...between the House and the Senate and the danger of using reconciliation to pass the health care bill in his column today. I disagree, but, whatever. It's his first three paragraphs that caught my attention. Because it's here that he inadvertently sets the table for a great argument against Ayn Rand and Objectivism:
Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals. We emerge into the world ready to connect with mom and dad. We go through life jibbering and jabbering with each other, grouping and regrouping. When you get a crowd of people in a room, the problem is not getting them to talk to each other; the problem is getting them to shut up.
To help us in this social world, God, nature and culture have equipped us with a spirit of sympathy. We instinctively feel a tinge of pain when we observe another in pain (at least most of us do). We instinctively mimic, even to a small extent, the mood, manners, yawns and actions of the people around us.
To help us bond and commit, we have been equipped with a suite of moral sentiments. We have an innate sense of fairness. Children from an early age have a sense that everybody should be treated fairly. We have an innate sense of duty. We admire people who sacrifice for the group. We are naturally embarrassed when we’ve been caught violating some social code. We blush uncontrollably.
In other words, try as we might to imagine ourselves as rugged individuals, we're really members of groups. While I think of humans in the wild as existing in tribes, my wife (animal lover that she is) takes it back a step further, to herds.
Like it or not, man is a social animal and dependent on others.
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