Attack Against Objectivist Club Unfounded

When the Harvard Objectivist Club brought the Ayn Rand series to campus last semester, we knew we would encounter disagreement. Realizing that new ideas, especially radical ones, are always a hard sell at first, we even anticipated a certain degree of hostility. We certainly did not expect to see in The Crimson an attack like Chris H. Kwak's "Critique of Pure Nonsense" (January 30). Kwak's fact-free, sarcasm-laced rant would not normally warrant a response, but given that it and a similar diatribe printed December 17 seem to represent the only kind of coverage The Crimson is willing to give the Objectivist Club's efforts, we feel obliged to write.

Some may be surprised to hear this, but Objectivists knows full well that Ayn Rand did not originate the concepts of reason, egoism or laissez-faire capitalism. They also know full well that she was the first philosopher to integrate these concepts into a wholly consistent system of thought, one which is increasingly breaking through the decades-old wall of silence desperately maintained by Establishment philosophers. Witness the existence of the Ayn Rand Society of the American Philosophical Association, or the more than 1,000 professional philosophers who requested complimentary copies of Miss Rand's most technical philosophical work, her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

But even without these facts, the range of topics covered during the "Ayn Rand Comes to Harvard" lecture series should be proof enough that Objectivism is a philosophy worth taking note of. Lecture topics ranged from the nature of man's free will to the proper basis for the ethics of the evil of multiculturalism. Even people who only made it to the debate on the morality of selfishness last December 10 heard Professor Harry Binswanger lay out a detailed chain of reasoning to establish that by virtue of the facts of reality and of human nature, the pursuit of rational self-interest is the moral ideal whose political corollary is a free society in which the individual rights are inviolate. In short, the individual lectures as well as the series as a whole were intended to present to the Harvard community some idea of the scope and content of Ayn Rand's historic intellectual achievements.

It should be obvious that aspiring opponents of this new and radical philosophy were given ample opportunity to hone their skills refuting all these unpopular ideas. But what is the best that Ayn Rand's critics at this august institution can throw at her? Objectivism is lumped in with conservatism, as if Ayn Rand's vision of man as a rational, productive, heroic being were compatible with the conservative vision of a wretched sinner who will sacrifice himself for the needy willingly if the government will just let him. Objectivists are caricatured as blind followers, as if being convinced by a rational argument were equivalent to obeying some authority's dogma. Ayn Rand's admirers are smeared as "philosophically challenged" by a detractor who invokes Nietzsche and Sartre as historical advocates of reason--a howler which would bring swift retribution in any first-year philosophy class. None of these critics seems to feel willing or able to adduce reasons to reject Ayn Rand's ideas in favor of their own. Objectivism, with its passionate rejection of age-old Judeo-Christian ideas in favor of reason, selfishness and unfettered capitalism, no doubt inspires antagonism in many people; but it deserves competent criticism, not just hysterical bile.

The Harvard Objectivist Club welcomes all those who are serious about philosophical ideas. We could not agree more that unthinking acceptance of a viewpoint is wrong, and we invite you to critically examine ours--and your own. --Barry D. Wood G4   Jeffrey P. Lindon '97   Joseph C. Anderson '99   Andrew P. Schwartz '99