A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering The Dispossessed, first published by Harper & Row in 1974. My edition is Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014, and this installment of the reread covers pages 192 to the end.
Revolution is sexy.
It’s been in vogue since the 18th century when first the colonies that would become the United States, then the colonial domains of Haiti and Peru, then nation after nation across the Western world and its colonized peripheries declared new independences, new governments, new ways of relating between state and citizen. We might even go back further and speak of the many rebellions that sporadically rose up in the wake of Europeans’ “discovery” of the Americas and their enslavement and genocide of millions of black and brown folks all over the world. And even earlier, to medieval peasants’ revolts that shook the power of feudal lords in Europe and Asia, to religiously inspired rebellions across Christendom and Islamdom, and to the servile uprisings of the Roman Republic. Looked at one way, history is the story of revolutionary mo(ve)ments.
But what is revolution, this attractive thing we love to cosplay but rarely commit to? If you’ve been following along with the Le Guin Reread or if you are already familiar with Le Guin—and given how much I’ve learned from folks’ engaging comments on these posts, many of you are!—then you know Le Guin might have some answers, ones that take aim specifically at the powers of the state and capital, especially in earlier work, and turn more explicitly to colonialism, gender, and race in later years.
The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s most famous answer to the question of what revolution is. If the first half was a comparative exploration of life in anarcho-syndicalist Anarresti and capitalist Urrasti society, then it’s fair to say that the second half is a much more thorough dive into what exactly revolution means. The particular genius of this approach—the slow introduction, in media res, to Shevek’s life—is how it subverts the utopian novel, a tradition Le Guin was keenly aware of when developing the novel and which she specifically alludes to in her original subtitle, An Ambiguous Utopia (which was removed from later reprintings for reasons that aren’t entirely clear). In this second piece on The Dispossessed I want to focus on revolution and/as utopia, what this means for Le Guin, and why it still matters—in short, why this rather strange science fiction novel has been remembered as one of the masterpieces of the genre, and why people still talk about it almost fifty years later (which, holy crap, that’s a long time…).
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Ambiguous Utopia
Le Guin’s subtitle has provoked a great many responses, none more pointed than fellow SF writer Samuel Delany’s 1976 novel Triton, later released as Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1996) to make Delany’s meaning absolutely clear. (The initial subtitle, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part One, was a bit opaque, but also put it in conversation with Shevek’s search for a unified temporal theory.) Delany was famously critical with The Dispossessed, detailing his response in a long essay, “To Read The Dispossessed.”
Of particular concern to Delany was Le Guin’s “failure” to radicalize Anarresti society around sex and gender; on Anarres, Delany suggests, Bedap’s homosexuality should not be cause for intense depression and sadness, a source of rejection from the sort of partnership that Shevek and Takver experience. Truly, Le Guin gives us no examples of homosexual partnering, though she notes that Shevek had had multiple sexual experiences with men and even with Bedap. But Anarresti society is not, apparently or at least in Le Guin’s description of it through Shevek’s eyes, a particularly radical place where sex, gender, and sexuality are concerned. In fact, it’s pretty damn hetero. By contrast, Delany’s Triton, like all his fiction, is queer as fuck, dealing openly with how a libertarian society might embrace radical openness of sexuality and gender roles.
Like the word “utopia,” Delany’s heterotopia is a play on words. Utopia, as given to us by English humanist Thomas More, author of Utopia (1516) and notorious torturer of Protestants, comes from two Greek sources: the first, eu- (“good”) + topos (“place”), meaning “the good place”; the second, ou- (“not”) + topos (“place”), or “the not-place,” “nowhere.” More was an intelligent scholar of Greek and knew that his pun would be well-received by the two dozen people who could understand it; thankfully, those folks wrote down their interpretations and we know that utopia was always meant to be both a desire for a better world and unattainable, a place we can’t go.
Heterotopia comes from French social theorist Michel Foucault, who saw it as the “other place” (Gk. hetero-) outside of the orthodoxy of social norms and values. It already exists: It’s there in the subcultures, for example, of BDSM fetishists, of gay bathhouses, of the punk music scene of the 1970s, of radical feminists and black abolitionists. Unlike utopia, you can get there. But there’s also the other pun: hetero(sexual), which heterotopias by definition of their search for otherness (in a straight-normed world)… are not.
But while Delany took aim at what he saw as the unradicality of Le Guin’s utopia, and maybe of the entire concept of utopia as generally useless since, well, it’s a not-place, The Dispossessed does not promise Anarres as the solution to “our” problems (or at least those of the sexist capitalist society of 1970s America). Rather, Le Guin’s Anarres is simultaneously an ever-changing social organism and a society plagued with problems, whether (as I argued last time) with regard to gender or to personal liberty or to the way in which ideology inheres simplistically such that Anarresti yell “propertarian” at whatever seems to challenge what has become the “norm” on Anarres. Many see utopia as an ideal solution to social, cultural, and economic problems, and that is historically what the genre of utopian writing upheld: a logical explanation of how society could operate if XYZ problems were fixed. But utopia for Le Guin, as for many so-called utopianists who have invested entire scholarly careers in thinking about what “utopia” means, is not so much an achieved state of being or place of residence as a struggle toward something better. In this instance, a heterotopia might be utopian precisely because it strives toward an ideal through difference that seeks to dismantle what those in the heterotopia believe is unjust.
I’ve got no idea why the subtitle An Ambiguous Utopia was removed from some later reprintings, since to me this idea of ambiguity is integral to what Le Guin is talking about. Interestingly enough, utopia is only referenced once in the novel when Pae, an informer for A-Io’s government, tosses a drunk Shevek into bed and rummages through his papers in search of the theory of simultaneity Shevek was brought to Urras to produce. Frustrated, he asks Oiie, “Have we been taken in by a damned naive peasant from Utopia?” In this sense, the actual fact of Anarres as a functioning society is so minor to the capitalist mindset that it is a sideshow to the “real world.” It’s the naive fantasy of “peasants,” the uneducated, the unrealistic, those who don’t know any better. It’s the word liberals use to call Leftists crazy, to demand greater focus on “real” issues and “practical” matters. But neither Shevek nor Le Guin see Anarres as utopia. It’s qualified, it’s ambiguous, it’s unachieved, a work-in-progress—an outopos.
So why call it an “ambiguous” utopia if, for Le Guin and most thinkers on the Left, utopia is always ambiguous? For one, Le Guin wanted The Dispossessed to revitalize the utopian novel, a tradition that traces back to Protestant-torturer Thomas More (as mentioned above, who himself took the idea from Plato and other Greek writers) and which flourished in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the United States and Europe, socialists, feminists, and black thinkers wrote hundreds of utopian novels. These followed a pretty typical format: A utopian society exists; a member from outside of it (usually representative of the reader’s society) pays a visit; some friendly utopians show the outsider around, detailing the social, economic, infrastructural, and other functionings of utopia; the outsider records his observations on the differences between our world and the possible world, usually offering some ideas in a more moralist frame about how “we” could get there. Utopian fiction was rarely plot-based; these were essentially Wikipedia articles on non-existent possible-worlds written out with perfunctory attention to characters and story as met the prerequisites for being labeled a “novel.”
In sum, they were boring and aesthetically rather uninteresting. Le Guin didn’t want to be boring; she wanted readers to invest emotionally in the story as much as she did in the ideas, so she wrote a utopian novel that turned the genre inside-out, that narrated from the perspective of the utopian society and that explored our society. She estranged the propertarian and opened up a space for thinking of capitalism as, well, the pretty shitty system it is. Anarres is not necessarily a sexy utopia; it’s on a resource-strapped desert moon and life is hard work. The main character isn’t even particularly happy there, for fuck’s sake, and that’s pretty clear from the very beginning, when he’s being stoned for trying to leave, and from the first scenes of his life, when he’s chided for his intelligence. Even the gender and sexual politics, if you agree with Delany, aren’t all that great. And the beauty of it is that Le Guin was telling us this all along: It’s not supposed to be perfect. It’s human. It’s… ambiguous, just like utopia itself, a concept that captures dreams as diverse as Thomas More’s Catholicism, Hitler’s Nazism, Marx’s communism, Goldman’s anarchism, Modi’s Hindutva, #NoDAPL’s decolonialism, the current administration’s xenophobia, and #BlackLivesMatter’s abolitionism.
If utopia can capture so much, including ideologies that are directly at war with one another, what matters then is how the utopian impulse—the always unfinished drive toward utopia—responds to the ambiguities inherent in the very idea of utopia. Why is an ambiguous utopia—in other words, any utopia—worthwhile if it won’t be perfect? I might be a smart-ass and say, well if you’re going to ask that, then ask yourself why anything is worthwhile. But to tamp down the snark and get real: Life sucks, why not (try to) make it better? Better isn’t best, but it sure beats this. Utopia isn’t the destination, it’s the journey.
Revolution Is Change
The Dispossessed is a painfully beautiful novel. Le Guin writes about love and longing, desire and connection, personhood and agency so powerfully and yet subtly that many readers feel themselves in her words. I dislike Shevek, but he seems so real and familiar to me that I can see myself in his emotional being. True, Le Guin often writes heterosexual characters deeply invested in a relationship with a single person who is their all; this was Le Guin’s experience with her husband Charles, whom she married in 1953. Le Guin led a rather traditional heteropatriarchal life for a woman in the 1950s, staying home to take care of the kids, and only later, when her kids were older, launching her writing career. This informs her early books, just as Delany’s search for place as a bisexual black man among intellectuals and queer folks in the 1950s and 1960s shaped his fiction. It’s not wholly surprising, then, that despite Le Guin’s radical anti-statism and anti-capitalism, those with political investments in the feminist and gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s thought The Dispossessed didn’t go far enough.
But as we saw with responses to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin embraced political and personal change as a matter of existence and acknowledged her own inability to think outside of some orthodoxies even as she was thinking inside of others. Indeed, she theorized this conception of utopia in The Dispossessed—not only that utopia is ambiguous, that it is always utopian only in relation to certain historical moments (say, the conditions that brought about Odo’s writing and the revolution that finally got the Odonians their moon), but that revolution is not singular, it is multiple, it is change. To put it bluntly: This shit isn’t simple and positing utopia as a singular solution ignores how difficult (and many) the problems are.
Not only does The Dispossessed play around with what the utopian novel was, as a rather well-known genre form, it also helps us think about the utility of utopia in bleak times, largely by reframing our conception of revolution. We are wont to think of revolutions as moments of ecstatic rupture, of a break between past and future during which time the present is an explosive, almost orgasmic moment that radically transforms the old into something new. Anarres, for example—the whole social experiment in anarcho-syndicalist life—is said to be a revolution. But how can a society be a revolution? How can a thing that has existed for nearly 200 years, with minimal contact with those against whom they rebelled, be a revolution? To think like Shevek, we need to understand where we’ve gone wrong.
Take the Russian Revolution of 1917. It did away with the tsarist state and brought about the Soviet Union in one fell swoop, a wholly different society from the one before. Right? At least, that’s the high-school world history version of the story. But as China Miéville carefully shows in his moment-by-moment retelling of the Revolution, things weren’t so cut and dry, nor were the Leninists the most radical faction operating in the revolutionary fervor of October that year (he killed most of the anarchists!). Moreover, the Soviet Union was quickly transformed into something quite familiar: a state eating up smaller states, relying on authoritarian force to maintain power, and competing within 30 years for global dominance. This is Thu of The Dispossessed, which emerged out of Odo’s revolution just as Anarres did but went a different way; this is Orgoreyn on Gethen.
Look at another revolution: second-wave feminism. Things changed, bras were burned (yes and no), and sexism seemed to be, well, less. But there was a third (and maybe a fourth) wave of feminism. #MeToo was still necessary; judges and elected officials at the very highest level of government have been confirmed and supported despite their troubling histories, statements, and behaviors; the gender wage gap still exists; most jobs in the U.S. don’t allow paid time off for mothers, and so on. The feminist revolution was not boom, bang, done; it’s ongoing, made possible by the constant work of thousands, millions, of people across the world who adhere to a utopian dream. Here is the ongoing revolution of Shevek’s Anarres. To be feminist is to live a constant revolution, always striving for an end to (hetero)patriarchy. To twist Le Guin’s description of Anarres just a bit, feminist “society, properly conceived, [is] a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process.”
So, yes, revolution is sexy. But only because we’re thinking of the mythical revolutions, the Les Misérables that are over and done with after some punchy songs, slow ballads, and a rousing chorus. We marched with our pink hats… but misogyny is still alive and well at the highest levels of power. We think of revolution in terms of quick, exciting moments, Che Guevara shirts, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and movies starring Mel Gibson. These visions of revolution attract because they are easier and glorious: The battle is fought, hopefully won, and things are different ever after. Huzzah, to the rebel! Viva la revolución! Etc.
Le Guin wants us to see revolution anew, the way things have historically worked. She takes the anthropologist’s eye to recognizing that society changes not dramatically but piecemeal, that rarely is one person, one glorious leader, an agent of wholescale change; rather, we are all part of a collective action that can only ever be ongoing and that can only ever be achieved collectively. If this sounds familiar from earlier posts in this series, that’s because it is. I argued as much was Le Guin’s impetus in The Left Hand of Darkness, and we see this continue in her second major novel.
In fact, it’s a lesson that Shevek learned in the same way we all learn our ABCs: as part of growing up, the necessary indoctrination into culture. But it’s also a lesson he has to re-learn, to learn at the deeper level of personhood and identity, to move past the bare ideology of knowing how to use “a” vs. “an,” “he” vs. “him,” and to recognize that there is a grammatical rule at work. Only in going to Urras does Shevek come to understand the true meaning of living in a society that is a revolution, and when he learns this, he recognizes that Anarres is not perfect, that it’s dull adherence to parroted Odo quotes learned in grade school is not enough.
While the Urrasti elite embody all he disdains, and the PDC fails to stop power from centralizing on Anarres, Shevek finds that the struggle for justice among the Nioti, the underclasses of A-Io, is a fulfillment of the ongoing utopian vision of Odonianism. Having cut themselves off from the outside world, having learned to pretend that the only struggle worthwhile is simply to be Anarresti, the lunar anarchists have forgotten what solidarity means and have abandoned it and the principle of change. It is no coincidence that after Shevek rediscovers and truly inhabits the meaning of revolution—revolution is change—while caught up in the Nioti riots that Le Guin takes us back to Anarres, back to Shevek’s increasing radicalism on Anarres against the stultified PDC prior to his departure. Le Guin’s interweaving of moments in Shevek’s life practices the constant need for personal and ideological growth that The Dispossessed argues for. To us as readers, each chapter brings a new Shevek, someone who we have to relearn and place in his altered social conditions. Like society, the individual cannot remain static, but must react, evolve, live the revolution. The Dispossessed is itself an Odonian manifesto.
There is so much to say about The Dispossessed that it overwhelms. Rarely do I read a book and leave the experience feeling exhausted, shocked by just how much one could say, how many pages I could flip between to build arguments and discuss minutiae with others. That I’ve been able to say this much flabbergasts me, and I don’t even think I’ve begun to say anything all that worthwhile! I imagine this is what the very religious experience when talking the finer points of Gospel or Talmud. And I don’t think this is far from what Le Guin wanted… After all, The Dispossessed is not a perfect book and it’s a deeply Taoist one. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, its flaws call out to be seen! We must make something of them and engage our critical senses, and at the same time we love this thing, this messy book, this beautiful and tiring and unforgettable book.
It is, I truly think, impossible not to go unchanged by the experience of The Dispossessed. It is a novel that practices utopia, that changes and changes its readers. It calls us to something greater: not an ideal to be reached, like Heaven or Utopia, but an ideal to be lived. We aren’t going to get there, to our grand vision of what things should be, but the journey lies ahead nonetheless. May we be reborn on Anarres, and may we recognize that it has to be of our own making—here, now, always changing. May we be the revolution.
Join me in two weeks, Wednesday, April 8, for a reread of A Wizard of Earthsea. We’ll read the whole thing and discuss it in one go! In the meantime, take care of yourselves, folks. Stay safe, practice social distancing, and remember that while individual liberty is essential to the Odonian movement, your freedom to carry on as you like does not come at the expense of the health and safety of the social organism. Don’t be propertarian!
Sean Guynes is a critic, writer, and editor currently working on a book about how the Korean War changed American science fiction, and co-writing a book on whiteness for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. For politics, publishing, and SFF content, follow him on Twitter @saguynes.
I just love St. Thomas More’s new title of Protestant torturer. Certainly he opposed Protestantism, he wrote some fairly scatological works against it and approved of the burning of Protestant activists. In this he was fairly typical for his time, on both sides. But the charge of personally torturing Protestants is ungrounded in fact. The closest he came was ordering a whipping for a supposed Protestant who made indecent attacks on women in churches. Give him this much, if he killed others for their beliefs he willingly died for his own.
I remember as a younger reader trying to force my way through The Dispossessed. At that age I didn’t understand that all science fiction books were not meant to be fun or even have an interesting plot. At the time, I thought the book should come with a warning that there was no excitement inside.
Of course I now realise that not only can authors seek to explore philisophical conundrums in their stories. But that publishers lie when designing the cover. The Dispossessed showed a rugged male explorer in a helmetless space suit with a starship in the background.
So whilst I recall there book, it is through a grey mist of disappointment.
There is so much to say about The Dispossessed that it overwhelms. Rarely do I read a book and leave the experience feeling exhausted, shocked by just how much one could say, how many pages I could flip between to build arguments and discuss minutiae with others.
I needed this re-read to make me pick up the book again, and see what time had erased: UKL’s Odonian heterosexism. I’d blanked it out as incompatible with my love of the ambiguities of the story.
Deeply satisfying to see it now, to quarrel with a beloved book and author while still seeing the merit in each.
Another beautifully written and thought-provoking essay. Many thanks. This book is what all books should be, a deep challenge to think anew, look at the world anew and be anew. (Like Rilke’s poem on the torso of Apollo, which says to the viewer, “You must change your life.”) And I love the story about Odo, The Day before the Revolution. As a LeGuin fan for most of the period since The Dispossessed was published, I delighted in LeGuin’s willingness to keep evolving herself.
“Protestant torturer” is an interesting term for More, based on Foxe, most of whose facts stand up to scrutiny, and echoed by Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell. Ironic, perhaps, that he was willing to spy on, persecute and burn people (including Tyndale) for heterodoxy, and equally willing to die for his beliefs when they became heterodox.
@3 oldfan
maybe we should apply the advice of the ending of one my other favorite books, The Female Man, written by one of LeGuin’s toughest feminist and LGTB critics, Joanna Russ. The last bit of the text sends the little book out into the world, and tells it not to be discouraged when people criticize, and even stop understanding what it was trying to do: “Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free.”
I found this novel kind of underwhelming, tbh – I read it about five years ago. It’s hard not to see it as a riff on communism versus capitalism, although Le Guin would obviously disagree. I wasn’t aware of the subtitle, but I guess Annares is an ambiguous utopia? Inasmuch as the citizens of the planet have to work together because resources are so scarce? I’m sure there’s an Orwellian slogan in there somewhere…
I had two core issues with the book:
Shevek. I guess most of us have heard of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Well, Shevek is John Galt’s alter-ego. Using an mc to validate a particular ideology is a pretty old trick – and a pretty unconvincing one.
Is this a SF novel? Well, is it? Supposing I decided to make a film of this book, but had Shevek grow up in some Kibbutz in the Middle East and – here’s an idea – had America stand in for Urras. Would that change the story in any meaningful way?
@1 – I noted this into my journal earlier today and it seems appropriate here:
“If your focus is on your RELIGION then you can be stingy with believers of other faiths, because they don’t share what is most important to you. If your focus is on THE CREATOR then your heart will be generous with believers of other faiths, because they too are His. “
Lee Weissman (@JihadiJew) March 25, 2020
@5
What a great idea…”your existence however imperfect is enough” is a thing we need to teach people to apply to themselves, so definitely to books.
@7, I agree with that. More and his Protestant opponents would not. The past is a different country. As R. W. Chambers, one of More’s biographers wrote, ” There’s no point in imagining Thomas More as a 19th century liberal, and then complaining because he wasn’t.” Or a 21st century liberal either. The kind of tolerance even most believers embrace today was a totally alien concept in 16th century Europe.
@@.-@, Foxe is a hagiographer and mythmaker, which I do not mean as a slur. His version of events has a distinct ideological slant, though he did not deliberately set out to deceive his sources were not always accurate. For example there are a whole lot of questions marks about his story of Stephen Gardiner’s attack on Queen Katherine Parr. Mantell is highly biased in favor of Thomas Cromwell, high time somebody was. Cromwell was not a two dimensional villain, he was ruthless, yes (who wasn’t in those days) but even his questionable acts were performed to further what he saw as the good. He’s no favorite of mine but he was a good family man, a loyal servant of his king, and a convinced religious reformer.
@9 True to a point. But people can imagine more (ba dump) than we sometimes realize. I point to, in this case, Richard Hooker’s Learned Discourse on Justification. While it dates from 50 years after More’s judicial homicide, the line of thinking in it was not without precedent in English spirituality.
An important aspect of The Dispossessed, so it seems to me, is that neither world is Utopia, nor are they meant to be. Shevek’s homeworld was founded by people trying to create a better society. They fixed some of the problems from the society they came from, kept some, and created new ones. The first scene from Shevek’s childhood is one of him being bullied. A bigger child shoves him out of his spot where he can enjoy the sunlight. I was ready for the adult present to set things right (stopping the bigger child from using his size to take what he wants) or be oblivious. Instead, Shevek gets in trouble for using the word “my.”
Right off the bat, we’re seeing a core problem in this society. People who are “bigger,” who have positions of power or who can invoke social attitudes, can all sorts of things away from others. The victims can’t complain because the, culturally speaking, they never had a right to what was taken.
If this were a typical adventure tale, Shevek would go on to another society where he is valued and rewarded for the things that made him out of place in his old world. But, that’s not what Le Guin does. We’re left with no doubt that Shevek’s world was right to want to change the society they came from. But, they have no mechanisms to allow for change or correction as their own flaws become apparent.
On judging More and other historical figures: It’s been said that “He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” It’s not that we can’t judge them. But, we need to be careful about judging them fairly. Proving what someone of a particular time should have known or believed was right is tricky and can lead to remarkable mistakes. Much of the basic math Einstein built on was known in the 19th century and there was no reason someone equally brilliant might not have done what Einstein did sooner. Still, we don’t criticize the Native Americans for not inventing nuclear weapons to protect their lands with.
Personally I never thought that Bedap being gay was supposed to be the reason he felt unfulfilled, it always seemed more to me like, he looked upon Shevek and Takver’s closer-to-nuclear family than usual for their society and wanted to have a more intimate, private relationship like that…kind of the same thing as the Syndicate of Initiative, it’s a reaction to how Anarresti went so far out of their way to reject Urrasti life that they lost some of the valuable parts of it. A thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, much like how the Hainish ship at the end is meaningfully described as striking a balance between Urrasti comfort and Anarresti spartanism.
@9 A story which tried to be fair to both More and Cromwell would be quite something. It must have been a terrible time to be alive. Certainly a terrible time to have to decide what was right.
At this point I think I will put in a recommendation for the Shardlake series of CJ Sansom. After all, Shardlakes initial ideas about Reform would be quite as dramatic as many revolutions. And maybe his later ones.
In fairness, proof of More actually ever torturing anybody is pretty patchy – but the popularity of such stories in a post-Catholic UK would be understandable. That said, they were cruel times and what constituted a ‘good’ man would have been very relative – certainly by our standards!
@14, Yes, but that is a bit like saying that (Oliver) Cromwell probably never personally shot a single Irishman. Since he was in charge, he naturally gets the blame for what was done at his command. Oliver would presumably argue that his acts were in accordance with the conventions of war at the time, not that his hand did not literally pull the trigger.
Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell could make similar arguments. I suppose we ought to expect this sort of thing when the legitimacy of the governments right to rule gets tied up with religious issues. Almost any religious issue can then turn into treason, or a motive for it. And then where are you? Even the most tolerant ruler is going to have a problem with people who ought logically to think he ought to be overthrown and executed as a usurper.
Thank Heaven (so to speak) those days are gone. In most of the world.
@11 That is a wonderful point, and one that I had completely forgotten. I must say I am very impressed with Le Guin identifying perhaps the greatest danger of the maybe-utopia her central character comes from, and putting it up-front.
@15,I very much doubt Oliver Cromwell would think he needed to defend himself against charges of killing Irishmen. He thought it was right to do so.
@10, there were a few voices against religious persecution but unfortunately they were regarded with contempt by everybody else.
“I suppose we ought to expect this sort of thing when the legitimacy of the governments right to rule gets tied up with religious issues.”
Well, in some cases, they are one and the same (ie, the majority actually support a conservative religious orthodoxy – e.g. a lot of muslim countries).
I’d see religion as just one way in which a country expresses its national identity. And when that nationalism is agressive and expansionist, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a religious nationalism or a non-religious nationalism: the consequences (generally negative) are pretty much the same.
Interestingly enough – or not! – a friend of mine (a historian) told me that Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power was bank-rolled by the London merchant-class, who’d seen a similar coup work out very successfully in Holland. This was motivated in both cases by the excessive royal levies on all imports, (ie, it was much economic as religious).
The Stuarts were famously fiscally irresponsible.
@7
Bingi! Thanks for sharing.
@9
”The kind of tolerance even most believers embrace today was a totally alien concept in 16th century Europe.”
A generation later than More, there are the Politiques in France and Queen Elizabeth I: “There is one Christ Jesus and one faith; all the rest is dispute about trifles.” More died by the sword he lived by.
Yes, Foxe has an axe to grind, like every other polemicist, before or since. As his work was often attacked, however, he took a lot of trouble with his research.
@11
Excellent point, thank you. Orthodoxy is a potent weapon in the hands of the powerful.
And Elizabeth was accused by both sides of atheism. I’m not saying More, Luther et al were right. Just that their kind of extremism was the norm. They felt about heretics the way we feel about fascists. People who took a more enlightened attitude were fighting an uphill battle.
Even Elizabeth, though she didn’t want to make windows into men’s souls, felt that a certain amount of visible conformity was necessary, ie attending Church of England services. She herself had been forced to conform to Catholic services under her sister Mary. Elizabeth was not in fact lukewarm in religion and accepting Catholicism was hard for her. She delt with it by deciding,quite logically IMO, that God cared more about her inner commitment than forms forced on her. The fine little points of observance that everybody else obsessed over just didn’t matter and there was no good reason Catholics or separatists shouldn’t sit through a standard service as a matter of form and loyalty.
Here are some random ideas that my prior readings of the novel spurred:
First some notes I wrote in the inside cover of my copy of the book : dated 3/28/75 [I was born in 1954] Freedom is the ability to choose and to accept, one’s own limitations. The individual is all important, yet individuals cannot exist in isolation, they need the group. For the group to survive, to truly live, it must be made up of individuals who choose to limit themselves and to unite. The group must acknowledge the individual and the individual must acknowledge the group. 7/11/77: A society’s wealth, primary resources, and reason for existing is its people/citizens. 7/19/75: Wealth is in People and that is what a society’s economy should be based on.
Next a theme that struck me: The idea that the Shevek’s idea could be ‘owned’/possessed by the collective, the syndics and thus repressed by them, stuck me as an realistic irony of the flawed collective system where the ego and self interest can control the decimation of ideas. Irony in that in the capitalistic system of A-Io where everything is ‘motivated’ by ownership Shevek’s ideas were printed in the competitive and not really free market place of that countries university system publications because prestige, one-upmanship, and individual ownership of ideas ruled.
I was also struck by the fact that Bedap’s music was also limited and controlled by the music syndic. Again, the theme is played out here in the arts as well as in the sciences, that what goes outside of the norm and tradition is shut down by the syndics.
On this theme of suppression of ideas, I had underlined these passages:[SF Book club 1974 edition] p.145 “You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.” (Talking about Sabul the head of the science syndic) “In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any [Really??? Seems to me there is.] Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use it. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odoian society by stifling the individual mind.” Another quote: “The legal use of power to maintain and extend power. Replace ‘legal’ with ‘customary’, and you’ve got Sabul, and the Syndication of Instruction, and the PDC.”
pg. 146: “We’ve let cooperation become obedience….It’s always easier not to think for oneself.”
T
@23 Interesting thoughts. Your one comment reminds me of a quote from LMB: All true wealth Is biological.
It must be over thirty years since I read this. The one bit I remember is where he walked into a wall re-enacting Zeno’s Paradox, which was probably intended to show that he was a mathematical genius, but to me looked more like he was an idiot who walked into walls, and there went my suspension of disbelief. I also remember that I thought the “good” world was dreary and unpleasant: you could do or be anything you wanted, but you were strictly limited in what you could want. The “bad” world was sixty-ish western industrialized society with the warts prominently displayed, which was boring, because every writer with any pretension of being literary did the same warts.
Loved the book, loved the essay. Thank you!
“There is so much to say about The Dispossessed that it overwhelms. Agreed! (So, why are we talking about More?…)
It’s interesting to me that the word “communism” (as far as I know) was only used once in the book, once in the essay, and once in the comments. It’s interesting because this book isn’t anarchy envisioned (that’s The Road), it’s about communism envisioned (the it was supposed to go, not the way it went).
p.s. “permanent revolution” is the same as no revolution when you’re talking about forms of federal government.