Wonders of the world they wrote

So, the other night on a whim I read Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I’ve looked into Objectivism as a philosophy as a few times, though never with any particular understanding of its appeal to some people, but this was my first serious foray into the fiction of the often verbose Ms. Rand.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. A couple of years back, I saw a high school production of her play, “The Night of January 16th.” I was not particularly impressed with the script, though the actual performance was pretty good.

Anyway, Ayn has become something of a running joke among my peers. There was a period of time where a copy of The Fountainhead was rolling around the backseat of my friend’s car, and we’d occasionally read random passages of pretentious dialogue or florid descriptions out of it for a laugh.

Anthem, owing to its short length, avoids many of those problems; the story is so short that the printers have done everything possible to pad it out–the font size is enormous (and changes about twenty pages in), the columns are narrow, the leading is huge, and there’s an extra space after every paragraph. As if that weren’t enough, a second version of the novella is included, photocopied from an earlier manuscript, complete with the author’s handwritten editing. They really wanted to justify charging 7.99 for a story that weighs in at 90 pages, padded out.

About 15 pages in, my overwhelming impression was that I preferred this story when it was “Harrison Bergeron.” Halfway through, I realized that Rush’s “2112” concept album was a closer adaptation of the story than their song “Anthem.”

And before I knew it, the book had devolved into a chapter or two of soapbox lecturing, and then it was over. It wasn’t a bad story, mind you. And I’m always a sucker for a good dystopia story. But there were some significant problems with it, which cast harsh light on Objectivism as any kind of viable philosophy.

First, and perhaps least relevant to the philosophy, is just how blatantly anti-feminist the story is. The only female character follows around the protagonist like a lost puppy looking for guidance. I understand that Ms. Rand was a bit of a sub, but this is ridiculous. She barely had a personality; she was purely object.

Our heroic protagonist, Prometheus (née Equality 7-2521), was the pure, unfiltered Randian hero: brilliant, willful, and instantly skillful at whatever he puts his hands to. In his post-apocalyptic quasi-medieval society, he and another lowly street-sweeper manage to find an abandoned subway tunnel. Through pure trial-and-error experimentation with the remnants of 20th century technology, he rediscovers steel and electricity, and he singlehandedly reinvents the lightbulb. Ultimately, he decides to share this discovery with the scholars, but is refused and threatened with death. He flees into the woods, where he proves to be a fantastic hunter (his first flung stone kills a bird, and he’s able to fashion a bow and arrows–and use them with great skill–with no apparent prior knowledge or training). At some point, the one girl he knew in the city shows up, having followed him. Eventually, they come across an abandoned centuries-old cottage in the mountains, with its own generator (which our hero is able to repair). He reads voraciously from the cabin’s apparently prodigious library, then comes up with names for himself (Prometheus) and his bride (Gaea). He decides that community and altruism are evils, designed to keep folks like him from achieving their potential, and leading to the stagnation of society and the stifling of independent thought. He determines that he needs no one else, and so he will return to town eventually to liberate the other free-minded ones like himself.

Yikes, where to begin? I’ll leave aside the evolutionary benefits of altruism at this point, they’re purely incidental to the problems with Prometheus’s reasoning. Isolation and independence are all well and good for him, but they don’t translate into a real-world viable option. See, Prometheus is only able to become self-sufficient because he is the luckiest man on the damn planet. He literally falls into advanced technology that, for whatever reason, still kind of works, and then fumbles his way through several centuries worth of scientific progress. He manages to leave town with little problem, despite his violation of various serious laws. He manages never to eat anything poisonous while living in the wilderness for a fairly extended period of time, bumps into his girlfriend in the vast woods, and finds a pristine, untouched, undamaged house from centuries earlier. This might make for decent fiction, but you can’t count on such wondrous luck in the real world, and that’s a nail in the coffin for Objectivism as a viable way of life. Sure, selfishness works when you’ve got everything else going for you.

You know, except when it doesn’t. Somehow, in his rant at the end of the book, Prometheus fails to recognize that it’s dependence on others and their altruism which got him to this point. He found the entrance to the subway with his friend, International 4-8818, needed his help to open it, and had to trust him to put himself at risk in order to keep the finding (and their subsequent experimentations) secret. He needed Liberty 5-3000 (who he’d later rename Gaea) to keep their conversations and interactions secret. He needed the humans of the past to share their innovations with the rest of the world, so that he might rediscover them. And, you know, if Gaea’s going to fulfill her role in recreating an individualistic human society, he’s going to need her around too. Selfishness only works when you’re actually self-sufficient, which no one, not even our dear Prometheus, is.

Anthem, to an astute reader, is more an indictment of Objectivism than a promotion of it. Prometheus’s speech at the end reeks of sour grapes and undeserved feelings of superiority, and it utterly ignores how much he’s relied on other people to get anywhere near self-sufficiency. And then, after decrying altruism and denouncing society, he resolves to return to the city to liberate others like him and bring them to his mountain home. Last I checked, that sort of action qualified as altruistic, and a collection of people living together was the necessary component of a society.

It really demonstrates the problem with Objectivists: they claim that altruism is a general negative and that people ought to be able to get by on their own skills and merits. Then they run headlong into reality, in which people actually do need one another. They’re ultimately put into a position of perpetual complaining, that they’re better than society and they don’t need other people and altruism is bad, but not actually being able to do anything about it. Objectivism is a philosophy of inevitable cantankerousness.