Arnold Newman, Ayn Rand, 1964. According to biographer Anne C. Heller, Rand believed “the dollar sign was a better symbol than the cross, because it didn’t require the sacrifice of anybody.”
So my ninth-grade son Henry has been assigned Anthem by Ayn Rand. He spent a large portion of his Labor Day weekend on this travesty. Is this necessary? For a young reader to spend any fraction of his formative intellectual years with Rand’s stilted prose and ghastly philosophy? So many great and beautiful books, and they pick Anthem?
Anthem is about a future devoid of both rationality and individuality, a dark age in which science and technology are all but gone, a world subsumed by groupthink. Use of the pronoun “I” is punishable by torturous death. The hero of the book, Equality 7-2521, slowly finds his way out of the system and into the dread Uncharted Forest, where he and his partner in scandal, Liberty 5-3000, discover the first person singular, change their names to Prometheus and Gaea, and, in a final flourish, engrave the word EGO in stone above their front door.
I don’t know much about high school reading lists these days but if it’s collectivist dystopia they want, why not assign something interesting and relevant? Why not Brave New World?
It’s hard to decide which is worse: Rand’s writing or her philosophy. But maybe that’s a false choice; David Bentley Hart claims that when it comes to Rand, “aesthetic and ideological revulsion are not really separable.”
He may be right. Anthem‘s cure for what ails us is as simple as it is wrong: the worship of ego, of the first person singular. This is of course a bleak prospect, a gesture of death, but its presentation in Anthem is so cartoonish that it simply cannot be taken seriously. Perhaps this is necessary — is there a stylist alive who could possibly beautify Rand’s ideas? We think not.
Life is too short and wondrous for such an awful book, yet there Anthem rests on Henry’s desk, dog-eared, spine broken.
On second thought, though, maybe I needn’t worry. Henry’s no fool and Rand’s perfect inversion of Christianity has undeniable pedagogical value. It’s always instructive to see solutions that are exactly wrong. The message of Anthem is precisely what we must not believe, writ large and without ambiguity. The ego — what we think we are — is, after all, the one thing Christ calls us to kill: you must lose your life to save it; the last shall be first, blessed are they who mourn.
Thomas Merton is eloquent on this point. In New Seeds of Contemplation he equates the ego with what he (and others before and after him) calls the false self. Our ego, says Merton, is no more than our private fantasy of ourselves, a false self God does not know.
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
We are not very good at recognizing illusions — the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is called a life of sin.
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become invisible when something visible covered its surface.
But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.
But the secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.
This is reality, and Rand refuses it. The ego is the one thing that is patently and absolutely illusory. It is, in fact, the only truly anti-real thing in the universe. By worshiping ego she perfectly inverts the very structure of life. By rejecting God she abandons us to mere reason and turns us into our own worst problem.
Of course this is not accidental. Rand hated Christianity and she gets credit for recognizing and targeting the heart of the Gospel: that true life is found in the death of the ego, of self-obsession, selfishness, vanity, and pride. Life in God is precisely the death of the horror she engraves in stone in Anthem‘s dismal climax.
So Henry will survive Anthem and maybe one day he’ll remember it only as the book that ruined his holiday weekend. But my hope is that, years from now, he’ll remember and admire it for its absolutely perfect wrongness.
