand the context of the "ivory tower" quote, let's look at the overall structure of For the New Intellectual:

1. Introduction: America at present (1960) is intellectually bankrupt and this is not good! (p. 10-12, Signet paperback edition)
2. Attila and the Witch Doctor: The professional intellectual and businessman are modern professions, only since the industrial revolution.  Most of history has been ruled by the man of faith and the man of force, designated Attila and the Witch Doctor. (p. 12-20)
3. The Producer: A producer is any man who works and knows what he is doing. She contrasts the producer with Attila and the Witch Doctor and points out that these three archetypes are the only three fundamental modes for man to live on earth. (p. 20-22)
4. History Review: Rand discusses the role of ideas in various times and societies--Ancient Greece, Greco-Roman, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and the founding of the United States. She shows that for each society, the degree of success correlates with the degree to which the producers were free from Attila and the Witch Doctor. (p. 22-25)
5. The Businessman and the Intellectual: Capitalism, the system on which the U.S. was formed, created two new types of man: the businessman and the intellectual. (She later clarifies that it was the professional intellectual that was created by capitalism.) It is in this section that the quote at the top appears. Here she states clearly that under capitalism, in the ideal society, "two key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman." (p. 25-28)
6. Professional Philosophers: In the history of capitalism, the businessmen have done a spectacular job of advancing mankind.  However, the professional philosophers have taken us in the opposite direction.  This section reviews the major progression of ideas from the philosophers, from Descartes, to Hume, to Kant. She discusses Kant at length, including his influence on Hegel. She finishes with later major philosophers, Comte, Spenser, Nietzsche, and Marx, and how they became destroyers of capitalism when their profession should have been defending it. (p. 28-38)
7. The Invention of Socialism: The professional philosophers did not get from the businessmen what they had previously gotten from Attila (material support and respect) so they set out to destroy him. They did this by inventing Socialism which made the businessman immoral. (p. 38-44)
8. The Surrender of the Businessmen: Businessmen became anti-intellectual when it came to philosophy and accepted the role of Attila. Our culture has come full circle and now the twin-motors of progress invented by capitalism have taken on the roles of the Witch Doctor and Attila. (p. 44-50)
9. The New Intellectuals: What we need now are new intellectuals who come from both camps: businessmen interested in philosophy and thinkers interested in how to live in the real world. The whole article is a call for new intellectuals to defend capitalism on moral grounds. (p. 50-57)

Looking at the overall organization of the article we can see that the quote on "transmitting ideas from the 'ivory tower'" comes after a review of history (part 4) and the recognition that capitalism created two new archetypes: the professional intellectual and the businessman (beginning of part 5). The quote in question describes how the professional intellectual acts--or, perhaps, should act--in a capitalist, free society. This is evident by the very next passage after the quote (still part of the same paragraph):

The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all other fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But in the racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all the others, men need knowledge wider than their particular specialties, they need those who can point the way to a better mousetrap--or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the better view of existence. [p. 26-27, italics are mine]

Tracinski writes in Anthemgate: "I should note that while the top-down premise does appear in Ayn Rand's theory of history, it is not consistent throughout, and it is very clear that she held an opposite view implicitly." Ayn Rand did not consistently use explicit terms to make clear the difference between intellectuals before the industrial revolution and professional intellectuals after that time, but she does state early on that there is a difference:

Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in the primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect--the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists--were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. (p. 12-13)

Ayn Rand was very careful with what she wrote and the words she used. Note that in the "ivory tower" quote at the top, the first three words are "The professional intellectual..." This is further evidence that the rest of the paragraph describing a top-down approach refers only to history since the industrial revolution, even though she uses the shortened "intellectual" after the first sentence.

I agree with Tracinski that "the top-down premise, once it had gained a toe-hold in Objectivism, had a profound effect on the Objectivist movement." But I disagree that "the error does go back to Ayn Rand." The only time she promotes the top-down approach to history is when discussing modern societies under capitalism where professional intellectuals exist. She then goes on to show how this top-down process worked after the industrial revolution; for example, the ideas of Kant and Marx led to the Russian Revolution and the advent of communism in practice (part 6).

As for the idea that Rand thought the world could only be saved by Objectivist philosophy professors at Harvard and Yale in a top-down approach (as Peikoff seems to believe), the whole article is a call for new intellectuals who can come from any profession:

Who are to be the New Intellectuals? Any man or woman who is willing to think. (p. 50)

Those who could become the New Intellectuals are America's hidden assets: their number is probably greater than anyone can estimate; they exist in every profession, even among the present intellectuals. (p. 50)

The New Intellectual will be a reunion of the twins who should never have been separated: the intellectual and the businessman. He can come from among the best--that is: the most rational--men who may still exist in both camps. In place of an involuntary Witch Doctor and a reluctant Attila, the reunion will produce two new types: the practical thinker and the philosophical businessman. (p. 51-52)

I would like to point out that, 50 years later, we now have excellent examples of these two new types: Robert Tracinski is a practical thinker, and John Allison is a philosophical businessman.

Hopefully this post does not come off as a desperate attempt to maintain the infallibility of Ayn Rand--my previous post was written to guard against that perception. Rather, I believe For the New Intellectual is a valuable guide to understand the role of ideas in history, but it requires careful study to fully understand what Rand was saying.

(In general, I hate posts that quote Ayn Rand extensively. I'd rather read original viewpoints from the person writing. Quoting Rand also gives the appearance of blind acceptance of everything she wrote rather than independent thinking. So, to counter-balance this post, my next post will be my own thoughts on how technology is helping spread the right ideas and making the university philosophers obsolete.)

Why Ayn Rand is Always Right

Ayn Rand wasn't always right, it just seems that way because she had an extraordinary method of thinking which she used relentlessly: reason. Reason is simply logic applied to the facts of reality to form abstractions or conceptions. The genius of Ayn Rand was that she did this consistently with all of her knowledge all the way down to the fundamentals. So whenever she made a pronouncement, she knew exactly what facts supported it and the chain of reasoning that led all the way back to basic axioms such as "existence exists."

Because she knew that man is not omniscient nor infallible, she was careful to only say and write publicly what she could demonstrate all the way back to fundamentals, which leads to the impression that she is always right. However, by reading her journals we can see her thought processes in action and see that she's just like the rest of us in that she made mistakes. The best example I can think of is her brutally honest grappling of the mistake of having an affair with Nathaniel Branden (which, amazingly, was with the permission of both of their spouses) as recorded in The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics:

I think and feel strongly that our relationship was a mistake from the start--that there was and is no way to implement it in practice. [...] We were right to attempt it originally. But we should have broken it about 8 years ago. [p. 254]

And later she is struggling to understand Nathaniel Branden's odd and irrational behavior, wanting to find an explanation that might excuse his bad behavior:

The evidence, so far, is still evenly divided between an evil explanation and a (perverted) good one—as it has been all during our last 5 months. [...Here she summarized for herself the two possible explanations as she sees them.]

Actually, does it matter to me which is the true explanation? I seem to feel that the second one is good (and, by implication, hopeful), but that is probably my greatest mistake at present.

The results, in reality, on earth, are the same. In fact, morally, the second explanation is worse than the first. The first is merely a mind-body split, which is bad enough, but it is less horrible—monstrously, uselessly, wastefully horrible—than the second. [p.372-373]

These quotes are by no means intended to give Ayn Rand "feet of clay." Rather, they show her incredible dedication to rationality and honesty in dealing with every aspect of her life. To read her journal entries, written for herself, is to see a great mind at work dealing with an incredibly emotional subject—being rejected by a man she once loved. They are a lesson on how to think about one's life with complete rationality and honesty.

I believe the key to Ayn Rand's genius was identified by her early on in this journal entry from May 15, 1934 when she was 29 (from Journals of Ayn Rand):

Some day I'll find out whether I'm an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts.  Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy?  Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence. [italics are mine]

Here we see that Ayn Rand was committed to understanding all of her instincts and feelings in a rational manner, understanding their causes in terms of fundamentals, and that this requires an unerring commitment to honesty.

Why am I saying all this? In the next post I will be defending a paragraph from Ayn Rand's essay For the New Intellectual which has been misinterpreted by Objectivists and is central to Tracinski's What Went Right series. I have already addressed this in a previous post, but my argument there seems to let Rand off on a technicality so I'm going to revisit it.

Even though I am a great admirer of Ayn Rand, I have no need to see that she is always right. Rather, I want to know what in her philosophy is useful to me in living my life and in helping put America (and the world) on a better course. I am a big fan of hers because most of what she has written has been useful to me once I understood it. In the passage that I will discuss in the next post, I only want to know: What did she mean? What was the context? Is it true?

Damn Communists!... Damn Capitalists!

I pass this Shell station every day on my way home from work so I notice when gas prices go up or down. Whenever they go up, I think to myself, "Damn Communists!" because Big Government policies lead to higher gas prices (primarily increased money supply and environmental regulations). But every time the price goes down, I think to myself, "Damn Capitalists!" because somewhere, someone, somehow figured out a way to extract energy from the earth in a more efficient manner, thereby increasing the supply and lowering the price. I damn them (only in jest) because their hard work and ingenuity allow the "Communists" to survive another day.

Seeing the world as a battle between the Capitalists and the Communists (or Socialists, or Democrats, or Compassionate Conservatives—they're all basically the same) is one of the central ideas in Atlas Shrugged. And even though I've read that book four times now, the idea didn't really sink in until I learned more about economics.

I wasn't motivated to learn about economics until I lost over $100,000 on my house and Obama was elected for a second term in 2012. The loss on my house (so far just "on paper" according to zillow.com, but it will be very real whenever we decide to move) was caused by the real estate crash of 2008, the root causes of which I wanted to understand. The reelection of Obama in 2012 concerned me because the conservative press had been highlighting the poor economic policies of Obama and were predicting doom for America if he was reelected.

I wanted to better understand the prediction that America was doomed and so I read After America by Mark Steyn. The book is funny and has lots of good information on the decline of America, but it is light on specifics as to how America will collapse. It talks about the unsustainability of our entitlement programs, our declining school standards, the falling value of the dollar, our increasing national debt and our cowardly foreign policy as things that weaken our country. But it does not point to a fundamental reason why America is doomed by these things or the process by which the impending collapse will occur.  In this regard, it was a disappointment, but I kept up my search for answers.

The wealth of facts that Steyn used in his book made me realize that my history of America was not very strong so I looked for a book to give me more background information. I chose Lies the Government Told You by Judge Andrew Napolitano. As a history of the corruption and deceit of politicians throughout America's history, it was very good. The facts in the book make a very good argument against Big Government.  In terms of economics, the most useful chapter was on the Federal Reserve.  As Ron Paul says in the introduction, "While there is substantial literature explaining the myriad ways the Federal Reserve damages our economy, there is not nearly as much writing that explains how the Federal Reserve System violates the Constitution and ties the Federal Reserve to the general assault on liberty waged by Big Government. This book helps fill that gap."

While Napolitano's book was good at telling us what not to do (i.e. let the government interfere in the economy), it was not strong on what we should do (i.e. turn to laissez-faire Capitalism). So next I turned to John Allison's The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope. Not only did this book make a strong case for pure capitalism, it also explained in detail why the housing market crashed in 2008. As the CEO of BB&T Bank (the #12 largest bank in the U.S. by assets), Allison saw the housing market collapse first-hand from the inside. His book is a "tell-all" of sorts on the manipulation of government into the inner workings of the banks and the economy in general. He amply demonstrates that the recent financial crisis was caused by government interference in the economy and makes a strong case for a return to laissez-faire capitalism, which America had for its first hundred years or so. I highly recommend this book.

The final book on my journey to realizing the on-going battle between capitalism and communism was George Reisman's Capitalism. I wanted, finally, to learn basic economics in order to avoid another $100,000-plus mistake (like my house) and almost took the advice of Allison from his book above when he said, "A deep understanding of the Austrian economic school is a tremendous competitive advantage in making long-term economic decisions. (You should read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises.)" I downloaded the sample of Human Action to my Kindle and started reading. Right off the bat, I was put off. The first section of the introduction is entitled "Economics and Praxeology." What, I wondered, is praxeology. By simply tapping the word on my Kindle, the definition came up: the study of human conduct.  OK, Mises likes to use fancy words; I'll keep reading.  But it got worse.  Later in the introduction, he wrote, "In the Methodensteit between the Austrian economists and the Prussian Historical School, the self-styled 'intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,'[...]" and then on the next page, "It is seemly for him to remember Spinoza's dictum: Sane sicut lux se ipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic Veritas norma sui et falsi est." I thought to myself, isn't there another economics text that speaks plain English?

I remembered see at an Objectivist friend's house the book Capitalism by George Reisman so I downloaded the sample onto my Kindle. As difficult as Mises' style is to read, Reisman's style is incredibly easy to read while at the same time being incredibly thorough in his explanations of economics. Reading the preface (which I believe is available for free in the Kindle sample) is a beautiful example of independent thinking and describes Reisman's career goal: "I undertook the study of economics for the explicit purpose of finding economic arguments in defense of individual rights, i.e., property rights." His book Capitalism is the result of that quest. To get there, he studied under two great minds, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. By integrating the knowledge from both Mises and Rand, Reisman's Capitalism is the only thorough explanation and defense of capitalism on both practical and moral grounds. I was stunned when I realized that a complete defense had not existed before Capitalism's publication in 1996. (Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal from 1967 was the first presentation of a moral defense.)

Just as Ayn Rand built a complete philosophical system from fundamental truths (e.g. existence exists), Reisman defends capitalism from the ground up:

Part 1, The Foundations of Economics, explains the nature of economics and capitalism, including the role of a philosophy of reason in economic activity. It then shows that, based on his nature as a rational being, man possesses a limitless need for wealth.  This, in turn, is shown to give rise to the central problem of economic life, which is how steadily to raise the productivity of human labor, that is, the quantity and quality of the goods that can be produced per unit of labor. Next, it is shown why the continuing rise in the productivity of labor is not prevented by any lack of natural resources, indeed, how man is capable of progressively enlarging the supply of useable, accessible natural resources as part of the very same process by which he increases the production of products.

It was not until I understood capitalism that I realized its incredible power (the essay I, Pencil is an excellent, condensed summary of the power of capitalism). So while there are thousands of Philosophy professors, journalists, cable news anchors and movie makers spouting bad philosophy, there are millions of Americans working every day to invent new goods or to improve the efficiency in the production of existing goods that we use to survive and thrive in our daily lives.  Certainly, the battle between the Capitalists and the Communists is an unstable one and cannot go on forever. And if we hadn't had the free market reforms of the eighties, we might not have survived. But whenever the American people see the true consequences of the Communist ideas (as they are starting to with Obamacare), they swing back toward free markets and capitalism. I believe a big part of "what went right" in the last thirty years was the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their subsequent unleashing of the forces of capitalism.

John Tamny on What Went Right

I started this blog about a week ago to discuss Robert Tracinski's What Went Right. Yesterday morning I took a break from posting because I wasn't quite sure what my next post should be and instead decided to catch up on my favorite blogs. One of them is John Tamny's column on Forbes.com, and to my surprise, three of his recent posts are related to the subject of What Went Right.

The first is a book review of The Seven Fat Years which came out in 1992 and which Tamny describes as "one of the greatest economics books ever written." The "seven fat years" refers to the years 1983-1990 when Reagan's policies of increased economic freedom paid off and the economy grew in leaps and bounds. In Tamny's history, the '60s and '70s were a time of economic errors and low growth, but then the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years were boom times resulting from more economic freedom and better money policy. But then we took a downturn with Bush II and Obama with their inflationary money policies, increased federal spending, and more regulations.

I agree with Tamny's assessment, and I believe most of "what went right" since the 1980s--as described by Tamny and Tracinski--were the results of better economic policy in the eighties and nineties. Tracinski cites the fall of communism and the spread of global capitalism as two major, positive events. Both can be linked to the increased prosperity of the '80s. The Soviet Union went bankrupt, in part by trying to keep up with the arms race against America in the 1980s.  And countries like India and China would not have been motivated to move toward market economies if they hadn't seen the wealth produced in the '80s and '90s.

The second post from Tamny is a rebuttal to the many columns by Mark Steyn on the imminent demise of America. I've read Steyn's book After America, and while quite entertaining, it is also quite depressing as Steyn shows how America has declined over the last century and makes a convincing case that we're headed in the wrong direction. Stein's foreboding of doom is similar to that of Peikoff and other present-day Objectivists, although his arguments are less philosophical.

Tamny's argument against collapse is that America, thanks to the power of capitalism, is stronger than the doomsayers realize. "It's fun and easy to join a centuries old echo chamber about how lazy we've all become, but the facts are that the U.S. is still full of the most brilliant, productive, and innovative people on earth," he writes.  He goes on to say that America could be so much richer and stronger if we didn't have the government interference, which is a shame.  As it stands now, capitalism is so far keeping pace with the bad economic policies and horrid monetary policy in order to give America low to modest growth.

I completely agree with Tamny on this point.  As I see it, the history of America for the last hundred years has been a see-saw battle between socialism and capitalism, with the American people alternating their votes between the two: as one becomes stronger, they vote for the other and reverse the trend.

The third column by Tamny is a review of the movie Atlas Shrugged: Part II. His review of the movie isn't the important part (although he liked it), but rather the fact that he read Atlas Shrugged in 1994 while in college. From this column, we learn that he is a fan of Ayn Rand, and that he has accepted some of her ideas. This, I believe, is also part of "what went right." Even though Ayn Rand isn't taught in the Philosophy departments at Harvard or Yale, she is still having an important and significant impact on the culture.

As I discussed in a previous post, Ayn Rand outlined how ideas have influenced the culture since the advent of capitalism:  from philosophy professor to other college professors and then on down from there. But since Ayn Rand published her unique philosophy in the form of the novel rather than as a philosophy text book, people have had another avenue to learn philosophical ideas. During the nineties, after I read Atlas Shrugged, I often checked bookstores to see if they carried Ayn Rand. Most of them did, and some of them even had Atlas Shrugged in the Classics section.  Now with amazon.com, forbes.com and the rest of the internet, access to ideas has never been greater. Perhaps we can change the world without changing the Philosophy departments at Harvard and Yale.

The Role of Philosophers in History

I wrote previously about the role of ideas in history; now I'll turn to the role of philosophers.  Within the Objectivist community, there seems to be some confusion about the difference between the role of ideas and the role of philosophers. I believe the confusion comes from this passage by Ayn Rand from For the New Intellectual:

[Two] key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman.

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher.  The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the "ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor--to the writer--to the artist--to the newspaperman--to the politician--to the movie maker--to the night-club singer--to the man in the street.

This passage appears to promote a top-down approach to the study of history--to identify the causes in history, we need only to look at the ideas of the philosophers from the previous period. However, I believe the passage above is Ayn Rand's view on how philosophers have influenced history in the modern era--after the introduction of capitalism--and not a general view.  The quote above is preceded by the following:

Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit.  It replaced Attila [rulers of force] and the Witch Doctor [rulers of spirit], the looter of wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge--the businessman and the intellectual.

With this context, we can see that Ayn Rand is speaking only of the time after the invention of capitalism.  Even though philosophers existed in ancient Greek times, businessmen did not, and so they could not be the "twin-motors of progress."

Thus, I believe Tracinski's observation on the role of ideas in ancient Greece and in the middle ages is consistent with Ayn Rand's writings.  Tracinski points out that philosophers were not responsible for most of the achievements of ancient Greece:

In ancient Greece, for example, virtually all of the arts and sciences were established and reached a high level of development well before a philosopher came along—Aristotle—who could identify, defend, and transmit the essence of the Greek achievement in explicit philosophical terms. It was the "Golden Age" of Greek history that came first and the philosophical ideas that followed.

So a key difference between the role of ideas and the role of philosophers in history is that philosophers only play a key role in our modern era where we have a professional class of philosophers who can influence the other university professors, the journalists, the movie makers, etc. However, saying that the philosopher's ideas determine the fate of nations does not mean that we can predict with certainty what will happen to America or any other country simply by looking at what the top universities are teaching in their Philosophy departments (even though this appears to be the basis of Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels).  One problem is that the Philosophy departments throughout the U.S. and the world are not united in a consistent message--many ideas are taught, and very few professors teach with any strong convictions.  A second problem with the theory, at least in America, is that the American public has stopped listening to the intellectuals, as discussed in this previous post.  Finally, a third problem is that the theory underestimates the other twin-motor of progress: the businessman.  I believe the hard-work and ingenuity of businessmen, scientists and engineers have kept this country strong enough to withstand the horrible policies of the politicians (from both parties). I will expand on these ideas in future posts.

Anti-Intellectual Americans

Published in 1982, Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels predicts the collapse of Western Civilization, but without a timeline. Now, 30 years later, Tracinski points out in What Went Right that not only has the world not collapsed, it's actually headed in a positive direction. Part of Peikoff's case for a collapse was in demonstrating similarities between pre-Nazi Germany and the current state of America (in the 60's & 70's). However, he noted:

There are essential differences between the United States and Germany

The hope of the United States lies in the philosophical breach between the American people and the intellectuals.

By the "intellectuals" in this context I mean those whose professional field is the humanities, the social sciences, education, or the arts, i.e., the study and/or evaluation of man and his actions.  By the "people" I mean the rest of the country, including physical scientists and businessmen.

I believe part of "what went right" is that America became anti-intellectual, in the sense that most Americans stopped listening to the intellectual class, especially university philosophers.  Americans saw the vile ideas coming out of the universities, particularly in the 60's, and stopped listening in an act of self-preservation.

Can we actually measure the split between the people and the intellectuals? Art is a good barometer of a person's and a culture's sense of life, so I looked to art for my comparison. To represent the intellectuals, I chose the Pulitzer Prize committee that chooses the Fiction award for the best novel (awarded since 1917).  The Pulitzer Prize is administered by Columbia University. For the American people, I'm using the top 10 best-selling books each year as determined by Publishers Weekly. I then asked the question: how many Pulitzer Prize winners were also in the top 10 lists of books bought by the American people? The results shown below are quite striking.

From the beginning in the 1920's, the American public was in line with the intellectuals with more than half of the Pulitzer Prize winners also in the top 10. This alignment of the people and the intellectuals continued through the 1960's and then took a nose dive. Only one book in the last forty years, Humbolt's Gift by Saul Bellow in 1975, has won the Prize and has also appeared in the top-10 best-seller list.

The disconnect between the intellectuals and the people evident from the graph above fits my own experience as well. I've read almost 100 books in the last five years, and I'm always looking for something good to read. In looking at the Pulitzer Prize list, the only ones I've tried (i.e. downloaded the sample onto my Kindle) were The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I found both to be pretentious and boring, so I didn't buy them. I read Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, the 1989 winner, around the time it was published, but I only remember that it was depressing. To find a book on the list that I read and liked we have to go all the way back to 1961 for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee--this is also the final period in the graph above where the American people were aligned with the intellectuals in their choices of novels.

Turning to the top 10 list for the last three years (2010-2012), I've read five of the thirty books and quite enjoyed three of them: The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. None of these books are strongly philosophical, which is why they sell well in today's anti-intellectual culture, but they all have a good plot with interesting characters who make interesting moral choices.

So if it is true that ideas influence and even determine the fate of a society, what happens when a society gives up on ideas and divorces themselves from the intellectuals? This will be the subject of future posts.

The Role of Ideas in History

Part one of Tracinski's What Went Right is titled The Collapse of the Collapse of Civilization.  It summarizes the big events of the twentieth century up until the eighties that demonstrated the world was falling apart:  the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Nazis and the Communists, and the counterculture rebellion of the sixties.  Tracinski then points out that things turned around in the eighties with the economic revival thanks to Reagan and Thatcher, the fall of communism and the spread of global capitalism, particularly to third world places like China and India.

He goes on to claim that Objectivist intellectuals have missed this trend and are still stuck in the mindset of the sixties and seventies:

For as long as I can remember, the typical final paragraph of any review of the state of the world by an Objectivist writer or speaker has gone something like this—which was aptly paraphrased in a recent note from a reader who had noticed the same pattern: "Western civilization as it exists today is doomed to destruction; I only hope I don't live to see its fall. Only then can a new future be built upon the philosophy of Objectivism."

This is the basic premise behind the What Went Right series, so it is worth examining where this idea came from, which is the main subject of this post.  Indeed, Tracinski explains that some readers claim he is not accurately depicting the views of Ayn Rand or other major Objectivist scholars:

One objection I have heard to the previous installments in this series is that the misinterpretation of the role of ideas in history that I am criticizing is merely a rationalistic error made by a few young Objectivists, but that it is not widely held by other Objectivists. Yet I have found that this erroneous view is pervasive, not usually as an explicitly stated idea, but as an implicit assumption.

In fact, the role of philosophical ideas in shaping history has been discussed by Ayn Rand in For the New Intellectual (1960) and by Leonard Peikoff in The Ominous Parallels (1982).  Although Rand died in 1982 and so did not witness any of the improvements Tracinski cites as "going right," Peikoff has continued to promote the idea, including the subtitle in his most recent book, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out (2012).

Ayn Rand stated very clearly her view on the role of ideas in history in For the New Intellectual:

Just as a man's actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society's existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas.  The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.  The nineteenth century--with its political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the necessary conditions of material progress--was the result and the last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance.

And in the introduction to The Ominous Parallels, she says:

He [Peikoff] demonstrates that there is a science which has been all but obliterated in the modern world.  "Yet this science determines the destiny of nations and the course of history...," he writes.  "It is the science which had to be destroyed, if the catastrophes of our time were to become possible.  The science is philosophy."

Leonard Piekoff is also clear on the role of ideas in history in The Ominous Parallels:

By its nature, changing the course of a nation is a task that can be achieved only by men who deal with the field of ideas.  In the long run the people of a country have no alternative:  they end up following the lead of the intellectuals.

The intellectuals cannot escape ideas, either.  They may become anti-ideological skeptics, who offer the country for guidance only subjective feelings and short-range pragmatism;  but it is the ideas--ultimately, the basic ideas--they still accept, explicitly or otherwise, that determine the content of their feelings and of their pragmatism.  In the long run the intellectuals, too, have no alternative:  they end up following the lead of the philosophers.

The above quotes tell us that ideas from one generation influence the history of the next.  Because of this relationship, one would expect to be able to predict the future of a society by examining the ideas of its culture, it's dominant philosophy.  This is what Peikoff does in The Ominous Parallels:

No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed.  No one can know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation's spirit and system of government.  No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly--or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a foreign war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs

What one can know is only this much:  the end result of the country's present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular.  The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.

If the political trend of the world remains unchanged, the same fate--collapse and ultimate dictatorship--is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously in process of decline or disintegration.  (The Communist countries and the so-called "third world" have long since fallen, or never arisen to anything.)  [...]

Most of the East is gone.  The West is going.

So Tracinski has correctly formulated the Objectivist view of the role of ideas in history.  He has also identified a common belief among Objectivists that America is doomed to collapse if we don't discovery Ayn Rand, a view that was made clear by Peikoff in The Ominous Parallels.

In the next post, I'll review Peikoff's views on how America can be saved and a primary difference between modern day America and pre-Nazi Germany.