Ergo: The right point of view

"You have to consider: it was several decades after Marx's first writings that Communists took over Soviet Russia--and that was with money pouring in from many foreign sources. We libertarians have no foreign benefactors--but we've just begun to write," says Steven Wright, editor of Ergo a libertarian newspaper based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wright, unlike many Marxists, does not call for violence to bring about a libertarian society. He feels that the seeds of individualism have already taken hold in the United States and that, sometime in the future, a major intellectual debate will spread them sufficiently. Ergo is the fan that can stir up the storm libertarians need, says Wright.

Right now, however, Ergo is a weekly tabloid distributed to Harvard, MIT, Boston University and Wellesley with a circulation of 5000. It was established in 1969 in reaction to the appearance of a leftist student newspaper that has since folded. The paper's philosophic bent, after a wishy-washy period when the staff members ranged from Republicans to utopian socialists, has focused on objectivism. This offshoot of libertarianism calls for a society where a person's rights to do whatever he pleases are limited only when he exerts or threatens force against another person.

Embarassed, Wright admits that the paper receives free office space and equipment from MIT in addition to its income from advertisements and subscriptions. He winces at this because of the paper's devotion to objectivism. MIT derives a substantial part of its income from government grants and contracts. The partly laundered money Ergo receives from MIT is tainted, Wright says, because the government obtained it by exerting force upon millions of people--that is, by taxing them.

The paper is primarily an organ of commentary. Often Ergo's interpretation of the correct libertarian line is so rigid that to other libertarians break with the paper. Lawrence White '77, president of Sons of Liberty, Harvard's libertarian group, calls the paper "too right wing." He explains that Ergo founds its philosophy on the thought of novelist Ayn Rand. As a youth, Rand saw the Bolsheviks take over Russia. Before she emigrated to the United States, the Bolsheviks killed both her parents, leaving her with a virulent anti-Communist streak.

One active member of Sons of Liberty who wished to remain anonymous said Ergo is "too dogmatic. They adhere religiously to Rand's senile ideas." He and White agreed that Ergo represents a fraction of the libertarian spectrum, even though the spectrum claims only 40 to 50 members at Harvard and MIT combined. Perhaps for this reason there has been little interaction and co-operation between libertarians at the two campuses. Several Harvard libertarians contacted said they had never heard of Ergo.

Harvard libertarians also split with Ergo over its frequent sallies beyond the realm of politics. "Randians are too moralistic. They believe in absolute standards--Rand's absolute standards--and sometimes they get a little too strident," Donal Rucker '78, a member of the Sons of Liberty, says. In the thousands of pages Rand has written, she carries her philosophy of "rational self-interest, egoism,. individualism, and capitalism" beyond its obvious application to social structure, into fields like art and personal conduct. Ergo holds that only romantic art is good art, for example. A recent display of neon sculpture by Boston artist Chris Sproat at MIT's Hayden Gallery was reviewed critically in Ergo: "One can see the show in 10 seconds, the time it takes to walk across the gallery. The pieces do not differ significantly from each other except that in one case the conduct is curbed rather than angular, the shapes smeared in chalk rather than paint, etc. An electrician might want to take a closer look at the arrangements of the wires and junction boxes, but I don't think many others would want to bother."

The paper also takes stands on personal conduct in everyday life. Ergo reprints each fall a sermon-like article by Wright, for the benefit of incoming freshmen. The article applies libertarian principles to college life, and finds it sadly collectivist: "There is, on university campuses today, a vicious killer loose: a destructive force that can sap the minds and souls of the strongest men. That killer is peer pressure. Do not say that you can value both your ideals and the approval of the group. The group will not have you on such terms--you must adapt to theirs."

The libertarian prescription for an ideal world is never precisely set forth in Ergo, although it is implied backhandedly through a criticism of government intervention in the economy or political "freedoms," government grants to study man-polar bear relations, for example. Wright outlines a world where no one coerces anyone. A police force would be funded voluntarily, because those who did not contribute would not receive protection. Wright admits to a small chink in libertarian logical armor when he concedes that someone who refused to pay for a national defense system would benefit from it anyway; but he points out that we have never had trouble raising a volunteer army in the past.

Ergo is willing to compromise more in order to achieve its ideal society than are the Harvard libertarians. Ergo endorsed Nixon and Ford in their presidential campaigns ("Ford's government followed the libertarian creed to the letter: it did nothing," says Wright), whereas the Sons of Liberty worked for John Hospers and Roger McBride, the presidential candidates of the Libertarian Party in 1972 and 1976.

Wright offers no actual examples of a libertarian society in action, although he suggests that the Founding Fathers thought along somewhat libertarian lines and implemented many libertarian principles when they designed American government. The only attempt to set up a totally libertarian world occurred when a group of libertarians claimed a coral reef in the Pacific as their own nation, with hopes of filling in enough land to establish a tiny island-nation where a libertarian paradise could reign. Their hopes were demolished when an envoy of angry tribesmen from a nearby island informed them that the island was already their property.

The theoretical model of an ideal world that Ergo presents to its readers--a world where social concern and moral action come naturally--has yet to appear on earth. But to a group of dedicated individualists at MIT, that goal is tangible and worth working and publishing for.