What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Ayn Rand wanted us to be selfish,
but democracy asks us to be generous.
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

You’ve called an election. Appropriate then to send you Ayn (rhymes with Pine) Rand, whose books are highly political. It’s very easy to dislike Ayn Rand, not only the writer, but even the person behind the writing, and many readers and intellectuals do indeed dislike her, intensely. However, more than a quarter century after her death (she lived from 1905 to 1982), Ayn Rand still has her dogged followers, a cult nearly, and her books continue to sell in great numbers. There is clearly something both attractive and off-putting about her writing. Her brief novel Anthem, just 123 pages, is a useful work to discuss in the context of an election. You will see in what follows that I fall on the side of those who dislike Ayn Rand.

Anthem, first published in 1938, is a dystopia with a utopian heart, a portrayal of a future where everything has gone wrong but where the reader is shown how things can be made right. The novel starts well. The language is simple, the writing understated, the cadence engaging. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the main character, whose name is Equality 7-2521. (Ayn Rand gives her characters names that clearly indicate the notions, the ideals, she wishes to debunk.) Equality 7-2521 does not live in good times. He has no significant freedoms. He has chosen neither where to live nor what to do for a living. He has no family and no real friends. In that, he is like every other man he knows, living a life of rigid conformity that is socially useful but grinding. The reader accepts this premise willingly because of a clever and effective linguistic device on Ayn Rand’s part: the complete absence of singular personal pronouns. Equality 7-2521 does not speak as an “I”, nor is anything ever his with a “my” or a “mine”. Such individualistic concepts are banned from his society and he is a “we”, as is everyone else, and all are at the service of the collectivity. As Equality 7-2521 says:

We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:

“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.”

Union 5-3992 and International 4-8818, fellow street sweepers, manage to endure such conformity, but:

There are Fraternity 2-5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9-6347, who are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in a voice which chills our bones…

As for Fraternity 9-3452, Democracy 4-6998, Unanimity 7-3304, International 1-5537, Solidarity 8-1164, Alliance 6-7349, Similarity 5-0306, and especially Collective 0-0009 (they are a nasty one), they are the oppressive system’s prime defenders, and they will collide with Equality 7-2521, who is pushed irresistibly to think on his own and pursue his ideas, no matter where they lead him.

There are women. They live separately. Only once a year, for a single night during the “Time of Mating”, do men and women come together, in pairs matched by the “Council of Eugenics”. It is not then, but earlier, on the City’s limits one work day, that Equality 7-2521 meets Liberty 5-3000. He falls in love with her, committing “the great Transgression of Preference”. He calls her—they call them—”The Golden One”.

This love of his, combined with his independent thinking, eventually forces Equality 7-2521 to flee the City for the Uncharted Forest. The Golden One joins him there. Far from dying in the forest, as he had expected, they find pastoral relief from the oppression of their urban lives. Better yet, they come upon an abandoned house in mountains beyond the forest and they find happiness. They find it because of books left in that house, relics from the ancient times before the “Great Rebirth”. Equality 7-2521 begins to read and he comes upon a word, a concept, a philosophy, that gives expression to all the confused mental yearning he has been going through, the word “I”.

That discovery—it is revealed on page 108 in the edition I am sending you, fifteen pages before the end of the book, the very beginning of chapter 11, starting with the words “I am. I think. I will.”—is where Anthem goes to pot. The point of Ayn Rand’s fiction, as I’m sure you will have seized, is a critique of collectivism, typified at its most terrible by the horrors of communism under Stalin in Russia, the country of Rand’s birth (she became an American citizen in 1931). And there, the reader, certainly this reader, is with her. Bloodthirsty dictatorships are repulsive to every sane human being. But Ayn Rand makes two mistakes in her allegory of life in the Soviet Union. First, she sees only the worst in collectivism, throwing out wholesale the good with the bad. To her, the Gulag and socialized healthcare, for example, were instances of one and the same evil. Second, in rejecting Stalin and his damnable system, she goes to an absurd opposite libertarian extreme. Rand posited that humanity would be happiest if we lived as autarkic individuals, beholden to no one, unbounded, unfettered, free, free, free. The virtue of selfishness, that’s what Ayn Rand is all about. It’s even the title of one of her books. No wonder Rand appeals mostly to two disparate groups of readers: adolescents in the throes of carving out their individuality, and right-wing American capitalists bent on making and keeping too much money.

Back to the novel. Equality 7-2521, on page 108, has bust free thanks to the word “I”. What follows is an orgy of I-ism, of me, me, me, mine, mine, mine:

My hands…My spirit…My sky…My forest…This earth of mine…

You know you’re in trouble when someone claims to own the sky. As much as Equality 7-2521 was appealing when he was oppressed, once he is free he becomes annoying, pretentious, repelling. While his strange speech in the City—we this, we that—came off as noble and incantatory, his free speech in the mountains is dull and pompous. The struggling hero whom we cheered on has become just another self-righteous, domineering male who thinks he knows everything. We sympathized with his plight, but now we shudder at his solution:

I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. … Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. … I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. … And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

“I.”

You are a religious man, Mr. Harper. You will know that the essence of every religion, of every god, is precisely the opposite of what Ayn Rand is speechifying about: God is about the abandonment of the self, not its exaltation. But that is an aside, a minor point. The main problem with Rand’s libertarianism, this über-Nietzschean cult of the heroic individual standing on a mountaintop, is that it makes not only society unworkable, but even simple relations. An example jumps out in Rand’s own novel. Equality 7-2521, now drunk with his own uniqueness, has naturally tired of his name. He says to the Golden One:

“I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus.”

Prometheus, the nice guy formerly known as Equality 7-2521, goes on:

“And I have read of a goddess who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.”

What if Golden One rather fancied herself as a Lynette or a Bobbie-Jean? Who is this Prometheus to tell her what her name should be? And what if she doesn’t want to be the mother of a screaming gaggle of kids? What if one child will do, and a girl if possible, thank you very much?

But, headstrong as Liberty 5-3000 seemed to be in the City, as Gaea she is passive and submissive, doing as she is told, because nothing and no one should get in the way of Ayn Rand’s romantic Superman, especially not his woman.

And what does Prometheus intend to do with his newfound freedom? He’ll raid the City for “chosen friends” and conquer the world!

Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort. … And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

Well, what does he want, does he want to be free and unfettered or a bustling capital?

The novel ends, with trumpeting triumphalism, as follows:

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. … The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

EGO

Just the kind of neighbour we all want, the loud, overbearing oaf with the poor, mousy wife who has the word EGO carved over his door.

That is the paradox and failure of Ayn Rand’s vision. Her response to the excesses of collectivism is an excessive and simplistic egoism. The more realistic challenge in life is to be oneself amidst others, to heed one’s own needs and at the same time satisfy the demands of one’s community. It is not easy. Life, and not only politics, is the art of compromise.

That push and pull between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collectivity is at the heart of an election. If every voter votes strictly according to self-interest, then the collectivity, the nation, will be riven by discord and divisions and will risk falling apart. But if the collective We is overfed, then its constituent elements are starved. Every politician, and you first and foremost, Mr. Harper, must balance personal interest with what is good for the nation. If you divide and conquer too much, if you heed too little, then the country will suffer, as will your reputation in history. Enlightened statesmanship is required by all, both voters and politicians. But that’s a risky sell, isn’t it, trying to peddle a better future to voters worried about their immediate present? The best is demanded of all of us. I can only hope we will get it.

Since we have an election on our hands, let me make my personal appeal. Don’t worry, it won’t cost anything. I won’t bay about arts funding or the centrality of art in our lives or even, more cravenly, about the profitability of the arts industry in Canada (what was the sum I read recently, $47 billion in 2007 alone, more than the profits from the mining industry? Not that I buy that argument. The essential is inherently profitable, existentially. The individual who is artless is poor, no matter how much money he or she may have). No, I only want to give you for free an idea, the following:

What if a reading list were established for prospective prime ministers of Canada, to ensure that they have sufficient imaginative depth to be at the helm of our country? After all, we expect a prime minister to have a fair knowledge of the history and geography of Canada, to know something about economics and public administration, about current events and foreign affairs, the financial assets of a prime minister are accountable to us, so why shouldn’t his or her imaginative assets also be accountable?

Because that has been the whole point of our literary duet, hasn’t it? If you haven’t read, now or earlier, any of the books I have suggested, or books like them, if you haven’t read The Death of Ivan Ilych or any other Russian novel, if you haven’t read Miss Julia or any other Scandinavian play, if you haven’t read Metamorphosis or any other German-language novel, if you haven’t read Waiting for Godot or To the Lighthouse or any other experimental play or novel, if you haven’t read Artists and Models or any other erotica, if you haven’t read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or The Educated Imagination or any other philosophical inquiry, if you haven’t read Under Milk Wood or any other poetic prose, if you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Drown or any other American novel, if you haven’t read The Cellist of Sarajevo or The Island Means Minago or The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—then what is your mind made of? What materials went into the building of the dreams you have for our country? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of your imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask, but once someone has power over me, then, yes, I do have the right to probe your imagination, because your dreams may become my nightmares.

This Prime Minister’s Reading List could be administered by the Speaker of the House of Commons, an impartial figure, perhaps benefiting from recommendations not only from Members of Parliament but from all Canadian citizens. It would be a hard list to set up, that’s for sure. How to represent concisely all that the written word has done, here and abroad, in English and French and other languages? The Prime Minister’s Reading List couldn’t be too long; we wouldn’t want you sitting around reading novels your whole mandate. And it would be subject to regular updates, of course, to reflect changing times and tastes. How to implement the list would be another challenge. Would it be a yearly reading list, or just one at the beginning of each term? And how to check that you’ve actually read the books and not had an assistant summarize them for you? Would you have to write an exam, pen an essay, face a committee, answer questions during a Question Period exclusively devoted to the matter?

“I have no time for this nonsense,” you might feel like shouting. But as I said to you in my very first letter, there is a space next to every bed where a book can be lying in wait. And I ask you again: what is your mind made of?

So, would that be an idea, to set up a Prime Minister’s Reading List? What is your position on this vital issue?

I await your answer.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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