By Ayn Rand
 It
gives me great pleasure to introduce the first book by an
Objectivist philosopher other than myself.
Perhaps the best recommendation I can give this book and its
author, Dr. Leonard Peikoff — is to say that it and he are not of
today's cultural mainstream. They will be part of tomorrow's.
It is not necessary for me to prove that something is wrong with
today's world. Everybody — of any creed, color, or intellectual
persuasion, old and young, rich and poor, conservative and
liberal, foreign and domestic — senses that something monstrous is
destroying the world. But no one knows what it is, and people keep
blaming one another-with some justice.
As a symptom of today's cultural anxiety, observe the unusual
interest in and the deluge of books dealing with Nazi Germany.
Every sort of semi-plausible and wholly impossible theory has been
offered in futile attempts to find the cause and explain the rise
of Nazism. The failure of those explanations intensifies the
quest. Men seem to sense that the collapse of what had been a
civilized country into such monstrous evil must be understood if
we are to make certain that it will not be repeated. "We dare
not brush aside unexplained horror such as Nazism," states
Dr. Peikoff. If we do not know its causes, how can we be sure that
our own country is not traveling the same road?
Dr.
Peikoff answers these questions. He identifies the cause of
Nazism — and the ominous parallels between the intellectual history
of Germany and of the United States. He demonstrates that there is
a science which has been all but obliterated in the modern world.
"Yet this science determines the destiny of nations and the
course of history...," he writes. "It is the science
which had to be destroyed, if the catastrophes of our time were to
become possible. The science is philosophy."
The non-modern (and non-old-fashioned) aspect of Leonard Peikoff's
book is the breadth of his vision and the stunning scale of his
philosophic integration. He does not share the concrete-bound,
college-induced myopia of those alleged philosophers who study the
various meanings of the word "but" (the contemporary
empiricists) — nor does he share the foggy stumbling and the
floating abstractions of their predecessors (the rationalists). He
presents the history of Germany's philosophy, in telling
essentials — then the history of America's philosophy and what
destroyed it. (The chapter "The Nation of the
Enlightenment" is the most inspired and inspiring tribute to
the Founding Fathers that I have ever read.) Then he presents the
practical results — the way in which philosophic ideas direct the
course and shape the particular events of the history of both
countries, as reflected in politics, economics, art, literature,
education, etc.
This last is the cardinal achievement of Dr. Peikoff's book. While
today's philosophy departments make it a loud point to proclaim
that philosophy has nothing to do with practical life or with
reality (which, they add, does not exist) — Dr. Peikoff shows to
their mangled victims what philosophy is, what it does, and how to
recognize its influence all around us. He gives a virtuoso
performance of shuttling effortlessly between abstractions and
concretes — keeping the first tied firmly to reality and thus
illuminating the second. He shows that a nation brought up to
regard the principles of duty and self-sacrifice as cardinal
virtues will be helpless when confronted by a gang of thugs who
demand obedience and self-sacrifice.
It is a tragic irony of our time that the two worst, bloodiest
tribes in history, the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of
Soviet Russia, both of whom are motivated by brute powerlust and a
crudely materialistic greed for the unearned, show respect for the
power of philosophy (they call it "ideology") and spend
billions of their looted wealth on propaganda and indoctrination,
realizing that man's mind is their most dangerous enemy and it is
man's mind that they have to destroy — while the United States and
the other countries of the West, who claim to believe in the
superiority of the human spirit over matter, neglect philosophy,
despise ideas, starve the best minds of the young, offer nothing
but the stalest slogans of a materialistic altruism in the form of
global giveaways, and wonder why they are losing the world to the
thugs.
As
an example of why the cause of Nazism should be understood (but is
not), I would like to mention a recent television interview with
Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany. Asked to name his
favorite philosopher, he answered — in a changed tone of voice, a
stiff, solemn, deaf and-blind, heel-clicking tone — "Marcus
Aurelius. He taught that we must do our duty above all." If
he is typical of his country (and I believe he is), Germany has
learned nothing.
The
ineffable monster destroying the world is not an entity but a
vacuum, an absence, the emptiness left by the collapse of
philosophy. In that lightless emptiness, mindless men rattle
frantically, bumping into one another, seeking desperately some
way to exist on earth-which they cannot find without the tool they
have discarded. This leads to phenomena such as Nazi Germany or
Soviet Russia, as Dr. Peikoff demonstrates.
If
you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical
bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection
and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly,
the ideas that are destroying you and the world. It will bring
order into the chaos of today's events — and show you simultaneously
the enormity of the battle and the contemptible smallness of the
enemy.
The
Ominous Parallels offers a truly revolutionary idea in
the field of the philosophy of history. The book is clear,
tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly
reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystal-and as
sparkling. If you like my works, you will like this book.
As to my personal reaction, I can express it best by paraphrasing
a line from Atlas Shrugged: "It's so wonderful to see
a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine!"
AYN
RAND
New
York
November 1980
|
