Authored by Peter Saint-Andre.
Reading Rand, one might think that history began with the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. Her essays are full of scorn for "primitive" man. Yet that scorn betrays a lack of understanding for human context and the general rule that one must "start small or not at all". Everything takes time, and one of the keynotes of human cultural evolution is that progress has in general become progressively more rapid (despite the occasional setbacks). Further, as Bronowski notes, human progress tends to reach plateaus from which it does not again descend: it is well-nigh impossible to imagine humans becoming pre-linguistic or pre-agricultural or pre-urban or pre-scientific. These achievements, once gained, are not relinquished.
And many of the most fundamental advances of humankind were made in that undocumented time we call pre-history. Language, mathematics, art, tool-making, religion (which Rand considered a primitive form of philosophy), agriculture, the building of cities, trade, money — all of these pre-date Rand's beloved Greeks. (The relative advancement of so-called primitive man was brought vividly to life by the discovery in 1991, in the high Alps along the border between Austria and Italy, of a well-preserved corpse at least 5,000 years old; found on this corpse were a bevy of tools and items that indicate he could well have been a trader plying his wares between towns on either side of the Alps.)
The mental leaps behind these progressive advancements in ways of human living are deeply significant, and deeply conceptual. The most fundamental of these is language, although mathematics and art are not close behind in the conceptual sophistication they enable. Yet each of these innovations involves a change in human thought-patterns. Consider the agricultural revolution. No longer were humans to hunt and gather as nature made potential foods available. Instead, humans began to "make their own nature" -- to think not a few hours or days ahead, but to plan months in advance for the harvesting of crops and the keeping of seeds for the following year. Here is a radical change in human thinking and behavior, a change which is anything but primitive.
The same could be said for the building of the first cities. The change from nomadic to settled life occurred in concert with the agricultural revolution, but here villages were presumably built close to good cropland. Several thousand years later, people began to build modest-sized cities distant from prime agricultural land. Here again we see a change in thinking, an increased ability to abstract from the particulars of place to conceive the possibility of human living outside the context of immediate access to foodstuffs. Similar advances in the human ability to abstract can be found in the invention of irrigation, metalworking, trade, money, and all manner of tools.
While I would not deny that Rand celebrated the conceptual achievements inherent in certain of these innovations, she seems strangely unaware of their evolutionary nature. For example, nowhere does she trace or even hint at the humble origins of her favorite symbols of human productivity -- such as the sign of the dollar or the skyline of New York City -- in the trading of shells and stones or the founding of early proto-cities on the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers over six thousand years ago. Yet there is a direct line of thinking here; as Rand noted in a different context, human concepts do not change, since they still refer to the same entities: it is the knowledge of those concepts that becomes ever wider and deeper (IOE, p. 66). Once human beings formed the concept of cities or trade or money or tool-making, the rest was development (albeit often hard-won development) of those concepts.
Part of the reason Rand seems uncomfortable with these insights is that a great deal of their explanatory power lies in the concept of evolution. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence for the facts of both biological and cultural evolution (no matter what one thinks of the theories that have been advanced to account for them), Rand never affirmed that she recognized those facts. She focused much more heavily on the formation of a concept than on the often slow process of refinining, deepening, and broadening that concept in both theory and practice.
In turn, one reason she slighted such slow processes is that they are seemingly communal or non-individual in nature. She celebrates the nameless first person to harness fire, but not those who developed extensions to and uses of that insight. Yet a great deal of human ingenuity goes into those extensions. But the ingenuity of the extension is evolutionary, not revolutionary -- and Rand was interested not in the relative equilibrium of everyday human progress, but the punctuated outburst of innovation one finds in the foundational inventions and discoveries of outstanding individuals.
One of the problems for Rand in pre-history is precisely the fact that we don't know who those individuals were, so she is at sea regarding whom to celebrate. Yet I think her reticence is tied to another phenomenon: pre-historic innovations are, more particularly, pre-philosophic. And Rand believed that ideas (specifically philosophical ideas) move the world. How was innovation even possible before human beings had gained proper philosophic principles and insights in the time of classical Greece? Such innovation is rather hard to account for on Rand's theory of history, so her chosen approach seems to be to ignore these uncomfortable facts.
I think one key to resolving the dilemma is to recognize that while ideas may indeed move the world, not all ideas are philosophic ideas. Specifically, concepts such as working towards a harvest, gathering together in a city, trading one item for another, or making tools are key drivers of human progress -- both material and mental. On this view, technology and trade and art and other human products are just as conceptual, and just as historically determinitive, as philosophical theories. While I offer this idea here only as a thesis, I plan to explore its implications for Randian historical analysis in future essays.