Five Speakers Spark ''A Meeting of Minds''

On November 1, one hundred and thirty people attended The Objectivist Center's one-day conference, "A Meeting of Minds," held in New York City. Featured as speakers were TOC's executive director, David Kelley, and the director of TOC's Washington office, Ed Hudgins, who teamed up in a presentation entitled "America and the World." They were joined by Robert Bidinotto, editor of the center's Atlas Society Web site and author of his own Web site ecoNOT.com, who spoke on environmentalism's human casualties. Setting a different mood, Susan McCloskey celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of The Fountainhead's publication by reprising her summer seminar talk, "Love and Work in The Fountainhead." At the end of the conference, University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, a founder and co-director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, spoke about political correctness in academia.

The Objectivist Center's senior fellow, William R Thomas, moderated the sessions. Following the lectures, TOC sponsors joined the speakers for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

The Green and the Dead

Bidinotto began the day by asking what it means, in practice, to hold a philosophy that values pristine nature, apart from any use that humans may make of it. The question is urgent, he said, because just that is the fundamental premise of the environmental movement. and the consequences are human deaths. As evidence, he cited the deaths last summer in France, which resulted from a lack of air-conditioning—a lack that is the result of high energy taxes. Bidinotto also mentioned Washington's war on big cars, which has been estimated to cause an additional 1,200 to 2,000 deaths per year, plus ten times that number of injuries. Perhaps the most shocking statistic Bidinotto cited was the figure of 50 million deaths, reckoned to be the number people who have died of malaria since the ecologists began their attack on DDT.

Ad Astra per Aspera

McCloskey's celebration of The Fountainhead took the form of an inquiry into the novel's depiction of love and work, in all their varieties. After touching on the lesser love relationships of family member, mentor, and friend, McCloskey turned to the highest love relationship in the novel: heterosexual romance, as embodied in the failed courtship of Peter Keating and Catherine Halsey, and the transcendent romance between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon. For Keating and Halsey, McCloskey said, romantic love offers the chance to achieve "the best within them," but they reject its summons. Dominique does not, and, McCloskey argued, her success in becoming capable of receiving and reciprocating Roark's love constitutes her work in the novel. For her, love is work. For Roark, by contrast, his work is his love: It is not merely a means of sustaining life, but an end in itself. It is not how Roark lives. It is what he lives for. It is his consuming passion. Said McCloskey: "Roark's work, both in its process and its product, lies at the novel's erotic heart."

European Anger

Ed Hudgins kicked off the two-part presentation "America and the World" by inquiring into Western Europe's opposition to the U.S. war against Iraq. Americans might oppose the war, Hudgins noted, because they have to bear the cost and might not find the benefits sufficient. But why, he asked, would Europeans scream against the liberation of an enslaved population when the liberation cost Europe nothing?

The answer, Hudgins proposed, lies in the philosophical premises that the two societies embrace. Europeans are personally and politically more collectivist; Americans are personally and politically more self-reliant. Because Europeans see their outlook as philosophically superior to America's, they disdain characteristic American behavior—calling it the behavior of cowboys, materialists, and vulgarians. It is therefore intensely frustrating to Europeans that America's "cowboy" morality gives it overwhelming economic and military might.

This European disdain and frustration turns into anger, Hudgins argued, when America's differences manifest themselves internationally, particularly when the United States exhibits the determination and power to act alone for its own national interests. Thus, Hudgins observed, America was beloved by Europeans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when it was perceived as humbled and stunned. But Europeans responded with outrage as America quickly regained its characteristic self-assurance and began to act self-reliantly to exact revenge and pre-empt future attacks.

Islamic Hatred

In his half of "America and the World," David Kelley applied the points made by Ed Hudgins to the Islamic world. Many people, he observed, including President George Bush, have argued that the United States is hated by large majorities in the Middle East because of the values it represents. The rebuttal to this position observes that most Muslims affirm support for democracy and markets. Kelley quoted one Iranian as saying: "Who has anything against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Given the paucity of free polities in the Islamic world, Kelley noted, quite a few people there must "have something against" Jeffersonianism. Yes, he said, people mouth the buzzwords, but few are prepared to embrace the underlying values of Enlightenment or modernist culture. These include: a strong admiration for achievement and a rejection of egalitarianism, political liberty, a disdain for group identity, and a respect for the pursuit of personally envisioned happiness. Not least, modernism includes a thorough-going commitment to reason, science, objective thinking, independence of mind, and an openness to new ideas.

Until the Islamic world embraces these philosophical values, Kelley said, America cannot expect to be looked upon favorably in the Middle East. There are a few policies that Washington might undertake to foster such values abroad. But, Kelley concluded, Americans should remember that acceptance of these values in the West required a long struggle, and the same is likely to be true elsewhere.

Anti-Americanism's Home Front

"Betrayal of Individual Liberty and Dignity on America's Campuses" was the title of Professor Alan Kors's talk. He began by noting that the student radicals of the 1960s demanded autonomy for themselves and persuaded universities to abandon their paternalistic, in loco parentis role. Yet when these radicals became academics and found themselves confronting conservative student bodies, they denied students' ability and right to think for themselves. Consequently, these radical professors made their own leftist vision the secular dogma of campus life and created new disciplines of oppression studies closed to debate and disagreement.

Yet control of the curriculum has not been enough, Kors added. Too many undergraduates remain independent in their thought. Thus, to further suppress dissent, universities have assigned group identities to their students, including, for each group, an officially designated group ideology that no "true" member of the group is allowed to dispute. Next, the universities have declared that certain groups—such as women, minorities, and homosexuals—are too weak to hear the expression of attitudes opposed to their officially designated ideology. This has allowed universities to claim that they must, paternalistically and in loco parentis, impose speech codes banning disagreement with the alleged ideologies of such "vulnerable" groups. After noting the irony of this reversal on the part of the Sixties generation, Kors commented: "No one who tells you that you are too weak to live with freedom is possibly your friend."

Conference Exhibitors

Throughout the day of the conference, a number of organizations and individuals set up booths to promote their activities and products. Among those present were Michael Newberry of the Foundation for the Advancement of Art, Lou Marinoff of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, and Duncan Scott of the Objectivist History Project. Also exhibiting were Camp Indecon, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.