So her anarchists, confronting theory rather than facts, come over as nice, reasonable, and fairly boring. They behave like middle-class middle-brows, except that they are scrupulously horrified at the idea of property. (One of the book's assets lies in reassuring the middle-brow reader that revolutions will let him feel moral and yet comfortable. Everyone, after all, believes himself capable of overcoming his own greed and being a nice guy.) The conspicuous villains of the book are a physicist who steals Shevek's work, and of course lots of pseudo-American capitalists on Urras.
But not quite. As Delany pointed out in his essay, she treats the homosexual Bedap with an unconscious condescension. It is clear that Bedap should reform himself—stop being gay—because it does not fit in with the Utopia she is constructing in her head. Which in turn intersects with the reactionary utopist's dislike of cultural diversity. Homosexuals cannot be eliminated from human society (without genetic engineering at least); they are a fact impossible to ignore, but clearly their presence troubles LeGuin's blueprints.
In her world, a quiet talk over herbal tea will surely fix matters up. A romantic, she ignores the problem of evil. In LeGuin's land, crowds watching a potential suicide on a window ledge never shout "Jump!" Averting her gaze from the 20th century, she sees evil people as those unfortunates who have not been given sufficient chance to be good.
The real question here is not the use of violence—which is, in LeGuin's work, an invariable sign of Wrongness—but rather, is moral order compatible with human diversity? Her answer is clear: her societies should opt for the age-old solution known to the Pharaohs—moral authoritarianism. Even in the dystopian future America of her novelette, "The New Atlantis," dissidents retreat into classical music and romantic humanism as a counter to the oppressive state. Old world values can, perhaps, redeem us.
Active thwarting of violence is not allowed, though. LeGuin labels her Utopia as ambiguous, clearly knows something is wrong, but does not confront the deep problems. Rather than think through the hidden assumptions of Anarres, Shevek returns to pursue his own moral self-realization. Perhaps he, too, will become a martyr, like Odo—and thus engender more guilt, more attendant control.
Looking Backward
But why are utopists so often reactionary? Obviously, some underlying aspects of LeGuin's thought come from the failures of European Utopian theory. But there's more to it than that.
While there is much in reactionary Utopias we should scorn, I think we should properly look at The Dispossessed and some more obviously feminist Utopias as responses to earlier, more mechanistic and masculine Utopias. (As examples of novels which clearly are such reactions, see Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Joanna Russ's The Female Man.) They depict communal societies with pleasant characteristics: relative lack of government, ecologically virtuous, with diffusion of parenting, freedom of movement, sexual freedom, and no crime.
Women's Utopias often use the family as a model for social structure, but it's "the unowned, non-patriarchal family, headed by nobody."[4] This, with their classlessness, makes them seem like fantasies about how families ought to be (and seldom are).
If masculine Utopias fret over the means of production, feminist ones are bothered by the means of reproduction. They uncouple sex from power. But this is not enough to provide social ordering.
Perhaps it is natural for women to extend the family as a model, since they have not so often experienced society as a focus of conflicting forces. When dreaming of the future, we all tend to take the most pleasant areas of our lives and puff them up into metaphors for better societies.
It isn't surprising, then, that the problem of control doesn't rear its vexing head in such Utopias, and the principal problem seems to be work assignments (who's going to do the dishes?). I recall Lenin's famous remark as he took over the government, little anticipating how hard it would be. He said, "A baker can run the state," and proceeded with a lot of half-baked approaches. In the end, Stalin came along to crack heads and force-march Russia into the future.
In most feminist Utopias, no trace remains of general competitiveness and the desire to be better than others. Somehow, they have been laundered from the human psyche. (Interestingly, few support this by asserting that women are inherently better—that is, uncompetitive. The idea seems to be that men have merely taken a wrong turn lately.)
There is no doubt which authority figure is to set the house rules, as Joanna Russ's choice of words signifies: "Careful inspection of the manless societies usually reveals the intention (or wish) to allow men in . . . if only they can be trusted to behave."[5] If you don't, presumably you are sent to your room, i.e., exiled—unless it's James Tiptree's (Raccoona Sheldon's) Utopia in "Houston, Houston, Do you Read?", where you'll be killed with minimal regrets. In no case should divisive ideas or surging hormones be allowed to thwart the communal good. Unsurprisingly, the authority figure is the only fallback enforcer in such worlds. The problem of control is simply neglected.
These feminist Utopias are primarily reactive, responding to perceived masculine evils. The qualities they long for—stronger communal feeling, harmony with the natural world, violence only if it expresses anger in limited ways or in self-defense, good country vs. bad city (where the streets are unsafe)—reflect current needs. But by concentrating on these concerns they run the risk of forsaking the gains of the present, and becoming reactionary because they cannot imagine new ways to organize a community.
Freedom to do as we please, so long as we all agree with each other and remain in a state of harmony with the cosmos, is no freedom at all. It is little better than a religion in which faith in a deity has been replaced by faith in some supposed truths of the human spirit. It is a single-party system that is as superficially benign, yet as subtly authoritarian, as Disneyland.
Why does much Utopian thought tend in this direction? The central difficulty confronting social planners is just that contained in the name—they must plan, and so must fear the wild card, the diverse, the self-regulating. History provides methods for governing errant wild spirits, so a planner looks longingly backward for models. Few peer ahead to landscapes where men and women have more freedom, can interact swiftly and chaotically yet with good result.
Some SF authors have seen this. Norman Spinrad's depictions of electronic democracy, from Bug Jack Barron onward, are deliberately saturated with lust for power and sharp contradictions. Frederik Pohl has meditated throughout a long career on these problems, notably in the recent The Years of the City, which abounds in Utopian visions threaded with practical lore.
And what about looking at such older (more apparently "right-wing") Utopian novels such as Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty? I suspect they'll prove to be rather more enlightened than some recent chic visions.
It seems to me that reactionary facets spring in part from lack of imagination. Feminists, searching for ways to revise our society, fall upon analogies with the family, even if these do not provide solutions to the genuine problems of a diverse, urban, cantankerous world.
Instead, utopists long for sweeping simplicities. The supremacy of communal values, the need to suppress the individual, the fear of diversity or of science, the longing for a respite from change—these find many echoes in socialist thinking, in Third World societies, in all those who look hopefully forward to a restful era when we could, thank God, sleep off the binge known as modern times.
References
1. "In a World of Her Own," Mother Jones, January 1984.
2. Sheila Finch, Science Fiction Review, December, 1985.
3. Samuel R. Delany, "To Read The Dispossessed," The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Berkley, New York, 1977.
4. Joanna Russ, "Recent Feminist Fictions," in Future Females, Bowling Popular Press, 1981.
5. Ibid.
Editor's Introduction To:
These Shall Not Be Lost
E. B. Cole
John W. Ca
mpbell, Jr. had his own notions of Utopia: a world in which social science worked. He had no doubt that we would some day have scientific penology and sociology.
Campbell paid lip service to cultural relativism, but in fact, he was pretty sure what the Good Society would look like. The original Campbell blurb to this story was:
"No one man—no one race—no one culture—can think up all the ideas that might be possible. So, for the Philosophical Corps, no culture should be wholly lost . . ."
Which was all very well, but just as Indiana Jones's blatant pot-hunting horrifies genuine archaeologists, real anthropologists aren't likely to approve of the Philosophical Corps, which has no compunctions about changing cultures it doesn't like.
It's a real dilemma, of course. A society that really believes that everything is relative is a society that won't have any defenders. People don't get killed for a standard of living. If you can't tell why your culture is better than your enemy's, you won't last long.
The relativistic dilemma haunts Nomenklatura who own the Soviet Union. Of course, they don't want the average Soviet citizen to think that the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are in any way moral equals, which is why all the propaganda, and why World War II is to this day known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. For that matter, it's why the Red Army's name got changed to "Army of the Soviet Union."
If you don't think you're right, you have little to fight for. On the other hand, a society that can't admit it's wrong will soon turn to persecutions of another kind. It's a moot point which is worse—to fall into the hands of the True Believer or the cynical Nomenklatura. Neither one believes in the Rule of Law, and without law, neither republic nor empire is endurable.
These Shall Not Be Lost
E. B. COLE
Exploratory Cruiser Calimunda, No. 4735
107-463-578
From: Commanding Officer
To: Office of the Chief Explorer
Subject: Preliminary Report, Planet No. 5, Sun G3-4/572 GSC
1. The subject planet is one of fourteen in a system with a rather large G3 sun. Reports will be submitted at a later date on two other inhabited planets in this system.
2. Enclosures include Chemical, Geophysical, Biological and Ethnic reports in accordance with SGR 45-938.
A brief summary follows:
a. Chemical: Subject planet has an oxygen-nitrogen envelope, with traces of other gases. Water vapor varies in its partial pressure over a medium range, with local exceptions. Presence in varying quantity of all natural elements was noted in the planetary crust and in the seas. No trace was found of artificial elements, their resultants or products.
b. Geophysical: Two major land masses were noted. These form large polar caps, extending well toward the equator, but are so broken up by seas as to form several subdivisions. Some islands exist in the equatorial seas, but none of these can be considered as important land masses. The planet has both rotation and revolution, with a slight axial perturbation. No satellite exists. The seas are tideless. The land temperatures range from approximately 230° to 395° absolute. Atmospheric pressure is 0.9 bars, mean, at sea level and gravitation is 960. Atmospheric turbulence is moderate. Precipitation is light over most of the planet. Some comparatively large areas ashore appear to have virtually none.
c. Biological: All life forms noted were on the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen cycle.
Vegetable life was found to be reasonably prolific, stationary in type, and relatively uncomplicated in structure, though taking numerous forms. Life cycles were variable, being virtually ephemeral in some cases and of medium duration in some of the larger vegetation observed.
Animal life proved to be varied, running from simple to complex in structure. Both warm and cold-blooded forms were observed in virtually all areas investigated, existing both at sea and shore. All animal life cycles, including that of the dominant species, were of short or extremely short duration.
d. Ethnic: The dominant form of life is humanoid, type 6.4151. Skin pigmentation is variable. Some inter-mixing of pigmentation groups was noted, but in the main, each group has its own area.
Civilization groups were observed in four areas. Civilization level was quite primitive, being on the imperial threshold. Centers of civilization were in the planetary semitropical bands in both hemispheres, with territorial extensions well into the temperate areas.
In general, the civilizations observed are in the first stages of development. No mechanical means are used for power sources. Slave or animal labor is used in all phases of activity. Media of exchange are in existence, but no co-ordinated system of banking was discovered. Among the ruling classes, knowledge of mechanics or computational mathematics is unfashionable. Chief avocations appear to be literature, music, martial exercises and a sort of philosophy unsupported by research.
3. Recommendations:
It is believed that this planet is presently in a stasis, or approaching a stasis which may prevent further progress for several periods, and even cause lost ground unless assistance is given. Recommendation is therefore made that this planet be referred to the Philosophical Corps for further action.
Hel Guran
Comdr, ExpC
Commanding
3 Enclosures:
1. Chemical Survey, Form EC-107
2. Geophysical Survey, Form EC-232
3. Ethnic Survey, Form EC-296
Informal Report
From: OIC, Team 6
To: Commanding Officer, 7342 Philosophical Group
Subject: Initial check, Planet 5, Sun G3-4/572 GSC
1. Team six has set up a base on an island at coordinates 220.4070-302.0050. Pursuant to orders, observers have been sent to the four civilizations noted. Transcripts of observer reports are enclosed herewith.
2. As can be seen from the observer reports, the civilization centered at 523.4060-220.0060 is the probable dominant. Of the rest, one is so completely in stasis as to require long attention; the other two are so thoroughly lacking in desirable factors and so tainted with inherent weakness as to be inconsiderable.
The dominant is presently subject to powerful stresses, both external and internal. Complete collapse is probable within a period or less, and it is believed that this collapse would be impractical to forestall, due to the large number of unassimilated savage and semisavage tribes in close proximity to the Imperial borders, as well as to the serious internal faults. In any event, desirability of complete preservation is open to question. Among the internal stresses will be noted a strong trend toward insensate cruelty, sufficient to destroy most cultures. A long history of corruption in government and trade is also noted. On the other hand, governmental and legal structure are excellent, cultural level is good, and the arts and sciences are satisfactorily advanced. These should not be lost.
3. It is recommended that operators be sent in with a view to isolation and retention of worthwhile institutions and knowledge during the period of extreme uncertainty which will follow the collapse of the Empire. Provision should be made for possible deposit of further knowledge useful to the planet's future.
Jon Dall
Capt. PhC
OIC, Team 6
4 Enclosures
Observer Reports
7342 Philosophical Group
Office of the Commanding Officer
579.0352
From: Commanding Officer, 7342 Philosophical Group
To: OIC, Team 6
Subject: Operation No. 705
1. Informal report received and noted. The reports have been reviewed and forwarded. Recommendation is hereby approved and operation is designated as number seven hundred five.
2. Operation will be organized to conform with SGR 10-351 and Handbook PH-205. Control observers without recall will be sent in advance. These will act as foci in case modification of standard procedure is necessary, and may be used as operation assistants. Discretion is granted.
Coatl Myxlr
Col. PhC
Commanding
In town, a man walked by the houses. Unobtrusively, he opened a door and entered. Soon, another came to the same door. Another came, then others.
Inside, Master Operations Technician Marc D'lun glanced around at the group.
"Well, gentlemen," he greeted them, "I see you have all arrived. Are your integrations complete?"
One of the men nodded.
"Yes, they are," he announced. "I am now the tent-maker, Kono Meru. The records indicate that I am thirty years old. I was born in a nomad camp out in the hills, and am now an orphan." He pointed at another man. "Xler, there, is an itinerant woodcutter, named Kloru Mino. He's twenty-six. Both parents were pretty old. They died a couple of years ago. The rest of the section are nomads, herders, artisans, and so on. Records are all straight. We all have a number of acquaintances, but no close friends or relatives."
Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Page 18
