Down with Altruism

Against tough competition, a square, greying woman stepped to the stage in the Yale Law School auditorium one night last week. In the hockey rink there was a lively game with Brown University; in Woolsey Hall there was a concert by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Elsewhere on the campus there were three other guest orators, including Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who drew a full house at Yale Divinity School. But the opposition hardly fazed Novelist Ayn Rand, 55 (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged}, who considers herself the "most creative" philosopher alive today.

Her 600 listeners made the biggest audience ever drawn by Challenge, a bustling undergraduate group that aims to tingle Yalemen-- with prickly ideas. Polemicist Rand delivered as advertised.

"If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world," began Russian-born Author Rand in her still noticeable accent, "I will say that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial problems--and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief that no answers are possible." To paraphrase the Bible, the modern attitude is: "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing--and please don't tell me."

Spiritualized Cash. Author Rand will not let the world get off that easily. Already she has hurled more than 1,000,000 words in two hectoring novels at what she considers the root illness of man--the tyrrany of altruism. "If any civilization is to survive," said she last week, "it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." And why? Because this Christian virtue leads to self-immolation, tolerance of the "incompetent" common man, the welfare state, and ultimately to the slave labor camp. By hindering ego, altruism destroys human "reason." Nurtured by a small Manhattan cult, Author Rand's unaltruistic philosophy of "objectivism" is objectified by the gold dollar sign that she often wears as a brooch ("The cross is the symbol of torture; I prefer the dollar sign, the symbol of free trade, therefore of the free mind").

But this weird spiritualization of cash ("Money is the root of all good") is perhaps only an outward and visible sign. The real point of objectivism is rousing unembarrassed self-interest. For the best man is a tough-minded egoist, "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Firmly convinced that her own one absolute is reason, Author Rand has gone so far as to boast: "I have never had an emotion that I couldn't account for." Less fortunate people, she suggested last week at Yale, can blame Immanuel Kant. Just when faith was on the wane, and self-interest had a foot in the door, he "saved the morality of altruism" with his duty-setting "categorical imperatives." It was he who bred the mental worm that makes modern men "equate self-interest with evil," that makes businessmen afraid to admit they seek profits (i.e., happiness), that leaves the victims of dictatorship feeling "selfish" if they resist. "The ulti mate monument to Kant and the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia."

Old Rugged Cro$$. To Author Rand, the "freedom and reason" that should combat "faith and force" were best embodied in the "historical miracle" of early capitalism. "Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions" of the early years. "Capitalism did not create poverty--it inherited it." The real miracle was the creation of "the necessary corollary of political freedom"--laissez-faire capitalism. The tragedy is that this "magnificent benefactor of mankind" soon died --Government controls killed it. And even the "so-called defenders" of capitalism were too chickenhearted to resist. "Because, ladies and gentlemen, capitalism and altruism are incompatible. Make no mistake about it--and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society." True capitalism is just as dead under Eisenhower Republicanism as under the New Deal, according to Author Rand, and it cannot be reborn with any such slogan as "service to society." Only its original purpose will do: "The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake." The alternative to this "rational" purpose is totalitarianism.

Is there any hope? In a windup that left Yalemen limp, Author Rand crackled: "Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default. But in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is the altruist morality that you have to reject."

-- And students at other colleges across the country. Launched at Yale last spring, Challenge already has chapters at Antioch, Chicago, Oberlin, Princeton, Reed, Smith, Stephens and Wisconsin.'

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