Cleaning Up Intellectuals' Messes

          (Image from montanalibraries.org)

Ideally, intellectuals help us all by showing what is important, and which way to go in the future.  But as smart as they are, intellectuals have made huge mistakes.  Because they have shaped the thought of whole societies, their impact has been powerful and lasting.  So their mistakes have led to disasters on a global scale.  How do we clean up their mess?

One such cleaner-up was Ayn Rand, whose landmark book "Atlas Shrugged" was published 50 years ago today, as noted by Robert Tracinski in "The Historic Significance of Atlas Shrugged."

Tracinski notes that:

The most important event of the past two centuries, with which artists and intellectuals ought to have come to grips, is the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution--a social revolution that has radically transformed human life for the better.

No one could have conceived of the achievements of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution before they happened--and these new events required a radical re-evaluation of conventional ideas. Yet the intellectuals failed to perform such a re-evaluation.

Instead, intellectuals were looking backward, many to the Middle Ages.  They feared all the new science and technology, the soaring new industrialization and predicted it would bring disaster.

A German intellectual named Karl Marx gave one of the most influential accounts of the new capitalist system--and he got everything wrong. An Industrial Revolution driven by scientific and technological advances springing from the minds of a few extraordinary individuals, he would describe as the anonymous, collective product of brute physical labor; an economic system of liberty, he would describe as a system of oppression; a system built on the right to property he would describe as a system based on expropriation--and then he would propose actual oppression and expropriation as the solution.

This has been the pattern of the artists and intellectuals in dealing with the most significant phenomenon of our age. While the world was transformed around them, they refused to grasp the real meaning of these events, choosing to ignore or denigrate the forces that were rapidly improving human life.

What Ayn Rand did was to grasp the meaning of these forces and illuminate them in both fiction and philosophy.  She found heroism in the achievements of the entrepreneurs and industrialists who were making it happen.

Atlas Shrugged was written in an age of creeping global socialism. Extrapolating from the trends of the day,  Rand projected a future in which most of the world's nations are collapsing into the poverty and oppression of socialist "people's states," while America itself is collapsing under the weight of an increasing government takeover of the economy.

She saw the dramatic potential in asking a single question: what would happen if the innovative entrepreneurs and businessmen--after decades of being vilified and regulated--started to disappear?

This involved the novel's philosophical question - what is the moral status of the businessman and industrialist?

Capitalism unleashed an extraordinary burst of scientific and technological innovation and of human creativity--yet this had largely gone unrecognized as a phenomenon with any moral or intellectual significance. Ayn Rand was the first to celebrate the accomplishments of the James Watts and Andrew Carnegies and Thomas Edisons and to recognize in their productive energies an example of moral heroism.

The central philosophical theme of Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's demolition of the intellectuals' dichotomy between the high-minded pursuits of the intellect and the allegedly grubby, un-intellectual world of business and industry.

Now, 50 years later, we recognize that knowledge and ideas are the engine of wealth-creation, more than physical labor or raw materials.  Ayn Rand originated this idea during the old industrial age, when the "brute muscle power of union workers was still widely put forward as the source of American's industrial might."

Throughout most of mankind's history, moralists have warned that individuals driven by "greed" and left free to pursue their self-interest would plunge society into a destructive war of all against all, a system of brutality, plunder, and exploitation--precisely the qualities Marx projected onto the new capitalist system.

Instead, capitalism produced a system of freedom, independence, prosperity, and super-abundant creative energy--while the societies most thoroughly dedicated to the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the 20th century's Communist regimes, were guilty of the greatest crimes ever recorded.

As a Christian and an economist, I part company with Rand on the issue of selfishness.  She pointed to the now widely-accepted fact that self-interest works out for the greater good of all in capitalism.  But she also claimed that pure selfishness in personal relationships works out for the greater good of all.  As a social scientist, I do not think that can be demonstrated to be true.  On the contrary, there is broad evidence it ruins marriages, families, communities and describes narcissistic sociopaths.

Still, Rand should be celebrated for pioneer work in giving philosophical and intellectual recognition to business people and entrepreneurs, whose efforts and innovations undergird the revolution in technology that is shrinking poverty all over the world.