Altruism, Pity and Compassion Significant (and ignored) differences by W. Teed Rockwell Two philosophers, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, have denied the value of both Altruism and Pity, a fact which causes most people to ignore their numerous differences. While I agree with their evaluation of Altruism and Pity, there is a closely related third virtue, which I will call Compassion, the cultivation of which is a necessary part of my vision of what it means to be a good person. Altruism Altruism is the opposite of selfishness; that is, it is devotion to the welfare of others. If we accept that all virtue has its basis in altruism, then virtue is thus considered to be the denial of self, and selfishness to be the root of all evil. If a person helps me in such a way as to help himself at the same time, this has no altruistic moral worth. Actions are only morally admirable if they involve some sort of sacrifice on the part of the doer. Kant took this principle to its logical conclusion, and said that even the desire to help people was morally neutral. Thus, if feelings of pity for a beggar prompted you to give alms, this was of no more moral worth than if the desire for a hamburger prompted you to take that same money and buy a hamburger. An altruistic action is thus not motivated by any desire whatsoever. Altruism is present only when all desires are sacrificed to a sense of duty. To say that all virtue has its basis in altruism is to say that life itself is evil, for desire for something is the mainspring of all life. According to this value system, some of us are less evil than others, because we mutilate and mortify our desires from time to time, but anyone who is still alive will have a self, with dreams and desires of its own, and will therefore be selfish. As long as we live, we will continue to indulge these desires, and therefore will be necessarily evil. The most destructive thing about this concept of virtue is that it makes most people think that no one can ever really be virtuous. Just as Puritanism produces prostitution, and tee totalling produces alcoholism, so the continual insistence that the Self is evil produces millions of "selfish" Selves. I once knew a young man who (among other vices) continually ran up unpaid phone bills on other people's lines, and frequently borrowed money that he never paid back. Once every few years he becomes a devout fundamentalist Christian, and talks continually about how all of us are sinners because we only think of our selfish little egos. He includes himself, of course, but he doesn't stress this strongly. He seems to enjoy the fact that in the eyes of God, the differences between himself and an ordinary decent human being are not that noticeable. Altruistic morality demands that everyone should try as hard as they can to do their duty, but common sense tells us that most of the time we can't. This encourages people to believe that "almost" is good enough in everything we do, and that mediocrity is the highest level that anyone will ever actually achieve. This attitude is by no means limited to Christians, however. Political liberals and radicals have often believed (with varying levels of explicitness) that the system in which we actually live and work (called Capitalism), requires every person to either exploit or be exploited by the people he works for and/or with. According to this way of thinking, anything you get for yourself in a capitalist system is in some sense stolen from the people who have less than you do, and the only way you can morally redeem yourself is to give away what you have to the have-nots. Unfortunately, you can't give away everything you have without starving to death, and even if you did, it would only slightly help the millions of have- nots for perhaps a nanosecond. Consequently, what everybody ends up doing is keeping what they have and feeling guilty about it. Slogans like "People, not Profits" imply strongly that anybody who was earning profits was necessarily hurting people, and that if more and more people became unselfish, the world would become a better place to live. However, seeing as capitalism supposedly guarantees that the unselfish people will be annihilated by the selfish ones, the goal of increasing the percentage of unselfish people in the world is doomed to failure, no matter how many people become converted in the short run. This kind of altruistic duty is a much greater burden for the Agnostic liberal or radical than it is for the Christian. The Christian is permitted to believe that no matter how much injustice he sees around him, fundamentally "God is in his heaven and all's right with the world". If he does his part in the world around him (If he "loves his neighbor"), he can have faith that God will handle the rest. An Agnostic altruist has the duties and obligations of God which he must fulfill using the powers and abilities of a single human being. Is it surprising that such a value system would first drive a person to almost insane hysteria, which would eventually burn itself out, leaving only an embittered cynicism? During the 60's, these attitudes actually stirred many young people to political action, although much of it was fairly unproductive. During the 70's and 80's, however, these very same attitudes were very effective in paralyzing any efforts at social change, which is why conservatives, not liberals, brought about most of the social change (for better or for worse) in those years. The reasoning that governed this paralysis was something like this: The system is corrupt, because everyone in it is selfish. I have to be selfish if I am to survive, and there is no point in dying because the system will continue corruptly on without me. Therefore I might as well take up my position in the system, but there is no point in pretending that it is possible for me to have work which will make the world a better place to live. It might be worthwhile to be sure that your daily work has somewhat less moral vileness than working for a munitions plant, but it would be hopelessly naive to assume that anything anyone would pay you money to do could actually have any positive moral worth. This transition from committed idealist to cynical power broker has been gone through by the children of the rich ever since Marxism existed. While young, they become Marxists, and then when they mature they become just the sort of Capitalists that Marx taught them to be. These two attitudes can also be seen operating simultaneously in the San Francisco weekly newspaper called the Bay Guardian. Most of its articles are carefully researched muckraking pieces that demonstrate convincingly that everyone in America with any power has sold out to The Business Interests. The rest of the magazine is devoted to lists and reviews of various places to buy things from those business interests: articles which could all be subtitled "Ten new places to spend all of that money you don't deserve to have." The writers and editors probably do feel guilty about the necessity to devote so much of the magazine to these subjects, for there is a thinly disguised cynicism that runs through all of these hymns to materialism. They probably justify this to themselves by saying that these pieces make it possible for them to get the muckraking out to these same people, which will hopefully make them somewhat less materialistic. But it is the muckraking which actually reenforces the materialism of the rest of the magazine, by continually underscoring the hopelessness of doing good in a corrupt society. The implication seems to be that you can't do good for others, so why not look out for yourself.* The basic assumption behind altruism might be phrased as: because greater love hath no man than he who gives up his life for his brother, anybody who is still alive obviously doesn't love his brother as much as he should. By forcing people into an Either/or choice between morality and life, Altruism has created thousands of amoral lives, lived under the assumption that morality is something that everyone talks about, but never actually lives by. Pity People who are more driven by their hearts than their heads often advocate a morality based on pity, rather than duty. Pity is the feeling of upset and misery experienced when one confronts a being more wretched than oneself. The feeling of pity makes a person want to help the pitiable being, unlike the sense of altruistic duty which makes a person believe that she ought to help the pitiable person whether she wants to or not. Seeing as most philosophers are people of the head rather than the heart, there are almost no philosophers who have defended the ethics of pity, and quite a few (including Kant and St. Augustine) who have said that pity and morality have nothing to do with each other at all. There are millions of ordinary people, however, who feel that being moral means only one thing: Helping those people that you feel sorry for, and feeling sorry as often as you can. Popular Christian writers usually compromise by saying that pity and altruism should work in harness together: that of course it is virtuous to feel pity for the wretched, but that emotions sometimes desert us and we should continue to do the right thing even when we don't feel like it. In one sense, Pity-morality requires less self-mutilation than Duty- morality, because it requires a person to continue to feel. In another sense, however, Pity-morality requires more self-mutilation, because it requires a person to feel bad. Doing one's duty is usually only boring: it might be actively unpleasant on occasion, but even then it requires one to stoically ignore this unpleasantness, not wallow in it. A morality based on pity requires you to act on other people's feelings as if they were your own, and not just any other person's feelings but only those of the most wretched people of the earth. According to the morality of pity, a truly moral person does not fill his consciousness with the thoughts of Shakespeare and the emotions of Beethoven; his soul reverberates only with the wailing of cripples and the moans of the starving. He does not formulate dreams and plans of his own; he merely responds, like a Pavlovian dog, to the ringing of a bell from a sickbed. If there were a God who had pity for the human race, he would have eliminated the morality of pity long ago. It requires every happy human being to soil his soul with the sadness of the most miserable, and thus multiplies human misery far more than any physical disaster ever could. Pity-Morality and Duty-Morality both agree on one lethal point: Doing the right thing is not any fun. Both are opposed to the idea that morality could be defined as enlightened self-interest: that being good is actually more fun than being bad. There are people who verbally advocate something like Pity-morality and who themselves lead genuinely happy lives, but I will try to show in the next section of this paper that their morality is better described as a morality of Compassion. There is also the case of Mother Teresa, who is far too complex a figure to be fully explained by the few paragraphs I will devote to her here. Anyone who values human achievement cannot dismiss or belittle her triumph over day-to-day human impulses. She is a genuinely heroic figure, and an inspiration to those of us who achieve heroism only at our occasional best moments. Her morality is clearly motivated by pity, for she devotes herself exclusively to the most wretched and helpless, whom she calls "the poorest of the poor". She does not, however, appear to be driven by duty, but rather by some kind of inner prompting which she believes to be the voice of God. The most important thing for her is not to be obedient to some code of law, but to follow that inner prompting: as she said in the documentary on her life, "If it says to help the sick, you should help the sick. If it says to live in a palace, you should live in a palace." As we are talking about codes of morality here, this is not the place to either attack or defend a morality that is based on direct intuitions, rather than codes. At any rate, it is clear from the above quote that she does not believe that every human being ought to live the way she lives, regardless of what might be implied by certain interpretations of Christian scripture. She never condemns those who don't live the way she lives, and in fact she has rejected novices from her service who seem to her to have joined her order out of duty rather than joy. It also seems that she is a genuinely happy person who enjoys the life she has chosen for herself. When I saw the documentary on her life, I did not feel that I ought to help her, but I felt as if I wanted to help her, and I have never felt called to do that sort of work before. It appears that she genuinely loves people that anyone else would find completely hideous and wretched, and that anyone who comes in contact with such pure unconditional love is forever changed by it. However, thousands of people who were capable of their own kinds of greatness have merely crushed what was best in themselves by trying to imitate hers, and millions of others have given up trying to be good entirely, because her form of Christian sacrifice was the only kind of goodness they believed to be possible. Furthermore, the heroism of her efforts should not blind us to the fact that she has done relatively little physical or economic good for the people she is trying to help. The few people who receive the loving attention of her or her nuns certainly do feel better from having received it, and will probably never forget having been in her presence. But a businessman who built a factory in her neighborhood, provided on-the-job training and medical insurance for the people who worked there, and made piles of money for himself in the process, would do far more to actually alleviate human suffering. However, advocates of the morality of altruism would dismiss that man's achievements because "He only did it to make a few bucks for himself" and advocates of the morality of pity (including Mother Teresa herself) would promptly turn their attention elsewhere, because the people there would no longer be pitiful. The Foundations of Morality It is, of course, far easier to criticize an existing system of ethics than to create a new one. Because I am going to articulate compassion as a positive moral ideal in the next section of this paper, I must first say something about moral ideals and how they should be evaluated. The traditional way to defend a new system of ethics from a critical onslaught is by sheer chutzpah: to claim that the creator of this system is God, or the son of God, or received it from God on a stone tablet of some sort. This kind of moral foundation is called an unconditional "ought." Kant also tried to formulate an unconditional ought based on reason alone, which he called the categorical imperative. After many months of reading the Critique of Practical Reason, I concluded that either he was wrong or I didn't understand what he was talking about. Ayn Rand also believed that her morality was based on reason alone. Her claim was that a moral person made choices that aided his (nonparasitic) survival, and that because survival was something that was objectively measurable, morality was therefore based upon objective rational reality. "Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare and injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative life and death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative". (For the New Intellectual pp.131-132) Unfortunately for this position, Life rarely offers us two such simple choices. There are a variety of things which give us joy, and frequently the choice between them has nothing to do with physical survival. It is true that there are short-term pleasures which are destructive in the long run, and long-term satisfactions that can only be won by choosing short-term suffering. In these situations, the choice between short-term and long-term happiness can be seen as a question of the survival (or at any rate, the health and well-being) of the chooser. This is what Rand means by this passage. "Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you the driver have corrupted"(ibid p.132). But there are many satisfying and exciting ways of earning a living, and the choice amongst them cannot be made on the basis of survival, because all of them are capable of giving their practitioners long- term livelihoods. Howard Roark designed buildings because he received more joy from being an architect than he would have from running a railroad. Dagny Taggart ran a railroad because she received more joy from doing so than she would have from being an architect. There is no purely rational method by which either one could have made the choice between those two activities. The reason Roark became an architect was because in the long run he felt better building buildings than doing anything else, regardless of whatever short term suffering his goals put him through. This does not mean that careful deliberation cannot be helpful in coming to a decision as to what would be a satisfying career. Particular "feeling-events" caused by occurrences in daily experience can be traced back to fundamental premises of value (what Aristotle calls irreducible primaries), and then analyzed rationally to see whether the connection is legitimate. (I am angry at a man whom I see beating a horse because I feel that kindness is valuable and cruelty is wrong. The man's behavior is genuinely cruel, therefore my anger is consistent with my values). But these primaries are themselves a deep fundamental kind of feeling, and that is what makes them primary, i.e. irreducible to rational terms. The deliberation which enables one to choose fundamental values involves not only rationality, but also what is called "getting in touch with your feelings". If one discovers through such processes that one feels better about designing buildings than about running a railroad, then one ought to be an architect. Feelings are not, however, the same as whims. One of Ayn Rand's biggest mistakes was to confuse the subjective and the arbitrary, and thus to assume that a value system built on feelings would necessarily be totally chaotic. Feelings, like everything else in the universe, are what they are. There are laws that govern their behavior, and the person who does not learn those laws is destined to be destroyed by them. Ayn Rand herself had no real understanding of how feelings operated. She believed that if she felt strongly about something, her feeling was a logically deduced fact about it, primarily because she did not have a clear awareness of the difference between reason and rhetoric. Her "arguments" for the immorality of an action usually consisted of dishing out enough rhetorical abuse so that anyone would feel bad if he contemplated himself doing that action. Once she had done this, she then claimed she had rationally proven that the action was morally wrong. For those of us who believe that morality is based on feelings, this is a legitimate technique, within limits. This is, in fact, the technique which I used in the previous two sections of this paper. By Rand's own standards, however, this is the worst sort of mysticism, and bears no relationship to the principles of morality she claims to follow. It is possible, I believe, to have a morality based on feelings which is not arbitrary or capricious, but it must be based on; 1) a knowledge of the psychological principles which govern feelings themselves 2) the articulation, using poetical and rhetorical language, of some sort of Ideal way of living, which stirs strong feelings in those who contemplate it. 3) the formulation of Maxims which describe the sort of behavior necessary to achieve this ideal, given that these psychological principles are true. The maxims should be formulated with as much rationality as possible, so that their connection to the Ideal can be clearly and logically seen. The Ideal itself, however, must be formulated in poetic language capable of rousing the reader to follow it and/or flee from its opposite. (Rand's novels do this brilliantly.) If this Ideal is formulated with awareness of valid and reasonably complete psychological principles, and the maxims really do describe the sort of behavior that produces the Ideal, people striving for the Ideal by following the maxims will lead rewarding and satisfying lives. If those principles are inconsistent or incomplete, the followers' lives will be damaged accordingly. What I intend to do is make some general statements about the nature of human consciousness, based on my lifetime of experience as a conscious human. (This activity is sometimes referred to by philosophers as phenomenology). I will then try to show that given that these statements are true, a certain kind of ideal life would be possible if one followed certain maxims. The "ought" of all my maxims is thus what philosophers call a conditional ought: It is based on the condition that the ideal life I am describing is one that I believe would make you feel good. If this ideal life appeals to you, you would have good reason to try to live by these maxims. If it does not, I would strongly recommend formulating ideals and maxims of your own, and invite you to use whatever fragments of mine you like as raw materials. Compassion In ordinary speech, Pity and Compassion are more or less synonyms, but for the purposes of this paper I will make the following distinction between them. Compassion I will define as its literal meaning: Com- passion; to feel with. A compassionate person is aware of the feelings of the people around her; when they are happy she feels their happiness almost as vividly as she feels her own, and when they are unhappy she also feels their unhappiness. Because she feels their feelings, she also naturally takes an interest in the ideas and beliefs of the people around her, and so she will, as a consequence, ask them the sorts of questions that will eventually make her aware of their thoughts as well as their feelings. If a compassionate person is around people who are pitiable, she will naturally feel pity for them. But she is not drawn to pitiable people more than to happy people. In fact she is far more likely to want to be around happy people, because she is so sensitive to the pain of unhappy ones. Hume called this form of awareness "sympathy", saying (perhaps metaphorically) that all of us "vibrate" sympathetically to the feelings of others just as strings tuned to the same pitch will all vibrate together when one of them is struck. The Mahayana Buddhist tradition teaches that compassion is a unique form of awareness that centers in the energy around the heart chakra. It is thus a kind of sixth sense, according to this tradition, which provides a direct awareness of the emotional energy of sentient beings, just as the eyes provide an awareness of electromagnetic energy, and the ears provide an awareness of vibratory energy. There is, at the moment, very little scientific evidence for the existence of the chakra system. For those who do not feel comfortable in believing in something that has not yet been measured by scientific instruments, compassion can be explained as the awareness of people's feelings through ordinary sensory channels: changes in voice tone, skin color, speech patterns, etc. Each person responds to these "vibes" in different degrees depending upon his or her personality. This is because each person is usually only aware of a small part of what he perceives. To some degree these variations are merely a reflection of personal history and taste: of three people entering the same party, one may notice the clothing of the other people present, another may notice the music being played, a third may notice the food on the buffet. But a morality which values compassion says that there is not absolute freedom as to where your awareness may rest if your soul is to be ÑÊwhat? Good? Healthy? Enlightened? Choose whatever word you like. A Compassion-based morality claims it is necessary to be directly, immediately, aware of the feelings of the people with whom you interact on a daily basis: your family, business associates, even the people sitting next to you on the bus. A person may ignore clothes or music without damaging himself, but to go through life without any awareness whatsoever of other peoples feelings is a recipe for self-destruction. Once a person hardens his heart to even one person who is suffering, he will no longer be as compassionate, i.e. as aware of the feelings of the people he encounters. This is why so many religious traditions have considered pity to be synonymous with the virtue of compassion, because it is when we are confronted with pitiable beings that we are most tempted to numb our sense of compassion. Unfortunately, if we succumb to this temptation, our awareness will shrink, and this will make us narrower, more desiccated people. These terms are as unmetaphorical as any descriptions of feelings can possibly be; one actually feels smaller when in this state of mind, "boxed in", in a way that produces irritability, suffocation, and paranoia. A person who has tried to make himself happy by blinding himself to other people's feelings is usually called selfish, but the smothering of compassion is a terrible act of self-mutilation. It will provide temporary numbness from the pain of those around you, and if one has some kind of fulfilling work, it is still possible to have moments of deep satisfaction in spite of this numbness. But if one does not have some compassionate contact with people one cares about, it is impossible to avoid the powerful side effect of the non-compassionate life called Loneliness. Compassion is the only cure for loneliness, for if you surround yourself with people and do not share their feelings, you have the experience of being "lonely in a crowd". Charles Dickens has shown the effects of this attitude in characters such as Ralph Nickleby and Ebenezer Scrooge: characters who hardened themselves to the sufferings of those around them, and consequently made themselves every bit as miserable as the people they were exploiting. Of course, most people realize this at some level, and so do not numb themselves to the feelings of everybody they encounter. Instead, they establish compassionate bonds with a small number of people, and ignore the feelings of everyone else. The world becomes thus divided into US and THEM: those people with whom we have an I-Thou relationship and those with whom we have an I-It relationship. Seeing as this is what most of us in fact do, it might not be as easy to paint a rhetorical picture of this state of mind as a living hell. But it is extremely easy to make self- destructive choices as to who is US and who is THEM. Should I maintain compassionate awareness only of those people who are useful to me, and break that awareness off whenever it is contrary to my self-interest? If I assume that my bonds with a person can be broken any time that I choose, those bonds were never really I- Thou bonds in the first place. Should my choices be based on family ties, or on culture or nationality? The popularity of this choice is responsible for the success of Mafia families and for almost every war between nations. Should my choices be based on rationally shared values? Ayn Rand lived by this formula and alienated herself from almost all of her friends. Because she believed that shared values were the only basis for maintaining emotional bonds with anyone, a significant disagreement inevitably produced an outpouring of hatred for that person. Hatred is one of the most effective destroyers of compassionate awareness, and its spread throughout Rand's psyche doomed her to a paranoid and embittered old age. It seems to me that there is only one genuinely viable choice, and that is not to make a choice at all. A sense organ that only sees what we want it to see is a sense organ that lies: to do its job properly, it must tell us what's out there, not what we would like to be out there. One must, in other words, maintain a compassionate awareness of everybody one encounters. One must see all the people one encounters as people, with feelings and thoughts. It is not enough to merely intellectually acknowledge that "of course, they have feelings, now that you mention it." One must to some degree feel their feelings and think their thoughts. If we make choices, either conscious or subconscious, which block out our awareness of the humanity of the people we encounter, we cut ourselves off from an essential wellspring of our being. This does not mean that we must be equally aware of the feelings of everyone on the planet. The inner lives of the people we sit next to on the bus will not be as vivid to us as those of our family and co-workers, because our encounters with them are infrequent and disjointed. Our lack of awareness stems not from numbness or denial, but from lack of exposure to them. The spiritual danger comes from denying our experience because at one particular moment that experience may be unpleasant or painful. For when we damage the emotional antennae that make us aware of human feelings, they cannot be regrown at our convenience. If the need for compassion is a fact of human existence, what sort of maxims does this imply to guide human behavior? First of all, it eliminates the foundations for both altruism and its alleged opposite, because the absolute distinction between self-interest and concern for others collapses. We cannot look out for ourselves and ignore everybody else, because in doing so we doom ourselves to a life of benumbed mutilated loneliness. It is essential to our own self-interest to maintain an awareness of what other selves are interested in, and thus to feel their feelings and to some degree make them our own. However, we need not assume from any of this that we are always obligated to respond to other people's feelings, any more than we are obligated to always respond to our own feelings. The compassionate person does not necessarily do what other people want, she merely wants to do what other people want, because to some degree she shares their feelings. A person who possesses compassion without wisdom would indeed respond," like a Pavlovian dog, to the ringing of a bell from a sickbed" and would possess no life of his own. But a life governed entirely by impulsive response to compassion would be as self-destructive (and as ineffective at helping others) as a life governed entirely by the desire for alcohol. If I gave all of my grocery money to a beggar, and thus let my children starve, this act would not be right, even though it was motivated by deep feelings of compassion for the beggar. People with wisdom realize that human finitude is a fact, and they take that fact into their plans. In order to have a life that fulfills both self and others, it is necessary to have a goal or an ideal of some sort, and to formulate plans and projects that will turn that goal into a reality. This is true even for people involved in what are thought of as altruistic activities. If one devotes oneself to nursing AIDS patients, one has made a conscious decision to let the starving people in Ethiopia die without lifting a finger to help them. Even Kant admitted that we cannot have an obligation to do the impossible, and seeing as we cannot solve all the world's problems, we have no obligation to do so. This means that we have the right to choose which of the world's problems we will devote ourselves to solving, and no one problem can say "You must solve me. I am too serious to be ignored". Does this mean that we could ignore everyone else in the world if we wish, and devote our talents to the ravenous acquisition of property and possessions? Some people would say no, because to do so would violate the commands of God and/or Kant's Moral Law, but I think that a more compelling argument against this course of action is that it condemns us to the cold loneliness of Nickleby and Scrooge. For the sake of our own happiness then, the wise thing to do is to find a way of working in the world which uses our potentials to their fullest, and keeps us in compassionate nourishing contact with other people. Compassion and Abstract Values The rewards of so-called altruistic work do not come from obeying some obligation to stop the world from falling apart. They come from the times when one actually succeeds in helping somebody. This satisfaction comes from two different sources. The first is the emotional "charge" that one receives from experiencing the happiness of the person one has helped. One can receive this charge only if one is in sympathetic compassionate contact with that person. Mother Teresa's only "skill" is her ability to maintain compassionate contact with people whose lives and bodies are so hideously disfigured that an ordinary person could only feel nausea or revulsion in their presence. But that contact obviously feeds her soul whenever she sees the joyous expression of people who are experiencing care and tenderness for the first time in their lives. Anyone who has ever earned another person's gratitude has tasted some measure of this exhilaration. When I was a Christian, I believed that I experienced this exhilaration because God was rewarding me for doing a good deed. But there is no need to posit supernatural intervention if we acknowledge that compassionate contact with other sentient beings is an essential nutrient for our souls, and that successful acts of charity intensify this contact in an especially potent way. However, there is another kind of reward which automatically comes from successfully performing a so-called altruistic act: the sense of accomplishment that comes from a job well done, which is essentially the same as the experience that comes from building a well-designed building, or learning a complicated and demanding dance step. A therapist or social worker who has used her skills to help solve a client's emotional problems feels an exhilarating sense of self-worth because she has accomplished something that is good in terms of her own values. This has nothing to do with being able to brag to somebody that one has accomplished something. The act itself, and the actor's awareness that it was performed skillfully and well, is intrinsically satisfying in a way that is independent of whether or not the act was acknowledged by anyone else. One of the things that makes so-called altruistic activities so satisfying is that they automatically fulfill these two essential human needs at once: The need to accomplish things that satisfy one's values, and the need for compassionate contact. Other callings have a much more ambiguous connection between these two goals. It may seem that Howard Roark of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead cares nothing at all for other people, and only for buildings and the abstract values which determine how he builds them. This is why Rand refers to his values as "selfish". However, she makes it clear that Roark is inevitably concerned about the people who will eventually inhabit his buildings. When Austen Heller moves into the house that Roark designed for him, he says "... thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There were so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all of my needs. ... You were very considerate of me." Roark's reply was "you know, I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house...Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you." (The Fountainhead p.137). A building is by definition something that people live and work in, and therefore a well-designed building will take into consideration what the architect thinks is best for its inhabitants. Similarly, a well-made painting or symphony is designed for the edification and delight of those who share the values of the creator. In fact, anything whose creation is successfully governed by a value system will necessarily give pleasure to anyone who shares that value system. Unfortunately, it is not always the case that customers who share the creator's values actually exist when the work is created hence the neglect and suffering which is Roark's story in The Fountainhead and the story of countless other creative people. The contact that a creative artist receives from an audience gives the same kind of nourishment that a doctor receives from curing a patient, and is every bit as essential for the artist's spiritual health. But there are frequently times when an artist must sacrifice the quantity of the contact for anticipated future quality. In other words, an artist must frequently create for a very small audience (and sometimes for an audience that does not yet exist), because she wishes to create an experience for them that only a very few people are capable of appreciating at that time. But an artist always suffers when she is forced to do this, even though it may sometimes be necessary. This suffering is often so great that an artist may decide to tailor her own values to appeal to an audience of real human beings, so that her art will be admired and/or paid for. A person who makes this kind of compromises is called a "second-hander" in the Fountainhead, and is considered to be a moral degenerate. The same kind of person is called a "trader" in Atlas Shrugged, and is considered to be a hero. Once Ayn Rand achieved financial success and recognition for herself, she conveniently forgot that people who refuse to become second-handers frequently find no one willing to trade with them, and thus end up starving in obscurity like Roark's mentor Henry Cameron. For the rest of us, to balance the demands of the ideal audience, who may exist only in one's mind for many years, and the real audience, with whom one could be in direct compassionate contact, is the hardest task that any genuinely creative person must face. This same choice is present for anyone in any profession, not just in morally glamorous activities like social work or art. A person who manufactures ice cream because he enjoys doing it, and wants to give people the happiness that comes from eating really good ice cream, is faced with a choice of values very similar to any other creative person's: Do you create for an ideal customer, who may not actually exist, or do you give the customer that is already there what he wants? There is a very real satisfaction in knowing you make the best ice cream there is, and an equally real satisfaction in knowing that people are enjoying what you make. Some businessmen take the attitude of Willoughby MacCormick, who said about his spices "If you make the best, someone will buy it." Others devote themselves to market research and make only whatever the public is already buying. It is tempting for those of us in the so-called creative arts to think that we have a rougher time with this choice than do other professions. After all, a lot more people eat ice cream than read books these days. But everyone, regardless of his calling, must decide how much he adapts himself to the world and how much he forces the world to adapt to him. It is the fundamental moral choice, and both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche did a tremendous service by showing the inadequacy of answering this question by saying only "live for others". The view that we must live for others is neither true nor false, because it is confused. It is true that we cannot be happy unless our life positively benefits other people in some way, for we are by nature social animals. We define ourselves, however, by choosing our own specific way of benefiting other people. This choice is what determines our values and thus creates our Self. Rand claimed that any compromise of one's personal values to social pressure makes one a second-hander. I claim, however, that it is essential to sanity and survival that one's work eventually be experienced as valuable by a concrete social network of real human beings with whom one is in sympathetic contact. To live on the assumption that no one's opinions and feelings matter but your own is a useful attitude when one begins to define oneself as a creative individual, and it may be necessary to keep this attitude for many years in order to fully achieve one's highest goals. But it is a spiritually dangerous attitude to have, and anyone who is forced by circumstances to maintain it should be fully aware of the dangers. Ayn Rand had no use for compassion, and believed that a person had betrayed himself if he compromised his abstract values to accommodate another person. Roark, who exemplified her ideal on paper, was usually described as completely unaware of other people's feelings. He was "the fountainhead" because he was his own source of values, and when he was able to create on his own terms he was always happy and fulfilled. Ayn Rand tried to live her own life according to Roark's values, and was a success in their terms, and in society's terms as well. She had millions of admiring readers, an intimate circle of close friends and students, and financial success, achieving it all without ever compromising to anyone else's point of view. She repeatedly claimed that she and her closest friends were living proof that it was possible to live by her system of values. And yet despite her delusionary claims to the contrary, those who knew her best (most specifically Barbara and Nathaniel Branden) agreed that at the height of her success, she was miserable most of the time for no fully understandable reason. Perhaps this was because she failed to live up to her values, but it seems more plausible to me that her values themselves were flawed. Living compassionately with other people means engaging in a dialogue of values with them. During this dialogue we must maintain a sympathetic awareness of their values, while simultaneously keeping our personal values strong and consistent. To have this dialogue turn into a monologue is unhealthy for both the listener and the monologist. We must accept the fact that genuine dialogue always produces some changes in the belief systems of both parties that engage in it, and never results in one party completely surrendering her values to the other. I think that Ayn Rand's depressive tendencies came from the fact that she did not recognize the need to appreciate another person's viewpoint, either emotionally or rationally. Although she had many friends and admirers, her lack of sympathetic awareness seems to have made it impossible for her to be really aware of their thoughts and feelings. Most of her closest friends (being much younger than she was, and dazzled by her brilliance) ended up molding their lives to fit her values, hiding their differences from her and from themselves. Very rarely did she ever receive actual "input" from them, so it is likely that she rarely received the unique nourishment ordinarily received from compassionate awareness of friends and neighbors. In a very real sense, she was always "alone in a crowd", because she was incapable of empathizing with anyone who did not already think the same way that she did. This degree of self- absorption made it possible for her to see the world with a unique and profound vision. But the fact that she was not happy even though she was a success in her own terms seems to indicate that she had failed to place value on something that is essential to human fulfillment. We cannot live in service of abstract principles alone without mutilating ourselves. Even though all of our highest values presuppose the goal of benefiting anyone who shares those values, it is not enough for us to perform our actions only for some abstract "ideal observer". We must be able to experience the benefits that flesh and blood human beings derive from our efforts. Nevertheless, it is also self-destructive to live the life of a "second-hander", which is only knee-jerk responses to compassionate impulses and/or the desire for praise. Abstract principles and compassion are both necessary if we are to live fulfilled lives Ñ as is the wisdom to know how to balance their frequently contradictory demands. An Addendum, Mostly About Money I have developed the following diagram to summarize the main points of this paper. This diagram outlines the four possible combinations of two pairs of opposites: the social versus the personal and the universal versus the specific. At each intersection point are the names of two individuals for whom that combination is the highest value. Social Personal universal Kant Ebenezer Scrooge Lenin Donald Trump specific Peter Keating Howard Roark Mother Teresa Ayn Rand Peter Keating, the archetypical second-hander who is Roark's foil in The Fountainhead, exemplifies the position that the opinions and feelings of the people we encounter socially are the only source of value. So does the compassionate value system of Mother Teresa, although in a significantly different way. Howard Roark and Ayn Rand exemplify the position that each person must have their own personal value system, which must be completely independent from the social pressure of people encountered in daily life. Both of these positions, however, have values that are relatively specific, when compared to the service of an abstract "common good," which is the highest value for Altruists like Kant and Lenin. (i.e. Roark follows his own personal values, and Keating follows the values of the particular people around him). I have already given my views about values which are Specific- Social and Specific-Personal in the preceding section of this paper, concluding that neither of these works if completely divorced from the other. I have also, in the section on Altruism, described the dangers of values which are Universal-Social, and thus make no reference to specific persons at all. In the interest of completeness, I think I should say something about values which are Universal-Personal, with special emphasis on the medium that frequently gives this value an illusion of concrete embodiment: Money. Our values must be rooted firmly in concrete realities, because "universal" values are dangerously empty. Our social lives must be built around the real people whom we encounter in our daily lives, not around some abstract "common good" or "Categorical Imperative". Similarly our personal goals and desires must be built around some set of values that define who we are. To be selfish without a set of specific, concrete values is not to have a self at all. In Francisco D'Anconia's famous speech on money in Atlas Shrugged, he explains why it is impossible for a person without values to justify his life by accumulating money. "But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires... Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: Money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek....Is this the reason why you call it evil?" (For the New Intellectual p. 90) Unfortunately, there are far too many people who love money who make this same mistake, and many of them are powerful figures in the industrial and financial world: Men like Trump, Boesky, and Milken, for example. Because money has no intrinsic value, a person whose highest value is money is really what Ayn Rand calls a "lone Wolf" driven by "Selfishness without a self" (see Philosophy: Who Needs It pp.56- 63). The activities of a person driven by genuine intrinsic values will benefit himself and anyone else who shares those values; a person who values money alone will only be feeding an insatiable addiction. The latter person may be doing worthwhile productive work as a by-product, but his value system will make it impossible for him to see this. An ice cream manufacturer with this kind of values would see himself only secondarily as pleasing his customers. His conscious goal would be to "beat the competition" so he can make money, and the fact that he can beat the competition only by pleasing his customers becomes obscured. Unfortunately, no one who believes that serving the public is necessarily unprofitable, altruistic, and self-sacrificing will be able to see that envisioning a better world, and using your money to create it, is more fun than piling up money for no reason at all. What most people (rich and poor) fail to realize is that it is possible to spend only a very small amount of money on one's personal needs, in comparison to the amount of money that very rich people actually have available to them. J. Paul Getty's yacht, mansion and Rolls Royce are not significantly more expensive than the ones owned by the numerous minor executives who work for him. The only thing you can do with the quantities of money which are called capital is to help other people with it, i.e. run an industry which provides jobs for its employees, services for its customers, and aid to charity and the arts with the surplus. This activity is selfish in that the industrialist gets to decide how and when to help people, and thus his work is a form of self-expression. But if you're not interested in helping people at all, there is really nothing you can do with that much money Ñ except use it to get more, and thus indefinitely put off the question of what the money itself ultimately is for. Any profitable activity provides an opportunity to develop skills and make other people happy, if one is willing to see one's profession in those terms. It also frequently produces a surplus of wealth, which makes it possible to sponsor creative non-profit activities. A successful ice cream manufacturer can take the money that he earns from manufacturing ice cream, and use it to sponsor activities which he thinks are worthwhile but that don't turn a profit. (The way that Ben and Jerry's has done.) These non-profit activities will inevitably express the personality and values of their sponsor. If the benefactor made his money by carefully following market research trends in boring or obvious ways, he will probably choose boring and obvious charity projects like the Red Cross or the United Givers Fund. Creative businessmen like Ben and Jerry spend their money on projects which are as creative as the ways they found of making it. It is quite obvious that men like Ben and Jerry have no interest in money for its own sake. Their love of ice cream and their skill in making it and marketing it is a form of personal expression for them, which fortunately brings them enough money that they can also express themselves through a variety of non-profit activities. What more could any "selfish" person want? (If we use Ayn Rand's definition of "selfish" as having a sense of self created by a strongly held set of personal values.) If all businessmen were selfish in this way, there would be very little need for government-run social programs. The amount of wealth and ingenuity that would consequently be focused on making a better world would be far greater than any amount of money ever spent by any welfare state, and the variety of positive visions that would be released by a free marketplace of social improvement would be far more colorful and exciting than any grey flannel utopia ever planned by a centralized philosopher-king. 853A Crocker Ave Daly City, CA 94014 415/585-8046 * It must be said in all fairness that there are new perspectives manifesting in the Bay Guardian because of the distinction its writers now make between "Big Out-of-own Business" and "Small Local Business". The Guardian now runs favorable articles on business organizations such as Michael Phillips' Briar Patch Network, which teaches how it is possible to have "right livelihood" in a Capitalist society. I heartily applaud those at the Guardian who are encouraging this attitude, and hope it continues to grow.