The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma
In Praise of Ursula Le Guin
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.
The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
It's worth remembering, too, the critical resources we have for envisaging the future society. Ursula Le Guin sings the praises for the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin got caught up in a lot of controversies and polemics in the 1980s and his reputation suffered as a result. That's unfortunate. He saw the dangers of a certain kind of ecology becoming the new dismal science, sapping the will and diverting minds into obscurantism and worse. He held firm to reason, public life and democracy, redeeming the radical potential of the Enlightenment (in the tradition of the left republicanism of a Spinoza, so much more substantial than the tepid liberal 'defence' of the desolidarised atomism of the present day). (I'd just say, leave something over for anarchic excess, a little something that escapes a totalizing Reason, something core that evades enclosure ... that bit that Wittgenstein was silent on, the bit he thought the most meaningful. The 'active life process' is more than a 'collection of dead facts', as Marx put it in The German Ideology, and a whole lot more than the ‘realism’ that Le Guin castigated.
In a 2012 polemic, “Lying It All Away,” Le Guin wrote scathingly of “growth capitalism” returning to its origins and “providing security for none but the strongest profiteers.” She notes that “I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising.” Can America, she wonders, continue “living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country?” “I don’t know,” she replies. After all, our country is now run by corporations “of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.”
Are we up for the socio-ecological transformation of the political so as to constitute a public sphere worthy of the name? Ursula Le Guin thought highly of Murray Bookchin. And so do I. He was onto the ecological as well as the social contradictions of the capital system from the very start of the 1960s (and reading Marx at the moment, so too was he, in his notion of metabolic rift. If you are serious about system change and a future beyond not merely the institutions of the capital system but the very logic of capital ... ).
Writer, science fiction icon and radical thinker Ursula K. Le Guin endorses Murray Bookchin’s latest collection of essays, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy.
'Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in The Next Revolution represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. Murray Bookchin was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.'
Yet, Le Guin argues, young people continue to look for “intelligent, realistic, long-term thinking: not another ranting ideology, but a practical working hypothesis, a methodology of how to regain control of where we’re going.” She notes that Bookchin does indeed address this question of “where we’re going”:
“Impatient, idealistic readers may find him uncomfortably tough-minded. He’s unwilling to leap over reality to dreams of happy endings, unsympathetic to mere transgression pretending to be political action: “A ‘politics’ of disorder or ‘creative chaos,’ or a naïve practice of ‘taking over the streets’ (usually little more than a street festival), regresses participants to the behavior of a juvenile herd.” That applies more to the Summer of Love, certainly, than to the Occupy movement, yet it is a permanently cogent warning.”
Le Guin turns this warning towards the subject of ecological degradation:
“What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned.
‘Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.’
Deep and enduring transitions and transformations require an actively democratic and social content.
"Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status."
—Murray Bookchin
"What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned."
"Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in "The Next Revolution” represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. He critiques the failures of past movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy and, in the last essay in the book, sketches his hope of how we might turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice—a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system."
It’s sad to have lost someone so eloquent, someone with vision, but we still have her words, and they are very pertinent to the world we live in. In her writing she has raised questions concerning capitalism, the environment and gender that are interlinked and will grow more and more pressing in the years to come.
China Miéville described her as “one of American literature’s most radical voices”. We need that voice. ‘I’ve always been something of a socialist in politics,’ she said, ‘that’s extremely radical over here.’ She got to the roots of things. And she was right about the imagination: ‘My books have been banned simply because they are imaginative - science-fiction, fantasy, what have you. The imagination is considered dangerous and of course, it is. These people are right. The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.’
I love how she affirmed imaginative literature as the oldest kind of storytelling. She challenged the domination of a certain kind of ‘realism.’ ‘If it was realistic it was inherently better than anything imaginative and therefore the silliest realist was better than Tolkien. Well, it just, it won’t wash, as we say.’ Exactly!
At the 2014 National Book Awards, Le Guin was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. I like that she accepted the medal on behalf of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, all those who had been “excluded from literature for so long” whilst the literary honours went to the “so-called realists.”
From her speech:
‘Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.’
Talking of Tolkien, I love Tolkien, and have written at length on his work, even though I am a socialist and he makes a point of saying that he, as a conservative, is not. Ursula was influenced by Tolkien, most clearly in the Earthsea cycle. But if I had to point to a difference here, I’d say it is this: whereas Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings presents us with a geography of good and evil, the world as a battleground between contending forces who have to go to war and fight the issue out, Ursula Le Guin’s stories concern a search for an internal “balance” among competing forces that, when balance is found, complement each other, a view she took from her lifelong study of Taoism. I like that view. Her writing embodies that search for balance alongside a need for compassion.
Much of Ursulu’s writing and wisdom derives from her long standing study of Taoism. She was responsible for a new translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu - new English version by Ursula Le Guin, Shambhala Publications, 1997.
In the footnotes, Le Guin uses 'anarchists' twice to identify the correlation between Taoism and Anarchism.
“Lao Tzu, a mystic, demystifies political power. Autocracy and oligarchy foster the beliefs that power is gained magically and retained by sacrifice, and that powerful people are genuinely superior to the powerless. Lao Tzu does not see political power as magic. He sees rightful power as earned and wrongful power as usurped. He does not see power as virtue, but as the result of virtue. The democracies are founded on that view. He sees sacrifice of self or others as a corruption of power, and power as available to anybody who follows the Way. This is a radically subversive attitude. No wonder anarchists and Taoists make good friends.”
Footnote to Chap 13 (pages 16-17):
“About Lao Tzu ...I don't think he is exactly anti-intellectual, but he considers most uses of the intellect to be pernicious, and all plans for improving things to be disastrous. Yet he's not a pessimist. No pessimist would say that people are able to look after themselves, be just, and prosper on their own. No anarchist can be a pessimist.”
Footnote to Chap 57 (pages 74-75):
She goes into the depths. Without the dark, there is no light: and it is the fact of mortality that allows all that is alive to be. She goes into fear, pride and envy, our shadow selves, concealed, which ever threaten to devour us from within. Lives that are messy, often broken, but very real, and capable of fullness.
On a personal note, I’ve always loved books. When asked about my favourite book or which book/s have influenced me most, I struggle to answer. All of them! I’m inclined to say. Ursula makes precisely that point: ‘They say ‘Tell us about the book that influenced you most’. Everything I ever read! It all goes into me, it’s like food. Tell me about the meal that nourished you most? I can’t do it! I eat books and so of course they become part of me.’ I know exactly what she means, that’s such a great comment from her.
She draws us into what she called the ‘inner lands’ of the imagination, making a powerful statement for words and writing serving as a moral force in the world. I agree very much. “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.” She saw her “pleasant duty” as a writer being to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”
“The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right?” "“Machoman is afraid of our terms, which are not all rational, positive, competitive, etc. And so he has taught us to despise and deny them. In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean — the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life." “The way to make something good is to make it well." “Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do.” —from A Wizard of Earthsea."
“Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,” she has written, “and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.” Imaginative literature, she has written, asks us “to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.” In her fiction, she has tried to balance the analytical and the intuitive. “Both directions strike me as becoming more and more sterile the farther you follow them,” she says. “It’s when they can combine that you get something fertile and living and leading forward. Mysticism—which is a word my father held in contempt, basically—and scientific factualism, need for evidence, and so on . . . I do try to juggle them, quite consciously.”
The literary mainstream once relegated her work to the margins. Then she transformed the mainstream.
Odo wrote:
'A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
From Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Page 207
Unbuilding Walls
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls."
Shevek from Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed
This is what Ursula Le Guin said with respect to The Dispossessed in the introduction to The Day Before the Revolution, a short story written in memoriam to the anarchist, Paul Goodman:
“My novel 'The Dispossessed' is about a small world full of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn't get into the action - except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right, but anarchism as pre- figured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian state (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”
The Day Before the Revolution is a story about the reflections of an old revolutionary, and how she copes with her ideas on freedom and responsibility now being realized. It describes lost expectations and hopes, the despair of old age and the bond between herself and the people from the streets she is one with. The story itself acts as a definition of a communitarian or socialist anarchism, defining the anarchist one who freely chooses and who accepts the responsibility of choice.
“Who is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”
The Dispossessed offers an analysis of individuals living under different political systems, going on to give a detailed description of life in an anarchist society and the ways in which problems are addressed. A few quotes give an idea of the philosophy, life, and organization of society on Anarres:
“Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo's plans for the society she did not live to see founded. She had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization. Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that all communities be connected by communication and transport networks, so that goods and ideas could get where they were wanted, and the administration of things might work with speed and ease and no community should be cut off from change and interchange. But the network was not to be run from the top down. There was to be no controlling centre, no capital, no establishment for the self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the dominance-drive of individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chief's of state.”
But this ideal view of an anarchist society was not to be the reality in practice.
“There had to be a centre. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labour and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates, were in Abbenay, right from the start. And from the start the settlers were aware that the unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance.”
A lack of vigilance causing the steady growth of a bureaucratic elite forms the background to this story on Anarres. Toward the end of the story, Shevek, the principal character, sums up his experiences of capitalism on Urras:
“... there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter in, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person - yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box - Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrappings of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and, what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a. dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last.”
When Shevek returns to Anarres he brings with him a Hainishman (from the planet Hain) and emphasizes the responsibilities of an anarchist. We are responsible to you and you to us, you become an Anarresti - with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe. But it is possible, through a proper understanding of 'choice' and 'responsibility', and how these things that are necessary to a truly human life are given content and meaning only through the practical reappropriation of social power from the alienated forms and systems in which they have been incarnated.
“Le Guin writes in quiet, straightforward sentences about people who feel they are being torn apart by massive forces in society— technological, political, economic—and who fight courageously to remain whole.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. L e Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own.” —The Boston Globe
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Word for World is Forest
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Word for World is Forest
