That's a very good article with some astute contributions by John Milbank.
Rand, of course, is just one of many thinkers who either believe that we are simply not capable of being altruistic, or that it might actually be a good idea to be selfish.
For example, the Roman playwright Plautus once stated that ‘man is a wolf to man’, a view echoed by the ancient Chinese philosopher Hsun Tzu, who argued that human beings are basically evil and immoral. Their claims were eventually taken up and developed by the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote of ‘the war of every man against every man’. Freud is another instance of this line of thought, with his theory that that the id has to be kept in check by the superego.
Much economic policy-making from this perspective is based on the model of homo economicus - the view that humans are narrowly individualistic, rational but self-interested creatures. Although associated in economics with Adam Smith, in a work which has not attracted quite so much attention as The Wealth of Nations, he actually stated: 'To restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists in their whole grace and harmony.' A pity that Javid doesn't seem to have read it.
More recently, over the pond, many Americans cite Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (rather than The Fountainhead) as the book which had influenced them the most after the Bible. Published in 1957, this 1400 page saga was printed in a run of 24 million copies, and even today it sells several hundred thousand copies a year. President Ronald Reagan was an admirer of it, as was Alan Greenspan, the economist and former head of the Federal Reserve, which controls the American economy. A more recent enthusiast was Paul Ryan (as the article mentions), who was the candidate for the American vice-presidency in 2012. Ryan’s economic and social programme - it should be recalled - consisted of reducing taxes for the rich, whilst at the same time also cutting subsidies for the poor.
Then, of course, there is Thatcher's famous statement about there being no such thing as society to add to the mix.
Interestingly, Rand’s philosophy is not merely that we are all basically selfish; in fact, she thought that we are not selfish enough.
In other words, a lot of people seem to take it for granted that all of our deeds, words and thoughts are motivated by selfishness. But how reasonable is it to believe this?
Well firstly, this is not true when it comes to the animal kingdom. For example, the primatologist Frans de Waal cites the example of a female chimpanzee called Washoe who, upon hearing cries of distress from a female friend, raced across two electric wires to reach her companion, who was struggling desperately in a moat. Wading in the slippery mud at the edge, Washoe managed to grasp her friend’s outstretched hand and pull her to dry land.This is no minor feat, for chimpanzees do not know how to swim and are overcome with panic as soon as water reaches their knees. Fear of water can therefore only be overcome by a powerful motivation, something more than a self-interested calculation like ‘…if I help her now, she’ll help me later.’
Meanwhile, researchers into the behaviour of 2,000 elephants over the course of 35 years noted over 250 examples of empathic reaction to a companion’s distress, including being willing to face danger together, protecting others, comforting them, helping them move, taking care of the children of other mothers, or extracting foreign objects from a companion’s body.
In some exceptional cases, helping behaviour directed towards animals of different species has been observed. One famous example happened in New Zealand, when four swimmers suddenly found themselves surrounded by a band of dolphins who were swimming around them in ever tighter circles, like a sheepdog herding sheep. When one of the swimmers tried to break away, two dolphins forced him to rejoin the group. Soon after, one of the swimmers saw a great white shark pass by, and realized that the dolphins had been preventing them from swimming into harm’s way.
The same altruistic tendencies have also been noticed in very young children. Studies have shown that they will spontaneously offer to help an experimenter complete various tasks, such as bringing the experimenter an object that had fallen to the floor, doing so without any prospect of any kind of reward. As one of the researchers noted, ‘The results were astonishing because these children are so young – they are still wearing nappies and are barely able to use language, but they are already showing helping behaviour.’
When it comes to adults, after 18 years and 31 carefully designed experiments, the psychologist Daniel Batson has concluded that when people engage in helping behaviour, only very scattered support has been found for the claim that they are doing so for some hidden selfish motive.
Research into the immediate aftermath of disasters and emergency situations also reveals that - far from fending for themselves - those people caught up in them make strenuous efforts to help those around them.
I could go on but - if people want still more evidence to falsify the underlying assumptions of Rand's philosophy of egoism, it can be found in Matthieu Ricard's Altruism, a massive, multi-disciplinary study of this prominent tendency in human nature.
Of course, with a government as spectacularly inept as our present one, which seems to be led by a bunch of self-serving grifters, it is no surprise to find that members of it like Javid are still embracing the ideas of such a discredited theorist.
In any case, ethical egoism is a self-contradictory theory. If two people have been bitten by a snake but only one vial of an antidote is available, an ethical egoist would be obliged to act in their own self-interest by taking the antidote. But if their companion asks for advice, an ethical egoist would be committed, according to their own theory, to telling that companion that they should try to get the antidote first.
