Eric Nolte is a captain with a major airline, a writer, musician, husband, and father of two young girls. At night, flying at 30,000 feet, Eric feels inspired by the sight of the stars, and the promises of a bright future.
This article is one of many that Eric writes on the meaning and value of benevolence. Posted here with Eric's permission. Also posted on OWL.

Abstract:

We objectivists are frequently perceived as big jerks at the fringe, and are often dismissed as callous and compassion-challenged oafs. I believe there is sometimes a grain of truth to this attack. In this essay I seek to add to our list of objectivist virtues, charity, when it is properly defined to exclude approval of any collectivist, government orchestrated and coercive system of welfare.

I will argue that free will amounts to control over that little sliver of our lives that is the area to which we pay attention. Free will is the essential basis of Rand's assertion that we are entirely beings of self-made soul. Our nature endows us with the ability to make our souls, but this ability is not entirely unlimited, it is constrained by a cosmic roll of the dice that dictates the circumstances of our birth. As magnificent as this power is, free will is a faculty that is perhaps more limited than many O'ists would allow.

I will argue that charity amounts to a bow before the recognition that there go I, but for the grace of our great good luck in the cosmic sweepstakes for the time and place of birth.
 

The Selfish Virtue of Charity

by  Eric Nolte

Ayn Rand asserted that one's own happiness is the goal of life. She argued that three values are paramount in achieving this happiness: reason, purpose, and self-esteem. By reason, we mean, as Rand defined it, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provides by our senses, and that we should examine this experience guided by logic and evidence. Since "purpose" is a neutral term that applies equally to objectivists, Popes, and lynch mobs, we should explain that by purpose we mean the pursuit of honorable, peaceful ends. And by self-esteem we mean, not the vain puffery of a braggart, but the quality Nathaniel Branden once described as "the reputation one earns with oneself." The virtues required to manifest these values on earth are: rationality, productiveness, pride, honesty, integrity, justice, and independence.

David Kelley has argued in Unrugged Individualism that benevolence should be explicitly added to this list of virtues .

While I wholly agree with all of the above, I propose to add Charity to this list.

Now, before cranking the heavy artillery to bear on my tender flesh and accusing me of having degenerated into a hopeless advocate of a tyrannical, government-run, advanced welfare state, hear me out.

By charity I mean the behavior of one who lends a helping hand to others who are not as well off or as far along as we. I do not mean by charity anything that exudes even the faintest whiff of an obligation. I do not mean a duty to cough up a tithe or a tax to secular or religious authorities who are eagerly collecting parts of our hide for proud display alongside all the other scalps and antlers above their mantlepiece. I am not suddenly declaring that the needs of others should assume primacy, or become heavy shackles around your ankles, pulling you helplessly beneath the waves while you're trying to swim across the sea of life.

But... having so much as a wild shot at living anything like a decent life depends heavily on the accident of your birth. "There but for the Grace of God go I," is a phrase that captures something of the spirit behind this truth. While I don't believe in any traditional formulation of God, it is beyond dispute that we are all born into a matrix of time and place as if by a roll of the cosmic dice.

We do not enjoy the tiniest bit of control over being born healthy, free, white, rich, American, and male (which gender matters only because cultures have always tended to deny opportunities to girls.) Neither do we have any control over arriving as a sickly girl, born into an illiterate family that is all dying of AIDS, living in a vermin infested thatch hut with a dirt floor, in some god-forsaken, blistering hole in sub-Saharan Africa.

Who would argue that your chance for living a decent life is not affected by such circumstances of birth? Who would argue that the poor, sick girl in Africa can somehow transcend the kind of tribalism that will drag her into a filthy, hideous rite of passage when she reaches puberty, in which she will stand helplessly while her elders hack off part of her genitals during an unhygienic rite from which she stands a good chance of contracting an infection that might kill her? Who would argue that she can somehow rise above all these forces, and make the kind of transcendental leap required to hold her own life and happiness as a high virtue? Who would look at this poor girl, and then unreservedly agree with Rand that "Man is a being of self-made soul"?

You have no control over such circumstances of your birth, and you should offer singing hosannas every day for the great good blessings you enjoy through no virtue of your own. I will argue that one of the ways in which it is proper to offer up such thanks is through giving to the less fortunate.

Of course this is not to say that there are no personally won virtues that allow one to see farther and travel wider than the ground below the tree you first fell out of.

Let me also hasten to add that American liberals, welfare statists, and socialists of various stripes, all point to the randomness of our birth as a factor in arguing for their controlling the economy, and thereby implicitly running your life. There always seem to be vacuous, seductive slogans, such as "People before profits" which always seem to accompany the well intentioned proponents of a political system which they would be shocked to learn does not lead to benevolence, but rather to collectivist tyranny. Let me distance myself from this "liberal" confusion of compassion for indebted servitude. It does not follow that one's compassion for the unlucky should entail one's giving up a majority share in one's life.

Communitarians and other collectivists are not so sure that there really are any virtues we can win apart from those we are given by the accident of birth. These folks are also not sure that there are any pleasures we should enjoy as a matter of right, and that should be exempt from the prying hand of the tax collector. Their pious good intentions count for everything; they believe this piety should wash over and dispel even our worries about the Machiavellian notion that a good end justifies even the means of tyrants.

Such collectivists do not think we deserve what we have, and they explain their collectivism by reference to how all our blessings arise as a consequence of our birth. There is no free will in this view, no power that can rise above the deterministic forces of genes and environment. But the debate in psychology that attempts to explain behavior by reference either to nature or nurture (or even by the marriage of the two) is simplistic, as Kenneth Livingston (a professor of psychology as Vassar, who also lectures at David Kelley's Objectivist Center) has observed. Moreover, none of these positions captures the complex interaction of those factors with free will. In fact, free will does not even register on the academic radar screen. If we are none of us responsible for our blessings, then we are neither to be praised nor blamed for our behavior. If no one deserves praise or blame, then of course egalitarian government enforcement of equal outcomes should be the way we ought to run things.

Free will applies to but a sliver of our lives, the direction in which we choose to aim our attention. It does not affect the luck of our genes or our parents' behavior towards us, or which country we are born into. Of course, this choice of where we pay attention makes all the difference in the quality of our lives, but it is not a power that can conquer every obstacle lodged in the road that leads away from our birth.

Objectivists have noted that there are surely degrees of childhood damage that utterly ruin one's chances for shaping a happy life for oneself. Even Leonard Peikoff grants the point. But I would argue that the number of people to the tragic side of this line may include far more people than Rand or Peikoff would allow. I maintain that there is almost no way in hell that the poor African girl I mentioned above stands a snowball's chance in Somalia for a decent life. I have read credible estimates that there are at least 80 to 100 million such women alive today. Think of the chances for a decent life if one is born into a brutal dictatorship. There are over a billion such people in Red China alone. Think of the many, many hundreds of millions who have lived and died under such circumstances. I would not care to estimate what percentage of these people stand a chance of living a decent life (as beings of self-made soul...), but I would imagine that our presumption of a benevolent universe may not apply to as many people as we are inclined to think. Living in a malevolent world is not as marginal an issue as many objectivists may believe.

So here's the point: every one among you has been hugely blessed by the total accident of your birth. And all around us is a multitude, I dare say even a majority, of people in the world who are vastly less fortunate than we, in the metaphysically given circumstances of our birth. We have worked hard to win our understanding of things that allow us to enjoy hope, happiness, and abundance. We are not all rich, of course, but we should feel happy to share something of our blessings with others who are not so lucky.

Do we deserve what we have worked to achieve? Of course we do. Do children born into poor, illiterate, abusive and hopeless families deserve to sleep under the bridges of prosperous cities? You damn well know they don't DESERVE such a fate, and we who can help should give some thought to how we might lend a helping hand.

A life affirming philosophy to guide our lives is crucial, of course. But so is a having a roof over your head, a little heat to ward off the cruel knife of winter, and some food to power the synapses firing in your brain. Abraham Maslow's pyramid of consciousness holds true, that without first satisfying our survival needs, no higher thoughts are possible. Until physical survival is assured, no comfort is possible. Without comfort, there is none of that repose required for any deep thought, Without deep thought, there is no growth of consciousness into the higher strata of existence, and certainly nothing approaching enlightenment! Before satisfying all these basic needs there is only the pre-verbal, primal, animal, yearning for life itself.

Giving is important. Lending a helping hand (and maybe some time given in such activities as teaching somebody to read or cipher, or giving goods to a local food pantry or shelter for battered women, or a soup kitchen) is an expression and recognition of the blessing of your good birth.

Now, is it true that Michael Milken was a truly greater benefactor of humanity than Mother Teresa? In the sheer number of people whose lives are touched for the better, I agree with David Kelley that this is so. But I am not asking for a choice between the false alternative of Milken's freedom to do business versus the saintly nun's implicit morality of altruistic collectivism. I am saying that the immediate relief of suffering is a good thing. I also agree that the long term success of freedom will ultimately do the most for swelling the flow of that abundance which will most improve the health and happiness of the multitudes. These are two facets of the same issue, one viewed from the immediate perspective, the other from the long-term.

We who admire the work of objectivists are not in danger of confusing "giving" with the sort of "giving back" that we hear exhorted by collectivists. "Giving back" is a collectivist signal for the belief that everything we have is ours by no virtue of our own, that all we have is given to us by society, and that we should correct any imbalance we may enjoy above others by giving it back to society, thereby restoring the moral equilibrium. To advocate such "giving back" represents a profound confusion about the nature of wealth, and the sources that can contribute to the conquest of poverty and hopelessness.

We understand that when you have not embraced your own happiness as a moral end in itself, you will never reach the point where you will likely have anything worth giving anybody.

It is worth mentioning here the airline briefing given to passengers before every flight that captures this point: In the event of an emergency loss of cabin  pressurization, you should always put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help a child or other person who may require assistance. The flight attendants never elaborate on this point, but as an airline pilot who understands the facts here, I should tell you the reason for donning your own mask first is that, given the very short period of useful consciousness at high altitudes, trying to help helpless others first... will kill you both.

Now, having donned your own mask and saved your own hide, why not help the poor bastard beside you who, through no fault of his own, can't tell the difference between his ass and his oxygen mask? If this doesn't make you feel better, then you haven't got a clue about how lucky you are, in the cosmic sweepstakes that gave you birth in a relatively good place, and gave you any prospect for happiness.

Charity in this sense is a metaphysical "thank you" to the good luck that landed you in the fortunate time and place of your birth. Charity here amounts to the recognition that there go I, but for the grace of our great good luck in the cosmic sweepstakes for time and place of birth.

End

20 Apr 2001

* * *

A reply to Barbara Branden's comment on OWL.

Barbara Branden wrote (on 4 May 01)

"I am inclined to agree with much of what Eric Nolte has to say about charity. I know that sometimes I receive a phone call asking me to give money for some purpose, and my first inclination is to refuse -- and then I look around my house, I see how I live, and I agree."

Ms. Branden writes that she takes strong exception to my attempt to add charity to our list of objectivist virtues, even when, as I suggested, it is properly defined to exclude approval of any collectivist, government orchestrated and coercive system of welfare.

Ms. Branden continues, "The list of Objectivist virtues is intended to include only those virtues that are necessary to human life. Whatever value charity might have, it is not essential to human life, and cannot, therefore, be included as a specifically Objectivist virtue." 

Let me say to the world that I admire Barbara Branden's work HUGELY!  I am flattered and warmed to read that she offers any kind words on my thought. 

I would guess that she is, like me,  properly wary of the sly, sneaky subverters of human happiness, whose altruism masquerades as benevolence. I hope she will hear the following questions and observations in this context.

Ms. Branden writes that Objectivist virtues would include only those which are essential to human life.

Human life? Very well, then whose life?  The poor African girl dying of AIDS? Your own life, individually?

I have been struggling to define something here, as much for my own clarity as for any others who have been troubled by the apparent indifference of some objectivists to the kind of human suffering that is beyond any individual's control.

I am attempting, with no obvious success, to focus on a concept that is new to me. I am not certain that charity is the proper term to name this idea.

I am speaking to the part of Ms. Branden whose first inclination is to refuse requests for charity, but who who then looks around at her own house, observing how she herself lives, and then agrees to give help.

What part of us is it that wants to lend a helping hand?

For some, perhaps most, charity is animated by liberal guilt, or self-sacrificial altruism, or by any of a myriad of other reasons that we will properly reject.

But I believe that there are legitimate grounds for helping others.

What I am calling charity here is my attempt to name a behavior we should do, in awe-struck recognition of the amazing fact that we ourselves have avoided the horrible fate that has struck down the multitudes throughout history, a fate which we ourselves have averted not through any choice or virtue of our own, but through the pure, dumb luck in the circumstances of a better birth.

In short, I am asserting that lending a helping hand is good. Others have suggested that a better term than charity for what I'm struggling to name here might be the concept "generosity." Generosity is more clearly voluntary in nature, and charity seems to carry the tainted freight of duty, obligation, and self-sacrifice. Call it what you will -- charity, generosity, an aspect of benevolence, or maybe someone else can suggest a better term.

Now, given that this generosity is a good thing, note what remains true:

OF COURSE you have a right to your own life and everything you produce!

OF COURSE you should -- we should all -- view our individual lives as a sacred mission with our own happiness as the goal of our peaceful and productive path on earth!

OF COURSE no government and no institution should arrogate to itself the "right" to filch any part of our life, liberty, or property, so long as we don't threaten the same right of any other individual!

I asserted that by charity I don't mean anything that exudes even the faintest whiff of an obligation. Ms. Branden points out that "the Objectivist virtues ARE obligations. They tell us what we MUST do, what we MUST practice, if we choose to live and to be rational. If charity is not an obligation, it does not belong in the list of Objectivist virtues."

Ms. Branden writes that she sees many other problems with my defense of charity, such as the objects and the degree to which our gifts should properly impinge on our own ability to enjoy our own lives.

I have not thought long or deeply enough about these matters to have fully adequate answers.

But I can say emphatically that I do not believe that anyone should compromise their own ability to enjoy that primary value which is the joy of their own unfolding lives, and that the degree of any such giving should be determined by the giver. The Giver is not synonymous with the Plundered, whose stuff is redistributed by the government or the mafia.

Clearly, this principle that one's own happiness is the moral purpose of our lives suggests a hierarchy in which charity should be a derivative and secondary virtue. As I put it in my essay, one has nothing to give -- either in trade or for charity -- if one has not first assured an abundance for oneself.

The actual degree of this charity should be determined by one's own choice. Any other view would seem to be self-destructive, and therefore should be rejected.

Giving till it hurts, as the liberals would force us to do, is evil. Giving as a symbolic bow to our own good luck, giving in the spirit of Aristotle's great souled man, giving as a gracious gesture from the bounty of our own great success -- is good.

The fact that Ms. Branden admits to sharing some of her own bounty would seem to indicate that she shares something like my own view, that lending a helping hand, from the bounty of one's own great success, is a good act.

I would be very interested to hear her mull over and share with us more about what prompts her to act thus generously.

Eric Nolte
6 May 2001