“Nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom!”
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky
Picture this scene:
In a world without laws, without prisoners, and without prisons, four boys stand outside a room with concrete foundation walls, a foamstone door, and a makeshift lock. A fifth boy sits inside, in the dark, alone. The other four are captivated by the perversity. “Where’ll he piss?” “What if he has to crap?” One of the boys asks what’s so funny about crapping. “I thought–what if he can’t see–in the dark–” His words are broken up by laughter. They know the boy inside could hear them laughing, but don’t care. They laugh until they are breathless. Thirty hours they leave him locked in the room. When they finally let him out, his shirt is smeared in yellow fecal matter. The boy tries to hide it when the lantern light exposes the filth. He asks for the duration of his imprisonment. “Thirty hours.” “Pretty long,” he says without conviction. His friends clean him up and never talk about the incident again.
This scene is taken from Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. One detail I left out of the retelling is that Kadagv, the boy in the makeshift prison, volunteered to imprison himself. “I want to see what it’s like,” he tells the others. He wants to know how it feels to submit. In a society formed around the idea of brotherhood and non-ownership, Kadagv feels the urge to be owned. One of the Kadagv’s four jailors, Shevek, happens to be the protagonist of Le Guin’s novel. When Shevek lies to the foreman about Kadagv’s whereabouts, he feels a sense of secret power. Shevek is disturbed by this. On Anarres, a propertarian is the worst name people can call you. Owning anything is a slap in the face to Anarres’s social order.
I wanted to begin the post with this prison scene because it helps explain why we act against our best interest. Often, the very act of rebelling is satisfying enough to compensate for undesirable realities. Kadagv knew full well what he was getting into; nobody pressured him. Shevek made a point of giving Kadagv some bread and water so that he could stay in the room “as long as you like.” But Kadagv corrects him. “As long as you like.”
When prisons become a foreign concept and exerting power is more illicit than promiscuity, it becomes exciting to rebel by subjecting yourself to a cell. Now I’m no psychologist, but I’d imagine it’s little different, psychologically-speaking, than those Youtubers who run marathons in Crocs. They’re not doing it because they believe crocs will help them run faster–in fact, those who attempt it suffer extreme skin abrasions–they’re doing it to attract attention by defying a social convention. It’s a silly example, but it leads to an interesting premise: freedom without purpose self-destructs. In other words, freedom gets stale if left out too long. Like a block of cheese, freedom changes texture and grows mold, if left open on the counter instead of wrapped up in the fridge. As it turns out, some boundaries are necessary for human flourishing. Collapse all walls, and we may find ourselves wishing to build them up again.
Before Whom Should One Bow Down?
You are god, so give me what I want.
I am god, so I do what I want.
This is essentially the dichotomy that forms the basis of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
It’s a matter of authority. Either you are your own master and servant (master because you tell yourself what to do; servant because disobedience feels like failure and you punish yourself for it). Or you abdicate responsibility for security and providence. But it’s a transactional relationship. I obey you so long as I prosper. This can be our attitude with God. Thus, when we suffer, our rebel-instincts kick in. I’m not getting what I wanted out of this relationship. I’ve submitted myself to you, but for what? You take control of yourself once again.
The problem with being your own master is that there are countless things to indulge in, and so few lead to happiness. It gets to the point where you wish someone would tell you where to go to be happy, who to follow to ensure that everything will be all right. Why do you think culture is obsessed with self-help books and financial guides? When it comes time to switch out headlight bulbs why do we go straight to You Tube tutorials instead of figuring it out ourselves? Because we want a proven road to success. We want someone to show us the way.
It’s a matter of authority. Before whom should one bend the knee? That is the question I’ll be exploring today.
Before we get to some truly profound quotes from Le Guin and Dostoevsky, here’s a proper introduction to The Dispossessed. It’s a great read. This blog doesn’t really do book reviews, but if you’re looking for a sci-fi read that’s more about philosophy than plot, this book is a great find.
An Ambiguous Utopia
The story takes place on two planets, Urras and Anarres (Urras’s moon). Urras is a hyper-capitalist world that is concerned with becoming technologically powerful enough to withstand invasion from alien worlds. Anarres is an anarchist colony, home to the seventh generation of rebels who split from Urras one hundred and forty years prior.
As I mentioned before, Shevek is the novel’s protagonist. He’s an Anarresti physicist, determined to develop a General Temporal Theory–a theory that, if put into practice, would make faster-than-light travel a reality. However, his work is constantly interrupted. Anarres can only be considered a utopia in the ideological sense. The planet is barren; the only natural resource they have is natural metals, which they export to Urras. Farming is of utmost importance; thus communal labor is necessary for society’s survival, particularly during a drought. One such drought draws Shevek away from his scientific research for several years. One can imagine how such menial work can frustrate an ambitious scientist. Believing the success of his theory will unite the worlds of Urras and Anarres, Shevek arranges to go to Urras, which has the infrastructure to publish and distribute his work. But his message of unity isn’t so readily accepted. Urras is as wary of Anarristi brotherhood as Anarres is of Urras’s propertarianism. When Shevek learns of Urras’s intent to use his theory for political gain, not for the betterment of society at large, he takes matters into his own hands.
The Dispossessed is an interesting novel because it doesn’t villainize one world and exalt another. The book’s subtitle is An Ambiguous Utopia. Both worlds are sacrificing a particular set of desirable things for another. Judgement is left to the reader. This perspective of subjectivity is set up well in the book’s first couple paragraphs.
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks 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 boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than 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.”
Le Guin
The literal wall being discussed in this paragraph refers to the one separating the port of Anarres from the rest of the moon. But we can extrapolate this image to illustrate the wall between Urras and Anarres. I love the phrase “an idea of boundary,” because it elevates the importance of the ideological. Change your ideas and you change what side you’re on. What matters isn’t the physical barrier between one world, one way of doing things, and another, it’s the ideological barrier. And by ideology I mean a system of guiding principles that inform a society’s political and economic policy.
On whose authority? On my ideology’s authority. The wall exists between my principles and yours. What seems horrible to me is acceptable for you, and visa versa.
But what gives an ideology authority? The answer is simple: the people who adhere to it. The greater number of people insist on following a certain set of principles to their logical end, the harder it is to ‘change sides’ so to speak. This is why you had tens of millions of Russians sentenced to the gulags throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many of whom were accused by their own neighbor or family member. When ideology becomes the authority, a single boundary exists between those who adhere and those who don’t.
My point is this: It matters what you believe. It matters to whom you bend the knee. Because even if you aren’t consciously aware of who you’re submitting to, your actions will reflect the will of some higher master, whether it be a tyrannical dictator or your own hedonistic whims.
Let’s examine Urras and Anarres in greater detail and get to know the two sides of tyranny: Kadagv crawling into the cell and Sevek turning the key.
The Power of Prosperity
In largely irreligious worlds, such as Urras and Anarres, there are two distinct precepts regarding authority. You can say either, “You are God, so give me what I want,” or “I am God, so I can do what I want.” Urras most clearly follows the former, while Anarres follows the latter. Christianity, of course, presents a third precept, but I’ll save discussion on that point for the end.
You are God, so give me what I want.
What do I mean by this? Obviously, this precept can be manipulated to fit a religious context. As preached in the Prosperity Gospel, you can look to God and expect riches from heaven. But in the context of Le Guin’s world of Urras, the god in this precept refers to materialism (or indirectly to capitalism). Just to be clear, Urras is a world with two rival political regimes. You have A-lo, which is the hyper-capitalist country Shevek visits in hopes of distributing his theory, and you have Thu, which is essentially a communist country. Whenever I refer to Urras, I’ll be referring to A-lo, since that’s where Shevek spends most of his time.
On Urras, people exchange their individual freedoms and responsibilities for comfort. I can put a utopian twist on that same idea. On Urras, people are free from wants, distractions, and cares to pursue careers that serve the greater innovation and influence of the State.
When Shevek arrives on Urras as “The First Man from the Moon,” he teaches two seminar courses at the University. He observes how supremely focused his students are. They don’t have to work rotational duty or help with the family chores. “It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.” In other words, the less you have to do, the more you start wanting to do. Their examination system–the all-too-familiar rigamarole of “cramming in information and disgorging it at demand” –appalls Shevek. But when he attempts to revise it by offering his students to write about anything that interests them with the added benefit of guaranteed high marks, the students get upset. They want the guidelines, the rubrics, the earned grades; they want him to “set the problems, to ask the right questions”. You see, all his physics students care about is reaching their careers as academic or industrial scientists. Shevek isn’t used to such single-track minds. On Anarres he fulfilled a multiplicity of roles: partner, father, Odonian, and social reformer. “He had not been free from anything: only free to do anything.” On Urras, Shevek, says, it was the other way around.
The State frees people from anything that would compromise their productivity. People want standards, guidelines, boundaries? The State would give it to them with the expectation that their generosity would be well-rewarded with increased innovation and material wealth. As Urras prospers on the outside, it suffocates on the inside.
“The individual cannot bargain with the State,” Shevek says, “the State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.” The State thinks if people can possess things they will be content to live in prison.
You are god, so give me what I want. If this particular god obliges, then you become as dependent as a child is to his mother. Freedom, as it turns out, doesn’t provide the happiness most people think it does. Enter: The Grand Inquisitor.
The Grand Inquisitor
“The Grand Inquisitor” might be the most philosophically rich chapter in all of literature. Entire books have been written on this single chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As a diligent blog writer, I, of course, haven’t read any of them. The reason I introduce this chapter to you here is because of its extreme relevance to the relationship between freedom and happiness.
Without bogging you down in a great deal of context, “The Grand Inquisitor” is a poem, or rather, a short story, told by an atheist to his devout Christian brother. The story is set in Spain during the Inquisition . . . with a twist. Jesus Christ has returned to the world. After Christ raises a girl from the dead in front of a large crowd, the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor enters the scene. The crowd bows to him, as if of one body. Christ, who is called the Captive in the story, is taken away for interrogation by this Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, an elderly man who is determined to point out the error of the Captive’s ways when He gave humanity free will to follow Him or turn away.
The Grand Inquisitor refers to the passage of Scripture where Satan tempted Jesus in the desert.
“Now the tempter came to him and said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
Matthew 4:3
Matthew calls Satan the ‘tempter’. The Grand Inquisitor refers to Satan as the ‘Spirit’. He argues that if Jesus had given into this temptation, if he had turned stones into loaves, then the people would have followed Him gladly, “like a flock”. The people would have followed him and worshipped him, grateful and obedient, though fearful that he might take away their food supply. But Jesus did not want to deprive man of their freedom. He wanted them to follow Him out of their own free will.
To the Grand Inquisitor, this is a great evil.
“You desired that man’s love should be free, that he should follow you freely, enticed and captivated by you. Henceforth, in place of the old, firm law, man was himself to decide with a free heart what is good and what is evil, with only your image before him to guide him–but surely you never dreamed that he would at last reject and call into question even your image and your truth were he to be oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice?”
Dostoevsky
To the Grand Inquisitor, it is a great evil that Jesus should ask virtue of people without providing them with anything material to lessen their earthly suffering. “Feed them and then ask virtue of them–that is what will be inscribed upon the banner they will raise against you and before which your temple will come crashing down.”
By denying earthly power, Jesus allowed conflicts over idols to take his place. Without a ‘miracle-man’ to follow, the question becomes, “Before whom should one bow down?” The Grand Inquisitor tells the Captive that he’s “corrected” His great deed. The Catholic Church, weaponized by the Inquisition, would take in those burdened by the freedom Christ had given them.
“In our hands, though, everyone will be happy and will neither mutiny nor destroy one another any more, as they do in your freedom, wherever one turns. Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom for us and submit to us. And what does it matter whether we are right or whether we are telling a lie? They themselves will be persuaded we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom has brought them.”
Dostoevsky
According to the Grand Inquisitor, the Church will provide the walls, the lines that one mustn’t cross, the words that one mustn’t say; the Church will take on the burden of the knowledge of good and evil because the weight is too heavy for the common man to bear.
Like the students on Urras who complain when Shevek encourages them to write an essay on whatever interests them, those taken in by the Grand Inquisitor’s lies are happy to submit if they receive bread and law in exchange. Because the Grand Inquisitor has a point. Freedom can seem unendurable. Those of us who prize security will crawl into the cell and those of us who prize power will turn the key.
This is what Shevek discovers during his time on Urras. Urras welcomed him on their world, not to distribute his scientific theory to the population at large, but to those in control of the State. Shevek does want to work for the State. He doesn’t want the money and the things the State gives him. In desperation, he tries to get the people to wake up.
“You the possessors are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!”
Le Guin
The precept “You are God, so give me what I want” will never lead to true happiness because, as Shevek points out, “there is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power.” If Jesus had turned the stones into loaves and the people had worshipped him because of it, their obedience would have been dependent on his ability to provide for their earthly needs. Their relationship would have been solely transactional. I give you my undying loyalty, you give me bread. Love is replaced with profit. Suffering might be mitigated, but true brotherhood, the true sacrificial spirit, becomes obsolete.
Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. What does Anarres have to contribute to our ambiguous utopia?
One For All and All For One
When you think of anarchy, a few things could jump to mind; The Purge TV series, Ayn Rand, a middle school locker room. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather crawl into a prison cell with my loaf of bread than face the unrepentant mob of middle school boys after gym class.
So what about anarchy is utopian? Well, Anarres’ society functions how many leftists dream it might. Communal meals, communal housing, presumably universal health care. People take turns working undesirable jobs like mining, garbage collecting, and grave digging. Without laws or a government to enforce them, order is kept simply by the communal nature of life. Shevek explains to the father of a Urrasti family he’s staying with: “Nobody owns anything to rob . . . as for violence . . . would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
As it turns out, getting people to work on Anarres isn’t as difficult as one might think. In a world whose natural resources are limited to mercury, fish, worms, and a species of tree, entertainment is scarce and work is plentiful. Starvation is a constant threat. Shevek states the only reward for work is the “social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors . . one’s own pleasure and the respect of one’s fellows.”
So although Anarres may have been founded on the precept “I am god, so I do what I want,” the reality becomes “You are god (referring to collective community) so do what I want”.
I think it’s important to make this distinction between theory and reality because it just goes to show how exhausting it is to make ourselves the authority on everything. Also, if the anarchist vision includes ‘doing whatever you want,’ then what’s to stop you from marking off territory, gathering wealth, and utilizing your advantage to oppress others? Doing so would inhibit others’ ability to do whatever they want. So in order for an anarchist or socialist system to work, there must be some form of law, whether actual or instilled in the social imaginary.
Odo was the leader of this anarchist movement who lived one hundred and forty years before the novel takes place. One of her maxims, so to speak, was this: To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. Just imagine that spray-painted on a college campus somewhere.
Owners and laws are hated in the Odonian philosophy because they restrict an individual’s agency.
“The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”
Le Guin
Revolution is our obligation. In other words, to be a good Ododnian, one must continually revolt against the established order. An adapting and changing society, according to Odo, is the only way for it to survive. And a society can only adapt if the individual is free to act on his own initiative, unburdened by authority.
But that’s not what we see on Anarres. For one hundred and forty years, society has remained the same. Very few deny a job posting. The label ‘egoist’ is slapped onto anyone who acts like a ‘propertarian,’ meaning they talked about possessing something, even something as innocuous as a child wanting to sit alone in a ray of sunlight. They talk and act like radical revolutionaries, but only in comparison to the Urrasti.
Odonians believe property and material things are the sole culprits of a sick society. They look at an oppressive regime like the State and decry it, shouting, “You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them.” But what Shevek comes to learn is that people don’t require laws to commit crime. Or, rather, the laws don’t have to be written down, or even enforced, to weigh heavily on the community. Social convention, imposed by a particular ideology, will enslave you far more effectively and quietly than any signature or gavel.
Near the end of the novel there’s quite a revealing conversation between Shevek and his partner, Takver (I say partner because Odonians believe marriage and its associated titles to be a form of possession). They’re discussing the fate of a mutual friend, Tirin. Now Tirin is an artist in the true sense of the word– “an inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage.”
What is Tirin satirizing? Who else but the Odonians. His play tells the ludicrous story of an Urrasti smuggled onto Anarres where he runs around, trying to own everything. At one point he tries to pay a woman for sex, but she wouldn’t accept the money; so he’s trapped between temptation and his view of morality. Was Tirin praising the Urrasti practice of ownership through his comedy? Regardless, the play was viewed as immoral by Annaresti standards and Tirin was forced into therapy–something the novel doesn’t elaborate on. What’s important here is how the Anarresti brotherhood rejects a man who was only fulfilling Odo’s expectations. Tirin ‘accepted no rule’ was ‘the initiator of his own acts’. As Shevek explains to Takver, Tirin was a real Odonian, unlike the masses who dismissed his play. This ostracization affected him greatly. He wrote the same play over and over, hoping every time he’d pluck up the courage to share it, to talk about it. But he’s too frightened of the ‘social organism’. When a job posting drew him away from his small group of friends, Tirin didn’t exercise his right to refuse the posting and stay.
Shevek makes the point how everyone always says we can refuse the posting, exercise our right as free people. “We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind . . .”
You can see how society at large can become an idol. Tirin is a victim of a cancel culture remarkably similar to the America of five years ago. When we point to a particular ideology and say ‘You are god, so do what I want,’ part of the sacrament, so to speak, includes castigating those who fall out of line.
Odonians say, ‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws,’ but that saying ignores the deeper reality of human nature because material things like owners and laws are only one side of the coin. There’s also the spiritual side, where belief, superstition and ideology come into play. Listen to Shevek criticize what Anarres has become.
“We’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate–we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking.”
Le Guin
Think back to the Grand Inquisitor chapter. How the inquisitor ridiculed the Captive for presenting humanity with a choice–follow on faith or turn your back. The Grand Inquisitor said Jesus would have created peace on earth if only he had created more mystery, dispensed more miracles, and dwelt among the people as a uniting force. As the Grand Inquisitor stated himself “The need of universal union is the third and final torment of human beings”. But I think a lasting union only works if everyone is submitting voluntarily, out of adoration, caring not for material gain or social standing.
Think how easy it is for us to create echo chambers, to find something that sounds good and bow down to it and condemn anyone who remains standing. Is this the kind of obedience Jesus desires from us? A fearful loyalty? Bending the knee out of fear of what the neighbors will think if you refuse?
Part of why I think we value freedom as much as we do is because we recognize the importance of voluntary choice. Because that’s what Jesus gave us–a free will to choose. His way or the highway.
Our House
So which world would you rather live in? Urras or Anarres? I think the answer comes down to what you would rather rebel against. One of Shevek’s acquaintances on Urras makes an interesting comment about Odonianism. “I know that you’ve got a–a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says ‘Do this!’ and you do, and ‘Don’t!’ and you don’t.” And Shevek says, “That is where she belongs . . . Inside my head.” But his acquaintance says no. “Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her.”
Would you rather rebel against a State, or rebel against yourself? Would you rather rebel against a god who failed to satisfy your every want or a god who lives inside your head, telling you you’re free when there are eyes everywhere?
At the end of the day, Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia sets up a false dichotomy. As Christians, we don’t have to continually revolt against authority to be free. Nor do we have to abide by every law, or submit to every statute to gain prosperity. I’d like to introduce a third precept for authority. Not “You are god, so you give me what I want;” not “I am god, so I do what I want;” but “You are God, so let your will be done.”
A step of faith into voluntary submission to authority, out of love, for the sanctification of your spirit, so that you may live in the house of the Lord forever.
In Greek, utopia means no place. The Wikipedia definition: An imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members.
Heaven is no utopia.
“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”
John 14: 1-3