52
PARTISAN REVIEW
Once I visited the parents of a student from China who was studying
at the College of Staten Island in
1989.
When Hebei University had its
spring vacation, my daughter Miriam and I went to the home town of
my student. I got to his parents' apartment house and found that there
was some water coming from a neighboring construction site which
trickled by the entrance of the building. Algae was growing there, mak–
ing it very hard to get into the building without slipping. I was told to
hold on to the wall so I wouldn't fall. My friend's mother had fallen a
few weeks earlier and was still in the hospital. We visited her the fol–
lowing day and commented on how dangerous the entrance to her
building was. "I was careless," she said.
If
the accident had happened
today, she might not have blamed herself but would have sued.
Divorces and lawsuits are not nice things, but the fact that they now
are possible makes China a better place-a freer place-than it was
before.
Marxism encourages sacrifice for the public good . There is no aware–
ness of the fact that what is good for the public is the sum of what is
good for each person. There is no recognition of the rather obvious fact
that people will always disagree, not simply because their interests may
clash, but because different individuals view things in different ways.
Yet the boundary between selfishness and altruism is not as absolute as
many people think. Every individual has personal, family, neighbor–
hood, professional, national, and world interests. All of these are simul–
taneously selfish and altruistic.
Furthermore, each of us belongs to many smaller and larger circles at
the same time. Every group has different needs, all of which are valid.
There may be conflict between a person's status as family member and
as citizen, which is not to say that one of these roles is somehow more
moral than the other. Human life could not have survived without both
selfishness and altruism.
In Chairman Mao's day, the government and the people spoke only
of altruism; today they speak only of selfishness. The second is the neg–
ative of the first, but both views are equally simple-minded and equally
wrong.
Democracy is the institutionalization of the fact that disagreement is
both inevitable and good. Marx didn't distinguish between democracy
and other political systems. In the
Manifesto,
he wrote, "Political power,
properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for
oppressing another." He was wrong. A philosophy that looks forward
to the end of conflict of interest leads logically and inevitably to a soci–
ety where disagreement is viewed as the embodiment of evil. When indi-
