Longing for Something Sacred

On Rumaan Alam's 'Entitlement'

Salvador Dalí, After the Head of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1982, Oil on canvas

In his seminal 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the American historian Christopher Lasch warned of the increasing normalization of pathological narcissism. Though he was hailed as a “biblical prophet” by Time magazine, his was far from a purely moralistic diatribe. Rather, he aimed to demonstrate that this anxious focus on the self was primarily a psychological condition more so than a mere moral failure, arising from certain sociological factors tied to the expansion of neoliberal economic policies. Lasch — formed by the material approach of the “Old Left” — pointed to the impact that over-bureaucratization and the decline of institutions that banked on mutual responsibility, respect, and the forging of thick social bonds had on our collective psyche.

His Freudian background drew his attention to the effect that familial dysfunction — especially the distortion of dynamics between men and women — had on social realities, which other theorists of his ilk were less inclined to pick up on. While dedicating much writing to the effects of the decline of the role of the father and the bureaucratic paternalism that took its place, Lasch also considers the effects of the doting mother who, seeing “the child as an extension of herself, lavishes attentions on her child that are ‘awkwardly out of touch’ with his need,” thereby encouraging “an exaggerated sense of his own importance.” The resultant lapse in the child’s superego — his capacity to discern and adhere to limits — makes it difficult for him to maintain “boundaries between the self and the world of objects,” gives rise to “delusions of omnipotence” and magical thinking, and disposes him to oscillate between yearning to win the approval of others and to gratify his own base instincts. This collapse of the child’s sense of objectivity and his skewed sense of the real traps him in a bewilderingly solipsistic state.

It shouldn’t be surprising that many have highlighted the relevance of Lasch’s work to the millennial generation. Yet unlike Lasch, few have managed to offer a critique of millennials’ self-centeredness that doesn’t fall into overt moral censuring — few except for Rumaan Alam, whose latest novel Entitlement is an insightful, generous, and humorous exploration of millennials’ struggle with “adulting” and embracing living in a world that fails to conform to our whims.

The novel features 33-year-old Brooke Orr, who has recently been hired to work for billionaire Asher Jaffee’s new philanthropic initiative, the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, having given up on teaching at a charter school in the Bronx. Like many other starry-eyed people her age, Brooke is driven by her desire to make the world a better place. Yet her noble intentions keep running up against the messiness of the real world and of human nature — namely her own.

It was this desire that first drew her to teach at Endeavor Charter School. But she eventually found her passion stifled by the school’s focus on boosting test scores and preparing students for lucrative career paths. “The school only cared about STEM. Coding and that kind of thing . . . . But what about their souls?” As a teacher, Brooke prides herself on her grand ideas: “No, her kids had not excelled at the regular tests. But Brooke was not without ideas! . . . She had something she believed in.” She takes her students on museum visits and other creative outings. But her requests for more funding for the arts curriculum are rejected, which discourages her — that, and the fact that she isn’t such a great teacher. But when she quits, “rather than blame herself, Brooke finds a scapegoat in that old standby: the system. ‘Maybe it’s bureaucracy. It wears you down. You can’t teach like that, you need to feel — it has to be a calling, I think.’”

After a brief stint selling high-end yarn, Brooke moves on to work for Jaffee, bringing her lofty ideals with her — which catches the attention of the boss. “You’re an ideas woman,” Jaffee tells her during a one-on-one lunch outing, where she proceeds to pitch him the idea to invest in a nearby Black-owned community arts program in Brooklyn — a prospect she tries to convince him would be much more impactful than his previous investment in oysters to clean New York’s water supply. After more flattering comments about her altruistic proclivities, Jaffee grants her permission to move forward with the idea. Brooke, elated, gets to work.

The only problem is that Ghalyela, the elderly Black woman who built the Throop Community School from scratch and runs it with a meager budget and a heart full of passion, is not interested in receiving “help.” “You come here and tell me that I must need something. But, sister, I did not ask you here. And I did not tell you we were in need.” She goes on to ask Brooke what the catch would be, pointing out that such “help” always “comes at a cost.” After much prodding and insisting, Brooke convinces Ghalyela to accept the donation, only for her bubble to be burst upon discovering Jaffee’s donation was a small fraction of what she had promised Ghalyela — and that his attraction to her was not purely to her “ideas.” She soon discovers that Jaffee’s moral conscience was not as pristine as she thought it was — that his “sacred” mission to give back to the community was tainted by alleged “complications” and “obstacles” — nor was her own.

But her solipsistic relationship with reality inclines her to justify her morally lax behaviors, ranging from skipping a relative’s funeral and flirting with the boss to using the company card for personal expenses:

“We agree to rules. Most of us. There are some, though, you know, who do not obey, who are not asked to observe them. There are those who are lucky, who are — what's the word? It’s blessed. There are those who are blessed. There are those who do not live among the rest of us. You might say, even, that they distract the rest of us with their rules, their decrees, their standards . . . I’m not interested in standards anymore . . . I never agreed to these terms. That my existence, my happiness, my future, my — I don’t even know what the right noun is — would be determined by math, independent of my input, not taking into account anything of interest. What if I’m good? What if I am a good person? Can a number show you that, and can we answer why it can’t?” She could hear how she sounded. She did not care. “I am a good person. That is the answer, one answer, to a question that no one is asking because it’s irrelevant.” She demanded it. A better way. A bit of grace. Dispensation. She deserved it, but that didn't matter, either. Brooke demanded it!

In the words of the late Italian theologian Luigi Giussani, the essence of love for one’s neighbor is not to “fix” or “revolutionize their situation,” but rather to “share life” with them. Brooke struggles to embrace the fact that doing good in the world requires more than just noble intentions. As Ghalyela demonstrates, it requires commitment, getting one’s hands dirty taking care of the nuts and bolts of an operation, and ultimately love — a desire to “stay with” the people and the reality in front of you, rather than to “fix” an imagined need — which is part of the reason she is so baffled by Ghalyela’s skepticism.

Much like Lasch, Alam attributes Brooke’s “delusion” and “derangement” to particular socioeconomic factors specific to the Obama era, namely elite overproduction and the cost of housing. “That tradition of looking for security,” says Alam in an interview, “at this point in American life, is delusional. The only way to write about it is as a mania.”

In Brooke’s own words:

Things used to be different, you know. Higher wages. Cheaper education. Cheaper everything. Greatest Generation because it was the Great Society and everything was underwritten. You married a man with a job and he stayed at the same company for half a century and retired with a pension. That was life! I have every advantage you can. I have cash in the bank, I have health and education, it doesn't matter. The cost of things makes no sense. Value is determined by rooms full of guys trading things. It’s abstract. We used to say the American dream was a home, but now a home is just some weird commodity. We said that so much that we believe there's some moral advantage to it. Owning a house. Owning a thing.

In a world where nothing is sacred, anything can be sacred, if you want it to be. Owning things, Brooke continues, doesn’t necessarily “make you a better person or a person at all. We are people.” If there was no ethical superiority in being rich, what was the problem in asking for money? “I can’t stop myself wanting things.” Her moral permissiveness, and ultimately her dissociation from reality and the limits it imposes on her, is directly correlated to the senseless rules of the neoliberal market. While Alam calls Brooke “delusional” and “deranged,” he suggests that “maybe derangement is the most logical response to the conditions of contemporary life.”

Brooke’s derangement is perhaps most poignant when it comes to her attitude toward work. She is disillusioned upon realizing that teaching requires the acquisition of real skills, alongside lofty ideals. Luckily for her, her success within the Jaffee Foundation banks less on her skills and work ethic than on her ability to impress the boss with her charm.

“In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself,” writes Lasch, “the good opinion of friends and neighbors, which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments.” Ghalyela’s old-school work ethic, her attention to and passion for every little detail of the job — from which she derives her sense of dignity — seems archaic compared to youngsters like Brooke who “seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes” in order to climb the corporate ladder, wishing “to be not so much esteemed as admired” and “to be envied rather than respected.”

Philosopher Matthew B. Crawford captures this juxtaposition quite well in an assessment of his experience working for a think-tank as compared to working at a mechanic shop: “Working in an office, it’s often difficult to see any tangible results from your actions . . . . The chain of cause and effect can become opaque and confusing so that that experience of individual agency becomes elusive.” Abstract office work, compared to “the job site” — which requires the worker to engage with reality as it is, to conform herself to its limits and demands, rather than to make demands of it — “can be a fairly paranoid place.” When you can’t “appeal to concrete standards,” you are “never quite sure where you stand — everything’s open to interpretation. What you have to spend quite a bit of your time doing as a manager is managing what others think of you.”

After being mistaken as a cocktail waitress at one of Jaffee’s events (and rolling with it), Brooke catches a glimpse of the “exhilaration” and “freedom” born of mastering a skill that forces you to be in tune with the world beyond the confines of your mind. While running back and forth to the kitchen to deliver orders, she tastes — if only for a moment — the “joy” of no longer being “a person, with her stupid needs, her small problems . . . .”

Alam’s masterfully subtle humor puts him in the ranks of Christopher Beha and other satirical novelists who capture the follies and existential dramas of New York City’s elite. He has a knack for being hilarious without trying too hard, and for chiding the well-to-do while also affording them some grace, highlighting that beneath all the pretension and artifice is a heart. And his disregard for PC orthodoxies — playfully poking fun at stereotypes — is oblique enough to avoid falling into the crass anti-wokeness characteristic of recent “heterodox” fiction.

In the face of our unruly market economy, the soul-sucking effect of bureaucratic office work, and the bewildering solipsism these engender, Crawford posits that there is a way out of it all: “affection for the world as it is.” Perhaps the greatest virtue of the novel is that the satirical humor, rather than being nihilistic or self-indulgent, is full of hope — insofar as it functions to raise a question. Characters like Ghalyela — and Brooke during her brief stint as a cocktail waitress — hint at a potential answer, one which would seem to coincide with Crawford’s. The fact that people like Brooke still have utopian aspirations and a longing for “something sacred” — despite getting mangled by the rootless, abstract ethos of our day — is itself a reason to keep hope alive.

Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the

Cracks in Postmodernity

blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.