Summer Seminar Caps IOS Decade

The 1999 IOS Summer Seminar was more than just another event, for it placed the capstone on a decade of seminars conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Objectivist Studies. And that is not merely to say that the '99 seminar was special for being the tenth summer seminar. It was a true capstone in being the last summer seminar that will be conducted under the label of "IOS." Executive Director David Kelley has announced that, on September 2, the organization would change its name. "Henceforth," he said, "We shall be known as The Objectivist Center." (For more on the change, see page 6.)

This "last of the IOS seminars" continued in the path of its predecessors by being at once new and reliably the same. New this year was the seminar's setting: the University of Vermont, in Burlington, which provided participants with beautiful vantages of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains. New, also, was the seminar's attendance: a record 290. But unchanged was the combination of intellectual excitement and benevolent openness that has prevailed throughout the institute's history. "I've never felt so much visibility immediately with so many diverse people before," said first-time attendee Steve Chalfant. "Everyone showed an incredible zest for life, an openness to different opinions, and a willingness to talk about everything. The attendees are the number one reason I'll be coming back next year."

Added Carol Deihl, who was one of three people honored for having attended all ten summer seminars: "It's a time to bond with those who share similar values. It's a place where people of all ages forge new friendships and exchange idiosyncratic ideas." (The other two ten-seminar honorees were David Ross and Francisco Villalobos.)

Opening Day

Seminar week began on Saturday, July 3, with registration in the common room, and soon the air was filled with greetings and debate. "The Summer Seminar has always been a place for the open discussion of ideas, from well-studied ideas to works-in-progress," said Deihl. "In this respect I think of the seminar as the 'ultimate scientific conference,' where observations, theories, principles, and conjectures are presented both in formal lectures and informal discussions, and all kinds of ideas are explored in a benevolent environment."

Because first-time participants constitute a significant part of the summer seminar's annual growth, a "newcomers' get-together" was held again this year in order that they might meet the IOS staff, members of the summer seminar faculty, and each other. At 5:00 p.m., nearly fifty newcomers showed up to share a bit of food and spirits while getting acquainted with executive director David Kelley, director of administration Jamie Dorrian, Navigator editor Roger Donway, and the institute's new manager of training and research, WilliamThomas. Also present were such popular faculty members as Susan McCloskey and David Mayer. "The newcomer welcoming was a good way to start the week," said Chalfant. "It allowed me to meet several other newcomers that I wound up socializing with for the rest of the week." First-timer Cameron Bortz remarked: "As a newcomer, I was gratified to find an almost immediate sense of belonging. How easy it is to find commonality with people who hold a rational, positive, life-affirming personal philosophy!"

At 6:00 p.m., participants made their way to the campus green for a cookout and a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Then, as the sun slipped below the horizon, busses transported attendees to picturesque Lake Champlain to watch a magnificent fireworks display over the water. Afterward, many participants gathered at UVM's Living and Learning Center, the site of this year's common room. As Chalfant observed, "Everyone gathers in the common room for card games, conversations about the day's lectures or any other topic; and lots of improvisational comedy spring up. It's very relaxed and very fun."

The State of the Culture

Continuing a tradition that he started in 1997, David Kelley kicked off the week of lectures on Sunday morning by delivering his annual State of the Culture address. "Welcome to Atlantis," he began. "And I think of it as Atlantis, not Galt's Gulch, because you don't need an invitation to come, just your interest in ideas and your willingness to participate and spend a week together here."

Kelley went on to convey the increasing optimism he feels as a result of the rising number of references to Ayn Rand and Objectivism in the popular culture, the mainstream media, and even the academy. "The sheer fact of this interest means something significant about the growth of our ideas and their importance, to our time and to the people in our society," Kelley said. Referring to the Ayn Rand stamp issued by the U.S. Post Office, as part of its Literary Arts series, Kelley called it one sign among many that Rand is overcoming her past image as an ideologue and is becoming more renowned as an historically significant author of the twentieth century.

Kelley also noted that Rand and Objectivism have been cited in articles or editorials in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Orlando Sentinel, Denver Post, Insight, Reason and Investors Business Daily. And, in part because of the publicity Rand has received, IOS is being recognized more often as one of the key organizations promoting her ideas, Kelley told the audience.

One major indication cited by Kelley to point up Rand's growing importance on campus was the article "Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars," published in the April 9, 1999, Chronicle of Higher Education. Over the next several months, CHE's on-line "Colloquy" section went on to publish more than one hundred and twenty-five letters concerning the article, several by people associated with the institute. (As we go to press, another magazine of academia, Lingua Franca, has published an eleven-page article called "The Heirs of Ayn Rand," with favorable mentions of IOS. A full discussion of this article will appear in the next issue of Navigator. For a comprehensive look at the proliferation of references to Ayn Rand and Objectivism, visit the Cultural Reference Archive at the Objectivist Center's Web site: http://www. objectivistcenter.org.)

After concluding his review of Objectivism's recent surge in public attention, Kelley went on to address the wider picture and describe again the three subcultures that he sees as constituting the overall American culture.

The pre-Enlightenment Right, he explained, is a subculture that still believes in faith, duty, and renunciation. Never having grasped the ideals of the Enlightenment, pre-Enlightenment people hold tradition and authority as key social values, and tend to be paternalistic and pragmatic.

The anti-Enlightenment Left, by contrast, is a reaction to Enlightenment values, being anti-capitalist, anti-reason, and anti-individualist. Members of the anti-Enlightenment sub-culture typically support environmentalism and egalitarianism (although they also tend to support affirmative action).

And then there is the pro-Enlightenment culture. Said Kelley, "Objectivism subscribes to the core values of the Enlightenment: a belief in reason; the pursuit of happiness as a moral end; achievement and progress as key values, both for individuals to pursue and for societies to cherish and protect; and freedom as a political system, with capitalism as its political economic expression."

Kelley ended his State of the Culture address as he began, with optimism: "If only we could spell out our principles in moving personal stories, as our rivals do; if only we could have youth groups, like those that are part of virtually every church in the country; if only we could have all the aesthetic embodiments of our vision that the cultural Left has created, I think we'd win."

"Let's go do it."

Unveiling the Objectivist Center

On Sunday, July 4, IOS's staff unveiled the institute's new name: The Objectivist Center. (The center's logo appears on the cover of this issue of Navigator.) Nearly three hundred summer seminar attendees gathered at the campus center theater to witness the historic change and hear about the center's plans.

TOC (as the center calls itself for short) will continue putting on summer seminars and Objectivism Today conferences, under the leadership of David Kelley and Jamie Dorrian. It will continue to publish and sell tapes, books, and pamphlets, through The Objectivism Store, headed by Russell La Valle. It will continue to have a Web page, managed by Thomas Ryan Stone. And it will continue publishing Navigator under the editorship of Roger Donway.

Along with the new name, however, will come several new or enhanced undertakings. Research and training programs, always a key element in the institute's operations, will receive still greater emphasis at The Objectivist Center. William R Thomas has been named the manager of research and training, and already this year the institute has held a scholarly Advanced Seminar. (See the report on its first meeting: "Advanced Seminar Studies Philosophic Method," beginning on page 10 in this issue of Navigator.) Public advocacy, which was likewise part of IOS's program, will be furthered by the creation of a Speaker's Bureau.

An entirely new undertaking for TOC will be the Atlas Society, which will be headed by the center's director of membership development, Robert James Bidinotto. With its own newsletter, Web site, products, and events, the Atlas Society will reach out to the millions and millions of Rand readers who have never become involved with Rand's philosophical thought. A fuller description of its purposes may be found in the last issue of Navigator, and the society will be featured in Logbook later this year.

Sponsors Dinner

Once again, the IOS Sponsors Dinner was held in conjunction with the summer seminar, and once again Bob Bidinotto and the IOS staff outdid themselves in finding a magnificent site: Shelburne Farms, a grand estate on the bank of Lake Champlain. A record audience of 90 dined sumptuously to the sounds of a jazz trio; David Kelley, William R Thomas, and Bob Poole of the Reason Foundation gave brief talks; and fifteen people were honored with plaques for their efforts over the years to make the summer seminar a success.

The "Logical Structure" Course

Throughout seminar week, William R Thomas conducted a six-session series based on a book that he is coauthoring with David Kelley: The Logical Structure of Objectivism. Faculty member John Gillis ("Architecture and Freedom") remarked that it is "hard to overstate how important an endeavor this is for IOS." Eyal Mozes, a veteran of nine summer seminars, concurred: "The upcoming book promises to be by far the most important work on Objectivism by anyone other than Rand." Participants in the limited-enrollment course were given a "beta" draft of the work in advance of the seminar and therefore were able to provide a great deal of feedback. Indeed, such was the demand for question-and-answer periods that Thomas added two afternoon "technical sessions" devoted to exploring issues at a greater depth. According to Thomas, "the participants [at one technical session] pushed David Kelley and me on an issue we had debated since the start of our collaboration, and I grasped a point about it that had eluded me for over a year."

Enlightenment Lectures

On Sunday and Monday afternoon, IOS senior fellow Stephen Hicks presented his two-session lecture, "The Counter-Enlightenment." In that address, Hicks explained what happened following the Enlightenment when various forms of primitivism, irrationalism, and collectivism replaced Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, rationality, and individualism.

"Stephen's lectures have a way of being great intellectual and historical mysteries," said Stan Rozenfeld. "The way he leads you on in search of a solution seems to automatically engage my mind. His specific example of the cultural impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasion on the Germans illustrated how a key event can become a catalyst for a new set of ideas coming to transform and dominate a culture."

Susan Dawn Wake's two-session lecture, "Francis Bacon as a Voice for the Enlightenment," proved that Bacon's significance for the Enlightenment extended far beyond his oft-quoted saying, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Indeed, Wake showed that Bacon-one of Jefferson's three heroes, along with Newton and Locke-was at the forefront of an intellectual battle to move the culture away from a preoccupation with faith, spiritual salvation, and authority.

Activism

On Sunday afternoon, Debra Ross inspired attendees with her lecture "Everyday Activism." The former editor of the IOS Journal and current CEO of Axton Enterprises presented concrete methods for successfully promoting Objectivism on the individual and mass levels.

In the course of her lecture, Ross described two psycho-epistemological types, which she called "the engineer" and "the warrior." The engineer's method is reason and active-mindedness; the warrior's is emotion and closed-mindedness. Recommending an engineering approach to advocacy, Ross encouraged Objectivists to be warm, charming, generous, calm, and open to new ideas. "Be someone that somebody would want to have a beer with," she said.

As for vehicles of communication, Ross encouraged Objectivists to write letters to the editor (but to keep them short and on point). Another good way for Objectivists to get their ideas out into the mainstream, Ross said, is to do things that reporters and magazine writers will consider worthy of coverage. Or, having acquired a certain expertise in some field, an Objectivist can then offer that expertise to local newspapers. More ambitiously, one can send story ideas to papers and magazines.

On Monday, Robert James Bidinotto discussed activism and the sociology of cultural change. To foster the development of an Objectivist community, he said, Objectivists must refocus the strategies by which they strive to affect culture. Since a community is made up of individuals, he pointed out,

building an Objectivist community within a non-Objectivist culture will entail changing many individual minds. It will require that we attract and persuade many non-Objectivists. To do that, we must first understand something about the process of individual philosophical transformations, and in particular we must be clear about how non-Objectivists become Objectivists.

He then elaborated on Objectivism's traditional theory of "trickle down cultural change," which advocates changing beliefs among intellectuals in the academy and expecting those changes will gradually seep down to the general population.

It is true, Bidinotto conceded, that history shows new movements begin with members of the upper and middle classes. But, he added,

I don't believe we'll win them over merely because they will have read The Logical Structure of Objectivism. Rather, I think that those who come to accept Objectivism will do so primarily for the same reasons that they've accepted other belief systems: for reasons of emotional, social, and cultural value. I think that systematic and scholarly presentations of Objectivism are important for many reasons I could cite. But within the context of an individual's converting to Objectivism, such presentations will ratify their conversion rather than effect it. They will assure the converts that the world-view they find appealing is also rational.

When You're Hot, You're Hot!

A group of 300 Objectivists talking about the weather? At times, that was how it seemed, as northern Vermont suffered along with the rest of the Northeast from an oppressive heat wave. Conference staff and their UVM colleagues scrambled to deal with mid-90s temperatures that "never happen" in Burlington. (Average daytime highs in July are about 80 degrees.) UVM provided a few dozen fans for the dormitories. Lectures scheduled in rooms lacking air conditioning were moved to rooms with air conditioning. Taking it stoically was conference assistant Greg Fuecht: "I'm actually used to hot and humid weather," he said. "Summers in Wisconsin usually have a week or two very similar to the weather we experienced the first half of the week." But for those less acclimated to heat waves, Tuesday's cold front and showers brought immense relief.

Art

Though it is now difficult to remember, art sessions were added to the summer seminar curriculum only four years ago. Today, a week-long Objectivist conference without several discussions of art and aesthetics seems unthinkable, so popular has the "arts track" become. The comments on this year's sessions reflect that enthusiasm. On Monday, Lee Brooks initiated the sequence with "Verdi as a Musical Dramatist," which participants described as "passionate" and "knowledgeable."

Michael Newberry's discussion of painting was particularly praised for the connections that the speaker drew between the philosophy of Kant and the productions of modern art. "Fantastic!" said Ari Armtrong. "Please, please keep bringing Michael back!" Also on Tuesday, John Enright turned his attention to the often unappreciated achievements and pleasures of modern poetry and Amy Kaufmann found him "a highly entertaining and well qualified speaker." Douglas Wagoner's talk, "The Role of the Conductor in the Orchestra," was termed "impressive" by Rosario Saya, who said it "provided great insight into a very complex and fascinating profession." Susan McCloskey, as always, drew rave notices. Her lecture "How to Read a Novel" was called "inspiring and charming," "absolutely delightful," "magnificent," "brilliant," and "a tour de force." And Kirsti Minsaas, who brought the art sequence to a close on Friday, put participants in a thoughtful mood by asking whether Ayn Rand had managed to bring her aesthetic Romanticism into line with her broader Enlightenment outlook. Virginia Walker called the session an "excellent historical and aesthetic history of the contrast between neoclassicism and romanticism," and added: "[It] raised extremely interesting questions about problems in Rand's aesthetic theory."

Education and Psychology

With an increasing number of Objectivists becoming parents, questions regarding pre-college education are naturally moving to the forefront whenever Objectivists gather. And perhaps no question troubles Objectivist parents more than this one: "Where can my child receive a decent education?"

Today, nearly 1.5 million Americans answer: At home. And, though many of these home-schoolers are motivated by religious concerns, the state of public education is such that more and more secular parents are also taking their children out of public schools. (Noneducational aspects of public schools are likewise spurring the home school movement. See "Soundings" in this issue.)

In light of this situation, the summer seminar was fortunate indeed to have Mary Heinking, a home-schooling parent, present a two-session lecture/workshop on her research and personal experience. (Many readers of Navigator will remember Heinking as the author of the popular article "Treasure Hunting for Children's Books," in the January 1999 issue.) "Heinking managed to jam an unthinkable amount of useful info into these two sessions," said Rebecca Reale. And a number of evaluations called these sessions the "best-ever" non-theoretical lectures they had attended at IOS summer seminars.

David Ross, always one of the seminar's most popular lecturers, did it again with "Mathematics Education," which focused on the importance of learning to formulate mathematical problems. "Excellent talk," said Paul Chivers, adding that he "would like to hear David Ross give a talk on the epistemology of problem formulation in philosophy and mathematics."

In the area of psychology, John Bechtel's narration of his personal odyssey through the Jehovah's Witnesses, including ten years at the top of that sect, evidently fascinated his audience. "[It's] a story I will not forget," wrote Jennifer Baker, "both because it was told very well and because the speaker must have been very brave to leave such an organization." Reaching that same conclusion, many audience members asked for more: future lectures explaining in detail how a person thinks his way out of a cult.

Politics

Given the high rank that individual freedom holds among the values of Objectivism, IOS's annual summer seminar naturally offers a multitude of lectures on various aspects of liberty. In 1999, one could put the number of lectures at ten or more, a quarter of all the courses presented. At the practical end of the spectrum, Stephen Moses's "How to Survive of the Baby Boom" looked at the personal and political opportunities presented by the coming collapse of government old-age security. Hannelore Bugby found the talk "absolutely superb, [a] nice mix of facts and inspiration." At the most theoretical level, David Mayer, Randy Barnett, and David Kelley discussed whether a government monopoly on coercion is necessary to a well-ordered society. Though individual parts of the debate were much applauded, it is not obvious that any minds were changed.

Another topic that divided seminar participants, more surprisingly, was the Microsoft antitrust case. All agreed on the evils of antitrust law, as evidenced by the highly favorable reception given to David Mayer's lecture, "Antitrust versus Capitalism." And Robert Levy's lecture on the Microsoft case was also well received at its fundamental level. As James Nelson put it, echoing the principles laid down by Ayn Rand almost forty years ago, "Thanks for the fundamental answer of 'property rights.'" Still, a significant minority of Objectivists evidently dislikes Microsoft so much that they feel no great outrage over this lawsuit.

Concluding the political track, and serving (many said) as the climax of the entire seminar, was José Piñera's discussion of social security. Piñera, who helped bring a privatized old-age pension system to Chile and now serves as cochairman of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Privatization, drew two standing ovations, as well as such accolades as these: "a real-world Francisco"; "truly heroic," and "Ayn Rand would be proud of this man."

Celebrating a decade

Much of this year's closing banquet was devoted to celebrating the institute's ten years of growth and paying tribute to the man who, more than any other, made it possible: David Kelley. Trustee Ed Snider offered an opening toast to Kelley, while Susan McCloskey read letters of congratulations from TOC Board chairman Frank Bond, Cato's Ed Crane, Reason's Virginia Postrel, FEE's Don Boudreaux, ABC's John Stossel, and many others.

Barbara Branden, making a special guest appearance, eloquently invited participants to promote "the spirit of Objectivism." That spirit, she said, is the idealistic vision of passionate individualism, integrity, and love of life that inspires tens of thousands of new Rand readers every year, and that continues to inspire those who see themelves as Objectivists. It is this spirit, Branden concluded, more than any technical exposition, that will make Objectivism a force for the future in our culture.

Picking up on the theme of spirit, in a post-seminar interview, David Kelley said: "When I founded the institute, I had a vision of what Objectivism meant in practice and of the kind of Objectivist movement and community I wanted to be a part of. But I had no idea how many other people shared that vision. I didn't know whether there were enough to support an event like the summer seminar, or indeed the institute itself. I just felt that the vision was so right that if we created it, people would come. It has been very exciting to see that vision fulfilled."

(This article was written by Patricia Speer and Roger Donway. All photos are courtesy of Patricia Speer

See also: "Advanced Seminar Studies Philosophic Method" for additional 1999 Seminar details. A portfolio of color photographs from the seminar, as well as a more complete account of activities (including more detail on the lectures) are coming soon!