Age in Anthem Essay

Anthem

Equality-7-2521 states that it is very unusual for men to reach the age of 45. Offer several possible explanations, consistent with the story and its meaning, as to why life expectancy is so short in his society.

The book Anthem takes place in the diary of a young man in the dark ages of the future. The era in which he and his brothers dwell had begun after the Great Rebirth, which was a large change in mans perspective of life which helped the world breakaway from the Unmentionable Times, something which was not considered to be beneficial to humans. The unmentionable times is used to describe a period in time which is very close to the present, and when all men were considered as individuals. The Great Rebirth was the rising of a collective society from the ashes of the individualist one. One of the very ironic things about the Great Rebirth was that meaning the same thing as Renaissance which means to be born again in Latin it bears a completely opposite consequence. The Renaissance was a period of peace and prosperity and more importantly individualism, however in contrast the Great Rebirth in Anthem led to a regression in the human civilization by overpowering the idea of brotherhood.

In the new age, after the Great Rebirth, there is to be nothing in life that is unpredictable, you may not have any preferences towards anything, and you may do only what your brothers do and think only what your brothers think, everything else is a sin. The average life expectancy is only forty as opposed to sixty-five of the world today. By the age forty-five, an age that was a miracle to have reached, a man would be considered ancient one of this age can expect to die any minute. There are many possible explanations as to why the men of this primitive society mature so fast and have such short life-spans.

Ayn Rand writes that there was a large explosion marking the beginning of the Great Rebirth. The Unmentionable Times has about the same technology as there is today. The book states that there were great fires that raged over the lands. And in the fires the evil ones and all the things of the evil ones had perished. Darwins theory of natural selection could apply to this if there was some type of biological warfare and some people survived because they were immune, but at the cost of a shorter life and faster maturing. It is also possible that there were genetic mutations caused by the cataclysm that made the human societies this way.

No man in this book but Equality-7-2521 and the Saint of the Pyre knew any happiness in life and nobody had anything to live for. This community however has nothing to live for except for the superficiality of its brothers. Anybody with any type of love or enjoyment will tend to live longer because they want to live, and find joy in life. That is why the scholars in Anthem, live longer than all others: They enjoy their lives because they have fame and respect, and have more than their brothers to live for. This can be applied to real life too: an average citizen in the seventh-century Middle-East lived for about thirty-five to forty-five years, but a men of the scholarly class lived for about fifty-nine to eighty-eight years, a much longer life span than the others. The Saint of Pyre died an unnatural death but had himself and the correction of humanity by rebellion to live for. Equality-7-2521 had both Liberty-5-3000 and himself to live for, there for, his will live, longer and have a happier life.

Ayn Rand describes a countless number of times a regressing human society, she says that humans disinherited the individualism for their common belief of collectivism. Today, we have a much longer life-span as opposed to the fifth century, there was a longer life-span in the fifth century as opposed to ten-thousand B.C. and so on, this is because there was more technology, we have evolved over time and better adapted, and overall become more civilized and fit to survive on the planet in a peaceful and efficient manner. By showing that a man is of the age forty to forty-five and wrinkled and exhausted to a point where he is unable to move even his lips which is expected only at the age of one-hundred and above shows he has aged much faster than the average human of today. Long ago humans matured at a much faster rate and died earlier as in this book. Ayn Rand is reinforcing the fact that human society is regressing once more after it reached its peak during the unmentionable times, humans are becoming more and more primitive and it is a consistent theme shown many times throughout this book.

There could be many reasons for this incredibly fast aging and what was going on in Ayn Rands mind when she wrote this magnificent book and on these different themes in it. We can only guess what she meant.