Howard: Keep looking out for the self during college years
By Giles Howard / Columnist
published: Tue, 16 Mar, 2010
For many, college is the time to venture out on their own ideologically, discarding the beliefs of family and friends in favor of new ideas that they either stumble upon or are exposed to in this new setting. Indeed, the way in which the college experience severs the social and geographical bonds that tie young people to the community of their adolescence creates a vacuum of influences where fresh ideas flourish and a new morality often develops.
Importantly, this campus-centered morality is founded on an appearance of independent thinking, but it often involves the uncritical adoption of another person’s needs as the driving force for morality. This is evident in the international humanitarian who organizes students to stop hunger in Africa, in the new socialist who self-consciously sloughs off his middle class background to decry the excesses of capitalists and starts a group working to unionize service employees — and, most of all, it’s obvious in the student who, in 2008, worked tirelessly to elect Barack Obama because he felt that health care was a right.
What all these archetypes of college life have in common is that they involve the college student’s acceptance of another person’s needs or values as more important than the individual’s own. Ayn Rand called such people “second handers” — those who live through others — explaining that, “After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand.”
Indeed, the dominant campus Left that so many politically active students identify with is a political movement whose morality is “second-hand,” whose ideology is defined by altruism and whose adherents — though claiming to think for themselves — just uncritically adopt this other-focused way of thinking.
Dr. Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor in Pitt’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and an expert on Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, explained the relevant part of Rand’s view of morality in two principles: First, “Each person has a right to pursue his own rational self-interest,” and second, “We will benefit from [others] pursuing their own self-interest, just as they will [benefit] from our pursuing ours,” Gotthelf said.
These pillars of objectivism constitute the morality of that segment of the political Right that values individual responsibility, free markets and small government. It is this morality that is largely absent from college campuses today whereas the Leftist morality of altruism pervades higher education.
Part of the reason for this, Gotthelf said, is that the first-mentioned principle of Objectivist morality isn’t defended or advanced in American society. Instead, Gotthelf said, “people are imbued with the moral sense that lies behind socialism” in their places of worship, schools and families throughout their lives, and although they are “too American” to accept the political dimensions of socialism, they buy in to its morality.
This acceptance of altruism constitutes a perversion of that first liberating impulse that many students encounter when they arrive at college: the new responsibility over one’s own thoughts and actions. Rather than accept the Left’s second-hand ideal of altruism and self-sacrifice, students should fully pursue that first impulse.
Of course I realize that, as Gotthelf said, “it’s not easy to be first-hand.” The groups dedicated to saving Darfur, unionizing university employees or volunteering on alternative spring breaks all tug at the emotional heartstrings of college students and conform nicely to the socialist ethic of altruism that pervades our society. Indeed, scoffing at these groups and their goals seems callous on a campus where we are told regularly that we are privileged and should give back to those less fortunate.
Students who already reject the second-handedness of Leftist altruism must overcome this pressure and begin to defend this first principle of objectivism if the ideological makeup of college campuses is ever going to change. It’s no longer enough to oppose the specific political initiatives of the Left because its embrace of altruism as morality makes it far stronger — on campuses and around the country — than the Right will ever be until it acknowledges and advances the morality of its cause.
We must make the case on campus that the rational pursuit of self-interest is a moral action and that the best way to live is to live a life for oneself rather than a life for others.
Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.
Comments
First Hand
For those who really want to know what Ayn Rand wrote, read her yourself, and pay no attention to the comments of those who don't really understand her ideas. Thanks, Giles, for writing this article. It is a welcome respite from the usual.
This article concerns me.
This article concerns me. Certainly it is important to take care of yourself and recognize that other's needs are not more important than your own. But trying to lessen suffering in the world-- organizing students to stop hunger in Africa or end genocide in Darfur-- is not "Leftist altruism." It is not some liberal impulse that needs to be suppressed. Empathy is part of human nature. It's really not that complicated. The bottom line is that if Mr. Howard ever finds himself in a situation when he desperately needs aid, he will undoubtedly hope that the people in a position to help do not subscribe to his own perverse vision of morality.
Respectful Dissent
I would like to express solidarity with Giles' passion for rationality and commitment to clear dialogue despite my present disagreement with various claims made above, and I will move straight to the point out of respect everyone's time and attention.
I want to argue briefly for sociality as a condition of selfhood and the consequent inseparability of the individual’s good and the collective good. Society is one harmonious physical-social event or collective action of which individuals are particular moments and aspects; additionally, both the content and form of our self-narration are created through co-existence and dialogue with others.
What we call “the mind” is not a thing independent of the flow of time but rather a label for our capacity to see and talk to ourselves as if we were someone else and that "someone else" is an abstraction of the particular others with whom we coexist in community. Individual thought only emerges as the result of our being born or thrust into a situation where the truth of certain fact and value claims are inevitably taken for granted and it is only through personal experience and dialogue with others that one acquires the ability to RETROACTIVELY evaluate what they were originally taught. In short, self-made individuals do not and cannot exist, and because of this Objectivist ethics is demonstrably flawed at its foundations.
Individual freedom is structurally and morally only semi-autonomous from society at large from start to finish. Even now, we exist in bodies birthed by parents indebted to their respective families and the larger social structure, we speak with borrowed words, we communicate typing on keys and looking at monitors that exist through the labors of others, our whole life rests upon deeds done and duties executed by others as our feet rest on the ground. I would encourage everyone to consider the Stoic philosopher Epictetus’ proposal that “seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings.”
Nothing in this world happens
Nothing in this world happens in a vacuum and to claim that we should only act in self-interest encourages behavior which does not consider the needs and thoughts of others. I saw an earlier comment talking about how sending aid to Haiti only resulted in rubble. I'm sorry that Haitians couldn't "pull up their bootstraps" and prevent a earthquake. Years of Western sponsored dictatorships helped ensure that they could not use the token aid money given them (of course after all the debts foisted on the country not long after their independence) to develop their infrastructures. Maybe when you end up in a natural disaster and you need help, I should say "FU U SHOULD HAVE SHOWN MORE SELF-INTEREST"
Ayn Rand talked a good game about the virtues of being selfish. Then her husband cheated on her with another woman and all of sudden she was furious and humiliated. Her husband was only looking out for his sexual needs so what was she so mad about?
From the Desk of...
Although I applaud this article for its dedication to philosophy of self-interest, I am deeply saddened by the hypocrisy of the columnist. I have researched this University of Pittsburgh and discovered that it is a government funded institution! Not only this, but the paper is non-profit charity fish-wrap. This boy seems to enjoy looking at his ideal world as he sucks on the teat of socialism, readily grasping both spheres. His idea of self-interest is clearly shallowed by the help the government gives him. Nice try, Mr. Howard. Publish this in your own paper, and you may have my interest.
The right to government largesse
Andrew,
As I mentioned in my previous reply, the most fundamental requirement of one's human nature is to be free to apply reason to effort in the service of life. The automatic byproduct of such a principle is the implicit requirement to grant that same freedom to all other men.
Therefore the only question that separates the moral from the immoral in politics is, freedom or force? Force here refers specifically to the force that is used to take, withhold, or destroy values belonging to others. These are the principles that demand that theft be a crime in a moral society.
It is widely understood, furthermore, that an accessory to a crime is as guilty as the perpetrator assisted. Thus when a majority group within a society concocts a political scenario to implement their altruist ethic by using coercion to extract values from some (taxation) to give to others (Pitt), that act is indistinguishable from any other form of theft and all who advocate, support, agree with, and vote for it are guilty of theft as accessories.
Since no accessory of theft may claim a right to the booty, then no one who supports public education funded in part by money extracted involuntarily by taxation can justify a claim to benefit from the proceeds. Only those who consistently oppose taxation in all instances as a matter of principle can qualify as victims free from the guilt of the accessory to morally lay claim to taxation's proceeds and benefits as restitution.
So if Giles opposes taxation in principle he is neither hypocrite nor moocher. You, on the other hand, ...
The right to benefit
Andrew,
As I mentioned in my previous reply, the most fundamental requirement of one's human nature is to be free to apply reason to effort in the service of life. The automatic byproduct of such a principle is the implicit requirement to grant that same freedom to all other men.
Therefore the only question that separates the moral from the immoral in politics is, freedom or force? Force here refers specifically to the force that is used to take, withhold, or destroy values belonging to others. These are the principles that demand that theft be a crime in a moral society.
It is widely understood, furthermore, that an accessory to a crime is as guilty as the perpetrator assisted. Thus when a majority group within a society concocts a political scenario to implement their altruist ethic by using coercion to extract values from some (taxation) to give to others (Pitt), that act is indistinguishable from any other form of theft and all who advocate, support, agree with, and vote for it are guilty of theft as accessories.
Since no accessory of theft may claim a right to the booty, then no one who supports public education funded in part by money extracted involuntarily by taxation can justify a claim to benefit from the proceeds. Only those who consistently oppose taxation in all instances as a matter of principle can qualify as victims free from the guilt of the accessory to morally lay claim to taxation's proceeds and benefits as restitution.
So if Giles opposes taxation in principle he is neither hypocrite nor moocher. You, on the other hand, ...
You spend this entire article
You spend this entire article quoting objectivists, but you fail to actually defend your philosophical points as they relate to the on-campus activism you decry.
How is it in my rational self-interest that people be slaughtered in Darfur? And if it is in my rational self-interest, I would like to know exactly how the people of Darfur will benefit.
Likewise, I am ALREADY being overcharged for the mediocre food Sodexo provides through my meal plan. It's not as if the sorry state of workers' rights in the company is keeping the food affordable. The only people who are benefiting in that equation are the higher-ups at Sodexo, who are making HUGE profits by overcharging us for their food and barely letting the workers see a penny of it.
Thus deprived of economic incentive one way or the other, I am forced to conclude that it is in my rational self-interest: A. to know that my thousands of dollars a year for board are not funding gross abuses of workers' rights, and B. to be served in the dining-hall by people who are not too busy worrying about how to care for their sick children without health insurance to do their jobs effectively, and who do not resent me as complicit in exploiting them.
You can't derive a valid politics from economics
Jayson,
Actually it is your grasp of Objectivism that is elementary. Politics is a branch of philosophy. Specifically, it is the extension of ethics — that defines the normative principles of an individual's life in the context of the human individual — to normative principles for an individual's life in a social context. Consequently, every politics implies an ethics, and one cannot validate a politics without reference to a valid ethics.
Economics, on the other hand is not a branch of philosophy. It is a specialized science that describes the actions human beings take and their consequences when exercising those normative principles.
The entire libertarian oeuvre notwithstanding, you cannot derive a valid politics from economics. By embracing that notion, you are missing Rand's contribution to us of an ethical foundation for the politics of liberty. Her politics does not rest on the successes of the free-market. Rather, those successes are validated by the underlying ethical principle that there is ultimately only one single political alternative: freedom or force.
That principle is necessitated by the ethical mandate for individual autonomy in the application of reason to effort in the service of life that is in turn necessitated by our nature as volitional beings dependent on the proper choices to use and implement our capacity to reason. In the long run, pragmatism will prove to be an impotent political base in the face of a consistent ethics rooted in the facts of the essential nature of human beings.
Before you sneer at Giles's moral self confidence, you need to deal with the question of whether he is right or wrong. That is way more significant to your life than how big his league is.
Politics=economics
"Michael M" (who comes complete with Giles' writing style and knowledge of objectivism-- Lee Siegelism is not merely the bane of the left)
I daresay that politics is not a branch of philosophy; rather philosophy, concerned with wisdom, with truth, seeks to understand and advance specific ideas as to how politics work or should work. When Aristotle, you might recall, suggested that man is a social animal, he was describing the way in which people lived. It was not as though Aristotle's word indicated the beginning of this process.
Likewise, ethics allow us to attempt to understand our actions, and to suggest future, superior methods of action.
Interestingly enough, you'll find that economics, too, was initially a branch of philosophy-- moral philosophy, in fact-- and thus your argument that politics implies ethics and so on and so forth does indeed suggest that politics can be derived from economics. This is, after all, your argument.
But we aren't talking objectivism, here, are we?
I am not missing, as you say, Rand's contribution of an ethical foundation for the politics of liberty. I'm suggesting that such a contribution is unnecessary, as politics, like the economics with which it is intricately intertwined, is descriptive-- positive-- or very narrowly normative. Pragmatism, Mr. M, is the name of the game. You say that I need to deal with the question of whether he is right or wrong. I reply that I have dealt with such a question, and while I find his conclusions sound, his logic is not. "That is way more significant to your life than how big his league is." Cute. But, by the looks of it, still not very large. My information, after all, can be largely found on wikipedia.
Invest equal time against the altruist right
It is also necessary that the first-handers take a clear stand against the conservatism of the right that also embraces the altruist morality. They are as willing as the left to sacrifice the individual, just on a different alter. Objectivism expressly rejects both sides of the left-right axis as a false alternative — a classic soul-body dichotomy that frees the spiritual while enslaving the material on the left and the reverse on the right. Only rational egoism liberates both of these necessary components of human life.
Virtually none of the entrenched left of academe has grasped that, and they consistently fortify their opposition to the Objectivist rational egoism by associating it with their right-wing enemies. More should be trumpeted on campuses that it is their altruistic collectivism that implicitly condones the conservative tyranny of the majority that outlaws drugs, gay marriage, and abortion.
While I agreed nearly
While I agreed nearly whole-heartedly with the first two paragraphs of this piece, my heart sank a bit at the discovery that this was just another pro-market diatribe with Ayn Rand rather slavishly used as justification. Mr. Howard cites "second-handers," but I'd like a suitable justification as to how mercilessly employing objectivism is not, to use the words of Ayn Rand herself, "seeking self-esteem through others." Rand's philosophy, her economics, and, most importantly, her prose are elementary at best. I find myself in support of a (mostly) free market, but wouldn't it make more sense to justify it 1. with actual economists, preferably those who have won a Nobel prize, (Friedman, Hayek, Coase, Becker, anyone from Chicago, really) 2. without insisting moral superiority or that "it's not easy to be first hand," a questionable speculation at that and 3. with writers who aren't given to the purplest of prose. Come on, Howard. Step into the big leagues.
"These pillars of objectivism
"These pillars of objectivism constitute the morality of that segment of the political Right that values individual responsibility, free markets and small government."
The problem is that this works in theory, and only in theory. In practice, these 'moral values' of the Right quickly get corrupted and lead to exploiting the many for the luxury of the few. The current financial crisis shows exactly just how far the corruption and self-interest can go, and how badly it can hurt the general public.
The morals of the Left, however, work both in theory and in practice. Each person working for the sake of others means you have the rest of the population working for your benefit, as you work for theirs. In practice, you have small groups working to benefit other small groups, with tangible results. Corruption and taking the Leftist morals to the extreme means that more resources are shared.
It's been shown that the Right's system doesn't work in the real world. Time to embrace the altruistic Left.
"These Pillars of Objectivism"
The morality of the left and the right is the same thing Laura. That is they both accept and practice the immorality of altruism or self-sacrifice. The whole ethical theory needs to be questioned and a new morality of self-interest or selfishness needs to replace it. It's the only morality based on the facts of reality.
actually I believe its the
actually I believe its the other way around, that the left's system does not work. can you show any examples of this actually working?
glimmer of hope
It's encouraging to see some cracks in the altruist walls of college campuses at last. The focus of your post on the second-handness is right-on. For all of the claims of individuality, the new-New-Left is just renaming / branding the same bubble of corrosive rust from their predecessors.
"Screw Haitian relief"? Notice the wild difference between the 2 countries you've ID'd as in need of aid. One is significantly more self-sacrificing than the other (Chili) which is significantly more driven by self-interest. All of the decades of welfare exported to Haiti have to show for their effort is a pile of rubble.
Yeah!!! Screw Haitian relief!
Yeah!!! Screw Haitian relief! what did they ever do for us? They can't give us money so why bother? Chile? Not my problem an earthquake decided to screw them over. Cure for AIDS? Hell no, I don't have AIDS, if you have AIDS that's your own problem.
Giles, you are an idiot and I hope someday when you need the help of someone else, someone who actually listened to your "self-interest" nonsense leaves you hanging.
I think everything in this
I think everything in this article is too true and needs to be said, and I'm also pretty sure he didn't say any of those things in it.
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