It is well known that Objectivism eschews, indeed condemns sacrifice:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New American Library, 1964), page 44; The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1963.]

And:

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t. [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s speech.]

While I will not be contradicting what Objectivism has to say about altruism, I do wish to comment on its use of the word “sacrifice,” which is, at least sometimes, a little odd. My comments will address both the secular and the religious uses of the word

Let us begin with ordinary usage. In baseball, sometimes a batter will deliberately hit a fly ball to be caught, to give his teammate on third base a chance to run home, and so score, or simply to advance from first or second base. The thinking is that it is more important that the runner score or advance, and so improve his chances of scoring, than it is for the batter to take a chance at striking out, or, if the runner is on first, hitting into a double play. The hit is called a “sacrifice fly.”

It may be objected that this example is not exactly what the Objectivist has in mind, because in baseball it is proper for an individual player to put the team’s interest ahead of what may appear to be his own personal interest (e.g., his batting record), whereas that is exactly what the “virtue of selfishness” would deplore in society. In other words, a game played by teams is not an appropriate metaphor for life in a society.

Let us turn, then, to an individualist game, one in which there may be teams, but the interest of the team does not take priority over the interest of the player (at least, it is not supposed to take priority). I have in mind chess. In chess, when one allows his opponent to capture his Queen in order to effect a checkmate or to gain some other advantage a few moves later, it is called a sacrifice. A famous example is Bobby Fischer’s “Game of the Century” against Donald Byrne, which featured a Queen sacrifice on the 17th move. Fischer allowed his Queen to be captured, but Byrne’s capture of the Queen allowed Fischer to win a Rook, two Bishops, and a Pawn, and to coordinate his pieces to checkmate on move 41, while Byrne’s Queen sat useless on the other end of the board. By Objectivist standards, Fischer’s 17th move was not a sacrifice at all; but surely there is no point in insisting that every chess commentator in the world change his analysis of this game to conform to Objectivist usage.

Let us move from the world of games to that of professional accomplishment. Consider the movie Way Down East. (The entire movie can be viewed on YouTube here.) In that movie, Anna Moore (played by the incomparable Lillian Gish) faints from exhaustion on an ice floe and is swept toward a waterfall, her hair and a hand hanging off the floe into the freezing water. The young man who loves her manages to rescue her at the last minute, jumping recklessly from floe to floe. It is important to remember that this scene is not performed by doubles or stuntmen, but by the actors themselves, and was filmed on actual ice floes. (That scene is available here, and runs from 3:05 to 6:18.) Of the filming of this scene Gish writes,

After a while, my hair froze, and I felt as if my hand were in a flame. To this day, it aches if I am out in the cold for very long. When the sequence was finally finished, I had been on a slab of ice at least twenty times a day for three weeks.... This kind of dedication probably seems foolish today, but it wasn’t unusual then. Those of us who worked with Mr. Griffith were completely committed to the picture we were making. No sacrifice was too great to get the film right, to get it accurate, true, and perfect. We weren’t important in our minds; only the picture was. (Lillian Gish, with Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me; quoted in a review by Frank O’Connor, The Objectivist, November 1969; emphasis mine).

The Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home” may capture what Objectivism has in mind more precisely. While the narration explains exactly what the girl who is leaving is doing and why, the counterpoint captures what the parents are saying, or at least thinking:

She (we gave her most of our lives)
Is leaving (sacrificed most of our lives)
Home (we gave her everything money could buy)....

She (we never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)
Home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)

Now, an Objectivist would argue that if the parents really loved their daughter, what they did was not sacrifice at all, and to call it that is to suggest that they valued any number of things more highly than they did their daughter. And yet, surely any parent who has been treated thoughtlessly by an ungrateful child (“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth ...”) understands the sentiment perfectly: We did everything we knew how to do for her, and we did it though it cost us pleasures that others were enjoying. We did it though it was hard, sometimes inconvenient, and always because we loved her more than we did anything else we could have used the time or money for.

Elsewhere, Ayn Rand says that you measure love by the things it outweighs, i.e., by referring to the “hierarchy of values of the person experiencing it,” and the simple parents of the song are telling us the measure of their love. It outweighed everything they might have had, if they had not loved their daughter. They may not have given their daughter what she wanted (“fun”) and they may not have understood her very well, but surely that should not count against them in judging whether they loved her.

Now, of course, any Objectivist will point to that phrase “never a thought for ourselves” and pour on it all the mockery and condemnation of which he may be capable. But can we leave that alone for now, recognizing it as the way simple people — not Objectivists — think and speak in a world that is dominated by altruism? Altruism, after all, does not merely offer the world a poisonous set of ethical ideas; it takes over the language in which people express moral ideas. To speak literally, the girl’s parents obviously took thought for themselves: they ate, they clothed themselves, probably they got medical care when they needed it, and provided shelter not only for their daughter but for themselves as well.

On this matter of language, let us look at what is probably the most famous example of a choice that many have called a “sacrifice.” At the conclusion of Charles Dickens’s book A Tale of Two Cities, set in Paris during the Reign of Terror, Dickens’s character, the condemned aristocrat Charles Darnay, is in prison. Sydney Carton, sufficiently like him in appearance that the two have sometimes been mistaken for one another, and in love with Darnay’s wife, has managed to change places with him, so that Darnay has escaped, and Carton is soon on his way to the guillotine in Darnay’s place. A young seamstress, who once met Darnay and who is also condemned to be beheaded, detects the subterfuge and is amazed. She asks Carton to hold her hand to the end, which he agrees to do. Another woman on the scene, perceiving Carton’s peaceful demeanor as he faces certain death, wrote down the words that she believed he would have spoken had he been given the chance, words ending, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” There can be little doubt that readers — and perhaps especially young female readers — describe the scene as a noble and romantic sacrifice Carton has made for the sake of Lucy Darnay and her family. And yet it is clear, is it not, that Carton’s decision and action reflect accurately, indeed inevitably, exactly what he values in this world. They reflect his hierarchy of values. He is not giving up a greater for a lesser, but the lesser for the greater.

So far, I have tried to show that the idea of sacrifice that most people have is not precisely the same thing that Objectivism means. We see this even more clearly in ceremonies honoring military men or policemen or firemen who die in an effort to save the life of some other. “We honor their sacrifice, etc.”

Without getting into the merits of the particular circumstances in which such men may find themselves, it seems a little harsh to say of them that they were betraying their values or that they were sacrificing the good (their lives) for what was evil. They may have made bad choices. They may have misjudged the danger to themselves. But surely they were not preferring what was evil to what was good. It seems unlikely that they were thinking, “I value my family more than this stranger, but I shall risk my life for the stranger nonetheless.”

Yet, if we accept the Objectivist definition and apply it to the situations I have described, that is what we must conclude.

Objectivism has a point, certainly in particular contexts where there is an attempt to persuade a person to take an action he finds distasteful. People do in fact use the word “sacrifice” in such contexts, along with other words (e.g., “team player” — at work, not in a game — “good of the company,” “good of the country” or even “the greater good”). In the movie Billy Budd, ship officers are urged to give up (and then do give up) their own judgments of Billy’s guilt for the good of the ship, indeed the good of naval discipline. I concur with Objectivists who would say that the officers were being asked to sacrifice — in the Objectivist sense — the judgment of their own minds for something that they were told was in some sense “higher.” (A portion of the relevant scene from the 1962 movie is available on YouTube here.)

But the primary issue is not that they changed their minds. It is whether the thing they were told was “higher” was indeed higher. I submit that it was not higher, but if a man thinks that it was, if he actually values something like “naval discipline” more highly than the judgment of his own mind, it is hard to see how we can call his decision to condemn Budd a sacrifice in the Objectivist sense. A mistake, even a moral evil, but not a sacrifice.

Indeed, such a man would say that in sacrificing Budd to the requirements of naval discipline, he was offering the lesser for the greater — just as Fischer did with his Queen in the Game of the Century and Carton when he took Darnay’s place. An Objectivist would probably say that he was instead offering the individual for the collective. And that gives us some insight into this unusual treatment of “sacrifice.”

The Objectivist is looking at what is objectively good and what is objectively more important, and seeing that it is being given up for something that is objectively of less value. In the case of Billy Budd, the officers give up a good and noble individual for the sake of a collective or an abstraction. They also give up their own judgments for the sake of that collective or abstraction. And that is called a sacrifice by them. And in the Objectivist sense, it is.

But whether they are right or wrong, that is not how the people sacrificing Billy see the matter. It would do no good to say to them, “You must not give up the greater good for the sake of the lesser,” because they would reply, “We are not. We are giving up the lesser for the sake of the greater.” And still they might agree that they were making a sacrifice, though in the usual sense, not the Objectivist sense, of the word.

In most cases, then, the Objectivist characterization of sacrifice is one that no one uses about his own actions. Rather, it characterizes how an outsider might see a particular action. It is a term, loaded as it is with altruistic baggage, that is used to persuade a person to act against his own judgment or wishes. It characterizes also certain choices when we look backwards at them. A man who gives up a great deal for the sake of a woman he loves, and whom she later betrays, may indeed come to think that what he did was make sacrifices in the Objectivist sense, though such did not seem to be the case at the time.

Religious sacrifices

Let us now look more deeply into the idea of sacrifice; let us look into its origins in religion. And for this part of the discussion, I must beg the reader to believe that a person who says he believes that God exists, does in fact believe that God exists. He may be wrong in his belief, but when a person makes choices about his actions, he must do so on the basis of his own knowledge and beliefs, even if they are defective. To be sure, he has a moral obligation to enlarge and refine his knowledge so far as he is able, and to correct it when he sees that it is incomplete or mistaken. But at any given moment, he must rely on the information and knowledge he already has, or believes he has, not on what Objectivists on the other side of the world or in future centuries think he should have relied on. Ethical behavior, like knowledge, is contextual.

To sacrifice, in the sense that religions mean it, is to make something holy (“sacrum facio”). And you make something holy by giving it to God. Now, to God, being what a god is, you give the best you have. You do not give the leftovers. And you do not give the damaged or unusable. Thus, in religions with animal sacrifice, you take the best from the flock, the best-looking, the healthiest, and, usually, something young (that is, something that has not yet been used either for its products or for its ability to reproduce).

The application to collectivist cultures that practice human sacrifice is obvious. Virgins are offered to the god because it is possible to determine that they have not procreated. They are valuable to the collective, and yet the collective — or its headmen — decides to surrender them; the collective forgoes benefiting from their value. In some religions (apparently, for example, that of Moloch), any child would do, male or female, simply because the value of the child to the collective both was real and had not been realized. It had not yet contributed to the wealth or well-being of the collective. Some societies sacrifice foes captured in battle; they are sacrificed because the captured foe is given to the god rather than kept and used as a slave; that is, the collective gives up something of value.

It must be understood that what is given, is given to something that is held to be of greater value. The collective is not giving up something of great value for the sake of something of less value or of no value. When we look at societies that practice animal or human sacrifice and take their beliefs seriously, we see that we cannot apply the Objectivist understanding of sacrifice to what they are doing at all. Any Objectivist who said to any of the sacrificers that they were offering a greater value for a lesser one would be told that he has completely failed to understand what is going on.

In Genesis, Abraham apparently comes from a society in which some human sacrifice was practiced. The story of the sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac (Genesis 22) tells us many things about the God of the Bible. At least one of them is that Abraham is being told that human sacrifice is hereafter to be off the table, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the nations or religions that claim descent from Abraham has ever practiced it.

There is also the detail that when Isaac asks Abraham, “Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham replies, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.”

If one is reading “the Bible as literature,” one might take this as merely Abraham’s certainty that God does not really want Isaac, and that an animal will be supplied (and, indeed, a ram is caught in the thicket, which Abraham offers up in sacrifice, instead of taking it home to mate with his ewes). But if one reads it as sacred literature with a possible prophetic component, one might take it as an inadvertent prophecy (there are many inadvertent prophecies in the Bible) that God would at a later date provide the Lamb, that is, the Lamb of God that would take away the sins of the world. That is, one may read Abraham’s answer to Isaac as a prophecy that God will send his own Son to be a sacrifice.

We are led, then, inevitably, to Ayn Rand’s comments in her Playboy interview:

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

It may be true that the symbolism is used by some people in the way that Rand stated, but it does not follow that that is its meaning. Indeed, none of the writers of the New Testament texts uses the symbolism of the Cross in that way. We can hardly allow a misuse of a symbolism to deter us from adopting that symbolism ourselves. Certainly, one never hears of any Objectivists giving up the symbolism of the dollar sign because of its misuse by political cartoonists.

Let us sort out what is correct about Rand’s formulation. But in order to do that, we must take Christianity seriously. That is, we must confine ourselves for the purposes of this discussion to the universe as understood by Christianity. If Rand wants to speak of the story of Christ, she must retain the context of that story and all its components and details. Christ is the human ideal. And he was a man of perfect virtue. But that is not the whole story. What Rand has left out is that “according to Christian mythology,” he was also God. What are we to make of a God who makes a sacrifice rather than one who receives one? Here, allow me to caution the reader, for we have now entered the deep territory of the theology of redemption (soteriology), on which countless books have been written, some of them fairly bad. I shall try to touch only on those aspects of it that are relevant to a discussion of sacrifice as it pertains to Objectivism.

Of course, I have misstated the matter slightly, for God both makes the sacrifice and receives it. Its purpose was a kind of rescue operation. In an informal address at Georgetown University, I once heard Tibor Machan present the basics of the Objectivist ethics. He was asked, “Would you jump into a lake to save your wife if she were drowning?” His answer was, “It depends on who my wife is.”

His point, of course, was that before we can answer such questions, we need a lot more information than what is usually presented in the question. How well can I swim? What are the chances of succeeding? And, who is my wife? Is she someone I love passionately “beyond love’s own power of loving”? Or is she someone I have grown to hate over the years? There are surely others, but that should be enough to get the idea across.

Now, for whom did Christ die? For whom was he sacrificed? Let us review some of the New Testament story. It is obvious that Christ’s enemies were going to find some basis for having him killed sooner or later. They had begun plotting it early in his teaching career, even before he had committed any act that could be interpreted as blasphemy (the charge for which eventually he would be tried and killed); and throughout his career, they laid traps for him that he managed to turn back on them, which is just the sort of thing to make enemies even angrier. At the height of his popularity, they were still plotting, and when he raised a man from the dead who had been in a tomb for four days, they planned to kill both him and the formerly dead man. (It is entirely possible that one reason Christ is forever telling people whom he has cured, “Tell no man” is that he understands that because he had healed them, they too would become possible targets of his enemies. Certainly that is what happened to the man born blind, whom he healed and whose story is told in chapter 9 of the Gospel According to John.)

In other words, so far as the account I have just given is concerned, Jesus has done nothing more than any number of unpopular teachers have done throughout history. He made unpopular claims both about himself and about his enemies, he stuck by them, and they killed him for it. When one reads Atlas Shrugged, it is clear also, is it not, that Galt’s enemies are perfectly ready to kill him for his teaching if they cannot make some use of him, or if he will not back down. If we stop here, there is nothing for anyone to become indignant about, least of all Ayn Rand. Christ has done nothing that John Galt — who “according to the Objectivist mythology,” is the human ideal — was not prepared to do.

(And, as an aside, we can easily imagine that, in the case of a John Galt killed by his enemies, a few hundred years later, there would be people who said that he had died for the sake of the truth, and it’s just a short step from that to saying that Galt had died so that we could know the truth, thereby completely garbling the meaning of his death and of his original message.)

So at least, insofar as we look at the story merely as literature, there seems nothing objectionable to it. But as we know, there is more to it. There is theology. And if one is going to interpret the story (and Rand’s remarks in the Playboy interview must be seen as a interpretation), one cannot leave out the theology, because “the mythology of Christianity” is not just the story of the Crucifixion.

And the theology goes something like this: Man, having been created in the image and likeness of God, decided he’d rather manage things his own way and made a general mess of them. Not just throughout history, but in the heart of each one. Having some inkling of this, he frequently resorted to God to try to fix things for him, but the problem was that God is supremely holy, and sinful man cannot tolerate the presence of supreme holiness. He cannot get close enough to be healed. That was the point of the animal sacrifices: man had an altar (which God had designed for him) and made offerings on it of animals (which God had created for him) in an effort to be forgiven for his many rebellions and misdeeds. The animals were sinless* and the altar holy, so both could act as a bridge between man. Or at least that was the idea. That it was incomplete in all religions is shown by the fact that the sacrifices had to be repeated, some annually, others more often.

With respect to the sacrifice of Jesus, God looks at man and sees that he is not able to approach him. He sees further (what man perhaps did not see) that the animal offerings were mere substitutes. Substitutes for humans.

Therefore, God, imitating man in this case, offers to man his best, to wit, his Son, as both a sacrifice and as a rescuer. This Son, being God and infinite, is able to take on everything — past and future — that is required to bring man into at-one-ment (atonement) with God. He spends a few years trying to help a few followers understand who he is and what he is doing. He warns them what will happen to him, and, incidentally, to them. And then he allows himself to be captured, tortured, and killed (which was going to happen anyway, as I have already said), but in making of himself a free-will offering to God by allowing the crime of killing him, he accomplishes what he set out to do, namely, “to draw all men to him.” And being drawn to him, they are able to enjoy all that which they were meant to enjoy in the first place. Because his act frees them from sin (if they will accept the offer), they are able to live the life that they were meant to live, to live according to their true nature, not a corrupted nature.

Out of love for his own creation, he endures this death, this sacrifice; that is, he endures it because he loves those who will benefit from it. Just as a man will die to protect his children (not because he loves death, but because he loves his children), and just as a man may die to rescue his life’s work from a fire (not because he loves death, but because he loves the work he has done), so this Creator is willing to die to rescue his own creation.

What does he get out of it? He gets the satisfaction from knowing that he has done an ugly job well, and that what he set out to accomplish, he has accomplished. But that just sounds like an ordinary mortal’s death. This is a god’s death, and God always makes things even better than it seems to us they need to be.

We are told by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that Christ endured the Cross and despised the shame of it (it was a criminal’s death, after all) “for the joy that was set before him.”† What joy was that?

A bride.

Somehow — I do not presume to know how; I am merely recounting the terms of the story, including the terms Ayn Rand omitted from her summary, terms which we may not omit if we are to take any criticism of it seriously — he is able to gather those who accept his offer of rescue into a supernatural body called the Church, and this Church is somehow going to be his bride. What we see at the end of the Apocalypse of St. John is not just a party to end all parties. It is a wedding reception.

In effect, we are told in this story that the whole point of creating humans in the first place was to have a party at the end of time. But in order to have the party, we humans had to be made fit for it, both in mind and in spirit. And in understanding. In addition to undoing the separation from him that our rebellion created, God wants us to understand the whole business of his love for us, but because we are temporal beings, we had to learn all of this. And it took rather a long time. And even when it was time for it all to be revealed to us, most of us still didn’t get it. And still don’t. But we will once our darkened minds are made clear by the removal of rebellion against God from them.

Defending against “sacrifice”

Now, you don’t have to believe any of that. Most Objectivists don’t. What I have been concerned to do here is to show that the Objectivist idea of sacrifice, for the most part, does not give us any information about what people have in mind when they speak of it. Even so, I have alluded already to the importance of the particular understanding that Objectivism offers us with respect to this word: It helps us understand what is going on when one person is trying to get another person to betray his values.

The one use of the word “sacrifice” that exemplifies the meaning Objectivists ascribe to it is in the effort to instill guilt, and in instilling guilt, to motivate a person to do something for which he can otherwise be given no rational motive or reason to do. It is a key element in some forms of the argument from intimidation and in attempts to instill guilt. The genius of Ayn Rand where this word is concerned is that she spotted the treachery, and having spotted it, was able to reveal it to her readers and so arm them against it.

In particular, younger readers trapped in a world held in the grip of altruism, who are trying to make sense of the world, including, perhaps, the irrationality of their own parents and the things their parents try to make them do, were able to have a better understanding of what was going on. Instead of being confused or feeling lost, they found themselves on the steady ground of understanding and rationality. Instead of being caught in a trap, they had been forewarned. What happened next would vary from situation to situation and from person to person. But what was important to each person was that he had been given the means for defending himself against an onslaught of irrationality, or at least for not embracing ideals that were destructive of virtue.