America, the stingy?

Some observers have taken the recent disaster in South East Asia as an opportunity to engage in their favorite sport: America bashing. A Norwegian UN official suggested that the world's richest nations were "stingy" with humanitarian aid contributions, clearly pointing a finger at the richest of those rich nations: America. He has some gall. In 2004, America contributed $2.4 billion in disaster aid, a full 40% of the worldwide total. Americans have always been the most generous people on earth. Gordon Sinclair summed it up best way back in 1973:

This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.

Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it. When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.

The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.

I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?

Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those.

The Virtue of Selfish Love

Gary Hull debunks the conventional view that love should be selfless.

Some highlights:

Every Valentine's Day a certain philosophic crime is perpetrated. Actually, it is committed year-round, but its destructiveness is magnified on this holiday. The crime is the propagation of a widely accepted falsehood: the idea that love is selfless.

Love, we are repeatedly taught, consists of self-sacrifice.

Love based on self-interest, we are admonished, is cheap and sordid.

True love, we are told, is altruistic. But is it?

Imagine a Valentine's Day card which takes this premise seriously. Imagine receiving a card with the following message:

I get no pleasure from your existence.

I obtain no personal enjoyment from the way you look, dress, move, act or think.

Our relationship profits me not. You satisfy no sexual, emotional or intellectual needs of mine.

You're a charity case, and I'm with you only out of pity.

Love,
XXX.

Needless to say, you would be indignant to learn that you are being "loved," not for anything positive you offer your lover, but--like any recipient of alms--for what you lack. Yet that is the perverse view of love entailed in the belief that it is self-sacrificial.

Genuine love is the exact opposite. It is the most selfish experience possible, in the true sense of the term: it benefits your life in a way that involves no sacrifice of others to yourself or of yourself to others.

Loving Life

For all you procrastinators out there still trying to figure out what to get that special someone for christmas, allow me to make a suggestion: Craig Biddle's introduction to Objectivist ethics, Loving Life.

This book is the definitive answer to Dostoyevsky's claim: "Without God, everything is permissible".

From the inside flap:

If you want to live your life to the fullest, if you want to achieve the greatest happiness possible, this book is for you. It is about the essential means to that end: a proper code of values - a proper morality.

Contrary to popular myth, morality does not come from God; it is not a matter of divine revelation. Nor is it a matter of social convention or personal opinion. Being moral does not consist in obeying commandments, or in doing whatever is culturally accepted, or in doing whatever one wants to do. The rabbis, the priests, the relativists, and the subjectivists are wrong. Morality is not a matter of faith or conformity or feelings.

True morality is a matter of the factual requirements of human life and happiness. It is a matter of reason, logic, and the law of cause and effect. As such, it is an indispensable guide to living well and loving life. This is demonstrated in the pages ahead.

By the way, I won't mind if that special someone is me.