Q&A with Onkar Ghate, Robert Mayhew, Gregory Salmieri, Tara Smith, and Yaron Brook.

The world today stands at a crossroads. We continue to reap the benefits of more than two centuries of progress. Yet there seems to be growing cultural strife and political conflict threatening to tear our civilization apart.

A number of thinkers—especially Steven Pinker in his best-selling book Enlightenment Now—are looking to the Age of Enlightenment for solutions, and this is the right direction to look. To the extent the world has moved forward in the last two centuries, it has done so by implementing the best of the Enlightenment’s philosophical principles: reason, science, individualism and government limited by the principle of individual rights.

So what is needed to bring about a lasting revival of Enlightenment ideals?

Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher famous for her bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, addressed this question head-on. She identified weaknesses at the base of Enlightenment philosophy and viewed her original philosophy, Objectivism, as putting Enlightenment ideals for the first time on a durable foundation.