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Rob Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist has sparked another fierce debate in Objectivist circles with a recent multi-part article entitled “What Went Right?”. In it, he argues that “the great story of the second half of the 20th century is the non-collapse of civilization”.

What he means by this is that while in the first half of the 20th century it seemed, from trends in philosophy (e.g. the rise of total skepticism, post-modernism, subjectivism and nihilism), politics (e.g. communism, fascism and welfare-state socialism) and the culture (e.g. modern “art”, the collapse of objectivity in science and journalism), that civilisation was collapsing, in the second half the trend was reversed. Communism collapsed in Russia and is in the process of collapse in China; fascism was defeated in Germany and Italy; America and Britain rolled back many of their socialistic policies under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s; and freedom seems to be on the march in Eastern Europe, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and elsewhere.

Tracinski notes a series of thinkers who have bucked the conventional “wisdom” and advanced the cause of reason and freedom by their own first-hand thought. He cites Julian Simon, the economist who exploded the myth of the “population bomb” when he realised that the human mind was “the ultimate resource”. He also cites Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, who instituted many free market reforms in India after coming to understand the reason for the success of the newly liberalised East Asian economies.

All this sounds reasonable enough. So why the controversy?

The cause of the fuss is that Tracinski goes on to attack what he sees as “the prevailing Objectivist view of the role of ideas in history”. He sees this theory as stating that not only do “ideas move history, particularly fundamental philosophical ideas” but that “only fundamental philosophical ideas have efficacy, that they directly and necessarily render irrelevant all other knowledge in a man’s mind, so that the wrong explicit convictions in epistemology, for example, render irrelevant good ideas in the special science of economics”. Tracinski sees this view as being incapable of explaining the recent advances he cites:

The evidence of the current state of the world tells us that every thinking man who does honest work in his own field is our ally and is helping to move civilization forward. The work of such men is not mere cultural “momentum” from a previous era, but an active addition to human knowledge and achievement. And whatever their philosophical errors, in their professional work these men are creating valid and important ideas that do change the course of events.

In the latest installment of his article on November 14th, which he entitled “Pajama Epistemology” (in tribute to bloggers), Tracinski expanded on this view. It was this part of the article which caused the most controversy. Unfortunately for the present discussion, the article itself is not available freely online, as it was published in Tracinski’s subscribers-only news service, TIA Daily. And some of the most important criticisms of Tracinski’s theory are also not universally available: for example, Harry Binswanger posted some preliminary objections to his private mailing list, HBL, yesterday. (There is, however, some commentary freely available in other places: for example this, by Ed Cline.)

This is unfortunate for this discussion, because it means that readers without access to these sources will have to rely on my summaries and quotations and will be unable to judge the full works for themselves. But I hope (and expect) that this state of affairs will change in the near future, because Tracinski has raised some deep and important issues here, which cannot ultimately be confined to private forums.

Tracinski writes:

I do not mean to deny the crucial importance of fundamental philosophical ideas, but to suggest that the relationship between philosophical ideas and all other ideas, and the means by which ideas are propagated in a culture, is more complex than the standard Objectivist theory has recognized. We must look in more detail at the role of fundamental philosophical ideas, their relationship to the achievements of the special sciences, and their relationship to the other intellectual factors that we can see at work in the world today.

The first relevant fact to recognize is that achievements in the special sciences like economics, psychology, and biology, and in other specialized fields such as history, law, and even journalism—all of these are not mere “applications” of philosophy. That is, one cannot arrive at them simply by deducing them from one’s philosophical knowledge. They require original observations and integrations derived directly from experience.

Any valid new observation or theory in a specialized field is based on an immersion in facts and observations, and on a whole range of lesser integrations and preliminary conclusions derived from those observations. Thus, there is a very important sense in which specialized knowledge is independent of philosophy. It is independent because it is based on and integrated directly from observation of reality. It is induced up from the facts, not deduced down from philosophical principles.

Philosophy does have an indispensable role to play. It provides a crucial context for valid work in specialized fields, a context that provides the specialist with guidance on his basic method and with basic principles about the nature of the world and the nature of man. But philosophy does not and cannot dictate the content of a specialized field. A specialist cannot produce knowledge within his own field simply by “reading off” results from the assumptions taught to him by philosophers.

Unfortunately, that has been an implication of the standard Objectivist interpretation of the role of ideas in history.

He goes on to quote Leonard Peikoff in the epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (hereinafter OPAR) as follows:

Philosophy is not the only cause of the course of the centuries. It is the ultimate cause, the cause of all the other causes…. The books of philosophers are the beginning. Step by step, the books turn into motives, passions, statues, politicians, and headlines.

He then comments:

This is a kind of trickle-down theory of intellectual influence, in which the philosopher is the originator and only source of the ideas that drive the course of history, while the public intellectuals and the men in the specialized sciences are mere transmitters and translators of those ideas.

I object to Rob’s theory, on two main grounds. Firstly, I believe he is seriously misrepresenting Leonard Peikoff’s view of the role of ideas in history, in essence constructing a straw man. Secondly, I see Tracinski’s own new and still-forming theory as being incompatible with Peikoff’s actual view, with which I agree completely.

Let me start by imitating Cline, providing a fuller quotation from Peikoff’s relevant passage in OPAR:

Ayn Rand’s theory of man leads to a distinctive interpretation of history. By identifying the cause of human action, her theory enables us to discover the factor that shapes men’s past — and future.

If man is the conceptual being, philosophy is the prime mover of history.

A conceptual being is moved by the content of his mind — ultimately, by his broadest integrations. Man’s actions depend on his values. His values depend on his metaphysics. His conclusions in every field depend on his method of using his consciousness, his epistemology. In the life of such a being, fundamental ideas, explicit or implicit, are the ruling power.

By their nature, fundamental ideas spread throughout a society, influencing every subgroup, transcending differences in occupation, schooling, race, class. The men who are being influenced retain the faculty of volition. But most are innocent of explicit philosophy and do not exercise their power to judge ideas. Unwittingly, they take whatever they are given.

Philosophy first shapes a small subgroup: those whose occupation is concerned with a view of man, of knowledge, of values. In modern terms, these are the intellectuals, who move philosophy out of the ivory tower. The intellectuals count on and use philosophy to create its first concrete expression, a society’s culture, including its art, its manners, its science (if any), and its approach to education. The spirit of a culture, in turn, is the source of the trends in politics. Politics is the source of economics.

Objectivism does not deny that “many factors” are involved in historical causation. Economic, psychological, military, and other forces play a role. Ayn Rand does not, however, regard all these forces as primaries.

There is no dichotomy between philosophy and the specialized factors. Philosophy is not the only cause of the course of the centuries. It is the ultimate cause, the cause of all the other causes. If there is to be an explanation of so vast a sum as human history, which involves all men in all fields, only the science dealing with the widest abstractions can provide it. The reason is that only the widest abstractions can integrate all those fields.

The books of philosophers are the beginning. Step by step, the books turn into motives, passions, statues, politicians and headlines.

Philosophy determines essentials, not details. If men act on certain principles (and choose not to rethink them), the actors will reach the end result logically inherent in those principles. Philosophy does not, however, determine all the concrete forms a principle can take, or the oscillations within a progression, or the time intervals among its steps. Philosophy determines only the basic direction — and outcome.

In order to grasp the role of philosophy in history, one must be able to think philosophically, i.e., see the forest. Whoever sees it knows that history is not the domain of accident.

Peikoff neither states nor implies that discoveries in the special sciences are “deduced down from philosophical principles”. In fact, he has repeatedly argued against this view. For example, he has stated (in his superb lecture course Understanding Objectivism and elsewhere) that Ayn Rand’s philosophy would have been impossible prior to the Industrial Revolution, because only after it was there enough data about the supreme role of reason in man’s life for her to reach her conclusions.

No-one has done more to identify and validate the proper inductive method of knowledge, or used it more effectively to combat rationalism, than Leonard Peikoff. And no-one has greater expertise in applying this method to that most complex of domains, human history and culture: as examples, I offer Peikoff’s first book, The Ominous Parallels, and his lecture course The DIM Hypothesis, currently available to registered users at the website of the Ayn Rand Institute — as well as the epilogue to OPAR that I extracted from above.

To suggest, therefore, that Dr Peikoff’s theory of the relationship between fundamental philosophic ideas and the special sciences is this crudely rationalistic and obviously wrong pure-deductive model, is uncharitable to say the least. (There may be some so-called “Objectivists” on Internet discussion boards who do hold to Tracinski’s rationalistic straw man. But as Tracinski should know well, not everyone who claims to be an Objectivist actually is one.)

My understanding of Peikoff’s theory is that a person’s fundamental philosophic ideas, whether those ideas are held explicitly or implicitly, colour and affect his thinking on every other subject, including the special sciences. For Peikoff (and Rand), human knowledge is a hierarchy: some pieces of knowledge are more fundamental than others. The model that Peikoff has repeatedly used is that of a skyscraper: more fundamental ideas are lower down, and others are then built on top. The classic example is in mathematics: knowledge of calculus is impossible without algebra, which is impossible without arithmetic. A person’s fundamental philosophic ideas, for Peikoff, are at the very bottom of his “skyscraper”.

It is not that a person’s fundamental philosophy will mechanistically determine his other views, as if a man who accepts the two-reality view of Plato will inevitably come to accept that the world was created in precise and literal accordance with the account given by the book of Genesis. It is that having the proper views of such matters as the object and method of knowledge, and the source and validation of human values, is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for a rational understanding of the world and successful existence in it, just as a correct understanding of arithmetic is an inescapable precondition of a correct understanding of algebra and calculus.

That the inductive method, which Tracinski praises Julian Simon and Manmohan Singh for using so effectively, is the proper way for humans to gain knowledge is not self-evident, nor can it be employed by special scientists without any reference to philosophy as Tracinski appears to be claiming. It rests on a certain view of reality and of human learning, a view which, as Tracinski should know, has been under constant attack from all sides for almost as long as human philosophy has existed.

The skeptic school represented by David Hume rejects induction on the basis that human conceptualisation and reasoning are a matter of arbitrary social convention and therefore tell us nothing about reality. The rationalist school represented by Descartes rejects it on the basis that it does not conform to the mathematical, axiomatic-deductive scheme which they arbitrarily uphold as the sole proper form of objective human reasoning. To the extent that anyone accepts either premise, he will be unable or unwilling to gain knowledge by the inductive method which Tracinski rightly lauds.

To reinforce his point that philosophy actually depends on achievements in the special sciences, Tracinski asks us to “consider where the defenders of reason would be without Newton and Darwin—men who provided natural, scientific explanations for the nature of the universe and the origin of man, two questions that had traditionally been the exclusive domain of religion.”

It is true that those two men are fine examples of the proper method of reasoning, and they are extremely helpful to philosophers who wish to study how human reason works and make explicit the mechanisms by which knowledge is obtained. But I am, frankly, stunned by the extent to which Tracinski ignores the role played by the philosophic context of their times in their achievements.

My question for Tracinski would be: why were there no Newtons or Darwins in the West between Augustine in the fourth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth? The answer is that during this period, the focus of men was not on earthly existence but in the alleged eternal life to come; science was condemned by Augustine as “the lust of the eyes”, and it was considered contemptible arrogance to think that “bespotted and ulcerous” man could come to understand anything he chose in God’s majestic and mysterious creation purely through his own effort. The fundamental philosophic ideas which were dominant in that period made it impossible for any men such as Newton or Darwin to flourish.

It was only after Aquinas reintroduced the pro-reason philosophy of Aristotle to the West, giving reason its own domain alongside and independent of faith in Catholic dogma, that men’s focus turned back to this world and the rise of modern science was possible. But even then, religion was still strong in society, and the Church ruthlessly persecuted scientists whose ideas they felt threatened them: just look what happened to Giordano Bruno, just a few decades before Newton’s birth.

The scientists and secular philosophers of the Renaissance had to struggle against oppression and, in some cases, hide their true beliefs in order to survive. But they changed the culture for good. It is certainly true that philosophers drew inspiration and insight from the achievements of the scientists, as they demonstrated the efficacy and power of human reason in a series of momentous discoveries. But this does not imply that the special sciences are independent of philosophy. It is merely an example of Peikoff’s “spiral theory of knowledge” in action: a respect for reason and this world leads to scientific discoveries, which reinforce the idea of the efficacy of reason and refine the philosophers’ knowledge of how reason operates, which in turn leads to greater discoveries and so on.

Once good philosophic ideas are discovered, even in as compromised a form as Aquinas’s account of reason, a virtuous cycle or “spiral” is set in motion, whereby the good philosophic ideas and the good discoveries of the special sciences are mutually reinforcing, and any errors in each are progressively corrected. But this is not to deny the hierarchy of knowledge, or that it is the philosophic ideas which are fundamental.

Tracinski, then, may not mean to “deny the crucial importance of fundamental philosophical ideas”. But intentionally or otherwise, this is precisely the effect of his theory. He is, in my judgement, relegating philosophy to a useful handmaiden of the special sciences, rather than their inescapable precondition.

As for the notion that “only fundamental philosophical ideas have efficacy, that they directly and necessarily render irrelevant all other knowledge in a man’s mind, so that the wrong explicit convictions in epistemology, for example, render irrelevant good ideas in the special science of economics”, the point I would make is that because human knowledge has to be an integrated whole, and because philosophic knowledge is more fundamental, “lower down the skyscraper”, than knowledge in the special sciences, wrong explicit convictions in the former will necessarily clash with good conclusions in the latter.

Tracinski offers the example of a man who holds “a mixture of American individualism and Christian altruism” and rebuts the idea that he must really be a consistent altruist and that the individualist elements must be mere window dressing “because the man must necessarily be consistent to his fundamental philosophical ideas”.

Again, I think this is a straw man: neither Ayn Rand nor Leonard Peikoff nor any other serious Objectivist has ever said anything like this to my knowledge. It is certainly true that ethics is more fundamental than politics, and so this man’s altruism would be “further down the skyscraper” than his individualism. But it does not follow from this that he must accept the more fundamental idea and reject the less fundamental one. What this man would find is that the two ideas would be constantly in conflict in his mind, in each relevant concrete situation he thinks about.

There are basically two possibilities this man would have, that I can see (provided he holds both altruism and individualism seriously and not as meaningless bromides, and that he tries to apply them both). Either he will evade and suppress any mental discomfort he might feel when he experiences the clash of the ideas, or he will seek to root out its cause and eliminate the contradiction. In the latter case, he might decide to embrace altruism and eliminate individualism, or vice versa (or he might fail to work it out and give up — I am not saying these are the only possible outcomes).

But notice this. Whatever the outcome of this man’s thinking process is, it will still be his fundamental ideas that drove him there. The most significant thing for the outcome is the basic philosophic premises which make up the man’s character. If he is a chronic evader, he is likely to evade the contradiction. If he is a serious Christian and holds altruism as an unquestionable absolute, he is likely to come out a collectivist, rejecting individualism. If he is a rational man, he may well reject altruism and embrace egoism. But all this depends crucially on his deepest premises, and those prevalent in the culture (for example, he is far more likely to reject altruism in favour of egoism if he has read Ayn Rand).

The theory, again, is the same: fundamental ideas do govern man’s life. They are the “cause of all the other causes” in his existence. But they do not govern by rationalistically, deductively, mechanistically determining his other ideas, as Tracinski’s straw man would have it: they determine his fundamental approach to knowledge, including the way he goes about learning new ideas and integrating them to his existing knowledge. The same applies on a social scale — I don’t feel I need to labour this point.

I am certain that Tracinski has received many letters from TIA Daily readers making many of the points I did above. Tracinski is not a fool, nor do I have any reason to suspect he is dishonest. I see no call for frenzied denunciations or insults: in fact I am grateful to him, and to Harry Binswanger, Ed Cline and others who have commented, for helping me to think through these issues. Tracinski is only half-way through his six-part article, and it will be interesting to see how he responds to his critics.

I would like to close my remarks on Tracinski’s view of ideas in history with a few relevant quotations from Ayn Rand.

In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is — i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts — i.e., he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need: his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.

(Philosophy and Sense of Life, in The Romantic Manifesto)

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 a 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 last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance. The men engaged in those activities were still riding on the remnants of an Aristotelian influence in philosophy, particularly on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly). But they were like men living on the energy of the light rays of a distant star, who did not know (it was not their primary task to know) that it had been extinguished.

(For the New Intellectual)

If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality — the intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The greatest, unprecendented, undreamed of events and achievements were taking place before men’s eyes — but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the United States and of capitalism. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men — that is: men discovered science and political freedom. The creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined.

Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the causes of that historical miracle?

They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism.

(Faith and Force: the Destroyers of the Modern World, in Philosophy: Who Needs It)

The final point I wish to consider is: what accounts for the unquestionable modern successes such as those Tracinski cites? Tracinski criticises the idea that these are simply “cultural ‘momentum’ from a previous era”, calling them “an active addition to human knowledge and achievement”.

In my judgement, this is a false alternative. There is no reason why an idea cannot both stem from cultural momentum from a previous era and be an active addition to human knowledge and achievement. The cultural momentum comes from the rational epistemology ultimately of Aristotle; its tragically brief heyday during the Enlightenment made our modern prosperity possible. This epistemology now has very few defenders in the universities. Good new ideas still come along, but they only do so because of the remnants of Aristotelianism in our culture. This philosophy is still implicitly alive today, but if not explicitly sustained, it will die.

I do agree with Tracinski on one point, and that is that the modern achievements are significantly helped by the collapse of Objectivism’s enemies. In particular, the Kantian influence in the world has taken a big knock. Fascism is dead, and communism is discredited, an ideological “dead man walking”. Socialism has been exposed as a failure, and this has left a gap for freedom to be advanced by the more rational thinkers in society. More fundamentally, modern academic philosophy is widely held to be a useless joke, even among academic philosophers. I know of philosophers today who see their profession as a meaningless pushing-around of words, a fraud perpetrated on those (usually taxpayers) who fund them. This blunts their influence on society.

But the collapse of a negative is not a positive. What we increasingly have today is an ideological vacuum waiting to be filled.

If Objectivists are getting anything wrong at present, I think it might be an underestimation of the strength of good ideas in society. Reason and egoism may be in a parlous state in modern academic philosophy, but the strength of their influence in society (the “cultural momentum”, if you will) is still strong. Looking around society today, it is absurd to say that reason and egoism are dead today. To the extent that they live (and learn) at all, people do so according to Ayn Rand’s ideas, even if they have never heard of her. A great many people spend almost all their time advancing their own values, even though sometimes misguidedly. Such people do mostly look at reality honestly and come to rational conclusions about it.

That’s not to say they aren’t undercut by the negative elements in popular culture, that they don’t sometimes evade, that they don’t sometimes feel guilty about being too selfish — or that they don’t sometimes engage in sacrifice. Nor is it to say that there aren’t a great many very evil people in the world. But the fact remains that there is a huge amount of good in today’s world for Objectivists to exploit. We have a huge opportunity to take the good premises people hold — almost always implicitly and in a compromised fashion, mixed in with opposing bad premises — and make them explicit, helping people to strip out the inconsistencies. This, while still difficult, is a much easier task than trying to win over a completely hostile society.

In fact, I sense that people are searching for new ideas to govern their lives, following the disasters of the twentieth century. I sense a yearning for ideas which will explain the state and history of the world, provide guidance and purpose, and provide people with a way to fight the insanity that they see all around them. Man’s need of philosophy has never been more obvious.

But it is not inevitable that the ideas that people find will be the right ones. As evidence, I offer the alarming growth of serious religion in America today. People may be fed up with Kantian subjectivism, but this does not mean they will all become Objectivists. There is a real danger that they will turn back to that “destroyer of man since time immemorial”, as Peikoff puts it.

That, along with the crucial role of ideas in man’s life, is why the ideological battle is more important today than ever. If we are to overcome the very considerable forces of evil in today’s world, a few isolated advances in the special sciences will not be enough. Only the fundamental philosophic ideas of Ayn Rand will do it.

Update (20/11/2006): Thank you very much to Gus van Horn for the link, the thoughtful analysis and the kind words. Please, Gus — call me Andrew!

No further instalments of Tracinski’s article have yet arrived — it’s early days yet. But Harry Binswanger has followed up his previous criticisms on HBL with a second post, which if anything is even better than his last one. Again, I cannot point you to it, as it was posted to Dr Binswanger’s private mailing list. But I can say that he draws two wonderful analogies: one pointing out a similarity between the link between philosophy and culture and that between physics and engineering, and one constructing a parallel in economics of Tracinski’s argument against what the latter calls Peikoff’s “trickle down theory”.

Dr Binswanger also points out something which I should have made more of in my essay, namely that the full context of Tracinski’s Peikoff quotation itself actually explicitly contradicts the straw man Tracinski ascribes to him. For example, Peikoff’s full passage specifically denies that all historical details are completely determined by philosophy, and specifically admits the possibility of small oscillations within broad historical trends.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how Tracinski managed to come up with his absurd straw man. And I think I’m going to need a good answer to this before I consider renewing my subscription to TIA Daily.

This is getting really interesting now. How will Tracinski respond to the growing barrage of criticism of his position? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Update (8/12/2006): As predicted, Rob has made the first four parts of his article (which is all he has published so far) on TIA’s website here.

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