by Robert Tracinski
Author's Note: This article contains the first five parts of a six-part series originally published in TIA Daily. Click here to go directly to the most recent installment, "Part 5: The Summit and the Foundation." The final installment will be added when it is completed.—RWT
The Collapse of the Collapse of Civilization
In several recent editions of TIA Daily, I have commented that the great story of the second half of the 20th century is the non-collapse of civilization.
In order to understand why the absence of a civilizational collapse is such a big story, it is important to remember the first half of the 20th century. During those years, civilization was collapsing. It was collapsing culturally, with such trends as the rise of incomprehensible, non-representational Modernist art, unintelligible Modernist literature, and the screeching dissonance of Modernist music—all of it a precipitous collapse from the high achievements of 19th-century art and literature. But most of all, it was a political and economic collapse, with two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the rise to power of two totalitarian movements, Fascism and Communism.
So it should be no surprise that writers and intellectuals of the era were pre-occupied with the threat of a general collapse into war, dictatorship, poverty, and mass death. You can see this reflected in such famous dystopian literature as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Wikipedia provides an extensive list of dystopian literature, and you will notice that Ayn Rand wrote two of the novels listed. Her 1937 novella Anthem projects life under a perfectly consistent collectivist society, while her 1957 masterwork Atlas Shrugged depicts the collapse of the American economy under a statist political system.
Depictions like this were not alarmist. They were a straightforward projection of the trend of current events, including, in Ayn Rand's case, her own experiences in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and her observations of the political atmosphere of the Great Depression in America in the 1930s.
For some decades into the second half of the 20th century, the same trend seemed to be continuing. In the 1960s, the rise of the New Left and the "counter-culture" rebellion against civilization, logically accompanied by race riots in the inner cities and violence on university campuses, confirmed a sense of cultural decay and collapse. Meanwhile, the Soviet dictatorship seemed to be on the offensive, expanding its influence into Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, while America floundered in a period of malaise and retreat following the Vietnam War. An observer might still have been justified in fearing that America was following the same path as the Roman Empire before it—that our society was decaying from within and was about to be overrun by a new barbarian invasion.
This conclusion would have been reinforced, not just by an observation of historical trends, but by an examination of the basic cultural causes at work. All of the ideas that had made possible the rise of the West—reason, individualism, the subordination of government to individual rights—were under attack by the most prominent intellectuals of the era. If these intellectuals were the ones steering the culture and setting the direction for the future, then we were doomed.
Then something remarkable happened: civilization did not collapse.
From about 1980 to today—a period of a quarter century, too long to be a mere blip or historical detour—it was the enemies of civilization who collapsed. And more: civilization has not merely avoided a collapse. It has grown and expanded. It is thriving.
The evidence for this began to appear in earnest in the 1980s, as both Britain and America pulled back from their headlong plunge into socialism, adopted moderately more pro-free-market policies, and were rewarded with an enormous economic boom and unprecedented progress in the development of high technology.
In retrospect, however, we can observe that the trend had its beginnings even earlier, in the post-World War II establishment of representative governments and free-market economies in nations like West Germany and Japan; in the post-war trend toward free international trade; in the slow but steady spread of free markets and free societies across Southeast Asia, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea—all of the "Asian Tigers."
But it was in the 1990s that the trend became truly global and its full significance began to be noticed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, war has collapsed: the number of armed conflicts across the globe, and the number of people killed in them, has dramatically decreased—even taking the War on Terrorism into account.
The nations of Eastern Europe moved rapidly toward political freedom and have continued to move steadily toward relative economic freedom. The move toward political freedom culminated in the past few years with rebellions against corrupt semi-authoritarian systems in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine. The trend toward economic freedom reached a kind of high point recently when the former Soviet vassal state of Latvia was rated by the Wall Street Journal as the fourth freest economy in the world, ranking well above the United States.
Over the past thirty years, Communism has undergone a slow-motion collapse in China. By a complex series of ideological evasions, the Communist Party gutted Marxism as a philosophical foundation for its political rule. I have been following this trend closely, and regular readers of TIA Daily are familiar with the details: China now has the four largest shopping malls in the world; the Chinese government recently awarded the "workers vanguard" medal to NBA star Yao Ming, along with a collection of Chinese businessman; the Chinese leadership has been debating over a sweeping reform that would formally recognized property rights in Chinese law; and a growing number of courageous Chinese lawyers, judges, and intellectuals are beginning to argue for free speech, individual rights, and the rule of law.
And the trend keeps on going. The "Asian Tigers" were followed by the "Celtic Tiger," as Ireland liberalized its economy and experienced a prolonged period of rapid economic growth. The same thing has happened in Chile, the freest economy in South America.
The latest sensation—and it is a big one—is India, which is finally experiencing an Industrial Revolution, at the same time that its large population of engineers and computer programmers takes advantage of the information age. This is the result of a process of economic liberalization that began in the summer of 1991, when India responded to a fiscal crisis—and to the collapse of the Soviet Union—by sweeping aside much of the "license raj," a Byzantine system of business licensing laws that sought to impose centralized economic planning.
There is now a new culture beginning to rise in India, whose symbol in my mind is a young man described by pro-free-market columnist Gurcharan Das in his 2001 book India Unbound:
The commercial spirit is not limited to the cities. The smallest village has found it. On a visit to Pondicherry from Madras a few years ago, I stopped at a roadside village café where fourteen-year-old Raju was hustling between the tables. He served us good south Indian coffee and vadas. Raju told us that this was his summer job and it paid $11.50 a month—enough to pay for computer lessons in the evenings in the neighboring village. For the next summer, his aunt in Madras has arranged a job for him in a computer company.
"What will you do when you grow up?" I asked. "I am going to run a software company," said Raju. He had decided this when "I saw it in TV, where this man Bilgay has a software company, and he is the richest man in the world."
By my count, somewhere on the order of three billion people—about half the world's population—are currently on a path toward political and economic liberty, and toward enjoying all of the things that liberty makes possible: a vibrant, innovative culture, a "First World" lifestyle of opulent wealth, and the benevolent sense that success and happiness are the hallmarks of a "normal life," so that a fourteen-year-old boy in rural India can reasonably believe it is possible for him to become the next Bill Gates.
In short, it is not just that civilization did not collapse. It is the vision of civilization as being on the verge of collapse that has collapsed—or at least, it ought to have collapsed.
The problem for Objectivists, unfortunately, is that our intellectuals, who ought to be in the best position to observe and explain this phenomenon, have generally not done a good job of recognizing the non-collapse of civilization. For the most part, they are still too busy worrying over the imminent collapse of civilization to notice, study, or explain the actual trends in the other direction.
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." Over the years, the pattern has become so reinforced that I see it everywhere, in posts on Objectivist discussion groups, and in letters like the one I received recently from another reader, who lamented that
Twenty-first century America is still riding on the historical momentum of the Enlightenment, which rested on a strong (though flawed)…foundation. What is the health of that foundation today?...
What happens to a society over time as its leading intellectuals and, in consequence, the general public, increasingly abandon reason and respect for reality? My answer, gleaned from the literature of Objectivism, is as follows. Faith and force inevitably fill the void that reality and reason should have occupied…. Faith and force, united together, become the ruling doctrine of the society (which then collapses altogether if or when it runs out of subservient producers to sustain it).
I grant you that there is room for debate as to how far down that path America has come. But I find the trend ominous, particularly so in other countries.
I have to admit that this approach has held sway in The Intellectual Activist as well, including a few of my own past articles. For most of its history, the theme of TIA's political coverage has been to show how our leaders' failure to embrace the right ideas is leading to disaster. This coverage was true and valuable—but it did not tell the whole story, because too little coverage was spared for evidence of any trend that was not a disaster. As just one small example, while putting together the bound volume of the back issues of TIA from 1979 through 1991, I noticed that the early issues provided extensive coverage of the crises of rising crime and runaway inflation. Subsequent issues devoted no coverage to the process by which inflation was brought under control and the crime wave was broken.
When it came to the most important event of the era, the Fall of Communism, the July 1992 issue of TIA carried an article that provided a worthwhile and correct analysis of the cause of Communism's collapse. But it ended with the admonition that "if you hear that Russia and her former satellites are struggling valiantly to become capitalist countries, don't believe it. Some of them are taking baby steps forward, but none has the desire (or knowledge) necessary to go even half the distance." There is some truth to this warning, when it is applied to Russia and a few of the former Soviet Republics. But it is flat wrong when applied to most of Russia's former satellites: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and so on.
To gauge the state of those societies, consider a recent article with the ominous title "Communist Retro Sweeps Eastern Europe." It turns out that this article describes, not a political movement, but rather a kind of middle-aged nostalgia among Eastern Europeans for the state-manufactured brand names and soft drinks of their youth—all of which are now produced for profit by private companies.
I don't blame Objectivist intellectuals for not seeing the signs of these more positive trends, because the impending collapse of civilization was the trend of the first half of the 20th century, and it is only in the past few decades that an opposite trend has clearly emerged. But it is important to begin to recognize that this new trend does exist, and to ask what makes it possible.
The current global spread of free markets, political freedom, and an industrial-technological civilization is too large a phenomenon to be explained as the mere "inertia" of a previous, better era. Indeed, the cultural "momentum" of the second half of the 20th century was the momentum of the era immediately preceding it, an era whose predominant direction was toward chaos and destruction. The story of the last fifty years has been the story of a reversal of cultural momentum.
I do not mean to imply that this trend is permanent and inevitable. I do not deny that there are ideological and political forces, such as the Muslim world's rebellion against civilization, that threaten to slow down and even reverse the recent progress that has been made in the world. But precisely for that reason, I think it is imperative for us to discover what is causing the good things that are happening in the world.
The most urgent question of our era is: what went right?
I will put forward my own preliminary answers to this question, but the first step is simply to recognize that the question has to be asked, and that new evidence may require new answers and new theories about the role of ideas in history.
The Implosion of the Population Bomb
Let us begin with just one example of recent political and cultural progress.
Recently in TIA Daily, Jack Wakeland covered the reaction to the news that the 300 millionth American had been born, and he noted the general implosion of the "population bomb" hysteria. For the most part, the 300 millionth American was celebrated as a sign of our healthy growth as a nation, not as a sign of impending scarcity and privation, as the doomsayers of "overpopulation" have been warning for many decades.
Jack attributed this cultural change to the influence of the late economist Julian Simon, whose work on this subject was implicit in numerous articles and commentaries on the latest population milestone. Jack linked to one such article, but an even better example appeared a few days later in the Wall Street Journal arguing that "more people means more prosperity."
At bottom, the debate over population revolves around a single question: Are human beings a burden, or a resource?... [P]eople don't just consume things. They make them too. More bodies means more minds, more innovation, more dynamism, and more progress. The history of the world as America went from 100 million or 200 million to 300 million lends a lot more support to the humans-as-resource view than the humans-as-burden view.
This editorial nowhere mentions Julian Simon's name—but it relies entirely on his ideas. Such is often the fate of an intellectual who succeeds in injecting an important new idea into the culture.
The idea of people as a "resource" and especially of the mind as an economic resource is the central breakthrough of Simon's 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, whose thesis is accurately summed up in its Amazon.com review:
In the contest between resource scarcity and human ingenuity, Simon bets the farm on the ability of intelligent people to overcome their problems…. The key to progress is not state-run conservation programs, he says, but economic and political freedom. Only then can talented minds properly apply themselves to our earthly dilemmas.
This has proven to be an enormously influential idea, providing pro-free-market thinkers and economists a profound argument for liberty. Here, for example, is just one example of the influence of this idea, from an important November 2003 speech by President Bush:
[T]he prosperity and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by the extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity—and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations…. But…there are governments that still fear and repress independent thought and creativity and private enterprise—the human qualities that make for strong and successful societies. Even when these nations have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest resources: the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.
A nation's "greatest" resource is the creativity of its people, which is more important than any natural resource? Where do you suppose that idea came from? Obviously, President Bush has been influenced by the arguments of Julian Simon.
The most interesting thing, from the perspective of Objectivists, is that Julian Simon's argument is nearly identical to the central theme of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. What Simon demonstrated in economics and demographics, Ayn Rand identified in philosophical terms: that reason is man's means of survival and that man's mind is the source of all of his values, including all of his wealth.
I used to think of Julian Simon's work as the application to the special sciences of Ayn Rand's idea. But then I realized that it was not an "application." Simon did not start out with Ayn Rand's ideas and derive his theories from them. He induced his theory from his own observations and from his knowledge of his specialty. He started out as an economist who accepted the conventional wisdom about "overpopulation," until he began to realize that it was not actually supported by the data and by the science of economics. This process led him to a crucial moment at which he made his breakthrough. Here is how he describes the origin of his theory:
On a spring day about 1969 I visited the AID office in Washington to discuss a project intended to lower fertility in less-developed countries. I arrived early for my appointment, so I strolled outside in the warm sunshine. Below the building's plaza I noticed a sign that said "Iwo Jima Highway." I remembered reading about a eulogy delivered by a Jewish chaplain over the dead on the battlefield at Iwo Jima, saying something like, "How many who would have been a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein have we buried here?" And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein…?
To my knowledge Simon was not significantly influenced by Ayn Rand, though I presume he must have known about her at some point in his career, especially since so many fans of her work were also fans of his. His integration and Ayn Rand's integration stand as companion ideas. Simon integrated knowledge he had discovered within his own field, and his integration goes beyond Ayn Rand's in one respect: the detail with which he is able to demonstrate the role of man's mind as a fount of wealth-creation. And Ayn Rand's integration goes beyond Simon's in another crucial respect: the scope on which she applies it. The mind as the source of all values is a principle that goes far beyond economics, and Ayn Rand is able to draw implications from it in art, morality, politics.
Julian Simon's achievement was important, but it is not the only example of an economist who has pushed forward the cause of human liberty by advancing the state of knowledge in his own field.
In August, I linked to a review of a book titled Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, which recounts a late 20th-century development in the science of economics, in which (according to this review), "knowledge" was recognized as one of the basic factors of economic production, and growth in knowledge was identified as the primary source of economic growth.
Thus instead of land, labor, and capital—the traditional inputs of economic theory—it was "people, ideas, and things" that mattered, driving technological change and entrepreneurial creativity…. More and more, economists came to see that it was knowledge that made the difference in modern societies—e.g., in software, drugs, industrial processes, biotechnology, and other parts of the economy where the upfront costs were large, the payoffs enormous, and the benefits widespread. Economists inevitably turned their attention to the institutions or invisible structures—constitutions, customs, property rights, cultural sentiments (like trust)—that help to generate knowledge and sustain its effects.
At the time I criticized the author of the review for naming several previous thinkers who had put forward the same ideas (he mentions Friedrich Hayek), without mentioning Ayn Rand, who should be well known to anyone on the political right. But it is also important to recognize that, as with Julian Simon's theory, the economic theory that ideas and knowledge are engines of production is more than just an "application" of the philosophical principle that reason is man's means of survival. Even if it was inspired by Ayn Rand, either directly or indirectly, such an economic theory would also have to be a first-hand inductive integration on the part of the economists who develop it, who would have to base the theory on the full range of data and observations available to them within their specialty.
And just as these ideas in economics are not and cannot be simply deduced or derived from philosophy, it is important to recognize that those ideas also have a real efficacy in human affairs, even when they are not accompanied by a wider and deeper philosophical explanation. They have a real efficacy, because they constitute real knowledge, a genuine integration built up from observation, and thus a real advance in the mind of anyone who accepts them.
As a demonstration of this fact, let us consider the career of an economist who was working on an even less theoretical level than the ones we have just described, but who had a far greater practical effect.
In his book India Unbound, Gurcharan Das describes an economic fad of the 1960s called "dependency theory," which argued that free trade was harmful to Third World economies. He then notes that "There was a mild, noncombative student of economics in Cambridge, England,…who argued for greater openness of trade and for a less controlled economy…. He went on to rebut the prevailing pessimistic view about the poor countries' export prospects by detailed empirical data." Later on, Das informs us that this same Cambridge-educated Indian economist became a civil servant in the bureaucracy of India's finance ministry and by 1991 "he had made a serious effort to understand the East Asian miracle. That is when he realized that India had to abandon many of its old and foolish policies."
In June of 1991, a new prime minister came to office in India vowing to deal swiftly with a massive fiscal crisis. He chose this economist as his Minister of Finance, and with the cooperation of the new Minister of Commerce, the three inaugurated a bold burst of reforms that eliminated the "license raj," a complex network of business licensing requirements that had been used to impose central government planning on the Indian economy. This "Golden Summer of 1991," as Das calls it, was the beginning of India's current economic rise.
The soft-spoken economist of this story is Manmohan Singh, who also happens to be the current prime minister of India.
For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that neither Manmohan Singh nor Julian Simon, nor any of the other pro-free-market economists involved here are Objectivists, nor is there any evidence that they were influenced by Objectivism in any fundamental way. In fact, many of them hold philosophical ideas that are not consistent with Objectivism and even antithetical to it in some respects.
And yet they are demonstrably helping to save the world.
This creates something of a paradox for the prevailing Objectivist view of the role of ideas in history. The Objectivist theory of history is that ideas move history, particularly fundamental philosophical ideas. Here is how Ayn Rand put it:
There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty—the power of ideas.
But this has been widely interpreted by Objectivists to mean 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.
I see this quite frequently when it comes to judging the actions of a political leader or intellectual who has mixed philosophical premises, with some elements of bad ideas and some elements of good ideas. There is a certain temptation to declare that the bad ideas cancel out and make irrelevant the good ideas. The temptation is to take a man, for example, who holds a mixture of American individualism and Christian altruism, and to construct an argument to demonstrate that he is really a consistent altruist. He has to be an altruist, and the individualist elements must be mere window dressing, the argument goes, because the man must necessarily be consistent to his fundamental philosophical ideas.
As with an individual, so with a culture. This view tends to regard the universities as the only significant institution for disseminating ideas and thus for shaping the culture and therefore to project the state of the world based on the dominant trends in academic philosophy—which is always a grim projection.
Given that the philosophy of Objectivism has not swept the university philosophy departments and that it demonstrably has not taken over the culture (although I believe it is growing, slowly but surely, in its influence), this view of the role of ideas in history is only capable of explaining the collapse of civilization. It is only capable of supporting a series of prognostications of imminent chaos and dictatorship, whether fascist or socialist or theocratic. The destination may change, but the direction is always the same: downward.
But this approach cannot explain the non-collapse of civilization. It cannot answer the question: what went right?
The examples we have just examined provide some clues to the answer to that question. We can say that at least part of what went right was the valid, honest, first-hand integrations made by men like Julian Simon and Manmohan Singh—men who did good intellectual work, not on the philosophical level, but within the specialized sciences.
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.
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 Objectivists have 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.
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Source: TIA Daily -- November 7 and 9, 2006
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