A Seminar for the New Intellectual

Every year, for one week, people from across America—and beyond—gather under the sponsorship of The Objectivist Center to hear top lecturers discuss philosophy, politics, law, economics, psychology, art, and life skills. Participants often refer to TOC's summer seminar as their week at Galt's Gulch, but the metaphor is not really apt. The heroes in Atlas Shrugged, after all, are recruiting the strength they need to endure a world they have abandoned. The participants at TOC's summer seminar come seeking the tools and the inspiration to improve their world.

This year the seminar was held from June 28 to July 4 at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. On the afternoon of the first day, even while participants were arriving and registering, the week's program swung into action. A faculty luncheon allowed members of the teaching staff to get acquainted, and a newcomers session later on Saturday afternoon performed the same function for first-timers. A reception for students allowed participants still in school to discuss the prospects for intellectual careers. The formal kickoff was a welcoming cookout, and many people followed it up by initiating the nightly discussion sessions in the common room.

The State of the Culture

One of the most highly anticipated presentations each year is David Kelley's "State of the Culture" address. This year, Kelley focused on the role of philosophers in shaping the broad ideas and values of a society. The term "public intellectual," he noted, has been used to describe people who serve as intermediaries between philosophy's most abstract thinkers and those members of the educated public who seek answers to large questions about the world, man's nature, truth, justice, and so on. In the past, this role was often taken up by highly regarded philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell. Increasingly, however, academic philosophers have surrendered this function and now concern themselves with the narrow questions that interest only their fellow academics. Thus, after 9/11, Kelley pointed out, it was not philosophers who explained to Americans the nature of the clash between Islamism and modernism. It was political scientists such as Samuel P. Huntington and historians such as Bernard Lewis.

To illustrate his point about the current irrelevance of academic philosophers, Kelley described the American Philosophical Association's attempt to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. The organization's campaign slogan was "philosophy matters," exactly the sort of slogan one might associate with public intellectuals. And one suggestion from an APA committee was that professional philosophers work with Starbucks to organize coffeehouse discussions. The trouble, Kelley pointed out, is that philosophic discussion these days is not usually about seeking answers to profound questions but merely about practicing philosophical methods—"doing philosophy," as it is called. Said Kelley: "What the public needs is not the experience of sitting around and 'doing philosophy.' It needs the experience of finding answers . . . on the things that are important in life." Fortunately, Kelley concluded, some philosophers, even outside the Objectivist movement, are beginning to understand this, and therefore he felt justified in expressing "a kind of hope that philosophy is coming to its senses."

The Lectures

Once again, the early-bird classes offered at 8:30 each morning comprised two six-lecture courses. Diana Mertz Hsieh provided a systematic introduction to Objectivism that assumed no prior knowledge of the philosophy and started at square one with metaphysics and epistemology, then traversed the fields of ethics, politics, and art. Running at the same time as Hsieh's course was William R Thomas's more advanced series "Six Virtues of Objectivism," which dealt with pride, rationality, integrity, productiveness, independence, and justice. In his opening lecture, Thomas set the theme for his lectures by observing that "Objectivism is radical in that it goes back to the root of issues." Over the course of the next six days, Thomas started at the philosophical root of each virtue and ended with its practical applications.

Following these sessions came two more rounds of morning lectures, at 9:45 and at 11:00, with each round offering a difficult choice between two talks. Should one attend David Mayer's "Interpreting the Constitution" or Jason Raibley's "Theory of Rights"? Bert Ely's "Business Accounting Scandals" or Greg Perkins's "God, Faith, and the Supernatural"? Walter Foddis and Robert Campbell's "Is High Self-Esteem Bad for Us?" or Duncan Scott's lecture on We the Living's missing scenes?

One enthusiastically received talk was "Mozart's Don Giovanni," given by John Kerns, a financial consultant and opera aficionado from San Francisco. While relating the story of the opera and showing video clips of key scenes, Kerns pointed out various ways in which the don could be seen as an Enlightenment hero who challenged traditional mores and institutions. Then, in counterpoint, Kerns set forth the no-less-convincing case that the don was a moral monster who shamelessly indulged in lying, cruelty, and murder.

Participants were introduced to the delights of pro-individualist poetry by John Enright, a computer consultant from Chicago and author of the collection Starbound and Other Poems. Enright gave a presentation entitled "Poetry of Freedom," during which he read with character and passion from an exciting range of works that celebrated liberty, including Satan's call for rebellion in John Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Susan McCloskey again brought her astute powers of analysis to Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophy, this year with a talk entitled "Love and Work in The Fountainhead." She spoke about the different kinds of love in Rand's novel—from the love of mankind to familial love, friendship, mentorship, and romance. One question raised by McCloskey in her exploration of romantic love was much discussed in the days after her class: What is the significance of Rand's including violence and pain in her descriptions of romantic love?

David Kelley's second talk of the seminar was "Concepts and Categories," which focused on a technical topic in the epistemology of classification. Despite its complexity (or perhaps because of it), the lecture was very well attended. As Keith Costa said: "I would prefer to see more advanced philosophy for the general population. . . . We need something so people who might not be ready to go to the Advanced Seminar can still get a flavor of what's going on in the Advanced Seminar."

One presentation, when mentioned at the closing banquet, drew a round of spontaneous applause. This was Greg Perkins's lecture "God, Faith, and the Supernatural." Those who attended were inspired by the speech, because it gave them an arsenal of intellectual weapons to use against theists who argue for the possibility that God may exist. Perkins showed, with humor and enthusiasm, how to fight back, rebutting theistic arguments drawn from cosmology, design, miracles, faith, revelation, and values.

Sam Kazman, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Death by Regulation project, spoke on the "precautionary principle," which he called a dangerous threat to human progress. In essence, the principle states that courts should be able to ban any product or halt any proposed advancement if there is even a possibility that it will have adverse effects. Said Kazman: "Technology has risks. But so does technological stagnation. And I suspect stagnation is much riskier."

Throughout the week, self-defense and the right to bear arms were often under discussion. Michael Huemer, Bill Perry, and Paul Hsieh each delivered a lecture on the subject before forming a question-and-answer panel on Monday afternoon. David Mayer, a law and history professor at Capital University who gave a brilliant talk on interpreting the Constitution, also spoke about the Second Amendment during his extensive question- and-answer session. He said that, over the years, the number of scholars who believe that the right to bear arms applies to state militias instead of individual citizens has shrunk considerably. He concluded: "There is nothing [in the Constitution] authorizing Congress to regulate firearm possession by ordinary Americans. Congress can't do it, period. Moreover, you've got the Second Amendment, which explicitly says, 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'"

Recording Objectivism's Past

On Tuesday afternoon, Duncan Scott offered the seminar a sneak preview of The Objectivist History Project, an undertaking that he is working on in conjunction with The Objectivist Center. Scott, though an Emmy Award-winner, is probably best known to Objectivists as the man who used his film-making talents to help Henry Holzer restore the movie version of We the Living. (During seminar week, Scott hosted a screening of We the Living and also gave a lecture that focused on scenes cut from the final version.)

The goal of the Objectivist History Project, he said, is to interview men and women who were personally closest to Ayn Rand, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s—"to capture on video…both the evolution of the philosophy, and also the entire picture of what it was like in those days." We have questions for these personalities, he added, and these individuals are getting older quickly. The day will come when the first Objectivists will have passed away. So, the purpose of the Objectivist History Project is to preserve their recollections, their reflections, and their versions of the birth and development of the philosophy.

As a sample, Scott offered a fifteen-minute glimpse of interviews that he had last March with Nathaniel Branden—interviews that already total two and a half hours. In the clip Scott showed, Branden discussed issues such as emotional repression in Rand's novels, animal rights, mysticism, and the evolution of Branden's work in psychology after his break with Rand.

The Sponsors Dinner

Once again, TOC held its annual Sponsors Dinner in conjunction with its summer seminar. On the evening of July 3, guests converged on the Bay Tower in the heart of downtown Boston for the eleventh celebration of this always-festive event. The Bay Tower restaurant, perched on the thirty-third floor of 60 State Street, offered sponsors and their guests magnificent views of both historic Boston and Boston Harbor.

In his address to the audience, David Kelley explained his vision of the center's mission: "In the long run," he said, "Objectivism must have an impact on the world of ideas in order to have any enduring influence on our culture and politics. That is where we should concentrate our efforts." But, he added, citing his "State of the Culture" talk, today it is not in the colleges and universities that one finds discussions of philosophy's fundamental ideas and their political and cultural significance. It is in the world of the so-called public intellectuals. And that, he said, "is the level where Objectivism shines. . . . It is the level where our own core competence as an organization lies. It is the realm in which we have intellectual allies who share our values of reason, individualism, achievement, and freedom—the core values of the Enlightenment or modernist outlook. And it is, finally, a realm accessible to the reading, thinking public: the opinion leaders in business, law, medicine, and other professions. I believe that reaching these people is our best strategy for gaining leverage for our ideas."

The Final Banquet

Among the brightest of each seminar's highlights is the gala banquet and dance that takes place on the final night. The sparkle of wine glasses and women's jewelry contrasts with the formal black and white of the men's attire and sets the glamorous atmosphere. There are scattered conversations concerning philosophy and politics, but for the most part people chat and laugh with a true sense of camaraderie.

At this year's banquet, which took place on July 5, the organizers had placed on each chair a copy of an op-ed by Ed Hudgins, entitled "What If There Were No America?" The essay, though brief, posed poignant questions to the participants: "What if armed minutemen had not fought so valiantly at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill? What if Washington's volunteers had been summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who could not endure the bitter winter at Valley Forge?" The answer was obvious, Hudgins wrote. The world would lack, not merely a country, but an irreplaceable vision.

For the audience, that realization inevitably posed a further question: "What if there were no Objectivism?" What if Ayn Rand had not struggled against the accidents of her birth and the culture of her era to write her magnificent novels and penetrating essays? What if, despite her achievements, no one listened and no one carried her work forth?

In his closing speech, David Kelley seemed to speak to these reflections when he commissioned the crowd to "take what you've learned here into the world and plant the seeds of our ideas, our movement, our cause—wherever you are, wherever you work—then come back next year, and we'll do it all again."

This article was written by Roger Donway and Chandler R. Kaiden.

2003 TOC LIVE! audiotapes from The Objectivist Center Summer Seminar are now available from the Objectivism Store