In her
introduction to the 1976 reissue of her book,
The Left Hand of Darkness,
Ursula K. Le Guin denies that she, or most SF authors, are into
prediction: "Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and
futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's
business is lying." Le Guin, though, thinks novels particularly and
fiction generally can earn their keep because, paradoxically, fictions
are not just complex and convoluted lies but also thought experiments
that can tell us important truths about current society and may be
useful, on occasion, in thinking about truths for the future.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., approached the issue with the metaphor and image
of artists as canaries: "I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the
arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the
canary in the
coalmine theory of
the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because
they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like
canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that
there is any danger whatsoever."
Science fiction isn't
very good at prediction because, as Le Guin notes, it's into
extrapolating current trends — and history indeed consists of the
continuation of most current trends, but also the occasional weirdo
change, frequently (and ironically here), a scientific and/or
technological change that changes a lot.
So every now and
then I praise some SF that has been kind of good at predicting and very
good at the canary-in-the-coal-mine job and warning of increasing
dangers. The occasion for beginning to write this essay was my listening
to Kim Stanley Robinson's
Forty Signs of Rain (2004),
which kills off a flock of canaries warning about global climate
change. Still, this time around I want to return to four classic
dystopias — and I'll allude to a couple more works — and an anti-utopia;
two of these stories you've probably heard of, the rest maybe not.
Okay, for the more pedantically inclined, a brief justification of
differentiating "dystopia" and "anti-utopia": If a eutopia is a story
about a Good Place (eu-topia), a dystopia is a story about a Bad Place
(dys-topia). Some dystopias may have started out as eutopian projects,
but if so that point isn't stressed, and dystopias are mostly agnostic
about the possibility of eutopia. An anti-utopia is an attack on trying
to set up at least one kind of eutopia and, at an extreme, an attack on
utopianism root and branch (and leaves and stems and seeds). George
Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a dystopia, with no
patience with the idea that Nazi and (more to Orwell's point in the late
1940s) Stalinist thugs are spoiled eutopians: when the novel's
severely-limited protagonist, Winston Smith suggests that the
totalitarian Party of Oceania works for the common good, the Party
official O'Brien cruelly corrects him: "The Party," O'Brien says, after
blasting Smith with excruciating pain, "seeks power entirely for its own
sake. We are not interested in the good of others […]. The German Nazis
and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but
they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They
pretended, perhaps they even believed that they had seized power
unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner lay a
paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like
that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of
relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end" (Part Three,
section 3).
In Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
(1932), however, the Powers that Be emphatically intend remaining in
power, but they know enough to do that by creating a society where
people are thoroughly unfree and controlled and set in a class and
individual place in a rigid hierarchy — and
therefore are
happy: innocents, of a sort, in paradise, this Brave New World ("that
hath such people in it"). Huxley was to go on to write the eutopia
Island (1962), and
Island and
Brave New World should probably be read together as a complementary pair, but
Brave New World is an
anti-utopia.
Anyway,
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Brave New World
are two of the works I want to talk about, and I assume you know them.
(If you do not, stop wasting your time reading my schlock and read them
now; they're in most libraries and on the web.) The others you may not
have heard of: Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We (1920), E. M. Forster's "The
Machine Stops," and Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's
Space Merchants (1952/53).
What
We, Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Brave New World, and
Space Merchants
all get right and what interests me in this part of my essay — who
stole what from whom does not interest me — is privacy in two senses.
First, all these worlds except the Brave New one are worlds of total (
We and
Nineteen Eighty-Four) or large-scale surveillance. In
We,
people live in apartment buildings, and the buildings are made of
transparent glass; spies are common, and, of course, one's friends and
colleagues will be honored if they betray you to the One State. Even
more
of course, in Oceania in 1984, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." In
Space Merchants, there are just microphones and taps on rooms and such.
I have dealt with surveillance fairly frequently, and at the moment of writing this piece (June of 2013), I needn't add my voice; people have been talking a
lot
about surveillance. And, frankly, right about now what I'd have to say
is mostly (pause here for dramatic effect): You know, the three most
beautiful words to hear may be "I Love You"; but among the most
enjoyable to say are "Told You So." All sorts of people have told you
so. Orwell's London of 1984 explicitly prefigures in terms of
surveillance London of the early 21
st century, one of the
most "surveilled" places on Earth outside of a penitentiary or Las Vegas
casino. Certainly, Americans who are shocked — Shocked! — at government
surveillance in 2012-13 just haven't been paying attention: the
National Security Agency has been gearing up for widespread,
computerized-assisted surveillance since at least
1978. And
cheek swabs for DNA testing have been an issue for nearly a
decade, and were central — in decorous satiric exaggeration — to the 1997 film
GATTACA.
But surveillance is just one way to invade privacy, and the great 20
th-century
dystopias showed The Powers That Be invading personal space not just to
get information out but also to get indoctrination in.
Big Brother is not only watching you, he is also drumming in slogans and
boring you to unconsciousness: "Orthodoxy," after all, "means not
thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"(
1984 1.5),
and there ain't nuthin' BB loves more than that orthodoxy! And, of
course, in the Brave New World conditioning starts in the womb-bottle
and continues life-long, though growing more subtle in bodily adulthood.
(The goals of the State include keeping people emotionally
juvenilized.)
We missed the bullet of fanatical
totalitarian indoctrination, but Pohl and Kornbluth extrapolated from
the capitalism and crazes for psychology, marketing, and advertising in
the mid-20
th-century and presented a future world where
personal-space is constantly violated by long TV commercials, intrusive
advertising, and, well, other people. The near-future society of
The Space Merchants
is ruled by ad agencies and others — but especially ad agencies — who
worship The God of Sales. And Sales wants worshippers: the more the
better, the dumber the better, the more passionately consumed by their
role of consumers … the better.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., started out his writing/canary-bird career with
Player Piano
(1952), warning against structural unemployment due to automation of
industry and reminding us that private-enterprise, industrial
bureaucracies are, by God,
bureaucracies; Pohl and Kornbluth
help teach that pervasive advertising and marketing is a form of
propaganda: «Capitalism is good; consumption is good; my general
identity is consumer; my more specific identity is a consumer of
__________ products [fill in name of Agency]. Buy! Buy! Buy! __________
[fill in names of some specific products, but the controlling idea — and
I do mean
controlling — is
Buy].»
In the near-future world of
Space Merchants,
the Agencies, Chamber of Commerce, and big firms generally pretty
directly control the government of the United States, and most of the
rest of the world. In our present, power is more diffuse, which is good —
but a bunch of Little Brothers and Medium-Size Brothers are also a
threat; and minimally regulated markets impinge on us in ways undreamed
of in Orwell's Oceania or even Pohl and Kornbluth's hucksters' utopia in
Space Merchants.
E. M. Forster's "
The Machine Stops" (1909)
is set in a far-future that seems extremely implausible. The opening
sentence of instructs us to "Imagine, if you can, a small room,
hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee." The room is underground,
inside a
world-machine;
and at the center of the room "there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a
woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." In a
very short space in this sentence, Forster brings together some of the
major motifs of 20th-century SF. He gives us a degenerate future
humanity, but more important he places our species underground, inside a
machine, and in an environment explicitly likened to a
hive.
Mechanizing the underworld had been done before, by H. G. Wells in
The Time Machine (1895), and Wells has a sub
lunar world of rather degenerate Selenites (Moon people) in
The First Men in the Moon
(1901); still, to put a whole human civilization underground was
something new and important. Back to the time of myth-making, the
underworld was the realm of "Chaos and Old Night," the womb of the Earth
Mother. It's no less than the complete reversal of an archetype to
mechanize Mamma, and the motif will be familiar to anyone who knows such
SF films as
Metropolis,
THX-1138, or
A Boy and His Dog.
We don't live in a literal machine underground, and we are not bloody
likely to. Forster, though, is known for the brief epigraph, "
Only connect…," and what Foster gets very right is showing us a world of connection and radical lack of connection.
The world of the Machine is highly connected: air and food and data and
ideas are conveyed in to each of the cells and excrement and data and
ideas and scholarship go out. And every now and then one can get new
clothes and stuff, and I'm sure there are entertainment channels we
don't learn about (the point-of-view character consumes and produces
lectures and
Ideas). The Machine connects people, but only
mentally, so to speak — and connects them within the limitations of
high-volume machine-mediated connection. The visuals are a little
degraded, and other communication subtleties are lost.
Nowadays, this may sound like a cliché of a nerd's life in his parent's
basement working the Internet, using his iPhone, and waiting for new
shorts and sandals from Amazon.com. Foster was writing at the beginning
of the 20
th century, and he seems prescient.
Well … maybe.
Le Guin and most SF critics would say what he was doing was telling
lies in the form of an insightful fable, a fable for his time that turns
out highly relevant to ours. The Machine can stand for advanced human
culture, for technology and techniques of social organization: all
useful things but which, taken too far, no longer connect people but
alienate us. The world of the Machine is a world of humans tenuously
connected to one another and radically disconnected from the physical
world and direct experience, disconnected from nature, history, and,
ultimately, disconnected from each other.
Out of touch.
This much is very clear in the story: subtlety is not totally a virtue
in the popular arts. Nuance is, though, and there is one nuanced bit
relevant for
Nineteen Eighty-Four, the late 20
th century, and maybe nowadays, as products of US and Western European higher ed. in the late 20
th century move into positions of authority.
The bit of nuance I'm talking about comes in a paragraph many readers
may skip through quickly because it appears between two major plot
developments. The second is "the reestablishment of religion" as many
people come to worship the Machine (beginning of part III, "The
Homeless"). The first change in the culture is "the abolition of
respirators" so that the people of the Machine, who can no longer
breathe easily the air on the Earth's surface, are now prevented from
leaving the Machine. This was a problem for students of surface things —
the sea, for example — but such scholar/scientists were few and their
activity mildly vulgar. More important, advanced intellectuals of the
time theorize the
rightness of restriction to the Machine.
A lecturer on what we'd call the web, "one of the most advanced of
them" in his thinking, enjoined his audience — we're told he "exclaimed"
the line, "Beware of first-hand ideas! […] First hand ideas do not
really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and
fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let
your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they
will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation."
The lecturer uses for an example his own field. "Do not learn anything
about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I
think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought" — significant name
there,
Urizen,
unimaginative reason and law in William Blake's mythology — learn
instead what "Gutch thought Hu-Yung thought […] Carlyle thought Mirabeau
said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these eight
great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were
broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ
most profitably in your daily lives," although he never says
how
this idea might be employed. What is important is to this advanced
intellectual and to the story is abstraction away from the physical, the
material. "'And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a
generation absolutely colourless, a generation "
seraphically free / From taint of personality," which
will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would
like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken
place in the days of the Machine.'" His conclusion is greeted with
"Tremendous applause," less because of the genius of the speaker and
more that that lecture "did but voice a feeling already latent in the
minds of men — a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored," so
abolition of the respirators and confinement to the Machine "was a
positive gain."
Making fun of cranks is one of the oldest
shticks in satire, but what is mocked here is significant. Parallel to
people's physical alienation from the world and the human body is the
psychological and philosophical alienation of literal Idealism, capital
"I" Idealism of the Platonic/neoPlatonic, religious-fanatic extreme
sort.
Idealism is a perennial philosophy and always out
there, going in and out of fashion. Forster earned his keep as canary in
the coal mine if for nothing else attacking this trend in a popular and
understandable medium — as opposed to, say, most academic philosophy —
in 1908.
Re-reading
Nineteen Eighty-Four in an
English department in 1984 and following, what struck me most forcefully
was the part of "The Grand Inquisitor Scene" — Winston Smith's
interviews with the Party official O'Brien — where O'Brien corrects
Smith's naïve, old-fashioned, empiricist view of the world. Today we
might say that O'Brien makes Smith sane again by getting him again in
love with Big Brother, gradually talking and torturing Smith away from
membership in "
the reality-based community."
Totally cut off from the world, in a torture room in the Ministry of
Love — for all practical purposes, as much a man-made total environment
as Foster's Machine — Smith is taught "that reality is not external.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." And if this is the
case — if reality is what came to be called socially constructed,
literally,
ontologically socially constructed, what then?
I've put it, If reality is created between our ears, it will be
determined by the guy with a gun in our ear. O'Brien more elegantly
clarifies that reality exists "Not in the individual mind, which can
make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the
Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be
truth
is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party" (
1984 3.2).
Well, maybe Foster's warning and Orwell's did
some good, not predicting the future but, in Ray Bradbury's formulation trying "to
prevent it," or
prevent things from being worse. Hitler and Stalin are dead; the Third
Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — "four lies in one
phrase" — are gone; and I can hope that those in power sympathize
strongly with "
The Social Construction of Reality" in terms of world-views, of epistemology, but otherwise are dues-paying members of the reality-based community.
Whatever: if we acted only if certain of the results of our actions, we
wouldn't do much of importance. Speaking out against vice and stupidity
was much of the job of Foster, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and
their generations. As I write, Fred Pohl is still alive — and we'd now
better start working on the warnings of Pohl, and of the team of Pohl
and Kornbluth.
