Key ideas: Published in 2012. “When I met Ayn Rand, I was seventeen. My first impression was of a figure standing on a mountaintop, seeing relationships I had never imagined. The people in the valley, whence I had come, found it easy to differentiate concretes. Everyone knew that Communism was the opposite of conservatism, that Rachmaninoff’s melodies had no relation to Hugo’s plots, and that economics had nothing to say about sex. But Ayn Rand put things together; in one evening, while retaining the differences, she could discuss each of these pairs and explain to me by what fundamental similarities their members are connected. I fell in love with integration.” (Leonard Peikoff)
THE FALL OF Western civilization—if it does fall—can be traced to its beginning. I do not mean that its beginning led to its end. I mean the opposite: Our rejection of our beginning is what is killing us. …
The pre-Greeks were the childhood of the human race. The Greeks were man, man the rational animal, starting to grow up.
The fact that Thales’ own physics was primitive is irrelevant. His unsurpassed achievement is that he was the first (or the first-known) to conceive a new kind of question, and therefore a new method of cognition. Using the word as I will throughout—that is, in its epistemological, not racial, sense—the method today is called “integration” (less often, “synthesis”). The discovery of this method, along with its philosophic preconditions and implications, was the origin of Western culture—once the greatest of human achievements, now a “fabulous invalid” disintegrating before our eyes.
The goal of the DIM theory is to reach a prognosis. What is the West’s disease? How long does the West have? Is there a cure? …
The answer to our questions, I hold, requires us to understand the evolution of the Western mind—that is, we must identify its changing approaches to integration. The story and future of the West lie in the rises and falls of the method of thought that once defined it.
When I met Ayn Rand, I was seventeen. My first impression was of a figure standing on a mountaintop, seeing relationships I had never imagined. The people in the valley, whence I had come, found it easy to differentiate concretes. Everyone knew that Communism was the opposite of conservatism, that Rachmaninoff’s melodies had no relation to Hugo’s plots, and that economics had nothing to say about sex. But Ayn Rand put things together; in one evening, while retaining the differences, she could discuss each of these pairs and explain to me by what fundamental similarities their members are connected. I fell in love with integration.
A year or so later, I learned from Ayn Rand that integration is the key to understanding not only the Greek discoveries and the random pairs we had so far discussed, but much more. Integration, she said, was the key to understanding human knowledge as such, all of it, in any field, era, or stage of development.
Knowledge is the grasp of reality, and reality, according to the Objectivist metaphysics, is that which exists; it is not a supernatural dimension, but this world in which we live. It is and is only the world of natural entities with their attributes and actions. The basic law of reality is that each entity has a definite, limited nature; each is what it is. In other words, each obeys the Law of Identity, A is A, and therefore each exists independent of consciousness. An entity acts not because of the decrees of consciousness—of any consciousness, divine or human—but rather in accordance with its nature. Under the same circumstances, therefore, the entity necessarily takes the same action. Hence a corollary of the Law of Identity is the Law of Cause and Effect (or simply the Law of Causality), which is the metaphysical basis of the uniformity of Nature.
In order to discover the attributes of specific entities and the laws governing their action, a man, according to the Objectivist epistemology, must exercise his distinctive faculty of knowledge, reason. This means that he must perceive and then think, checking at each step to ensure that the conclusions his mind draws do not contradict past knowledge or present data. Thus three elements unite to define the Objectivist concept of reason: perception, conception, and logic.
The first requires that all knowledge be derived ultimately from the evidence of the senses. The second requires that such evidence be identified and interrelated through the use of objectively defined language—that is, of objectively formed concepts. The third requires that the use of concepts obey another corollary of the Law of Identity, the Law of Non-Contradiction (nothing can be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect).
Each of these three elements is a form of integration. …
Man the rational being is man the conceptual being. Man the conceptual being is man the integrator. The DIM Hypothesis cannot be derived from these two principles; without them, however, it cannot even be conceived.
People use concepts (language) continually; unfortunately, they do not always hold their concepts as integrations. In one type of case, a person is unable to identify instances of his concept or its relation to perceived objects. In his mind the word (typically a broad, emotive one like “love,” “fairness,” “freedom”) is a castle in the air, a sound without referent, a “floating abstraction” in Objectivist parlance, a One without a Many.
In a second type of case, a person, having been taught a modest level of abstraction, will go no further. Characteristically, he is not alert to discover, or even dismisses as unimportant, broader similarities interrelating his observations, even if these are relevant to his goals; instead, he is predominantly concerned with mere perceptual differences. Ayn Rand describes this type of mentality as “concrete-bound” or “perceptual-level”; in Greek terms, the person is focusing on the Many without a One.
The “floater” misses reality; the concrete-bound person misses understanding. In the proper use of concepts, by contrast, the mind moves easily and regularly between concrete and abstract, between perception and thought. Only this kind of shuttling gives a man the full power to connect and understand the facts he observes. This type of mind seeks to grasp the One in the Many. …
The unity of knowledge means the unity of a man’s conceptual structure. Ayn Rand has compared a mind’s stock of concepts to a filing system in which each concept is a folder holding everything known about its referents. If the folders are properly labeled and organized, the material in any folder is accessible to a thinker as needed, no matter what other folders—what other entities or questions—are of primary concern to him. No folder is isolated; all are interrelated parts of a single whole. …
Human knowledge is not a mere collection, but a structure; it is a single body of interrelated cognitions. No item of knowledge is “self- contained”; taken as isolated from all the rest, no item even qualifies as knowledge. On the contrary, such an item, being closed to potentially relevant evidence, is a form of unreason, and as such must be rejected. This rejection does not mean a condemnation of cognitive specialization. What the theory condemns is any specialist who claims a logical right to ignore discoveries in all fields but his own, on the grounds that his exists in a cognitive vacuum and is thus self-validating. Ayn Rand called such individuals “compartmentalizers,” and often cited as examples pro- capitalist economists who regard morality as irrelevant to economics.
… the Objectivist viewpoint. The unity of knowledge I have discussed does not imply that connections can necessarily be found between every fact and science; perhaps some are simply not connected, and that is all there will ever be to say about the matter. What the principle does require is that we look for connections (in this world) wherever there is reason to think they are relevant to an inquiry.
Observing examples of integration is a necessary first step in grasping the meaning of the concept. Now we must identify that meaning explicitly; we must discover the defining factor implicit in the examples. This requires that we relate integration to several other concepts that are distinct from it, yet essential to knowing its full meaning. Five concepts are critical: whole, connection, necessary, system, and unity.
The word “integration” is a form of “integer,” which derives from the Latin for “untouched” or “intact” and thus means whole. … Since the DIM theory pertains only to man’s method of thought and its products, I too limit the word “integration” to the realm of human behavior. …
The history of philosophy provides many clashing interpretations of the source and nature of necessary connections (including Hume’s denial of them). In the Objectivist view, their source is the Law of Identity. A fact is necessary if and only if its non-existence would entail a contradiction. This formulation covers necessity both in metaphysics and in epistemology. Metaphysically, as mentioned earlier, cause must lead to effect; the alternative would require that an entity contradict its nature. Epistemologically, a logical conclusion, as we have seen, is one that must follow from the premises—because its denial would contradict them. In both fields, the “must” derives from the fact that it is impossible for a contradiction to exist in reality. …
Each of the concepts essential to an understanding of integration denotes the same process and result, but each makes explicit a different aspect of it. “System” identifies the fact that it is man who puts the constituents into a definite relationship. “Connection” identifies the specific nature of that relationship. “necessity” identifies the philosophic base and thus the full meaning of “connection.” “whole” identifies the fact that an entity is made of constituents thus related. “one” identifies a whole quantitatively, in contrast to its surroundings and its own constituents.
A unity of systematically connected elements—a triple repetition for emphasis—this is what a whole is, and this is what is created by the process of integration.
To denote the opposite of integration, many words could be chosen; the best, I think, is juxtaposition—that is, the mere conjunction of objects in space and/or time. For example, on the simple, physical level, Hiroshima after the atom bomb was no longer a whole because there was no longer a purposeful connection uniting the remains, but only sprawling chunks of glass, random puddles, and scattered flesh; at most one could say that there was a juxtaposition of lesser wholes (doorknobs, bodies, etc.).
Juxtaposition, like integration, is possible at every stage of mental development. … The same mentality is more easily recognized in the politician who calls for deficit reduction and new entitlements, easier money and less inflation, et al. Such a medley of platform planks, like the other cases above, is not an intellectual whole. A series of contradictions adds up to nothing and offers the voter no more than a juxtaposition of slogans.
If the object of knowledge, as Objectivism holds, is reality, identified as Nature, then metaphysically, a valid integration is one based on and pertaining to facts, the facts of Nature. And if man’s faculty of knowledge is reason in the Objectivist sense, then epistemologically, a valid integration is one reached by the logical conceptualization of percepts. Within the Objectivist system, these two formulations imply each other.
Examples of valid integration so defined are abundant in human life, but they are most striking in the work of scientists. Acceleration in free fall, Galileo tells us, is constant, a claim that subsumes countless unobserved cases. …
Now let us consider the issue of validity in regard not to thought, but to its building blocks: concepts themselves. I indicated the Objectivist view of concept-formation earlier. But how, one might ask, can a concept be formed by invalid integration? It would be easy for me to recite as examples all the mystical concepts claimed to transcend Nature and reason, such as god, poltergeist, transubstantiation, and the like. But it is more instructive in this context to analyze a concept not so obviously invalid, indeed one widely accepted even by those who in all sincerity laugh at supernaturalism. I have in mind the term “extremism,” which first entered the American vocabulary during the presidential campaign of 1964.
Although rarely given a clear definition, “extremism,” in essence, is a term used to condemn those who hold unpopular values intransigently and in action refuse to compromise them; the nature of such action is not delimited by the concept.
On the basis of this definition, the concept blends into a unit—and thus regards as instances of the same evil—two types of people: uncompromising moralists and violent zealots; men of principle (whether good or bad) and crazed activists; exponents of integrity and exponents of insanity. A concept of this kind is not based on observed fact: It is an attack against fact by requiring the evasion of profound differences among men.
If one observes men’s ideas, character, and actions, one can hardly avoid concluding that men condemned in their time for moral intransigence, such as Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, and Jefferson, are essentially different from Savonarola, Lenin, Hitler, and any Muslim suicide-murderer. The contrast in the meaning of “intransigence” here is so blatant that one can integrate all these men into a unit only on the basis of an emotion in defiance of reason. (In 1964, it was the desire to bring down Goldwater by forcing him to compromise.) …
Not every unjustified assemblage is a whole. But those created by integration are—and, as such, do have an inner logic. For example, the medieval Scholastics defended their ideas as elements within a chain of necessary inferences based on self-evident axioms, a chain like Euclid’s. In contrast to those of Euclid, however, the Scholastics’ axioms rested on faith in the Bible, the Church fathers, and the saints. Their integrating process was detached from reality and thus invalid. But their ideas nevertheless do form a system, because they are connected internally: Given the Scholastics’ axioms, the rest follows necessarily. In this way, their Many ideas do form a One. The contrast to a series of random aperçus such as those by Oscar Wilde or in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is obvious.
Now let us sum up the above material in the form of a principle, one that is essential to this inquiry. The principle is that there are three distinct alternatives in regard to integration: valid integration (e.g., Galileo), invalid integration (Nostradamus), and non-integration (Pollock). This trinity or trichotomy is the base for which DIM, as I will explain in chapter four, is an acronym. A trichotomy is a trinity each member of which is incompatible with the others.
Here is an example. Three students finishing a lecture course are asked to assess their teacher. One reviews the content and organization of her lessons, her manner of answering questions, her ability to motivate, then, balancing virtues and flaws as impartially as he can, puts it all together, reaching a verdict—say, a favorable one. This is an example of valid integration. A second student considers similar counts, but is steaming because of a career-threatening grade the teacher gave him that he regards as grossly unfair; governed by the steam, he sees flaws everywhere; putting it all together he happily slams the teacher. This is invalid integration. The third student can’t recall much of the class material, feels that judging others is subjective, likes the fact that he got a good grade, but dislikes the amount of homework; these factors, he feels, simply can’t be lumped together under any simple evaluative word or sentence, so he shrugs. In this case, too, we are being given a distinctive type of response, but the shrug is not a third assessment of the teacher. It is a rejection of the assignment, an example of non-integration —which, taken at face value, seems to be motivated by sincere belief.
A POLICY IN regard to integration is not a primary, but a consequence, a method of thought that derives from fundamentals. Minds in every field and eventually the general public learn it from teachers who specialize in studying the nature of reality and man’s means of knowledge—in other words, men learn it from philosophers. But philosophers have reached different conclusions in regard to fundamental issues, and have thus upheld different views of integration. In order to understand the views operative in our culture, therefore, we must first look at their basic causes in the history of Western philosophy. By common consent, the greatest philosophers of the West—the Big Three, I will call them—are Plato [427–347 B.C.], Aristotle [384–322 B.C.], and Kant [1724–1804].
Reality, for Plato, is not the physical world of Nature, not the imperfect sensible world of concrete men and things, with its ceaseless flux of contradictions (the latter because it is a union of “Being and non- Being”). Concretes, including individuals, are merely appearance, the distorted and ultimately unreal shadows of a higher, non-material, truly real dimension, the world of Forms or abstractions, which is motionless, logical, and perfect. The Forms are hierarchical, culminating in the pinnacle of reality, the ineffable Form of the Good (called by later Platonists the One). This Form is what gives unity and meaning to the universe. It is the fundamental fact, from which all the lower Forms (and thus all the shadows) derive and on which they depend. And it is the fundamental value, toward which all things aspire.
Plato’s epistemology is a corollary of his metaphysics (and vice versa). Since knowledge is knowledge of what is real, it cannot be based on sensory observation, which has no access to a non-material reality. Sense data, often contradictory to truth, are at best stimuli enabling us to remember ideas gained in an earlier life. Cognition, therefore, entails a break with this world. It requires that we reorient our minds: that we seek out the connections among pure Forms, guided only by pure logic. …
Walter Burkert, a renowned classicist, sums up Plato’s metaphysics as: “For the Greeks…religion [before Plato] had always meant acceptance of reality…. Through Plato reality is made unreal….”
In regard to epistemology, Plato himself puts it best: “[I]f we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.”
Augustine, the leading philosophic influence from the fifth through the twelfth centuries, offered a Christian version of Platonism. The transcendent unity from which all things flow is not an abstract goodness, but a personal God. Despite His personal nature, however, this God is not a concrete. To the extent that our minds can grasp Him, He is pure abstraction (“infinity,” “omniscience,” etc.). In stark contrast to His own Unity, God creates the Many, the world of natural, sensible objects, but these Many are merely the actors and stage sets in a divine play, entities devoid of autonomy and independent value. So far from its being true reality, the theater is soon to close.
The foundation of human knowledge, accordingly, is illumination by the One; we “must first believe,” Augustine famously tells us, “in order that we may then know.” This is the defining formula of Christian epistemology: The knower starts with premises justified by faith apart from sense perception, then deduces their implications. …
Now a word on ethics. As a derivative of metaphysics and epistemology, ethics is not a primary factor shaping men’s approach to thought, and as such is only peripheral to our study. But a glance at a philosopher’s ethics often helps to bring out more fully certain of the presuppositions or implications of his approach. As in the basic branches, the views of Platonists in ethics differ in detail, but not in essence. All these thinkers ask men to sacrifice themselves to a transcendent entity, such as the One, God, or the state. Since concretes are regarded as shadows, so are human concretes—that is, individuals. The good life, therefore, consists in each man’s renunciation of personal, worldly desires in order to serve a higher truth.
Although there are many variants of Plato’s system, what makes them the same in regard to integration is their commitment to two fundamental principles. In metaphysics, their principle is supernaturalism. In epistemology, it is rationalism.
“Supernaturalism” is the belief that reality is a non-natural dimension, one that transcends the material world we perceive. As such, the term is very broad, subsuming figures from the earliest Greek Orphics to the latest American televangelists. Western philosophers, however, have almost invariably defined super-Nature in philosophic, and specifically Platonic terms—that is, as a realm of abstractions or concepts. This version of supernaturalism is called idealism (not an ethical term here, but one denoting the view that ideas have primacy over matter).
“Rationalism”—Plato’s other cardinal principle—is the theory that conceptualization is the essence of human cognition, but that concepts (or at least the fundamental ones) cannot be derived from the senses. The true base of knowledge, in this view, is the a priori—that is, concepts independent of percepts. …
The proper means of knowledge, they hold, is not inference from observation. It is deductive logic; so the cognitive model for all subject matters is a geometric system. …
Rationalists hold that man reaches knowledge of reality through the grasp of a priori concepts. Since these exist independent of Nature they can be found only in a realm beyond Nature. Reality, therefore, is in some form a realm of concepts—which is the idealist viewpoint. The converse is also true: A world of concepts, if it existed and was rationally knowable, could be known not by observation, but only by the method of rationalism. Platonism, in short, is not a juxtaposition, but a true system: Idealism and rationalism imply each other.
The system defined by these two principles offers clear-cut advice to each of us qua integrators. Integration, it tells us, pertains not to this world, but to its transcendent source. … Do not look, but think, by turning your attention to the a priori ideas comprising reality. Now, with this orientation, you can start to integrate, which means gradually to discover the logical interconnections among ideas. If you keep at it, you will know when to stop, because you will have reached the summit….
Like most of the Greek thinkers, Plato sought to relate the One and the Many. His solution was to write off the Many as unreal, and construe the One as a self-sufficient, all-swallowing entity. Plato is thus the preeminent philosophical champion of the One without the Many. This is an inevitable consequence of his basic approach….
Plato was a master of philosophy and a world-class integrator. He was the first Westerner who identified this process, understood its importance, and consistently practiced it.
In fact, my friend,” he writes, “it’s inept to try to separate everything from everything else. It’s the sign of a completely uncultured and unphilosophical person…. To dissociate each thing from everything else is the complete destruction of all rational discourse. The weaving together of forms is what makes reason [logos] possible for us.
Plato took the first, huge step. Judging by the Objectivist definition of “validity,” however, the step was fatally flawed. Plato’s method of integration is the archetype of invalid integration. It rejects one element of validity (the senses), and detaches from Nature—supernaturalizes— the other two, logic and concepts.
In regard to cultural interpretation, as we will see, the most obvious indicator of a man’s Platonism is usually the last of these. Whenever floating abstractions are essential to the integration of a cultural work, the work to that extent is supernaturalist and rationalist.
Aristotle, “the master of them who know” according to Dante, created a very different system of philosophy. Whereas Plato’s metaphysics is supernaturalist, Aristotle’s may be called naturalist or secularist. This latter term means the same thing, but from a special perspective: Secularism is naturalism regarded as non-religious. Reality, Aristotle holds, is Nature and nothing more; it is the world in which we live. Nature is not an opaque flux of contradictions or a repository of abstractions, but an intelligible realm of concrete entities (“primary substances”), each with a specific identity consisting of matter shaped by form. There is no matter without form, Aristotle holds, and no form without matter; the two are inseparable. Form is not a transcendent reality, as in Plato, but one of an entity’s two worldly elements; it is the structure of an entity’s stuff (of its material, as we might say).
In epistemology, Aristotle rejects Plato’s theory of innate ideas leading to “pure” concepts, along with any other claim to a priori knowledge. The mind, he holds, is at birth a tabula rasa, and man must derive all his knowledge from sensory data. To move beyond such data, a man must use his faculty of abstraction: of separating out mentally, from a group of similar concretes, their form, which is the same in all of them. This enables a man to think abstractly while understanding that abstractions cannot exist separately. In modern terms, man forms a vocabulary of concepts, each of which is a “universal” subsuming all the similar concretes. Equipped with concepts, the mind can rise to the level of reason. (There is no recognized term to designate Aristotle’s theory of knowledge.)
If concretes are the constituents of reality, then the referents of concepts, that which gives them meaning, are the objects we perceive— that is, our observations, direct or indirect, of entities in Nature. Since we form concepts by grasping the real identities common to these entities, our concepts are objective, not arbitrary or mystical. And since man, unlike animals, is the rational being, he can understand observed facts, but only by conceptualizing his percepts. The learning process, in Aristotle’s view, is a series of ever-wider inductions ending with (not starting from) the discovery of basic principles. Plato’s turning away from concretes, therefore, is the means not of advancing cognition, but of strangling it.
In contrast to Plato, Aristotle regards man’s ability to form concepts not as a puzzle requiring a supernaturalist explanation, but as a natural fact requiring no explanation, at least not by philosophers. “The soul,” he writes simply, “is so constituted as to be capable of this process.” It is also so constituted as to be able to grasp the laws of logic—at least, after Aristotle had done so. Logical thought, too, he holds, is a worldly process. The Law of Non-Contradiction is not a “pure” tool, unsullied by sense, but a plain description of observed fact. This law, he says, is an absolute, true of this or any world; it is true, in his famous phrase, of “being qua being,” which is why compliance with it is a requirement of valid thought.
From the above, Aristotle’s advice to the integrator—where to start, how to proceed, when to end—is clear. On every key point, it is the opposite of Plato’s. …
In an era ruled by dogma, Aquinas taught that reason in the Aristotelian definition, reason as a secular, self-sufficient faculty, is valid. Faith, he held, is not the base of reason and may not contradict its conclusions. Nor are the two faculties equal: Reason is the authoritative guide; faith is a supplement, which helps to fill in the blanks when reason is silent.
Similarly, Aquinas taught, the natural world, governed by Aristotelian logic and order, is fully real, not a mere appearance. And to know Nature, one must first observe it, then exercise one’s power of thought, setting aside as irrelevant to human cognition any claims to a priori knowledge. …
The culmination of the Aristotelian approach is Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which, as she said, builds on Aristotle’s naturalism and on his view of reason. She did have several disagreements with him, however. The basic one pertains to his theory of concept-formation—specifically, his idea that the grasp of similarity among objects is the grasp of a common form or structure intrinsic within them. Ayn Rand rejects this “intrinsicist” viewpoint, as she called it, on the grounds that it regards the object of conceptual awareness as a metaphysical ingredient of entities. In her view, such an ingredient could not be grasped either by perception or abstraction therefrom, but would require some form of what is called “intellectual perception” or “intuition.” Such a theory, despite Aristotle’s intention, would make concept-formation non-rational and thus non-objective; in the end it could be used to support some version of Plato’s approach.
In Ayn Rand’s theory, as I have indicated in chapter one, concepts are neither intrinsic nor subjective, but objective; they are only human devices, and thus nothing apart from man, but devices with a factual, mathematical base. So man does reach unity through abstraction, but he does not find it pre-existing in objects; he creates it by his mind’s method of interrelating the measurements of the Many.
Though their ethics are sometimes quite different, all Aristotelians, even Aquinas qua Aristotelian, agree in opposing the Platonists’ otherworldliness and demand for sacrifice. Instead, they advise the individual to seek his own personal happiness in this world by the active exercise of his rational faculty. …
Plato was the greater of the two, because he was the first to discover the existence and the importance of the conceptual level of thought. But from another perspective, Aristotle was the greater, because he was the first to bring thought back to earth. No error of either can diminish these achievements.
Kant, the last of the Big Three, starts by agreeing with his predecessor Hume. Both hold that logic and causality—principles essential to integration—are baseless; neither can be derived from sense data or validated by reason, whether this last is conceived in Platonic or in Aristotelian fashion. But whereas Hume, stuck at this point, gave up philosophy, Kant undertakes to solve the problem by means of his “Copernican revolution.”
The human mind, says Kant, is furnished innately with twelve a priori concepts or “categories” (along with other kinds of innate endowments). These concepts are not ideas in the traditional sense; they have no referents to give them meaning, neither on earth nor in heaven. This is because they are not intellectual content, but mental machinery, processing mechanisms that transform the raw data from reality before these data reach our consciousness. …
Nature is not reality, but merely appearance, merely reality-as-processed-by-man, which Kant calls the “phenomenal world.” … True reality, therefore, is in principle unknowable, and more: It is inconceivable.
Kant’s revolution rejects out of hand Aristotle’s theory that concepts derive from percepts. On the contrary, concepts, or at least the world- shaping ones, come first; percepts are their product. …
Kant’s philosophy is not a set of affirmations, worldly or otherworldly, but of negations. In metaphysics, Kant denies the reality of this world not in favor of a higher realm, such as God, but in favor of an inconceivable—that is, of a nothing, nothing to human consciousness; he denies for the sake of the denial.
In epistemology, Kant condemns man’s consciousness as impotent to grasp real truth, not because our mind is inferior to some higher consciousness, but because, like every kind of consciousness, it requires a means of consciousness. Aristotle identifies the basic means as the senses; Plato, as the faculty of thought; Kant, as the categories. … Any information in any consciousness that has been acquired “somehow,” he holds, is thereby disconnected from reality. This is the invalidation not only of man’s consciousness but of all consciousness, no matter of what kind, because it is conscious. Again, Kant denies for the sake of the denial. …
In Kant’s philosophy, integration is the original sin of cognition; it is the thing that expels man from the Eden of reality. In literal terms, integration, man’s method of knowledge, is what makes knowledge impossible. Thus another, derivative negation: Integration is invalid because it is integration. This is not merely a rejection of integration. It is a declaration of war against it. It is a call not for non-integration, but for anti-integration. …
Like the other greats, Kant has had many followers.. These thinkers … adopt his anti-conceptual essence and as a rule apply it more extensively than he had. A leading exponent of this development is the pragmatist John Dewey, who rejects the very idea of fact independent of man. … For man, said Kant, truth is that which conforms to the requirements of our subjective minds. Truth, says Dewey, is that which conforms to the requirements of society’s subjective actions.
Since an idea, in Dewey’s theory, is a plan designed to deal with a concrete obstacle, the idea cannot to any significant extent be extrapolated beyond that concrete. Thus concepts, for Dewey, are not an important tool of knowledge. Integration through the use of abstractions is largely useless and can be harmful, he thinks, because it tends to draw men away from the complexities of the urgent present into an abortive search for some broad, inclusive principle that, precisely because it does abstract from differences, would be unable to offer the concrete guidance we need. No process of integration, he says, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, can cope with each day’s uniqueness; to succeed in life, man must throw off the crushing burden of “principles,” “incontestable theories,” “necessary laws.” Even Aristotle’s logic, he remarks, having worked so well for so long, is overdue for a change. …
Kant is the first and greatest nihilist in the history of thought. A nihilist is one who works to destroy man’s mind and values as an end in itself, for the sake of the destruction. If he is not a philosopher, such an individual typically limits his activity to the ideas and values of a specific field. …
A philosophy professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology makes eloquently real the connection between nihilism and anti-integration. I quote from a letter sent to me in 1998 by one of his students:
An anecdote from his own life…He said that he sat his 5 year old daughter down on his lap one day and asked “Where’s Daddy?” She responded by pointing to him. He said, “No, that’s Daddy’s body. Where’s Daddy?” She looked perplexed and then pointed to his head. He responded, “No, that’s Daddy’s head. Where’s Daddy?” This conversation continued for some time until he had reduced his daughter to tears while she screamed “Where’s my Daddy? Where’s my Daddy?” I dropped the course very soon after that….
The above clarifies why I use the term “disintegration” in defining my hypothesis, rather than “non-integration.” The latter term, if taken philosophically to denote a general mental policy, would apply to anyone who characteristically does not make connections, whether out of ignorance, indifference, laziness, low intelligence, and/or agreement with skeptics. By definition, these people, however great their number, hold no coherent ideas and have no cultural influence, except perhaps as echoes circulating the slogans of already established trends. The philosophic opponents of integration, by contrast, have changed our culture. They do not counsel mental inactivity, but wage an active fight to remove from cultural products any trace of the integrative work of their creators. Such men are the disintegrators in our midst. …
An assault on the process of grasping or creating connections can leave in its wake only the unconnected—the Many without a One.
What makes the Big Three great philosophers is that they are the only men in our history who have defined, whether validly or not, a new integration of fundamentals. The cultural and historical power they have had derives from this root. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, each in his own way, tell us how to use our minds. Lesser thinkers then elaborate. …
A great philosopher, by definition, is not a disciple, but an innovator. His philosophy is a feat not only of integration, but of new integration. This gives us a further means of defining essentials in the often tangled texts of the greats. One must identify a thinker’s new ideas in regard to fundamentals, and determine whether they form by themselves a new integration of metaphysics and epistemology. If they do, then any older ideas in their books are at best irrelevant to their system, or at best mere elaborations of it….
A new integration of fundamentals—this is the standard I use to identify the essence of a great thinker. …
Here is a way to identify, in emotional terms, the appeal of each of the Big Three to their champions throughout the centuries.
Western philosophy after Greece is divisible into three periods: a Platonic era, from the Hellenistic centuries through the Middle Ages; an Aristotelian era, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment; and a Kantian era, for the past two centuries. This progression has given rise to two further views of integration, both of which I call mixtures, as against the pure cases of the Big Three. …
Their new approach to philosophy, accordingly, is Kantian, but with some key Aristotelian tenets added. I identify this mixture as Knowing Skepticism, and here I do mean skepticism as against nihilism. The mixture was dominant throughout the nineteenth century, especially in England and America. Its first full statement was the positivism of Auguste Comte….
Positivism restricts cognition to the grasp of facts knowable by sense-perception. Any abstraction or theory involving unobservables is by its nature invalid. ….
Positivists integrate, but unlike Plato and Aristotle they do not keep on integrating. They do not integrate their integrations. Rather, they stop the process at a comparatively much lower level of thought. Their goal and end product, evidenced in their work in science and in other fields as well, is not a broad unification of data, not an encompassing whole, but a number of unrelated sets of observed relationships. In this way, positivism does not reject concepts as such, but only in part. …
Leaving aside theory now and considering only facts, it is a fact that in the history of Western thought, from Greece to global warming, we find many different kinds of philosophy, but only five modes of integration….
If the essence of thought is integration, then the science that teaches men how and whether to integrate is the power that shapes men’s thought —I do not yet say culture or history. It is philosophers who do this job, as we have seen, by defining the modes of integration entailed by their own fundamental principles.
I use the term “mode of integration” (or simply “mode” or, mouthful as it is, “integrative mode”) throughout to subsume any of the five possibilities, including the opposition to integration, and I refer to my procedure as “modal analysis.” Further, instead of mode, I often use “method” of thought or other synonyms when these less technical, more generalized terms can serve the purpose.
The three fundamental modes correspond, as we have seen, to men’s three basic integrative alternatives. Plato counseled a philosophic form of invalid integration; Aristotle, valid integration; Kant, anti-integration. This is the source of the trichotomy I define.
I call the Platonic mode “misintegration” — M.
I call the Aristotelian mode simply “integration” — I.
I call the Kantian mode “disintegration” — D.
… The symbols are used to refer to a mode in the abstract; or to the ideas of those who champion its practice within a delimited field; or to the champions themselves; or to the cultural products that reflect their mode. All of these are interconnected aspects of a single process that, when necessary, can be abstracted from the others for special study. Thus one can speak of a politician’s M ideas, or of an I physicist, or of a D novel, or even say that “D claims…” and “M responds….”
To accommodate the two mixed cases, I have subdivided D and M. I call the mode of the Knowing Skeptics D1, as against the pure Kantian D2; and I call the mode of the Worldly Supernaturalists M1, as against the pure Platonic M2. When used without a subscript, the letter D or M refers to the common denominator of its two variants.
The “1,” in both D and M, indicates fundamental agreement with the mode of the corresponding “2,” along with disagreement stemming from the acceptance of certain I elements. Unlike the D2s, D1 thinkers advocate some but not total disintegration; unlike the M2s, M1 thinkers regard integration as basically but not always a connection to the transcendent. …
Before I can present my hypothesis, I must make clear in general terms to which kinds of people and practices the DIM categories apply, and to which they do not. …
Since DIM categories identify a mind’s chosen method of thought, each symbol denotes a person’s epistemological commitment, no less and no more. …
Since DIM categories are epistemological, their applicability to a given individual is determined not by his mind’s content, but by its method—not by what he thinks, but by why he thinks it.
For example, the concept of D, to begin with that mode, does not apply to the countless people today who are merely non-integrators and know nothing about the issues of epistemology. Such people do not rise above the default state of consciousness—the observation of unrelated data given by Nature or by other people—and therefore come under no integrative category. Because of the nature of the human mind, of course, everyone (pre-historical men included) practices some kind of integration some of the time. But a great many people do not know in any terms that they are doing so, or that there are different ways of doing so, or that they have the power of self-direction in this regard. Instead, they merely absorb random snatches of someone else’s way of thinking, prompted by untutored emotions, conformity, childhood habit, and the like. Such individuals have no epistemological identity.
The D individual, by contrast, is not passive or ignorant in the above sense. He is a person who, having grown up in a conceptual culture, rejects it, in part or in whole, practicing concrete-boundedness as a deliberate policy, turning out corresponding products, and justifying his approach on intellectual grounds.
Similarly, an I type of man is not necessarily an Objectivist hero….
Most of the time Ms may be described in general terms as religious, but the M category does not subsume every adoption of religion. A vast line of people stretching back to the primitives has accepted sincerely the details, rituals, and leaders of some form of supernaturalism, but with no interest in ideas or in knowing intellectually what they are doing; these people fall outside of any DIM category. … An M in religion would see at minimum a connection between belief in a primary supernatural dimension and the need to accept ideas transcending the senses. His acceptance of dogmas and leaders would not be mere obedience, but would to him reflect a chosen mental direction, one built on God, faith, and the imperfection of the worldly.
Now let us note that modal commitment cannot be equated with moral or personal character. …
For the reader’s future reference, here are brief summaries of the DIM modes, each described in a few phrases.
Aristotle: Unity through: natural world/grasped by concepts derived from percepts. * I: One in the Many
Plato: Unity through: transcendent world/grasped by concepts independent of percepts; natural world is appearance, and percepts are untrustworthy. * M2: One without the Many
Worldly Supernaturalists: Unity through: M2 above, except: natural world is real, and concepts, some or all, must be applicable to percepts. * M1: Many from the One
Kant: Unity impossible and undesirable; concepts and percepts alike are detached from reality. * D2: Many without the One
Knowing Skeptics: Unity through: natural world/grasped in unrelated chunks by lower-level concepts. * D1: Ones in the Many
According to Aristotle, man is the rational animal; his mind is the source of his distinctive actions, including his creative ones. The process of creativity, in this view, does not consist in gaining a mystic insight or in reacting to a neural twitch; rather, it is a form of thought. If so, the thought of artists, scientists, and other cultural creators would be like that of men in other fields; it too would be guided by a method, by a mode of integration. And if it is, how can one identify the modes at work in the creators’ minds except by studying the existential results of those modes —namely, the cultural products such creators bring into the world? This study defines the program of this book.
“Cultural products,” as I use the term, are not academic treatises. Rather, they are things such as the Aeneid, the discovery of heliocentrism, Progressive education, the welfare state—i.e., entities that are familiar in some form to the people in a given society and that influence their lives uniquely, in both thought and action. … They are not philosophy of education, but the curricula and teaching methods of the K–12 schools children attend daily. They are not political abstractions, but the behavior of actual governments wielding defined or purposely undefined powers. The sum of such products is the culture of a society….
Now, at last, I can present the DIM Hypothesis, which is in fact two related theses. The first may be described as cultural, the second as historical.
The cultural thesis asserts that, since the Greeks’ development of philosophy, cultural fields in the West have produced up to five but no more than five essentially different kinds of products, defined by their mode of integration. In other words, the DIM categories exhaust the alternatives in Western culture.
The historical thesis asserts that the West’s mode of integration has changed several times across the centuries, and that this has occurred not by chance, but in substantial part because of the logic of modal progression. If we can gain an understanding of this logic, therefore, we will have a basis for a rational prediction about the West’s future. In short and in sum, if the essence of human cognition is integratio
In short and in sum, if the essence of human cognition is integration, then, I hypothesize, an understanding of the West, past and future alike, requires us to identify and interrelate its dominant modes, from Greece onward. …
Since I offer the DIM theory as applicable to the West from Greece to the present, that is the time span I shall survey. I am doing it in reverse, however, starting with the post-Renaissance era, from the seventeenth century to the present. My reason is that cultural facts are more fully available in the modern era and more widely known by today’s public; so I am using these centuries as a kind of primer. Then I will turn to its prequel, from Greece to the Renaissance.
When our survey is complete, we will have learned something about what (in the existential sense) men have done, but a whole lot more about what they have said. Only a handful of my pages touch on existential events, like the Peloponnesian Wars or the latest presidential election, although these are of undeniable importance. The bulk of the book takes a microscope, or modoscope, to things like the Iliad, the theory of relativity, the Declaration of Independence, and the manifesto of Summerhill.
The popular bromide, which has its uses, tells us that actions speak louder than words. But in regard to understanding culture and history, does it still apply? Indeed, is it possible that the bromide is in reverse?
Let the mode hunt begin.
Since a work of literature consists in essence of events enacted by characters, usually with an overarching theme, a literary school’s mode of integration is to be found in its treatment of these three aspects.
In classicist dramas (for example, those of Corneille and Racine), there are few events for the audience to observe. As a rule, any action takes place offstage, and the audience learns of it only from a character’s narration. … There can be no violence onstage, no fights, no crimes, not even a crowd scene. … there is a man’s recitation of love poetry. And even the poetry for the most part is delivered without much emotion; the passion proclaimed is always polite and decorous. The speeches are clear, logical, precisely worded, and elegant. They are the poetry of love or despair, but not its reality.
To the extent that there are events onstage, there is not much progression among them, because, according to classicist rules, the play as a whole must be set in a single location and must occur within a twenty-four-hour time period (these rules were based on the classical unities of place and time). So the viewer gains virtually no knowledge of how or why the characters have reached their present desires and conflicts. In effect, the audience sees the end of the story, but not the beginning or middle.
The themes of classicist plays are indicated by the kind of struggle that is typical of the main characters. Almost all of these are torn by the same, agonizing conflict: their sense of honor versus some beloved personal value that, they believe, cannot be countenanced by their honor. The theme is the conflict between virtue and desire, between duty and selfishness. Being highly moral, as their authors understand the concept, the heroic characters usually struggle against the lure of self-assertion, in order finally to embrace the rigor of overcoming the self. … More commonly, he is stoic in the face of tragedy. Either way, however, the hero, especially in Corneille, is a hero; he is self-directed, responsible, unflinchingly courageous, and proud of his ability to be guided by his rational faculty, rather than by baseless feelings. …
In their depiction of both events and characters, classicists uphold the values of simplicity and concentration. Their plays almost always present a single situation; subplots are not allowed. … The result is that both events and characters, though in part concretely real and even compelling, are also, insofar as they are “simple,” the opposite of concrete. Largely, we see the same abstract type of character facing the same abstract type of problem.
This tilt toward abstraction was not regarded by classicists as a flaw, but rather as another aesthetic requirement: universality. In their “Introduction to Neoclassicism,” the English department at CUNY elaborates: these artists
“consciously emphasized common human characteristics over individual differences…[aiming] to articulate general truth rather than unique vision….”
Universal characterization of this sort often gives abstractions in their plays primacy over concretes. For instance, the universal conflict of man—their theme of duty versus desire… Such an impression is heightened by the fact that the substance of the play is a flow of beautiful concepts (language) largely unrelated to perceived action. …
The classicists are not pure Platonists. Despite their fundamentals, they do not dismiss concretization as trafficking in unreality. To these moderns, the perceptual world conveyed by the dramatist, though structured and made intelligible by transcendent rules, is still an important reality….
Platonism as the ground of an earthly embrace—in my language, that is Worldly Supernaturalism. The classicists do achieve unity in their works, by means of retaining the Many occurrences and characters onstage, but subordinating them to a priori form. Thus the M1 approach: the transcendent One leading to and ultimately integrating the earthly Many.
It was against classicism that the Romanticist writers rebelled. Their approach dominated Western fiction from the late eighteenth to the mid- nineteenth century, and some of it still exists today, albeit in an antagonistic cultural environment. Although there were many famous Romanticist playwrights (for example, Edmond Rostand), the movement’s best showcase is its novels, such as those of Victor Hugo and, later, Ayn Rand.
The Romanticists rejected authority in aesthetics, classical or divine, in favor of the independent judgment of the artist. “As for himself,” writes Hugo, the great Romanticist spokesman, “he prefers reasons to authorities; he has always cared more for arms than for coats-of-arms.” The long tradition of classicism, which claimed to embody reason, is thus to be rejected—in the name of reason. Clearly, Hugo’s view of reason is not that of the classicists. …
Ayn Rand’s definition: “Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.”…
Romanticists reject the idea of determinism—of man as a puppet, whether of outer or inner, material or spiritual forces; they regard the individual as self-made and self-directed. …
The classicists, too, held an uplifted view of man and did not think that he was a puppet. The differences are that man’s freedom to choose values is not the basis of the classicists’ approach, but merely an important attribute of their protagonists, and that their hero typically fights to defeat a desire of his regarded as unchosen. The Romanticist hero, by contrast, is intoxicated by his own goals; he is defined by his wholehearted use of his faculties to gain and keep what he desires. …
Aristotle, Ayn Rand observes, was the first thinker to state this viewpoint: “The distinction between historian and poet,” he writes, “consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history….” I should mention in passing that Dostoevsky—a negative Romanticist, if you will—expresses moral idealism by presenting and denouncing what ought not to be. …
How can Romanticists create a hero who is larger than life, if they know men only from observation? They cannot turn for guidance to the Form of Man offered by Plato, who regards individuality as unreal and human heroism as hubris. Nor, as artistic rebels, can they turn to establishment models. They have no option but to follow the method of Aristotle: abstraction from sense experience. The Romanticist separates out one attribute (or more) from his observations of people as they are, an attribute that in the real world coexists with many others that are irrelevant to it, or may even contradict it. Then, setting aside these irrelevancies as non-essential, the writer is able to embody the selected attribute (good or evil) in his characters in purer, more consistent form than is found in life…. Thus are heroes created by observing non-heroes. …
The characters and events are the work’s concretes, while the theme, the guiding abstraction, is what unites them into a whole. … Only Romanticism uses theme as an all-encompassing integrator, which it could not do if the events of the story and the traits of the characters were viewed by the writer merely as juxtapositions …
A novel, Hugo states, is a secular undertaking, based on the observation of Nature: “There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature….” As an approach to literary art, this means that Romanticism does not rely on the supernatural. Most Romanticists did believe in some form of the divine, but this was irrelevant to their method of interrelating the elements of their books. The connector of their events was not divine purpose, but the logic of natural cause and effect as men observed it….
Romanticism in literature is a consistently Aristotelian approach to the relationship of the One and the Many. The work is its content, made of the real Many concretes in the novel or play; but it is a Many so connected by the author as to be a One, a secular One created by man’s integrating process. Such a One has no transcendent connotation, and no reality apart from the Many. It is a One in the Many—the I formula.
The Romanticists’ basic principle—that literature should be based on the fact of man’s free will—is dead wrong in the eyes of Naturalists. To them, free will is an empirically groundless, metaphysical concept, and thus an anti-scientific one; the same conclusion applies to the concept of value, which was held to have no basis in sense perception. The truth, say the Naturalists, is that men are moved not by choices or values, but rather by forces outside their control. These forces are almost always construed as social in nature.
To Naturalists, characterization is the essential task of literature; the theory, however, leaves room for a spectrum of different interpretations of this task, according to the width of abstraction regarded as legitimate….
Naturalists regard action in a story primarily as a peg on which to hang characterization. They reject the concept of plot, regarding it as incompatible with the artist’s task…
But just as there is no essence of a character, so there is no essence of their story lines—that is, no logic dictating a progression from beginning to middle to end. In Turgenev’s novel On the Eve, for example, a young fighter for freedom prepares to do battle, falls in love, has the bad luck to be caught in the rain, and before he can set out for the war, dies from pneumonia, at which point the novel ends. Turgenev’s justification of such a sequence of events is simply that these things have happened. …
Naturalism represents the first modern rebellion against the requirement, upheld by classicists and Romanticists alike, that a work of art be a fully integrated product. Like the positivists in philosophy, Naturalists repudiate—in regard to characters, story, and theme—the quest for a full integration. They too uphold only partial conceptualization—integration in chunks, as I have called it—within the framework of an otherwise random flow of people and events.
Naturalists hold that “reality” is a metaphysical term, concepts are suspect, and explanation is impossible; but they also contend that they can discover and depict objectively observable truths about men. This is Knowing Skepticism. The Naturalist avows his allegiance to the Many, certain aspects of which are connected by a number of unrelated Ones.
Naturalism represents Ones in the Many—the D1 mode.
The Modernist movement, although rejected by the public, has dominated Western culture for more than a century now. (Most American intellectuals, lagging behind Europe, did not embrace it until the 1930s.) …
Modernists reject all previous approaches to art—classicist, Romanticist, and Naturalist alike. The features required by traditional literature, in John Barth’s words, are “naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality.”…
Modernist writers are contemptuous of books that tell a story. They regard as artistically worthless any presentation of man in purposeful action in the world, whether by a Romanticist or a Naturalist. …
The same Modernist approach rejects characterization as well. Again, there are many techniques of elimination, including characters with no attributes, such as Kafka’s nameless cipher, and characters whose behavior is unreal because it is bizarre, such as Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, who feverishly adores the X-ray of the tubercular lungs of the woman who has spurned his love. …
If one were to try to abstract from Modernist works a recurrent theme of some kind, it would have to be their campaign against man— specifically, against the depiction in art of man, whether heroic or average, as a being who pursues values. On the contrary, these writers hold, the man who lacks values or, better, who embraces anti-values, the depraved man, is literature’s proper subject, and he is all of us—not the man of achievement, but the man who is barren or even psychopathic; not confidence, but disorientation; not beauty, but the repulsive. So the universe men inhabit, as we are regularly shown, is a hell of pain and doom. …
What the Modernists seek to evoke in the reader’s mind is a flow of the purely unintegrated—that is, of a newborn’s random, momentary sensations. …
Destruction is the essence of the Modernist creed. What these writers acclaim and produce are negatives: non-story, non-hero, non-character, non-meaning, non-grammar, non-language, non-objective, non- representational, non-intelligible, non-rational. This is not a mixed viewpoint, attempting to blend Kant with the conceptual orientation of the Greeks, but an uncompromising declaration of war against the Greek method of thought.
Disintegration, writes Ayn Rand,
is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty…[T]o reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to “moods,” of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.
A nihilist, we have said, is one who works non-venally to destroy man’s mind and values, who smashes not weeds but roses, and does it for the sake of smashing, who elevates nothing above something as an end in itself. If he directs his actions to a specific field, he works to eliminate all the essential attributes of that field’s product, leaving in their place nothing but the smashed remnants. The contribution of Modernism to literature is the demand for non-literature.
—D2
In the twentieth century, a different school of thought with its own distinctive position on art arose primarily in Russia and Germany: totalitarianism. Although the two versions of this approach agreed on essentials, the Communists were by far the more intellectual; for example, they defined literary standards and required writers to follow them, whereas the Nazis, as has often been noted, mostly preferred to burn books rather than to write them. This kind of difference helped to make the Communists far more influential and long-lived in the West. …
The official literary theory of Communist Russia, Socialist Realism, was conceived in the 1930s by Maxim Gorky; its acceptance by writers was quickly mandated by Stalin. For fifty years, any other form of literature was prohibited
Socialist Realism, like Modernism, presents itself as a rebellion against all previous literary movements. Unlike Modernism, however, what it condemned was not representation or objectivity in art, but rather the thing it regarded as the root of all evil, “bourgeois individualism.” …
The purpose of art, they say, is the dissemination of socialist thought. A proper work, in Gorky’s view, must conform to three criteria: It “must represent the interests of the people…further the cause of the Party, and… have sound ideological content.” Novels and plays must be designed to energize the proletariat in its class struggle, extol the Communist Party, and develop in people a social consciousness to replace individual consciousness.
Writers thus become social engineers, working with and for the state to create an unprecedented kind of idealism; their idealism is their enthusiastic desire to be absorbed into the group. …
Like Plato, though in their own variant, the Soviets distinguished two kinds of events: those pertaining to daily life, and those pertaining to reality; the two realms, they believed, may contradict each other. Thus even when it appears that Communists are losing, that is only appearance; in fact, they may really be winning….
Characterization for this school is the depiction and praise of an exploited collective, which feels and acts as a unit. In a story by Aleksandr Fadeev entitled “Young Guard,” one character, who has performed a good action on his own, confesses his error: “It was a bad thing to act the lone wolf. Brave and clever, but by yourself, bad.” ….
The socialist realists throw out, as counter-revolutionary, reliance on sense data, and are left with a system of connected floating abstractions—the One without the Many, M2.
The first system of physics after the Renaissance was that of Descartes, whose approach dominated science in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent England, from the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth century. …
Clearly, Descartes’ physics is M1. It is not, however, the actual beginning of modern science, but rather its short-lived precursor. We will soon encounter an M1 physics incomparably more sophisticated and influential.
Descartes’ physics was given a deathblow at the turn of the eighteenth century by the man universally regarded then and since as the creator of modern science: Isaac Newton, whose physics, in both method and content, ruled the field for two centuries. Among his many achievements, Newton was the first to identify three fundamental Laws of Motion along with his best-known discovery, the Law of Universal Gravitation.
The method by which he made his discoveries, Newton writes, is induction, the method Descartes opposed. Induction for Newton is essentially generalization validated by two processes: experimentation and then the mathematical interpretation of its results.
Although each of these had been necessary to Galileo’s work, and implicit in that of a few others, it was Newton who first identified the combination explicitly, and who first declared the two processes, if used together properly, to be necessary and sufficient to define the method of science. …
In the early stages of experimentation, as of observation in general, only qualitative information can be gained. For such information to lead to knowledge of scientific law, Newton held, it must be identified in abstract and in particular mathematical terms—specifically, as a relation of quantities expressed in equations. Once such equations have been established on the basis of observation and experimental data, Newton showed, the scientist, by mathematical reasoning alone, can extract from those data many otherwise inaccessible implications—which sometimes reveal laws so new to us that the experimenter himself, apart from the mathematical interpretation, could not even have imagined them. To Newton, in short, science is essentially a form of conceptualizing observational data. …
To explain for Newton means to integrate facts to their causes. ..
His method, Newton sums up,
consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by induction…and in general, [proceeding] from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general.
…
Newton called his secular One his “System of the World,” the Many motions so far known being connected by a few interrelated universal laws. And those laws, far from creating the physical Many, exist only as similarities among them.
Here again, this time in the area of physics, we see the I perspective. The One is real, but only as the One in the Many.
The positivists regarded Comte’s epistemology as the definition of scientific method. The world consists of sense data; percepts are the only means of knowledge; the unobservable is metaphysics; concepts, including those of mathematics, are merely a convenient shorthand; science is the description of regularities that happen to occur, but not because they are “necessary.”
The scientist, therefore, must delimit the questions he may legitimately consider. He can ask how things happen, but not why; the “how” is observable (it pertains to the phenomenal world), but the “why” is not (it would pertain to the now rejected noumena). As historian Benjamin Brodie states the theory: “We cannot ask what water is, only what it does, or what it becomes. We have no means of grasping the underlying reality of things, and so should content ourselves with the accurate description of what things do….” …
In rejecting forces, atoms, fields, energy, and the like, the positivists were rejecting the quest for broad integration in science, since such integration had never been possible apart from a basis referring to these unobservables. Only the “metaphysical” scientists had been able to interrelate a wide variety of data, data that had earlier seemed to be obviously unrelated….
Positivists champion the Many while still finding unity, in the form of internally related chunks, each unrelated to the others. Their formula is: the Ones in the Many—D1.
The positivist movement did not last long. Abstract theory, physicists came to believe, is indispensable to physics; it is not a cancer to be removed, but the heart of the subject. But the proper theoretical approach, these moderns hold, is not necessarily Newton’s. The most influential of the new theoreticians, the giant in the twentieth century’s radical reshaping of physics, was Albert Einstein.
Einstein was a champion of integration, always looking for fundamental principles expressed in the widest abstractions. In later years he sought, though unsuccessfully, to find a Unified Field Theory, which would subsume everything known in physics. His aim, he said, was “to obtain a formula that will account in one breath for Newton’s falling apple, the transmission of light and radio waves, the stars, and the composition of matter.” …
Clearly, Einstein and Newton disagree fundamentally about the nature of mathematics. For Newton, mathematics is a tool created by man. For Einstein, mathematics (space) is half the universe. For Newton, mathematical equations are valid because they describe physical facts learned ultimately by observation. For Einstein, mathematical equations are valid because they belong to a certain self-contained, a priori system of numbers. For Newton, to explain an event is to discover its physical cause. For Einstein, to explain an event is to discover its equations. …
The world of Nature is still regarded by Einstein as real. But in his theories, we see the beginning of the takeover of Nature by mathematics, which means: the subordination of perceptual fact to a transcendent realm of concepts. Since this implication is the antithesis of positivism, Einstein soon described himself as a rationalist. …
The One, in Einstein’s physics, is a transcendent system of a priori equations that underlie, interrelate, and explain the Many real concretes of this world. Like that of Descartes, though in a very different way, Einstein’s mode is the Many from the One—M1.
At the turn of the twentieth century, light, which had earlier been conceived as a wave and thus as continuous and spread out, was found to exhibit the discrete nature of particles. Similarly, electrons, earlier conceived as particles and thus as discrete entities with a specific position, were found to have some of the characteristics of waves. Thus arose the wave-particle duality: Waves, it seemed, have some attributes of particles and vice versa, which by the definitions of each seems to be a contradiction. …
As with all ambitious disintegrators, quantum physicists leave behind them only the Many—in this case, a juxtaposition of sensations, probabilities, and equations—a Many without a One, and thus reflect the D2 mode.
By the mid-sixties, physics was in a state of disarray. Four unconnected kinds of forces, along with dozens of kinds of particles, were being hypothesized and interpreted on the basis of the two unrelated (and sometimes mutually contradictory) theoretical frameworks of Einstein and quantum mechanics. …
If we are to reach the all-encompassing explanation we seek, most of these physicists say, we must recognize the validity of a certain popular physical theory and then interpret it in terms of string physics. Since we are seeking to derive everything that exists from an antecedent state, the theory argues, we are led back ultimately to the only state that could precede existence: nothing. But if a realm of nothing is our cosmic ancestor, there must at one point have been a cosmic eruption, a creation of existents ex nihilo but without a creator, a big bang, as the cosmologists have long called it, in which the primordial nothing turns into something. What this latter turns into is the sub-microscopic world of strings. …
The universe of the Theory of Everything is an unworldly monist’s dream: a transcendent, a priori One (a single set of equations) from which flows the unreal Many—unreal in physics, because banished from it as irrelevant. This exemplifies the M2 mode in physics.
The humanists of the Renaissance, “reborn” after a thousand years of faith, looked for inspiration and guidance to Greco-Roman culture. They embraced it not as educators, but as students going back, as they said, to the only rational school that ever existed. By the seventeenth century, however, their descendants in the field of education, as in art, had turned admiration of antiquity into their fundamental principle, which defined value in every cultural field. Thereafter, what is called classical education (or, as in art, classicism) ruled Western schools for three centuries, fading away only in the later nineteenth.
According to the classical approach, proper education is the study of the culture and society of the ancients, including their languages, especially Latin. Greco-Roman civilization, these new educators held, was not merely great; it was immeasurably superior to anything else (religion apart), including whatever educational ideas might emerge in times to come. In this view, as in that of the classicist playwrights, the ancients were no longer regarded as the key to unlimited human progress, but rather as treasured authorities from whose culture any deviation was not progress, but degeneration. …
By definition, classical education favored the traditional over the modern; the arts and humanities over the often suspect observations of natural science; and the student’s intellectual development over vocational and technological training, with its usual result moneygrubbing. …
Perhaps the boldest claim of the classicists was that only a study of the classics could achieve a crucial secular value: the development of a student’s rational faculty. In their words, only classical study “sharpens a student’s mind”; it does so by instilling in his mind the method of logic, the rigor of mental discipline, and the ability to think clearly while using broad abstractions. An essential element in the learning of these skills was thought to be the study of Latin, whose grammar and syntax were widely regarded as uniquely logical. A teacher aiming to sharpen minds in this way must present his material, including Latin, not as a miscellany of data, but as a structured progression of principles. Ultimately these principles, having been shown in various areas to be logically interrelated, will form for the young mind a system linking all the knowledge it has gained. …
Grammar studied the relations of words to one another; logic, the relations of sentences to one another; rhetoric, the methods of gaining one mind’s consent to the sentences of another. …
The classicist study of grammar, taken virtually intact from the ancient Romans, taught students how to connect words unrelated to experience. The teachers were not concerned with the role, if any, of these words and rules in the student’s life—for example, with their relevance to a boy’s actual mental process in understanding observed fact and organizing his conclusions. On the contrary, the focus was on the connection of words to other words, not to the world, on texts apart from experience. Non-empirical words, in short, are taking the role of tradition’s pure forms. …
Throughout his formative years, the student lived and thought primarily in a world of rules, sentences, names—that is, in large part a world of pure abstractions…. the seventeenth century, as the Britannica points out, soon shifted from content to form—in education as in literature. Form apart from content is, of course, the definition of Platonism.
Comparatively few students worked up much enthusiasm for the task of learning the assigned forms by rote, but rebels were reminded that school, being the opposite of dens of worldly enjoyment, required arduous discipline. …
Classical schools provoked continual, though largely ineffectual criticism from empirically minded reformists. Our schools, said the educational pioneer John Comenius, are “the slaughterhouses of minds,” since understanding comes “not in the mere learning the names of things, but in the actual perception of the things themselves.” Without empirical content, wrote John Locke, students might as well throw away their books as “containing nothing but hard Words, and empty Sounds….” …
For these educators, the Many—a school’s goals, its curriculum, its method of teaching—are realities interconnected because they all derive from a supernatural One—the formula of the M1 approach.
According to the Britannica, “Concepts of teaching and learning—and school practice—have changed more since 1900 than in all preceding human history.” The reason for this lies in the Progressive movement, which began in the late nineteenth century, took over American schools in the 1920s and 1930s, and still remains influential here at all levels, from kindergarten through college. Europe adopted Progressive elements a few decades later, and only in part.
Leaving aside its many precursors, the preeminent creator of this approach was John Dewey… Reality is indeterminate (like the limbo of the quantum physicists); man is primarily an actor, not a thinker; an idea is a plan of action designed to remove obstacles from an actor’s path; and the idea’s truth or falsehood lies in whether or not the plan works, an outcome that cannot be known in advance, but only after the action has been taken.…
If action has primacy over thought, the Progressive educators say, then that is how a child must learn: “by doing.” “Doing” here subsumes a wide array of activities, including making things, growing plants, looking around, collecting pictures, touring the neighborhood, sharing experiences, cooking, playing, and looking things up in a book when necessary…. Education, in this vision, is no longer the process of transmitting acquired knowledge to the child in order to prepare him for life. On the contrary, education is “participation in, rather than preparation for [life].” …
According to A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, one of the leading Progressive institutions of the twentieth century, the child needs freedom not merely at home, but also in school—even the freedom to ignore schoolwork. Education, Neill says, requires the complete freedom to play, “to experience the full range of feelings, free from the judgment and intervention of an adult.” “Learning,” said Aristotle—and educators through the centuries after him—“is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain.” No more.
The Progressive child does not, however, enjoy the same independence in relation to other children. Self-expression, though still important, is transcended by a more important goal: adaptation to one’s peers.. The child must learn to see himself not primarily as a separate entity pursuing personal desires, but as part and servant of a larger entity, which after graduation he realizes is society as a whole. The fundamental goal of education, says Dewey, is not that of traditional individualism, not sharpening minds, nurturing selves, or stuffing the student with knowledge, but developing in children a social spirit expressed in the desire for social service.
To achieve this end, one common Progressive innovation was group learning, in which students are assigned a project to be done in and by a group, and for which each member will receive the same grade, regardless of the quality or quantity of any one individual’s contributions. …
Progressives do not regard their twin goals, self-expression and social adaptation, as logically incompatible. During the years that we leave the young child free to seek selfish gratification, they say, the school is gradually reshaping him so that he is unable to gain much satisfaction on his own. Eventually, he comes to identify with the collective unit. Thus his earlier self-expression turns into peer expression; in a sense, his self becomes the group. …
Since thought is of value only if it helps remove concrete obstacles that interfere with the pupils’ concrete doings, the children do not hear much in school of abstractions. To teach principles, natural laws, scientific theories, and intellectual systems may sometimes have an auxiliary role. But as a rule these are just words to a student, because they are irrelevant to his immediate projects. The real problems of life, the student learns, are too complex for any neat set of words to be able to deal with. So the traditional curriculum, too, must be scrapped. …
Insofar as Progressives do teach traditional subjects, they apply consistently their commitment to the concrete as against the abstract…. The teaching of science, for example, consists largely of hands-on science activities—that is, concrete experiments performed by the children usually without any theoretical context or general conclusion offered by the teacher…
As to mathematics, that onetime citadel of abstractions is now almost unrecognizable. According to Anemona Hartocollis, a New York Times reporter, one Progressive offshoot, constructivism,
has led to the schools’ widespread rejection of textbooks, in favor of exercises using blocks, beans and other materials. One popular program, MathLand, suggests that students count a million grains of birdseed to get a feeling for the size of a million.
One “reactionary” mathematics professor at Harvard, Wilfried Schmid, was incredulous when he discovered that his daughter was “reduced to drawing 39 little men to solve problems like 39-14.” …
“If students enjoyed working with science-type materials such as magnets or mirrors,” says a science teacher, “I really don’t care if they learned anything.” Dewey goes further; communicating knowledge to a student, he holds, may be not only unimportant, but downright harmful. “The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair,” he writes, “that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” (Quoted in “Socializing Students for Anarchy,” Glenn Woiceshyn, Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1997. John Dewey, The School and Society)
The Progressives’ program for the schools is not reform, but demolition: of subjects, facts, lessons, texts, structure, intellect, teaching, and learning. Above all, the movement represents the equation of education with the perceptual-level mentality. It is the anti-conceptual mentality embracing the pre-conceptual child and training him to remain in that state for life.
Education without teaching and learning is not “education for democracy.” It falls in the same category as literature without story and characters, and physics without matter and laws. It is nihilism.
In their thoroughgoing concrete-boundedness, the Progressives, like all nihilists, recognize only a Many, a Many without a One—the formula of D2.
For generations now Progressivism has been a major influence in America, and to a lesser extent in Europe. But most of our educators do still accept many traditional elements; they have not gone all the way with Dewey, and are best described as pluralists. Pluralism in this field, as in others, means the elevation of the Many above the One; this approach is by far the top choice of our teachers today. Out of all the educational possibilities, it alone is institutionalized across America and publicly financed. …
The concrete-boundedness of today’s teachers begins with the schools of education, especially with the courses on methodology. Jacques Barzun, the famed Columbia educator and a critic of Progressive education, has identified what students learn in these courses. There is no one proper method of teaching, the aspiring teacher hears, but rather many methods.
There is a method for supervising schools and another for being a principal. Every subject matter taught has its special method. Even janitorial method can be learned, and the method of teaching janitorial method also. Methods grow like fleas on one another ad infinitum.
Teachers thus trained soon acquire a disdain for broadly integrating principles and usually even for lesser generalizations. They come to seek multiplicity not only in the goals they endorse, but also in how they deal in class with the content of any given course. For example, if a history teacher covers the American Revolution, he likely tends to dismiss as vague or empty an explanation in terms of the colonists’ view of individual rights and their consequent opposition to tyranny. Instead, his students learn that this view is simplistic, because in fact there were many causes at work
including the big landowners’ desire to preserve their estates, the Southern planters’ desire for a cancellation of their English debts, the Bostonians’ opposition to tea taxes, the Western land speculators’ need to expand past the Appalachians, etc. </blockquote? …
Students of such teaching—whether in history, science, or elsewhere —Barzun observes, “make heroic efforts to memorize…they provide themselves with five causes for this and ten results of that. They bulge with factors, forces, and trends….” Because of the material’s disintegration, however, most of them cannot understand or even retain for long the data filling their notebooks. Again, as in naturalist art and positivist science, the creators of the product offer description without explanation.
As all the above indicates, our schools are abandoning concepts in favor of perceptual-level education. The clearest illustration of this fact can be observed on the perceptual level: the rising use in the classroom of videos and digital pictures, and the fading interest in books. Textbooks are increasingly filled not with words, but with pictures. In one learning test, the state of California instructed eighth graders to answer an essay question about Einstein; as the tools by which to express their idea, the test offered the students a choice: “symbols, images, drawings, and/or words.” …
Unlike the Progressives, the pluralists do present facts and truths; but these are presented, in effect, as a flow of atoms without much molecular structure to bind them together. …
Despite their differences, all pluralists agree that—in purposes, subject matters, and methods—educators face an irreducible Many. But it is a Many among which unrelated Ones can be found—the D1 formula.
Totalitarian Education
Totalitarian educators regarded Western schools as disseminators of fragmentation, skepticism, and immorality, all of which they saw as the corrupt legacy of groups such as the bourgeoisie (or in the Nazi version, the Jews). Instead, the schools should work to advance the goal long dreamed of by mankind but never before achieved. They must work to turn out ideal men, men unprecedented in moral character, aspiration, and thought. The essence of such a man, they said, is defined by his ideology; he is the man who has become a true Communist. “The entire purpose of training, educating, and teaching the youth,” wrote Lenin, “… should be to imbue them with communist ethics.”…
“Textbooks,” writes Nadezhda Krupskaya, a pioneer in socialist education, “must be thoroughly permeated with the spirit of collectivism…so that children could get accustomed to view themselves as parts of a whole.”
To carry out this program, the content of virtually every school subject had to be reconceived. In history, for example, the traditional idea that a child should learn facts about the past and then draw generalizations from them was rejected as counter-revolutionary. Rather, the trends and even the details of history are to be taught as products of antecedently known ideological generalizations—which tell us of the class struggle, the evil of the capitalists, and so on. Even such concretes as Beethoven’s symphonies have been explained in such terms….
Totalitarian education was a thorough epistemological retraining of the student; as such it was an indispensable factor in the state’s ability to maintain total power. This is our first example of a system of floating abstractions being used as Plato did—that is, as a means of achieving thought control. Totalitarians, I should add, did not construe thought control as entailing passivity or fear; their aim was to turn out not cowed puppets, but impassioned zealots.
In the end, therefore, in the Communist schools, only the ideology, the One, was real—the One without the Many, M2.
An I Approach
I can find no I (or any other) approach to education in the modern era— no one like Aristotle in philosophy, Hugo in literature, or Newton in science. Certain educators do suggest an I approach, notably Maria Montessori, but her works, while Aristotelian in essentials, are not a full theory of education, but only an anticipation of one, focused on guiding pre-school teachers. So I must here suggest my own, Objectivist projection of an I approach (a quite different, ancient version of I education will be considered in part three). An I approach would not be oriented to classics, doings, a lot of things, or ideology. Its focus, in my view, would be on the student’s use of his conceptual faculty—the faculty that is basic to every aspect of human life that depends on cognition, including survival.
As I have discussed in chapter one, the conceptual faculty does not operate automatically. It may be directed to reality or detached from it; it may be treated as dependent on observation or as independent of it; it may be applied to all areas of life, only to some, or to none. Man’s basic tool of survival, in short, may be properly developed—or derailed, stunted, even destroyed. This sets the single ultimate purpose of the I educator. His task, across years, is to teach the perceptual-level toddler how to become a rational, conceptual-level thinker.
The content of an I education is uniquely delimited. Beyond the three Rs, the curriculum includes only four subjects: science, mathematics, history, and literature. …
The I teacher is hired as an expert in subject matter and in the method of its presentation. His primary activity in class, accordingly, is not to moderate uninformed discussions, but to lecture. To achieve his purpose, he must carefully select and logically structure the topics he covers.
Logical structure in this context is a form of integration; it means hierarchical structure. Since advanced concepts in the Aristotelian view are rooted ultimately in perceptual fact, the teacher, in any area, must present his material accordingly. He must teach not only facts, but facts forming a connected chain—a chain going from perception to lower- level concepts and generalizations to the more abstract, underlying principles, so far as the student at any given stage can understand them. The students are not given the arbitrary or the floating, but the inductive and the objective.
If students are to achieve a proper cognitive development, other forms of integration must also be taught. In my experience, the most important skill for them to learn is how to identify cross-relationships— that is, relationships between points taught in one area and those in others. I regard this aspect of teaching as critical, especially when the points and areas at first appear to be completely unrelated.
Not all issues are related, of course, but the conceptualizing student should learn to see (or at least seek) connections everywhere—for example, between King Tut and George III and Othello, between the inverse square law and Thomas Jefferson, and even between Mr. Spock and geometry. Gradually, the child so taught comes to see the world not as a juxtaposition, but as a whole. In my experience, the champion in teaching this particular skill, who achieved breathtaking results even with toddlers, was the great Chicago educator Marva Collins. ….
POLITICS
Absolute Monarchy
In this politics, the worldly One is the king, who is the state uniting the citizens, the Many—and this worldly unity flows ultimately from a transcendent One—the M1 approach.
Capitalism
In the eighteenth century, absolute monarchy was succeeded to varying extents by a new system, one that, in the opinion of James Madison, had “no parallel in the annals of human society.” In the nineteenth century, its opponents named the new politics capitalism. …
Throughout history, although the forms of the state have varied widely, its essence has not; the state, to quote from a book of mine, has always been regarded
as the ruler of the individual—as a sovereign authority… to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers [by contrast] …started with the premise of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. The individual…logically precedes the group or the institution of government. Whether or not any social organization exists, each man possesses certain individual rights.
And among these, according to a New Hampshire state document at the time, “are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; and in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.” These rights were regarded not as a disparate collection, but as a unity expressing a single basic right; in the words of Samuel Adams, they “are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
Self-preservation requires that an individual have the liberty to think, to act, and to keep the products of his thought and action. Before the Enlightenment, these rights, had they been conceived, would have been regarded as sins if not crimes, because they represent and protect the opposite of service to authority, whether king or God.
Individual rights enshrine self-assertion, not self-sacrifice; the quest for material wealth, not poverty ennobling the soul; the profit motive, not the heaven motive; independence, not obedience; the pursuit of happiness, not of duty.
Man’s rights, it was agreed, are inalienable, and their source is not society or government, but Nature. “Natural” here means based on the facts of reality—that is, on laws of Nature discovered by man scientifically; “inalienable” means eternal and immutable—that is, absolutes which no one may properly infringe. In both respects, it was said, there is no difference between these newly discovered laws of politics and the universally revered laws of Newton.
And “to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These powers, therefore, are limited. Government is forbidden to take any action that would infringe individual rights because, in Adams’s words, “the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights….” An agent of individuals, in other words, can exercise only the powers they have delegated to it.
Capitalist theory, consistently interpreted, requires a “wall of separation” between Church and state, just as it does between economy and state. … The state, in Jefferson’s words, is to concern itself only with that which “picks my pocket or breaks my bones.” …
Secularism, though most widespread in America, was a defining attribute of the Enlightenment throughout the West. … It was in this philosophic atmosphere that the capitalist system of government was born. … During the Constitutional Convention, William Williams of Connecticut moved to enlarge the Preamble to include language that today would be considered uncontroversial rhetoric; he wanted some mention of the country’s belief in “the one living and true God…His universal providence and the authority of His laws….” The motion was voted down. In the same year, the Senate ratified unanimously a treaty that included the statement that the U.S. government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion….” Again in that year, when someone asked Hamilton why there was no reference to God in the Constitution, he answered cheerfully: “We forgot.” ,..
In Jefferson’s words, “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” …
Jefferson, for example, urged the young to study history on the grounds that it would give them “the experience of other times and other nations…”; only this kind of knowledge, he believed, enables us to know the nature of man and the causes of happiness. …
All the key features of the capitalist state—its validation, its powers and limits, the prerogatives and interrelationships of its citizens—are unified, because all are derived from a single principle: the worldly self- preservation of the individual. In this view, the state is a form of connection among the Many—a connection made by the Many, and real only through their agreement. Here we see not a One transcending the Many, but a One in the Many. Or, putting Thales into Latin, e pluribus unum—the I formula.
Pluralism (in Government)
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the intellectuals of the West increasingly rejected capitalism. A new political approach had taken hold in Europe by the 1880s, starting in Germany under Bismarck; a generation later, the Progressive Party brought it to the United States. Following many political scientists, I call this approach pluralism, although in different contexts it has two better-known names: the mixed economy and the welfare state. …
The pluralist in politics denies that government has any single purpose, such as carrying out God’s will or protecting man’s rights. There are many proper governmental goals, he holds, and these are not connected by or deducible from any abstract formula. …
Modern pluralists in politics are skeptics in regard to basic principles, but knowers in regard to lower-level generalizations. They advocate the Many interspersed by unconnected Ones—the formula of D1. This is one reason why the Republicans and the Democrats, despite their rhetoric, so often seem indistinguishable.
Totalitarianism
As the name “totalitarianism” (coined by Mussolini) implies, the powers of the proper state are unlimited. The leadership can tolerate no dissent, whether based on religion, morality, or any other entity once regarded as independent of government. The state is to control not only art and education, as we’ve seen, but every detail of a man’s life; the only prerogative of the citizen is obedience. As to personal liberty, private ownership, inalienable rights—all these are remnants of a decadent past, which must be obliterated. “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany,” declared Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, “is somebody who is asleep.” …
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” writes Marx, “but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” …
… as the Communists liked to put it, socialism and then Communism.
When it arrives, the final stage, the classless society, will be the first truly moral society in history, according to the Communist Manifesto; the reason is that nothing then will be left of “naked self-interest,” “egotistical calculation,” or “callous ‘cash payment.’” Instead, the ruling principle will be: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”. These moral values, Marx observed, are “as old as the Judeo-Christian tradition. But their acceptance for social organization— their social realization—would be new….” In other words, the difference in moral values between Christianity and Communism is that the Communists intend really to live by the principles that the Christians merely preach.
Once these principles have been internalized by the citizens, Marx concludes, all will want nothing but to serve the group. So there will be no further need for a coercive state and the whole apparatus of totalitarianism will “wither away.” Lenin regarded the details of this withering-away—when, where, how—as unknowable. Nikita Khrushchev did have one idea about it; the period of time required to reach the classless society, he said, “will be a very long one.” …
In totalitarian thought, there is no longer a philosophic justification for a division of political power, such as between Church and king. The one true reality is grasped by the one unified party in the form of a unified system of ideas—a system that elevates the collective, and regards the individual and ultimately all worldly entities as unreal appearance. So: the One without the Many—M2.
Egalitarianism
In the decades after World War II, a new approach became increasingly evident on the ethical-political scene: egalitarianism, which for the first time has made explicit an idea long implicit in Western thought, notably in the teachings of Christianity, Kant, and Marx. The non-academic representatives of this viewpoint are usually concerned not so much with theory as with its application to some delimited area. But the pioneering source of this movement in our time is an academic: Harvard philosopher John Rawls.
Egalitarianism is the view that equality is the fundamental moral value and, therefore, the standard of good and evil. Equality here does not refer to equality before the law; although this principle, introduced by capitalism, is endorsed by most of these thinkers, they regard it as merely a minor instance of morality. Nor does equality mean equality of opportunity a social condition advocated since FDR by welfare statists, who argued that society should equip all men equally from the start with the knowledge and goods necessary to achieve success in life, but thereafter should leave men reasonably free to compete, some ending up winners and others losers. To this viewpoint, egalitarians reply that, owing to factors beyond their control, some men are doomed to fail no matter what society does. If the fundamental moral value is to be achieved, they conclude, society must concern itself primarily not with the start of a man’s endeavors, but with the end. The moral principle is not equality of opportunity, but equality of result. …
The value most often discussed by these theorists is material wealth. If equality is the definition of justice, then any disparity between rich and poor is self-evidently unjust. Egalitarians acknowledge that some men produce material values (and thus gain an income) that are superior, sometimes incomparably so, to those produced by others. Further, contrary to the Marxists, the dominant voices acknowledge that such producers usually succeed through their own character and consequent actions, such as disciplined thought and hard work. But none of this, they say, justifies the conclusion that producers have earned their products or deserve to keep them. The reason is that a man’s intelligence, his character, and all his other productive attributes are a result of luck: his luck in the “lottery of nature,” which gave him his superior brain; and/or his luck in being born and raised in a superior environment, which gave his brain the means to develop.
The actual creator of a product, therefore, is not its so-called producer, but the Nature/society combination that produced him. Since he is moving through life courtesy of factors he did nothing to earn, he cannot claim moral credit for his work, mental or physical, or ownership of it either. …
In place of the traditional idea of justice as giving every man his due, which implies that some are due more than others, we must implement a new definition of justice—justice as fairness. Fairness here means the elimination of the results of Nature’s unfairness.
Besides inequality of wealth, there are many other sorts of inequality that egalitarians in various areas condemn as unfair and seek to remove. Today’s ethnic leaders, who regard opponents of the new fairness as racist, seek not old-fashioned civil rights, already long gained, but equality for their minorities in regard to all the values enjoyed by the majority. Feminists seek equality with males—in income, status, power —through liberation from “sexism.” Age activists, fighting “ageism,” want equality with the young. The physically handicapped, fighting “ableism,” want equality with the healthy. The ugly, fighting “looksism,” want equality with the beautiful. The multiculturalists, fighting “imperialism,” want the West to acknowledge that its culture is no better than any other. The animal-rights activists, fighting “speciesism,” want us to recognize that man is no more important than any other creature. …
Rawls, the most philosophical of them, explains why. Men’s differences, he says, though real, are not morally relevant; we can reach a man’s moral essence only by imagining him stripped of his attributes, because all of these are but effects of his unearned (and thus non-moral) natural/social endowment. The moral man, in other words, is what is left after the man we see has been stripped of his brain, body, knowledge, memory, character traits, desires, skills, etc. From this perspective, Rawls concludes, all men are the same. …
A moral claim, in this theory, is one made by an attribute-less man— which means: by a man who is nothing in particular, by an existent without identity, i.e., by nothing. Men are equally deserving not because of what they think, feel, or do, but because at the core they are equally zero. … His own theory of justice, Rawls notes, “is highly Kantian in nature. Indeed, I must disclaim any originality for the views I have put forward.” …
Whatever the injustice egalitarians strive to eliminate, their method of dealing with it does not vary. Since the unlucky losers, the bottoms among men, are by definition helpless, they can gain the values equality requires only if the tops are cut down—that is, only if they are deprived not merely of their greater money, but also of their unequal share of respect, admiration, rights, and power. These values, too, must be—and are now being—redistributed.
In the affirmative action programs, jobs and college admissions are awarded regularly to unqualified applicants at the price of being denied to the qualified. In many schools, grading students and even scorekeeping in games are being dropped, so that the superior performers, being unidentified, do not enjoy admiration for their feats, while the inferior ones gain self-esteem, since they are free now not to know that their betters are better. … On the handicapped-lib front, one group a few years back, during Christopher Reeve’s fight to regain normal functioning after his tragic accident, denounced his fight as hurtful elitism, since it implied that a normal man is superior to a paraplegic.
Dostoevsky’s Shigalyov from Deamons is an early egalitarian:
Shigalyov is a man of genius! Do you know he’s a sort of genius like Fourier, but bolder than Fourier, but stronger than Fourier… He’s invented ‘equality’! … They’re all slaves and equal in their slavery…
First, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of science and talents is accessible only to higher abilities—no need for higher abilities! … Slaves must be equal: there has never yet been either freedom or equality without despotism, but within a herd there must be equality, and this is Shigalyovism!Also Ayn Rand’s Toohee from The Fountainhead:
Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. … Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men. … Slavery to slavery. A great circle– and a total equality … Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically.Peter Singer sums up the point memorably. It is essential, he writes, that we bring down the “high flyers.” …
The acclaimed humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, avant-garde in this issue, confessed the dilemma that often tortured him as a doctor: Since both are equal, should he save the man and kill the virus, or vice versa? …
The dictator of Cambodia, Pol Pot, an eclectic mix of Communism and egalitarianism, had no hesitation in mandating the result implicit in the ideal he had learned from the French:
After the first year of Khmer Rouge rule, to take just one example, foraging for food was denounced as a manifestation of individualism. Some might wind up with more than others. Better that all should starve equally.There is only one name for a theory that starts with a zero in man’s soul and uses it to create a zero out of mankind: nihilism. …
As the archetype of the anti-integration mentality in social-political issues, egalitarianism clearly upholds the Many without the One—the formula of D2.
Greek vs Roman education
As we have seen, Greek education was value-oriented, both in goal and method. In order to help the child become the human ideal and gain a life of personal happiness, he was taught the supreme value of heroism, independence, and self-sufficiency as exemplified by Achilles. Further, most boys were taught by or with teachers and fellow students whose knowledge, character, and/or athletic feats the boys naturally came to admire and seek to emulate.
Roman education replaced value with duty. The child was not placed in a world of heroes and admiration; rather—at least in the early, trendsetting centuries—he was left to learn from his parents; in the earliest years, his teacher was his mother, later his father. A father was not presented to his son as a hero; the child was told that his father was entitled to respect not because he was Achilles or strong or brilliant, but simply because he was his father, regardless of his traits. What was required of a Roman child, he was told, was not admiration, but obedience to duty—duty not only to his father, but also to his family, ancestors, gods, the men in authority, and, above all, the state. His highest duty, he learned, was the duty to support and protect the enduring supremacy of God-blessed Rome, regardless of any personal opinions he might hold on the subject.…
“If ancient Greek education can be defined as the imitation of the Homeric hero,” says the Britannica, “that of ancient Rome took the form of imitation of one’s ancestors.” Roman boys, of course, were also taught to admire illustrious figures—not as a means of promoting self-realization, however, but rather self-abnegation.
# Greek vs Roman politics
Roman politics, both republican and imperial, rested on three interconnected ideas: collectivism, duty, and law.
Whereas the Greeks’ goal in politics, as in education, was in substantial part individualistic—to foster each man’s self-development and personal fulfillment—the Romans’ goal was collectivistic. The purpose of the citizen, as Virgil had said and as all knew from their early schooling, was to promote not the welfare of the individual, but of the Roman state—to promote it and, when called upon, to sacrifice himself for it.
By this standard, most of the Greek values—such as abstract science, idealistic admiration, and even rollicking laughter—the Romans judged to be insignificant or even selfish. Instead, a citizen’s life, especially his public life, should exemplify whatever traits strengthened Rome: love of hard work, self-control in thought, seriousness, frugality, piety, and public spirit. The good citizen practiced these virtues not as a means to his happiness, which was morally irrelevant, but as an end in itself, simply because they were his duty.
The Inquisition
For many centuries, going back to the fall of Rome, Christians had regarded heresy as a crime, but had no power to impose punishment; now they had the power. They argued that their campaign, including its methods, had the sanction of Jesus himself, as revealed in the Gospel of St. John (15:6):
“[I]f anyone abide not in me he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither; and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.”To catch a heretic, one must first find him, which requires that one make inquiries. To find a mass of heretics, one needs a mass of inquirers. The Inquisition was little concerned with a heretic’s capacity to effect what we call regime change, which in that era, if conceived at all, would have been understood to be impossible. Nor was the motive primarily to punish crime. Their goal, the Inquisitors stated, was not to harm their enemies, but to express in action Christian love—not only their love of God, but also of each heretic himself. If the Inquisition could change his thinking and turn him into a true Christian, it would thereby ensure his salvation. So torture was merely an ephemeral infliction of pain on the errant, necessary for them to reach in the very near future an eternity of joy. …
The personnel and supporters of the Inquisition viewed themselves as healers—healers of the soul—and by the evidence I have found, a substantial number held this belief sincerely. Nothing else seems to explain their unique treatment of their victims.
The best- known examples of it are the cases of a condemned man being led to the fire, a man who had been tortured and sentenced for being invincibly unrepentant. The man was not then confronted with indifference, gloating, or even disapproval by his executioners (though he often was so treated by an unruly mob). On the contrary, from the moment of sentencing, the victim’s confessor, showing a kind of tender concern, stayed next to him and prayed, beseeching him to repent. The prayers and pleas continued until the last moment, when the pyre to which the heretic was bound had been lit and the flames had begun to rise. If the man even then had nodded his head in a gesture of repentance, he would still be incinerated, but his soul, everyone knew, would have been saved. …
The medieval Church not only exemplified totalitarianism, it invented the system. It is this Christian creation that became the model inspiring its twentieth-century heirs—the only model they had to guide them, spreading out before their eager eyes the essential ideas, the practices, and even some of the details necessary to implement their own (modernized) versions of papal supremacy. The logic leading from God to the Inquisition opened the door, and then we saw our contemporaries salute the logic leading from the dialectic to the gulags.
Medieval politics is clearly a form of Platonism. Individuals are as nothing because, metaphysically, they are unreal, merged ultimately into the corpus Christi, “one mystic body, of which body the head is Christ, but of Christ, God”—the One without the Many—M2.
Philosophy and Cultural Products
As Ayn Rand and I have argued at length, a society’s philosophy is what shapes its actions and future. The DIM Hypothesis, as I have pointed out several times, presupposes this viewpoint as its necessary foundation. Despite its causal primacy, however, philosophy taken by itself does not enable us to identify the essence of any particular society. The reason is that a society’s philosophy cannot be discovered directly, simply by asking its people—whether the intellectuals and/or the general public— what they think in regard to fundamental questions.
Most intellectuals, even in the humanities and sciences, are—often understandably—too caught up in the specialized problems of their field to be explicitly concerned much with philosophic abstractions. …
But to determine the extent of such influence, if any, we must discover to what extent these ideas are accepted or at least tolerated by people outside the intellectual world. A philosophy, brilliant or otherwise, that is unknown or intolerable to the public as a whole may still have future potential, but it does not reveal the society’s essence in the present. …
Let us take as an example the Objectivist principle that the rise of unreason in a society leads, if unchecked, to dictatorship (a principle on which I based an earlier book analyzing Hitler’s takeover of the Weimar Republic). And let us suppose we know by some means that a substantial part of a given society increasingly accepts unreason. …
To reach and direct the minds of the general public, philosophy has to take the form of concretes of a special kind
To reach and direct the minds of the general public in any era, philosophy has to take the form of concretes of a special kind: concretes that incorporate and communicate fundamental abstractions, but do so largely by implication—while in explicit terms they engage people’s interest and assent by offering them specific items of knowledge and/or value they do understand and desire. Only cultural products perform this dual task. They alone present philosophy in a form accessible to minds oriented to concretes, concretes such as the stories people enjoy or the (to them) wild and crazy electrons they read about in the Sunday papers with awe or their child’s teacher’s way of teaching him reading or the politicians debating taxes on TV.
Cultural works are the proselytizers of philosophy. If the works are accepted by a society not necessarily in theory, but in practice—in the form of purchases, enrollments, votes, applause, and the like, reflecting widespread approval—then the ideas they embody reveal a society’s actual, functioning philosophy, whether generally acknowledged or not. …
So my first inductive generalization, which I now regard as objectively proved, is no longer a mere hypothesis. This first generalization is: Cultural works are the transmitters to a society of philosophic fundamentals. …
From the foregoing, my second inductive generalization, relating culture and mode, is: Only modal analysis can lead us safely through a jungle of fallacies and objectively lay bare cultural essences.
A mode, being an application of philosophy to a specific task
Although a mode presupposes philosophy, that philosophy necessarily deals with many other issues as well. Ultimately, all these issues are interrelated. Despite this, however, a mode, being an application of philosophy to a specific task, is defined by reference to its philosophy’s stand on only two questions. The answer to either of these implies the other.
- Metaphysically, the issue is the status of this world.
- Epistemologically, it is the status of concepts.
A philosophy’s answer to the first tells a man what to integrate—that is, which kinds of connections to look for and which, however they may be sought after by others, are to be dismissed as non-existent or unknowable
The answer to the second tells a man how to integrate—where to start, through what kinds of steps or stages to proceed, how far he should try to go (and, of course, whether he should start at all). …
For the reader’s future reference, I restate here in compressed terms the key generalizations in this chapter.
Cultural works are shaped by and transmit philosophy through their mode.
Identifying mode is the only means of grasping cultural essence.
Only two philosophic issues—the nature of this world and of concepts—are necessary to the grasp of modes.
There are five, and only five, modes.
THE WEST’S MODAL PROGRESSION
In the battle between thinkers adept in dealing with broad abstractions and thinkers ignorant of the battle, there could have been only one outcome. The Athenians did not have to pay for their philosophic defects because there was no one like Kant to cash in on them. But now there was and he did.
The cause of the I downfall in the ancient world was a panic of the populace independent of the intellectuals; in the modern world, it was a passion of the intellectuals independent of the public. In both cases, the fall was rapid. And in the modern case also, the new (D1) mode in its early stages was seen not as a revolution, but merely as a relatively small change in emphasis. …
The basic cause of M1’s collapse in the ancient world was not existential convulsion (as in Athens), nor the sudden eruption of challenging new thinkers (as in the Enlightenment). The era of pagan M1 was not killed off by a mob, a war, or a philosophical bombshell. The era moved to its conclusion by a unique route: by the logic of being a modal mixture. …
The conventionally listed triggers, either alone or together, were not by themselves the cause of Rome’s fall. They were the fuel feeding the fire. The fire was the Romans’ interpretive framework—the final result of the inexorable drive of M1 …
M1, ancient or modern, occurs whenever men seek to integrate supernaturalism and secularism. Then, despite their desire to keep the mixture, they end by moving up to heaven or down to earth. M1 describes a transition from one of these pure modes to the other: It defines the mind-set of a society in which Plato is either coming or going —or, the same thing, in which Aristotle is going or coming. …
In essence, the medieval M2 was Platonism without compromise. There are no ideas inherent in M2 that lead it necessarily to self-destruction. As with the I mode, the longevity of M2 is potentially unlimited. In this instance, M2 ruled the West intellectually for a thousand years….
Nor was there a popular rebellion against Europe’s extreme and universal poverty. In part, this was because the concept of better living conditions was mostly unknown and even unimaginable. More important, it was a result of the religion all treasured. So far from promising rewards in this life, the leadership warned its flock against enjoying even the little they did have. Everything worth having, they all knew, could be attained only after death. If reality was a perfect spiritual realm and thus the opposite of this world, then man’s spiritual fulfillment and eternal joy were possible only within that realm; in our present debased life, only continuous suffering was possible. The pursuit of happiness on earth, in sum, was a metaphysical perversion.
On any issue pertaining to earthly well-being, the medieval M2s were invulnerable. Since they promised nothing here, the nothing their system produced did not disillusion the devout. On the contrary, people agreed that the more one “hateth this life,” the better off his soul. When suffering is expected and even sought out, evils of all kinds (including flagellation and torture) are viewed as normal and to be accepted. For centuries these Christians obediently lived what we would call the unlivable. …
This acceptance by the Church of Aristotle’s ideas is what led to its downfall. Unwittingly, the leadership was allowing, then blessing, a contradiction in fundamentals. In effect, as I earlier noted, they were trying to save M2 by turning it into M1. Within the short span of about 150 years, short for the pace of that period, the medieval era gave way to the Renaissance.
Here we see a new cause of modal change. The modern I movement was defeated by the invasion of enemy (Kantian) fundamentals beyond its ability to understand or defend against. The medieval M2s, by contrast, did understand and try in philosophical terms to defeat the invasion of enemy fundamentals—but they did it by accepting, albeit partially, those same fundamentals. This is the self-defeating attempt to protect a mode by methodically contradicting its essence.
The advocates of Marxism moved rapidly from theoretical polemics to totalitarian power
The advocates of Marxism moved rapidly from theoretical polemics to totalitarian power. Unlike the medieval case, these modern M2s’ final step to success in Russia depended on (civil) war; in their view, the success was independent of ideas, which they thought of as nothing but an impotent superstructure. Despite this, however, and like the medievals, the Marxists, as we have seen, regarded philosophy—that is, their own ideology—as the base and even the essence of reality.
It took the medievals centuries to imbue the West with the Christian fundamentals—to eradicate the pagans’ righteous joy in thought and life. But the Communists found their own fundamentals long entrenched, especially in Eastern Europe, in the form of an authoritarian and highly mystical variant of medieval Christianity, to which they added a modern enticement.
Objecting to religion’s promise of pie in the sky, these M2s promised to bring the pie down to earth but in a new kind of society which would provide material abundance, the reward of science, to all. A worldly utopia, which the medievals would have rejected as sin and as impossible, was precisely the stated goal of these moderns. …
No Western regime before Communism had promised millions of men so perfect an earthly paradise at the price merely of a short delay, and then failed so spectacularly to achieve it. The contradiction was made worse by the fact that it was the despised capitalist nations who were enjoying everything the Communists had promised. …
Here again we see the fatal effect on a mode’s longevity of philosophic deficiency—in this case, of its defenders’ self-contradiction. Whereas the medieval M2s, when insulated from enemy philosophy, were able to enjoy a lengthy and at the time seemingly endless tenure, the modern M2s, however tightly they sealed their borders, crashed in a matter of decades. These crashes have led to an almost unanimous dismissal in the West of both Communism and Fascism as viable possibilities for the future—unanimous except for the hard-core holdouts in our universities.
If there are to be successful totalitarians in our time, it would seem, they will have to eschew worldly promises. Neither economics nor biology nor any other science has been able to do the job for them. Promising heaven on earth has not worked. But promising heaven—that is a different story. …
The Christians were the first to grasp that philosophy is a power in the world
The Christians changed everything. They were the first Westerners to grasp that philosophy is not only abstractions of theoretical interest but is also a power in the world—indeed a power on which their own rise and continued rule depended. So a false philosophy, in their view, was not only blasphemous; it was also a practical menace.
Later, the emerging moderns saw the feared menace in action. They saw the fading of the Church’s power as a result of the unexpected battle between religion and science. And they saw that it was a sudden, philosophically instigated, culture-changing battle, a phenomenon without precedent in the pagan centuries. It taught moderns the worldly importance of philosophy in a form not available to the ancients or even imaginable by them. “Knowledge is power,” said Bacon, defining the modern mind—and philosophy, too, is knowledge. …
Paradoxically, the moderns (in every mode) have not been nearly as philosophical as their predecessors, and with the rise of the Ds most have lost the earlier respect for abstractions. But for about six hundred years, through the late nineteenth century, the moderns did grasp the practical power of philosophy, and some still do. The result was the modern urgency—the urgency of a new movement to spread its ideas and topple the establishment, and often the urgency of the public not to be left behind. This distinctively modern outlook highlights the unique vulnerability of any Western establishment today that eschews ideas.
Mankind, even its best Western representatives, is still frighteningly close to its primitive roots
The roots of the primitives’ mentality are sometimes ascribed to their unavoidable ignorance. They must struggle to live somehow as men, by using their conceptual faculty, but with no idea that such exists or how to use it. When they dealt with words broader than early-level concepts, as was unavoidable—for example, “life,” “luck,” “spirit,” “power,” “destiny,” etc.—they had little idea how to relate these to percepts. They could use this level of language largely as floating abstractions—which, as Plato showed, are in fact man’s only way to enter another world. But whatever the true causes of the primitive mentality, we can say this much: That the choice of reason and science would have been impossible to them. In primitive eras, the default setting of the mind was non-reason and non-science—until the Greeks reset it.
The above suggests that not all modes are created equal. The overwhelming dominance of M—anticipatory or explicitly philosophical —would mean that its fundamentals have been so entrenched in the mind of our species that we have never truly escaped them. Men, it seems, have remained in some form god-oriented, in part or in whole, almost without exception since the origin of the species. Even the I periods maintained a background belief in the supernatural. Mankind, even its best Western representatives, is still frighteningly close to its primitive roots.
The future of the United States
Given the above and even without further evidence, if one were inclined to venture a preliminary opinion, merely an educated guess, about the future of the United States, two points at once spring to mind. If there is to be modal change, it will be a change to the rule of M. And, given the modern pace, if it happens, it will happen soon.
SECULAR MODES IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY
The secular modes, in the broadest sense, are those that deny, at minimum, the exclusive reality of the supernatural—the two Ds, I, and M1. Since I have already identified the contemporary West as Kantian, I shall begin with the Ds.
As we have seen, D1 placed an unprecedented limitation on the cognitive role of concepts, an approach that made possible a number of mutually exclusive integrative variants. If so, we must ask whether this fact is relevant to the D1 movement today, one hundred fifty years after its start. … …
In nineteenth-century education, the welcome given by pluralists to unrelated subjects and purposes was evident mostly not in a derogation of concepts, but in their schools’ relative indifference to integrating classical studies with modern science. An intellectually demanding content was still taught in the early D1 schools, as indicated by the 1879 McGuffey’s Reader, a collection of difficult, abstract pieces designed to improve the thinking of primary-level students. But McGuffey himself, aware that there was no connection among the pieces, included in his book’s title the word “eclectic.” Then, as classical studies and history in general waned in the schools, there was the gradual expansion and splintering of the curriculum, accompanied by the increasing movement in most subject areas toward perceptual-level learning, as we have already discussed in chapter seven.
As to the attitude toward concepts of today’s teachers, we may note what is happening to the teaching of the most conceptual art: Literature. It is frequently being replaced by media classes teaching “television, newspapers, car repair magazines, and movies.” (At this point, the door is open to an undiluted anti-conceptual approach.)
In politics, most nineteenth-century D1s upheld (though as non- absolute) many broadly defined tenets of capitalism, such as private property and freedom of trade, pricing, hiring, interest setting, and more. Having discarded systems as such, however, they regarded these tenets as isolated guidelines, which did not necessarily imply one another.
Gradually, one or two concretes at a time, D1s came to regard their earlier attitude as rigid because too broad. No generalized abstraction, they started to believe, could tell us how to solve all our diverse political problems, such as those involving tariffs, railroads, or competition, but pluralism could point the way. Since it gives us a choice not of either/or but of degrees, we can legislate conditions that justify some protectionism, some control of railroads, some requirement for competition, and we can be flexible in doing so. …
As Lord Keynes observed to wide acclaim, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” In this manner, government controls have grown in concrete-bound steps piecemeal but steadily, and most often without the explicit invocation of ideology. (Action without ideology opens the door to the politicians of anti-ideology.)
## The more one cuts back on the integrating power of concepts, the less cognitive help the remaining concepts provide
Since concepts are our means of achieving unity, each act of disintegration leaves us with a morass of splintered concretes, and the morass grows with the next such act. In other words, the more one cuts back on the integrating power of concepts, the less cognitive help the remaining concepts provide, and so the more they, too, are cut back. In this way, each set of significant problems that D1s have encountered has led them to turn ever less to concepts for guidance and ever more to sense data.
What then has been the effect on the educated American’s mind? A principle, many students will inform you, is nothing but semantics, theory is true by definition, philosophy is mere speculation, ideology is dogma and an advocate of it is an “ideologue,” a self-evident reproach. Anyone who has taught in this milieu knows the eager certainty with which so many students pounce if he is benighted enough to declare as an absolute even so elementary an abstraction as 2 + 2 = 4. The gleeful comeback is: “Only to the base ten—and not if you mix two quarts of water with two quarts of alcohol.” …
These moderns go well beyond their two most unphilosophical antecedents. They turn away from philosophy not because, like the Romans, they see it as impractical, nor because, like the founding fathers, they believe its important questions have already been answered; they reject the subject because of the clash between their mode of thought and the very nature of philosophy which is the most abstract of human studies. …
On the basis of our discussions of D products in part two, I think it is safe to say that no Western society has ever been as anti-conceptual as our own. Kant’s takeover has been so thorough and swift that our current culture would have been unimaginable even fifty years ago. What then can we expect fifty years from now?
D2 in the United States
As M1 led to M2, so D1 leads to D2. To the fully anti-conceptual mentality, even the partial integration sought by the D1s is an unwarranted concession. A coherent story, a causal law, organized school lessons, an even semi-principled government—these and their like in other fields are reactionary nostalgia, conservative verbiage left over from a discredited past. …
D2, like M2 and like I, is not a modal compromise; there is no mechanism inherent in the mode necessitating its evolution to self- destruction. On the contrary, it is the end of the D1 road, the final destination of the mode’s evolution. As a cultural phenomenon, accordingly, D2’s nature has not changed in tilt, degree, or emphasis since its first appearance, even though, as with most rising modes, some fields were riper for an early takeover than others.
Serious literature and theoretical physics—both products of individuals—began turning to D2 at the end of the nineteenth century, about fifty years into the Kantian era. In education, a public institution, D2 did not become a major factor until a generation or more later, by the 1930s, say. It came later because parents, who did not yet care much about Joyce or Schrödinger, did care about their children. So the parents themselves first had to be schooled in the virtues of the new trend.
The final invasion by the new mode occurred in politics, which is almost always the last bastion to be taken over, assuming the citizens have some kind of freedom and a say in the process. … In the United States, the first D2s in politics were the children of the Progressivized parents of the thirties; these were the children who, in the sixties, became the New Left, which gained national power two generations later. The best evidence of this power to date has been the policies of Obama, the first New Left president.
Conservatives are mistaken in calling Obama a socialist. State ownership of the means of production defines the economics of totalitarianism, a system that, as we have seen, depends on thought control flowing from and producing a fervently held ideology. In DIM terms, socialism is M2—while Obama’s people state indignantly (and to me convincingly) that they have no ideology, no interest in finding a metaphysical base for their policies, and no plan someday to create a utopia. … Obamacare, for example, was defended not as compassion for those in medical need, but because equality of health care is a value in itself, quite apart from any special needs of the poor. …
I in the United States
Because the dominance of the I mode was only a brief exception in modern history, its status in the United States today is hardly astonishing. Condemned and dismissed by Kantians, the distinctive products of the Enlightenment have either been forgotten or never discovered by most of the country, educated as it has been largely in D schools. ….
There is also a special circumstance in the United States, since it is the first case in history of a nation consciously founded on an I philosophy by men whose acceptance of it was not, as in Europe, a mere transient phase, but a principled commitment—men still revered today by the country they created. …
Jean-Paul Sartre famously complained that Americans did not believe in evil—that is, in human impotence and depravity—a charge that speaks directly to the role of the Enlightenment in shaping the country’s subconscious. Some forty years ago Ayn Rand quoted Eve Curie (daughter of Marie), a liberal, on her astonishment at American audiences: “‘They are so happy,’ she kept repeating, ‘so happy…. People are not like that in Europe.’” …
What then of the I mode in the United States at this time? It is possible that the Enlightenment outlook on life is widespread and waiting within the American subconscious, and it is possible that it is not. What Ayn Rand wrote about this forty years ago is, I think, still correct: “It is impossible to tell.”
THE ANTI-SECULAR REBELLION
Different forms of instilling the same fundamentals into people’s minds—however dramatic and striking the differences—do not change the essence of the society that will result from those fundamentals. The obvious political examples here are Communism and Nazism, which, though self- described as mortal enemies, represented the same mode and created essentially the same society with the same results. …
In predicting the future, it is necessary to observe any change in philosophic fundamentals accepted by a society’s leaders and/or people. In this sense, any prediction must remain up-to-date. But this is needless in regard to modal analysis when no new view of philosophic fundamentals has been introduced. In that circumstance, no matter how the competing groups rise and fall, their mode and its future march on. …
My own modal snapshot was taken in 2009–2010 and will undoubtedly change in many ways in the next years, to say nothing of the next generations. But such changes, judged by our present state, will be irrelevant.
Christianity as Today’s M2
Considering our nation as it is today, the most prominent representatives of the M2 mentality—the largest, most articulate, and most militant groups of rebels against the establishment—are to be found among the fundamentalists, the evangelicals, the Pentecostals, and in general the born-agains. We may call these overlapping groups New Christians, new because the consistency of their religious ideology and the scope of their cultural ambition have not been seen in the West for many centuries. …
The American people—not only Christians—do not understand what is today called art. They do not understand what is called science. Their children do not understand what the schools teach. And the politicians, people think, understand nothing. It adds up to a historic popular feeling: Something fundamental has gone wrong with the United States.
The only possible fix, the New Christians tell them, is authentic religion—meaning religion shorn of secular concessions…. What they seek is revolution across the whole of American culture, in the name of a mode of thought that has not ruled here since the time of the Puritans.
WHAT’S NEXT
RELIGIOUS TOTALITARIANISM IN America—that is my prediction.
“God is dead,” said Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. To which a recent book title gives the twenty-first-century reply: God Is Back. …
The decline of America has often been compared to that of ancient Rome. From the DIM viewpoint, this comparison has substantial but not complete validity. Rome was the first Western culture to push a dissatisfied populace into the arms of an M2 religion sneered at but unanswered by an establishment disdainful of philosophy. This comparison is true as far as it goes, but it omits an important modal difference between the two. The Romans had long been guided by an evolving M1 orientation, so their fall into otherworldliness might be seen as more thoroughly prepared than ours, being a move merely from one version of M to another. A more exact parallel to the U.S. situation would have to be a takeover by M2 of a country run by the Ds. Many people today still remember this very type of modal transition. …
First, the M2 movement in America, in my judgment, will be religious; it will not present itself as secular nor as the means to worldly success; nor will it appeal to science for its validation. …
Besides its religious commitment, it is highly probable that an M2 movement here (especially if not foreign-based) will appeal to the nation’s strongly patriotic citizenry by stressing its own admiration of America and of American exceptionalism. …
As to the capitalist advocacy of private property, it is highly likely, in the light of American anti-Communism, that private property would be retained in name, but used and disposed of in fact according to the decisions of the totalitarian state (which would be merely an extension of our present D1 view of private property). …
Not just a religious totalitarianism, but a religious-fascist totalitarianism—that is my prediction of the American future.
M2 - Subservience to something beyond the things we see
M2, as we have seen, is unique: Subservience to something beyond the things we see, something accepted on faith has in pre-philosophical form been the orientation of the species from the start.
From this perspective, America’s trend today is not a mere fad; it has deeper roots. The nation is moving to regress to the mind of primitivism, which, it seems, despite all the values produced by modern civilization, remains ineradicable in the species. Twice, for a brief span, the West has escaped from the pull of the non-rational, and twice it succumbed. “It is earlier,” Ayn Rand once remarked, “than you think.”
This is why an M2 future is so probable. Given America’s present condition and the historical factors, it is almost impossible to overestimate the likelihood of its occurrence. …
The basic premise of DIM theory is the fundamental role of integration in human thought. If this is true, we would expect to discover that the basic conflicts among men ultimately have to do with integration. Today, this conflict takes a post-Kantian and thus unprecedented cultural form: floating abstractions versus concrete- boundedness. Even though, as a purely philosophical judgment, these are equally great errors, the present state of our country is evidence that men can tolerate the rule of one of these errors, but not of the other. They have lived for millennia, however poorly, when guided by concepts detached from percepts, and now when in trouble they yearn to do so again. Men, it seems, cannot cope for long with life in a world of percepts detached from concepts.
Floating abstractions give men a sense of integration, of the whole, and thus at least the illusion of understanding the world and knowing what to do in it. Concrete-boundedness gives men nothing but the sky above and the cave under their feet. …
The Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.
In most cases in life, the probable outcome, by definition, is the one that occurs. But not always. Across the ages, men have on occasion been able to achieve a cherished goal even when facing seemingly insuperable odds. The greatest Western example of this took place, fittingly, in ancient Greece.
In 480 B.C., in the Battle of Thermopylae, three hundred Spartans (with modest assistance) led by King Leonidas repulsed for three days hundreds of thousands of barbaric Persian invaders led by Xerxes I (Herodotus says there were over a million of them). During the three days, the Spartans were killed to the last man, but their indomitable character won out: The Athenians had been given enough time to prepare for and later defeat the enemy in a historic naval battle. Against incalculable odds, the Oriental mystics had lost, and Western civilization, which would otherwise have been strangled in its cradle, had been saved.
Now, in more modern dress, the mystics are invading again, this time from within. To repulse them, we, too, must be Spartans (in regard to courage, not philosophy). The odds we face are about as lopsided. But at least our weapons are stronger: We can repulse the enemy not merely with spears, but with that which ultimately moves the world—ideas. “History is philosophy teaching by examples,” Dionysius of Halicarnassus told us in 30 B.C. We have the philosophy now. What remains is to make history with it.
To win the battle for America will not be possible much longer.