Letters

From the July 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Loren Lomasky replies: David Brown correctly observes that a taste for Rand is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for bursts of rudeness. And, indeed, the preceding responses to my critique of Unrugged Individualism are impeccably civil. They do not, however, render any less Procrustean the task of trimming Objectivist ethics to mesh with benevolence.

David Kelley observes that Objectivism does not equate self-interest with economic gain. I have no reason to maintain otherwise, as a description either of Objectivism or of the good life. Any such straitened view of what it is to live well is too desiccated for human consumption. That is precisely why I find curious Kelley's persistence in attempting to limn an account of benevolence in terms of potential opportunities for trade. Hasn't he just agreed that the moral life is wider than that? Benevolence is one such wider dimension insofar as its essence is provision of benefits to others out of a primary concern for their interest, and doing so without insistence on receiving a quid for each quo tendered.

At one point in his letter Kelley seems to say that this characterization is an arbitrary piece of persuasive definition and thus disposable as a merely semantic quibble. But that proves not to be his settled view, for he acknowledges that a society in which many people regularly provide small, unreciprocated kindnesses to others is abundantly more congenial than one in which they do not. That's benevolence. Kelley cannot quite abide it but neither is he willing to discard it, and so it is at this stretch of the argument that his philosophical wheels spin.

Perhaps, he suggests, one's acts of kindness will set a general example that redounds to one's own benefit. Or they are a kind of "insurance policy" taken out to guard against risk. For reasons set out in the review, these attempts to reduce benevolence to enlightened prudence cannot succeed.

Kelley semi-concedes the point when he admits that his remarks do not surmount Prisoner's Dilemma problems but suggests that these problems might not be severe given a sufficiently wide understanding of self-interest.

David Brown deplores my equation of benevolence with altruism. This, I protest, is an overly extravagant reading between the lines. I cannot see where I equate benevolence, or anything else, with altruism. The latter is not a concept for which I've ever had much use.

In this disregard I am not alone. Altruism understood in Brown's terms as self-abnegation practiced by sacrificial detachment from one's own projects and well-being is virtually nonexistent in the philosophical literature--other, that is, than in the fulminations of Objectivists. It is a straw man, one given life by Rand's dramatized self-portrayals of her distinctness and agonistic struggle against the rest of the philosophical tradition.

Concerning those predecessors, however, Rand possessed a store of spectacular misconceptions. In fact, only with Aristotle does her understanding rise to the level of plausible misunderstanding. I say this as much with awe as accusation, for it is amazing how little inconvenienced she was by these oceans of ignorance and prejudice. That may be because Rand was an imaginative genius able to produce riveting critiques of works she had never bothered to read. But emulating this example has proven intellectually deadly to many of her followers.

Those who most closely hew to her excoriations of so-called altruism and refuse to wander away from the confining egoistic circle she has drawn have imposed on themselves an irrelevance within the greater philosophical world. To his credit, David Kelley valiantly attempts in Unrugged Individualism to expand that circle. But until he is willing to toss overboard more of Objectivist orthodoxy and to regard Rand as simply one philosopher among others, it will continue to confine his investigations.

Needless to say, these remarks are offered in a spirit of exquisite politeness and, yes, exemplary benevolence!

We're Not Worthy

Thanks but no thanks for the patronizing review of Radical Son ("Desperately Seeking David") in your March issue. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

The idea that the war with the left is over (hence my book and my life are pathetic anachronisms that needn't bother the truly enlightened) is laughable. It is also insulting to Ward Connerly, Newt Gingrich, me, and others who--because we are in the battle--live with constant death threats from this left and are subject to daily character assassinations in the mainstream media and from the university culture that the left still owns (or has review author Steve Hayward even bothered to visit a campus lately?). If the left is passé, how come racial preference systems still rule the land?

The power of the left is manifest in the fact that, after 25 years of being mostly right about the big issues, REASON remains a marginal publication, its editors and writers obscure nobodies in the literary culture, and major thinkers like Hayek and Mises are incomprehensible names for 99 percent of the graduates of our elite universities. At the same time, brain-dead socialists like bell hooks,
Cornel West, Catharine MacKinnon, and Noam Chomsky occupy chairs at premier universities and are cultural celebrities and hallowed icons for the same students.

Radical Son--which is the only description of the left from the inside over the past five decades--explains why this is so and provides a unique arsenal with which to fight back. Too bad for Steve Hayward that he doesn't think this makes Radical Son a socially relevant document.

Finally, let me say I'm sorry for Hayward that the personal story recounted in my autobiography embarrasses him and that he would rather pretend it didn't exist. It occurs to me, however, that it is just this kind of reaction to the human experience that gives conservatives a bad name.

David Horowitz
President
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
Los Angeles, CA

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