On October 24, over 240 people came to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York's Times Square to hear a discussion of America's "culture wars"—the real culture wars. At the invitation of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, six leading intellectuals from the libertarian Right (including IOS's executive director David Kelley) discussed the thesis that America is now divided among three warring subcultures: one shaped by the country's founding Enlightenment values; a second shaped by remnants of the West's pre-Enlightenment religious values; and a third shaped by the post-Enlightenment's anti-rational values.

Visiting New York for Objectivism Today 1998, Patricia and Richard Speer found the perfect symbol for a conference on human achievement.
(photo by Patricia Speer)

In an attempt to get beneath the superficial culture wars reported by journalists, Objectivism Today 1998 (OT '98) eschewed such hot-button topics as drugs, political correctness, and affirmative action. Instead, the day's analysis was conducted in terms of two values highly characteristic of the Enlightenment subculture: achievement and progress. What is the nature of these values, the conferees asked, and what does their standing in America today reveal about our society?

See also Walter Olson's article "Dark Bedfellows" in Reason Magazine, in which Mr. Olson praises the viewpoint presented at the OT98 conference.

A Conference Overview

In the past, Objectivism Today was an annual institute program in New York City that consisted essentially of Objectivists lecturing on Objectivism to Objectivists. Typically, too, there was little but Objectivism to link the topics on the program. This year, by contrast, the attempt was made to get Objectivist intellectuals discussing Objectivist cultural analysis with leading intellectuals who are sympathetic non-Objectivists, for an audience that comprised both Objectivist and non-Objectivist libertarians. In particular, the attempt was made to bring non-Objectivist thinkers into a dialogue concerning David Kelley's thesis regarding America's three subcultures. The success of the institute's endeavoris given in two statistics: First, attendance at this year's OT conference was sixty percent greater than at any previous OT conference. Secondly, this conference attracted favorable media coverage, whereas no previous OT conference had attracted any media coverage. (See following story.)

IOS staff who were largely responsible for running OT'98 (left to right): Director of Administration Jamie Dorrian, Administrative Assistants Laura Lucey and Kristen Carlson.

Hicks on Post-Modernism

The day began with Stephen Hicks, chairman of the philosophy department at Rockford College, delivering a shortened version of his 1998 IOS Summer Seminar address. Setting the background for the day's discussion, Hicks described how and why the West passed from its pre-Enlightenment culture to its Enlightenment culture, and then degenerated into a post-Enlightenment culture. (His particular focus was on post-modernism, the version of post-Enlightenment culture that has flowered since the Sixties.) The key figure in post-modernism, Hicks said, was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who brought together all the major beliefs that had been set forth in post-Enlightenment German philosophy: reason is subjective and impotent to know reality; logical contradiction is not an argument against anything; conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths about the nature of reality; feeling is a deeper guide to reality than reason; to live the authentic life one must leap, on the basis of deep feeling, into conflict and paradox; and one must embrace collectivism. These ideas were then transmitted to several of the major post-modern philosophers: Jacques Derrida (1930— ), Michel Foucault (1926—1984), and, in part, Richard Rorty (1931—).

Hicks then laid out a second element of the story, the Anglo-American element, which involves the collapse of confidence in science, a confidence long fundamental to philosophy in the English-speaking world. This collapse began with the posthumously published work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), but received a major impetus from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). After confidence in science had fully collapsed, in the 1960s, Anglo-American philosophers were prepared to look to the irrationalism developed by Continental philosophers.

Having presented this brief narrative, Hicks offered what he called his first major hypothesis: post- modernism is simply the synthesis of the subjectivist,

Stephen Hicks drew surprising conclusions about the values of post-modernists.
(photo by Brian Killigrew)

relativist beliefs that were left standing at the end of the twentieth-century philosophy. But Hicks then went on to challenge his own hypothesis, leading the audience through a series of arguments that ended with an astonishing conclusion: post-modernists are not driven primarily by their relativist epistemology, but are deeply committed opponents of Enlightenment values such as achievement and progress. Exactly how Hicks reached that conclusion may be learned on the audiotape of his 1998 IOS Summer Seminar talk, "Post-modernism," available from Principal Source.

Postrel on Progress

Rounding out the morning, Reason editor Virginia Postrel drew on her forthcoming book The Future and Its Enemies to set forth her theory of the four factors driving achievement and progress, and the motivations of people who oppose them. She began by presenting the views of bioethicist Daniel Callahan, a very mainstream and establishment figure, as she carefully emphasized. Callahan, Postrel said, is unhappy with contemporary medicine because it is too ambitious. Its spirit is "that of unlimited horizons." And this is true not just of a few Promethean doctors, according to Callahan; patients want medicine to be that way. They want to be free from suffering, early death, and various degrees of genetic determination. But Callahan hates this expression of what he calls the "Protean" self and seeks instead "a medicine that has, with public support, embraced finite and steady-state health goals."

In conventional political terms, Postrel noted, Callahan is a moderate liberal, but, she declared, she could equally well have quoted conservative Leon Kass to the same effect. And of course she could have quoted similar expressions regarding all fields of human achievement and progress, not just medicine. "The open-ended future," Postrel declared, "has become the central issue of our time."

On one side are those who crave stasis ("stasists," Postrel called them) and they come in two varieties. Reactionary stasists have a vision of stability set in the past; for example, Pat Buchanan wants to restore the ethnic Catholic neighborhood of his youth. Technocratic stasists, such as H.G. Wells, are utopians who want to progress to some final stable society of

Virginia Postrel distinguished dynamist and stasist attitudes toward progress.
(photo by Patricia Speer)

the future. What both attack, however, is the permanent endurance of markets, technological innovation, cultural exchange, and the reinvention of the self.

Opposed to the stasists are the dynamists, who value learning, discovery, and improvement. They do not wish to impose a vision, but only to set rules that allow differing visions to compete. Progress is not marching to utopia, Postrel said, it is simply the opposite of the steady-state. And those who wish to protect it must learn where it comes from. Postrel then set forth four ingredients of progress, each of which, she said, can be wrecked by stasist attacks.

One ingredient is on the demand side: people are never wholly satisfied. The supply side is provided by the existence of near-infinite combinations and the human ability to find new combinations. We as individuals are limited only by our imagination and our time; man as a species is limited only by the imagination of all men and the life of the species. A third element is the motivation for suppliers to seek new combinations, and an often overlooked motivation, Postrel said, is "play"—the sheer pleasure of doing what one enjoys because one enjoys it, not for money, or fame, or power.

The final ingredient is experimentation and feedback: trying something, testing it against demand, and then trying to improve it.

Postrel made exceptionally interesting points about the last two factors. As regards motivation, she observed, the traditional explanation is "the repression theory," associated with Max Weber and the Protestant ethic. This theory holds that behind progress, technological advance, and capitalism is a morality of self-denial, thrift, and duty. On that basis, Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism argued that capitalism would destroy itself because it encourages a pleasure-seeking ethos, contrary to self-denial, thrift, and duty. The theory of play-motivated progress rejects Bell's Weberian premise.

Turning to the need for experimentation and feedback, Postrel warned against the ability of stasists to stamp out achievement and progress with reasonable- sounding arguments. Thus, the Food and Drug Administration has managed to slow progress in medicine by requiring that every drug be proven "safe and efficacious" before it goes on the market. But this sharply reduces the gains that risk provides in the form of experimentation and feedback. For the "safe and efficacious" standard frequently requires more advanced knowledge than an inventor can possess. Daniel Callahan would go further and require that each medical advance be both "cost-effective and cost-beneficial."

In this way, stasists are always at an advantage because they have on their side all the dangers of the unknown, while dynamists are usually arguing on behalf of an advance that is just "one small step for a man." But what is ultimately involved, Postrel concluded, is nothing less than a dispute over how civilizations learn and whether they should.

Objectivism Today at lunch—in the 37th Floor Sky Lobby.
(photo by Patricia Speer)

Murray on Man's Résumé

Following a fine lunch at the Marriott Marquis's 37th Floor Sky Lobby, David Kelley set forth the day's central thesis of America's three cultures and "the real culture wars." (Further details are presented in "State of the Culture, 1997" an interview with David Kelley from the September 1997 issue of Navigator).

Next came Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground and What It Means to Be a Libertarian, who gave the audience a preview of his work-in-progress: Truth and Beauty: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Human Accomplishment.

One of his talk's two purposes, Murray said, was to help the audience "reacquire a sense of wonder and curiosity at this thing I am calling human accomplishment. Wonder—because there is so much to wonder at, in what human beings have done. And curiosity—because it is not at all clear how the thing has been done." Go back 10,000 years, Murray declared, and the people then existing (at the least the best of them) "were every bit as smart as the people in this room, as handsome, as aesthetically alert, as industrious, with senses of humor as witty or evolved as ours are. And yet they lived a daily life only marginally different from the animals whom they hunted." Fast-forward 10,000 years and marvel at what humans have accomplished.

The metaphor for his book, Murray said, is "the résumé of our species," and thus it leaves out many things. Just as a personal résumé would not include "stopped beating wife," even if that is (in some sense) an accomplishment, so the résumé of the species leaves out "defeated Hitler." It includes such things as cathedrals, symphonies, utensils, and great documents.

Now, said Murray, imagine each such achievement as a line in a database that contains thousands of lines. On each line is recorded what the achievement consisted of; when it was done; who did it (plus information on the age, education, upbringing, and parentage of the person or persons who did it); where it was done; the prevailing political system, wealth, and population of the country in which it was done; and so forth. "Imagine you have such a database," Murray said. "Imagine all the fascinating questions you can ask of it. And that is what I am engaged in, in the course of the book."

Charles Murray promised that his forthcoming book on human progress will be "like fingernails on a blackboard" to post-modernists.
(photo by Patricia Speer)