I think you’re mistaking not having a philosophy at all with having one you disagree with. You should be able to tell from the lists of my writings (pinned to the top of my profile page) that I’ve worked out a rather comprehensive philosophy. Not that I claim to have all the answers, mind you.
What you’re picking up on here, though, is that I’m ambivalent about secular humanism. I aim to combine philosophical naturalism with existentialism, cosmicism, pantheism, and possibly transhumanism. I’ve written a lot on secular progress, humanism, atheism, and various social aspects of modernity. I admire our potential for progress in the ways you lay out. But you’re more optimistic about it than I am. You say this progress can be measured (as Steven Pinker says, too), and I agree that we’ve advanced in numerous respects. But the downsides have advanced too, including our potential for self-destruction.
I like to contemplate the prospects of transhumanism, but I do so by keeping in mind what I take to be the existential motive behind this progress: we’re horrified by the amoral godlessness of the wilderness, so we build a humanized realm, the civilized technosphere. This is our Promethean, Luciferian ambition, to become gods, empowered by science, technology, and freedom.
Thus, I have some understanding of the modern secular ambition, although I reject Rand’s Nietzschean egoism as fallacious (she commits the conservative’s naturalistic fallacy of assuming that what’s natural and factual, such as our selfish impulse, is thereby good). The tautology that existence exists doesn’t take us that far. On the contrary, as far as we’re concerned there are two kinds of existence, the zombie-like wilderness, and the artificial, intelligently designed wonderland (civilization). We mean for the latter to supplant the former.
And the notion that we can live by reason alone strikes me as a delusion fostered by American propaganda for capitalism. The Soviets were supposed to be irrational in sacrificing themselves to their State, even though they took themselves to be following the science of Marxist history. Alas, Marx had only a pseudoscience or a philosophy, at best.
But capitalism, too, is based on the pseudoscience of neoclassical economics, as I’ve argued in a series I did on that subject. Rand was following something like Adam Smith’s invisible argument for capitalistic progress: as free individuals, we make rational, selfish decisions about what to buy or to sell, and the economic result for the whole society will be optimal. And indeed, this kind of individualism advances us in certain respects, as we can tell from the relative ingenuity, power, and happiness of capitalist societies.
The problem is that reason itself (via science and late-modern philosophy) is telling us we’re not so rational, so the upshot of all that individualism may not work to our ultimate collective advantage after all. Just look at the damage we’re doing to the biosphere. We want the technosphere to replace the biosphere, but in a sustainable way so we don’t end up destroying ourselves before we can merge with technology, defeat death, and live like sci-fi gods.
Anyway, I’m not saying Rand’s philosophy is entirely wrongheaded. I’m closer to that kind of naturalistic secularism than I am, say, to theistic worldviews. But I’m ambivalent about some of these things, so I’m drawn to other possibilities.
