On April 26, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) launched the nationwide Campaign against Servitude to battle President Clinton's call for "the ethic of service....The sense of duty...all of us owe to one another."
* Student protesters from 13 states confronted the advocates of service who had gathered in Philadelphia for the Clinton-Powell summit on volunteerism.
* At 160 campuses throughout the country, high school and college students papered their campuses with 20,000 anti-servitude posters.
* Professors and professionals manned microphones and explained on op-ed pages their opposition to what General Powell praised as "voluntarily sharing the wealth." By the end of three days, from coast to coast, newspapers, radio and TV stations had printed or broadcast more than 90 times the Campaign against Servitude's moral stand.
"Volunteerism is immoral. The Founding Fathers wrote a declaration of independence, not a declaration of servitude," says Dr. Michael Berliner, ARI's executive director. "The proposals for national service are an inversion of the principles on which this country was established: an individual's right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."
ARI's Campaign against Servitude will continue during the upcoming months, culminating in a special July 4 event at which its "Petition against Servitude" will be presented to the White House. Any American citizen wishing to be a petitioner can do so on ARI's website at: http://www.aynrand.org/no_servitude.
Leonard Peikoff, philosopher and media commentatorSpecialties: Ayn Rand's philosophy, current affairs, history, educationDr. Peikoff, Ayn Rand's legal and intellectual heir, is the leading Objectivist philosopher. He is the author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, the first systematic presentation of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Dr. Peikoff is also the author of The Ominous Parallels, which compares the philosophical roots and history of Nazism with similar trends in America. He is editor of several Objectivist anthologies and is currently a talk radio host with his own nationally broadcast show, Philosophy: Who Needs It. He has broadcast shows on such topics as what to do about crime, how to eliminate poverty, how to combat terrorism, and a woman's right to abortion. In the last year his commentary has appeared in such newspapers as the Orange County Register, the Miami Herald, the Glendale News-Press, and the Los Angeles Times. Dr. Peikoff taught philosophy at New York University, Long Island University, Hunter College, the University of Denver, and for many years at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He is chairman emeritus of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Michael S. Berliner
Specialties: ARI projects, Ayn Rand's life, Objectivist philosophy, philosophy of education
Dr. Berliner has been executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute since its founding in 1985 and is the director of the Ayn Rand Archives. He is the editor of Letters of Ayn Rand (Penguin Dutton, 1995) and is author of Penguin's "Teacher's Guide to Anthem." His editorials on such topics as Western civilization and multiculturalism have been published in the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers. He taught philosophy and philosophy of education for many years at California State University, Northridge, where he served as chairman of the Department of Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education.
Andrew Bernstein
Specialties: Ayn Rand's novels, Objectivism, business ethicsDr. Bernstein currently teaches Objectivism at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, and has taught Objectivism at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Pace University and at the State University of New York at Purchase. He is the author of the "Teacher's Guide to The Fountainhead," published by Penguin, is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Ayn Rand Institute and has spoken at many universities including Harvard, Stanford and Chicago.Harry BinswangerSpecialties: philosophy, capitalismDr. Binswanger, a longtime associate of Ayn Rand, taught philosophy at the City University of New York, Hunter College, from 1972 to1979. During the 1980s, he was editor of The Objectivist Forum, a bi-monthly journal devoted to Ayn Rand's philosophy. He is currently professor of philosophy at the Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is the author of The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts (ARI Press, 1990) and editor of The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New American Library) and of the second edition of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (New American Library). A regular speaker at universities, he has given more than 70 talks at some 40 universities on a wide variety of topics in philosophy and politics, from "The Primacy of Existence" to " 'Buy American' Is Un-American."
Thomas A. Bowden
Specialties: Legal issues, physician-assisted suicide, abortion rights, mandatory community serviceMr. Bowden, an attorney in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland, taught at the University of Baltimore School of Law from 1988 to 1994. Author of a booklet against multiculturalism, "The Enemies of Christopher Columbus," he has also published Op-Eds in the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Dayton Daily News and articles in The Objectivist Forum. He is a member of the board of directors of The Association for Objective Law, a non-profit group whose purpose is to advance Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as the basis of a proper legal system. In that connection, Mr. Bowden has filed amicus curiae briefs in the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal for the Second and Third Circuits, challenging mandatory community service for high school students on legal and moral grounds.Thanksgiving: The Producer's HolidayThis Holiday Is Designed to Celebrate, Not Faith and Charity, But Thought and Production.Gary Hull, Ph.D.
Thanksgiving celebrates man's ability to produce. The cornucopia filled with exotic flowers and delicious fruits, the savory turkey with aromatic trimmings, the mouth-watering pies, the colorful decorations - it's all a testament to the creation of wealth.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, because this country was the first to create and to value material abundance. It is America that has been the beacon for anyone wanting to escape from poverty and misery. It is America that generated the unprecedented flood of goods that washed away centuries of privation. It is America, by establishing the precondition of production - political freedom - that was able to unleash the dynamic, productive energy of its citizens.
This should be a source of pride to every self-supporting individual. It is what Thanksgiving is designed to commemorate. But there are those, motivated by hatred for human comfort and happiness, who want to make Thanksgiving into a day of national guilt. We should be ashamed, they say, for consuming a disproportionate share of the world's food supply. Our affluence, they say, constitutes a depletion of the "planet's resources." The building of dams, the use of fossil fuels, the driving of sports utility vehicles - they insist - are cause, not for celebration, but for atonement. What if, they all wail, the rest of the world consumed the way Americans do?
If only that were to happen - we would have an Atlantis. For it would mean that the production of wealth would have multiplied. Man can consume only what he first produces. All production is an act of creation. It is the creation of wealth where nothing before existed - nothing useful to man. America transformed a once-desolate wilderness into farms, supermarkets and air-conditioned houses, not by taking those goods away from some have-nots, nor by "consuming" the "world's resources" - but by reshaping valueless elements of nature into a form beneficial to human beings.
Since human survival is not automatic, man's life depends on successful production. From food and clothing to science and art, every act of production requires thought. And the greater the creation, the greater is the required thinking.
This virtue of productiveness is what Thanksgiving is supposed to recognize. Sadly, this is a virtue rejected not only by the attackers of this holiday, but by its alleged defenders as well.
Many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival. They agree with Lincoln, who, upon declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, said that "we have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven." They ascribe our material abundance to God's efforts, not man's.
That view is a slap in the face of any person who has worked an honest day in his life. The appropriate values for this holiday are not faith and charity, but thought and production. The proper thanks for one's wealth goes not to some mystical deity but to oneself, if one has earned that wealth.
The liberal tells us that the food on our Thanksgiving plate is the result of mindless, meaningless labor. The conservative tells us that it is the result of supernatural grace. Neither believes that it represents an individual's achievement.
But wealth is not generated by sheer muscle; India, for example, has far more manual laborers than does the United States. Nor is it generated by praying for God's blessing; Iran, for example, is far more religious. If the liberal and conservative views of wealth are correct, why aren't those countries awash in riches?
Wealth is the result of individual thought and effort. And each individual is morally entitled to keep, and enjoy, the consequences of such thought and effort. He should not feel guilty for his own success, or for the failures of others.
There is a spiritual need fed by the elaborate meal, fine china and crystal, and the presence of cherished guests. It is the self-esteem that a productive person feels at the realization that his thinking and energy have made consumption possible.
Come Thanksgiving Day, when some success-hating commentator condemns America for being the world's leading consumer, tell him that he is evading the underlying fact: that this country is the world's leading producer. And then, as you sit down to dinner, celebrate the spiritual significance of the holiday by raising a toast to the virtue of your own productive ability and to America's productive giants, past and present.
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