"The Dispossessed" and science fiction as a fantasy of political agency
So It Turns Out, #52
Hi,
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week.
"The Dispossessed" and science fiction as a fantasy of political agency
In college, I briefly flirted with Yale’s knockoff of Oxford’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PP&E) major — Ethics, Politics, and Economics (EP&E)1. (I later realized that it blocked me from getting pre-registration access to the good Poli Sci seminars, and switched to Political Science.)2
But while briefly in that major, I did have to take a class called “Classics of Ethics, Politics, and Economics.” And in that class, I had to read Marx’s Capital, Volume I, and then write an essay about it.
My essay was, frankly, a pretty boring argument that, duh, Marx is wrong about the labor theory of value, and that market values are based on exchange and sentiments.3
My professor gave me some of the most useful feedback I ever received. He told me that the paper deserved an A, but he was giving me an A-, because I hadn’t demonstrated that I had learned anything from the experience of reading Marx — I had come away exactly the same opinions I had before.
His criticism was not a reflection of his personal beliefs, or evidence for some sort of conspiracy theory about Marxism in the academy. (Suffice it to say that, ah, this professor has links on his personal web page to sub-pages entitled “Arendt,” “Hobbes,” and “Plato” and their lessons about confronting totalitarianism. A communist, he is very not.) Rather, he was saying that I hadn’t improved my argument at all by coming into contact with someone who believed something very different.
So, the goal of this essay is to avoid repeating that mistake with a book I read recently. I’m sure I disagree with a big chunk of it, but it did teach me some things that I want to share.
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, by Ursula K. Le Guin
It’s hard to explain persuasively in a review format why the book is so compelling. There are, I think, three reasons for that, two that I want to touch on only briefly, and the third that will be the focus of much that follows.
First, it is a work of science fiction, where part of the narrative power comes from experiencing a different way to describe things. The classic example is Robert Heinlein’s, “the door irised open,” to emphasize that doors are circular in the future; Le Guin uses similar literary tricks to demonstrate that the characters on Anarres are literally without possessions — saying things like “You can share the handkerchief I use” instead of, “you can borrow my handkerchief.” This is hard to describe more concisely than just block-quoting huge sections of the book.
Second, it’s a book written in 1974. There are just some things about its politics that were radical for its time, but aren’t as much so any longer, like its themes of feminism, equality of the sexes, and casual acceptance of homosexuality. Similarly, the structural intercutting of two time periods in a novel to demonstrate the themes of the work is just less unusual to fiction lovers raised on this trope.4
But third, and most importantly, the book seeks to demonstrate its themes in an intentionally-equivocating way.
The Dispossessed takes place on a moon, Anarres, settled by the descendants of an anarcho-syndicalist revolution, who fled Urras, a planet-kinda-like-ours around the star Tau Ceti. (As a background detail, the book is set in a broader universe where humans were settled around other stars by a collapsed ancient empire, so we’re supposed to think of them as us, not “Aliens!”)
Our hero, Shevek, is an Anarran physicist trying to develop a general theory that will have a variety of applications; some are for faster-than-light travel, others are for weapons of mass destruction. He believes in the value of reaching out to Urras, and he ultimately travels there to pursue his theories — and perhaps, to spread the philosophy of anarchism — regardless of the consequences. He faces great condemnation and accusations of disloyalty, and it’s never quite clear what motivates him; for such a smart man, he seems almost lacking in agency. He, ultimately, attempts to drive political change but fails at tremendous cost, and returns home, unsure of what he’s truly changed beyond the frontiers of physics.
(Of course, you scarcely need me to tell you this: Shevek is based on Le Guin’s memories of her parents’ close friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer.5)
On Anarres, everything is run by a series of theoretically-non-hierarchical worker’s syndicates, where there is no property, and at least in theory everything is held in common. You can do whatever job you can convince others to be okay with you doing; your home is assigned to you by the local syndicate based on your needs; you eat in a common dining hall; you can go on vacation when you want.6 And, oh yeah, no one gets to kick up their feet in a mansion: at least one day in ten, you have to go do manual labor to keep society functioning. This is a society where when there’s a famine, everyone starves a little. It does, genuinely, seem to have a sort of social solidarity in Le Guin’s account, and many people do seem to flourish in it.
Meanwhile, back on Urras, society is, ah, grim. The allegedly-not-totalitarian state is run by authoritarian aristocrats that ban women from work outside the home, aggressively censor speech, and routinely machine-gun labor unions. Its geopolitical rival, a totalitarian state, is basically North Korea. Both sides see Shevek purely as an instrument, whose insights are valuable purely for their own geopolitical games on Urras, not their importance to understanding the universe or exploring the galaxy. (Urras isn’t a stand-in for America, or capitalism, or whatever. It’s a stand-in for centralized power.)
But Anarres is, at best the “ambiguous utopia” of the subtitle. There’s many things about the consequences of its anarchist blend of voluntarism and communal life that would shock even most far-leftists: parents can abandon children with no consequences; teachers mock students who are too independent-minded; they don’t have jails so they rely on mob violence; and, perhaps most importantly for the philosophical experiment involved, our protagonist the society has the tyranny-of-structurelessness problem, where there is plenty of hierarchy that can ruin your life, it’s just more opaque. And there are famines, there.
In other words: “I’m not sure,” said the comfortable former management consultant, “that I would move there.”
How surprising, David.
Care to play for getting that minus removed from the grading sheet?
So what did I learn about the world from reading this book?
Another great science fiction author, Lois McMaster Bujold, once gave a Guest of Honor speech where she argued:
In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines “win” in romances, the way detectives “win” in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters “win” in adventure tales. But now that I’ve noticed the politics in SF, they seem to be everywhere, like packs of little yapping dogs trying to savage your ankles. Not universally, thank heavens—there are wonderful lyrical books such as The Last Unicorn or other idiosyncratic tales that escape the trend. But certainly in the majority of books, to give the characters significance in the readers’ eyes means to give them political actions, with “military” read here as a sub-set of political.
But unlike many other stories of around its time period, our hero Shevek seems to lack the sort of agency that we’d expect from a Science Fiction hero. He’s almost our passive Virgil, giving us a tour of hell, limbo, and heaven, rather than enacting a cunning plan to change it. He talks big about anarchism, but has no real idea about how to change Urras when he visits it, and no real plan for how to use the leverage of the theory he has in his head to do anything.
The fantasy, I want to suggest, isn’t about him.
The fantasy is that us — the readers — have the ability to avoid becoming people like this:
From: https://twitter.com/charlottecgill/status/1667846464683245569?s=21&t=XqhZxbcE5bMtlz9WPvMpdA
The point of The Dispossessed, I think, isn’t for us to vote on whether possessions are good, or hierarchy is bad7, or any of that stuff. Great college common room fodder, but not what this essay is about.8
The point is to say this: right now, you actually live in a society where you actually have agency. You actually have the ability to decide whether you’re going to be involved in whatever thing matters to you — organizing it, doing it, maintaining it, and occasionally mucking out its stables — and be a part of shaping your community. Or you can choose to become the sort of person who says the real fight is over which low-status group you want to force to do it instead of you, while you sit back and shoulder no moral responsibility for what results.
Which one are you going to choose?
I’m looking for new opportunities; I’ve been especially successful in the past in corporate strategy and consulting roles where I work closely with technical, product and legal experts, and am looking for similar for my next role. I’m open to a range of different industries, but am especially interested in organizations where I can help keep people safe from bad guys, and/or help them get easier access to government services and benefits that they deserve. If you’re aware of an interesting opportunity, I’d love to chat with you and learn more.
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I can only assume that it was very important to the folks who started the major that we not learn epistemology or metaphysics or aesthetics.
Ironically, most Yalies I know who majored in EP&E engage in a lot of epistemic work as lawyers, consultants, etc.
I don’t know how to square that circle, either.
My best friend didn’t; his life’s turned out pretty OK too. Choosing a specific major within a broad cluster of similar majors probably don’t matter that much in the long run.
For the inevitable person who misreads this essay eventually as evidence that I am a communist or something equally insane, may I encourage you to seek remedial English literacy classes.
See, e.g., Cryptonomicon, most Tarantino films, or This Is Us, Class of 09, etc.
Yes, really. At first, this seemed too fitting to be true, but no, it really is, I checked. It’s well-documented, and I even have a friend who heard Le Guin confirm it at a talk before she passed.
The degree to which a huge chunk of science fiction worldbuilding boils down to, “I wish I could go back to college,” is not lost on me.
As my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant would point out, the partisan packages here aren’t the only options on this, historically; subsidiarity is an option in all possible worlds…
Convincing you of my extremely weird blend of beliefs is outside the scope of this essay.