{"id":10263,"date":"2009-09-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks"},"modified":"2021-03-29T14:58:15","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T18:58:15","slug":"the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks","title":{"rendered":"The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The Wikipedia pages devoted to the Culture, a fictional civilization created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, are fabulously extensive. The main article is about nine thousand words long, and contains links to more than thirty other pages that provide more detail on the various aspects of Banks\u2019s imaginary world. (I would not be at all surprised if Banks himself, in the writing of Culture novels, consulted Wikipedia to ensure consistency with his previous work.) For purposes of comparison, it might be noted that the main page on Jane Austen is a little shorter and with fewer links to other Austen-related pages. Yet there are certainly far fewer readers of Iain M. Banks than of Jane Austen. How are we to account for this discrepancy?<\/p>\n

We had best begin by doing a better job of identifying Iain M. Banks. This is one of the two names under which the fifty-five-year-old Scotsman writes, the other being Iain Banks. A subtle difference to be sure, but one which the author maintains consistently: approximately half of his twenty-plus novels are science fiction, and these are published with the middle initial; the other half are, roughly speaking, realistic novels in contemporary settings, dotted with various proportions of horror, humor, and satire, and these are published uninitialized. He has also written, lyrically, about whiskey in Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram<\/a><\/em> (2003).<\/p>\n

Among his science fiction novels, seven (plus a handful of short stories) deal with the Culture. The Culture itself is not strictly speaking a world but rather a civilization within an imagined universe. Banks envisions a number of civilizations in our galaxy having the technological sophistication to cross vast tracts of space for purposes of colonization, exploitation, war \u2014 the usual imperial activities \u2014 though some are insular and xenophobic and resist contact with other peoples. (Some have even found a way to opt out of the physical universe altogether: these are called the Sublimed.) The Culture is just one among these many civilizations.<\/p>\n

The detail with which Banks has imagined these societies \u2014 seeing them as different paths by which evolution might produce highly intelligent life \u2014 and the care with which he has thought through their possible relations with the Culture help to build the reader\u2019s sense of a substantial fictional world. But most of Banks\u2019s world-building energies have gone into designing the Culture itself: its wildly varying geographies, its language, its social order, its biotechnologically enhanced citizens. The intricacy of these designs is what furnishes all those Wikipedia pages.<\/p>\n

World-building writers do what they do in part from sheer love of invention. But it is in the nature of world-builders to be philosophers as well. That is, the best of what Tolkien called \u201csecondary worlds\u201d are extended commentaries on and critiques of this<\/em> world: they are mirrors cunningly placed so we can see the back of our universe \u2014 aspects of our being that are normally hidden from us. Every major secondary world is to some degree polemical, ideological.<\/p>\n

The philosophy of Banks\u2019s Culture is that of Liberalism \u2014 Liberalism writ not just large but as large as possible. The Culture is, as one commentator has written, a \u201cliberal Utopia\u201d; but like all Utopias, it contains its dark places and puzzles, and perhaps even the seeds of its own critique. However, it is impossible to understand either the Culture\u2019s philosophy or its limitations without first understanding the technology that makes the Culture possible: the technology of the Minds.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Minds are artificial intelligences of almost infinite scope and power, and they govern the worlds in which inhabitants of the Culture live. A few of these worlds are planets, but far more often Culture citizens live on Orbitals \u2014 vast rings, each \u201clike a god\u2019s bracelet,\u201d that orbit stars and rotate in order to produce appropriate gravity \u2014 and on great interstellar ships. (Tens of millions of people may live on a ship; tens of billions on an Orbital.) The Mind of the ship or Orbital controls its every function and monitors every inhabitant to ensure contentment. The Minds are fully sentient and have their own personalities; they manifest themselves to Culture citizens through android avatars and through \u201cterminals\u201d: everyone has a terminal at all times, which he or she can use to ask questions, place orders, give information, relay messages, and so on. Citizens can tell the Minds to leave them alone, to cease monitoring their conversations, and it appears that the Minds do so, at least temporarily; there are no HAL 9000s in Banks\u2019s fictional world \u2014 no Mind ever harms a person, though in one strange case in Look to Windward<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (2000), a Mind decides to destroy itself. But it only does so after ensuring that the Orbital it governs is taken care of by its chosen successor.<\/p>\n

It is through the work of the Minds \u2014 in their overwhelming resourcefulness and, perhaps, wisdom \u2014 that the Culture possesses its most interesting feature: it is what Banks has called a \u201cpost-scarcity\u201d society, in which everyone has everything he or she wants. A Culture citizen can live in any environment, under any climate, in any kind of dwelling, and can wear any kind of clothes and own any imaginable objects. Sexual prowess and pleasure are ensured by genetic modification and precisely infused drugs: glands secrete at the citizens\u2019 commands to produce whatever mood or energy is needed. The Culture has no laws, and nothing that we would call a government. All power remains in the hands of the omnipotent and omnibenevolent Minds. As Banks himself has written, \u201cBriefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Player of Games<\/a><\/em> (1988), an outsider to the Culture named Hamin wonders, \u201cDidn\u2019t the Culture forbid anything<\/em>?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

Gurgeh [the novel\u2019s protagonist] attempted to explain there were no written laws, but almost no crime anyway. There was the occasional crime of passion (as Hamin chose to call it), but little else. It was difficult to get away with anything anyway, when everybody had a terminal, but there were very few motives left, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Suppose you murder someone, Gurgeh continues: you will then be \u201cslap-droned,\u201d which means that a drone \u2014 a small sentient robot, connected to the Mind \u2014 \u201cfollows you around and makes sure you never do it again.\u201d And since the drone\u2019s constant presence reminds people of what you\u2019ve done, you \u201cdon\u2019t get invited to too many parties,\u201d which means \u201csocial death.\u201d In the Culture \u201csocial death\u201d is the death that really counts, since people otherwise tend to live as long as they want to.<\/p>\n

Banks acknowledges that \u2014 among people, drones, and even Minds \u2014 there will occasionally be resistance to the Culture\u2019s way of doing things, but he emphasizes that these cases will be extremely rare. The Culture offers every possible distraction to the troubled mind, and of course everyone\u2019s glands secrete the proper mood at will. It\u2019s difficult under such circumstances for rage and resentment to become habitual.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more important even than these forces is the power of Marain. Marain is the language of the Culture, a synthetic language invented by Minds to shape the consciousness of its users in appropriate ways. In The Player of Games<\/em> a drone notices significant changes in Gurgeh\u2019s personality when, instead of speaking Marain, he spends almost all his time speaking the language of a less sophisticated and morally upright people, the Azad. A little later in the book Gurgeh realizes that he is playing the favored game of that people, also called Azad \u2014 an almost unimaginably complex game of quasi-militaristic strategy, sort of like Risk in several dimensions \u2014 \u201cas the Culture,\u201d that is, by setting up his game board according to a model of non-hierarchical and highly distributed authority. But he begins to play this way only after he spends some time speaking Marain. (Banks has worked out some of the key features of Marain, especially its orthography, which gives people who like making Wikipedia pages still more to do.)<\/p>\n

Language, entertainment, hormones \u2014 all of these resources are overseen by the Minds, who in general take an ironic attitude towards their own outrageous power. We see this especially in one of the most treasured features of Banks\u2019s universe, the self-naming of the Minds that control ships \u2014 that, in a sense, are<\/em> the ships. Every reader of Banks will have favorite ship names; here are some of mine: Prosthetic Conscienc<\/em>e<\/em>; No More Mister Nice Gu<\/em>y<\/em>; So Much for Subtlet<\/em>y<\/em>; Of Course I Still Love Yo<\/em>u<\/em>; Attitude Adjuste<\/em>r<\/em>; Lightly Seared on the Reality Gril<\/em>l<\/em>; I Blame the Parent<\/em>s<\/em>; You\u2019ll Clean That Up Before You Leav<\/em>e<\/em>; Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The last is one of a series, apparently developed in response to the comment by some figure from another civilization that the Minds, given their vast responsibilities, shouldn\u2019t be so frivolous in their self-naming. But are<\/em> the names so frivolous? There\u2019s something of the iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove about many of them. The Minds may be perfectly benevolent to the Culture\u2019s citizens. But not everyone in the galaxy belongs to the Culture. And that\u2019s where Contact comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Contact is the organization within the Culture that deals with everything and everyone that is not<\/em> the Culture. There is a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin called \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d in which she imagines a perfect society whose perfection is contingent upon the suffering of a single child locked in a closet and deprived of every comfort. Contact \u2014 more specifically, the wing of Contact called Special Circumstances \u2014 is Banks\u2019s version of that closet.<\/p>\n

(Though Le Guin had forgotten it when she wrote her story, there is an anticipation of her conceit in Dostoevsky\u2019s The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, when Ivan asks his brother Alyosha whether he would accept a world that is perfectly harmonious except for the sufferings of one innocent child. One might also cite in this context a bitter ongoing joke in Balzac\u2019s P\u00e8re<\/em> Goriot<\/em>: early in the novel the young social climber Eug\u00e8ne de Rastignac is asked \u2014 quite hypothetically \u2014 whether he would cause an elderly \u201cChinese Mandarin\u201d to die if by that death he could purchase social success. Then, periodically and as his fortunes wax and wane, Eug\u00e8ne assesses the health of his imaginary Mandarin. At times the poor fellow seems to be very near his last breath.)<\/p>\n

Consider this conversation from Use of Weapons<\/a><\/em> (1990) between Diziet Sma, a Special Circumstances agent, and Cheradenine Zakalwe, a man who is being adopted, as it were, into the Culture. \u201cThe life here seems…idyllic,\u201d Zakalwe says at one point. Everyone has told him that Special Circumstances is doing necessary work for the Culture; but, he says, \u201cI get suspicious when everyone agrees about something.\u201d What if Special Circumstances really isn\u2019t \u201cfighting the good fight\u201d? Sma replies,<\/p>\n\n\n

\u201cWe think we\u2019re right; we even think we can prove it, but we can never be sure; there are always arguments against us. There is no certainty; least of all in Special Circumstances, where the rules are different.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThey are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws \u2014 the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe \u2014 break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist…special circumstances.\u201d She smiled. \u201cThat\u2019s us. That\u2019s our territory; our domain.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cTo some people,\u201d he said, \u201cthat might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.\u201d<\/p>

Sma shrugged. \u201cAnd perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is….But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The liberal conscience at its self-soothing work!<\/p>\n

In the one Culture story that refers to our planet, \u201cThe State of the Art,\u201d Sma is among a group of Contact representatives who visit Earth in the year 1977. After a period of careful investigation, Sma argues \u2014 in the official report that constitutes most of the story \u2014 that the Culture needs to intervene to clean up the mess that human beings are making of our world. Were such an intervention to take place, Special Circumstances would spearhead it. However, one of her colleagues finds the Star Trek<\/em> television series almost the only redeeming feature of Earth civilization and recommends that the whole planet be destroyed. Special Circumstances would handle that as well.<\/p>\n

The role of Special Circumstances, then, is to implement the Culture Minds\u2019 decisions about how to handle other sentient beings, and those decisions are shaped overwhelmingly by a single criterion: How close is a given civilization to the values and priorities of the Culture itself? If it is intransigently opposed to those values and priorities then perhaps it had best be destroyed before it causes significant mischief \u2014 which is what happens to the Idirans, a civilization whose war with the Culture is the primary context for the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas<\/a><\/em> (1987). Here we have a conflict in which all wings of Contact play a role because of the scale of the problem. In order to prevent this fanatically religious society from imposing its repressive ideals on other parts of the cosmos, the Culture virtually destroys the whole Idiran culture and a great deal else, including fifty-three planets and half a dozen stars.<\/p>\n

But that is the worst-case scenario. If a civilization reached by Contact contains even a few hopeful seeds, then that world can become a candidate for mentoring<\/em> \u2014 whether it likes it or not.<\/p>\n

Mentoring \u2014 in this frankly, bluntly paternalistic version \u2014 is the primary theme of Matter<\/a><\/em> (2008), the most recent Culture novel. It is not one of Banks\u2019s better efforts, largely because it is overloaded with personnel, but it is built on the wonderful conceit that the civilization being Contacted is more or less like that of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> or George R. R. Martin\u2019s A Song of Ice and Fire series: what we would call a \u201cmedieval\u201d warrior society. The contrast between these fierce men (and sometimes fiercer women) and the urbane hyper-technologized Culture agents is a delightful one. But, while the plot hinges on the possibility that the whole world will be destroyed, if it does survive there\u2019s really no question about what will happen to the local civilization: it will become Cultured. When the Culture decides to mentor you you will be mentored quite thoroughly, even (or especially) if you\u2019re the kind of society that fans of epic fantasy nostalgically tend to long for. So Much for Subtlety<\/em> indeed.<\/p>\n

So it turns out that the closest analogue we have to the Culture\u2019s foreign policy is that of the United States in the recent Bush administration: just as President Bush wanted to spread the good news of American democracy to the rest of the world, and was willing to put some force behind that benevolent imperative, so too the Culture. The Culture is neoconservatism on the greatest imaginable scale. This may seem more than a bit self-contradictory on Banks\u2019s part, given his politics: as he writes, digressively, in his book on whiskey,<\/p>\n\n\n

I look at Dubya and just see…a grotesquely under-qualified-for-practically-anything daddy\u2019s boy who\u2019s had to be greased into every squalid position he\u2019s ever held in his miserable existence who might finally be starting to wake up to the idea that if the most powerful nation on Earth \u2014 like, ever, dude \u2014 can put somebody like him in power, all may not be well with the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

But there\u2019s no necessary inconsistency. President Bush \u2014 doubtless Banks will love this point \u2014 is not a Mind; and the American model of democracy is not that of the Culture. The Culture, Banks seems to think, deserves<\/em> to be expanded throughout the known universe, and the Minds can presumably be relied on to manage that expansion in the best possible way.<\/p>\n

But \u201cbest possible\u201d is not perfect, because the universe is not perfect \u2014 or, more to the point, even the most powerful civilizations within it are deeply flawed. And so when they come within the scope of the Culture\u2019s power, sometimes there\u2019s nothing for the Minds to say but No More Mister Nice Guy<\/em> and Of Course I Still Love You<\/em>. As yet another Culture ship tells us, It\u2019s Character Forming<\/em>. Banks has yet to mention Culture ships called It\u2019s In Your Own Best Interest<\/em> or We\u2019re Doing This For Your Own Good<\/em> or This Will Hurt Me More Than It Will Hurt You<\/em>, but surely they\u2019re out there.<\/p>\n

And maybe all this is true. Sometimes paternal figures \u2014 paternal cultures, even? \u2014 really do<\/em> take action that subordinate figures dislike but that are for the best. Given the wisdom of the Culture\u2019s Minds, don\u2019t they, better than any of the rest of us, know what\u2019s in our own best interest? Perhaps. But Banks, for all his warm praise for the Culture, occasionally plants a seed of doubt.<\/p>\n

Consider the Culture\u2019s relations with a civilization called the Chelgrians. (The history is told as part of the backstory to Look to Windward<\/em>.) The Chelgrians evolved on their home world from fierce predators and still retain predatory appearance and, to some degree, personality. Their social order was an exceptionally strict caste-based one, and when Contact began clandestinely observing them, its Minds decided that this structure was a near-absolute impediment to the Chelgrians\u2019 \u201cdevelopment\u201d \u2014 and so Contact surreptitiously intervened to create a movement devoted to wholesale cultural reconstruction along more liberal and egalitarian lines. The results were a civil war in which billions of Chelgrians died, which in turn led the Culture to own up to its behind-the-scenes manipulations.<\/p>\n

Why was the wisdom of the Culture\u2019s Minds not sufficient to foresee this mess? No explanation is given. Indeed, the Minds of Special Circumstances are surprised fairly often in these novels \u2014 in The Player of Games<\/em> they seem to realize from the start that they don\u2019t have the political situation on Azad figured out. There are only two inferences I can make here: either Banks is being careless or he is suggesting that even an intelligence capable of handling the everyday affairs of an Orbital containing thirty billion people is still<\/em> not smart enough to figure out what sentient beings will do in response to conflict. One hopes the latter is the right inference; but if it is, it suggests that the power of the Minds is largely the power of control: they can predict and deal successfully with the behavior of those who speak their language and use their drugs, but have limited ability to manipulate others.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a still more disturbing event at the end of Look to Windward<\/em>. The most repulsive character in that book is a Chelgrian, a kind of hit man working for the Chelgrian opposition to the Culture. At the end of the book the Culture sends its own assassin \u2014 an artificial but at least partly sentient \u201cterror weapon,\u201d which temporarily takes the shape of a female Chelgrian and is therefore referred to as \u201cshe\u201d \u2014 to track him down. When the assassin finds the Chelgrian she murders him, and does so in a way that is astonishingly gruesome. Banks describes this killing in vivid detail, but never offers a reason<\/em> for the assassin to torture her victim and to stay \u201cfor a while\u201d to observe his dead body in the ocean, as he makes a point of saying she does. There\u2019s no one else around, no one even to know how the Chelgrian has been killed \u2014 no one to be terrorized by the terror weapon. Again, Banks could just be nodding here, and enjoying himself to a troubling degree, but he\u2019s an awfully smart writer. Could it be that there is something less than utterly benevolent in the Culture\u2019s paternalism? Could it be that in the peculiar world of Special Circumstances something has gone wrong? What happens when Minds of near-infinite power become malicious, sadistic? It doesn\u2019t bear thinking of.<\/p>\n\n\n

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O<\/span>ne might protest that I have devoted too much attention to Special Circumstances and too little to the blissful lives of countless billions of Culture citizens. But this is what Banks does: Contact plays a leading role in all of the Culture novels, if for no other reason than because Contact is where the conflict is, and conflict is where the stories are. But there\u2019s more than simple expediency here. It seems Banks is encouraging us to ask the Omelas question: What price are you willing to pay, in the coin of suffering for a few, in order to gain the permanent contentment of billions?<\/p>\n

My impression is that Banks is straightforwardly utilitarian in these matters, and an advocate for real<\/em>politik<\/em>. I mentioned earlier that Matter<\/em> contains multiple echoes of fantasy literature, and there\u2019s an especially intriguing parody of the end of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> in the novel\u2019s epilogue. After one of the heroes sacrifices himself to save his world, Holse, his more-or-less faithful servant \u2014 a rather more sardonic and self-interested character than Sam Gamgee \u2014 returns to his home to assume a new role as local political leader. But he has been installed in his high place, which he clearly very much enjoys,by the Culture. (\u201cI don\u2019t doubt I shall be most affectionately remembered by later generations and will probably have streets named after me, though I shall aspire to a square or two and possibly even a rail terminus.\u201d) There\u2019s no pretense that Holse is particularly sharp or discerning, much less committed to the common good, but from the Culture\u2019s point of view he will get the job done, and the very strong suggestion is that the new Culture-dominated government will be greatly preferable to the previous one. In an ideal world we\u2019d have something better than this paternalism, but the people of Special Circumstances \u2014 and Banks himself, it seems \u2014 understand that we don\u2019t live in the ideal world. Coming to grips with this is, as the ship name has it, being Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But as we turn to life within<\/em> the Culture we learn that its residents tend to crave contact with that distinguished grill themselves \u2014 the smell of charring reminds them that they\u2019re alive. In Look to Windward<\/em>, a Chelgrian composer named Ziller visits a Culture Orbital, where a great concert premiering his newest piece of music is being planned \u2014 and people desperately want tickets. Now in one sense this is strange, because, as we are told,<\/p>\n\n\n

the level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary…to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

So any of the billions of residents of that Orbital \u2014 even those living tens of thousands of miles away from the concert venue \u2014 could experience the magnificent music just as vividly as those in the stadium itself. Nevertheless, in this culture without money, where everything one wants is available upon request, people are so desperate to get seats at the stadium that they resort to reinventing money. <\/strong>So says the Orbital\u2019s Mind itself through one of its avatars:<\/p>\n\n\n

People who can\u2019t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together \u2014 good grief \u2014 even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping!…How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Why have they become so barbaric? Because, as Banks explains, \u201cthere was, for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty much perpetually, an almost inestimable cachet in having seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or generally experienced something absolutely and definitely for real, with none of this contemptible virtuality stuff getting in the way.\u201d Contemptible<\/em> virtuality stuff.<\/p>\n

So it turns out that, \u201cfor almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually,\u201d the perfect simulation of reality does not erase the boundary between the real and the virtual but rather intensifies it, and makes the real ever more desirable. And such desire in turn re-creates scarcity in this allegedly post-scarcity society: the stadium where Ziller\u2019s composition will be premiered contains only so many seats, which means that it\u2019s quite possible to want and not get one. (The Mind rather mournfully explains to people that there will be no room to dance.) A very un-Culture experience.<\/p>\n

The Player of Games<\/em> is more subtly concerned with such experiences. Early in the novel Gurgeh cheats in order to win a game \u2014 it seems that even the Culture hasn\u2019t figured out a way to make real the Caucus-race from Alice in Wonderland<\/em>: \u201cAll have won and all must have prizes.\u201d Winning is a scarce commodity, which is, generally speaking, the point of a game. Gurgeh speaks of a game he has sitting in his house: \u201cThis is foreign. [It comes from] some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with?\u201d Note the implication that betting on a game somehow makes it importan<\/em>t<\/em> \u2014 there\u2019s at least a hint here that the Culture struggles to make anything really important, at least according to its own self-understanding.<\/p>\n

But perhaps its self-understanding is somewhat incomplete, or even self-deluded. Gurgeh can\u2019t make winning a game important by betting on it, but his pride<\/em> in being a skilled player of games is what leads him to cheat \u2014 to avoid losing to an adolescent girl, hardly more than a child. Winning is scarce; being pre-eminent among game-players is scarcer still. And other experiences too: through much of the book Gurgeh is deeply attracted to a young woman who isn\u2019t sexually interested in him, and what\u2019s to be done about that? No doubt an utterly convincing simulacrum of a sexual experience with her could be arranged \u2014 but Gurgeh would know such \u201ccontemptible virtuality stuff\u201d for what it is, and would despise it. Perhaps, then, there\u2019s no such thing as a society without scarcity \u2014 a society without loss or longing. As we have seen, Banks claims that in the Culture there are \u201cvery few motives left\u201d for crime. But there are some. There always will be some.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

W<\/span>hat I find fascinating about the anatomy of the Culture novels is the dissonance between Banks\u2019s straightforward statements about the Culture and certain recurrent features of the stories he writes. Banks talks about how \u201cnice\u201d the Culture is, and yet we see hidden cruelties and open desires for universal domination. He clearly envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire. He is aware that the very language of the Culture is a subtle but immensely powerful training in \u201ccorrect\u201d ideology.<\/p>\n

To some extent these oddities are, like the dominance of Contact, the inevitable consequence of the decision to write novels<\/em> about the Culture. It is not possible to come up with stories as such about people who are perfectly nice and can have everything they want instantly. But one might also say that people of whom no stories can be told are not really people in any sense recognizable to us; and the lives that they experience are not lives in any sense recognizable to us. In this sense the conceit of Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d is more complex than it seems at first to be: yes, it asks us what price we would be willing to pay for perfect happiness and social harmony; but it also may suggest that that one poor miserable child in the closet creates meaning<\/em> for all the others \u2014 gives their contentment a necessary contextual frame. Maybe those residents of Omelas who do not<\/em> walk away, who accept the necessity of the child\u2019s suffering, are all the happier because they see the contrast between that child\u2019s life and their own.<\/p>\n

This is a worrisome thought: that even the happiest of lives, or especially<\/em> the happiest of lives, depend on the existence of conflict and suffering somewhere. This is a darker view of the human condition than one which simply affirms that contentment only comes in its truest form after struggle or suffering are overcome. But in either case, it seems we are more wrapped up in \u201cthat struggle\u201d than Banks wants to admit; and it seems that his novels themselves acknowledge what he would prefer not to.<\/p>\n

An early edition of another Le Guin novel, The Dispossessed<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (1974), featured the tagline \u201cThe magnificent epic of an ambiguous utopia\u201d; those last three words eventually found their way to the title page of some later editions. This, Le Guin\u2019s finest novel, also concerns scarcity and its management: the planet Anarres is organized as a set of anarchistic communes with no central government. All goods are shared more or less equally, which is not only the philosophical choice of the society\u2019s founders but is practically necessary because on such a barren planet, so generally inhospitable to life, any alternative would lead to the deaths of many. You could say that the scarcity of goods is what makes Anarres work. But no environment and no social organization, it turns out, can eliminate pride, the desire for control of others, or the jealous suspicion of excellence. The largely capitalist planet Urras is more hospitable to the scientific brilliance of the story\u2019s protagonist, Shevek \u2014 more welcoming of his innovative thought \u2014 but its rank inequalities and stratifications disgust him. Anarres is in the end preferable, though flawed. It was built to be a utopia, but like all utopias it remains an ambiguous one.<\/p>\n

The same is true, then, of the Culture. Banks would \u201ctrade in [the] struggle\u201d that characterizes our lives in this our decidedly non-utopian world, but the passages from his novels that I have called attention to show that there is a trade to be made: Banks knows that not all<\/em> struggles are boring or pointless, as do the citizens of the Culture who try to restore unpredictability and drama to their lives. Indeed, the very existence of Contact and its Special Circumstances unit expresses this need for struggle, as Banks himself has written:<\/p>\n\n\n

The average Culture person \u2014 human or machine \u2014 knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate \u2014 though no less intellectually or morally worthy \u2014 than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

So Banks is willing, even eager, to trade our world for the Culture \u2014 but he recognizes that trade as a wager, the kind of wager that people can\u2019t make within the Culture itself, and he doesn\u2019t know precisely how it would turn out. (Even the best Minds, as we have seen, can\u2019t predict the future.) And he makes it perfectly clear that a society without internal struggles will need always to generate external ones. That is to say, Utopia requires enemies. This is not a comforting thought for societies on the path to Utopia \u2014 or for those of us living in Utopia\u2019s galactic neighborhood.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Jacobs on Iain M. Banks’s “Culture” novels and the price of bliss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5029,5041],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21988,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10263\/revisions\/21988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10263"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10263"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}