One so rarely gets to use the word “concubine” in a sentence, much less a song.

I’ve been reading a book that was given to me as a gift, “The Monk and the Philosopher : A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life”. It’s interesting that I agree, in part, with most of Buddhist philosophy and at the same time I agree, in part, with most of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. In “Atlas Shrugged”, one small character is a woman who once had partial ownership of a motor company. She and her siblings inherited the company from their father and decided to make it into a communist system.

They turned the company to shit, in other words, with the lives of its workers and their families with them. When the main protagonist of the book, Dagny Taggart, went to meet this woman, Dagny thought to herself as the woman was speaking that she should remember this moment, because she was seeing pure evil in its unadulterated form. This woman was a self-proclaimed Buddhist.

As I said, I don’t agree with either philosophy entirely. At the same time, it’s disheartening to see how sharply they disagree. It’s like you have two good friends who can’t stand each other.

Both seem to ignore certain parts of biology and its implications for human nature and philosophy. I believe that human nature is to be inherently selfish. Buddhism kind of acknowledges this. Rand celebrates this. What, then, do they ignore? They ignore the subtleties of the theory of human nature as espoused by Richard Dawkins. For example: Ayn Rand claims, through John Galt, that human nature contains no inherent altruism, and that any tendencies toward it are signs of corruption.

Perhaps Rand expects us to act against our natural tendencies, but that’s not what I get from reading her. I won’t cover Dawkins’ theory in detail, but it comes down to that genes, and not humans or other “individual” animals, are the base of replication. This means that they “do their best” to achieve their own good, with the good of the individual they reside in being closely tied, but not identical, to their own welfare. This can result in altruistic behavior, especially toward those individuals likely to carry copies of many of the same genes you do (i.e. your family, especially siblings and parents). Read more about it in “The Selfish Gene”.

If that’s the case, then Rand must make some case for acting against our inner drive to occasionally be altruistic. I haven’t read anything of the sort, but I can guess how it would go: one would be better off without acting on the pre-programmed impulses given to us by our genes, and instead relying on reason to make decisions.

Buddhism, I believe, doesn’t take into enough account the truly selfish nature we humans have. For beings such as us, letting go of our conception of “I” and “me” is very, very difficult. Even so, how are we to know that doing so will lead us to a better place than we are in now?

I suspect that the problem between the two sides of this coin is one primarily of semantic sensitivity. Rand abhors the word “altruism”, while Buddhism strives to eliminate the problems of the “ego”. Reconciling the two would be a difficult task for a seasoned philosopher, and I would love to read a book on the subject. Until such a book comes around, I’ll be forced to try to live with this apparent contradiction.

As John Galt says, there are no contradictions in the world - if you think you’ve found one, check your premises.

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