Soundings, July-August 2003

The Wordwatcher's Corner. The use of the term "altruism" has gotten completely out of hand.

The word was invented by Auguste Comte to mean "devotion to the welfare of others" and to stand as the polar opposite of egoism. It was introduced into English by Comte's translators, such as George Henry Lewes, who wrote: "Dispositions influenced by the purely egoistic impulses we popularly call 'bad," and apply the term 'good' to those in which altruism predominates." Ayn Rand used the term in Comte's sense but evaluated altruistic actions as bad and egoistic actions as good.

Unfortunately for clarity of thought, "altruism" gradually came to refer to every action that helped another person, whether that result was the motive of the action or the incidental result of an action intended to help oneself. The classic example was economic activity that was selfish in motive but incidentally good for one's customers, employees, suppliers, and so on. Pro-capitalists who did not dare to challenge the culture's anti-egoistic moralities hid behind the pretense that production and trade are essentially "altruistic" because of their incidental benefits to others.

Now, it appears, the word has reached the status of meaning nothing except that the speaker approves of the action described. In the Teaching Company's series Bach and the High Baroque, lecturer Robert Greenberg describes the "encyclopedic works" that Sebastian Bach wrote toward the end of his life. What Greenberg says of these works is that they were not written as part of the music that Bach's job required him to compose. Rather, they were "pieces of music written more for Bach himself, more for the altruistic joy of creating these unified wholes."

Have we become so afraid of the word "selfish" that we must describe even actions taken for our direct personal pleasure as "altruistic"?

(Be a wordwatcher and help us fight conceptual abuse. If you spot an egregious and harmful instance of linguistic distortion, report it to "Soundings," along with full documentation and a concise analysis. The Objectivist Center will pay $25.00 for each entry that is used.)

Bringing modernity and democracy to Iraq is going to be hard work.

"Zaqaniyah, Iraq. There were few tears for Iman Salih Mutlak at her wake. She is a hero to some — a martyr who tried to kill U.S. soldiers with grenades, then died in a hail of their bullets—but her family feels nothing but shame.

"Their rage comes not because of her planned attack, but because the 22-year-old woman left the house alone and without permission from her father—thereby besmirching the honor of her tribe.

"'When she left the house, she lost her innocence,' said her 71-year-old father, Salih Mutlak. 'Had she returned home, I would have killed her myself and drunk her blood.'" St. Petersburg Times, May 31, 2003.

A poll in Investor's Business Daily of May 12, 2003, indicates that most Americans do not look upon businessmen as moral people. (See below.) Commentators typically attribute this to genuine business scandals. Yet the constant drumbeat of stories smearing businessmen as immoral is no less important a factor. Consider a report that appeared on Page One of the New York Times of June 5, 2003.

"When Novartis, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, set out to give away a revolutionary cancer drug to people around the world who could not otherwise afford it, the company promised that no patient who needed the medicine would go without it. . .

"In India -- a country that holds huge promise for Western drug makers -- Novartis began its donations of Glivec with a warning that it would halt the program if the government let local companies eat into its profits by selling generic versions of the drug.

"Hundreds of Indian cancer patients got Glivec free, and commercial sales soared, as well. But after India cleared generic Glivec for sale, Novartis made good on its threat last month, saying it would leave it to Indian companies to meet the needs of the indigent."

The first innuendo is that Novartis's actions were not praiseworthy because it acted in light of India's "huge promise for Western drug makers" and not simply because people in India needed Glivec. In fact, if Novartis had given away its product without motives of profit-making, it would have behaved immorally, for it would have betrayed the investors who rightly expect the company to maximize their return.

The second innuendo is that Novartis was trying to buy a special favor from the Indian government: protection from legitimate generic manufacturers. In fact, Novartis is itself a generic manufacturer and has no problem with such competition. The trouble is that New Delhi has not given drugs patent protection since 1975, when Indira Ghandi declared that "medical discoveries will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death." Yet, the only hint of this in the Times story was the censorious remark that "The giveaway was a means, [some doctors] contend, to establish a commercial beachhead in India's brutally competitive drug business." Novartis was not using its giveaway program to seek protection from "brutal competition" but from muggers. When the government refused to provide such protection, the company rightly stopped its program.

In political campaigns, each party typically establishes a "truth squad" to point out the misrepresentations in the other side's literature. Businessmen might well consider establishing a journalistic "truth squad" to point out the media misrepresentations that are blackening their names and their profession.