"Why does the search for heaven always lead to hell on earth?" Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a lecturer for the Ayn Rand Institute, asked a Braker Hall audience on Jan. 30.
The purpose of the discussion-the year's first speaking engagement for Tufts' Ayn Rand Interest Club-was to "expose the campus to the ideas and philosophy of Ayn Rand and their application to the culture," sophomore and club president Eugenia Gorlin said.
Rand, a 20th century Russian-born writer who created the philosophy of objectivism, was the primary focus of the speech. Objectivism, or "state-of-the art human reasoning," is the philosophy "that reason, not faith, is the only means by which human beings can live well on this earth," Bernstein said.
Furthermore, he said, the abandonment of self-sacrifice for self-survival is the only rational course dictated by reason.
Bernstein argued that religious societies create "a choked and leashed poodle, forced to follow its master in blind faith."
Bernstein traced "almost all setbacks in human history" to the existence of this blind faith.
In the historical analysis he presented to justify this argument, he used the example of the period between 500 and 1500 A.D. in Europe. He described this period as "the era of religious domination....[when] the freethinking mind was stifled."
Low life expectancy, zero growth in per-capita income and a profound lack of productivity corresponded with such religious zeal, according to Bernstein.
To complement these empirical observations, Bernstein offered a metaphysical explanation, based mostly in the mindsets of religious fundamentalists, for this phenomenon.
Religion, he said, stifles all forms of rational processes. "You do not criticize the revealed text, you simply accept it," he said.
This mindset, he added, also "leads inexorably to dictatorship of a theoretic sort," because the clergy are viewed as the only class capable of good governance. Therefore, he concluded, religion and reason "crash irrevocably, with no possible hope of reconciliation."
After establishing this conflict, Bernstein turned to objectivism for a solution. Values, he said, cannot come from God, society or individuals, because "facts are conspicuously absent in all three codes. Facts, reality [and] nature play no role.
The "God-told-me-so attitude" can as easily be used to justify bloodshed as it can to restrain it, Bernstein said.
His solution: "A living being's values...are those things that nature requires for its survival." Just as birds are endowed with wings and lions with speed, humans are naturally provided with a means of survival, he said.
In humans, that method for survival is reason. "Man can no more afford to reject reason...than a bird can reject wings," Bernstein said.
Bernstein concluded his lecture by rejecting altruism. Metaphysically, he said, man exists almost in a vacuum, "leaving no collective organism." Each individual, therefore, can only care for himself.
"Life requires the attainment of values," he said, "not their sacrifice or surrender...to relinquish or sacrifice them is the code of death."
Though Bernstein said that religions "made irrationalism respectable," he framed the debate not in terms of religion versus secularism, but instead in terms of reason versus unreason.
Although he considers religion a large contributor to unreason, Bernstein equally faults the secular philosophies of communism and National Socialism for the unquantifiable amounts of bloodshed that they initiated.
His focus on the primacy of reason proved compelling for many observers.
"I was skeptical at first, but I tried to keep an open mind, and in the end I thought Dr. Bernstein's opinions were fascinating and informative," said freshman Michael Snyder.
Bernstein is a philosophy lecturer in New York with a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He first became interested in Ayn Rand after reading her works, and has lectured about her since 1991.
"I believe that it's the wisdom of the ages...the wisdom that the philosophers have been looking for for 2000 years," he said of her work.
Aside from his lecturing, Bernstein is also an author. His book "The Capitalist Manifesto" was published in September 2005.
The Ayn Rand Interest Club at Tufts is planning a lecture about art's value in daily life for Apr. 3.
