An Unambiguous Dystopia

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Every once in a while at Nerds who Read, we like to look back at one of the classics.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, but it continues to have relevance in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Occupy Oakland demonstrators were so inspired by its vision of an anarcho-communist utopia, that they chose it as one of the book covers they used to decorate their “shields” during a 2013 protest.

But when Ms. Le Guin first conceived the story that became The Dispossessed, it was not intended as a utopia. It was a character study. She recounts its birth in her essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” which appears in her 1979 collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like her book The Left Hand of Darkness, she says,

the origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever became clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time, a scientist, a physicist in fact I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was more attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time… My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and the novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeblemindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!” All right. All right, what’s-your-name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right, Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia. Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, the he might well come from a better place than this.

Thus Ms. Le Guin put the usual historical process in reverse. Real life communism begins with promises of utopia and ends with a Gulag. Ursula Le Guin began with a Gulag, and ends with promises of utopia. Such as it is.

The utopia is the planet of Anarres. Several hundred years earlier, a group of idealists had left its sister planet, Urras, to found a colony there. Since then, contact between the two planets was limited to a semi-annual supply ship and some radio contact reserved for the elite that wasn’t supposed to exist. Ms. Le Guin wanted to show how her utopia would unfold without outside interference.

The opening paragraphs are a rather ingenious depiction of a wall, which are well worth reading in their entirety:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks and roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important that that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

We then meet Shevek. As in the original short story, he is “escaping,” boarding the supply ship to return to Urras, the first person ever to do so.

From here the book alternates between chapters about Shevek’s experiences on Urras, where he’s lionized as a celebrity, and chapters recounting his life story up to his momentous decision to leave Anarres and return to the mother planet.

Frankly I found it slow going. Ms. Le Guin was so focused on her character, that she didn’t give us much by way of plot. For most of the book, there just wasn’t any conflict with sufficiently high stakes to have me wondering what was going to happen next. Yes, there were hints that Shevek’s hosts on Urras had some hidden agenda, but these were only passing mentions. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through, when Shevek set out to make his second escape, this time from Urras back to Anarres, that the pace picked up and I finally found myself drawn into the story.

On top of that, IMHO, Ms. Le Guin didn’t even succeed at what she set out to do in the first place, create a vivid character who was “attractive, I mean as a flame to a moth…too big for a short story.” I found Shevek to be a bit of a sad sack, a little boring, often passive, with an air of hopelessness about him. There was no flamey attraction at all.

But there is one aspect of the book that intrigued me (besides the opening passage), in a negative sort of way: the utopian aspect. Anarres is a society where all are equal, at least in theory. There is no private property—the absence of possessions gives the book its title. The needs of every citizen are met (sparsely) without requiring money or work. And yet they do work. “The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together,” Ms. Le Guin explains in a 2015 interview. “That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal…Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.”

Ms. Le Guin worked very hard on the utopian aspect of the book. “It took me years,” she wrote in the “Mrs. Brown” essay. “Reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where [Shevek] came from, and could see the landscape about him.” In an interview with Euan Monaghan, available on lithub.com she added, “I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.”

And yet, despite her hard work and schmoozing of bookstore owners, the Anarres utopia is a terrible place. The people barely survive at a subsistence level. Artificial heat and light are forbidden. Even on those rare occasions when there are resources available for them, it’s felt that such luxuries would undermine the virtue of poverty.

The so-called anarchy is not really without government. There’s a central agency that matches workers to available jobs. And when a road needs to be built, or a forest cleared, citizens are drafted, much like the corvée that reduced the medieval serf to slavery. The more perceptive Anarrans are well aware that their claim to have no government is a pretense, as Shevek’s friend Bedap admits at one point.

And yet the real power on Anarres is the amorphous pressure of public opinion. Those who are seen as not pulling their weight are ostracized, which is occasionally enforced by a barrage of rock-throwing. A similar fate awaits anyone with the effrontery to think for themselves. They’re cut off from the work that was supposed to be so fulfilling that they would do it without pay. Another of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, wrote an unpopular play and finds himself assigned to road work. As with dissenters in the Soviet Union, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even Shevek, working at a university, is barred from teaching until he gives up the original research the powers-that-be find threatening. I cringed every time an Anarran described himself as "free."

Anarcho-communism is not freedom. Like all forms of communism, it is fundamentally flawed. To take material goods away from people who produced them, in order to redistribute them to people who didn't, is morally wrong. Without the need to work in order to survive, not to mention the delightful possibility of growing rich, there is little incentive for anyone to put in effort. Without the price mechanism of the market, even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats lack the information they need to balance supply and demand. The result is chronic shortages. And when there are no checks and balances on the power of the collective, the pressure to conform is a tyranny as soul-crushing as anything government can impose.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin set out to create an ideal society, a utopian utopia, and judging from her various public statements, she was sincere about that. But the logic of anarcho-communism led her to its natural, grim conclusion instead. To her credit, Ms. Le Guin was too honest a writer to evade that logic. She never could escape from the Gulag that was the setting of her original short story.

Even Ms. Le Guin conceded, in her "Mrs. Brown essay" that Anarres was a utopia "of sorts." Some editions of The Dispossessed are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” I don’t know if that was Ms. Le Guin’s decision or her publishers’. But I would go beyond that. Anarres is an unambiguous dystopia.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His dystopian novel, Full Asylum, shows what America will look like if it continues down the path of socialism. But since George Orwell and Ayn Rand already wrote the grim version of that story, Dr. Isenberg wrote a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Domingoyu.com.

Building with Vibrations in the Air

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Book review by Michael Isenberg.

On the second night all the creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.

There is some fine writing in Ursula Le Guin’s collection of blog posts, No Time to Spare. No less than one would expect from a writer of her stature, or a book that won the Hugo Award this weekend for Best Related Work.

The late Ms. Le Guin—she died in January at the age of 88—disliked the term blog—“it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage,” she wrote. Nevertheless, her fellow octogenarian scribbler, Nobel laureate José Scaramago, inspired her to give blogging a try. The selections in No Time to Spare were written between 2010 and 2016. Their subjects run the gamut from daily life, to writing, to old age, to politics and economics. In between the main sections of the book there are a series of entr’actes, which narrate the adventures of her tuxedo cat. “His breed is Alley, his name is Pard./Life without him would be hard.”

As a former cat owner, I rather enjoyed “The Annals of Pard,” who only eats kibble. “I could put a piece of bacon on top of his kibbles and he would eat them and leave it. I could lay a filet of sole down on him and he would shake it off with contempt and go away.” Bacon and fish aren’t food. Only kibble is food.

The accounts of the non-cat parts of Ms. Le Guin’s daily life are equally entertaining. I was riveted by a four page instruction manual on how to eat a soft-boiled egg, thereby proving her claim in an earlier essay that a storyteller with “the narrative gift” “can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and a laugh riot.” Granted, my fascination with the egg story had much to do with learning that the egg spoon is a thing. Discovering new breakfast utensils isn’t quite as big a thrill for me as discovering new cocktail paraphernalia, but it’s in the same ballpark.

No Time to Spare is not itself “a laugh riot”—Ms. Le Guin prefers sprinkling gentle humor throughout rather than indulging in ROFL comedy. Most of the essays are quite serious. But there is an amusing account of getting drunk with John Steinbeck and a couple tongue in cheek posts. A sarcastic lecture on the utter lack of imagination in modern swearing uses the f- and s-words in just about every sentence. Another essay, “Vegempathy,” calls out vegetarians for the cruelty they inflict on their food, what with the cutting and the boiling, not to mention the tearing apart with teeth. Only by subsisting on “the unsullied purity of the O in the atmosphere and in H2O” will humans be able to “live in true amity with all animals and all vegetables.” Sadly, any such movement “is fated to be, in each individual case, rather short-lived.”

Ms. Le Guin’s literary observations benefit from her being born at the right time to spend her young adult years in the '50s and '60s, when American liberals had woken up to the fact that there was great literature out there that wasn’t Western, but before they turned their back on the Western canon as the work of “dead, white males.” Thus, her discussion of plot structure is informed both by Homer (or “Papa H” as she calls him) and the Mahabharata.

The book takes its title from her musing about aging. When asked in a Harvard alumni survey what she did in her spare time, her response was, “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.” Her thoughts on the subject can be summed up as: the young have no idea what’s in store for them. So they should stop saying foolish things like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” or telling the senior in their life who’s chronically in pain from sciatica about that ninety year old uncle who walks eight miles a day. “All I’m asking people who aren’t yet really old is…try not to diminish old age itself,” she writes. “Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.” It seems she has come to terms with old age, with grace and equanimity.

She shows no such equanimity—or grace—when it comes to politics and economics however, and on those topics I found myself in disagreement with Ms. Le Guin more often than not. Her rant on the “racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right” is such a cartoon that I wonder if she ever met an actual conservative. Growing up in Berkeley and making her home in Portland, perhaps not. An otherwise heartwarming story about a child who, thanks to a misunderstanding, thought there were horses in the bedroom, had to include a gratuitous dig implying that George W. Bush was Hitler. As with too much political writing these days, the double standards abound. Ms. Le Guin freely acknowledges that she was an angry Second Wave feminist during the 1970s. On the subject of getting angry, she writes, “We were right to do so…We were rousing people to feel and see injustice.” But two pages later, she calls the anger of the Tea Party an “orgy of self-indulgent rage” that threatens the survival of the republic. To her credit, she does call out her own team when she feels it has done wrong, in particular “Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate” with Romney.

Much of her anger is directed at capitalism, which she has long opposed in her writings. But despite Ms. Le Guin’s years of practice, No Time to Spare demonstrates no real insight into economics, merely colorful insults and tired clichés.

Capitalism is “fundamentalist” and “dogmatic,” she writes, capable of “providing security for none but the strongest profiteers.” It’s “social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw.” Economic growth is a “tumor” and a “cancer.” Capitalism is synonymous with environmental destruction, as if we still lived in the 1950s and motorcycle couriers in Los Angeles have to wear gas masks. Never mind that the capitalist countries passed clean air acts while the communist countries, with no property rights, and therefore no concept of externalities, had the sorriest environmental records. Only socialism has promise, and even though it failed wherever it had been tried [at least she admits that], it would have been a great success if only it hadn’t been “run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism.” She can’t even praise the good work done by the Oregon Food Bank, without taking a swipe at Walmart, whose architecture has “the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism,” [and which has fed far more people than the Oregon Food Bank].

I only noticed two instances in the entire book where Ms. Le Guin actually backs up her accusations with statistics. In one, she claims that under American capitalism, one in three children “aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.” That statistic has been widely echoed on the left side of the political divide. But, in the first place, Ms. Le Guin doesn’t get it right: it’s one in five. And in the second place, it’s been completely debunked.

The other statistic she offers concerns income inequality during the years 2000 to 2007. From it, she makes sweeping generalizations that “increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer.” Never mind that the Bush administration wasn’t particularly capitalist, or that income inequality data doesn’t actually show whether anyone is getting richer or poorer (it only shows relative wealth), or that those seven cherry-picked years aren’t representative of the 200-year history of capitalism.

What is representative of capitalism is literally billions of people lifted out of poverty. In the words of the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, writing in National Review:

Capitalism has done more to empower people and raise living standards than any other force in history. Throughout most of human history, nearly everyone was poor. Even our wealthiest ancestors enjoyed lower standards of living than ordinary people in America today. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the masses started to enjoy real and growing prosperity. What was the difference? Capitalism and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. Tanner offers a number of statistics to back up his claims, but few are as remarkable as this one from Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute:

It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – that has decreased by 80 percent. You never hear about that. It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it. 80 percent of the world’s worst poverty has been eradicated in less than 40 years. That has never, ever happened before. So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No. It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world. I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.

As for the effect of capitalism on those who aren’t so poor, such as Ms. Le Guin—judging from the amount of travel she writes about, I gather she was reasonably comfortable—those profiteers she wrung her hands about mass produced her books and distributed them worldwide, thereby keeping her well-supplied with kibble and egg spoons.

Ms. Le Guin began her blog a month before the 2010 election, when the GOP took the House of Representatives and effectively shut down the Obama agenda. So it is not surprising, given Ms. Le Guin’s ideology, that No Time to Spare is grim in its assessment of our political future. And yet, as she is thinking about what matters, she comes to the realization that there are things more important than politics, a perspective we could all benefit from during these times of hyper-partisanship. After enjoying a couple live music performances, she writes, “I came away from both of these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit—making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. For his own take on what America would look like without capitalism, check out his 2012 comedy novel Full Asylum, available on Amazon. Photo credit(s): Amazon.com