RANT: A FUTURE PAST?

 

The Will to Battle, BOOK THREE of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota science fiction quadrilogy begins with an EPIGRAPH from Thomas Hobbes’ great work of social criticism, Leviathan:

 

“For Warre, consisteth not in Battel onlye, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather.” (Levithan, XIII) 

 

AT ONE POINT, PALMER’S protagonist Mycroft Canner pleas with Sniper and the Graylaw Tully Mardi to use their influence to stave off a wave of violence and insurrection, as the globe teeters on the brink of worldwide war. Here, Mycroft evokes Hobbes and his immutable “timetable”:

 

“Sniper frowned. ‘It’s not war yet.’

‘Yes it is.’ It was I [Mycroft] who answered, or rather Hobbes through me. ‘War is not just battle, but that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest [italics mine] that humankind can no longer trust itself to keep the peace. We are at war.’ ” (Will, 135)

 

 

MYCROFT fears humanity is on the cusp of war, as social orders and political elites, time-honored charters and treaties, modalities of living, both familial and communal, seem ready to fracture and descend into horrific violence and chaos. He strives to prove Hobbes wrong, that the philosopher’s timetable is not immutable and that his theories on the human condition are false (or at least not all-encompassing).

HOBBES, YOU’LL RECALL, FAMOUSLY WROTE that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” AND declared HUMANITY EXISTS in a state of perpetual conflict, in an unrelenting “war of all against all,” and ONLY an all-powerful ruler—a “leviathan”—can save us from ourselves.

 

CHEERY THOUGHTS for an October morning as I watch the leaves fall, each according to its own timetable; one second, part of a canopy of colour rustling in the wind. The next, carried to the ground by those same stirrings of air to pattern the lawn and drive with their vivid yellows and reds. And as the seasons change and as we think of what’s been and what’s to come, it’s passing strange to compare the fictional, future war Palmer envisions with today’s real (and latest) war in Ukraine, with all its rising animosities, shrill accusations, truths laid bare, grievances and political scandals, alongside the best laid plans gone horribly astray, and the lies, damn lies, and statistics sounding from various battlefields, home fronts and moral high grounds like bells of the apocalypse. And also, not to forget, along with the real loss of lives and livelihoods, and all they contained and aspired to.

 

HOW ALIKE OUR TIME SEEMS to Palmer’s fictional one where we, too, appear to wait for the hammer's fall, or whatever metaphor you care to use to talk about the potential for another world war. IN PALMER’S NOVEL, the world has been at peace for over two hundred years. Science and technology have made earth as near to a utopia as we’ll probably ever get. And all it took, seemingly, for that terrible downhill cascade of violence and destruction to begin was a scandal within the leadership of one of the globe-spanning “Hive” societies*, and a revelation that sowed the  seeds of doubt and mistrust for government institutions and social orders throughout the world’s vast population. In that PEACEFUL ERA, so alike yet so distant from our own, the disclosure that one Hive used targeted assassinations [Drones, anyone? Ed.] to keep the global network of hive societies intact had inflamed public opinion and sparked outrage and concern among billions of the earth’s citizens.

TODAY, we barely blink an eye when this or that country is regime changed or a terrorist assassinated.¹ It seems like business as usual, a dirty business, granted, but one most of us accept as necessary. HOWEVER, in Palmer’s future world, such activity shakes the very foundations of what hive members considered to be their founding ethos and their humane, human-centric governance structures. It becomes, as these things often do, a moral as well as a political crisis.

BY USING ADVANCED FORMS of polling and predictive trend analysis, the “Mitsubishi-Greenpeace” Hive leadership determined that the world would experience political instability and violence unless steps were taken to stop certain social movements, organizations, or individuals from maturing or acting. To prevent this from happening, extra-judicial killings of specific individuals were authorized. The scandal revealed that this hidden, “special operations” wing of the government [Hmmm? CIA? Just sayin'. Ed.] had carried out a regime of murder for over two centuries!  Citizens were horrified that their civilization was based on lies and assassinations, even though billions benefited from the deaths of a mere two and a half thousand key individuals during that period.

TODAY IN OUR WORLD, I’M AFRAID, such a trade-off, or cost-benefit analysis, or calculation has been made far more often than I'd care to think. Not to mention sanction regimes, wars of intervention using R2P talking points, "colour revolutions" and other examples of industrial scale murder.

 

THIS BRINGS TO MIND the thought-provoking and beautifully crafted short story by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

OMELAS is a city paradise, located by the sea in a warm climate where the winds blow fair and rains come softly and only at night. The parable of "Omelas" begins with the narrator describing the “Summer Festival” where people from the countryside and neighbouring towns come into the city to celebrate. There are scenes of great cheer and joy, singing and laughter. The people who live in Omelas are mature, intelligent, brave, and thoughtful. They are also happy, though, our narrator tells us, they are not a “simple” people, such as might be found in a rural, market town where people have less need for introspection and self analysis. Their happiness stems not from ignorance of who they are; the people of Omelas are intelligent and aware of why they are happy and what their happiness is based on. 

AFTER TAKING THE READER on a tour of the festivities and on a walkabout through the city, meeting many of its happy inhabitants and admiring the grace and elegance of the place, the narrator goes on to describe how

 

“[i]n a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar.”

 

AND IN THIS DREARY CELL lives a boy. He will never see the sun or take part in the life of his city. He will stay there until he dies, for it is because of his suffering and deprivation that the city and everyone living there prospers and is happy. OUR NARRATOR assures us that everyone knows about the boy, and how their lives depend upon his being where he is. AND it is not if the people of Omelas don’t feel any guilt over the suffering child. Not at all! All the city’s children, by a certain age, are brought to see the boy. They see how he lives and what is being done to him. Afterwards, many children go home in tears, our narrator relates. Many spend weeks and even years wracked with guilt and feelings of “outrage and impotence” over what must be—over what must always have been—necessary for everyone’s happiness. AND AS TIME GOES BY, they come to accept the need for the boy to suffer--that one poor soul sacrifices his life so that all the rest may be happy. THEY EMBRACE their guilt and shame and pity, stoically, maturely, as they grow into adults. THEIR HAPPINESS, they finally accept, must come at the cost of that boy’s suffering.

HOWEVER, THE SPEAKER NOTES, with a certain amount of puzzlement, from time to time one child or another, upon leaving the boy’s cell, does not return to their happy and welcoming home. And some adults, as well, from time to time

 

“…leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

 

AND ALL THIS IS TO SAY that, like the people of Omelas, we have lives and customs and economies based, in part, on the suffering of others. We may not see it that way. We may not see it at all. And our calibrated blindness saves us from acknowledging how others must often be made to suffer for our happiness. 

WAR, it seems, is one time-tested method for uncovering what lay beneath the rock that sits at the bottom of our garden. Must it be the only way?

 

Cheers, Jake

_____________________________________________

 

[terra ignota=Latin: "unknown land".]

* In her novel, Palmer envisions future governance for humankind to be found in what are called  “hives”. By the mid-Twenty-Fifth century, nation-states have become obsolete, and people, as adults, join one of several hive societies, each with their own distinct laws, customs, mores, and economies. Interestingly, they are not geographic entities but span the globe. Think of hives like strands woven into fabric, each one is separate, but also allowing for the integration of other strands throughout the weave.

Set some two hundred years in the future, technology has advanced to the point where hunger and want have virtually been eliminated, along with war. There are no armies, and conflicts are resolved and judicial decisions rendered within each hive. An advanced transportation system allows people to travel across the globe far more rapidly than today (think Uber on steroids) and this makes hive culture possible. One may live on one continent, work on another, recreate on a third comfortably travelling between each, daily.

It’s quite a fascinating exercise in world-building, and Palmer’s idea of a truly “borderless” world of intentional societies replacing geographically sited nation-states has much to commend it. But, as with all Utopias, this future world has its dark side. 

 

1.    I used to watch a 60s TV show called I Spy that had a pair of globe-trotting CIA agents played by Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. They were in disguise as a travelling tennis duo. Culp was the tennis pro and Cosby played his sidekick and trainer. (No racial stereotyping there!) But anyway, they both used the cover of travelling from one tennis tourney to another to do their real work of spying. I don’t recall if they did any targeted assassinations, regime-changes, waterboarding, or other fun black ops stuff, but they sure were cool spies! Right On!

OF COURSE, Cosby had a second career as a serial rapist, but that’s another story.

 

P.S. The WAR in Ukraine and what’s to come? That’s fuel for another post to burn. And I’ve got plenty of gas in my tank to do the job! (Unlike SHOT-MYSELF-IN-THE-FOOT EUROPE.😁 What a clown show!)

AND IN THE MEANTIME: PLEASE! Don’t let him anywhere near the launch codes when he’s sundowning!

 

     

 

 

Palmer, Ada. The Will to Battle. Tom Doherty Associates. Tor Books. Macmillan Publishing Group. New York, NY. 2017. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651.

Le Guin, Ursula, K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. The Unreal and the Real: The Collected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Saga Press. New York, 2016. Print.

 

 

 

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