Against tough competition, a square, greying woman stepped to the stage in the Yale Law School auditorium one night last week. In the hockey rink there was a lively game with Brown University; in Woolsey Hall there was a concert by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Elsewhere on the campus there were three other guest orators, including Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who drew a full house at Yale Divinity School. But the opposition hardly fazed Novelist Ayn Rand, 55 (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged}, who considers herself the "most creative" philosopher alive today.
Her 600 listeners made the biggest audience ever drawn by Challenge, a bustling undergraduate group that aims to tingle Yalemen— with prickly ideas. Polemicist Rand delivered as advertised.
"If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world," began Russian-born Author Rand in her still noticeable accent, "I will say that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial problems—and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief that no answers are possible." To paraphrase the Bible, the modern attitude is: "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing—and please don't tell me."
Spiritualized Cash. Author Rand will not let the world get off that easily. Already she has hurled more than 1,000,000 words in two hectoring novels at what she considers the root illness of man—the tyrrany of altruism. "If any civilization is to survive," said she last week, "it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." And why? Because this Christian virtue leads to self-immolation, tolerance of the "incompetent" common man, the welfare state, and ultimately to the slave labor camp. By hindering ego, altruism destroys human "reason." Nurtured by a small Manhattan cult, Author Rand's unaltruistic philosophy of "objectivism" is objectified by the gold dollar sign that she often wears as a brooch ("The cross is the symbol of torture; I prefer the dollar sign, the symbol of free trade, therefore of the free mind").
But this weird spiritualization of cash ("Money is the root of all good") is perhaps only an outward and visible sign. The real point of objectivism is rousing unembarrassed self-interest. For the best man is a tough-minded egoist, "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Firmly convinced that her own one absolute is reason, Author Rand has gone so far as to boast: "I have never had an emotion that I couldn't account for." Less fortunate people, she suggested last week at Yale, can blame Immanuel Kant. Just when faith was on the wane, and self-interest had a foot in the door, he "saved the morality of altruism" with his duty-setting "categorical imperatives." It was he who bred the mental worm that makes modern men "equate self-interest with evil," that makes businessmen afraid to admit they seek profits (i.e., happiness), that leaves the victims of dictatorship feeling "selfish" if they resist. "The ulti mate monument to Kant and the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia."