Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
Page 13
The question divorces the reward of virtue from the reality of virtue, at least, in the view of the world where the only reward is the esteem and applause of men. Tan Dalton does what is right, come hellfire or floodwater, and does not flinch at paying the price in terms of esteem lost, prestige ruined, career savaged, character slandered—and he does not get the girl in the end.
The setup of the paradox of seeming rather than being good is simple enough: Dalton is presented with two political parties, a stupid party and an evil party, both of whom have a dumb and cowardly answer to a not-very-complex question, but a question that requires bravery and fortitude to answer. He cannot in good conscience join with either party, and so he is isolated, despised by both, and scorned by all. In other words, he is given for his goodness the exact same reward rightly given to evil men.
One thing that particularly delighted me both as a child and as a man about Dalton’s answer is the pragmatic idealism of it. Pragmatically, it is unwise either to overreact or underreact to the aggression of an ambitious but weaker alien menace. But whether it is unwise or not, it is unfair on idealistic grounds not just to Mankind, but to the Hukk aggressor also, to meet aggression with a reward, because it confuses them into a false picture of the world, one where they can make many small piecemeal attacks with no fear of massive, overwhelming, or, (in this case), genocidal retaliation.
Now surely no one raised in a Christian nation, (even one that is culturally Christian if not officially), is unaware of the answer to the Socratic question. The non-Christians who, for whatever reason, accept Christian value judgments as valid can see in the example of Christ on the cross, or Socrates drinking hemlock, the reward of being good rather than looking good. Until very recently, the picture of a man willing to make any sacrifice to do the right thing, despite any slander or false accusation, was a paramount ideal of our civilization.
The self-aggrandizing hucksterism of a Cassius Clay was not a mainstream ideal, nor was success at any cost, nor did anyone listen to smirking cads who said that winning was not everything, but the only thing.
Even children were taught the ideal of seeking the reward of virtue not in the opinion of the fickle world: Superman is garbed as a drab and mild mannered reporter who cannot even get a date, no worldly reward comes to Clark Kent for his good deeds; Spider-Man is hated as a menace by the city he saves, so if anything, his reward is even less. These are the men upheld, and rightly so, as heroes to our children. Glory Hounds like Booster Gold or Gilderoy Lockheart are rightly portrayed as distasteful, comedic, or villainous.
We are a society that by tradition—Christian tradition—mistrusts those who seek the good opinion of society. How alien this is to the caste system of the Hindu or the Mandarin philosophy of Confucius cannot be overemphasized: in those systems, position in society was identical with virtue. The shame of losing face was the evil, of losing family honor, or getting caught.
On that level, the self-sacrifice of our clean-cut Naval hero in our short adventure novel is nothing extraordinary except perhaps, (as I said), the clean clarity of the point. It is what we Westerners expect. In a happy ending, the merit of the hero is finally rewarded with an overdue recognition, perhaps an apology and a reconciliation. In a tragic ending, the merit of the hero is undiscovered until after his death, if ever.
But, again, the ironic twist of the last four words—“I’ll think about it,”—is that of a man who is not eager to accept the alleged reward his overlooked merit has finally earned.
I call it ironic because Dalton is not a Christian who believes in God, nor even a Socratic philosopher who believes in a transcendent ideal of truth worthy of such self-sacrifice. He is just a competent man trying to do a difficult job made more difficult by the evil and stupidity of his political superiors.
I call it ironic because there is a second note or overtone behind this main note of self-sacrifice, the note of Noir cynicism, of hardheaded pragmatism, of dry-eyed unsentimentality which would seem to undermine the idea of self-sacrifice in any form.
For the author goes out of his way in the opening pages of the book, practically the first scene, to permit Dalton to explain what is meant to be a philosophy so plain and clear that none of the craven shortsighted politicians in the book understand it, nor the politician’s daughter either. Dalton has the following dialog with Arianne, his girl, which is worth reciting at length, because otherwise the point may be lost.
The humans have forced the moron-level natives of the planet Aldo Cerise onto reservations to make room for humanity, which she regrets, but he justifies with these words:
“The human race has reached a point where it has to expand into space. Planet-bound, we’ll choke on our own waste-products… we have to live, and living means growth, and growing means expansion. A single planet cannot hold us, Arianne. We have to go out, or die.”
Heinlein has almost the same argument in almost the same words in his famous and ferociously maligned Starship Troopers. Also, I watched the first episode of Lost In Space with my kids today. I had forgotten that population pressures are expressly the reason that sends the space family, Robinson, to pioneer a new homestead on an inhabitable planet of Alpha Centauri. In these days of underpopulation, looking at the fears of overpopulation always evokes a weary headshake of wonder in me: what made our parents willing to be buffaloed by the likes of Paul Ehrlich?
Hearing this cold doctrine of population pressure leading to war, Arianne wonders:
“Why couldn’t we limit ourselves to totally uninhabited worlds? Why does our advantage have to mean some other race’s disadvantage?”
“You know as well as I that worlds where we can live without artificial environment are rare, and every such world has evolved its own life—is the product of life.”
“Of course. I just wish it were somehow different.”
“So do I—in a way. And in another way, I accept the laws of nature. The fox is a beautiful animal. Without rabbits to live on, it would soon die out. That’s nature. Who are we to decide unilaterally that the order of nature is wrong?”
“So we just go on, perpetuating a dog-eat-dog—or fox-eat-bunny—existence?”
“No—but we have to remember to make the distinction between what’s true and what we wish were true.”
A paragraph later, the conversation resumes. Dalton remarks that the curious urge to take unwise risks is peculiarly human:
“The old primate trait: climbing down out of a nice safe tree to see what it’s like out on the grassland among the lions.”
“Don’t talk about me as if I were an anthropological specimen,” Arianne said.
“But you are, my dear,” Dalton said, “And so am I. That is what we have to keep in mind every time we’re tempted to play God.”
Finally, looking over the colony town of this harsh new world, Arianne wonders at the desperate courage of the first settlers. Dalton comments:
“They did what they had to do. Now the Hukk are doing what they have to do. Our blunder was in not stopping them sooner….”
For a short novel which I have praised several times for being crisp and clear, this is remarkably convoluted and obscure. Dalton seems to be saying that men should avoid overweening pride. Certainly that is not a startling message, and appears in all good stories since Homer. But note what he is dismissing as an act of overweening pride: the act of regarding men as being somehow above nature and in a position to condemn it, namely, to condemn the Darwinian struggle of the fittest to survive.
For Dalton, war is not an evil, or, rather, not an unavoidable evil.
War is just a fact of the business of life, the side-effect of coming, as he puts it, out of the nice safe tree to see what it is like on the grassland. Life is a zero-sum game, so races, in order to survive, must expand and occupy the inhabitable terrain, displacing or exterminating the weaker races as they go, and meeting the expansion attempts of competing races of equal strength with all the terrible ferocity and glory of war
: Which, for some reason too obvious to mention in this dialog quoted here, must be fought bravely and honorably, without tear or trembling to face defeat and death at enemy hands, and without buffoonery, chicanery or even treason at friendly hands.
Dalton accepts this grim business as the laws of nature. To rebuke or refuse these laws is yielding to the unsound or perhaps insane temptation to play God.
This unsentimental, plain, and practical doctrine comes across as brisk and cold as a slap of cold water in the face. Life is what it is, and the hero plays the best hand he can with the bad hand he’s been dealt.
But why not cheat at cards? Without God, or some transcendent standard of behavior, why must one fight the dog-eat-dog dogfight of Darwin with honor and honesty and good sportsmanship? Why not fight like a dog? Absent God, then there is no referee nor umpire to the great game of life, and no one to chide the winners for cheating, or to cast down the proud from their seats, or to declare the meek blessed.
To be sure, there may be angry retaliation from someone you’ve cheated when it comes to a rematch, and had you treated him honestly, you might have befriended him (or at least made a temporary alliance of convenience before turning on him when the odds change). But this consideration only applies to enemies whose retaliation you fear, on onlookers whose opinion influences when and on what side they will fight you when their turn comes. And in the remorseless realpolitik world of Dalton, their turn will always come.
But behold the paradox. If life is a Darwinian struggle with no umpire, fear of retaliation is a reason not for honorable conduct, but for craven conformity and party-loyalty to whatever faction it is more prudent, from a survival standpoint, to join. Fear of retaliation at most is a motive for looking good but never for being good. What pragmatic reason is there for being idealistic?
There are a number of writers who believe in this odd combination of idealistic pragmatism, but none of them to my knowledge can answer this question. To answer would be too idealistic, I suspect.
If like me, Tancredi Dalton’s philosophy reminds markedly you of things said by characters in Robert Heinlein books, or Gordon R. Dickson, or Poul Anderson, or half a dozen others I could name, you may be wondering about the similarity.
Do not wonder. Writers, and the readers who support them, have a large but finite number of philosophical stances, given the current situation of the intellectual and cultural history of the West, about which they can cluster.
Naturally writers less concerned with philosophical coherence can range over a wide set of stances, since such men can contradict themselves more often, but those of average coherence gravitate to a very small number of positions.
The reasons, most importantly their view of man and man’s place in the cosmos, such men give for their conclusions on one issue are more likely to inform their conclusions on other issues, because drawing a distinction or exception as to why their general logic or general worldview does not apply in this case is an extra effort, and introduces an ever greater possibility of self-contradiction. Something like a natural Occam’s Razor operates in all human consciousness, rewarding simpler and clearer explanations over jury-rigs of ad hoc.
Now, you might say that only philosophers are interested in avoiding self-contradiction in their worldview; that everyone else follows the general trend of their times, or repeats the opinions of their parents or of the talking hairstyles on the television.
You would be partly right, but only partly. Philosophers are concerned with rational consistency, the kind of thing one can put into words. Layman are concerned with a consistency of mood or general outlook, a consistency of judgment, the kind of thing one cannot put into words, but by which one lives one’s life.
There is a reason why those who favor high taxes and high minimum wage laws also by and large favor gun control: because both value judgments about the role of property and the role of self-defense are informed by a more fundamental judgment about the civility and independence of man versus the prudence of trusting Caesar, either with gold or with iron.
Not every man who favors high taxes is a gun-grabber: I once met a man who was not. But he had to go to some elaborate explanation, one might say rationalization, to reconcile his view of man as weak and untrustworthy, ergo not to be allowed control of his own money, with his view of man as strong and trustworthy, ergo not to be disallowed control of his own means of self-defense.
Let us therefore map out, in far more detail than any patient reader would care to see, the whole landscape of thought as it exists from now until the end of the world.
Usually the books that have the profoundest effect on us are those encountered in the green youth of early adulthood, in the late teens or early twenties, which provide some schema or structural explanation of the complexities of life young adults so dearly need to orient themselves. In my case, however, there is at least one book I encountered later in life which provided a framework of pellucid clarity for understanding the relation of schools of thought one to another. There is many a student who regards the description in Plato’s Republic of the degrees of the degeneration of the state as just such an epiphany. This was to me what the Republic was to them. It comes from a tract called Nihilism by a man who delights in the name Archmonk Brother Seraphim Rose, albeit he was born Eugene Rose.
Rose’s scheme groups the schools of thought of Western man as he falls away from Christianity into four general categories.
The first school of thought is the classical liberal position of the pragmatic man, which says that religious opinion is a private matter that ought not to disturb the public weal by insisting on any special or central position in life. Instead of God as the source and center and summit of civilized life, or precise theologically defined dogmas addressed to the last nuance, we should have instead a rogue and vague dogma saying only that each man should mind his own business.
In this school, each man is free to seek his own pleasures in his own way, climb to the summit of his ambitions without necessarily stepping on those below him, (but not necessarily giving him a hand either). We all must agree only on general rules of civility and good sportsmanship needed for public order; we need to encourage and obey the civic virtues of teamwork and self-sacrifice where needed to keep the family, the city, and the market free from fraud, trespass, or invasion, and perhaps to curb such gross immorality or bad taste as pollutes the public weal. Each man must show respect for the religious opinions of others without showing uncomely zeal for his own.
In this school, ideals are impractical, because the world is imperfect and cannot be made perfect; but civic virtue and the prudent exercise of liberty and civilized tolerance of the dissent of others, which is their prudent exercise of their liberty, is crucial. A healthy respect for what are called ‘Judeo-Christian Values’ is crucial to the civil order. God is not crucial.
Ironically, this is the Liberal position as classically understood, characterized by Locke and other Enlightenment writers, what would now be called Conservative. That is the diametric opposite of what is now called the Liberal position is a source of confusion.
To avoid confusion, let us call this pragmatic and man-centric school of thought ‘Worldliness.’ The Worldly want to leave heaven alone and tend to business here on earth. They are hard-headed and hard-hearted men, idealistic only for ideals that work, impatient with theory, concerned with results.
The second school of thought is the sharp rebellion against this. Where the Worldly position seeks worldly wealth, civic peace, and the comfort of conformity in opinion, the Radical rebellion seeks Heaven on Earth, Utopian visions made solid, and all pragmatism is rejected as treason against the Great Dream of the Great Cause. Religion and Worldliness are rejected with scorn in favor of Ideology. Ideals are impractical, so this school holds, only because men are weak vessels too selfish to practice them; all the world could be made perfect if only sufficient force was used on weak men by a sufficiently enlightened and despotic Glorious Leader.
In this school, freedom is dismissed as selfishness and sacrificed to the common good or the Great Dream of the Utopian vision. Man lives for his neighbor, or, to be precise, for the Utopian vision. The only rules demanded are those of loyalty to the Great Dream. Civil order is not the paramount value, as disobedience, (either peaceful or violent or ultraviolent), to established hence 'reactionary' civil authority is not just allowed but required. All institutions of the state and church and civil society are to be smashed, or, in the less violent version of the Ideology, subverted, suborned, and subordinated to the Utopian vision. Only the Great Dream merits love, loyalty, respect, honesty, courtesy; only the Great Dream has rights; anyone disloyal to the Great Dream is an enemy. Life is Crusade.
Hatred of God and Man, hatred of Judeo-Christian and indeed all civilized values of any sort, is required in the long run, albeit a pretense of respecting ideals such as compassion for the poor or the equality of man is needed during the initial subversive period, to gain the aid of useful idiots.
Because this school of thought changes its name and its public rationale as frequently as the fashion industry changes the height of skirt hems, and because this school is fundamentally subversive, that is, fundamentally based on an inner circle deceiving the useful idiots of an outer circle who believe the opposite of the movement’s true purpose, no unambiguous name can be assigned these ideologues.