2nd Blogger Contest

The Undercurrent is pleased to announce its second Blogger Contest, which invites bloggers to write an article for the newsletter. The winner’s article will be published in Issue 3, both in the print and the online edition?along with the name and URL of the winner’s blog.

The article topic for this contest is: Star Wars, either the entire series or the most recent movie. This leaves open a wide range of topics for you, but please keep in mind?this kind of article is not an esthetic review. The article should analyze a philosophical/cultural issue raised by Star Wars or by its cultural reception, such as selfishness vs. selflessness, reason vs. mysticism, moral absolutes vs. compromise (”Only the Sith use absolutes!?), evil as powerful vs. evil as impotent, etc. But it should not constitute an esthetic evaluation of the film(s).

For those new to The Undercurrent or the blogger contest, please be aware that our target audience consists of college students who are unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Thus, any Objectivist principles cited or reached in your analysis should be adequately explained, keeping the context of a general audience in mind.

The deadline for submissions is June 10th. Articles should be approximately 750-1000 words in length, but do not panic if you run over; should you win, we will work with you in editing the article for publication. Whether or not you win the contest, you are welcome to post the article to your blog at any time.

Also, regardless of whether you submit an entry to the contest, please feel free to post this announcement to your blog. (You can also link to it, below.) And, as always, we are accepting contributions on all topics.

Questions? Write to us at mail@the-undercurrent.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

?The Undercurrent staff

Issue 3 Timeline

Here at HQ we’re up to all kinds of mischief: fund-raising, creating policies, refining the editing process, preparing for the next academic year, and generally entrenching ourselves and solidifying the identity of the paper. Partly because of all of this, and partly because it’s harder for us to reach students over the summer, we’re operating on a reduced schedule. Issue 3 won’t be available until the end of June, in time for this year’s OCON.

If you want to contribute for this issue, there’s still time, so contact us right away.

Google Versus The Pope

In recent weeks, with the world’s eyes fixed on the deteriorating health of an ailing Pope, Google quietly offered users a God’s-eye view of Earth via its newest innovation–satellite imaging.

The feature augments Google’s widely lauded mapping service. Detailed digital photographs allow users to scope out millions of locations around North America. The images give an immediate sense of the density of a given area, the parks and vegetation, street and freeway layouts, local shops and hotels.

The satellite-mapping feature is the most recent addition to Google’s long list of achievements: Google Glossary, Google Deskbar, Google Mail, Google Mini, Google Video… Whoever coined the phrase “you never cease to amaze me” must have been perusing Google’s recent press releases.

Google’s most significant innovation, of course, is none other than its core service: its internet search engine. Few people remember search engines before Google. Results were plagued with manipulated entries, ads undifferentiated from normal hits, and pages riddled with irrelevant information. Google set a new standard, one that remains unmet. From collecting dissertation data to finding the nearest flower shop, Google has become to research what antiseptics are to surgery–not merely helpful, but usually the difference between success and failure.

That Google is a free service is often taken for granted, but this too is a matter of innovation. Google’s service includes a unique form of placed advertisements, seamlessly integrated into the search process. The placed ads are a win-win-win endeavor: the companies purchasing the ads get incredible exposure at low cost, the users get a free service unencumbered by pop-ups or annoying distractions, and Google nets the tremendous profit it deserves.

The Founders of Google have not only created this powerful tool, they’ve done the undoable by imbuing it–a computer search engine–with the type of playful, friendly personality normally associated with Disneyland. From the colorful logo and “I’m Feeling Lucky” option to its many famous pranks, it’s apparent from the first use that Google is not only effective, it’s entertaining.

Google’s love of intelligent technology and spirit of enthusiastic enterprise are evident in the many technology-related prizes, contests, and events it subsidizes. And underneath the company’s playful exterior, not surprisingly, is an equally playful corporate culture of practical jokes and friendly camaraderie. The company’s employees regularly engage in twice-weekly parking lot hockey games and enjoy daily Grade-A lunches prepared by a beloved in-house chef. From the inside out, Google seems to be getting everything right.

What makes possible such a profoundly revolutionary and consistently innovative company? In a word: virtue. Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page had the expertise to develop their search engine technology, the foresight to envision its value to mankind, and the business genius to see that a free search engine could be tremendously profitable. They had the courage to put their postgraduate Ph.D. plans on hold, borrow tremendous sums of money, and invest their lives in this venture. They had the appreciation of human ability that enabled them to take seriously the need to seek out competent partners and employees and then to encourage innovation in those they hired. They developed a clear business plan that first enabled them to avoid additional capital investment, and then later gave them the resources to buy companies that had strategic value in relation to their goals.

Google’s Founders have, since the company’s inception in 1998, stayed true to their vision of Google’s audacious mission: to organize all of human knowledge. The profundity of their achievement cannot be overemphasized: Google has so explosively improved man’s ability to pursue knowledge that life without it is now almost inconceivable.

Millions of people use Google daily. But is its value fully appreciated by our culture? Is its monumental impact on human life properly understood and celebrated?

Contrast Google with a very different cultural institution: the Papacy. Catholics world around revere the Papal Office. The Pope is a symbol representing single-minded devotion to God, including a strict renunciation of worldly pleasures.

Recently deceased Pope John Paul II was a man who, like Google’s Founders, stayed true to his vision. From publishing on theological issues to visiting the destitute around the world, Pope John Paul II was a tireless crusader for the Catholic Faith. He revitalized the prohibition against contraceptives, abortion and euthanasia, Catholic tenants that were otherwise on the defensive. He contributed to the explosive growth of Catholicism in Latin America. While he did strongly oppose the spread of communism in Europe, John Paul was also an impassioned critic of free trade. He condemned the motives and practices of businessmen, a group which emphatically included technological giants such as the founders of Google.

In his last years of life, Pope John Paul II developed an advanced case of Parkinson’s Disease. More than anything else he did, it was his response to this condition that symbolized his life. Rather than precipitating his withdrawal from the public arena, his disease served as an opportunity for him to display how deeply he was committed to the creed of sacrifice. While all Popes are symbols of unwavering faith, Pope John Paul II’s illness made him, perhaps more than any other Pope in history, a cultural icon for the view that suffering is a human ideal. The image of him–old, hunched, shaking with illness, lips quivering, cheeks grimacing against physical discomfort–dramatized his willingness to sacrifice his life for the sake of his Christian duty. Pope John Paul II, a faithful child of Jesus, demonstrated to the world what it means to bear a cross in service of God.

Those who admire Pope John Paul II do so because they recognize and applaud the moral significance of his life’s work. They see his subordination of personal ambition, his indifference to material wealth, his suppression of romantic/sexual desire in favor of strict celibacy, his endurance of disease. The Pope’s admirers look up at him and see the perfect embodiment of the Christian morality which tells man to sacrifice his happiness on Earth–with all the pleasures and joys it can offer–for the sake of an otherworldly ideal.

If the Pope embodies faith and suffering, consider what Google embodies. Its core mission–to make knowledge ever more accessible for human beings–entirely contradicts the Catholic Church’s reverence for blind obedience. Google’s history of innovation suggests that progress and development are good things, in contrast with the anti-technology, anti-science orientation of the Papacy. Its happy-go-lucky exuberance clashes head on with the Papacy’s fixation on suffering.

Google’s owners and employees have undoubtedly struggled against massive obstacles, yet rather than wearing their struggle as a badge of honor, they have denied its importance. The world represented by Google, far from being a vail of tears, is not even a battlefield–not even one where the good guys win–it is an exciting playground.

The actions of Google’s executives and employees–all the decisions they make day-in, day-out–reflect an implicit set of moral values. The industriousness of its programmers, for example, suggests they value productivity. The long-term vision of its management shows they value foresight, planning, thought. The very idea of a search engine that organizes information suggests the view that knowledge is a value to be pursued. And Google’s light, benevolent approach reflects the profoundly moral premise that life on Earth is to be enjoyed.

The Pope, a man of the cloth, wore his morality on his sleeve. Catholic altruism explicitly guided his choices and actions. Pope John Paul II is dead, and Pope Benedict XVI has been elected his successor. By all indications, Ratzinger promises to be as much of an advocate of anti-pleasure, anti-self morality as Wojtyla ever was. The new Pope knows the difference between his morality and Google’s, and will proceed to condemn audacious men who dare to place knowledge and happiness above faith and suffering.

Whether or not Google’s owners pay lip service to the Pope’s morality, they certainly do not operate their business by it. But no other professed code guides Google.

Google, as a major cultural symbol of the pro-knowledge, pro-happiness spirit of enterprise, will come under moral attack. Google’s management should apply their boundless ambition to the task of defending themselves and their worldview from such attack. They should search the expanse of human knowledge and see if they can find a new code of morality, one that will enable them to fight off the Popes of the world and proudly bring heaven to earth.

Ray Girn graduated last year from the University of Toronto, and now teaches math and science at a private elementary school in Orange County, California. He is a student at the Ayn Rand Institute’s Objectivist Academic Center.

Sex, the Suburbs, and What Housewives Are Desperate For

Breaking every viewer record and emerging as the #1 primetime TV sensation, ABC’s Desperate Housewives has been called the Sex and the City of the suburbs. Writer Marc Cherry told The Age that “Desperate Housewives is a kind of skewed homage to suburban life,” and that he “found inspiration in everything from the later episodes of I Love Lucy (after they move to Connecticut) to the Oscar-winning American Beauty.” The show, which is set in the archetypal suburban neighborhood of Wisteria Lane, follows a familiar pattern (seen also in Pleasantville, The Truman Show, Stepford Wives): an outwardly idyllic paradise is unveiled to reveal the seedy, depraved colony of frustrated role-players swarming underneath.

With its soaring popularity Desperate Housewives reminds us that the corrupt-suburbia stereotype resonates with modern American viewers. Moreso, it seems, with the older generations than with the college-aged: ironically, the larger portion of viewers were found to reside in the suburbs of conservative, Bush-supporting “red states.” According to Frank Rich of The New York Times, “It is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York.” While college girls still cling nostalgically to their full 6-season DVD sets of Sex and the City, married suburbanites hastily put their kids to bed on Sunday nights and flip to the show that unabashedly pokes fun at their lifestyles.

At the same time, conservative groups like the American Family Association rage against the sex-drenched drama and its debasement of holy matrimony. (The AFA even pressured several companies to withdraw their advertisements from the show in protest.) Yet their protestations seem like hollow gestures when the “family-values” advocates who form their support base cannot help but tune in to the show.

So what is really so wrong with “suburbia,” and why are the suburb-dwellers so engrossed by its sex-infused televised dissection?

Consider some of the frequent criticisms of suburbia. Many decry the “spoiled rich” who are allegedly corrupted by their gigantic saunas and lavish three-story mansions, who sink into depravity when their shallow materialism fails to provide fulfillment.

Of course wealth is not restricted to suburbia. Indeed, the city girls of Sex and the City lead indisputably luxurious lifestyles, accessorizing to their heart’s content, strutting around in their $450 Manolo Blahniks and retreating to the Hamptons whenever they want some quality girl time. Yet for some reason, they do not end up as cynical manipulators or corpses (as in the case of Desperate Housewives‘ narrator and symbolic centerpiece, Mary Alice, who kills herself in episode 1 amid her husband’s freshly laundered shirts).

Perhaps, as some feminists maintain, the problem is with the stifling marriage ethic itself. The new, liberated woman does not surrender her individuality to old-world sexist expectations, slaving away in the kitchen and chasing after the kids while the “man of the house” is busy bringing home the bacon.

But wait–what about Miranda and Charlotte, our beloved Sex and the City singles, who end up happily (but not submissively) domesticated? Indeed, Charlotte even quits her job as an art agent, choosing to place her husband and long-awaited child as her top priorities. Yet Charlotte, unlike the uptight and verging-on-breakdown Desperate Housewife Lynette, gains a serenity and genuine sense of purpose through her struggle to adopt a child and giving her beloved but uncouth husband Harry some lessons in proper hygiene.

No, it is neither riches nor men that makes a woman’s life in the suburbs such hell compared to our cheerful New York City girls. It is rather some deeper attitude toward their riches and their men that distinguishes the ladies on Wisteria Lane–and America’s attitude toward them–from the Sex and the City feisty foursome.

What kind of attitude, or general approach to life, is associated with the women of suburbia? Marc Cherry himself provides a hint in describing the show’s premise: “All these women have made some kind of choice in their lives and are in various stages of regretting it.” So what, if any, is the common approach that makes their various choices so uniformly dissatisfying?

Consider the advice of Gabrielle, the rich married slut who wraps her handsome husband around her dainty little ex-model’s finger while sleeping with the 17-year-old gardener: “You’re a woman. Manipulate him. It’s what we do.” Yes, Gabrielle is a very rich lady, with a beautiful house and a dazzling (though slightly skanky) wardrobe.

But her wealth hinges on a lie–and she will resort to any manipulative scheme, just short of murder (but not by much), to hold on to those illusory riches. No wonder she complains to her high-school aged lover about feeling “trapped.” Her choices are to stay captive, bored and bound, in a loveless marriage, or leave her husband and be penniless (which, by Wisteria Lane standards, is unacceptable).

And it is not only for wealth that the women on Wisteria Lane are willing to entertain illusions. Bree, described as “Martha Stewart on steroids,” goes to desperate lengths to conceal from her suburban critics a failing marriage and a hateful relationship with her children. “Don’t confuse my anal retentiveness,” she tells her husband, “for actual affection.”

There is nothing “actual” about Bree’s relationship with her family: her husband has asked for a divorce, after being discovered with the neighborhood prostitute, but Bree insists on patching things up and acting normal because “what would the neighbors think?” Her friendships are defined, appropriately, by mutual deception: as she tells Gabrielle when the women find out each other’s shameful secrets, “great friends pretend nothing happened.”

Lynette, once a successful executive, has given up her career to play “model housewife”–and secretly resents it. Unlike the lying, cheating Gabrielle and the phoney Bree, Lynette lovingly devotes all her time to the care of her high-maintenance family.

Unlike Charlotte’s (eventual) discovery of blissful matrimony, contentment and joy somehow always seem to elude Lynette. In a typical episode, she fantasizes about her grouchy old neighbor, Mrs. McCluskey, dropping dead on the door stoop; when she “does the right thing” and rescues the old woman from death’s jaws, she does it out of grudging duty. “Half of life is obligation,” she explains to Mrs. McCluskey, agreeing to take her to the pharmacy when she admittedly has no desire to do so.

The people of Wisteria Lane live by service to others (like Lynette) or dependence on others (like Gabrielle); in either case, it is others’ aims and perceptions that run their lives. They live either for or through each other. And that means, in the end, that they (literally, in Mary Alice’s case) don’t live at all.

Contrast this with our sexy NYC ladies. To start, Carrie earns her wealth by excelling at work that she loves, creating a witty and insightful column that inspires millions of single New York women. Miranda is a successful lawyer who balances her responsibility as mother with her responsibilities as career woman; Samantha and Charlotte, too, earn their riches through creativity and persistence.

Of course, the girls highly value the men in their lives. But they never cede their judgment or their values to appease a boyfriend–at least not for long. Charlotte, the closest to a suburban-housewife-at-heart, gets a much-needed dose of reality after marrying the “ideal” cookie-cutter Protestant husband. Trey embodies Charlotte’s hand-me-down fairy tale of the perfect mate: he says everything that is expected of him, and gives the right gifts at the right time.

Yet, as Charlotte discovers, in his performance as husband and lover he is–on both counts–impotent. It is not until Charlotte chooses a man she genuinely loves (a highly non-cookie-cutter, eccentric, bald Jew!) that she discovers true “domestic bliss”–a marriage based on mutual affection and her own, chosen values.

Contrast this with poor Lynette, who lives out her days according to a unwanted and involuntary “obligation.” Wherever that obligation comes from, and whomever it’s intended to serve–her family, her suburban society, or her Christian ethic–one thing is clear: it does not come from her, nor does she derive much joy from its fulfillment.

Interestingly, like the proverbial “suburbs,” the city too takes on the character of an archetype. NYC is an anchor for the women’s personalities; it provides them with jobs they love, clubs and shows they can visit when lonely, taxis they can take if they don’t have a man to drive them. Carrie actually jokes that the city is her “boyfriend,” and her loyalty to it is unwavering. The city teaches the girls that they must reckon with the cold, hard facts of life: when Miranda finally marries Steve, she must part with her beloved Manhattan apartment and move to a house in Brooklyn to take her growing family’s needs into account. And when Carrie attempts to flee her city and her career to fulfill her boyfriend’s desires, she discovers (the hard way) that without New York and her column, she has nothing to live for. The man she loves and ultimately returns to is anchored to the city and to everything that is important in her life.

In her memorable last line, Carrie expresses a basic premise underlying the show: “The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that’s just fabulous.” Even more basically, it is the relationship you have with the world around you–the values you have chosen by surveying and evaluating, by your own judgment, all the world has to offer–that makes life exciting and fulfilling. Our New York foursome seems to realize that at least on some level. The ladies of Wisteria Lane, however, are operating on an entirely different policy.

So why such divergent approaches among the two types of women–surely it’s not just a matter of geography?

Well, one clue to the answer may lie in the strikingly mixed and aggressive reaction to the show among conservatives. Ed Vitagliano of the American Family Association writes:

“Desperate Housewives provides a glimpse into our nation’s prevailing view of good and evil. For example, goodness is defined in a scene where Paul, the surviving husband of Mary Alice… explains: ‘Before my wife shot herself, we lived a life that I was proud of. We loved each other, we had values, we went to church. We gave to charity. We were good people, Mr. Shaw.’…This is a moral worldview built on human effort, on man-made standards of right and wrong…Of course, the church is supposed to be about the business of preaching the Gospel, which casts to the earth all humanistic morality, and views good deeds as nothing more than putting a veneer of rouge and lipstick on a corpse. We are sinners in need of a Savior. Period. There are no ‘good people.’”

Mr. Vitagliano is strikingly honest in his description of the Christian view of human nature–so much so, that he unwittingly reveals a truth he would just as soon conceal: in fact, the women on Desperate Housewives, and perhaps also many of the show’s married suburb-dwelling conservative viewers, follow Vitagliano’s prescription to a tee.

Whether or not they are on active duty to Christ, they are driven, in one form or another, by some externally imposed “Gospel”: from Lynette’s begrudged duties of motherhood and Bree’s compulsive concern with keeping up appearances, to Gabrielle’s ongoing deception which fosters leech-like dependence on her husband.

All these women are sinners in need of a savior to tell them what to do; when the Gospel’s ideals of matrimony and motherhood fail to save them, they turn to neighbors and lovers for guidance. When even those prescriptions fail, the women give up all searching and–true to their “corpse”-like, purposeless selves–they kill themselves. Poor Mary Alice has discovered the futility of waiting for a “savior.” Most of her neighbors, including Bree, whose lip service to Christianity has estranged her from her homosexual son, are learning it too.

Why, then, does America associate the suburbs with dreary desperation, and the city with adventurous vitality? It’s not geography. Perhaps it’s because we do, in fact, go to the suburbs to get married, buy homes, and raise families. In most people’s minds, such decisions represent life-long commitments. And since the only kind of life-long commitment they think of is of the Lynette brand–stifling, boring, superimposed by a Christian-esque duty premise–it is no surprise that they think of commitment with a sense of desperation. Marriage is a “ball and chain.” A home is a tax liability. Children are “rugrats.” Dare we say, then, that the problem is not with the suburbs, but with a certain attitude toward life’s choices? Perhaps it is the self-driven, purposeful spirit of a Charlotte that’s missing on Wisteria Lane.

Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that college girls still turn to the independent, high-achieving (and unabashedly secular) women of Sex and the City and leave the corrupt Christianity-drained “suburbia” to the disgruntled housewives. Somewhere in the transition from youth to adulthood, the hand-me-down principles of the church or the college professorate take the place of independent judgment. If you want to retain that sense of luminous independence into adulthood, you must learn to live by the independent and principled use of your own mind. In downtown Manhattan or in the Kansas countryside, always remember: your life is yours to live.

Gena Gorlin is a freshman enrolled at Tufts University and the New England Conservatory.

Torpedoes Away

Things are getting crowded here in the War Room of the HQ.

Feedback, Site Updates

We’ve set up a feedback form for our May 2005 issue. As incentive to fill this out, we’ll be giving away copies of Atlas Shrugged to some of the respondents. So, give us feedback!

The site has also been cleaned up some. I’ve removed useless detail and, for anyone feeling the activist urge, added guidelines for submitting articles. I’ve also added an RSS feed for the blog (also linked to above). So, start aggregating!

The Real Purpose-Driven Life

Last March in Atlanta, suspected rapist Brian Nichols overpowered a deputy and stormed a courthouse, eventually shooting four people. Nichols then fled the scene and hid in the apartment of a woman he had taken hostage. The next day, the killer–his location unknown to police–voluntarily freed the woman and peacefully surrendered.

Many Americans found themselves wondering why. Ashley Smith, the hostage he had taken, had the answer when she appeared before the press. The turning point in her captivity began, she reported, when she read to Brian Nichols from a book, The Purpose Driven Life.

As the title might suggest, The Purpose Driven Life seeks to explain what it means to have purpose in life. Authored by Christian evangelical Rick Warren, the book has already sold in excess of 20 million copies since it was published in 2002. Following Nichols’ capture, sales soared to the #2 slot on Amazon.com.

According to Warren, the proper way for a human being to find purpose is to rely on divine revelation as expressed through the Bible. Warren’s central thesis is that it is a mistake to equate having a purpose with merely pursuing one’s life ambitions. To have a purpose means, specifically, to embrace God’s plan for you. As the creator of human life, God is the only legitimate source of human purpose.

Translation: any pursuit motivated by your own interests constitutes abandoning your life’s “true” purpose. There may be differences between the businessman who runs a bank and the criminal who seeks to hold it up, but according to Mr. Warren, as long as each is motivated by his own goals, each lacks purpose: “Being successful and fulfilling your life’s purpose are not at all the same issue! You could reach all your personal goals, becoming a raving success by the world’s standard, and still miss the purposes for which God created you… The Bible says, ‘Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self.’”

On this view, Nichols’ basic problem was not that his life lacked direction. It was not that he would steal, cheat, lie, rape, and murder on whim–it was that he was not motivated by desire to serve God. In surrendering, Nichols came closer to accepting the idea that God had a plan for him–perhaps the very plan suggested by his hostage, that God meant for him to minister to the spiritual needs of prison inmates.

Mr. Warren’s “purpose-driven” life is a misnomer. It ought to be called the duty-driven life. To have purpose, on his account, means to push aside everything you know and want, and accept that your job is to serve God. Being purpose-driven, in other words, is supposed to mean voluntarily subordinating your own desires to an alleged plan that an alleged God has put forward for you.

This suggests that a purpose is supposed to be some mysterious supernatural command wholly indifferent to your own hopes and dreams, but one that must be accepted anyway. Where does this idea of “purpose” come from? Why think of having a purpose in life as synonymous with accepting such a duty?

Warren’s book begins with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell: “Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.” This is Warren’s unexplained, undefended starting point which he assumes as an article of faith.

Unlike Warren, most people contrast being purposeful with drifting aimlessly: a student who studies regularly because he is devoted to getting into law school is purposeful–a student drifting aimlessly through his undergrad years is not. A mother dedicated to providing her children with a healthy, happy childhood is purposeful–a mother who raises her children by the seat of her pants, without any overarching plan, is not. When most people talk about someone having a purpose, this is what they mean: someone whose actions are deliberately and consciously directed towards the achievement of some goal.

Underlying the ordinary idea of purposefulness is a set of important facts about human nature. Unlike animals, human beings need to think and plan long-range in order to survive. They also need to choose to do this, which includes choosing the goals that will constitute their life.

In fact, some people accept the responsibility of figuring out what they want out of life and going after it while others do not. Some actively choose and pursue their dreams, while others passively default on that choice.

But which ends do purposeful men pursue? Is it really true, as Warren suggests, that a criminal like Brian Nichols was “purposeful” in the ordinary sense because he chose the goal of robbing a bank? No. Just because we need to choose our ends in life does not mean that “anything goes.” There is another important way in which men differ from animals: we survive by production, not by vegetation or predation on others. Choosing a purpose in life requires choosing a central, productive goal.

A central, productive goal, of course, is a career. A career, as his source of livelihood, is a man’s basic source of self-esteem–it is what enables him to pursue a romance, cherish friendships, enjoy art, sport, recreation. Choosing a career permits him to define the course of his life, to sort out from all of the complexities what is important and what is not.

A man whose life lacks an ambitious, productive goal is a man whose life lacks direction. As philosopher Ayn Rand once observed, “a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find.”

Having abandoned the idea of a productive career, Brian Nichols was not purposeful in any meaningful sense. But picking up the search for a divine purpose in life won’t help him, either.

Consider Warren’s conception of the purpose-driven life–a life in which an individual subordinates what he wants to God’s (alleged) plan for him. Is this idea even consistent with the idea of a productive, purposeful life? Consider Jesus’ message in the Sermon on the Mount, which chastises man for thinking that he must toil to provide for his own sustenance. The fowl of the air “sow not, neither do they reap”; the lilies of the field “toil not, neither do they spin.” That is to say–other living organisms do not work to survive, so why should man presume his survival requires productive work from him?

Of course we have already discovered why man cannot survive by the methods of the fowl of the air or the lilies of the field: he must think. Indeed, the reductio ad absurdum of Warren’s view of purpose is Terri Schiavo. Hers is that coveted vegetable state in which man toils not. Having existed in a state of living death for 15 years, pro-life groups defended the “sanctity” of her life. In their eyes, her life had “purpose.” Incapable of thought or awareness, unable to conceive of any goals, she embodied the ideal of Warren’s conception of the purpose-driven life–a passive, selfless life in which one is resigned to whatever God has ordained.

The Biblical conception of purpose is arbitrary. Not only does it fail to explain the difference between those people who seem to lead goal-directed lives and those who don’t, but it counsels an individual to defer to God the very responsibility denoted by the concept “purpose”: the responsibility of consciously deciding which goals one wants to pursue in life and then making those goals direct one’s actions.

If man belongs to God then his life is not his to live. As those Americans who fought for the Emancipation Proclamation understood, only a master–not a slave–can actually lead a purpose-driven life. A life directed by purpose requires a process of independent, unrestrained thought at every moment: in regards to what goals you will pursue, how those goals will integrate together, and what means you will undertake to achieve them.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the sacred values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness“, what did he mean by the latter, if not the value of purpose? The right to have a purpose, as originally conceived by America’s Founding Fathers, is not the duty to pursue some command from on high. It is the right to go after those things that you, as an individual, rationally decide constitute your happiness, your central productive purpose in life.

The media has made much of Brian Nichols’ surrender, and of the power of religion to inspire change and transformation. But can religion really give direction to a person’s life? It depends on your conception of purpose. On Warren’s conception, if you cajole a man into decent outward behavior with the bribe of God’s forgiveness and Jesus’ sacrifice atoning for his sins, that means he now has purpose. But on a proper conception, to choose the comforting fantasy of religion is to choose to abandon purpose–to reject your sacred responsibility to yourself as a reasoning, mortal being trying to live on earth: to actively pursue your own life and happiness.

Robert Sherman is an aspiring writer living in Sacramento, California. You can read his blog, authored under the alias “The General” at http://benjoblog.weblogs.us.

Ray Girn graduated last year from the University of Toronto, and now teaches math and science at a private elementary school in Orange County, California. He is a student at the Ayn Rand Institute’s Objectivist Academic Center.

The Pharmaceutical Industry: In the Business of Saving Your Life

The way the media would have you see it, the pharmaceutical industry is made up of a bunch of greedy businesses trying to make a buck off of you and your ailing family members’ illnesses.

And the truth is that they are trying to make a buck, but only by curing your sickness. Critics allege that drug prices are set ‘arbitrarily’ high, but this neglects the fact that prices are a function of supply and demand. They also neglect that the greatest benefit to the consumers is the medicines themselves–and that the pharmaceutical industry only benefits when they deliver valuable products that promote your health.

The pharmaceutical industry functions according to the principle of voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. Sadly, this is rarely explained and in general poorly understood. Yet knowing the truth about how the pharmaceutical industry operates is so important that it is literally knowledge that will help you save your life.

When the media makes the claim that the pharmaceutical industry sets “arbitrarily high drug prices,” they have already fallaciously assumed that the industry is somehow able to work outside the constraints of the laws of supply and demand. On the supply side, drugs are costly to produce and investors demand hefty return for their very risky investment On the demand side, people are (or ought to be) willing to pay for medicines because of the incredible life-saving benefits.

Producing prescription drugs is extremely expensive and risky. In 2001, the pharmaceutical industry spent $30 billion dollars in drug research. Each therapy area (oncology, respiratory, neuroscience, etc.) produces, on average, 1 million new drug compounds yearly. Of those 1 million compounds, 250 will make it to pre-clinical trials and only 5 of those will make it to actual clinical trials. As if these barriers were not enough, there is still the ominous prospect of the FDA, which companies must pay to evaluate their products–and there is nothing to stop them from failing to approve these drugs in the end. The research and development (R&D) cost of a single drug usually totals $800 million.

Like any business, the pharmaceutical industry has to make a profit above these high costs in order to afford to continue to pay its hundreds of thousands of employees, compete within its extremely competitive market, advance technology, continue to reinvest in R&D, and return its investment to its shareholders. Unlike most industries, which reinvest 4 cents for every dollar they make, the pharmaceutical industry reinvests 18. Despite this tremendous investment, the fact remains that out of every ten drugs produced, only three will ever make enough profit to reinvest in R&D.

The point here is that pharmaceutical production is extremely risky. Drug production is a long-term task of trial and error which often ends in failure. When a major discovery is finally made it is an achievement that deserves profit. The pharmaceutical business requires both a large investment in productive effort and capital, which means that when it is successful it has earned its profits.

Of course it is not hard work that is the measure of an industry’s profitability, but the value of its products. The fact remains that while prescription drugs are expensive, the benefits far outweigh the costs. For every $1 spent on prescription drugs, hospital stay expenses are lowered by $3. In just the last ten years, nursing home admissions have declined by 200,000, even though the number of people 85 and older has increased. Since 1980 over 600 new drugs have been developed and marketed in the US, all of which help avoid more expensive treatments, such as hospitalization, surgery, and nursing home care, and reduce your need to see a doctor. Thanks to increased pharmaceutical treatment, life expectancy has dramatically increased from 69.7 percent in 1960, to 77.2 in 2001.

This should not be surprising because saving lives is the purpose of pharmaceuticals. Profits motivate the pharmaceutical industry to produce more effective medicines and technologies. The more life-saving products they produce, the more people will pay them to do it. As these facts illustrates, curing diseases is a mutually beneficial process wherein everyone profits.

In fact, the price consumers pay for medicine is relatively low compared to what companies pay to develop them. In effect, consumers gain much more than the pharmaceutical industry whenever they trade because they do not have to go through the difficult process of discovering and producing new drugs. Think about it: in comparison to the centuries of scientific advancement and the billions of dollars needed to create the drugs you need, the $100 or so per bottle that you pay is an enormous bargain.

Unfortunately, gratitude for these benefits is rarely forthcoming. Instead of thanking the pharmaceutical industry for their irreplaceable life-giving contributions, pundits and politicians envious of their profits demand that medicine be socialized, as in Europe. Yet the commonly held notion that Europe’s socialized healthcare systems help reduce drug prices is completely false. The fact is that drugs cost more in the United States because they cost less in Europe.

Nationalized healthcare systems, such as Britain’s National Healthcare Service (NHS), offer drugs to their citizens at exceptionally reduced prices, sometimes even for free. They are able to do this because their governments implement controls that set artificially low caps on drug prices. While this may reduce drug prices for the average European for the time being, it means that the pharmaceutical industry must charge more in the US to recoup those lost profits in Europe. They have to do this, of course, because the money to fuel new R&D has to come from somewhere. If the same socialized medicine were to come to the United States, these lost profits could not be recouped, and both Europe and America would lose important medicines they have both come to rely on.

The pharmaceutical industry recognizes the injustice of this situation but is powerless to stop it: there is no way to work around European regulations. It will take far more than objections to these regulations, however, to protect the viability of the pharmaceutical industry. The rising tide of demand from socialized systems is symbolic of a wider demand for the unearned, not only from abroad, but from critics at home, as well. Yet everyone must recognize that is in their interest to protect this industry from price controls and the socialist systems that necessitate them, because these very measures hinder the availability of healthcare in the United States–health care on which the rest of the world depends.

The most important thing to understand about the pharmaceutical industry is the way in which it operates through voluntary trade to mutual benefit. The incentive for profit is what leads this industry to continue its quest for creating and supplying the world with better life-saving drugs that offer a quick fix to diseases that have devastated the globe for centuries. The price you pay in comparison to all the work and investment that goes into drug production is minimal.

The more that people understand the truth about how the pharmaceutical industry operates, they less likely they will hinder its progress. The people who work for this industry should be applauded for their honesty, integrity, and productivity at a time when they are misunderstood and yet continue to work every day in the pursuit of saving millions of lives. By recognizing the value of the pharmaceutical industry, and how integral making a profit is to ensuring its success, there is hope that this industry will be left free to continue to discover and create new drugs. As long as there is disease on this earth, we should be thankful that there is someone with the ingenuity and the drive to profit from curing it.

Jessica Wilson is a senior at Duke University. Next year she plans to attend law school, where she will begin her training to defend the pharmaceutical industry from unjust attack.

The Wild West

I want to elaborate some on a point I made to introduce my editorial: that there is no general cultural awareness, in intellectual circles or in the media, of the incredible technological advancement going on. I’m thinking specifically of the computer industry.

Because of my day job, I follow technology news pretty closely, but I’m going to do this even after I quit in a few months. Scitech news is an ocean of concrete instances of intelligence applied to the problem of survival, i.e. productiveness.

In general the computer industry attracts the best minds, and there are good reasons for this. It is a field that is wide open, with very little regulation (with certain significant exceptions). The territory is challenging and uncharted. It is a field with enormous potential to enhance our lives. The possibilities for how to store, deal with, and organize information of all kinds are exactly the kinds of problems that smart people love: they are highly abstract and demand creative, previously unheard of solutions.

Occasionally an analogy is made between the tech industry and the wild west. I think this is totally appropriate. There is a contiuous explosion of technological innovation that shows no signs of abating. If you wonder about the productivity of our culture, about where the excitement and innovation is, about the problems being solved by the best mind’s in the world, and about where the rationality in our culture is being directed–find a good scitech news source (or just use the Google News scitech aggregator).

The more reflective techies even offer very intelligent, general practical and intellectual advice, and even good cultural analysis of the significance of their field. Apropos of productiveness and purpose, check out Paul Graham on What You’ll Wish You’d Known in high school. It’s a very smart and enjoyable speech.

But despite it’s (significant) virtues, it highlights the need for deeper intellectual, i.e. philosophical, ideas. There are confusions about discipline and anxiety, very mixed advice on self-motivation, and only approximate indications as to what counts as purposeful and why.

The kind of analysis and advice Graham offers is badly needed. But the nature of work and how to pursue a career is the purvue of the humanities. Metaphysical and ethical questions bear upon what one should do with one’s life and how one should go about it, questions that require professional specialization, scrutiny, development, and integration. And as Graham realizes, this is completely absent from today’s university departments.

As Ayn Rand noted in numerous places, the humanities are the real uncharted frontier.

The FDA: Corporate Stooge or Coercive Stodge?

In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, the Food and Drug Act was passed, and the FDA was born. Founded on the premise that consumers can’t distinguish between a bottle of cough medicine and poison–or between a scientific drug study and an advertisement for a miracle cure–the Food and Drug Administration was meant to protect the American public against “the profit motive.” Now, a century later, the media has begun a new mud-slinging campaign. This time it is not against companies, but against the FDA.

A CNN.com article offers a carefully worded insinuation that the FDA is receiving kickbacks from major drug companies. The article complains, “The agency also receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the drug companies, which pay huge fees to have new drugs expediently reviewed and approved. Most people agree that relationship is all too comfortable.”

If the media were going to attack the FDA, this is precisely the sort of attack one might expect. It’s exactly the same profit-motive accusation that got the FDA established in the first place: if an entity–be it an individual, a corporation, or a government agency–is motivated by money, it must be corrupt.

What’s unexpected is that the media is attacking the FDA at all. Isn’t the FDA our protection against profit-seeking drug companies? The industry is regulated. Aren’t we safe now?

Apparently not. The FDA, it seems, is no more immune to errors of judgment than drug companies are. In December, the New York Times reported on a defective line of FDA approved defibrillators. Earlier in the year a scandal involving Merck’s popular drug, Vioxx, leapt to the headlines and inspired the current wave of anti-FDA sentiment. Senator Grassley of Iowa, leading that wave, states the problem succinctly: “The American people should be the number one and only client of the FDA.” It couldn’t be more true–but not in the way Senator Grassley intends it.

The problem is not that the FDA is receiving kickbacks from drug companies. First of all, it isn’t. Drug companies are forced, by a law called the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), to pay the “huge fees” CNN talks about–not for having their drugs approved, but for having them reviewed at all. Second, because Senator Grassley is right. The American public is not the one and only client of the FDA. The FDA, in fact, could not have any clients: it does not engage in voluntary trade. The FDA is not offering a product to clients who will forsake it if it offers nothing of value, or sue if it perpetrates a fraud; it is accountable to no one. It does not sustain itself as a productive enterprise, but by government decree.

In other words, the FDA has no vested interest in keeping harmful drugs off the market. If it slips up, it will weather a media storm. It has been weathering such storms since 1906. The distrust of the people who are meant to benefit by it does not matter–the FDA’s existence does not depend on those people’s choice. It is drug companies who really stand to suffer from selling harmful drugs–precisely because drug companies are actually motivated by profit. Drug companies, in a free market, stand or fall based on the voluntary actions of consumers. A company’s profit is the measure of the extent to which people choose to trade with it. The FDA do not work to create a product that consumers see the value of and therefore purchase. No individual chooses to trade with the FDA. The public is forced to accept their reviews–irrespective of whether they judge them to be even honest, let alone correct.

The same CNN article that lambastes the FDA reports that “Merck’s legal costs in the wake of the Vioxx fallout could reach $12 billion, and the company’s liability could total $18 billion.” And that’s just for a painkiller that might or might not create a higher risk of heart disease. Drug companies can’t get a billion dollars–much less 12 billion–by taxing the American public. They can only get it by creating a product that people want to buy. It is drug companies that are motivated by profit; it is drug companies that truly care about keeping bad drugs off the market.

Were the FDA disbanded, however, it would not be merely the fear of lawsuits that would motivate drug companies to offer effective and safe drugs. It would be–surprise–the profit motive. How priceless would a reputation for impeccable caution be in a free market drug company? How much more care a company would take to insure drug safety knowing that a lawsuit would destroy its credibility, not that of the eradicable FDA? How effectively would private review boards, like those that exist for cars and appliances, publish studies by which the consumer could easily educate and inform himself? How willingly would a drug company spend billions on R&D for a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s, if it had to rely only on the freedom and independent judgment of the consumer to ensure a fair return?

The media’s proposed solution to the FDA problem is to create “an independent drug safety board” to review the decisions of the FDA. But when the next Vioxx scandal hits, who will review the reviews of the Independent Drug Safety Board that allowed the FDA to allow the drug to hit the market?

The answer is not a new level of disinterested review. The answer is to recognize that interest, i.e. profit, is the best safeguard against harmful drugs. The answer is to place sole responsibility for drug safety on the private sector, to allow whatever corporation is up to the task of production to stand or fall based on the quality of its products.

Rebecca Knapp is a junior at the University of Chicago. She is studying classics and plans to go to law school.