American Utopia: Literature, Society, and the Human Use of Human Beings 9780367144272, 9780367144340, 9780429032004

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Part I Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia
1 What If You Could . . .?
One Utopian Hand Washes the Other
Modifying People Like Monsanto Corn
A Whopper to Pay
Platopia
The Island of Dr. More
A Quintessential Scale Model
Live and Let Go
The Piper to Nowhere
Notes
2 Little Commonwealth
A Sadistic Nightmare
Experimenters and Guinea Pigs
Bride of Christ
Off the American Grid
A Very Un-American Dream
A Perfectly Adjusted Anthill
Cherry Popsicle in July
Brother, Can You Paradigm?
Notes
3 Defense of Poetry
In Like Flynn
Milking Real Knowledge From Unreal Cows
Humankind’s Greatest Monsters
Why God Tolerates Historians
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais, and Dostoevski
Homo-cide
The Human Use of Human Beings
Who Will Guard the Guardians?
Notes
Part II Dischtopia: Thomas M. Disch
4 Enter the Chameleon
Endzone
A Text Adventure You’ll Never Forget
Playfully Serious About It
Drop Dead
Utopia Is the Reciprocal of Armageddon
Darkly Wise and Rudely Great
Who Will Make the Guardians Obey?
Unlineated Free Verse
Notes
5 East 11th Street
Dreams of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Death of Socrates
Bodies
Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire
Emancipation
Angouleme
334
Average Joe and Joan
Notes
6 The Shape of Things to Come
Elementary, Dear Watson
Joe Weider’s Protein Blast
What Do I Want, Dear?
The Peter Principle
To Each According to His Need
Utopian Basic Income
Gross National Happiness
Ochlocracy
Notes
Part III Pantopia: Bernard Malamud
7 Earth Abides
Djanks and Druzhkies
Vegan Vampires
Aesop, La Fontaine, and Br’er Rabbit
Utopus
Three Branches of Government
Pax Americana
Aren’t We a Little More Two-Faced Than That?
Famous Four Fs
Notes
8 You Tell Me That It’s Evolution
No Dice
Pinch Yourself To Find Out How Much It Hurts Others
Gene-Culture Coevolution
Monkey-See-Monkey-Do
Unabomber
Proselfish and Prosocial
Team USA
Paleoanthropologists Have It Easy
Notes
9 Proverbial Wisdom
From “Cinderella” to “Snow White”
The Wit of One But the Wisdom of Many
Tribal Voices Trapped in Amber
Me-First-We-First
Charity Begins at Home
God Takes Care of a Blind Cow
Frederick Douglass
God’s Grace
Notes
Part IV Uchronia: Kurt Vonnegut
10 The Islands of the Day Before
Groundhog Day
Cynics Are Lapsed Romantics
What Are People For?
A Garden of Eden Here
Nothing in This Book Is True
Darwin’s Islands
Like Einstein on an Elevator
Greater Love Hath No Man Than This
Notes
11 Do the Chronomotion With Me
Joe Pesci Shrimp
Scrambled Eggs
Ten Years in Spacetime
The Pissing While
V Comes Back Greater Than C
The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe
Tinseltown Filmflam
Future Shock
Notes
12 The Imp of the Perverse
Hollywood After Dark
Man Is Wolf to Man
Prisoner’s Dilemma
No One Goes Hungry
Blue Meanie
TFT
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Smalltown USA
Notes
Part V Biotopia: Margaret Atwood
13 Oryx and Crick
The Perfect Linchpin
Tell That to Ted Bundy
Twelve Monkeys
Once Upon a Time
Calling Linda Lovelace
Paradice
Brainstorm
Massacres, Genocides, That Sort of Thing
Notes
14 The Advocate’s Devil
Ethical Cleansing
Earth and Eden
Clay Pigeons
What Would You Do?
Less Than Human
Devil Spawn
Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover
One for the Old Generation, One for the New
Notes
15 Talkin’ ’Bout My Gene-ration
Every War We Waged
Frankencrops
Careful With That Axe, Eu-gene
Earmouse
Clone Me a Me
Revving Up Autoevolution
Recreational Vikings
The Divine Comedy
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

AMERICAN UTOPIA

From Black Tuesday to the White House, from Plato to Robert Nozick, from Eugene V. Debs to Richard Nixon, from Peter Cornelis Plockhoy to the hippie communes of the Sixties, from universal basic income to utopian basic income, from proverbial wisdom to multilevel selection, from Big Data to paleomorality, from Prisoner’s Dilemma to social-engineering Israeli kindergartens, from time travel to gene engineering, from the pretzel logic of meritocracy to deaggressing humanity, American Utopia maps the pitfalls and windfalls of social reform in the name of the human use of human beings. Interrogating the assumptions behind four outré utopias by Thomas M. Disch, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood, the book interrogates the assumptions that have historically been central to the utopian project. Whence the seeds of social discontent? Whence our taste for egoism and altruism? For waging war and waging peace? Can we bioengineer human nature to specifications? Should we? Who makes better guardians: humans or machines? And who will guard the guardians? Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and writer who is listed in the Canadian Who’s Who. He is Amazon and Alibris #1 bestseller in American history and criticism, popular culture criticism, and Canadian literary criticism, and author of nineteen award-winning books, including American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History (Routledge, 2011).

Peter Swirski is one of the original scholars of his generation. American Utopia combines an incredible range of knowledge, wicked humor, and take-no-prisoner attitude to the corruption, exploitation, and political repression that come between us and social justice. Anyone interested in Utopias and Utopian thought, in American literature and American society, and in the future of humanity—and that includes all of us—will find this one-of-a-kind book difficult to put down. —Arthur Asa Berger, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University This is quintessential Swirski: sharp, exciting, and sophisticated. This is a timely and rewarding read. Don’t miss it! —David Livingstone Smith, Professor of Philosophy, University of New England This book is a major contribution to Utopian studies, an insightful critique of some contemporary utopias, and an important meditation on issues raised by the doomed search for human perfection. —David Rampton, University of Ottawa

AMERICAN UTOPIA Literature, Society, and the Human Use of Human Beings

Peter Swirski

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Peter Swirski to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-14427-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-14434-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03200-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to: Nicholas Ruddick, humanist, essayist, fantasist and Brigitte Braschler, scientist, ecologist, myrmecologist

Utopian dreamers are deceived and deceiving. Their “fight for the people” rhetoric may sound good at first, but history proves egalitarian governments and the cultures they try to create destroy freedom, destroy creativity, destroy human lives, create poverty and misery, and often spread beyond their borders to bring others under slavery. Utopians believe that through their own personal brilliance a better society can be created on earth. When the belief in man as a creation in the image of God is completely rejected, the use of slavery and mass execution can be justified in the name of the creation of a utopian state for the masses. Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung: together these so-called visionaries through their fanciful policies are responsible for the deaths of millions of people. —William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, communists, just like Hitler called himself, hey presto, a Christian. To children of the Great Depression, however, it still seems a mild shame to outlaw from polite thought, because of the crime of tyrants, a word that in the beginning described to us nothing more than a possibly reasonable alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot. Yes, and the word Socialism was the second S in USSR, so good-bye Socialism along with Communism. —Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

CONTENTS

List of Figures

xiv

PART I

Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

1

  1 What If You Could . . .? One Utopian Hand Washes the Other  3 Modifying People Like Monsanto Corn  4 A Whopper to Pay  6 Platopia 7 The Island of Dr. More  9 A Quintessential Scale Model  11 Live and Let Go  13 The Piper to Nowhere  14 Notes 15

3

  2 Little Commonwealth A Sadistic Nightmare  17 Experimenters and Guinea Pigs  19 Bride of Christ  20 Off the American Grid  22 A Very Un-American Dream  23 A Perfectly Adjusted Anthill  26 Cherry Popsicle in July  27 Brother, Can You Paradigm?  29 Notes 30

17

x Contents

  3 Defense of Poetry In Like Flynn  31 Milking Real Knowledge From Unreal Cows  33 Humankind’s Greatest Monsters  34 Why God Tolerates Historians  36 Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais, and Dostoevski  38 Homo-cide 39 The Human Use of Human Beings  40 Who Will Guard the Guardians?  41 Notes 42

31

PART II

Dischtopia: Thomas M. Disch

45

  4 Enter the Chameleon Endzone 47 A Text Adventure You’ll Never Forget  48 Playfully Serious About It  50 Drop Dead  51 Utopia Is the Reciprocal of Armageddon  52 Darkly Wise and Rudely Great  54 Who Will Make the Guardians Obey?  55 Unlineated Free Verse  57 Notes 59

47

  5 East 11th Street Dreams of J. Alfred Prufrock  60 The Death of Socrates  61 Bodies 63 Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire  64 Emancipation 67 Angouleme 69 334 70 Average Joe and Joan  71 Notes 73

60

  6 The Shape of Things to Come Elementary, Dear Watson  74 Joe Weider’s Protein Blast  75 What Do I Want, Dear?  77 The Peter Principle  79

74

Contents  xi

To Each According to His Need  80 Utopian Basic Income  82 Gross National Happiness  84 Ochlocracy 85 Notes 87 PART III

Pantopia: Bernard Malamud

89

  7 Earth Abides Djanks and Druzhkies  91 Vegan Vampires  92 Aesop, La Fontaine, and Br’er Rabbit  94 Utopus 95 Three Branches of Government  97 Pax Americana  98 Aren’t We a Little More Two-Faced Than That?  100 Famous Four Fs  101 Notes 103

91

  8 You Tell Me That It’s Evolution No Dice  104 Pinch Yourself To Find Out How Much It Hurts Others  106 Gene-Culture Coevolution  107 Monkey-See-Monkey-Do 109 Unabomber 111 Proselfish and Prosocial  113 Team USA  114 Paleoanthropologists Have It Easy  115 Notes 117

104

  9 Proverbial Wisdom From “Cinderella” to “Snow White”  118 The Wit of One But the Wisdom of Many  119 Tribal Voices Trapped in Amber  121 Me-First-We-First 123 Charity Begins at Home  125 God Takes Care of a Blind Cow  127 Frederick Douglass  128 God’s Grace  131 Notes 132

118

xii Contents

PART IV

Uchronia: Kurt Vonnegut

133

10 The Islands of the Day Before Groundhog Day  135 Cynics Are Lapsed Romantics  136 What Are People For?  138 A Garden of Eden Here  140 Nothing in This Book Is True  141 Darwin’s Islands  142 Like Einstein on an Elevator  144 Greater Love Hath No Man Than This  145 Notes 146

135

11 Do the Chronomotion With Me Joe Pesci Shrimp  147 Scrambled Eggs  148 Ten Years in Spacetime  149 The Pissing While  150 V Comes Back Greater Than C  152 The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe  153 Tinseltown Filmflam  156 Future Shock  157 Notes 158

147

12 The Imp of the Perverse Hollywood After Dark  159 Man Is Wolf to Man  160 Prisoner’s Dilemma  163 No One Goes Hungry  165 Blue Meanie  166 TFT 168 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  169 Smalltown USA  170 Notes 172

159

PART V

Biotopia: Margaret Atwood

173

13 Oryx and Crick The Perfect Linchpin  175 Tell That to Ted Bundy  176

175

Contents  xiii

Twelve Monkeys  178 Once Upon a Time  180 Calling Linda Lovelace  181 Paradice 183 Brainstorm 184 Massacres, Genocides, That Sort of Thing  185 Notes 187 14 The Advocate’s Devil Ethical Cleansing  188 Earth and Eden  190 Clay Pigeons  192 What Would You Do?  193 Less Than Human  195 Devil Spawn  196 Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover  197 One for the Old Generation, One for the New  200 Notes 201

188

15 Talkin’ ’Bout My Gene-ration Every War We Waged  203 Frankencrops 204 Careful With That Axe, Eu-gene  206 Earmouse 207 Clone Me a Me  209 Revving Up Autoevolution  211 Recreational Vikings  212 The Divine Comedy  213 Notes 215

203

Bibliography216 Index236

FIGURES

1.1 Utopian history in three easy stages. Credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW10541  2.1 Petitioning for change in America. Credit: Peter Swirski 3.1 Utopia on American soil. Credit: Map data © 2018 Google 4.1 Narrative grid or narrative maze? Credit: Thomas M. Disch 5.1 334 East 11th Street, New York, New York, USA, today. Credit: Peter Swirski 6.1 Naissance d’une utopie—Birth of Utopia. Credit: Peter Swirski 7.1 East meets West: superpower détente, 1972. Credit: Peter Swirski 8.1 Evolutionary studies and cultural studies. Credit: Peter Swirski 9.1 Proverbial wisdom. Credit: David Liam Moran/CC BY-SA 3.0 9.2 Relative shares of we-first (moralistic) and me-first (selfish) proverbs in nine sample collections. Credit: Peter Swirski 9.3 Changes in the relative shares in four collections for which I used an inclusive definition of moralistic proverbs. Credit: Peter Swirski 10.1 Old-fashioned humanism: RefuseFascism.org. Credit: Peter Swirski 11.1 Pros and cons of time travel. Credit: Artertainment Productions 12.1 Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Credit: Peter Swirski 13.1 America’s mean streets. Credit: Peter Swirski 14.1 The inhuman use of human beings. Credit: Imperial War Museum (BU 4260) 15.1 Nude earmouse. Credit: Brittany Forkus

10 25 37 58 66 82 100 110 122 129 129 137 155 162 179 198 208

PART I

Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

1 WHAT IF YOU COULD . . .?

One Utopian Hand Washes the Other There are two pathways to utopia, and by extension to eutopia—a better rather than a perfect place. The first one is commonplace, having been pursued in every society since the dawn of society, and its principles are as simple as rain. We try to engineer behaviour by tweaking the rules that govern behaviour in society: constitutions, laws, contracts, regulations, norms of conduct, school curricula, and the like. Social engineering can be strikingly successful, as it had to be for us to have collectively made it thus far. There are limits, however, to what all such noninvasive interventions can accomplish. This is because, as I was at pains to show in American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), noninvasive techniques work only to the extent that they don’t interfere with the basic biology underlying the human life cycle. Human nature is enormously pliable, as testified by the remarkable variety of cultures and behaviours it nurtures around the globe. But it is not infinitely so. At the bottom of all societies lie structural similarities in the form of biological restrains on flexibility of behaviour. Try to overstep these restrains and nature will push back—and hard. For example, in the twentieth century communist states from the Soviet Union to Maoist China tried to do away with family bonds. Those were to be replaced by loyalty and love for the state. Yet, as soon as the ideological soap bubble had burst, the decades-long indoctrination proved skin deep. People turned out to be less like the infinitely malleable putty that totalitarian architects insisted they were and more like roly-poly dolls, returning to the default state when the force acting on them eased.1 However, social reformers who like to see a quicker return on their investments have a less roundabout path to utopia. Instead of working with social

4  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

rules and laws, you can cut to the chase and engineer the desired type of social behaviour by engineering the desired type of social being. In stark contrast to socio-engineering, bioengineering is anything but slow, superficial, and reversible. Cut and paste a few genes and in one swoop you could get all the prosociality you want. Ultramodern as it sounds, the instrumental path to behaviour modification is not without antecedents, from twentieth-century lobotomy to medieval trepanation.2 So is its chamber-of-horrors iconography, straight from Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness. Naturally, going inside people’s heads and flipping neural switches is not for the weak-hearted among social reformers. This very directness, on the other hand, is what makes opportunistic politicians and utopian prophets salivate at the thought. Without any pomp or fanfare we have already plunged into the murky waters of engineering people for society rather than the other way round. In 2016, the American Biosafety and Ethics panel gave unanimous thumbs up to gene editing in humans. In an eerie twist, the research is administered by the University of Pennsylvania, where in 1999 a gene-therapy project got axed after a patient died and the chief scientist was exposed to have had a financial stake in the trials.3 Like it or not, our technologically turbocharged civilization is vaulting over somatic barriers and ethical taboos every day. The question is no longer if but when designer genes will become as acceptable and affordable as Calvin Klein’s. And that brings us back to engineering utopia in a world awash with blood, pain, and tears on every page of every history book. Which path should we take: social engineering or bioengineering? Should we modify the way we live or the way we are? Of course, this seemingly clear-cut dichotomy isn’t. Laws and norms control social behaviour, ideally to the point where they become internalized and no longer needed.4 Remove the proscriptions and prescriptions and individuals should act as if they were still in place. In utopia you could remove speed limits and radar traps—and publicize it to the motorists—and they would keep the foot off the gas. Better yet, they would never be tempted. Conversely, modifications of human nature presuppose changes in laws and statutes, which at that point become obsolete. People engineered not to speed, be it through biogenetic, surgical, or pharmacological means, no longer need speed limits. Wife-beaters, homicidal maniacs, or suicide bombers engineered out of violence and rage do not need restraining orders or criminal codes. Generals and politicians who cannot conceive of wars will not fight them. One utopian hand washes the other.

Modifying People Like Monsanto Corn What makes social engineering socially acceptable is that, unlike bioengineering, it is not invasive, one hundred  percent efficient, or irreversible. This is

What If You Could . . .?  5

because, instead of poking inside our heads, planners rely on suasion, often in the form of economic incentives or behavioural nudges. Reframing our choice architecture, they promote better choices. Bioengineering, on the other hand, frightens precisely because it is—in principle at least—perfectly effective. Whether by means of genetic modification, surgery, nanobots, or molecularlevel drugs, bioengineering has the potential to implement utopian imperatives from the inside. Both the allure and the dread of engineering behaviour through invasive means stem from modifying parts of our biological makeup. Instead of a protracted social process, one procedure could remake terrorists, child rapists, and freeloaders into models of civic virtue. Both paths to utopia—social engineering and bioengineering—come in two varieties: suasive and coercive. Noncoercive conditioning relies on algedonic control (pleasure-pain principle) to induce people to submit to the social regime. Education, propaganda, and other types of indoctrination also aim to effect compliance without coercion. In contrast, coercive measures are premised on making us do things against our will in the name of higher good. Coercion runs the gamut from implicit threats to explicit penalties to the use of force. Despite the bad rap, coercive techniques don’t necessarily involve a fascist boot stamping on a human face.5 Any form of negative reinforcement or punishment (they are not the same) is a type of coercion. So is normative legislation, which forges compliance everywhere on our planet. The reason we don’t regard it as such—until it takes a particularly repressive form—is because it wards off dog-eat-dog anarchy. Be that as it may, from direct democracies to autocracies, laws are backed up by penalties ranging from fines to incarceration or worse. To the extent that these penalties must be credible, the rule of law falls in line with military or paramilitary repression. And yet, the distinction between coercive and noncoercive techniques is crucial. Policies decried as strong-arming become palatable when internalized via education, cultural immersion, propaganda, and similar soft sells. The difference is especially striking when it comes to bioengineering. Who in his right mind would consent to somatic or genetic engineering in the name of living in utopia? Voluntary indoctrination, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of modern democracies and an essential part of social engineers’ toolbox. The same people who will resist a communist diktat will follow the communard piper to hell. If invasive techniques smack of authoritarianism, it is because they often are. Look no further than the twentieth-century mass sterilizations imposed in the name of eugenic control in the ostensibly democratic United States, India, and many other countries.6 But invasive methods need not be coercive, let alone harmful. Some, like vaccination campaigns, rely mostly on education and persuasion. And although they modify our biology (via the immune system), entire populations opt in precisely for that reason.

6  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Ailing patients sign on to all manner of invasive procedures in the hope of upgrading their quality of life. For all the deep-rooted mistrust about messing with our heads, the precedent is clear. Make the price right and watch shoppers line up. But what about bioengineering scaled up to planetary dimensions? Would we opt in to a utopian program of, say, genetically neutering our appetite for aggression and violence? Or would we balk at the risk of becoming puppets in the hands of hinky bioengineers and their paymasters? The same technology that terrifies with the prospect of modifying people like Monsanto corn opens the door, however, to a future that seems to sidestep the peril of unethical overlords. Instead of retrofitting ourselves, we could bioengineer a new species of utopians. Although fraught with its own hazards, it evades many of those attendant on modifying ourselves. Adam and Eve were glorious creations, not genetic mutants. God was a life giver, not an evil geneticist. At the end of the day, the path to utopia bound to provoke the least outcry will be noncoercive and noninvasive. Propaganda and education are acceptable, after all, because they only facilitate the internalization of social ethos. No penalties, no riot police, no armed brigades—just rational suasion, positive reinforcement, and social boosterism. A rave new world, indeed.

A Whopper to Pay Another way to frame the issue is to say that the relation between utopia and human nature comes in two flavours. The optimistic variety is evident in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). Julian West, an upper-crust Bostonian, awakens in the year 2000 after sleeping for a century plus. “Human nature itself must have changed very much”, he marvels at the marvellous future. “Not at all”, counters his host. “But the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action”.7 This is about as believable as the premise of the hero resting for a century in a mesmeric trance without food, drink, or the need to use a toilet. Bellamy, and with him the utopian tradition from Plato on, puts the cart in front of the horse. We are asked to believe that a radical change in social order can instigate a radical change in human nature. Socialize the economy and watch enmity, egoism, and evil melt away. No blowback from missteps. No pushback from malcontents. No setbacks of any kind. If the long and rich history of experimental communities in America proves anything, it is that separating sociology from biology is like trying to separate minds from brains. Where the utopian communities were to be the wellsprings of altruism, they bred egoism instead. Where they were to be paradigms of rationality, they were seething cauldrons of factionalism and dissention. Where they were to be paragons of careful planning, most were textbook cases of sloppy or arbitrary management.

What If You Could . . .?  7

This alone ought to drive home the point that the biology of the horse is as paramount as the design of the cart. There is also the question of why utopia ought to arise in the first place. Bellamy downplays this chicken-and-egg dilemma, stating that virtuous laws will produce virtuous conduct. Never mind how to settle what is just and virtuous from one person to another. In his utopian calculus, social reform precedes prosocial conduct. But why should an unvirtuous society remake itself into a utopia in the first place? What bootstrapping mechanism could produce the wherewithal to enact and enforce policies that cure evil, vice, and greed? Conversely, if the society in question was virtuous enough to enact and abide by utopian reforms, how did it get to be so virtuous before the utopian makeover? It would appear that any community capable of transforming itself into a utopia might already be utopian in all by name. After all, as soon as the utopian project swelled in popularity and followers, it would become a mortal threat to the establishment. Faced with losing social control and vested privileges, would the powers that be sit by and let themselves become the powers that were? Or would they rather, as history bears vivid witness, use all means at their disposal to crush the communards, no doubt branded communists by then? Suppose that, against all odds, these colossal socioeconomic dislocations did succeed in precipitating a new order. How would utopians deal with the elites who, having just lost their status and power, are unlikely to roll over for the new regime? Would they need to be culled from the herd in the name of concord and harmony? The best that can be said about such an Iron Heel scenario is that a blood-splattered reign of terror would not bode well for universal liberty, equality, and fraternity. Ditching all such deus ex machina storylines, the more cynical—or realistic— view of human nature holds that it must be modified before any utopia can succeed. Murderous and invidious, even if given to collaboration and even sporadic altruism, humankind is, after all, hardly a promising candidate for utopia. The point here is the form and extent of the modifications. Human nature has evolved holistically and to think that you can cherry-pick biology is an illusion. Evolution is not a K-Mart where you stroll down the aisle and select what you like. And there is usually a whopper to pay.

Platopia Among ancient Greeks, Plato was the first known philosopher to seriously play with blueprints for an ideal state. Strictly speaking, of course, his social models dispersed over Republic, Critias, Timaeos, Laws, and less well-known treatises and dialogues were not utopias but uchronias. Instead of being located in a geographical no-place, they were removed into a mythical past.

8  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Plato idealized the past, cutting and pasting the idea of a mythical golden age from a fellow Hellene, Hesiod. In his epic poem of rural life, Works and Days, Hesiod moralized on the decline of the historical ages of Man—from golden in the mythical yesteryear, through the progressively shabbier silver and bronze, down to iron in the present. Then as now, golden oldies came tinged with nostalgia for lost innocence. In a nod to Hesiod, in Republic Plato also colour-coded his utopian citizenry gold, silver, and bronze. At the top sat the philosopher kings, whose principal virtues were justice and wisdom. Below them served the guardians (administrators, military brass, public servants), who embodied the virtues of courage and devotion. The last and least on the social ladder were the plebes, whose dominant traits, according to Plato, were restraint and obedience. Plato was not the first to disparage the Athenian electorate as feeble-minded and fickle, easily preyed on by demagogues. But his censures and the corresponding nod to the elites earned him more rebuttals than most. In 1959 a couple of Harvard sociologists took Plato to task in their notorious Power and Morality: Who Shall Guard the Guardians? Their verdict could not have been harsher. Political ruling classes, they concluded, are consistently more criminal, submoral, and mentally deranged than the ruled. And that was before Nixon and Trump. The crucial question is which way the causality flows. Do degenerates covet power because they are degenerates? Or do they, as Lord Acton would have it, become unhinged by the power they come to brandish? Though still debated, empirical evidence appears to favour the former view.8 At the end of the day, of course, the apparent disjunction may only be anything but. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, utopian revolt might only bring out the worst in pigs already hell-bent on getting their snouts in the common trough. Its fascist elements aside, Plato’s utopia continues to matter today because it bequeathed to the Western societies the ideal of a just and equitable society. Echoed by utopian scholars like Chad Walsh, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead went so far as to proclaim that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. The ideal of just society ruled by a morally upright elite has proved so seductive that we have not stopped wrangling over it since. Much of this enduring fascination with Plato has to do with his solutions. Plato advocates tough eugenic controls for maintaining both population stability and social hierarchy. He distinguishes authentic human needs (few) from the endless list of wants, especially for consumer goods and trappings of status. Most of all, he puts the community above the individual so that each human ant is valuable only as part of the hill. Some of his key teachings, such as the condemnation of luxury, come in the form of the famous parable about Atlantis. Corroded by wars and moral decadence, he warns, Athens is on the same downward trajectory as the mythical city wiped out in a cataclysm of poetic justice. Unwittingly, the threat of corruption,

What If You Could . . .?  9

evident already in the universal slide from the golden to the iron age, casts a deep dark shadow over Plato’s guardians, who are really his focus. Plato is contemptuous of democracy, which he equates with mob rule. Even though he allows that all citizens—meaning Athens-born, non-slave males— have the potential to grow into philosophers, he backpedals that only some are up to the job. Democracy and meritocracy are, of course, mutually exclusive. Either you invite everyone to join the club or only those who are deserving. Trying to embrace both, Plato tries to square the social circle. The problem rears up at every level of social hierarchy, utopian or not. Take modern colleges. Democracy would enrol everyone regardless of ability, race, or age. After all, college graduates live longer, earn more, and add greater value to society.9 Except that colleges could not accommodate these numbers, society could not spare them, and most people would not want to stay in the classroom well into their adulthood, even if they were predisposed for advanced-level brainwork, which most are not. But if you do not enrol everyone, who gets in? Presumably those who merit it. This, however, hangs a question mark over affirmative action, which democratizes education by giving merit points to minorities for being minorities and, in the process, robs non-minorities of their scholastically merited spots. Democracy, in short, is a fine thing. So is meritocracy. But even in utopia they don’t see eye to eye.

The Island of Dr. More The most famous utopia in history, not least because it gave the name to the whole genre, is Thomas More’s. First published in Louvain in 1516, Utopia consists of two books. The first, devoted for the most part to More’s England, was actually written second. The second, narrated by that intrepid wayfarer Raphael Hythlodaeus, details the social and economic arrangements of the island of Utopia. And so, Book II begins with a sketch of the island’s geography and topography. The minimum distance between towns in Utopia, we learn at the outset, is twenty-four miles. We also learn from the very next sentence that each town’s territory extends for at least twenty miles in every direction. Have you been paying attention? Together, the two propositions are logically and physically impossible. Proposition one entails that there are towns in Utopia that are only twentyfour miles apart. Proposition two entails that the closest distance between any two towns is forty miles. Put the two together and you have a blatant contradiction. And from a logical contradiction anything follows: that kumquats vote Republican, that Martians do not live on Mars, and that More’s utopia is not a prime example of a logical fallacy. The only thing more disconcerting than the gaffe at the heart of one of the foundational books of the Western culture is the silence about it among libraries

FIGURE 1.1 Utopian history in three easy stages. Anti-clockwise: surviving papyrus

fragment of Plato’s Republic; title woodcut of the island of Utopia from the first edition of More’s Utopia; Equality colony (circa 1900) inspired by and named after the sequel to Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

Credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW10541.

What If You Could . . .?  11

of learned commentary. Could it be that generations of readers of Utopia missed an error of this calibre? Perhaps, insofar as generations of readers of Bellamy, Hertzka, Howells, or Skinner, who founded utopian communities in the belief that the novels delivered workable blueprints for the best of all societies, prove that literary utopias can seriously cloud their readers’ judgment. Ironically, it was in the wake of More’s satire that the term he coined came to represent an ideal—as opposed to unreal—society. Biographical and textual evidence suggests, however, that Utopia is not necessarily a straight-faced model of ideal polity. Playful and puckish even when he is moralizing, the narrator may flay life on the British Isles under the pretense of visiting the make-believe Island of Dr. More, but his goal is as much to entertain as to enlighten. As a Christian humanist, More was keen to banish from utopia the antisocial effects of the seven deadly sins. Unfortunately for his and other reformist programs, status seeking, greed, lust, envy, overeating, proclivity for violence, and freeriding are all too deeply rooted in evolution to be deracinated at a stroke of a pen. This is why, contrary to Hesiod and Plato, human nature has not changed much since the golden age. This is also why Enlightenment utopias began to place the ideal state not in the past but in the vast parts of the yet unexplored—then only uncharted—globe. By the early nineteenth century, however, as geographical discoveries shrank the Earth, even this narrative stratagem became increasingly threadbare. With the spirit of meliorism and progressivism sweeping the industrial world, the influential social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon proclaimed: “The Golden Age of the human species is not behind us, it is before us”.10 Whether before or behind, it is striking that neither Saint-Simon nor More has anything enlightening to say about the fundamental utopian problems of egalitarianism and socialism—problems of authority and incentives. In a society of equals there are, after all, no rational grounds for following commands. Moreover, since everyone is equal, all should put in an equal measure of effort at work before wealth can be distributed according to everyone’s needs. Good luck with that. It is clear what people want—just ask them. Better still, fling open the doors of Walmart or Dolce e Gabbana and let them take what they want. But is it so clear what they actually need? Awarding one woollen coat to every citizen every two years, More insists that Utopians receive what they need in the exact measure they need it. According to whose impersonally and interpersonally noncontentious formula?

A Quintessential Scale Model Reading commentaries on Utopia by More’s contemporaries such as Erasmus, Peter Gilles, Busleyden, or Budé, one is inevitably struck by how timely they are, which is to say, how little has changed in the five hundred years since. All

12  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

the moral, social, and political oratory since More’s time has not delivered us anywhere near utopia. So why should we believe it ever would? One tantalizing answer comes from neuroeconomists, who combine the study of economic behaviour with brain research. Oddly, it appears that enforcing the rules of social fairness can carry its own reward. People who punish a complete stranger for behaving unfairly toward another stranger register positive emotions, revealed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Their pleasure centres light up like a Christmas tree, strongly suggesting an evolutionary link to altruism and altruistic punishment, the basic ingredients of any recipe for utopia.11 Be that as it may, the folly of our customs and the rot of our politics have not changed since the dawn of civilization, giving ample material for utopian writers and reformers to roast our vanities. Take a look around. The stench of corruption pervading our politics, the obscene violence with which we handle our conflicts, and the carefree arrogance of our consumerist-hedonist economy amply testifies that we remain as unfit for utopia as we were in More’s—or for that matter, Plato’s—times. Ironically, the very scale of these problems combined with utopia’s unique ability to bring them into focus makes the genre crucial to inquiries into the nature of better society. Indeed, it is my contention that, far from being a mere literary convention, utopia is an invaluable cognitive shortcut in these inquiries. More than any other genre, it leans on clear protocols for thought-experimenting with boundary conditions of social policies. Utopia, on my understanding, is a social thinker’s drawing board and litmus paper combined. Instead of multiplying reformist scenarios, which is costly and time-consuming, it is much easier to extrapolate social extremes and gauge their desirability. Instead of tracking all intermediate states, focus on the best-case situation. If a model of a utopian society bioengineered to refrain from war and killing still looks like dystopia, there is your answer. Conversely, if the worst-case scenario still looks attractive next to the real world, perhaps it is worth another look. Controlled social experiments are always messy, often ethically dubious, and sometimes plain impossible. Efficient, safe, and fully controllable, armchair inquiries sweep away these problems by placing experiments in the realm of the imagination. Not coincidentally, imaginary societies and characters are the lifeblood of narrative fiction. Indeed, it is this genius for controlled speculation that makes literary utopias such valuable laboratories of the mind.12 As every scientist knows, the beauty of scale models is that, although they don’t correspond faithfully to the world we know, they capture select aspects of it. As with most reductions, such bare-bones approximations are easier to untangle conceptually, often hinting at regularities that apply to the world we live in. In my view, utopia, that imaginary place where things are the way they ought to be, is a quintessential scale model. Put differently, utopia is a projection at its limits—a boundary case, like the speed of light in Einstein’s special relativity. The analogy is apt since, as soon

What If You Could . . .?  13

as you begin racing with light, reality starts to kick back. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more massive your body becomes, at the limit soaring to infinity. Similarly, you can always glimpse utopia in the distance, taunting with its siren song, seemingly within reach. But, just like racing with photons, this may be as close as you can ever get to it.

Live and Let Go Saying that utopia is a pipe dream is saying that there is no one perfect social arrangement for all. However, it is possible to conceive of utopia tailored to every individual’s likes and needs—in every sense a youtopia. Its upper limit would be the world housing as many utopias as there are individuals on Earth, forecast to stabilize at ten to eleven billion. This number is vast but finite. Not every utopia, moreover, will be unique. Families, friends, social circles, and entire communities may favour common principles of social life. Outside of hermits and stylites, few people’s utopia will involve living alone—this is why we band and bond in the first place. A global pluralitopia would give all the right to build their version of paradise on earth, providing they respect others’ right to do same. Utopia, on this model, is not a static one size fits all but a mosaic of live and let lives. On the face of it, it looks a bit like the world we live in, a planet-wide civilization consisting of a motley of nations, regions, towns, social circles, families, and individuals. But the differences are as noteworthy as the similarities. Pluralitopia safeguards the freedom to live under any social arrangement so long as this doesn’t encroach on the freedom of others. The social arrangement that grants everyone the freedom to found their own heaven on earth resembles the pluralitopia that Robert Nozick defended in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Translated into a hundred languages and listed by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the One Hundred Most Influential Books since WWII, for close to half a century this iconoclastic study has fuelled debates about what makes good society. Ironically, although Nozick himself was the antithesis of a social and political conservative, his chef d’oeuvre was perceived by the neo-conservative circles as underpinning parts of their shock doctrine (even as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin became banner names for liberals).13 As a result, his libertarian philosophy became the bedrock of neo-conservatism, hijacking the utopian idealism which has historically been associated with social liberals and liberal socialists. Anarchy, State, and Utopia proposes a simple but radical makeover of the world we live in in order to create the world we would like to live in. The central element of pluralitopia is the qualified freedom to exercise utopian freedoms. In the parlance of game theory, you can think of pluralitopia as an aggregate utility function, one that factors in everyone’s preferences for building a perfect society under the condition of aggregate freedom to build one.

14  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Freedom in pluralitopia begins with the freedom to move about, congregate, and experiment with alternative lifestyles and social arrangements. No less vital is the freedom of access to information about other societies, including their constitutions, histories, and practical arrangements. So is the freedom from material needs, such as money to remove to the utopia of your choice or to jump-start your own. Most of all, there is the freedom from interference from any individual or state (if the latter still exist), so long as your utopia doesn’t curb the freedoms of other paradise seekers. As crucially, pluralitopia entails both the freedom not to join anyone’s utopia and to secede from any one you may have joined. This, in turn, entails effective and enforceable divorce laws, asset division statutes, secession mechanisms, and the like. It entails, in short, the entire apparatus of fair and equitable arbitration and conflict resolution, from spouses fighting over child custody to communities splitting assets in the wake of a breakaway. Paradoxically, pluralitopia may be the closest thing to the one-size-fits-all of utopian dreamers.

The Piper to Nowhere Outside of alternative lifestyle communes, few people nowadays take utopias seriously. So why should we? The answer begins with the fact that the yearning for utopia is too deeply buried in our collective subconscious to let go. We all want a better life. We all want to better the lot of our children. Utopian dreams may be no less than a manifestation of the very instinct for survival and, as a result, a narrative expression of our adaptive behaviour. This may explain why innumerable generations have been willing to endure terror and mass death on the barricades every time the utopian carrot was dangled before their noses. It may explain why libraries have been written on a subject that is ontologically as real as Santa Claus. It may also explain why, for a place that does not exist, utopia continues to attract a surprising amount of press from academics to polemicists to the general media. To take just one prominent example, the Economist, a no-nonsense weekly by any standard, regularly wields it as a measure for our capacity to think big. The internet as a self-governing cyber-utopia; the Swiss utopia of Universal Basic Income; the utopian populism in Italy; the utopian idealism in post-WWI German politics; the utopianism of moral calculus; the dream of rule of law in Russia-invaded Ukraine—this is just a short list of recent contexts in which utopia comes into the mix with hardheaded economic calculus.14 Come to think of it, who said anything about a no-place? Utopia is all around us, winking seductively from every commercial. Sexy singles, cordon bleu TV dinners, rug rats in self-cleaning nappies, hemorrhoids receding, receding hairlines advancing, stock portfolios kissing the sky. Utopia is traffic-less roads, native-free getaways, and National Security Agency-proof gadgets. Everyone, starting with you, has a dream job, oodles of leisure, and unlimited purchasing power.

What If You Could . . .?  15

Today the job of sending postcards from a picture-perfect world has shifted, however, from socialists to telecom capitalists and social media evangelists. Each new tech pitch, from driverless cars to Airbnb, is a utopian narrative that starts with “What if you could  .  .  .” and ends with “Well, now you can”. Of course, utopia is like Airbnb, happy to accommodate anyone. In China a community of artists and activists beating the drum for the killing fields of the Cultural Revolution does so on a website called Utopia. Paul Johnson, historian and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, argued in Modern Times (1983) that the twentieth century was the golden era of social engineering. With the twentieth century looking like the hell of a better world than ours, the fork in the road to utopia has never looked darker. Social engineering leads to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Bioengineering may take you straight to hell. One is discredited; the other is plain scary. The alternative to both is the world we know—iniquitous and inundated with violence. Every day, everywhere, newsfeeds record the obscene procession of atrocities, genocides, mass murders, serial killings, suicide bombings, state-sanctioned tortures, sadism, child abuse, and other testimonies of how badly we need a collective ticket to utopia. Lest there be any doubt about our inhumanity being a historical constant, in Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood compiles a shortlist of what we are capable of: The destruction of Carthage. The Vikings. The crusades. Ghenghis Khan. Attila the Hun. The massacre of the Cathars. The witch burnings. The destruction of the Aztec. Ditto the Maya. Ditto the Inca. The Inquisition. Vlad the Impaler. The massacre of the Huguenots. Cromwell in Ireland. The French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars. The Irish Famine. Slavery in the American South. King Leopold in Congo. The Russian Revolution. Stalin. Hitler. Hiroshima. Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Sri Lanka. East Timor. Saddam Hussein.15 Little wonder that, facing this Panglossian best of all worlds, generations of practical dreamers decided to put their dreams of engineering a better society to the test. As they followed the utopian piper to nowhere, they suffered duplicity, hunger, poverty, grievous abuse, and even murder. Yet no sooner had one commune folded, another sprang in its place in the name of reaching for the stars in the constellation of Utopia, visible from everywhere on Earth if only you put rose-tinted glasses on.

Notes 1. Goldman; Stites; Fitzpatrick; also Swirski (2011), Chapter 1. 2. The 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared by Walter Rudolf Hess for his work on electric brain stimulation and neurologist Egas Moniz, the inventor of lobotomy. 3. Jesse Gelsinger underwent an immunological meltdown caused by genetically modified viruses that carried the replacement gene for the faulty one in his body; see Reardon.

16  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

4. On neural and evolutionary basis of social norm internalization, see Buckholtz and Marois. 5. See O’Brien’s speech to Smith during the conversion in the Ministry of Love in Orwell, 1984. 6. Reilly; McCoy. 7. Bellamy, 29. 8. Sweet. 9. Buckles; Merisotis. 10. Saint-Simon, Vol. 2: 328. 11. De Quervain et al.; Hoffman et al. 12. Swirski (2007). 13. Nozick would deplore the interventionist Libertarian paternalism of Thaler and Sunstein (2008); on Chicago School shock doctrine, see Klein; Swirski, American Political Fictions. Pluralitopia pops up in fiction from Clarke’s Childhood’s End to Haldeman’s The Forever War. 14. The Economist (2016) 26 March: 16; (2016) 4 June: 21–24; (2016) 1 October: 54; (2016) 22 October: 43; (2017) 28 January: 73–74; (2015) 26 September: 46. 15. Atwood, 80.

2 LITTLE COMMONWEALTH

A Sadistic Nightmare Just like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, utopia contains multitudes, not to say open contradictions. On the one hand, it denotes an ideal state and an ideal state of affairs. On the other, it stands for an impractical illusion if not an escapist delusion, and as such for a very imperfect state of things. Indeed, depending how you look at it, utopia is a social blueprint or a literary fantasy, a reformist call to arms or a blue-skies siren call, a realistic dream or a sadistic nightmare. In short, utopia is an oxymoron. Astonishingly, in view of these irreducible contradictions, there has never been a dearth of individuals willing to bet their asses and assets on winning the utopian jackpot. “History be damned”, you could practically hear them mutter in the face of centuries of communal failures and outright flameouts. Every new utopian colony fancied itself to be the chosen one, immune to the sea of troubles that beset all those that preceded it. Not all were impractical dreamers and schemers. The single-tax campaigners and the socialist reformers straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, in fact, anything but. The utopian communes they founded in droves were intended to put into practice the economic theories of Henry George and the prosocial platform of the party of Eugene V. Debs. Trading thought experiment for social experiment, they scaled society down to the size of a commune and tried living like they thought everyone should. The single-taxers especially set out to systematically test the different versions of the single tax (tax on unimproved land), maintaining at least a dozen colonies into the 1930s. Tired of boosting the program through pamphlets, periodicals, and books, resolute to disprove doubters in a manner that paper

18  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

campaigns and political action never could, they rolled up their sleeves and founded cooperative collectives, holding them up as fountainheads of enlightenment for America at large. Almost as soon as they had been formed, however, those fountainheads began to run dry, bedevilled by the same toxic mix of behavioural derelictions and sectarian infighting that reduced almost all utopian communes to historical footnotes. Human nature proved as intractable as Mother Nature. Time and again, both proved George Santayana right: learn your history so as not to repeat it. Historically speaking, when it came to seeding their visions of a better world in the New World, utopian colonies trailed only a step behind their commercially or royally chartered counterparts. The first utopian settlements on American soil date back, in fact, to the same expansionist wave that saw the first commercial outposts sprout on the Eastern seaboard. Utopia seekers were there right from the start, experimenting with recipes for a better society one commonweal at a time. Although there may have been even earlier ones, the first well-documented utopian community comes on record in the mid-seventeenth century. Peter Cornelis Plockhoy’s Commonwealth was founded in 1663 in what is now Delaware with the express goal of engineering life along prosocial lines. Its principles were spelled out in the title of one of his two published tracts: A Way Propounded to Make the Poor in these and other Nations Happy by bringing together a fit, suitable, and well-qualified People into one Household-Government or little Commonwealth. Noble as it was, the experiment proved short-lived. Although outfitted with all manner of Robinson Crusoe necessities to survive in the wilderness, it fell victim to its peaceful constitution, becoming annexed by the British, who had just overrun New Amsterdam. Still, the seeds had been sown. Other utopian communes, such as the Labadist Bohemia Manor on Chesapeake Bay, soon followed, offering perennial alternatives to the American Dream. Although united by social idealism, utopian communities—which by the late nineteenth century swelled into the thousands—have always been a motley crew. At their forefront stood politically minded socialists, galvanized by Fourier, Cabet, and Owen, to seek a new political order. There were social progressives ready to play the lodestar on which the masses could fix their compass. There were eccentric writers, free-thinking reformers, freewheeling libertarians, religious schismatics, back-to-the-landers, millenarian visionaries, philanthropists, occult mystics, and not least armies of snake-oil messiahs. Although they failed to reform America into a utopia with liberty and justice for all, accompanied and in some cases led by utopian novelists they were pivotal in disseminating the ideals of progressive reforms to the public at large. Indeed, as the authors of the finest history of utopian thought in the Western world sum up, much as in America, almost all the social ideals of the English and French working classes of the early nineteenth century trace to “the printed works of utopian writers”.1

Little Commonwealth  19

Experimenters and Guinea Pigs Away from their pens and palettes, quite a few utopian novelists, bohemian artists, and reform-minded members of the vibrant arts and crafts movement tried their hand at alternative social living. The latter especially shared, and their communes embodied, a conviction that art was a powerful instrument of personal and social advancement. This apostolic ardour explains, perhaps, why they were willing to undergo pains and privations in the name of reforming society. Many drew inspiration from Ruskin and Morris, socialists and founders of art-based communities across the Atlantic, where literary and sociopolitical utopias have marched arm in arm at least since Bacon’s New Atlantis. On the American side, literature and communal experiment came together most famously in Helicon Hall. Flush with receipts from The Jungle, Upton Sinclair founded the colony as a form of direct utopian action. Located just across the Hudson from Manhattan, it was fully democratic in day-to-day governance, with communal child-care and meals. Sinclair’s guiding light was the words of another writer and social reformer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, especially those on the rationalization of domestic labour.2 Though Gilman herself rebuffed the colony, the list of residents and guests popping in for a respite from the American way of life included some of the biggest names in arts and letters of their time, from psychologist William James and journalist Lincoln Steffens to education reformer John Dewey and future literary Nobelist Sinclair Lewis. Despite outsized ego clashes, Helicon Hall didn’t last long enough to fall prey to internal dissention, the bane of virtually all communal experiments. Instead, just five months after opening, it was gutted by fire from which, unlike the mythical phoenix, it never recovered. All the same, in the post-mortem of his utopia, Sinclair rhapsodized: “I have lived in the future”.3 Before Helicon Hall, there was an anarchist colony at Freedom Hill, on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, founded by utopian novelist J. William Lloyd. There was Equality on Puget Sound, named after Bellamy’s eponymous sequel to Looking Backward. Later on, the hippies would rally around Stranger in a Strange Land, a sci-fi novel about a prophet who transforms terrestrial culture via sex and mysticism. With its digs at monogamy and monotheism, it became gospel for a long line of hippie communes, prominently Sunrise Hill in Massachusetts. The Sixties would also give birth to Tolstoy Farm outside Spokane, named after the preeminent novelist, anarchist, and single-taxer Leo Tolstoy. Even more prominently, the decade saw a rash of behaviourist communes, many lifted almost verbatim from the pages of Walden Two. Leading them were Twin Oaks and Los Horcones, at least in the yearly years, before head-on collisions with reality prompted them to repudiate Skinner’s utopia as their manual.4

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The list runs, of course, much longer, from Altruria in northern California, based on Howells’ A Traveller from Altruria, to Freeland in Washington State, based on Hertzka’s Freeland and its sequel A Visit to Freeland, or, The New Paradise Regained. Amid these living tributes to the power of utopian makebelieve, one of the earliest synthesis of utopian idealism and pragmatism came, however, not from a litterateur but from a literary critic. Horace Traubel, tireless campaigner for social justice, was both Whitman’s literary executor and one of the movers and shakers behind Rose Valley, a major art colony outside Philadelphia. He also founded the Rose Valley Print Shop, where he printed the community magazine The Artsman. In the inaugural issue, he eloquently defended communal utopias as social laboratories and their members as social experimenters and guinea pigs combined: Rose Valley is not altogether a dream or wholly an achievement. It is an experiment. . . . Rose Valley has not withdrawn from the world. It is in the world. It is to fight its battle on the field upon which it finds a challenge. It is not an ideal. It is a step towards an ideal. It is not standing in the way of any agent of social evolution. It is cooperating with such agents.5

Bride of Christ If reality bites, utopian reality is a pit bull. Like so many communes before and after, Rose Valley was brought to its knees by the familiar laundry list of delinquencies and derelictions. Trying to escape America at large, the utopians ended up mirroring it all too closely, right down to the brutishness and selfishness they imagined they had left behind. Not all the utopian dreams proved as deadly as Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known as Jonestown. With new atrocities committed every day in the cutthroat competition for world headlines, to this day it remains a byword for mind-fucking more lethal than anything in The Manchurian Candidate. In 1978 well over nine hundred disciples of Jim Jones perished there in an orchestrated mass murder or mass-assisted suicide, depending on your point of view. All the same, fortified with a volume of history of utopian communes, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their judgment was perpetually clouded when it came to the dream of just and virtuous society. Quite apart from baffling naiveté about individual and group rationality, time and time again they fell victim to snake-oil salesmen. This time, of course, their alleged cure-all was sociopolitical rather than pharmacological: a promise of society greater than the sum of its parts. From the thousands of American communes that rose and wilted in no time few, however, can beat the brief history of Bride of Christ for sheer entertainment value. Among the picturesque array of freeloaders, loafers, moochers, deadbeats, lowlifes, and other scoundrels, its leader stands out precisely because

Little Commonwealth  21

he is not that different from other utopian messiahs who shepherded their sheeple to the promised land. This made-for-Hollywood comedrama began in 1903, when a young Franz Creffield, freshly arrived from Germany, joined the Salvation Army. In short order he completed his basic training in doing good works and got dispatched to Corvallis, Oregon, then a boomtown of two thousand. No sooner had he settled in, however, than he saw the light and began to dispense salvation on his own, radically different, terms. Calling himself the second Christ, the silver-tongued messiah soon amassed dozens of followers: female, ardent, and committed to his way of achieving utopia, which involved a total renunciation of clothing during afternoon congresses when their menfolk were at work. Egalitarian to a fault, the second Christ made all equal as his brides (with the prettier ones more equal than others). The colony proper came into being when a local businessman, Victor Hurt, whose wife and two daughters made his house and themselves readily available for the second Christ, put an end to these afternoon evangels. The Holy Rollers, as they became locally called, quickly established a commune outside of town where they threw themselves body and soul into the pursuit of paradise on earth. Things came to a head when the residents of Corvallis were made aware of a photograph depicting the communards as naked as so many Eves before the fall. Nabbed by vigilantes, Creffield was duly tarred and feathered before being kicked out of town. But utopian dreamers are not so easily derailed. The dust had scarcely settled when the second Christ began to sneak back to resume his gospel, until he was caught literally with his pants down. What followed was a tragicomedy of manners, not to call it a burlesque, that could have come straight from the combined pens of Mark Twain and Henry Miller. With the town up in arms, in the ensuing brouhaha Creffield fled, it was widely presumed, to the ends of the earth. Three months later he was nabbed again, emaciated and naked as Adam, skulking under the home of Victor Hurt, whose daughter he had previously married. Tried and sentenced to two years, he ended up serving one. Upon being released, he immediately bought land in another area of Oregon with money donated by his faithful retinue. Attesting to the irrepressible allure of utopia, once again the women of Corvallis began to skip town to rush into the arms of the second Christ. Timothy Miller, the leading chronicler of twentieth-century American utopianism, supplies the denouement: The Corvallis men whose wives and sisters had flocked to Creffield’s side had had enough. One George Mitchell, whose sister Esther was one of Creffield’s most devoted followers, found Creffield in Seattle on May 7, 1906, and shot him dead. Mitchell was duly arrested, but at his trial was quickly acquitted—not surprisingly, given the district attorney’s observation that he had done “a very laudable act in eliminating that miserable

22  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

animal Creffield from the face of the earth”. Esther, avenging her prophet, shot her brother in the head at the railroad station as he was preparing to leave Seattle. This time the court was less sympathetic, committing Esther to the state hospital. Only several weeks later did the naked female followers out on the Oregon coast learn of their leader’s demise and make their way back to conventional society.6

Off the American Grid Who in his right mind would believe in utopia in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is about as real as Bigfoot? And yet, even as we don’t believe in unicorns and other mythical beasts, we keep searching for a perfect world. Is it because the dream of Eden is wired not just into our collective mythology but into our biology as well? A dream of primordial savannah with food aplenty, fresh water, friendly neighbours, just laws, wise heads, kind hearts—a biotopia, ecotopia, and utopia rolled into one? With thousands of communities experimenting with alternative social setups across the United States, their geographical range has been mirrored by their politics, which ran the gamut from autocracy to anarchy. At first blush, of course, anarchy is antithetical to planned communal life. Interestingly, though, the same individualists who challenged government structures as abuse of power had few qualms about accepting communal strictures. The more thoughtful among them openly argued, in fact, that in the absence of outside authority, some framework of mutual cooperativeness and recognition of individual rights and wrongs was necessary. The alternative, as they saw it, was to have their communes and the utopian dreams they embodied degenerate into dog-eat-dog . . . anarchy.7 The dream of utopia does not, of course, sit well with American ideology, which is that of competitive, me-first capitalism rather than of cooperative, wefirst socialism. Self-contained and self-directed, the American Dream is leery of equating wealth with commonwealth. This is why the communal movement and the utopian ideals behind it have always attracted controversy like a dog attracts fleas. Ditching competition for cooperation, they raised uncomfortable questions about the American way of life. Unfortunately, it was all too easy for state and federal authorities to brand utopian activism as anarchism. Few things bring it into focus as sharply as the infamous Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920.8 Conducted by the Department of Justice, they sought to arrest and deport all anarchists and radical leftists. Led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, they impressed on the country that communal living and socialism were un-American. A no-place, utopia now became a no-go. Ironically, during the 1930s the FDR administration itself tried to establish cooperatives to help displaced farmers and workers, only to see the legislation

Little Commonwealth  23

get shot down by Congress. Under the auspices of the New Deal, the government did actually set up a few dozen homesteads as part of the Resettlement Administration. In no time, however, red-baiting that communal life was communism incarnate led to congressional investigations and the closing of the program.9 As a political movement, socialism could win neither at the polls nor against the pols. Like the Debs socialists a generation earlier, many of the believers decided, therefore, that the best way to win America over was to establish utopian communes. They would become living organs of an ideal body politic that would be fruitful and multiply into a countrywide and eventually global federation. Tying themselves to the communal mast, the socialists would demonstrate in miniature that the ship of state could be sailed under the flag of utopia. Alas, even as their communes became bastions of political agitation and social reform, they ended up demonstrating just the opposite. One by one, like their innumerable predecessors, the would-be utopias imploded under the pressure of economic unsustainability and internal dissention. Yet, in a turn of events that few could have anticipated, the utopian spirit got a new lease on life from the freewheeling Sixties. Almost overnight social and sexual experimentation was the rage, behavioural taboos went flying out of the window, and altruism fortified by psychedelics became the new norm. What started as a post-Beat trickle turned into a flower-power river, and then a countercultural flood. The age of Aquarius was upon America and, while Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, tens of thousands of communes were trying out a rainbow of recipes for utopia.

A Very Un-American Dream Hippies, political radicals of all stars and stripes, social reformers and experimenters, religious sects from orthodox Christian to Jesus freaks, spiritual growth groups from Zen and Tibetan Buddhists to Sufis and modern mystics, gender and other-equality seekers, group-marriage enthusiasts, sex libertarians and libertines, self-help support groups, greens, peaceniks, and plain misfits all followed the call to communal living. All told, up to a million people chose to live off the American grid. Some withdrew into reclusiveness. Others were flamboyant to the point of exhibitionism. Some practiced an open land policy, with anyone at liberty to join in. Others were selective to the point of fastidiousness, with long apprenticeships and probation periods. Some were deliberately leaderless and rudderless, experimenting with varying degrees of democracy. Others were highly structured, with statutes and even constitutions, however minimalist in form. Some wanted to remake society in their image, envisioning their communes as blueprints and eventual flashpoints for full-scale revolt. Others were more humble or just more realistic. Their mission was to serve as prototypes for piecemeal

24  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

reform. Still others eschewed scaling up in any way, seeing communal life and the pooling of resources as means of improving their own economic lot. But at their core, all these little commonwealths lived the dream of communal interdependence and the pursuit of non-material wealth—a very un-American Dream. Almost all were self-conscious, sometimes to the point of narcissism, of their repudiation of mainstream America. This hyper-awareness of their avantgarde status radiated from the pages of their trade journal, fittingly called Modern Utopian. We will show you, ran the unwritten creed, what life can be like when freed from economic, political, religious, racial, or sexual shackles. “We intended to be social reformers and pioneers, not escapists”, recalled a member of Earthworks commune in Vermont.10 Ironically, while many wanted nothing more than to be left alone to do their thing, they ended up living in a fishbowl. For one, they were under constant scrutiny from skeptical and often hostile locals, whose rhythm of life could not accommodate farm-loads of social radicals widely suspected of sexual goingson and anti-establishment sentiments. Communards also found themselves under the microscope wielded on behalf of the nation by Time and Life reporters, always on the lookout for reports of misconduct, orgies, or internecine strife. As these sometimes juiced-up accounts became instant bestsellers, America was transfixed by this mass rebellion against—incongruously enough—both rugged individualism and middle-class prosperity. Dwelling on the oddities and crudities of hippie lifestyle, few dwelled on the challenge posed by the communes to the consumerist mainstream. The majority of communes were models in Spartan, even ascetic living. You could survive on almost nothing, many discovered, if you were content with almost nothing. If you could do without showers, clothing, and the clutter of possessions, if you could eat tofu, brown rice, and beans ad nauseam, if you could sleep on tatamis and relieve yourself in nature, you could turn your back on Thoreau’s Walden Pond as an avatar of conspicuous consumption. Even so, virtually none of the utopian communes were economically selfsufficient. Belying the façade of turning their backs on society, money would come in from the outside. Most of it came from families, friends, and nest eggs, supplemented by part-time jobs off-site that ranged from farming to waiting tables to selling sex. Food would be scrounged from nearby towns and cities, donated by sympathizers, or picked up from federal or local food banks. Government welfare was programmatically spurned at some places as tainted with the blood, sweat, and tears of capitalist wage slaves. Most communes, however, adopted a pragmatic attitude to the Man. Welfare cheques, food stamps, and other freebies were welcome and usually shared. There would be scavenging for furniture, machinery, and all kinds of odds and ends that the communes could never hope to produce themselves. In more than a few cases there would be royalties coming in from the sale of books, not least in the case of Raymond Mungo at Packers Corner or Ken

FIGURE 2.1 Petitioning for change in America. Americans have the right to petition, or

communicate, with the government. Petitions can be signed documents, but today petitioning has also gone digital. You can petition online at the We the People website through Whitehouse.gov. If a petition receives 100,000 signatures in thirty days, the administration will respond.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

26  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who enjoyed the windfall from the ­phenomenal receipts of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.11 Indeed, when the going got tough, art would often swing to the rescue. Aside from cottage industries like organic farming and textile weaving, about the only viable forms of communal enterprise turned out to be book publishing and rock shows.

A Perfectly Adjusted Anthill Nearly all of these would-be utopias fell apart in no time, some after only a few months. Even more to the point, all succumbed to the same inventory of nonutopian behaviours. Regardless of sociopolitical orientation or ardour, it was only a matter of time before selfishness, pettiness, and vindictiveness would boil to the surface, fuelling ferocious power struggles that bred paranoia and Machiavellian webs of intrigue. Ironically, utopian visionaries were often too fixated on the future to address problems festering in the present. Dismal planning doomed many communes, hippie or otherwise, from the get-go. Social arrangements were left up in the air in the belief that communal life alone would transform ragtag individuals into a perfectly adjusted anthill. Financial planning was a joke, with capital outlays routinely saddling pioneers with crushing debts. Barring a few outliers, economic viability remained a pipe dream. Defective leadership, though often charismatic, was only part of the problem. Most communes could only dream of critical mass, averaging between a dozen and a score members. Practically all suffered from extremely high turnover rates—in itself a sign of instability and dissatisfaction—which further fuelled personal friction. Few lasted more than a few years, while those that did had to contend with social seismic shocks and tectonic rifts almost from day one. The problems and, consequently, failure rates were so drastic that they ought to have given a pause to even the staunchest believers. Time after time, the stipulated prosocial ethos would dissolve into argumentativeness and antagonism. Freeloading, spitefulness, and scuttlebutt slept in the same bed as sexual jealousy and status envy. Chronic squalor (people sneaked meals and showers when off-site) were exacerbated by primitive sanitary conditions that bred diseases and even epidemics, from typhoid to tuberculosis. Scarcely any colony showed the foresight of recruiting a resident physician. When it came to corruption and mismanagement, experimental utopias often recapitulated the mainstream, right down to nepotism and intolerance of heterodoxy. Schisms, factionalism, and a torrent of defections were the order of the day. Forever in uproar over real or imagined iniquities and inequalities, would-be utopians proved for the most part unable to live in peace and harmony with likeminded individuals who had also escaped society to find harmony and peace. From the bird’s-eye view of history, experimental utopias resembled nothing so much as protozoa. No sooner had they come into formal existence, and

Little Commonwealth  27

in many cases even before then, than they would begin to feud and splinter. No sooner had these splinters come into their own than they would fall victim to their own power struggles, shedding another wave of antinomians who would go on to repeat the process again and again. You can pick examples virtually at random, starting with Equality. The Puget Sound colony was to be the flagship of a projected groundswell of utopias projected to bloom throughout Washington State and then the nation at large. Echoing hubris going back as far as the Puritans, Equality would be a model city on the hill, proving the superiority of socialism to the American establishment. So, at least, intimated its newspaper, the leading radical periodical of its day, Industrial Freedom. The dream was over in five years, in its heyday never topping three hundred members. Ironically, after feuding and fighting whittled the numbers to just three dozen or so, the death knell was rung by the arrival of a new contingent of utopians to buttress Equality’s dwindling human resources. This because, unlike the Bellamistas, the newcomers pledged allegiance to another utopian novel, Hertzka’s Freeland. In no time the factions found themselves at war over their respective visions of equality, freedom, and utopia. It did not help that the newcomers quickly got the upper hand, symbolized by the renaming of Equality as Freeland. Growing hostility was capped by an act of arson, with the two groups pointing fingers at each other. With a good part of communal assets up in smoke, within a year there were only charred timbers and charred dreams littering the empty campsite.

Cherry Popsicle in July Through the power of social engineering, cooperative homesteading would generate reciprocal altruism in and of itself. Everybody from More to Marx said so. Refurbish social policy in line with dialectical materialism or some other type of -ism and watch the utopian word turn communal flesh. Bellamy thumbed-up this consensus in his bestselling dream vision. Skinner threw his ample capital as a scientist and public authority into the pot. In reality, the verdict on experimental utopias could scarcely be more unkind. Plato, More, Bellamy, Skinner, and all of their disciples were wrong, plain and simple. If income sharing could morph me-first egoists into we-first egalitarians, Bellamyite and Waldenite colonies would not have suffered the toxic power battles they did. If sexual freedom could put an end to jealousy and family bonds, personal relationships would have never lapsed from amity to enmity. Blueprints for a perfect society not only failed to produce the promised bliss but often became the very source of discontent and eventual disintegration. But the costliest illusion of all proved to be the belief that social engineering could override or even overwrite human nature. At every turn biology pushed back, toppling fools’ paradises like so many dominoes.

28  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Problems with dodgy power structures, restrictive rules, and naive ideologies aside, the biggest hitch proved to be the people who were supposed to make utopia work. The principal obstacle to the success of any utopian experiment, lamented the communards at Sunrise Hill, was the treatment individuals suffered at the hands of society. It, more than anything else, made them idle, selfish, and aggressive. Or so they thought. After the community had fallen apart, one of its founders reflected: We of course assumed that such inadequacies (or “hangups”) would straighten themselves out within the “healthy” context of our Utopia. This— needless to say—was naive.12 Kat Kinkade, planner at the Skinnerian Twin Oaks, was even more upfront in taking the biological line. Along other adaptive traits, “envy seems to be built into the human, and I can see evolutionarily why that might be true”.13 No need to look further than the enduring utopian ills. People shirking work? Freeriding. Failing to practice equality and thrift? Status seeking. Being argumentative and cruel? Envy and aggression. Decision-making by consensus proved next to impossible, often dominated by individuals who knew least about the problem. Parasitism corroded all aspects of the communal work ethic. Jealousies and petty intrigues were the norm. Communal child-rearing would come to a shuddering stop as parents reasserted their biological instinct to raise their children as they saw fit.14 The egalitarian code frayed as soon as there was furniture or other freebies for the taking. The potential for violence was rarely more than a few hard stares or words away, frequently dealt with by asking volatile types to leave. Things could get ugly, though, even in the archetypal hippie heaven of Drop City. When a dweller known as a UFO marine took to threatening others with a firearm, the ostensibly anarchic ecovillage welcomed the FBI with open arms when it came to cuff him. Collectively, the evidence is unrelenting. Before you sit down to write the articles of your utopian constitution, you have to come to terms with evolution. Experimental communes provide a graphic record of irrepressible sociobiological drives latent in all individuals, not matter how highly motivated. Ignore those and your utopia will have the staying power of a cherry popsicle in July. Evolution nests too deeply in the human psyche to be put out to pasture when it comes to engineering a better society—or just designing a better blueprint for one. Only by acknowledging our evolved nature can we hope to engineer social habitats that will nurture prosocial habits. For the radicals among utopians, the upshot is clear. If social engineering cannot change people from the outside, it may be time to change them from the inside. Bioengineers, get your résumés ready. For all this, it is worth remembering that collectives like Oneida, Harmony, or Amana have endured since the nineteenth century, and that the communal ethos of the Hutterites, the Amish, or the Shakers runs even longer. In fact, although for

Little Commonwealth  29

most people utopia evokes affluence, technological sophistication, and secular pluralism, religious back-to-the-basics groups have always dominated the alternative lifestyle landscape in the United States—beginning with the Mayflower.

Brother, Can You Paradigm? The American Dream does not concern itself with spiritual renewal, self-­cultivation, and collective happiness. Instead, it conjures up utopia American-style: bottomless opportunities for trading rags for high net assets. It is a dream of a social escalator running all around the clock inside an America-wide department store, whisking all from street level to the upper floors where every testament to consumer prosperity awaits on display. By 2001, with hippie utopias a distant memory, the old debate about whether businesses ought to maximize shareholder profit or contribute to greater social good was over. The economy, embodied by General Electric, was proof that shareholder-profit maximization was in itself the greatest social good. That year GE’s boss, Jack Welch, retired with a payout of under half a billion dollars, proving to the business community that the American Dream was within reach of everyone. With the average American production worker earning less than $13 an hour and the average CEO nearly $4,000 an hour, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting subprime loans. Then came the economic equivalent of a druggie going cold turkey. From WorldCom to Enron, upper-end corporations that came to exemplify profit maximization began to go belly up. Before anyone could say “meltdown”, they were followed by the financial house of cards built by Bank of America, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and others. By 2009, with the global economy in tailspin, even Jack Welch was blasting shareholder-value maximization as the dumbest idea ever. With at least two million American families living in extreme poverty on less than two dollars a day per head, the unofficial anthem of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” began to sound a lot like “Brother, Can You Paradigm?” Indeed, the acute Depression of the 1930s and the chronic one in which the American workforce has been mired for decades have more in common than meets the eye. The US economy suffers from problems that gnaw at the heart of capitalism and the regulatory frameworks supposed to keep it from going rogue. The biggest of them is short-sightedness, especially when it comes to investments of the short-term-pain-long-term-gain variety. Global crises like climate change lay bare the bromides about self-correcting market economy. The latter has no stake in the future, whether the future is identified with consumers, economy itself, or the planet as a whole—entities that have no voice in the market today. Critics see the remedy in widening its mandate from stockholders to stakeholders, from those who invest to do well

30  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

to those who have a vested stake in living well. In this they are bolstered by research which shows that money primes individualism, most apparent in the reluctance to trust and get involved with others.15 The job of capitalism, they point out, is not to maximize profits but to make goods and, indirectly, good. To be sure, Adam Smith did write that no dog has ever made a free and fair exchange of one bone for another. But belying this dogeat-dog imagery, he wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that, no matter how selfish Man is, there are “principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it”.16 As with the dichotomy between social and bioengineering, the one between capitalism and socialism is a red herring. Competition and cooperation, egoism and altruism are the building blocks of human behaviour, social and economic. Social theories and economic models that neglect to take this into account are caricatures. And those who call these caricatures caricatures are called utopians. Vilified left and right, not least by the political Left and Right, straight-ahead utopias may no longer be viable today. But the hope of engineering a better if not an ideal society—a eutopia rather than a utopia—remains as beguiling as ever. Indeed, if the mostly tragic history of American utopian communes teaches anything, it is that the yearning for a virtuous commonwealth remains as powerful today as it was for the original thirteen colonies.

Notes 1. Manuel and Manuel, 10; on utopian colonies in England, see Armytage. 2. Gilman; Kaplan; Sinclair (1906). 3. Sinclair (1920), 67. 4. Swirski (2011), Chapter 1. 5. Traubel, 23, 26. 6. Miller (1998), 114. 7. Miller (1998), 98–99, 104–107. 8. Murray; Finan. 9. Conkin, 48–110. 10. In Miller (1999), 151. 11. Swirski (2011), Chapter 2. 12. In Miller (1999), 191. 13. Kuhlmann, 204. 14. Tiger and Shepher; Swirski (2011), 28–40. 15. Vohs. 16. Adam Smith, first sentence of Part I, Chapter 1.

3 DEFENSE OF POETRY

In Like Flynn Social science is like all science in that even a failed experiment holds heuristic value. Tellingly, the scorecard of experimental communes and their efforts to engineer America in miniature is chock-full of spectacular failures. Rich in hardearned experience, these natural experiments ought to feed back into utopian planning to ensure better results next time. The history of utopian communities suggests, however, that few learned from their mistakes, let alone those of others. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the trajectory of the vast majority of utopian communes resembles nothing so much as a string of starryeyed marriages followed by acrimonious divorces, followed by another round of honeymoons and broken vows, and another. You’d think that at some point in the cycle marriage counsellors, psychologists, or sociobiologists would be brought into the picture to inject stability into utopia. But you would be wrong. Futurological think tanks as a matter of course delegate a subset of their resources to meta-forecasting—forecasting both the future of the think tank and the future of forecasting itself. Utopian thinkers show no evidence of adopting such a meta-perspective. Scarcely any planners planned for the evolution of the community, let alone that of the planners. This demonstrates a startling disregard for the bedrock of all life, which is change with feedback. Such short-sightedness is a hallmark of all static social systems, frozen like bugs in amber in their worldview. But real life is anything like that. Our natural and technological environments change ceaselessly, albeit at dissimilar rates, demanding constant adaptation and innovation to cope with the novel challenges they pose. At this stage of our civilization technoscience in particular has

32  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

become an independent variable that, feeding on itself, accelerates at a rate that will not be checked except, perhaps, by global catastrophe. Insofar as this ever more rapidly changing conditions demand ever more rapid adjustment, the first order of business for any utopian community ought to be planning the reform of the original blueprint. The process ought to involve a taskforce dedicated to planning the reform of all plans and all reforms, including those of the taskforce itself. Repeated failure to do so ignores, not to say insults, human intelligence, social history, and the bootstrapping dynamism of the industrial-scientific civilization. The whole idea of a perfect and thus immutable social system represents, in my view, a mistaken view of what utopia can do for us. For one, the very concept of a perfect system is mired in irreducible paradoxes. A classic utopia cannot evolve with the times. A change for the better would mean that things hadn’t been perfect to begin with. A change for the worse, on the other hand, would mean that things are perfect no more, to say nothing of the fact that a lapse from perfection in a perfect system is a contradiction in terms. This is why, by means of this book, I advance a different way of looking both at the genre and the social ideal. Utopia, in my view, is not a unique blueprint for a paradise on earth but rather a habit of mind cashed out in the way we interrogate the world, society, and selves. Utopia, in other words, is not so much a prognostic as a diagnostic tool. It is not the answer but the question. The list of questions raised by literary utopia is long and varied. But any version of it must begin with the fundamental—although rarely asked, let alone answered—question about literary fiction in general. Think for a moment about its methodology, not to say ontology. How is it that flights of fancy about nevernever worlds can act as a force of renewal in the real one? How can utopian make-believe lead anyone to believe that it is as real as death and taxes? How does fiction regenerate itself as fact? Before tackling this quandary head-on, consider the so-called Flynn effect— the startling but historically well-documented uptick in intelligence in all developed countries.1 After WWII, when IQ testing went mainstream in American society, scores on IQ tests averaged 100. Half a century later the same tests produced average scores of 118, with the biggest gains in abstract thinking. Test results on Wechsler’s intelligence scale for children have also climbed by three percent per decade. Clearly, going by standardized testing, we are getting smarter, but why? Common explanations cite, by and large, better education and better nutrition. James R. Flynn himself argued, however, that our rise in intelligence owes more to the embeddedness in modern civilization. Surrounded as we are with science and culture that at every step demand higher-level integration and ­problem-solving skills, the very fact of living in the Anthropocene is the engine that drives cognition up. And a core ingredient of this engine is literature.

Defense of Poetry  33

Nothing brings it home like Flynn’s notorious contention that you can learn more from reading great works of fiction than from studying at university.

Milking Real Knowledge From Unreal Cows Utopian fiction embodies the power of ideas to transform human life. But how does make-believe get a hold on reality? For the longest time, the effect of the immaterial on the material, of the metaphysical on the physical, of the ideal on the real has been one of the great mysteries of human cognition. Fortunately the mystery, if not the sense of wonder, dissipates when you shine evolutionary light on it. Historians, sociologists, ethnographers, cultural anthropologists, and not least storytellers and story scholars have always celebrated the cognitive power of fiction. Recently, however, they have been joined by scientific luminaries, who have come to take note of our propensity for telling and learning from stories. As a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics noted, human minds have “a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents”.2 But epistemically one needs to square this with the fact that knowledge and truth are one thing, whereas literary fiction is, well, just fiction. It is precisely for this reason that telling stories is a synonym for lying or that you can bracket a child’s fear for a princess in distress with “It’s just a story”. There is something puzzling about milking real knowledge from unreal cows, and this oddity needs to be explained by any account of utopian fiction as an instrument of inquiry. Fortunately, as I showed at length in Of Literature and Knowledge (2007), the puzzle loses its bite if we approach literary stories as thought experiments, a well-established and well-understood method of inquiry.3 Scientific and philosophical counterfactuals—scenarios that map consequences of events that by definition did not occur—yield real cognitive payoffs. Literary narratives and utopian novels in particular, I contend, proceed in a similar manner and in part for similar reasons. The capacity of utopias for generating knowledge owes to their capacity for generating thought experiments and tracking them to their narrative conclusions, be they appealing in utopias or appalling in dystopias. It is only because thinking counterfactual thoughts is such an ingrained and indispensable part of our cognitive armoury that we hardly pause to think about how marvellous and marvellously useful they are most of the time. Not coincidentally, the same holds for utopian fiction.4 Our knack for seeing the world in stories is a biological adaptation. It helps us navigate our days on Earth more memorably and more effectively, which at the end of the day comes down to more successfully. Look closer at the type of stories we call utopias. They weave artful tales, project social conditions at their

34  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

extremes, and send us home with real intel. They make us smarter by tapping into our capacity to engage with paper heroes on paper quests while designing social models and model societies. All this is to say that good thinking often comes down to telling a good story. Interestingly, an argument echoing mine has been remastered recently on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement. The subject was a book by a professor of logic who, unlike most of his colleagues, set out not to bore his readers to death. Consequently, even though the dialogic form has lost some of its lustre from the days of Bishop Berkeley or indeed Plato, his logical treatise told a story of people taking a train, meeting strangers, striking up a conversation, and debating one another until the journey’s end. Even more striking than the literary medium, however, was that the reviewer evaluated the success of argumentative logic in part by evaluating its literary qualities. It might seem unfair, conceded the philosopher who penned the article, to demand such qualities from a book executed for a different purpose. But to be pedagogically successful, a book has to be a good read.5 As it happens, the treatise in question was not, which is one reason why the reviewer concluded it wasn’t good philosophy.

Humankind’s Greatest Monsters Plato contends in Ion that, appearances to the contrary, poets are not the makers of their verses. Being divinely inspired, they only channel a kind of temporary insanity. Insofar as these poetic seizures place them beyond the control of the state, however, they are dangerous. Free outpourings of art cannot be tolerated in the ideal republic, and by the time of Republic Plato censured poets not for trading in lies, but for failing to put these lies at the service of the state. Philosophy, in short, was virtuous, poetry treacherous. Two thousand years later, in his classic Defense of Poetry, Philip Sidney took it upon himself to debunk Plato and other debunkers of art in general and literature in particular. In defiance of the Greek philosopher, he argued—openly tipping his hat to More’s Utopia—that literature was morally superior not only to philosophy but also to history. Making readers emote with the story, it inspired virtue by virtue of telling them a good one. Needless to say, were we to take Plato seriously, philosophy would have to be judged a spectacular underachiever as an engineer of virtue. Not to look too far, some of the greatest philosophers in history were tutors to some of the greatest tyrants, beginning with Plato and Dionysus, Aristotle and Alexander, and Seneca and Nero. Things, however, don’t look much better if we take Sidney at his word and argue for the moral superiority of literature, or art in general. From Hitler the watercolourist to Mao the poet, some of humankind’s greatest monsters were artists. Books like The Catcher in the Rye have been implicated

Defense of Poetry  35

in multiple assassinations, from the death of John Lennon to the attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan. Killers and serial killers like Gary Gilmore and Jack Unterwager were freed by parole boards persuaded that men who created refined sketches or prose could not relapse into homicide. If only. There is no need to go to such extremes either. Borges never got the Nobel Prize he so richly deserved because the Swedes couldn’t stomach his endorsement of Argentina’s bloody junta as gentlemen and decent people. On the other side of the political aisle, Nobel winner García Márquez out-Platoed even Plato. Where the Greek philosopher only wished to banish writers from his republic, García Márquez declared that it didn’t matter if his friend Fidel Castro hanged them all—including himself.6 Call it authoritarian absolutism or merely ideological idealism, but anyone looking for a moral here could be hardly blamed for concluding that art is hardly the elevator of virtue that Sir Philip saw in it.7 What exactly is it good for then? Nothing at all, crowed Morse Peckham in 1967, the year that saw the release of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and In the Heat of the Night. Plato himself could not have put it more stridently: Art tells us nothing about the world that we cannot find elsewhere and more reliably. Art does not make us better citizens, or more moral, or more honest. It may conceivably make us worse.8 This is a bleak, not to call it misanthropic, view of our propensity for telling stories, whether in prose, lyrics, or moving pictures. More to the point, it is untrue. Whether art makes us morally better is an open question. But contrary to Peckham, it does make us cognitively better off. This is because stories today function as they had throughout the history and prehistory of our species: as counterfactual laboratories, scenario builders, script editors, and memory databanks (with thrills thrown in at no extra charge, making them cheap indeed).9 Thought experiments, whether literary or scientific, are far from mind games for mind games’ sake. They are not an addendum to the book of life but a crucial part of the story, so much so that we might not even be here if not for our gift for reaping harvests from things that are not. This is not to even mention that, like all things in life, utopian fiction is always embedded in a social context. It imprints itself on the people who read it, and people go on to build societies. Of course, I’m not alone in subscribing to this view. In 1971 the University of Chicago took an unusual step of awarding a master’s degree in anthropology to a student who had flunked decades earlier when his two theses—on revolutionary art movements and on oscillations of good and evil in short fiction—had been rejected. Now, citing its contributions to cultural anthropology, the university accepted a literary fiction called Cat’s Cradle in lieu of dissertation and awarded Kurt Vonnegut his long-delayed graduate degree.

36  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Why God Tolerates Historians You don’t need to be versed in speech act theory to realize that, like any other form of language use, writing utopian fiction is a form of language in action. Language in action is everywhere around us, from the day we begin to communicate to the day we die. More than omnipresent, from time to time at least language may also be omnipotent. No other reason why God tolerates historians, quipped Samuel Butler, author of utopian classics Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. By rewriting history, he said, they can do what even He cannot: change the past. The power of language in action is readily apparent in the court of law. Sworn testimonies, factual cross-examinations, and doubt-sowing rebuttals are only some of the stories circulating in the legal setting, with fortunes and sometimes even lives hanging in the balance. Much as in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, litigants flanked by attorneys, witnesses, jurors, and judges take turns in ­reconstructing—occasionally even reenacting—the story of what happened in a collective effort to write the past. The final version of these reconstructions, and sometimes out-and-out creative fictions, becomes the official record of the proceedings and often the nearest thing we have to the truth. Legalese itself is the best example of language in action. Hermetic as it is, its consequences can be wide-ranging and dramatic. Employed in the court of law for the purpose of rhetorical persuasion, it shapes the stories we tell by binding our pledges and chiselling at our testimonies. Epitomizing the power of language in action, it metes out justice by the act of sentencing, the verdict being literally an act of telling the truth, from the Latin veritas and dictum. All this is to say that, even though talkers get a bad rap from doers in life, language is a talker and a doer. In the linguistic and philosophical parlance, it always states and performs.10 “I do” before a marriage registrar has profound social consequences. So does a declaration of war. So does the act of writing a story. Language is the weapon of choice of writers as they flesh out the range of human actions, the motives for these actions, the consequences of these actions in society, and as—at the end of the scale—they transform the world. The checklist of stories that changed the course of history is longer than the book in your hands, beginning with the millions of lives taken in the name of the Word as transmitted by this or that version of their Holy Scripture. Closer to home there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which fomented the Civil War by fomenting antislavery sentiments. There was The Jungle, which drove the Theodore Roosevelt administration to enact sweeping consumer protection laws. And let’s not forget the fiction streaming daily out of the White House.11 As with American fiction, so with American utopian fiction. Bellamy’s makebelieve led to a worldwide wave of experiments in communal living based on the social model outlined in the novel. Ditto Freeland. Ditto Altruria. Ditto Walden Two. Galvanized by the stories they read, tens of thousands of men and women sold their houses, packed their bags, and removed to remote locations to seek a better life, all on the word of utopian fantasy.

FIGURE 3.1 Utopia

on American soil. Bellamy’s make-believe led to a worldwide wave of experiments in communal living based on the social model outlined in the novel. Ditto Freeland. Ditto Altruria. Ditto Walden Two. Galvanized by the stories they read, tens of thousands of men and women sold their houses, packed their bags, and removed to remote locations to seek a better life, all on the word of utopian fantasy.

Credit: Map data © 2018 Google.

38  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

Alas, their efforts to translate novels into the language of labour division, economic incentives, and interpersonal commerce proved time and again that plotting fictive lives is not the same as planning real ones. This is perhaps to be expected. Fleshed out in words rather than in social interaction, literary utopias are conceived by single minds and fired up by singular visions. This arresting simplicity, in turn, fosters an illusion that literary utopias are complete, coherent, and practical. Would it were so simple.

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais, and Dostoevski The history of American utopian communities makes it abundantly clear that most of them considered utopia without a printshop to be like a mouth without a tongue. Virtually every sizeable collective, as soon as it had procured living accommodations, a communal mess hall, and a one-room school, would rush to set up a printing press. Those that did not more than made up for it with a flood of newsletters, newssheets, columns, pamphlets, bulletins, notices, appeals, funding drives, and other miscellany, printing it outside. For all this eagerness to leave a paper trail of their philosophy of life, most utopias never made the jump from notebooks to real life. The best estimates suggest, in fact, that for every living commune there were a hundred that never got past the planning stage.12 If anywhere near the truth, this staggering ratio suggests that the tens of thousands of collectives dotting the American landscape at the turn of the Sixties were only the visible fraction of the millions that never got off the ground. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the entire history, if not for the very concept, of utopia. It’s not just that we may have underestimated the true magnitude of the utopian spirit by two orders of magnitude—a colossal error by any standard. As importantly from our standpoint, if projected utopias outnumber those that actually made it to the builder’s lot by a factor of a hundred, almost all utopias in history were created on paper, making utopian history practically synonymous with the history of utopian writing.13 In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, following pages of technical philosophical and economic analysis, Nozick offers the following advice: “No one should attempt to describe a utopia unless he’s recently reread, for example, the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais and Dostoevski”.14 This is a striking admission from one of the leading thinkers of his generation that, despite massive research budgets, social scientists are nowhere near holding a candle to writers of fiction when it comes plumbing the complexity of human beings in their social milieus. Nozick’s words from 1974 ring as true today. Even the best models from microeconomists or action theorists reflect only a pale ghost of the infinite variety of motives, desires, and behaviours of human agents as we know them from

Defense of Poetry  39

life or, for that matter, from literature. This is one more compelling reason for taking literary utopias seriously, quite apart from the fact that, away from their word processors, many writers have been known to work for social and political change on the community level, right down to building utopian colonies with their own hands and money. For all their idealism, utopians are hardboiled realists too. Promises of social bliss aside, they are not blinkered to rot. Why else would they ache for something better? Yet the fact remains that, in spite of all historical evidence—to say nothing of Arrow’s impossibility theorem—many people find it easier to fall in than out of love with the idea of aggregating everyone’s social preferences.15 Clearly, an emotionally satisfying illusion can be more potent than a cold shower of facts. And what more powerful illusion than that of perfect society?

Homo-cide Notwithstanding all the modern wrinkles in the utopian fabric, the classic cut of the cloth comes down from Plato. Elite government, checks and balances, meritocracy, eugenics, education, child-rearing, redistribution of property, status of women and minorities, role of art, suppression or even eradication of violence and aggression—under the bouquet of modern flavours hides the ancient recipe. Indeed, like the proverbial generals who always fight the last war, for all their progressive thinking utopian visionaries have always looked to the past. In itself, this is not surprising. Just as we cannot jump out of our skins, we cannot jump out of our history. Yet even this simple realization should be enough to scuttle the whole idea of utopian revolution, quite independently from the fact that all totalitarian perestroikas were someone’s utopias writ large. Just as the best is often the enemy of the good, the razzle-dazzle of utopia often dims the relative attractiveness of piecemeal eutopian reform. This is, at least, one of the key premises behind my book and behind the four books that lie at its heart. None of them is strictly speaking a utopia, not at least in the classic sense of the term.16 The best you could say about them is that they are utopias manqué, which is precisely what makes them so interesting. Rewriting the book on utopia, not least by letting the four horses of the apocalypse run wild in paradise, Thomas M. Disch, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood take on the mantle of social reformers by diagnosing the pitfalls of social reforms. Life in 334, God’s Grace, Galápagos, and Oryx and Crake is anything but perfect and society anything but ideal. Angst, malaise, ennui; theocracy, infanticide, savagery; decadence, debacle, devolution; homicide, genocide, democide. This is what you get, argue the storytellers, when you try to engineer paradise on earth. Disch does his part by linking the ideals of the welfare state directly to its perversions. Malamud weighs the odds of success in deprogramming human and primate nature and comes out against both. Vonnegut plots a straight line

40  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

between a global economic meltdown and biological descent with feedback. And Atwood concocts a witch’s brew from Promethean hubris and homicide on the scale of the planet—truly a Homo-cide. In all four novels, humanistic ideas and humane ideals pave the way for the social engineering and bioengineering of societies that reflect ours like a cabinet mirror of Dr. Caligari might: sinister and grotesque. But just as you might be tempted to write them off as unremitting nightmares, the ghastliness dissolves into egalitarianism, communality, social responsibility, altruism, self-sacrifice, and other basic building blocks of utopia. What they lack in optimism, they more than make up for in cynicism. But at their core, they are animated by concepts and ideals familiar from the classics of the genre, starting with equality, community, and prosociality. For all that, even as they situate themselves at the centre of debates about what makes society good and what makes good society, their utopianism has less to do with the tropes of the genre than with the rigorous critique of some of the basic assumptions behind the utopian project.

The Human Use of Human Beings When it comes to engineering utopia, a far greater obstacle than social norms is the nature of human nature. In framing this argument I am assisted by the authors of 334, God’s Grace, Galápagos, and Oryx and Crake, all of whom do a thorough job of stripping the varnish off our civilization to reveal human nature at its rawest. With their help, I set out to illuminate both the finer points of social and bioengineering and the areas of interplay between the two, opening new lines of inquiry into what a society better than ours might look like. The tropes of classic utopias are well known. A visitor arrives to nowhere, suffers a culture shock, meets a local cicerone, gets a guided tour, asks a host of leading questions, marvels at the wisdom of the laws and the goodness of the people, pans the social life back home, and if he’s lucky marries a native belle. Starting with H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1904), however, most modern utopias remix these familiar motifs with themes notably absent in Plato and More.17 Foremost among them are the rise of urban welfare state, the evolution of prosociality, the estrangement into the future, and the engineering of world peace. Not coincidentally, all four are amply represented by the novels I adopt as my guides to utopia in general and American utopia in particular. Disch socioengineers a total, if not totalitarian, welfare state. Malamud puts the last man on Earth on a collision course with a community of sentient and social-­engineered chimps. Vonnegut travels in time to devolve humankind as we know into blubbery seals. Atwood goes even further, taking an apocalyptic shortcut to a designer-genes biotopia. Between them, the four novelists represent differing approaches to our two instrumental pathways to utopia. Where Disch writes from the perspective of a

Defense of Poetry  41

social engineer, Malamud’s protagonist is a social engineer who runs into a brick wall of biology. Where Vonnegut plays with evolutionary reverse-engineering, Atwood bioengineers a new humanoid species, leaving humanity in the rearview mirror. It is this variety in unity that compels me to approach the four novels as chapters in a collective book devoted to what Norbert Wiener memorably called the human use of human beings. Although from dramatically different perspectives, all four draw the spotlight to the ergodic gradients in human evolution. In plain English, they highlight the ways in which human adaptive behaviours foil all shortcuts to utopia. If all this sounds more like science than literary studies, it is in keeping with the fact that, in addition to being a book of literary analysis, American Utopia is also a book of science.18 This is because, at different points in the book, seizing the potential for getting a quantitative foothold on the questions under investigation— multilevel selection and the attitudes to aggression and deaggression—I don the lab coat of a social scientist and present the results of my original studies into these two aspects of utopian engineering. To wit, in Chapter 9 I analyze the distribution of the evolutionary deposits of prosociality in proverbs—literary fossils reaching possibly as far back as the Upper Paleolithic. These oral nuggets of ancestral wisdom, I argue, can tell us a great deal about prehistoric societies and thus about human nature. The results are striking. My research shines new empirical light on the controversies surrounding biological theories of multilevel selection and makes predictions for the interplay of prosocial and antisocial behaviours in all cultures, past and present. In Chapter 14 I compile, combine, and analyze the results of a twenty-year long study of attitudes to bioengineering deaggression. Armed with data from respondents from all parts of the world, I arrive at predictions as headline-­ grabbing as the wars and genocides that go on even as I type these words. Giving peace a chance is an idea whose time has come, although—as my study reveals—it may be an idea as utopian as any in history.

Who Will Guard the Guardians? From Philip Sidney to Frederick Douglass, the concept of literature as a speaking picture is an invitation to enter into a conversation with books that speak to us. This dialogic approach, grounded in the interrogation and even clash of ideas, underlies my approach to all the books on whose shoulders I stand. There are many of them, from social studies to history, science, philosophy, and literary criticism. But leading them are four American utopias—or, as you may later decide, utopias turned sour. But far from merely glossing their authors’ imaginative leaps, I accord them the serious critique that befits the seriousness of the scenarios they weave. On

42  Utopia, Eutopia, Youtopia

occasion this means disputing not only the feasibility but even the premises of their social models. At times like these, I depart from the scenarios suggested by the novelists to pursue original avenues of inquiry. Although built on their conceptual nuclei, they take me in directions unforeseen by their originators. When it comes to the outré and outrageous in utopia, you can scarcely do better than Disch, Malamud, Vonnegut, and Atwood, who stretch the limits of the genre to the point of snapping. Giving due credit for their artistic inventiveness is a part of my aim to formulate true and interesting propositions about their visions of societies better than ours. Success here should radiate to my parallel aim of modernizing the concept of utopia and renewing its place on the literary and social landscape. My plan is to work back and forth between two related sets of questions. The first one interrogates many of the assumptions traditionally central to the utopian project. Whence the seeds of discontent and dissent: human nature or social nurture? Can we bioengineer human nature to specifications? Should we? Can social engineers change their image from the twentieth-century’s whipping boys to poster boys for a brave new age of Big Data and smart algorithms? The other set of questions interrogates the specifics of the four narratives, from social modelling to time travel, some of which are concrete enough to permit analysis and even framing generalizations. Whence our taste for egoism on the one hand and altruism on the other? For waging war and waging peace? Who will bring peace to utopia? Who will make better guardians: humans or machines? And who will guard the guardians? Hyper-specialization, endemic to our age, limits the horizons of many, if not most, disciplinary inquiries. Bucking the trend, I intertwine the study of literary and social utopia—which is to say of fiction-based and fact-based visions of good life—in the hope of mapping the pitfalls and windfalls of prosocial reform. I do this by throwing narrative light on the broader questions posed by history and by throwing historical light on the questions posed by storytellers in a feedback loop that forms the backbone of my book. Working back and forth between literary visions and social reality, I seek to reconcile the idealism and realism of the genre. The search for utopia, a blueprint for a happy life within the framework of harmonious social existence, is ultimately a search for self-identification and self-identity. As such, it is a search for a definition of life well lived. If only for this reason, I contend, utopia will always be with us, just because there is hardly a more important task for any human being—and by extension for any collection of human beings—than finding happiness for “me” in the context of “we”.

Notes 1. Flynn; Trahan et al. 2. Kahneman, 29.

Defense of Poetry  43

3. Brown; Sorensen; Nersessian; Horowitz; see bibliography in Swirski (2007). 4. On thought experiments in literature, see Swirski (2007). 5. Kutsch, 7. 6. Kean; Krauze. 7. See, for example, Hickey. 8. Peckham, 313; for rebuttal, see Swirski (2007); Literature, Analytically Speaking (2010). 9. Swirski (2007). 10. For a nontechnical introduction to speech-act theory, see Swirski (2010), 84–86. 11. Swirski (2015). 12. Miller (1998), xxi. 13. See Sargent. 14. Nozick, 311. 15. This is impossible; see Maskin and Sen. 16. On the subject of genre membership, when it comes to science fiction, Disch trashed it in (1998) and (2005); ditto Vonnegut in “Science Fiction” (1965; ditto in 2004 Vonnegut’s exegete, Klinkowitz, even as traced Vonnegut’s sci-fi themes); Atwood has disavowed sci-fi throughout her career, even as her Handmaid’s Tale won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 17. First serialized between October 1904 and April 1905. 18. On isomorphism between literature and science, see Malamud, Talking Horse, xiv.

PART II

Dischtopia Thomas M. Disch

4 ENTER THE CHAMELEON

Endzone Thomas Michael Disch—Tom to his friends—was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in the winter of 1940. His early years were spent bouncing like a pinball around Minnesota before coming to rest in St. Paul. As a grownup he lived in England, Mexico, Turkey, Italy, Spain, and Austria, where in the late Sixties he began writing 334. But like many other writers, from Thomas to Tom Wolfe, he felt most at home in New York. It was there, in his rent-controlled, spartanly furnished Manhattan apartment that he died in 2008 from a self-inflicted gunshot. In itself, it was not that much of a surprise. Disch had long held death in close embrace, particularly in his last writings and on a blog suggestively called Endzone, now closed under a posthumous banner: “This journal has been placed in memorial status. New entries cannot be posted to it”.1 His handpicked death date, however, was something else. Fourth of July, birthday of the nation. Whatever the symbolism, for years before then Disch had been dying a ­writer’s death. Depressed, following the 2005 death of his partner Charles Naylor, he had trouble writing. True, just days before his rendezvous with a bullet he saw the release of The Word of God, a patchwork of philippics on atheism, death, and literature, roughly in that order. Later that year came The Wall of America, an anthology of past satirical salvoes on the future present of the nation. Mostly, however, there was a scattering of poetry, more or less regular blogs, and the ebb and flow of email correspondence. It was over email that—only months before Disch’s suicide—we reconnected to talk about his arguably best novels, 334 and The M.D. Disch seemed in good spirits, if somewhat detached, and glad to muse about his literary life, behind

48 Dischtopia

which always loomed New York City. Arriving there, he remembered, was like finding a soulmate while looking for a housemate. Disch originally went East to study architecture. Parting ways with the program after just a few weeks, he quickly enlisted, went AWOL, received a medical discharge, and started evening classes at New York University. He dropped out two years later, fed up with the academic mentality and the torture of academese. In 334 NYU looms behind a protective palisade, an island of learning walled off like the walled compounds of the intellectual and social haves besieged by plebes in Oryx and Crake. To make ends meet, he worked odd jobs from bank teller to copy editor to mortuary attendant, getting the feel for what would become “Bodies”, handsdown the most realistically macabre section of 334. The turning point came when he sold his first story, a time-travel entanglement. Years later he gleefully trashed it as a tired retread of a B-movie, with Formica characters and no redeeming literary value. After two years of churning out advertising copy, he turned to full-time writing in 1964. The late 1960s found him in London, pressed into the ranks of New Wave science fiction. He was certainly instrumental in defining its characteristics: experimental, pessimistic, dedicated to liberation politics. Like the hero of his frequently anthologized story “The Asian Shore”, he had assimilated so well that, before heading back to New York, he was asked to novelize the hit British television series The Prisoner. Back on his native grounds, he never looked back. A literary chameleon, he changed styles and genres as often as an IndyCar racer changes tires. In the decades to come he would bounce from science fiction to utopia, horror, gothic, adventure thriller, crime mystery, historical romance, children’s literature, book reviews, movie scripts, opera librettos, theatre plays, literary criticism, and reams and reams of verse. There was so much verse, in fact, that in his later days many readers thought of him simply as a poet who occasionally dabbled in prose. By 1988 Newsweek argued on behalf of many that he might be “the most formidably gifted unfamous American writer”.2 Despite a smattering of prizes and a 1999 Special Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, this distinction held true right to the day he ate his gun.

A Text Adventure You’ll Never Forget From his very first novel it was apparent this kid meant business. Most authors of apocalyptic fiction, with Malamud, Vonnegut, and Atwood in the lead, stop short of total annihilation, leaving pockets of survivors to carry the torch of civilization forward. Disch’s 1965 novel of alien invasion had no room for such mawkishness. The Genocides wipes out every man, woman, and child on the planet, putting the kibosh on any possible renaissance of Homo sapiens. The end.

Enter the Chameleon  49

For all its scorched-earth imagery, however, even his inaugural novel pays a sideways homage to utopia. Many of its motifs, from communal existence to quasi-eugenic marriages to the presence of a philosophical elite, are familiar from the classics of the genre, if ironically inverted. The philosophers, for example, play only a peripheral role in the community’s quest for food and shelter. In another dig at Plato, Disch’s leader is a brute farmer: a plebe. Indeed, utopian inversion is the novel’s leading structural principle. The Garden of Eden returns as an Earth-size garden of alien monoculture. Rather than growers, human beings are the new ecosystem’s pests. Instead of luxuriating in abundance, they go hungry or grow obscenely fat. Dispossessed by the aliens’ back-to-the-land blueprint, they follow in the footsteps of the dodo and the moa—or, as in 334, the ostrich and the octopus. Already at this stage, Disch’s signature style is on full display: naturalistically ironic, literarily eclectic, and not least politically caustic, as in the title of his 1967 story “Thesis on Social Forms and Social Controls in the USA”. In 1968 Disch ramped up the political stakes in Camp Concentration, a Faustian and Orwellian allegory on bioengineering hyper-intelligence in a secret research lab. In the book Uncle Sam fights a dirty germ war in Asia, interns subversives, and like the real-life CIA uses them for clandestine medical experiments. Blacklisted for a time in the land of the free, Disch’s hell-raiser ended up being released in Britain. In the wake of 334 Disch edited several anthologies, the first two decidedly dystopian, followed by The New Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian S-F. Perish the thought, however, of basking under the rays of climatically engineered paradise on earth. As often as not, the new improved suns are social analogues to white dwarfs and red giants, lighting up the honeytraps of capitalism or Big Brothers writ small. In 1979 Disch revisited the New York of 334—bitten to the quick by food shortages, coercive controls, and spiritual lassitude—in another genre-bender called On Wings of Song. Then, in a creative lap sideways, he made his mark as an interactive gaming pioneer. In the days when few people had even heard of artificial intelligence, he wrote Amnesia, billed as “a text adventure you will never forget”.3 The text-based game opens when a sleeper awakes in a midtown Manhattan hotel. He has no clothes, no money, and suffers from a total lack of recall. Presently he finds out not only that he is engaged to a woman he knows nothing about, but that a man is hell-bent on killing him and that he’s wanted in Texas for murder. From there he—you, the player—must unravel the chain of events that lead back to this midtown Manhattan hotel. In the years to come Disch would once again reinvent himself, this time as a gothic and horror storyteller. His 1991 The M.D. earned glowing testimonials from the leading names in the genre, including Stephen King. Praised by literary critics and at long last commercially home-free, during the Nineties Disch had

50 Dischtopia

seemingly found his philosopher’s stone. And yet, when I asked him about the most creative period of his life, he pointed straight back to the Seventies.

Playfully Serious About It With Nixon riding the broom to political purgatory, the OPEC-hit economy on its knees, and flower-power idealists ditching tie-dyes for the nipple shirts of the disco craze, the Seventies were not a good time for utopias. Many intellectuals wrote them off as déclassé at best, passé at worst. Those who still took them seriously, like Karl Popper or Friedrich Hayek, blasted them as one-way tickets to hell.4 Two writers disagreed. One was Robert Nozick. The other was Disch, who in 1972 (British edition) reinvigorated the genre in a short-story novel called simply 334. Nozick’s bottom line was minimalist to a fault. The state is legitimate solely in the realm of security, protection of property, and enforcement of contracts. All three emphatically exclude any form of engineering social welfare, be it through economic redistribution or social egalitarianism. Freethinking as ever, Disch took the opposite tack. The welfare state is not going anywhere. Despite lip service about bringing the big bad government to heel, every Demublican administration only makes it more entrenched. Social programs are like street drugs: easy to get hooked on, easy to run wild, easy to blame for every ill under the sun. The rest writes itself. SimCity the welfare state into the early 2020s, blight it with overconsumption and computers, and watch it hurt. Dischtopia is the antithesis of Nozick. The socialist technocratic state is allintrusive yet liberal. Laws are permissive, welfare bureaucrats fair-minded, and basic needs provided for. Regents—the Revised Genetics Testing Act of 2011— regulates most everything, from child licences to welfare payouts. Education is free, no one is hungry, no one is homeless. Women are equal at work and at home. For all this, life is a catastrophe, although in a quiet-whimper rather than big-bang sort of way. People’s lives in 334 are as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short as those decried in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The social panorama unfolds in a flurry of detail, leaving it to the reader to link the dots on this alien yet familiar cityscape. Food and energy crunch. Doing dishes in bathwater. Apartment blocks behind electric moats. Random terrorist bombings. Black market graft. Dogs wiped out by child gangs in wars for rooftops. Psychological aberrations in trippers on legal drugs. Disch lords over his SimCitizens with an almost Olympian detachment, his finger never far from the “Afflict” button. But make no mistake: his ship of welfare state is not the Titanic. If anything, it is its sister ship the Olympic, griefstricken and bankrupt, but doggedly braving perpetual headwinds. Indeed, in our correspondence going back to 1989, Disch objected to 334 being read as a

Enter the Chameleon  51

sociopolitical homily. His intentions, he argued, were often simply aesthetic or even playful. Play as a social activity is too fraught with real life analogies to be irreconcilable with being earnest. But for writers, as for children, play is often a goal in itself in that it transcends immediate concerns, like getting a book done so that you can get paid and head to the supermarket to put food on the table. Play generates ideas and alternate worlds but it is governed by its own rules. There’s nothing to stop anybody from comparing a novelist’s play world to the real world, but there’s nothing that says they have to coincide either. What you say about literature as thought experiment is correct if you’re mindful that a writer can be playfully serious about the whole thing.5

Drop Dead In many ways Disch didn’t have to imagine his ailing welfare state, scabrous housing project, or empire in the doldrums. Nixon’s America supplied enough black grist for his novelistic mill. The early Seventies were, to be sure, a heady times abroad. Nixon became the first president to visit Peking, then Moscow, opening up to China and at a stroke of a SALT Treaty pen downshifting the buildup of nuclear arsenals. But at home Americans were hammered by a series of structural body blows. The devolution of power from the industrial sector to the financial, arm in arm with the expansion of the service and information economy, wrought turmoil around the country. Deindustrialization and deregulation, coupled with Wall Street–cosy politics and a sharp turn to the right in social policies, left urban cores hollow. Cocaine, then crack, sold faster than tickets to an Ali-Frazier fight. Disch’s New York became ground zero as acute poverty, chronic joblessness, gangland turf wars, and anything-but-just justice system pummelled it worse than the Egyptian plagues. Shifting demographics and thinning capital investment ripped the heart out of the city. White flight reached zenith, taxable base nosedived, Tammany Hall went bankrupt, and the Big Apple hit rock bottom on October 30, 1975, heralded by the notorious Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”.6 Following the Arab-Israeli war and the oil embargo, gas shortages and power blackouts sent people and stock markets into a tizzy. Boots began to ship back from Vietnam but indiscriminate carpet bombing and napalming only shifted into higher gear, even as the war receded from view like a herpes virus in its chronic phase. Unemployment hit ten percent, the economy stagflated, and the two-career family became the norm for baby-boomer yuppies and DINKs (double income no kids).

52 Dischtopia

As in 334, not everything changed for the worse. The number of women in law schools and with doctoral degrees shot through the roof, even as the earning gap actually widened. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court struck down state abortion laws, completing the revolution wrought over the previous two decades by the estrogen-laced pill. A few years later, the Supreme Court welcomed its first female justice. But what America gave with one hand, it took away with the other. Even as it elected more than a hundred black mayors in urban centres as big as Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Atlanta, black unemployment topped twice that of whites. Nixon ruled like Caesar, turning the republic into his private empire.7 When Congress funded social programs, he impounded these earmarks and, in a show of disdain, continued to do so even after Congress had overruled him. And throughout it all, the welfare state grew like Alice on magic mushrooms. When Harry Truman bagged his own election in 1948, he construed it as a mandate to universalize the social largesse of the New Deal. His inaugural address promised that the government would see that every American had a chance to obtain his fair share of the country’s increasing wealth. To the welfare state, his Fair Deal became what rapid-growth hormone is to the cattle industry. Today, neocon rhetoric notwithstanding, the welfare state is as American as apple pie. No citizen born after the Great Depression has known anything else. The system is so entrenched that not even Reagan, Bush, or Trump dared dismantle the social net of pensions, health insurance, the minimum wage, education assistance, public housing, and job creation in the ballooning military sector. The welfare state controls the American way of life even as it boasts levels of dysfunctionality not seen since The Sopranos. In many ways the welfare state is the victim of its own success. It is so good in protecting and prolonging American lives past the standards of the mid-­ twentieth century that it has morphed into a money pit. Unless technocrats wrest power from politicians and overhaul it—beginning with the retirement age— this giant Ponzi scheme will cave in as baby-boomer retirees overwhelm the thinning workforce. Yet, even as entitlements scarf up the lion’s share of the budget, like in 334 no one knows how to put the lion back in the cage.

Utopia Is the Reciprocal of Armageddon Throughout his career, even as Disch had demonstrated little patience with utopian idealism, he was equally dismissive of the classic Zamyatin-Huxley-Orwell dystopia. In their simple-mindedness, he argued in the introduction to The New Improved Sun, both are no less ridiculous in literature than in real life. The same dolts who expect Babylon to go sliding into the Pacific tomorrow morning are also expecting their messiah, what’s-his-name, to lead them to the Promised Land by tomorrow night. Utopia is the reciprocal

Enter the Chameleon  53

of Armageddon, and neither locality can survive long in the cruel world of reality.8 Dischtopia makes little distinction between the cookie cutters of utopia and dystopia. Deep down, it suggests, their apparent polarities are as entangled as two photons shed by a de-excited atom. Even as the particles race away from each other to the ends of the universe, their properties continue to be correlated. Feel the social pulse of one and you can diagnose the ills of the other. In short, where literary tradition sees a disjunction, Disch sees a conjunction. This is not to dispute Disch’s almost naturalistic objectivity—his detractors would call it cruelty—that often neglects to look on the bright side of life. So what? Have you read the New York Times today? Wars. Terrorism. Human shields. Captive mutilations. Sexual slavery. Serial-killer caregivers. Mothers doping children. Unholy alliances. Corruption and kickbacks. Environmental mayhem. Claiming that in Dischtopia hell is just around the corner is one thing. As the saying goes, scratch a pessimist and watch a realist bleed. But, taking exception to the care with which Disch eviscerates the welfare state and, indirectly, the political ideals of the Left, some literary critics took to painting him as a nihilist. One of them even took the time to clarify what nihilism meant in the context: “a wholesale destruction of social, moral, and logical tenets”.9 Did anyone actually parse that? Let’s see. If the statement is true, then all logical tenets are invalid after their wholesale destruction. Without propositional logic, however, all communication—beginning with the statement in question— becomes meaningless. Therefore, if it actually means anything, the statement means nothing. Conversely, if it means nothing, it means nothing. Ergo, it means nothing. Not only does this kind of nonsense give literary critics a bad name but the charge of nihilism is simply misconceived in Disch’s case. To be sure, as he was at pains to stress in our interviews, his artistic goals are not reducible to the didactic. But, as he acknowledged shortly after the publication of 334, at the end of the day all artists are Hamlets, holding a mirror up to nature so that “our actions, whether on the barricades or in the voting booth, will be better, saner, more humane”.10 In other interviews Disch simply noted that nihilism is a slur by means of which orthodoxy dismisses an outlook different from its own.11 As it happens, in 334 the outlook disconcerts because it paints the welfare state as Dali painted timepieces—lifeless and limp, a brainchild of social engineering coming unglued. Its pessimism, however, is only realism, an upshot of Disch relishing the utopian and dystopian alternatives like the devil relishes holy water. It is hard to deny that 334 paints a downbeat picture—perhaps even, in the Elizabethan sense, a world-weary one. Its Pandora’s box of afflictions is bottomless and disturbingly imaginative. But neither is the future it conjures up totalitarian

54 Dischtopia

or in any systematic way dystopian. His United States of the 2020s differs not in kind but only in degree from the country we have built in the meantime.

Darkly Wise and Rudely Great If Disch’s disposition is that of a scientist, it is more sociological than technological, and nowhere more so than in 334. Imaging the evolution of welfare state dynamics, he follows Alexander Pope in judging the proper study of mankind to be man. Most probably, he would also echo Pope’s dig at humankind being darkly wise and rudely great, with too much knowledge and too much weakness. In short, a species unmade by technology and ideology. 334 knits a social web of welfare-state beneficiaries who spin their wheels into an ever deepening rut. Yet if Dischtopia offers little hope of progress for the human condition, it offers even less for anything resembling all-out social revolution. As a progressivist Disch is an incrementalist—which is to say a eutopian.12 Only piecemeal solutions compounded over time can bring more good than bad. Over the course of centuries, the general tone of utopian imagination echoed the transformations of Western societies. As the role of religion as a source of moral certitude and social organization tailed off, evolutionary and sociobiological thinking came into its own. Questions about human nature and its relation to Mother Nature began to be dressed in the language of profit-driven market competition moderated by an occasional nod to social commonwealth. Means of production and ways of redistribution joined taxes and governance as the axes of deliberations about the paths to perfect society. Technoscience and its promise of effective social and bioengineering shot to the top of the wish lists of all modern ruling elites. Outside of a handful of utopian communes, the dream of back-to-nature rusticity cranking out material prosperity without industrialscale investment vanished like Cinderella before the stroke of midnight.13 Beginning in earnest in the late nineteenth century, the Enlightenment ideals that drove these transformations came under intense scrutiny, not to say assault. At their bottom lay the formation of mass society. It, more than anything else, made the agrarian or aristocratic gentility of classic utopia look as obsolete as flint arrowheads. Propelled by overpopulation and overconsumption, it homogenized the American Dream, flattening the social landscape into a plain-flour pancake. Myths, however, die harder than Bruce Willis. Today Americans continue to venerate individualism in a nation that had invented mass production, mass culture, and mass-culturally produced myths, starting with the myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance. An equal opportunity offender, Disch slaughters political cows left and right, highlighting the price tag of social engineering by market capitalists on one hand and by welfare planners on the other.

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Dystopias downgrade biological nature while promoting the image of almost infinitely malleable human nature. They exhibit a puritanical sense of higher purpose sustained by near idolatry of science and its offshoots, such as social engineering and bioengineering. In dystopia social life is urbanized, schematized, taylorized. Information and education channels controlled. Personal expression eclipsed by social collectivity. Family bonds blunted. Religiosity hijacked by idolatry of the state and state leadership. All true, except that Dischtopia is assembled in equal measure from myths and motifs that run all the way from Plato to Bellamy. A technocracy vested with political power in the name of meeting everyone’s basic needs. A commonweal under universal basic income. A welfare bureaucracy guaranteeing universal housing and healthcare on one hand, and education and entertainment on the other. A nationwide information farm tracking everybody’s vital statistics in the interest of prosociality and eugenics. Having fun with our heads, Disch borrows equally from socialist dreams and liberal nightmares before paying them back with interest. Handling this balancing act with such equipoise that neither side steals the show, Dischtopia truly stakes out the middle ground between a rock and a hard place. Its future—our future—is neither utopian nor apocalyptic but rather another rough patch to muddle through, lurching from social paralysis to reformist paroxysms much as we have throughout history.

Who Will Make the Guardians Obey? Diluting the progressivism of utopia with the fatalism of dystopia, Disch retools the genre for the era of Big Brother and Big Data. Bucking millennia of utopian thought, he contends that no social policy is in and of itself good—or bad. More than the text of the utopian constitution, what counts is the context in which it is legislated. More than the nobility of the words on the page, what counts is the nobility of the people who implement them. The nature of human society boils down to human nature. It, rather than any other factor, can suck the air out of any thought-balloon on which utopia would rise above its historical present. Headed by Steven Pinker, there are voices today ready to argue that, driven by evolutionary pressures, prosociality worldwide is on the rise. Skeptics point to studies that show the frequency of wars to be a historical constant.14 Either way, the fundamental building blocks of utopia—common ownership of property and communal life rather than family-centred life—violate human nature as shaped by nature itself. Property owned by multitudes diffuses responsibility to the point of dissolving it.15 This is why public toilets everywhere are a stinking mess. The same goes for people’s governments, which as a rule demonstrate little care for the people in whose name they govern.

56 Dischtopia

But rather than reject utopia offhand, Disch adopts its tenets in dead earnest only to pursue them to their logical and sometimes pathological consequences. This murderous consistency sets him apart from Plato, Bellamy, and every other utopian in between. Much in the same spirit, ten years after Disch, Joseph Heller had all the fun in the world using the Socratic method to blow holes in Plato’s plan for a virtuous republic. “Why”, wondered Aristotle, trying his hardest to puzzle it out, “would a ruler with absolute power, and those around him who allow him to have it, agree to surrender it?” “Because he is virtuous. Because I will tell them to”. “Will the rest of the population want to comply?” “They would have to comply, whether they want to or not. In my virtuous communist republic, it will be the role of the individuals to do the bidding of the state”. “And if people don’t agree?” “They will be oppressed, for the good of the state. The Guardians will make them”. “Who will make the Guardians obey?” inquired Aristotle. “Where is the stronger force to compel them?” “What difference does it make?” said Plato, vexed. “What people do in this world is of no consequence”. “Then why are you bothering? Why are we talking? Why did you write your Republic?”16 Bellamy is, if anything, even more slipshod when it comes to his supposedly clear-headed utopian planning. Quite aside from a long history of communal fiascos to make its society work as advertised, Looking Backward provides a textbook case of how to part with common sense, let alone smart thinking, in a pattern that holds all the way to Skinner (who, as a scientist, should have known better). Look no further than the keystone of utopia: labour policy. At first Bellamy declares that work in utopia is assigned strictly on the basis of aptitude. Never mind how you determine aptitude for proctology or ophthalmology—everyone gets a job corresponding to his skill set, which incentivizes all to work happily and hard. There is nothing in this picture to suggest that scrubbing public toilets and brainstorming policy are not equal in every respect. Then comes the first retrenchment: labour assignments turn out to differ in the number of hours. Reading between the lines, some utopians, unhappy about or not well suited to the assigned workstations, are rewarded with shorter workdays. It seems that, contradicting what we were told before, not all utopians are matched to their jobs and not all jobs are equally equal. Then another retrenchment. After telling us that utopians don’t shirk work, Bellamy admits the need for incentives. Mind you, these are strictly

Enter the Chameleon  57

non-monetary, such as badges or ribbons for the Stakhanovites who toil beyond the pale. Then yet another epicycle. Casting doubt on the value of the ribbons, boosters are said to be rewarded with promotions. This being utopia, promotions bring no extra pay, only extra workloads, ensuring that real people would try hard not to get promoted. Then yet another retrenchment. Forget aptitude and education—it turns out that for the first three years in the workforce utopians are assigned jobs entirely at the discretion of their superiors. Finally, after going round in circles, we return to square one. Schools, writes Bellamy, enrol on the basis of aptitude, predetermining professional careers of teenagers. No errors are made, so much so that if you wish to change jobs later on, it is downright difficult, and downright impossible if you want to change again. Amen.

Unlineated Free Verse 334 defies labels, beginning with the label of a novel. Represented geometrically, its six chapters would be regular polygons which could be reordered and reattached to any other in any configuration. This modular design owes to the fact that all of the chapters were first published as standalone stories. Adding another layer to this additive layout, the last and longest chapter spiders around the others, retrofitting interlinks even as it scrambles the chronology between 2021 and 2026.17 Like the preceding chapters, only more so, the sixth is diced into parts diced into dozens of almost autonomous sections, adding to the impression of a novelas-mosaic. Top this artful architectonics with a half-army of characters and a profusion of time jumps and 334 almost defies synopsis. Its plot, such as it is, follows a loose-knit cluster of welfare recipients and societal nobodies, most of them residents of a scummy housing project at 334 East 11th Street in New York. Although it doesn’t become apparent until the last chapter, called “334”, at the heart of the book stands the Hanson family, housed at the 334. This delaying tactic is an essential part of Disch’s technique. As in The Wire, Treme, or any other David Simon television series, there are no minor characters or marginal plotlines. Everyone has a story to tell and gets to tell it in a voice as distinct as a fingerprint. Each part and often each section is rendered through the eyes of a different human atom. Each atom’s trajectory is the vector of the interfaces and interferences between it and the agglomeration of atoms we call society. Multiplied a millionfold, they add up to the microcosm of New York City. Extrapolated, they add up to the macrocosm of the United States. Mindful of how easy it is to lose way in his narrative maze, Disch comes up with a unique solution. Prefacing the closing, labyrinthine chapter is a visual aid. The three-dimensional grid draws out the spatial, temporal, and personal relations among three members of the Hanson family over three years and four

58 Dischtopia ANOTHER POINT-OF-VIEW

FANTASY

38 36

7/23

41

8/24 27

1

22

18 2024

15

34

18

17 32

2021

IE P

IM

R

N

SH

SO

N

A

H

33

S. R

30

M

3/29

28

TT LO

4

13

19/31

2/20

2025

14/42

25

28

21

43

12

9

8

MONOLOG

40

10

37

11

5/35

REALITY

+ 39

FIGURE 4.1 Narrative

grid or narrative maze? Mindful of how easy it is to lose way in his narrative maze, Disch comes up with a unique solution. Prefacing the closing, labyrinthine chapter is a visual aid. The three-dimensional grid draws out the spatial, temporal, and personal relations among three members of the Hanson family over three years and four modal keys.

Credit: Thomas M. Disch.

modal keys. Looking every bit as tricky as the pages it ushers in, it plays the double role of instruction manual for the reader and artistic manifesto for the writer. There is an element of hubris in posting this interpretation guide, as if to say that we are not cunning enough to figure things out on our own. But there is also an element of anxiety that a compositional masterpiece not be mistaken for dystopia or science fiction. Either way, the grid dispels any notion that the unity of the vignettes that make up “334” is only in the binding—kaleidoscopic shifts in time and point of view notwithstanding. Disch’s architectonic diagram, much as 334 itself, is a gauntlet thrown down by an artist at the top of his game. In many ways his défi resembles the experimental constructions spirited on the reading public by the Oulipo society. Its members, mostly litterateurs and mathematicians, included Disch’s co-author in the years leading up to 334, John T. Sladek. Oulipo’s forte was constrained writing. Where Robert Frost famously poohpoohed free verse, saying it was like playing tennis without a net, Oulipo

Enter the Chameleon  59

transferred his philosophy from free verse to unlineated free verse—prose. Free prose was too easy or just too formless. It should be played with a formalistic analogue of a net, be it a lipogram, a palindrome, or as in Disch, a grid based on three people, three years, and four tonalities: 3–3–4. Clearly, there is an element of showmanship here. Imagine working hard to create this intricate latticework of relationships and then working as hard to conceal it behind the drabness of a near future welfare state. And then, as if fearing he may have done too good a job, laying out the compositional principle in the grid. “You may be on to something”, conceded Disch when I put it to him in these terms. But mostly I was trying to draw attention to the principles that undergird my book which are very different from those in traditional utopias. Most utopias have a clear forward-motion structure, chapter by chapter nearing the imaginary paradise, rather tediously for the most part. 334 shuttles back and forth in time which helps, I think, to keep every encounter fresh.

Notes 1. http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com. 2. Clemons, 66. 3. Front cover, original edition. 4. Contra the naysayers, dozens of utopian studies have appeared since, including Morris and Koss; Armytage, Segal; Kumar; Carey; Kelly; Claeys and Sargent. 5. Unless indicated otherwise, all interviews with Disch are from September, 2007. 6. Additional background in Swirski (2015), Chapter 4. 7. See Swirski (2010), Chapter 2. 8. Disch (1975), 2. 9. Barlow, 202–203; see also Panshin and Panshin, 301; Rupprecht, 149. 10. Disch, Bad Moon Rising, 9. 11. Platt, 186. 12. See Scheidel for the opposite argument, namely that only violent upheavals level economic and social disparity. 13. Swirski (2011), Chapter 1. 14. Richardson; Hayes; David Livingstone Smith; Pinker. 15. Psychologists call it diffusion of responsibility; see Darley and Latane. 16. Heller, 281; see Swirski (2015), Chapter 1. 17. Twice the novel flashes forward: twenty-one years (page 144) and “some years” (page 146) past 2025.

5 EAST 11th STREET

Dreams of J. Alfred Prufrock Try, if you can, to follow this hugely simplified trail of narrative bread crumbs. In “The Death of Socrates”, Birdie Ludd is torn up over Milly Holt, resident of 334. Loitering in the project, he runs into Nora Hanson. Jilted by Milly, he takes up with Frances Schaap, a hooker living downstairs from him. In “Bodies”, hospital attendant Arnold Chapel carts around the body of now terminally ill Frances. His work pal is Ab Holt, father of Milly. Ab runs a scam with Juan Martinez, husband of Lottie Hanson (daughter to Nora). In “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire”, Alexa Miller, wife to Gene, mother to Tancred, is a social worker looking after 334. Alexa helps Lottie place her daughter Amparo in school. In “Emancipation”, Boz Hanson, son of Nora, brother of Lottie and Shrimp (Shirley), conceives a child with Milly. Nora and Ab’s late wife, and so Boz and Milly, have been neighbours at 334. In “Angouleme”, Tancred, Amparo, and a gang of juveniles try their hand at murder, bumping into characters who had walk-on parts in the preceding chapters. In “334”, the full cast is assembled, remixing their stories into a scrapbook of everyday life in the later American empire. Short scenes reel off at the ampedup speed of a nickelodeon, time travels back and forth as if worked with a zoom lens, faces pop in and out like virtual particles in a vacuum. Welcome to 334. The impression of a collage is reinforced on the stylistic and even visual level. Beside a symphony of narrative voices styles, modes, and tonalities, 334 reproduces letters, poems, song lyrics, commercial jingles, extracts from books of history, a school essay summary, boxed text, a line of musical score, a blockletter lineated plaque from the Battery statue of Verrazano, and of course a fullpage graph-key to this one of a kind novel with a key.

East 11th Street  61

The origins of 334 go back to 1967 and the story “Problems of Creativeness” which, rewritten and retitled “The Death of Socrates”, fronts this jigsaw novel. “The Death of Socrates” sets up Plato’s ideal philosopher as a symbol of the best and the worst in Plato’s city-state—both the ideal and the real one. A cynic skeptical of all systems of government, beginning with democracy, Socrates is famous for taking his own life after being sentenced to death by Athenian democrats for railing against democracy as a cure for bad government, warmongering, and civil illiberties. To be sure, history never stood in the way of a good story, and the legendary stature of the cynic philosopher owes as much to legend—which is to say fiction— as fact. There are, naturally, accounts of Socrates, notably from Plato. Yet the latter met his mentor only briefly and only when the sage was already in his sixties. To say that Plato’s Socrates may be as much Plato as Socrates is not half as bad, however, as not knowing which is which. Ancient Athens is idealized today as the fountain of democracy, and democracy as its arch legacy. The bulk of commentary from antiquity, however, is highly critical of both. Plato himself warns that, in the hands of an untutored populace, democracy is vulnerable to bigotry and rabble-rousing. It’s no accident that Socrates—father of the Socratic method, in which teachers pose questions not to test brute memory but to tease out insights—towers behind the first chapter of 334. Education is a tool of engineering civic competency and a musthave for a licence to have a child. Other chapters roll out other elements of classic utopia. “Bodies” dissects healthcare as a tutorial in black-market economics. “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire” crawls inside the belly of a bureaucratic leviathan. “Emancipation” takes on egalitarianism and eugenics, fruits of technological progress and sexual permissiveness, both far more radical than those engendered by the pill and women’s lib. “Angouleme” sets its sights on the bête noire of any society: our appetite for aggression and violence. In “334”, all this is blended into a social panorama we have come to expect from utopia, even if it is one hollowed out like the dreams of J. Alfred Prufrock.

The Death of Socrates “The Death of Socrates” recounts a chapter in the life of Birdie Ludd, a rudderless black teenager about to flunk college as a result of a bad attitude and even worse aptitude. When his absentee father is diagnosed with diabetes, Birdie’s already low Regents index slips below the cutoff for fathering a child. As his fortunes take a beating, he clings to the hope of reigniting a relationship with Milly Holt, who dumped him in the wake of his genetic reevaluation. Counselled to retake his Regents tests to make up the shortfall, Birdie’s IQ score sinks lower than ever while on the creativity scale he drops to moron level. Failing his half-assed attempt to earn extra points by enrolling in a for-the-birds

62 Dischtopia

college, he receives a stipend to better his score by researching an essay on the problems of creativeness. Coming up short again, feeling victimized by the system, he brutalizes the prostitute who has been supporting him and ships as a Marine to fight another American war in Asia. Birdie’s problems of creativeness play out against the background of rampant ill-education and institutionalized genetic profiling. At their forefront lies the tension between evolution and education—nature and nurture. Utopia, echoed by the liberal state, promises equality and, in the same breath, meritocracy. Dischtopia pits one set of values against the other. Affirmative action gets Birdie points just for being black. Being dumb earns him a fail. Always happy to go against the grain, however, Disch resists profiling a lazy and dim black male teen by showing that it’s the genetic reevaluation that triggers Birdie’s regression from a mere slacker to deadbeat. Similarly, he goes out of his way to show how the state goes out of its way to help Birdie earn a pass. Incongruously, where public schools are a sinkhole mass-producing dropouts, welfare repeatedly throws Birdie a lifeline which he repeatedly proves too lazy or dim-witted to catch. Disputing the clichés of soulless bureaucracy, more than one of Disch’s civil servants serve society best they can. It is welfare society that proves lazy and lax. But no sooner do things start to look bad for utopia than Disch props it up again. Below-bar scores do not rob Birdie of any of his civil rights. On the contrary, they release the floodgates of assistance to get him out of the hole. Counselling, tutorials, cash—the state does everything for him short of writing his test or his extra-credit paper. It is here that Disch shows his literary chops by composing a five-paragraph essay précis on behalf of his underachiever, virtually indistinguishable from the hundreds of doozies that crossed my desk in real life. Can you, without looking between the covers, tell whether the excerpt below was crafted by Disch’s meatball or by an English major at one of the major universities in North America? In his first argument he explains that it is normal to wonder about the evolution to give certain theories on life. The curiosity can be exaggerated between practical and theoretical abilities. The process of applying information creates a drive for simplicity and generality. This includes the fact that wondering in the armchair inquiry doesn’t always give the right answer; therefore it is a fallacy because the theory of evolution doesn’t always apply, it can be just a generality.1 Unless social engineers are prepared to go inside people’s heads to make them just and noble from the inside, education will always remain the key to utopia in technocratic society. This is why in Dischtopia bad grades automatically get Birdie probation, curfew, and counselling. Except that all this is too little, too late, to undo the effects of the mirthless joke that is public education in 334.

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Although universal and free, it is a human sausage-maker. Most students apply to be exempted, and Disch makes no bones why. The Socratic method is as extinct as Socrates himself. Birdie takes the equivalent of MOOCs (massive open online courses), where teaching is replaced by pre-recorded modules so liked in our world by quants and other throughput-fixated education engineers. Hey, if you’re going to teach one student, might as well teach a stadiumful. It is the same mindset as in the army joke that says, if a grunt digs a foxhole in an hour, sixty should do the job in a minute. Bigger doesn’t always mean better and in 334 public education is what it is in our reality. No one teaches, no one reads, no one dares, no one cares. Multiplechoice exams—shunned by all top schools worldwide—are the norm, freeing contract lecturers from knowing how to lecture or even how to grade. Software sniffs out plagiarism, but the need for it means that the system has already failed. To dodge intelligent questions, Disch’s proctors screen health education movies, presumably of the same kind that makes the ones we had to watch such good fodder for Rifftrax riffing.

Bodies “Bodies” homes in on Ab Holt, Milly’s father, Bellevue morgue aide, and tenant at 334. Thanks to a never-in-your-lifetime string of coincidences, Holt both takes and saves the life of Frances Schaap. A child of the welfare state—born symbolically on 3/3/04—now dying of lupus, she is murdered in order to be cryogenically preserved under another patient’s name, pending medical breakthroughs. There is, you see, a good dollar to be made in trafficking fresh and attractive cadavers to a necrophiliac brothel that caters to clients with tastes more offbeat than the sexual torture heaped on Frances in her line of work. A mix-up with an insurance company leaves Ab short of a body, as the rightful one has already been mutilated by a john. With the aid of Chapel, a retard who works by his side, he manages to brass-ball the crisis by “burking” Frances and tagging her body as the dead girl’s.2 With his me-first mentality, Holt is a quintessential urban specimen of social adaptability: a perfect opportunist or, if you will, a perfect parasite. He embodies the survivalist traits of his genus, his sociable exterior concealing a pathological absence of empathy and prosociality. A commonwealth built on the golden rule of reciprocal altruism must rank as the greatest creation in his book. It lets freeriders like him cop a free ride. Holt’s business partners in crime are Juan Martinez, Lottie Hanson’s shirker husband, and Chapel, a black ex-con for whom life holds only as much as the soaps he watches with the avidity of an addict, physically suffering from withdrawal when a favourite show is terminated. Television is his alternative universe and his spiritual controller without which he could not sort out the confusing bedlam of life.

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Jerzy Kosinski’s bestselling send-up Being There was published only two years before 334, and Kosinski’s Chance and Disch’s Chapel are twins in their mesmerized addiction to television—two men without qualities caught in the grave machinations of others. But where Kosinski needs a full-blown novel, and a plagiarized one at that, to satirize the unreality of American media culture, in Disch’s hands it is but a small brick in the wall between us and utopia. Fifty years down the road, the brick and the wall have only got bigger. To be fair, American adults today view less television than before, on average just five and a half hours a day. But the total time they spend on consuming media—TV, internet, apps, and radio—continues to soar into the stratosphere. In 2015 it passed nine and a half hours a day. In 2016 it passed ten and a half hours.3 Utopians promise that smart robots and fully automated production lines will make work scarce and leisure abundant. Experience shows that people who lose jobs seldom reinvent themselves on the fly. Where utopians see them enrolling in college, signing up for language courses, or engaging in philanthropy, downsizees spend the bulk of their newfound leisure on couch warming, watching television, and surfing the net. The pathologies of laissez-faire turn out to be indistinguishable from those of laissez welfare. Look past Holt and Chapel to the healthcare system. As befits utopia, it is free—but two-tier. Where private clinics offer the works, the state dispenses just the modicum (doctors’ names are pencilled on doors). Hospitals are an underfunded maze of shoddy practices, smelly corridors, and humming machinery of black market supply and demand. Everyone tries to beat statist controls, just like they try to beat state controls in capitalist economy. Graft and nepotism are all around, connections trump merit, and systemic corruption gums the machinery of state—not enough to break it down but more than enough to morph a hare into a tortoise. “The corruption wasn’t all at the top”, hisses Nora Hanson as she fights eviction from her dilapidated hole in the wall in 334; “it worked its way through the whole system”.4 Ironically, much like virtually everyone else around her, the matriarch herself is a housing-law breaker, proving that utopia begins not with the state, but at home. Mahatma Gandhi was right when he said that you need to be the agent of change you want to see in the world. Expecting everyone but you to do the right thing is the same as calling everyone else stupid. In short, no point blaming society for not picking up the slack unless you’re prepared to be a model citizen first.

Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire” directs the spotlight onto Alexa Miller, a Welfare Department (MODICUM) administrator with 334 under her jurisdiction. Looking over the shoulder of this dedicated bureaucrat, we see the kitchen side of utopia where jobless leisure (benefits phase out if you hold a job),

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free healthcare, free schools, free housing, and universal income supplements spectacularly fail to produce universal happiness. For one thing, there is not enough real work to go around. Most graduates in the humanities become caseworkers or teachers, part of a massive social support net that regularly contrives assignments to fill worksheets. Echoing classic utopia, menial jobs like street sweeping are sought after as they pay more. The city tests workers on job satisfaction, but technocracy fails to make a dent among crumbling infrastructure and overall neglect. Although MODICUM provides for all the basic needs, its name means just that. The building at 334 is a federal flophouse where garbage rots in dumpsters and bins, elevators have not run for years, and grease turns yellow on kitchen walls. Temps hole up in staircases in licensed bags, but even without them the tenement is overfilled a third over the original optimum. Living is cheap but so is life, with euthanasia on demand and suicide rampant. Luckily, opiates for the masses don’t stop with television or the rainbow of mood stabilizers. Morbehanine, a novel synthetic mindbender, offers all a cheap and legal means of dropping out. Unlike the trippy drugs of yesterday, however, it works more like a virtual-reality game, in which autonomous characters and events can be embedded in the framing fantasy. Franchised in a multitude of formats and brands, just as in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World or utopian Island, Morbehanine keeps America doped and docile. Alexa, a social engineer, is more or less well married to a computer-matched heat-retrieval engineer. She is well liked, well off at least in comparison to the slum-dwellers, and like everyone else around her assailed by an incurable sense of loss. Depressed, she persistently trips to the late Roman Empire, leaving it to her therapist to sort out the roots of such escapism. Her virtual reality becomes her drug of choice, to the point of clouding the lines between disillusion and illusion, future and past, hers and ours. In her virtual life Alexa is a Roman citizen born, tellingly, in ad 334. But you hardly need a degree in history to see the parallels between the Roman and American Empires: free citizens of Rome were gradually reduced to a condition of serfdom. The upper classes had arranged the tax laws to their own convenience and then administered them crookedly to their further convenience. The entire burden of supporting the army—Rome’s army, of course, was vast, a nation within a nation—fell on the shoulders of the poor. The poor grew poorer.5 The déjà vu is reinforced by a page-long extract from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Echoing Marx on economics, Spengler alleged that cultural history was also subject to precise laws, which made the future of capitalism foreseeable. But where Marx predicted a proletarian utopia, Spengler’s

FIGURE 5.1 334 East 11th Street, New York, New York, USA, today. Number 334 is

a federal flophouse where garbage rots in dumpsters and bins, elevators have not run for years, and grease turns yellow on kitchen walls. Temps hole up in staircases in licensed bags, but even without them the tenement is overfilled a third over the original optimum. Living is cheap but so is life, with euthanasia on demand and suicide rampant.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

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cyclical vision of history led to a model derived from a biological life cycle: rise, ­domination, and decline. Naturally, a world in which history cycles through a finite number of phases is deterministic in nature, much like the world of utopia or dystopia. It is unclear whether Disch was aware of the shaky methodology and factual errors that mar Spengler’s theses.6 If so, his nod to The Decline of the West may have been merely to position American exceptionalism in historical context, with empires rising only to decline and dissolve. And symptoms of decline teem in 334, some are even more resonant today than half a century ago. Half a billion Americans face severe energy and water shortages. Real food is supplanted by hydroponic and synthetic substitutes. In spite of eugenic controls, computer matchmaking, and genetic screening, project children are physical wrecks. Like in Oryx and Crake, the country is racked by pandemics. Weather in March feels like May, rivers run dry, and the planet is turning into a wasteland. Alexa dreams, when she allows herself to dream, of joining her sister in the Village, a rustic utopian commune in Idaho. But she never will. Shrivelled inside, she feels powerless next to the scale of problems in Dischtopia. Worlds apart from the enlightened do-gooders, can-doers, and go-getters of utopian imagination, in a moment of truth she even wonders if “the great machineries of the welfare service might actually do more harm than good”.7

Emancipation “Emancipation” is the only chapter embellished with a subtitle: “A Romance of the Times to Come”. By pointing to a romance of the future, it points back to The Shape of Things to Come, a futuristic utopia by the author of some of the definitive scientific romances of our time, H. G. Wells. In Wells’s utopia, a benevolent World State dictatorship ends crippling wars and economic recessions. But where Wells’s vision is expansively global, Disch’s is minimalist and local. “Emancipation” puts a human face on the gamut of changes in the realm of parenthood, gender roles, and egalitarianism in the aftermath of dramatic progress in biomedicine. In Republic, Plato made women equal to men as a matter of principle, only to make them unequal in practice. Disch’s story plunges into the uncharted waters of fully emancipated utopia, counting down the pregnancy of a baby with a symbolically genderless name, Peanut. Boz Hanson and Milly Holt are a happily married couple at a crossroads. Boz sees himself as a househusband and Milly as the breadwinner. Both want a baby, but both want to trade places with respect to biology. Luckily, medical science comes to the rescue. Armed with a baby license and assisted by surgery and hormonal therapy, Boz acquires his wife’s breasts to nurse the artificially gestated infant, liberating Milly to further her career in the high school sexdemonstrators’ union.

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Even as Boz and Milly require a permit to procreate—though black markets offer a way around the contraceptives flowing in the water mains—Boz’s sister does not. Ultra-smart and genetically shipshape, Shrimp enjoys a virtually unlimited quota on babies as opposed to the nominal one. Emancipation in Dischtopia is the brainchild of bioengineering lite—not yet taking control of the head but already in full control of the body. The biogenetic revolution selects the sex of the baby, regulates all somatic functions, and offers a menu of perfectly safe and traceless omniplasty. And, like all child-related expenses, it comes free under the auspices of the Welfare Department. Taking the womb out of a woman, Disch’s radical take on family values was designed, he told me, to rattle social conservatives whose views on family values, family planning, and the role of women and society haven’t changed much from the time of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. In the 1959 paperback, Bond drips acid on his times and mores in a rant that puts “Emancipation” in stark perspective: As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits—barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.8 Disch’s literary allusions, scattered about the chapter like Cinderella’s slippers, suggest a complex picture of the biomedical and social revolution. Boz’s pet authors are Gene Stratton Porter, businesswoman and proto-feminist, and Norman Mailer who, like Socrates, loved playing l’enfant terrible with contemporary pieties, beginning with militant feminism. Utopia, runs the subtext, is as much the labour of skeptics as of believers. Ironically, contra population-bomb scenarios going back to Malthus, our own world is shaped not so much by eugenics as by demographics, with birth rates across the West sagging well below replacement levels. Historically, wherever living standards for women go up, birth rates go down. Fewer babies mean, in turn, better care lavished by parents and society. The Chinese experiment in social engineering on the scale of four hundred million people—the countryside was always exempt from the one-child quota—proves it with two generations of female infanticide, boy princelings, and tiger moms. As for the United States today, the country that wraps itself in family values thinks nothing of leaving parents high and dry. By any measure, American families with children receive less support from the government than in any other developed state. And the social costs are high. The United States has the highest rates of infant mortality and child poverty in the industrialized world—much higher than, for example, France.

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France offers a particularly good reference point in that its socialist system has built an emancipated society that easily puts America to shame. Mandatory maternity and paternity leave, help at home after childbirth, time off to care for sick children, and affordable childcare for working parents are universal without, as the skeptics would have it, the country going bankrupt. “Emancipation” may have been written almost half a century ago, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Angouleme “Angouleme”, the shortest chapter in the novel, is in some ways its centrepiece by virtue of tackling the fundamental problem of utopia or, indeed, any society: violence. It depicts a short summer in the life of a New York gang of seventh graders, with the youngest still in single digits. Led by Bill Harper, they include Lottie Hanson’s daughter and Alexa Miller’s son. Trying to channel their summer tedium and their thirst for blood—Disch describes it as the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone—they try their hand at robbery before settling on killing an old panhandler.9 They name him Alyona Ivanovna, after an old pawnbroker murdered with an axe in Crime and Punishment. In the end, as in most children’s games, the murder plot fizzes out as the gang breaks up and Bill lacks the nerve to pull the trigger when he runs the old bird down. Disch’s tomorrow is as consumed with butchery and killing, as is our today. Wannabe Kill Bill is fixated on Dostoyevsky, Gide, and Mailer or, for readers who know their way around literary classics, Crime and Punishment, Les Caves du Vatican, and An American Dream. The common denominator among these novels—motiveless murder—indicts the peewee killers, who tellingly call themselves Alexandrians, after the raiders who gratuitously put the greatest library of antiquity to the torch. Like gangsters the world over, the children try to out-macho one another by clowning about what ‘M’ stands for in M-Day, the day of the planned murder. In real life it stands, of course, for the classic of world cinema, M (original title Mörder unter uns—Murderer Among Us). Disch’s child killers even mirror the first scene of the film, in which a gaggle of children amuse themselves with reciting a nursery rhyme about murder. If Fritz Lang’s film offers a more compelling picture of murderers among us than Dostoyevsky’s novel does, it is because, instead of a megalomaniacal Uberman, his murderer is an inconspicuous middle-class urbanite. Strikingly, however, where in Lang’s masterpiece it is a child murderer who terrorizes the city, in Disch the roles of prey and predator are reversed. It is the young, bright, educated Leopolds who go after the ultimate thrill. Decades after the release of 334, M-Day strikes an even more poignant note. In the novel, the children pick the Fourth of July to shoot the old panhandler.

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But where in 1972 the death of an aged, white-bearded, hardy, charismatic New Yorker was all fiction, in 2008 it became fact as the birth of the nation rang in the death of an aged, white-bearded, hardy, charismatic writer. Only Disch knows why he picked July 4th for his own M-Day, and his lips are sealed. Violence, latent in children who play war or crime and punishment, boils up to the surface everywhere you look in Dischtopia. Perennial American wars in Asia and the Middle East, burking, murders, mutilations, necrophilia, suicide, euthanasia, terrorist bombings, serial killer series on television, teaching modules such as “A History of Crime in Urban America” that the Alexandrians take in high school, and of course the countless dead in the name of this or that giant leap forward to the promised land. Today, at the threshold of Disch’s fictional timeframe, even as homicides in America ride a low tide, crime at large still rides high, still an irresistible shortcut to the American Dream. Murder and manslaughter are still chiefly the work of young men. The vast majority of killers still come from the bottom of society in terms of education and employment. As a rule, so do their victims. And although vastly more men kill than women, both sexes kill more men than women.10

334 The chapter “334” dishes out a mosaic of vignettes of days in the lives of the Hanson family. Flashing back and forward in time as if fed through a narrative shredder, the scattered strands of life in Dischtopia—the good, the bad, and the idle—are finally brought home to the 334. To the sound of breaking windows and vicious fights behind closed doors, the tenement stands witness to one family’s silent screams. Shrimp, reeling from her latest childbirth, tries to fill up the vacuum around her by joining a convent. After Juan’s death, Lottie becomes a prostitute, gorging on food and cheap movies. Boz and Milly live in relative harmony, but their days, spent watching TV and playing Monopoly, are not what most people would expect from utopia. The younger generation flee the race to the bottom that is 334 with the grim purposefulness of crash survivors. In the middle of this general malaise it is Nora Hanson, the boring, garrulous, gushy matriarch who emerges as the novel’s most improbable heroine. With grim fortitude she tries to counter entropy by holding the family together through all their ups and downs. Only after she loses the fight she files for euthanasia in the old people’s dorm, where she ekes out her days after being evicted from her two-bedroom rathole. Despite her painful shortcomings as a parent, tenant, and citizen, her efforts to make something like a home out of a slum in which they live make for one of the few positive actions in the novel. Although quixotic, her battle against

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bureaucratic and social anomie sets her apart from others who to varying degrees just go with the flow. Outside of drugs or pills, the only other means of escape from 334 is art. Boz, who prefers to work on his tan rather than find a job; Shrimp, who is paid by the National Genetics Council to bear babies for communal upbringing; would-be killer Amparo—all at some point try to express or even find themselves through art. And if their attempts are short-lived and ultimately futile, they are all the more heroic against the backdrop of analphabetism and TV soaps. Appropriately enough for a novel whose title is a street address, behind the Hansons looms the sprawling legal slum of downtown New York City. The welfare system has secured universal basic necessities for America’s postindustrial plebes but at the price of universal basic misery. Scuzzy as it is, the Hansons’ fleabag project is no worse than any other. Not fit for pigs, it is good enough for means-assisted humans. The technocratic state has assured minimum living standards for those at the bottom only, like God on the seventh day, to wash its hands of what it has created. Things could be, of course, much worse. Leisure in Dischtopia is plentiful. Welfare bureaucrats look after the needs of the needy armed with a portfolio of incentives to bootstrap them out of the projects. Sustenance is cheap, thanks in part to gigantic food farms in the oceans. But for every silver lining, there is a cloud. The oceans are dying from overproduction. The food’s nutritional quality is so crummy that supermarket museums flourish. Hyperinflation is finally under control, but unemployment is out of hand. Fortunately, there is no slackening of demand for cannon fodder to fight on behalf of every democratorship America wants to prop up. And while TV programs are the pits, at last the commercials are better than the shows. At the heart of this failed utopia are the Regents or, to call it by proper name, eugenics. In addition to compulsory contraception, compulsory sterilization of foreigners who work in the States, and a one-child policy, the Regents classify everyone by genetic fitness, health, race, intellectual aptitude, education, and contribution to society. They also reclassify people in real time, based on data collected by the Welfare Department’s ubiquitous computer antennae that snoop on every step you take.

Average Joe and Joan Cities crawl with roaches and slums. Migrant hordes criss-cross the states in search of food and work. Hunger riots break out across the country. Pandemics lay waste to the populace. Rocked by water and energy shortages, Uncle Sam teeters on the brink of collapse. Everywhere you look there is evidence of a once proud empire wasted by terminal disease. Although the picture looks familiar, it does not come from 334 but from Disch’s later novel On Wings of Song.

72 Dischtopia

On the other hand, 334 alludes to Disch’s earlier Camp Concentration, not least through Hills of Switzerland, a poetry book written by the hero of Camp Concentration, which in 334 is turned into a film. Such explicit intertextual crossovers point to an even deeper symmetry. The continuity between the books mirrors the continuity between the books and real life. Dischtopia, it suggests, is more than fiction. It is reality translated a half century into the future. Where most utopias are about big ideas and brave new designs, Dischtopia is about little people and incremental tinkering. At the same time, where most utopias are little more than poorly written social tracts, Dischtopia comes closer to a literary masterpiece than anything else in the genre. Part of the secret is that, where most utopias are dead earnest and consequently monotone, Disch is as quirky and unpredictable as Alice in Wonderland, changing stylistic hats more often than Paris Hilton changes stylish ones. In the ever-changing world we live in, it is comforting to believe that utopian ideals are invariable and invulnerable. Likewise, it lessens our collective responsibility for that ever-changing world to believe that its dystopian tendencies are the work of evildoers at the top, who crook the wheel for the rest of us. There is no such solace in Dischtopia. Neither the worst nor the best of all possible worlds, it is simply the best version of utopia we can manage, given who we are. Although imperfect, Dischtopia pays homage to many classic utopian ideals, such as communal living, which is par for the course in New York. In a haunting glimpse of a different kind of commonwealth, however, it also sketches a radically different social system than the East Coast conurbation. As we learn from Alexa’s letters, her sister lives in Idaho in a utopian commune. Called simply the Village, it is a rustic outpost where—as in real-life Bellamyite or Waldenite communes—people live in peace under the guidance of the elders, weaving baskets, making preserves, and keeping the rat race at a distance. If it sounds like a pipe dream, it’s worth remembering that in the 1930s the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes himself tried his hand at futurology. A hundred years hence, he prophesied, the working week would be reduced to fifteen hours, so much so that the biggest challenge will be filling the leisure time that technology and compound interest will have won for average Joes and Joans. If this sounds utopian—not to say naive—to our ears, it is no more naive than agrarian utopia or, for that matter, economic models in which prices neatly balance supply and demand, steering markets and self-interest toward greater good. The problem with utopian visions is that, as a rule, they are taken literally and therefore not seriously. This is a mistake. Richly fleshed-out scenarios for alternative social arrangements are not logical axioms. It’s not the case that as soon as a specific detail—a fifteen-hour workweek, distance between cities in Utopia, or economically sustainable agrarian paradise—is incorrect, the entire imaginative exercise becomes worthless. But if we are to take utopias less literally, but more seriously, how does Dischtopia of the 2020s stack up against the real world?

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Notes 1. English major, junior level. 2. Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people in the 1820s, selling corpses for anatomy dissections. 3. Nielsen. 4. 255. 5. 100. 6. On page 35 of his much later On SF, Disch rips into Spengler as “twaddle”. 7. 107. 8. Fleming, 269. 9. 151. 10. Leovy; see also Swirski (2016).

6 THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Elementary, Dear Watson There is no free lunch even in utopia, and the price to pay for social progress can be steep. Half a century ago Disch asked about the price of free and universal assistance to everyone in need. His means-tested utopia provides universal education, universal housing, universal healthcare, universal basic income, and a host of other perks. The price? Computerized surveillance state, hyper-­ bureaucracy, and social anomie—all to the max. For biological evolution, half a century is no more than a blink of an eye. For social and especially technologically evolution, it can be an eternity. On the threshold of the 2020s the time is ripe, therefore, to ask how far we have come on the road to Dischtopia, all the more so that Disch’s prescience is at times uncanny. In 2017, to take just one example, New York rolled out a plan for free college tuition to all low- and middle-income families. Utopia now? To sort out fiction from fact, let us start with the one thing more responsible for launching us into the future than any other: the computer. In 2011 IBM ignited a firestorm when it rolled out its super-algorithm, Watson, among boasts that it could beat human champions at Jeopardy. The entire world was transfixed when, exactly as advertised, Watson crushed the two best contestants in history in a televised showdown of man-versus-machine.1 The victory was no mean feat, in that Watson was able to wrap its microchip head around the clues and give answers in natural language. Its ninety servers had to parse the question, determine the intent behind it, search millions of lines of human language, and return the answer in the space of three seconds. Brilliant— except that the algorithm behind it was infinitely dumber than Birdie Ludd.

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You might know the answer to this one: “The first person named in The Man in the Iron Mask is this hero of a previous book by the same author”. No? Elementary, dear Watson. The author in question is Alexandre Dumas père, the previous book is The Three Musketeers, and the answer is, of course, “Who is Aramis?” But even if you got it right, you could never match the machine’s ability to mine information in the long run. Within the format of fact-retrieval contests like Jeopardy, people will continue to be beaten by computers. So what? A bulldozer packs more brawn than the human biceps, yet we do not lose sleep over it. Watson was created to operate exclusively in an artificially bounded informational niche and in that niche alone. Taken outside it and plugged into the real world, it would make Birdie look like Einstein. What it did, on the other hand, it did splendidly, namely give us a foretaste of the things to come. And if communiqués pouring out from IBM’s publicity division are correct, fully operational Watsons and even Holmeses are coming our way sometime during the 2020s. They will take over—and efficiently too—the running of healthcare, finance, education, customer care, travel, management, journalism, accountancy, the military, and other sectors of social commerce and even policy. If you think this is another publicity stunt, like the computer utopias we have been hearing about since Eisenhower’s terms in office, think again. In 2016, artificial intelligence rocked the judiciary when it foretold verdicts in hundreds of cases at the European Court of Human Rights with an accuracy of almost eighty percent.2 If this sounds like no great shakes, remember that the algorithm had to plow through reams of legal mumbo-jumbo in order to predict the future. Oh, and it used IBM’s Watson as a cognitive platform. Most often such milestones are greeted with unconcern or, conversely, with outcries, as when professional tennis implemented the Hawkeye system for tracking line calls. Saps the beauty and the power of the game, griped the contrarians, never explaining how bad calls do not. There is, to be sure, a world of difference between sports and the justice system. But both highlight the same question: are we hiking to utopia on the back of decision-making software or just digging our collective grave?

Joe Weider’s Protein Blast Everything and everyone is digitagged and monitored. Computers run the economy, putting people to or out of work, determining welfare eligibility, doling out benefits, keeping track of families to ensure they meet minimum face-time requirements, and even playing matchmakers. As part of the process, they vacuum up exabytes of data to feed the eye in the sky that scours for patterns and deviations.

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Looking back at Dischtopia from 1972, it is remarkable how many things it got right. Less than half a century hence, it is a given that computers run the show better than we ever could. Look outside the window. With tireless efficiency they fly airplanes, navigate ships, drive cars, direct traffic, route freight, buy stocks, perform surgeries, dose out IV drips, diagnose blood infections, optimize livestock nutrition, detect plagiarists, nail criminals, design logic circuits, identify oil-rich strata—the list is endless. Even more to the point, they also penetrate domains long held to be socially sacrosanct. Today’s algorithms conduct sex- and psychotherapy, identify impending system crashes, diagnose psychological stresses, predict nervous breakdowns, and of course match romantic dates, posting higher success rates than the old hit-and-miss  methods. In 2016, select California school districts even began to employ algorithms to assess students’ grit and character—better predictors of graduation, it turns out, than scholastic aptitude. Back in 334, Alexa’s first marriage is a washout. Her second, brokered by an algorithmic Cupid, is satisficingly durable. Computer, take a bow, please. What was brave extrapolation then has in the meantime become the social norm thanks to the second computer revolution, which put smartphones in people’s hands. A stunning two-thirds of the world today owns a handheld clump of chips that takes every step we take and rats it out to the data gluttons at the other end. The closest that life has come to imitating art so far is in China. The country is test-driving a social-credit system that is the Regents in all but name. Citizens get points for good conduct, such as visiting far-flung family, and lose them for socially harmful acts such as traffic infractions—or going outside the approved channels for assistance. With the carrot of being fast-tracked for public housing or promotion and the stick of getting on the wrong side of the system, this is Dischtopia par excellence. To keep a running score on the nation, the government needs data, and lots of it—presumably at least as much as the Americans do. The NSA alone stockpiles fifty billion internet records a month and 150 billion phone records a day and these numbers are growing fast.3 And as the consumer society throws off data, all manner of Big Brethren appropriate it, sifting for patterns. It is these very patterns that let Google and Facebook charge billions for target ads, which they then use to expand their data-lifting and data-sifting capacities. For a social engineer, this makes sense. Forewarned is forearmed, and if you can hedge your bets against the future, why shouldn’t you? All you need is to predict it, and today the predictive power can be bought by the petabyte. Credit card usage, to take just one example, can foretell divorce with disturbing ­precision—a valuable bit of intelligence to creditors in light of potential change in their customers’ solvency. Big Data is the mother of predictive analytics. The secret of machine learning lies in its capacity to crunch astronomical quantities of data. Ordinarily you begin by throwing the algorithm into the deep end of the pool, where it chews

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through binary code in search of patterns and deviations. Once it isolates factors that correlate with actions, creatures of habit that we are, we become detectable and predictable. What do the contents of bail judges’ meals have to do with whether bail will be granted?4 A lot, it turns out, which is why machine psychics beat human experts by a wide margin. Still skeptical? Today’s programs predict heart attacks, finger potential restaurant hygiene violators, identify people at risk of danger of becoming homeless or dropping out of school, and even predict which bailees will reoffend, teasing the future out of the digital crumbs scattered about today.5 In predictive analytics, size does matter and, much as with the patrons of Joe Weider’s Protein Blast, bigger means better. Indeed, Big Data is so big that, when it comes to knowing what we want, it sometimes knows better. Predictive analysis can even flag people’s inner states—such as police officers nearing a breaking point from on-the-job stress—and do it more reliably than the cops themselves would. Mindless algos, it seems, can read minds. Or maybe they are just good at manipulating them. In 2015, Jeff Bezos revealed in a letter to the shareowners that Amazon generates a nonstop automated stream of machine-learned ‘nudges’ to potential customers—seventy billion in a typical week. This came in the wake of Facebook owning up to experimenting with emotional manipulation (priming) of almost three-quarter million users without their knowledge. Big Data has never looked more like Big Brother Data.

What Do I Want, Dear? In 334 everyone’s personal data, medical and otherwise, is constantly updated into the Regents. The instant your father shirks work or gets diabetes, your welfare index goes south since both traits are highly heritable, as Birdie learns from a social worker. With paper bureaucracy, you could still play hide and seek, as Jerzy Kosinski did during his epic con job to leave communist Poland. With digital bureaucracy, it is seek and find. Facebook, for one, systematically collects data on its alleged two billion users—ninety-eight points on each, to be exact.6 Much of it is supplied by account holders themselves. More comes from posted pics: weddings, birthdays, graduations, parties, trips. Facial recognition software can pick you out in a crowd and then follow you in cyberspace to kingdom come. Even more comes from being spied on by Facebook regardless of what your preferences say. Anytime you visit a site that sports its “Like” button, you’re painted (Google tracks you on the sly even with your location services turned off ).7 To evade the cyber-snoops you would have to go off the grid, hippie-like— not an option for most citizens. But even if you did, you would still find yourself in their digital mills because everyone, from thousands of commercial databrokers to banks to municipalities, peddles records. Business, voter, vehicle, or warranty registrations; death or marriage notices; bankruptcy or foreclosure

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declarations; credit card usage; pay stubs; loyalty programs; travel tickets; pharmacy records—everything is up for sale. For the info-gluttons who would rather feed the habit on the cheap, there are millions of public datasets on tap. There are also freebies. In 2016 Yahoo! owned up to leaking almost three billion accounts, followed by revelations that it had long been scanning users’ emails and passing them to the feds in the alleged interest of national security. AdultFriendFinder, a casual sex site, admitted to having almost half a billion accounts jacked. And some hackers release industrial quantities of information for free. This is the USA today. In a hint of things to come, however, cyber-snooping is getting so sophisticated that it can detect patterns, which is to say behaviours, even when you try to cover your tracks, say by behaving erratically. Search, shop, or play, your digital signature pokes through. Providing there is a large enough dataset, the cyber-hounds can sniff out your statistical coefficients even if you factor their noses into the equation. Like it or not, even your tricks have your tics imprinted on them.8 Dischtopia or dystopia, the question looms how to beat the pattern snoops. Resorting to a randomizing device is one stratagem. In game theoretic parlance, this is called using mixed strategies: allocating probabilities to all possible plays and then rolling the dice to see what to do on a given occasion. But even here, as soon as you play repeatedly, you give away intel that can be used to neutralize your next move. After all, even the information that you play randomly is strategically useful. Once this is clear, instead of trying to outguess you the other side cannot do better than play minimax, which at least has the advantage of minimizing losses. Naturally, against minimax you cannot do better than to play maximin, sealing an equilibrium from which neither side has any incentive to budge—at least when facing an enemy. But, aside from the gut-churning unease about being spied on, is that really the case? In the pre-computer days many of our preferences were equally no secret. Valets knew what their masters wanted to wear on a given day. Shopkeepers made savvy purchase recommendations. Bartenders hit you with the usual. Mentors picked career paths for protégés. Have you ever asked your spouse “What do I want, dear?” and gratefully accept the answer from the apparent mind reader? Who, save the ACLU perhaps, says that we’re not beneficiaries of Big Data? Thanks to the cyber-snoops we read better books, patronize better eateries, and date better dates. Shipping or shopping, they find us a better route or a better price. They even help keep the bad at bay for, whether we cook expense accounts or crank out reviews of our own books, the algos can tell. The future has never looked brighter. Weed out false positives, make the algos tamper-proof, spread their tendrils to the ends of the earth, and you’re halfway to utopia.

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Today’s Big Data provides a foretaste of utopian hedonism when consumers will not even have to think about choices. The algorithm will oblige and, calibrating our glee or frown, do even better next time. Directing public funding to where it can do most good, predictive analytics could even optimize social planning by taking it out of our hands. The question is, at which point on the road to Dischtopia do the guarded become secondary to the needs—or maybe just wants—of the guardians?

The Peter Principle Birdie’s welfare officer tries every trick in the book to help him improve his Regents scores. Boz and Milly’s marriage counsellor irons out their kinks during the very first session. Alexa’s professional endeavours earn her thumbs-up even from the kvetchy matriarch of the Hanson family. On the other hand, for every good worker there is a lazy proctor, a bureaucratic slouch, and a hospital overseer content to live and let die. To the extent that utopia stands for a just and fair society, it will have to have just and fair social managers. As incarnations of Plato’s guardians, the integrity of the system hinges on their professional integrity. Integrity in this context can be defined at the minimum as resistance to corruption and cronyism. Ironically, this minimum has been historically indistinguishable from the maximum. Try as you may to weed them out, like a fungus they sprout everywhere society takes root. Traditionally, the best fungicide was thought to be high pay and job security, typified by top pay grades for civil servants and lifetime tenures for Supreme Court justices. Recent research turns this picture upside down. Integrity in the discharge of professional duties correlates not so much with money or tenure as with meritocracy. Merit-based hiring cuts graft regardless of level of economic development, political system, and ethno-cultural particulars. And—icing on the cake—it fuels growth and cuts waste too.9 A century ago sociologist Max Weber rationalized bureaucracy, this mashup of military command structure and industrial engineering, as the most rational means of imperative control over people.10 Today we would say that bureaucracies perpetuate themselves insofar as they reify our adaptive desire to control the environment, be it natural or social. Standardized operating procedures and hierarchies forge continuity, streamline efficiency, and filter out favouritism. But taking the human factor out of the picture can only go so far. The proof is furnished by every bureaucratic structure, with its biggest assets—consistency and controllability—being also its biggest liabilities. Communication breakdown, overlap and redundancy, and cutthroat turf wars are the bane of institutional hierarchies the world over, including the management of utopian communes. And that’s just the tip of the viceberg.

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You do not need to follow the twists of Bellamy’s pretzel logic to realize that human nature and not bureaucracy is the worst enemy of utopia. Here is an example from Social Engineering 101: the incentive system. In utopia, everyone works his butt off on principle, but in our world monitoring performance and linking it to pay are better guardians of results. What could be amiss with making sure that workers work and paying in accordance with what they do? In practice, looking over people’ shoulders and raining gold on eager beavers is frequently a recipe for getting the workforce up in arms against micromanagement, intrusiveness, and the hotshots who make everyone else look bad. If meritocracy was a no-brainer, it would have become the gold standard ages ago. In reality, it is often a fig leaf for brownnosing on the ground floor and empire building at the top. If bribing the guardians with competitive salaries does not bring us closer to utopia, how about underpaying them? In theory, this should weed out the chaff and attract only the best recruits, those motivated by vocational love of nursing, teaching, or management. But not in practice. Workplace experience shows that cutbacks only lead to temping, overpromotion (the Peter Principle), decline of morale, and overall rot in services.11 Ask yourself this about any bureaucracy, starting with your own. Why would experienced staff put their hearts into mentoring trainees who will go on to take their jobs away? What performance reward system could get the best out of teams whose personal motivations are all over the place, even as they share a common goal? Alas, how to graft common interest onto self-interest is a problem that no utopian, from Plato and More to Bellamy and Skinner, has come even close to solving.

To Each According to His Need Dischtopia has attained the utopian grail of universal basic income. A peacock’s tail of supplements creates a means-assisted cushion for citizens who fell to the bottom and those who have never risen from it. The whole thing calls up the classics of the genre, down to communal dorms and meals. For all that, universal basic income as we know it has nothing to do with the Marxist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.12 In the case of universal basic income (UBI), the operative word is “universal”. UBI would dole out the same amount to everyone, beggar and magnate alike. Egalitarian this may be, in a demented sort of way, but it’s not even progressive. In fact, it’s as regressive as can be. First you tax everyone—the cash has to come from somewhere. Then redistribute regardless of need. In practice, this means shortchanging programs that benefit people who hurt most to give a shot in the arm to all. Utopia is not about handing out a wad to everyone but about ensuring that no one goes without. Utopian basic income would ensure that everyone has at least

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the basic amount. If you are well-off, you get nothing. If you’re in the middle, you get nothing. If you drop below the baseline, you get topped up to the basic level. If you have nothing, you get the whole megillah, no questions asked. The trick lies in the baseline. Too much and it chokes off the motives to look for work or to continue working. Too little and it has no real benefit while draining the state coffers. In a perfect world, UBI ought to make a difference without sending the state into a fiscal tailspin. Especially that, like any welfare program, it will attract freeloaders as surely as dung attracts horseflies. To shoo off the horseflies, priority number one is to monitor the system and its beneficiaries. Just as in 334, the price for utopia is all-round surveillance. Priority number two is keeping outsiders out. Fail to seal the borders and every alien, legal or not, will crash the party where the buffet is free. This would bankrupt the system, or produce a two-caste nation: the UBI haves and have-nots. The need for policing the perimeter will dissipate only when universal basic income becomes just as advertised: universal the world over. Theory aside, of late UBI has gained traction among reformers who see it as the cornerstone of reorganizing society along postcapitalist lines.13 On American soil the idea goes back to 1797 when, with characteristic bravura, Thomas Paine argued that fifteen pounds per year should bring about economic utopia. In time, universal basic income was endorsed by many luminaries of the Enlightenment, starting with France’s Marquis de Condorcet. Since then, it has drawn support from political activists and theorists across the spectrum from libertarians and liberals to socialists and utopians. Curiously, the list that includes Benoît Hamon (2017 French Socialist Party presidential candidate) and Yanis Varoufakis (former Grexit finance minister) also includes two American presidents who thought enough of UBI to study its feasibility. Tellingly, they were Nixon and Carter, who had nothing else in common—­ starting with party colours, ideology, and not least morality—than holding office during the hippie era. Some parts of the world are sold on the idea. Finland launched a two-year pilot where people in need receive no-strings cash up to eight hundred euros a month. Many Dutch cities are about to unveil similar schemes. The Canadian province of Ontario is holding public consultations on basic income. From 1974 to 1979, Manitoba actually ran an annual income (Mincome) with the backing of the federal government. In 2017, India included a first feasibility study of nationwide UBI in its annual economic report. In this context, what happened in Switzerland in 2016 is even more critical. The country that exemplifies both the idealistic and the pragmatic ends of the social spectrum repudiated the proposal to give every adult a universal monthly amount of 2,500 Swiss francs a month. The pro campaign attracted as much attention for tabling the initiative in the first place as for running it under the banner of—you guessed it—Utopia. In the end, the pragmatic Swiss quashed the idealists three to one. The people have spoken.

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FIGURE 6.1  Naissance

d’une utopie—Birth of Utopia. Poster promoting Universal Basic Income (UBI) during the 2016 Swiss referendum.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

Utopian Basic Income Tellingly, when I interviewed both sides of the would-be Swiss utopia in the aftermath of the referendum, the sentiments were hardly those of defeat or victory. The nation as a whole showed remarkable maturity in addressing the vote not as a tug-of-war but as a question about what kind of nation it was and wanted to be. Both the opponents and proponents of the measure showed even more poise in accepting the results of the vote—especially, it must be said, the latter. From more than two dozen responses, the two I selected below are entirely representative of the country at large. As it happens, their authors came from almost identical backgrounds: educated, middle-aged, middle-class, multilingual, professional women. But on the matter of universal basic income they were as polarized as could be, albeit in a typically Swiss non-confrontational fashion. I voted for it of course. Every human and civil right that we currently have once seemed like some utopian pie in the sky to an earlier generation, and that’s how this seems now but sooner or later people might realize that humans were not made for this insane rat race of work and consumption that leaves everyone miserable.

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I voted against the basic income, even though I believe something like this may one day make sense. I just think it is too early. Especially in Switzerland. And without current need, I see no sense in such a disruptive reorganization of the welfare state. I can imagine voting differently some time in the future when the situation changes. Till then I will follow a time-honoured Swiss decision-making method: wait till everybody else has tested it and the best way to do it becomes obvious (like women’s vote, UN membership, VAT, and other things we introduced late and only after several tries). Universal basic income is, like utopia itself, a window onto the future. It can only gain in prominence as jobs evaporate because of outsourcing or, in the long run, automation. But Switzerland is not there yet. It boasts low unemployment, low-cost schools, and universal healthcare (as subsidized mandatory private insurance). Even the country’s poor are relatively well off. Although inequality is huge because of rich outliers, the have-nots are really the have-less compared to countries with a similar Gini coefficient.14 Thus a brave new system of redistribution is hardly a pressing need. On the other hand, the costs and difficulties of engineering this socioeconomic revolution would be daunting. It is not just that UBI would mean hiking taxes. It would mean political suicide, since handing the same bankroll to everyone—including jet-setters and job holders—would effectively lower payments to the disabled and pensioners. The pro side saw UBI as a great equalizer. They argued that for the first time it would reward people who usually go unpaid for their labour: housewives, families looking after sick relatives, neighbourly do-gooders. They argued that the Canadian experiment proved real social and even economic benefits. Secure and happy people, they pointed out, use hospitals less, have fewer mental problems, breed less domestic violence, and even improve school scores thanks to greater parental involvement. Still, not everything can be reduced to an economic argument. To the extent that every human being seeks meaning in life by cultivating self in relationships with others, work ought to be more than a mechanism for extracting labour and allotting purchasing power. Under the right conditions, it should be an effort that is satisfying and even gratifying. Recall the proverb that if you find a job you like, you will never have to work again. What UBI could do is to allow every person of working age the flexibility to decide what they wanted to do with their lives. The effects on labour relations alone would be transformative. Companies would need to adapt in a hurry, as no employee would put up with an unfair deal just because he needed a job to survive. Bosses that exploited rather than took care of their staff would go the way of Jimmy Hoffa.

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All in all, the Swiss initiative was a trial balloon for the future when, much as Disch projects in 334, paid work will wilt as a mechanism for distributing purchasing power in society. From there it will be just a step to a social engineer’s paradise. Like in China today, utopian basic income will be rigged to deter lawbreakers. Infract and your paycheck will take a hit. Good education, good lifestyle, or good deeds, on the other hand, might earn you a bonus from the guardians of the future.

Gross National Happiness Where classical economists use money as proxy for utility, more utopian ideas begin to penetrate the policy arena. Symbolically ringing in 334, social planning in Bhutan, for example, has been shaped by the ideal of Gross National Happiness (GNH) since 1972. Although the current administration is backpedaling on it, by law all new policies in Bhutan must have a GNH assessment—one reason, perhaps, why the state banned television until 1999. Bhutan may rank first in South Asia in peacefulness, economic freedom, and lack of corruption, but this small Himalayan country is hardly of consequence on the world stage. But France is, and in 2008 the Élysée Palace publicly invited a couple of economists to devise a wider measure of national well-being than GNP. It should be easy to dismiss this as just another beau geste, except that the two economists were George Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winners and icons of the political Right and Left, respectively. Picking up the baton, in 2010 the British government indicated that it would begin to collect data on well-being. By now, not only France and Britain but countries from Australia to the United States collect and publish data on national wellness. The Gallup World Poll collects data on well-being from millions of respondents in 150 countries. In part, this is a reaction to studies which detail how happiness is experienced in relative terms—relative to relatives, friends, society at home, and even citizens in other countries. In terms of happiness, what matters is not absolute but relative wealth. A net gain for your enemy, or for that matter a friend, registers as a loss on your own balance sheet. Relativizing to others goes down deep to the bone—so deep, in fact, that even primates display sensitivity to the distribution of payoffs.15 The upshot? If it originates so low down on the evolutionary tree, you cannot sweep it under the carpet. Equality is not just a matter of economics but of sociobiology too. The twenty-first century has seen an explosion of happiness research, with its own fleet of professional journals and conceptual orthodoxy. Attracting considerable investments, behavioural economists, sociologists, sociobiologists, and psychologists are on the quest to trap that elusive bird. Never mind that, like the centre of gravity, you can never observe the thing itself, only its effects. If the effects of happiness can be quantified, they can be put to work.

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And so, in 2016 the sheikhs who rule the United Arab Emirates announced the biggest government reorganization in their country’s history, including the creation of two new ministries: for Happiness and for Tolerance (diversity). The Ministry of Happiness sounds positively Orwellian in a state governed by unelected royals with the power to jail critics. But the joke that money cannot buy happiness—at least not at current oil prices—may be on you. The 2015 World Happiness Report, itself compiled only since 2012, placed the sheikhdom in the top twenty in the world, ahead of Great Britain and France. With Switzerland at the top, the United States came in only at number fifteen. After almost two and a half centuries of pledging allegiance to the American Dream, the country where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the constitution is far from the happiest place on Earth, or even a happy one. From Reagan to Trump, every administration pooh-poohs relative wealth, assuring Americans that a rising economic tide lifts all boats. Why worry about the rich getting richer, so long as the poor are a little less poor too? Problem is, a rising tide does not lift boats anchored to the bottom. These only strain against the chains and then overfill and sink. For many Americans, the upward mobility escalator is a trapdoor through which they fall to the ground floor, if not the basement. Changing the way we reckon economic development should bring into the open what most folks have known anyway. Market forces, deregulation, free trade, and austerity measures are not always the answer. State intervention, protectionism, debt relief, and minimum wage are not always the problem. Much social good, be it improvement in collective decision-making or decline in alienation, is not reducible to GNP or per-capita dollars. To gauge the difference, compare that ultrarational wealth-maximizer from economic fiction to any breathing human being: your cousin, your kids’ high school teacher, the immigrant family down the block. Or take most companies’ incentive structure, geared for quarterly profit, and put it side by side with complex motives irreducible to the bottom line, which may involve altruism, gratification deferment, aesthetic concerns, or ecological good on the scale of our children’s lifetimes.

Ochlocracy In 2015, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina put direct democracy in the spotlight. If elected, she said, she would turn every weekly presidential radio address into an instant referendum. She would table a policy question and ask Americans to vote with their phones, a matter of pressing 1 for yes or 2 for no. Pointedly, she did not elaborate who would determine the question or even whether the vote would be binding. Direct democracy was nothing but good public relations. Pity, because the nation that thinks so highly of democracy as to sometimes wage war on other democracies in the name of it suffers from a democratic

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deficit. Not to look far, in 2016 Hilary Clinton tallied almost three million more votes than Trump did. If America were a democracy, she would have got the keys to the White House. The 2016 flap was a replay of 2000, when Al Gore carried the popular vote by more than a million, only to go down in history as an also-ran.16 The United States in many ways reenacts the undemocratic democracy of the Athenian city state. Ancient Greece conjures up images of ordinary citizens enjoying high levels of day-to-day, face-to-face civic participation. In truth, Athenian demokratia was a power grab masterminded by Pericles to build his own political base outside of the hereditary aristocracy, who opposed his imperial designs. His people’s power upturned the legislative balance between the landowners’ Aeropagus and the people’s Assembly, enfranchising all adult Athenian men to take part in public affairs. At the same time it disfranchised all women, slaves, foreigners, and youth, at a stroke slashing the city to a quarter of its size. But the real genius was in selecting most public officials and jurymen by lot. Even if selected, the poor could ill afford to hold unpaid office as they needed to scratch out a living. As in America, democracy was a boon for the oligarchy of kingmakers. Money talks loud in American politics, and even louder in the wake of the Supreme Court’s lifting limits on political contributions. In a presidential race, you have to spend a better part of a billion just to get beat. But the same moneyequals-power system gives the rich the inside track elsewhere in the world. When Winston Churchill was first elected to the House of Commons, Members of Parliament did not draw a salary, in effect limiting parliamentary seats to the traditional ruling class, the rich gentry. To the credit of ancient Athens, once the democratic institutions took hold, the city stoked an interest in political education. Plato, who wanted to put power in the hands of the elites, bristled that democracy was no more than o­ chlocracy— mob rule. His hostility accurately mirrored a widespread conviction that the plebes could not properly exercise political power. No so, contested the reformers, convinced that the masses would do just fine if they had a chance to learn to do so. Outside city-level institutions, Athens quickly developed a network of local government assemblies and talking shops, where the electorate could debate and in effect practice politics. The same ideal lay behind the random selection for political office. In theory, the lot was to spread hands-on experience of governance among citizenry. There was, after all, no education for the populace and no trained cadre of civil servants. Serving on the city council was a practical course in political horse-trading. Even as the American republic systematically shuts out the voters, evidence mounts that direct democracy—initiatives, referendums, and other tools of people’s power—enhances not only political stability but also personal well-being.

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Indeed, it links directly to higher levels of social happiness. Significantly, happiness here has as much to do with political results as with being part of the process. Direct democracy is good for you even if you don’t always get what you want.17 In the context, the last word on social engineering, basic income, and direct democracy—in short, on utopia—goes to the author of 334. There is little reason to waste more time on Utopias than has already been wasted. But I’m not blind to the paradox. You’re right that Utopia is like Morbehanine, mass hypnagogia while the cities are burning. We need Utopia like a fish needs a bicycle. Except that some fish fly and some even breathe on land, and once they evolve any further, a bicycle might be just what they need. And from there it’s only a short step to dreaming up all manner of brave new worlds.

Notes 1. Swirski (2013). 2. Aletras et al. 3. The Economist (2016), “Creating”. 4. Danzinger et al. 5. Poundstone; Ludwig. 6. Dewey. 7. Halpern; Gibbs. 8. Poundstone; on game theoretic applications to the humanities, see Swirski (2007). 9. Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell. 10. Weber (1947), 337; Collier; Rotberg. 11. Hall, Propper, and Reenen. 12. Marx (1875). 13. Frayne; Srnicek and Williams. 14. The Gini coefficient the most commonly used measure of wealth-distribution inequality. 15. Brosnan and de Waal; van Wolkenten et al.; Sanfey et al. 16. Swirski (2011, 2015a). 17. Frey; Frey and Stutzer; Weiner.

PART III

Pantopia Bernard Malamud

7 EARTH ABIDES

Djanks and Druzhkies Wars proliferate. Tribal chiefs masquerade as presidents and ayatollahs. The weapons trade remains the mainstay of national economies. Global outlays on armaments run well north of a trillion dollars a year. The White House wages peace while gearing up for dirty war—so dirty that legislation passed under George W. Bush authorizes military action in the event that any American suspected war criminal is brought to trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.1 Not much has changed, in other words, since 1982, when a couple of unlikely bestsellers gnawed at America’s conscience and at the root of its militarized politics. On the face of it, the two couldn’t be more dissimilar. Where one races away with far-out fantasy, the other hews to the canons of Montesquieu. Where one dreams of utopia, the other catalogues fact upon grim fact. Where one peoples the earth with talking chimps, the other lets political and military history speak for itself. At their heart, however, both flow from the same quill dipped in an inkwell wrought from a Cold War missile casing. Looking death squarely in the eye, in austere detail both elaborate scenarios of nuclear doomsday.2 In The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell inventories the ghastly after-effects of a likely thermonuclear exchange. And in his final novel, the post-apocalyptic utopia God’s Grace, Bernard Malamud dissects the evolutionary roots of trouble in paradise. Both address themselves to all human beings who hope for the survival of their sons and daughters. Both are hard-nosed about the odds of self-extermination of our species, horrified that Ecclesiastes’ sun that also rises may be made from runaway neutrons. Both use every weapon in their narrative arsenals to strip

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the varnish off successive Washington administrations, which sign disarmament and non-proliferation treaties while ramping up nuclear arsenals in the name of a geopolitical game of chicken. Both, in short, take literally Albert Camus’s plea to writers to keep the world from destroying itself. Allegorical and whimsical, Malamud kicks off with a thermonuclear war “between the Djanks and Druzhkies, in consequence of which they had destroyed themselves, and, madly, all other inhabitants of the earth”.3 God’s Grace paints a front-seat picture of the nuclear Armageddon: tsunamis, radiation, and an implosion of the biosphere so catastrophic that even cockroaches die out. Only paleologist Calvin Cohn beats the bomb by virtue of doing research at the sea bottom. In the afterglow of the holocaust, he and Buz—a young chimpanzee he finds on the surface vessel—drift for weeks before shipwrecking on a lush tropical island. Like other protagonists of post-apocalyptic novels, from Earth Abides to A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cohn takes it upon himself to rekindle civilization from nuclear ashes. There is just one problem. As God rumbles from on high, irked at finding him alive, he is the only human to survive the Second Flood. Unfazed, Cohn shifts his Promethean designs onto Buz and others of his kind who begin to appear on the island. The Lord seems to approve, for Buz—whose previous owner equipped him with an artificial larynx—miraculously masters human speech. No less miraculously, he teaches it to others (for anatomical reasons apes cannot vocalize like humans do). A new world Adam, Cohn gives names to all newcomers and, with a resourcefulness that would have made Robinson Crusoe proud, proceeds to engineer a chimpanzee society. Not to repeat the errors of the past, he frames a political constitution in the form of seven Admonitions for the posthuman age. Specifying the rules of conduct, with the golden rule in the lead, they are to steer the apes toward pantopia. Daily he lectures to them on history, sociobiology, and altruism. Impatient with the pace of progress, he even monkeys with evolution by begetting a child with a young female, Mary Madelyn. Yet the more he presses the apes to obey the dictates of brotherly love, the more nature rears its head. Little by little the quasi-Edenic garden, on which insect-pollinated trees fruit even in the absence of insects, devolves into a primeval jungle. Hostility, racism, and cannibalism write the closing chapters. In the final scene, the prodigal son Buz leads captive Cohn up a mountain to slay him in a reversal of the story of Abraham and Isaac. At last, humanity is no more.

Vegan Vampires In a clear bow toward utopia, the island of the apes rolls out the welfare carpet for the communards. As Cohn never tires of reminding them, all members of the group enjoy free schooling, free healthcare, and free room and board. The only

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major task left for Cohn as the self-appointed planner-in-chief is to devise a just and equitable social contract for all. Malamud deliberately borrows many details from the most important—and easily the most notorious—of twentieth-century utopias, Walden Two. Both are small isolated farming covenants. Both founders are also the leaders. Both are alpha-male American scientists. Both are outsiders trying to fit in. Both guard their bottom line by engineering utopia top down. Both swear off coercion, favouring education and positive reinforcement instead. Both go back to nature to better human nature. But the similarities only accentuate a fundamental fault line beneath. Quite aside from the knack for telling a good story, what sets a literary masterpiece apart from a behaviourist pamphlet is evolution. In contrast to Malamud and in defiance of Darwin, Skinner regards the human psyche as John Locke did—a blank page on which virtually anything can be imprinted by means of respondent conditioning. To be fair, Skinner’s later writings, such as the notorious Beyond Freedom and Dignity, reveal a measure of appreciation that behaviours are channelled by a bed of species-specific adaptations. This is, however, as good as it gets. Outside those rare nods to evolution, he never lost his belief in the almost infinite plasticity of human nature. In Walden Two, he states it loud and clear: “men are made good or bad and wise or foolish by the environment in which they grow”.4 While Skinner makes light of the behavioural aspects of human adaptations, Malamud places our genetic baggage at the centre of his plot. While Skinner’s social engineers miraculously cure everyone of such primal instincts as parental investment, status seeking, freeloading, and envy, Malamud lets them run free. Taking issue with utopia without evolution, he even has his protagonist educate the apes on: the Descent, Advent, Ascent of Man as Darwin and Wallace had propounded the theory of species and natural selection; adding a sketch on sociobiology, with a word about the nature-nurture controversy.5 In a polemic with Skinner and other utopians, Malamud questions our degree of freedom from the ancestral Homo, insofar as the latter is the forefather of so many behaviours of the modern human. Hacking our own branch off the tree of evolution, God’s Grace remixes utopia into zootopia, only to watch it fall apart as surely as if the chimps were humans incarnate—which, in more ways than one, they are. This anthropological, not to say sociobiological, outlook is more than poetic licence. A lifelong teacher of literature, in preparation for writing Malamud became a student of evolution. Even as he pored over Thoreau’s Walden, he steeped himself in primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary

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psychology, reading everything from Louis Leakey’s Unveiling Man’s Origins to Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man. In an unusual step for a writer of fiction, he even spent a year at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, absorbing the essentials of in-group and between-group selection. Having done his homework, in the novel he turns evolution into a perfect vantage point from which to weigh in on the nature of perfect society. Social reformers who discount the bedrock of biology, he points out, have only so much—which is to say, so little—chance of success. God’s Grace addresses itself to a fundamental question linking ethics, biology, and sociology, which is the origin—and therefore the nature—of morality. Are we by nature evil or good? Are we born only with the instinct to be fruitful and multiply, or also to be good and do good? Is morality only a cultural overlay on human nature, as social constructivists and even some biologists maintain? Or does it gush from the same evolutionary wellspring that makes us selfish and cruel? If moral dualism—immoral by nature, moral by culture—sounds funny, it is because it suggests that in acting morally we struggle against our own nature— sort of like vegan vampires. Morality in this picture act like a behavioural barbed wire that keeps biology from roaming free. Which makes you wonder why, of all the species that have culture, only humans violate their nature? And how could it even be possible? Casting further doubt on moral dualism is research with primates, especially chimps and capuchin monkeys. Animals may not be moral beings but they do show behaviours that in humans would be interpreted as empathy, reciprocity, and a sense of fairness.6 This is, indeed, the very line that Darwin himself took in The Descent of Man (1871). Brushing off dualism, he argued that morality is an outgrowth of our social instincts, on a continuum with the sociality of other species.

Aesop, La Fontaine, and Br’er Rabbit In the decades before God’s Grace, Malamud had zigzagged in subject matter from a latecomer baseball sensation, an Italian petty hoodlum, a tsarist Jew, and a middle-aged biographer of D. H. Lawrence to less pigeonholable creations such as an earn-his-wings angel, a schlemiel Jewbird, and a talking horse. On the way he had tried his hand at everything from imagistic impressionism and stream-of-consciousness to almost scientifically rectilinear prose. But if he had taken creative chances all his life, in God’s Grace he is playing for the jackpot.7 It is not even that on page one he eliminates five billion people, leaving only a burnt-out cinder of a planet. It is not even that he repopulates it with sapient chimpanzees, a five-hundred-pound Jewish gorilla, and a hotunder-the-collar God, who gets a kick from pelting Cohn with lemons to teach him who is the boss of all bosses.

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In a variation on the last-couple-on-Earth bound to raise eyebrows even in an allegorical zootopia, he has his hero copulate with an ape to make the wheels of evolution spin a little faster. As if this wasn’t enough, she actually bears a humanzee baby, which is later killed and devoured by other chimps. Meanwhile, all this lunacy is textured out of a kaleidoscope of genres, from the evolutionary parable to post-apocalyptic drama to theosophical burlesque. These protean designs proved too much for most reviewers, who jumped on Malamud for this turn toward fantasy, clearly expecting another melancholy serving of matzo-ball realism. Some asked aloud why a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner would throw a monkey wrench into his career with so lowbrow a fare as a beast fable (even as they confused baboons with chimps and chimps with gorillas).8 Few paused to note that fantasy, especially one with allegorical overtones, has a pedigree that stretches from the Sanskrit Panchatantra and the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, not to even mention Aesop, La Fontaine, and Br’er Rabbit. Rather than stoop to the level of the critics, Malamud rode out the barbs in equanimity. “I write fantasy”, he chuckled, “because when I do I am imaginative and funny”.9 And funny he is, even if it is slapstick at times. When, while mouthing off to the Almighty, Cohn is knocked out by a pillar of fire, Buz declares the spectacle, ahem, a knockout and casually inquires about the next episode. Much of Malamud’s comedy owes, indeed, to such Pythonesque irreverence. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but the eschatology is deflated by the vernacular in which Cohn and Buz haggle over their social and biological priorities. Try as you might to look on the light side of life after doomsday, however, memento mori is never far from sight. Cohn’s island may be the new cradle of life, but it is littered with bones of animals that perished in the Second Flood. Much like the Paleolithic fossils Cohn painstakingly excavates near his cave, they are a reminder of his own mortality, to say nothing of the extinction of the human race. Consonant with the moralistic nature of the tale, not to mention its biblical overtones, the descriptive parts of God’s Grace often echo the cadences and phrasing of the Old Testament. The effect is heightened especially in passages that break with prose lineation. Punctuating God’s thundering rhetoric with blank spaces or casting it in the form of free verse only amplifies the allegorical resonance.

Utopus All allegories feed on ur-narratives, symbols, and archetypes, and God’s Grace is no exception. The almost encyclopedic range of its intertextual hyperlinks begins with the Bible, especially the book of Genesis. Playing more roles than Dan Castellaneta does on The Simpsons, at various points in the story Cohn wears the mantle of God, Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Jacob, Abraham, and Job.

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He is the ruler of the new world, the giver of names, and the first man in the new world order. He is the sole survivor of the Second Flood, the archetypal farmer, and the ultimate law giver. He is the usurper of another’s birthright. He is the family patriarch and would be slayer of his adopted son, even as his own death is stayed by God’s messenger. Last but not least, he is the archetypal sufferer who never lets go of hope for divine grace. The chimps’ names themselves allude to a number of sources in Genesis and beyond: alpha-male Esau, ‘womantic’ and lisping Mary Madelyn, venerable Melchior, the simple-minded twins Luke and Saul of Tarsus, and two males in their prime, Esterhazy and Bromberg. The last two, which straddle the worlds of religion and literature, hint at the trove of references that comes from Shakespeare, whose collected works Cohn salvages from the shipwreck. An island Prospero to Buz’s Caliban and a Julius Caesar to his Brutus, Cohn also reprises the role of Womeo in his star-crossed union with Mary Madelyn. All this is only a prelude to a library of allusions to iconic narratives of the modern times, to say nothing of ancient ones, such as the Odyssey. One such is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which an island commune degenerates into ritualistic murder. Another is Orwell’s parable about talking animals who struggle to wrest power from the human in the name of working-class zootopia. Yet another is the man-made apocalypse in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which spells the end of the road for the human species. And behind them all looms The Planet of the Apes, with its sapient, English-speaking speaking chimps as the inheritors. There is also an array of ancient myths, from the Promethean quest to bring enlightenment to lower minds to the myth of Pandora and her box of afflictions. Rounding up this refresher course on the cultural history of our civilization, Malamud’s protagonist reincarnates at various points suffering redeemer Jesus, blind storyteller Homer, stranger-in-a-strange-land Gulliver, morality-play Everyman, and socio-engineering Utopus. Most of all, he is Robinson Crusoe and his real-life model, privateer and Royal Navy officer Alexander Selkirk, who eked out four plus years on a desert island off the coast of Chile. The Defoe connection is far from a coincidence. During utopia’s golden era, stories of ideal societies that poured forth from Enlightenment France came in three major subtypes: imaginary voyages, dreamlike fantasies, and robinsonades. Malamud’s own robinsonade, which opens with an imaginary voyage and continues as a dreamlike fantasy, certainly rings in utopia in this tradition. But it doesn’t stop there.10 The spirit of Enlightenment is apparent most of all in Cohn’s strictly rational approach to prosociality. But it also returns in the chimps themselves, who represent an ironic twist on Rousseau’s noble savages even as their commune represents a back-to-nature experiment in communal living. With Cohn as the planner and Buz as the cicerone to the newcomers to utopia, the social and bioengineering join hands in Cohn’s eugenic experiment with Mary Madelyn.

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Three Branches of Government If Malamud’s chimpanzees are the new meek to inherit the earth, they look for all the world like God’s second mistake, if only he would admit it. Chances of that, however, are zero. The Almighty who lords over the Second Flood does not brook arguments and has a short fuse to boot. Like every Mr. Big, he likes to throw his weight around, cowing Cohn with threats and bolts of divine thunder. Yet he is also a dispenser of grace, however grudging it might seem at times. Having bet on unregenerate humankind and lost, now he’s willing to gamble on the great apes. There is no greater proof than their survival since, being morphologically like us, they should have perished together with those ultimate survivors, the cockroaches. Holding nuclear winter at bay, he fashions for them a lush island on which the apes can try their hairy hand at utopia. Despite his vexation at Cohn, he even sends a Samaritan gorilla to nurse him back from radiation poisoning. Why? The answer lies, perhaps, in Cohn himself. He is short in stature, and after the radiation sickness his bowed legs become even more crooked, chimp-like. Like his protégés, he is trim and muscular, and acquires a deep tan. Losing all hair, he grows a short beard and becomes a fructivore. The picture of a human ape is rounded up in a vote in which Buz and his conspecifics make him honorary chimp. The vote merely externalizes Cohn’s chimp-like traits. The word turns flesh, however, when the island becomes haunted by an albino ape said to spell trouble for the community. Ultimately, implies the novel, this is who we are: white apes haunted by our biology, where rule number one is to take care of number one. Little surprise, howls resentful Buz, that Cohn arrogates to himself the roles of lawgiver, leader, and judge. The three branches of government are his to sit on and dump on those beneath. Even as he contends with Buz, Cohn struggles with his own shortcomings as a leader, so much so that even his name reflects this struggle. Before he changed it to Calvin, his name used to be Seymour. The conversion from See-More (another wink at Utopia?) to one of the sternest hardliners in religious history reflects the blind spots in his island protectorate—his intelligence and adaptability notwithstanding. Biologically speaking, the adaptive value of intelligence is unquestionable. All things being equal, it is the optimal solution for coping with the contingencies of life. But although mental agility and adaptability enabled us to become top predators of all time, they exacted a heavy price. Sounding for all the world like Camus or Sartre, E. O. Wilson diagnosed it in Consilience as humankind’s psychological exile. At least some of our inner unrests, pathologies, and neuroses, argued the sociobiologist, may be the toll levied by evolution for cutting us to the front of the line. Considering how badly we treat one another and even ourselves, it’s worth asking: was the toll worth paying? Ironically, we are the only species

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on Earth who are even capable of contemplating that question. For Blaise Pascal and other Enlightenment thinkers, this alone was enough to answer in the affirmative. It’s not difficult to see why. Our intelligence lies at the root of innumerable social problems, from freeloading to the arms race, to say nothing of the existential itch that cannot ever be scratched out. But if you don’t like this by-product of our evolution, what is the alternative? Ditching big brains and devolving to the level of nonviolent blubbery seals, as in Vonnegut’s utopia of Galápagos?

Pax Americana To pay for the evolutionary ratchet that cranked up the intelligence explosion in the early hominids, we may have mortgaged our future. The same big brains that served us so well against predators, glaciations, and other ecological IQ tests on the way to the twenty-first century are also responsible for the nuclear means of exterminating life on Earth—and for the lack of political will to ensure that we don’t. Seen in this light, shared intentionality, which begot intelligence, which begot culture, which begot technoscience, which begot the arms race, which begot the H-bomb, may be the ultimate Trojan horse. Not coincidentally, while trying to awaken the moral imperative in his wards, Cohn lectures on the Holocaust: all that Jewish soap from those skeletal gassed bodies; and not long after that, since these experiences are bound to each other, the Americans drop the first atom bombs—teensy ones—on all those unsuspecting 8 a.m. Japanese crawling in broken glass to find their eyeballs.11 Since 1945 the whole world has lived, worked, and played in the shadow of atomic arsenals and their delivery platforms: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range bombers, boomer subs—and today, suitcases. Why worry about it now? Because in 2001 and then in 2017 the United States revived nuclear war as a political option. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty has been ratified by all countries, bar three. Israel, Pakistan, and India still live by Groucho Marx’s quip of not wanting to belong to the club that would have them as members. As spelled out in its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, Pax Americana calls for a replacement of the triad of ICBMs, subs, and strategic bombers with a new nuclear triad. These are offensive strike systems (including the old triad delivery platforms), active and passive defences (including the Strategic Defence Initiative, better known as Star Wars), and a wholly revamped physical and cyberinfrastructure, including a new Pentagon. Bottom line? “Nuclear weapons play a critical role in the defense capabilities of the United States”.12 All this comes in the wake of America’s withdrawal from

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the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, refusal to act fully on the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia, and nuking the proposed inspections regime at the Biological Weapons Convention. In all this, America rebuffs its legal responsibilities set in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. During the George W. Bush administration, the price tag for atomic weapons research and production averaged $7 billion a year. This was more than the annual outlays during the five decades of the superpower arms race. Bush’s last defense budget authorized a trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear triad. Tit for tat, Russia revealed plans for five new strategic nuclear missile regiments and, in 2016, plans to boost the combat readiness of its nuclear forces. It is like somebody pressed the reboot button on the Cold War. Worst of all, perhaps, in 2004 the United States flipped the bird to the rest of the world by dropping the norm-based approach to non-proliferation. It decided, in other words, to junk the principle of equality that has until now been the mainstay of all international agreements. Some states, in America’s eyes, would now officially be more equal than others. In practice, this has always been the case. Israel, which has nukes, has never faced repercussions. Iran, which doesn’t have them (yet), is treated like a pariah. In 2006, Bush even strong-armed Congress to okay sending civilian “nucular” technology to India, despite the awkward fact that halting the spread of atomic materials was to be the keystone of his foreign policy. In one fell swoop, America sacrificed decades of non-proliferation policy on the altar of a geopolitical counterweight to China. Today, after two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties and the New START Treaty of 2011, the combined number of strategic warheads fielded by the Djanks and the Druzhkies stand at well over three thousand. This is not counting tactical nukes, which are the mainstay of current research and development. As one warhead is enough to vaporize a whole city, there are not enough cities on Earth to be the targets of these bombs. Meanwhile, the United States is rapidly developing nuclear bunker busters and mini-nukes, one-third the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. At the same time, it is demanding that other countries, from Iran to North Korea, refrain from following its example. This double standard knocks a few more teeth out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and clouds the prospects of ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As I type these words, and as the Trump White House agitates for American nuclear supremacy, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stands at two minutes to midnight. If that means nothing to you, this is five minutes closer than in 1962, when Khrushchev and Kennedy eyeballed each other over Cuba. In fact, it is the closest it has ever been to midnight—the euphemism for nuclear war.

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FIGURE 7.1 East

meets West: superpower détente, 1972. One of the billboards at the entrance to Conghua Hot Spring, Guangzhou, in commemoration of Richard Nixon’s visit there during his historical 1972 trip to Communist China.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

Aren’t We a Little More Two-Faced Than That? The question of freedom of choice has dominated Malamud’s fiction since his first novel, The Natural. It has also dominated the infrequent interviews he granted in his lifetime. How much freedom do we have? How far does it extend? What do we do with it? The suppressed premise behind these questions is that moral accountability exists only to the extent that people or sapient chimps have free will. Despite libraries of theodicean treatises, no one has resolved the logical and moral paradox of omnipotent God and human freedom of action. In God’s Grace, the paradox takes the shape of a parable on the biological nature of Man. Who was responsible for the nuclear war: God, or Man created in his image? Who really failed in pantopia: the self-serving man, or the all-too-human apes? What is a human being: a moral and therefore culpable agent, or a puppet worked by God’s invisible strings? “The book asks, in a sense, a simple question”, summed up Malamud. “Why does man treat himself so badly? What is the key to sane existence?”13 Death, he might have added, combs everybody with one comb. The savage primitive, selfish and self-serving, is the face on the death mask of humankind for which civilization is merely a napkin on which to dry its bloody fangs. As Richard Dawkins put it, selfish genes make selfish people.14

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But wait a minute. Aren’t we a little more two-faced than that? Aren’t people capable of astonishing feats of cooperation, coordination, and collaboration, even as they look after number one? After all, even waging war requires millions of people to act in concert, each reciprocally dependent on another. True, this is not yet altruism, but it is a radically different type of behaviour than every man for himself. But even full-blooded altruism is not impossible to find on the battlefield. A Royal Marine who, on a patrol in Afghanistan, threw himself on a grenade to save his buddies is only one example of such seeming maladaptiveness.15 Naturally, not all that glitters is gold. While willing to die for his team, he was a participant in a neocolonial war on a country full of people who call this dusty corner of the Middle East home. It is erroneous, or at least overly generous, claim many moral philosophers, to speak of altruism whose radius is so narrow. If Cohn’s ecotopia is anything to go by, Malamud would agree. George, the black gorilla, is the object of virulent hatred by the chimps, with the Jesus-loving Buz in the lead. A passel of emaciated baboons becomes a live meat market for Esau and his otherwise civilized cohort. Baboons, rants the alpha-male in a verbal analogue of the Hitler moustache glued to the lip of the current resident of the White House, are dirty, stinking, thieving monkeys, interfering into everybody’s business. They breed like rats and foul up all over the clean bush. If we don’t control their population they will squat all over this island and we will have to get off.16 His rationale is as obscene as it is familiar from countless examples in history, starting with the Third Reich and Jim Crow Dixieland. So are the behaviours it tries to justify. The mere proximity of the black monkeys drives the supremacist chimps into a frenzy of hatred and predation, at the end of which they polish off the last morsel of bushmeat stripped from a baboon child. Caught red-handed, one of the chimp soldiers defends himself by saying that the pack leader said it was okay, since baboons don’t belong to the tribe. To Cohn’s heartbroken reproof that God wants all to live at peace with strangers, he shrugs: “What for?” Putting no stock in the moral golden rule, Cohn’s colonists are, of course, only too human. Echoing the novel, German colonists in Namibia also denigrated the humanity of the local Herero people, calling them baboons in a prelude to the first genocide of the twentieth century.

Famous Four Fs Much as open borders breed pluralism, isolation breeds tribalism. Pushing the tribal button, it separates people from the familiar social context and emotional reference points. The rest is easy. Once contact with the outside is severed, you can set about reengineering the behavioural benchmarks. Tell your followers

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that they are divinely chosen. Tell them that the only thing between them and destiny is the other group. This simple game plan, plus a range of evolution-cued tricks described in my American Utopia and Social Engineering, are essentially what lies behind the success of hit-’em-hard-hit-’em-low-and-don’t-stop-hitting campaigns of political dark horses from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. Indeed, most pundits see Nixon’s 1946 congressional race against Democrat Jerry Voorhis as the watershed. Full of half-truths and full-blown lies, it set the standard for negativity that goes by the name of electoral strategy.17 By now, everybody is in the game. The public may not condone negativity but, as focus group research shows, it continues to fall under its spell. But much as knowledge of evolutionary psychology allows social engineers to manipulate voters by activating primal instincts such as fear and tribal identity, that same knowledge is indispensable to building a better world, whether on a communal or global scale. At its most fundamental, culture is an evolved mechanism for responding to the environment more promptly than genes ever could. But culture can be massively maladaptive. One nuclear war can undo eons of selection for intelligence. This is to say that all the lessons in history, sociobiology, and ethics in the world don’t stand a chance against biology when survival is at stake. But are we always at the mercy of our primal instincts, the famous four Fs of evolutionary fitness: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproduction? Biology runs so deep that only technology can engineer it out of our systems. Malamud’s protagonist tries his hand at bioengineering the old way, through selective breeding. Creating a mixed-gene progeny, he launches a eugenics program that ignites a bloody chain reaction from the chimps. Their reprisals have a solid sociobiological justification that goes beyond sexual jealousy. Babies born to parents with higher IQ have higher odds of survival. These natural eugenic effects alone would give Cohn’s genes a leg up in pantopia. But the horror that rains on the island is only one part of the story. The other part is written by the many social and prosocial behaviours in zootopia: cooperation, reciprocity, and at the end of the scale, altruism. At the end of the day, we are moral beings because are so often immoral. If we were naturally all evil or all good, there would be no room for the only thing that everyone agrees is the essence of morality—freedom of choice. The moral instinct has a loose analogue in language acquisition. Humans are programmed for language, with precise surface-level manifestations left open. We are programmed to speak, in other words, but not to speak English or Swahili. Similarly with biological foundation of morality: we are born with the basic building blocks of prosociality, but our morality is channelled by the norms of the society we are born into. Symbolically, Malamud goes even further, making little distinction between the language instinct and the moral instinct. In God’s Grace it is the faculty of

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speech, with all it entails, from intentionality to shared intentionality, that makes us human. Once the chimps lapse in abiding by the seven Admonitions, they regress to the prelinguistic stage. Only George the gorilla retains the faculty of speech through all the anarchy and bloodshed. Not coincidentally, he is also the kindest, gentlest ape of all.

Notes 1. The United States didn’t even ratify the Rome Statute that brought the ICC into being. 2. In many ways a reaction against RAND and the concept of preventive war; see Kahn; Smith (1966). 3. 3–4; unless indicated otherwise, references are to God’s Grace; some material appeared originally in Swirski (2011), Chapter 3. 4. Page 257; also Skinner (1987), 99; Swirski (2011), Chapter 1. 5. 152. 6. Van Wolkenten et  al.; Brosnan; Brosnan and de Waal; de Waal (2010); Ghiselin; Haidt; Arnhart. 7. For autobiographical sketches of his life and work, see Malamud (1985); Davis; Malamud Smith. 8. Lelchuk; Leonard; in contrast, see Siegel. 9. In Lasher, 38; see also 112; see Rothstein for Malamud’s comments on his indebtedness to Chaplin. 10. In French, voyages imaginaires, rêves. 11. 154. 12. “Nuclear Posture Review Report” (2002), 8 January: page 7. 13. In Lasher, 132; see also Garchik. 14. Dawkins; see also Trivers; Alexander. 15. BBC News “Marine”. 16. 224. 17. Ambrose; Greene (2006); Geer; Swirski (2010); (2011), Chapter 5.

8 YOU TELL ME THAT IT’S EVOLUTION

No Dice Fearing our propensity for aggression, a powerful leader tries to engineer tribalism out of existence and replace it with universal brotherhood. No dice. Human beings would need to be redesigned from the bottom up to behave any different than they had throughout history. Free will is not that free, he realizes, when channelled by history and, deeper still, biology. Such is the plot of Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, yet another intertextual bridge to God’s Grace. But, as becomes utopia-as-morality-play, Malamud takes things a step further. Before aggression buries the utopian experiment, his ­planner-in-chief bakes seven Admonitions into clay tablets and affixes them to the face of a mountain. These quasi-Mosaic commandments are to safeguard the principles of a just and moral society. Taking for the most part the form of prosocial proverbs, like the injunctions against the seven deadly sins, the Admonitions convey the dual nature of engineering we-first behaviour. On the one hand, they gloss the nobility of utopian aspirations. On the other, they testify to the need to steer the truant onto the path of virtue. 1. We have survived the end of the world; therefore cherish life. Thou shalt not kill. 2. Note: God is not love, God is God. Remember Him. 3. Love thy neighbor. If you can’t love, serve—others, the community. Remember the willing obligation. 4. Lives as lives are equal in value but not in ideas. Attend the Schooltree. 5. Blessed are those who divide the fruit equally.

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6. Altruism is possible, if not probable. Keep trying. See 3 above. 7. Aspiration may improve natural selection. Chimpanzees may someday be better living beings than men were. There’s no hurry but keep it in mind.1 Throughout his life, Malamud cited his formative experiences as World War II, the Holocaust, the peril of nuclear war, and the history of racial strife in America.2 Not surprisingly, all of them are reflected in the utopian commandments. All the commandments, in turn, reflect the central concerns of modern utopia: deaggression, social engineering, education, distribution of resources, altruism, and eugenics. The ghost of nuclear winter lit by the embers of thermonuclear blasts drives the First Admonition which, for good measure, throws in the Sixth Commandment brought by Moses down from Mount Sinai. The Second Admonition swaps the Christian soundbite of “God is love” for a veiled reminder that God of the Torah is the ultimate mystery.3 So much for invoking his will as a cloak for war, symbolized by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan armed with rifle sights stencilled with biblical quotes. With Russia and America separated by eighty-five kilometres of Bering Strait, the Third Admonition is a reminder that ICBMs have shrunk the world to the size of a neighbourhood. With the Schooltree as the tree of knowledge, the Fourth Admonition exhumes the ghosts of John Scopes and the 1925 Monkey Trial for the Eighties, reeling under attacks on evolution by the Moral Majority. The Fifth Admonition to share resources equitably hews to the economics of utopia, in contrast to the United States where the wealth of the top one percent dwarfs that of the bottom ninety.4 The Sixth and Seventh Admonitions, however, seem different. Talking about altruism and natural selection—about me-first egoism and tribalism that turn us against those who don’t share our family tree or our patch of ground—they veer away from politics or indeed anything else that might fall under the rubric of culture. Or do they? The novel itself hints that the gulf between genetic and cultural evolution may be a red herring: Cohn lectured on the development of the great apes and ascent of homo sapiens during the course of evolution. He had several times lectured on natural selection—the maximization of fitness, someone had defined it—a popular subject with his students. It promised possibilities if one made himself—or in some way became—selectable.5 If the apes wish to become selectable, goes the subtext, they can do something about it instead of just waiting for evolution to grind out over eons. This is because natural selection and cultural selection dance together in a ­co-evolutionary pas de deux. Culture, is after all, an adaptation. For a hundred thousand years now, if not longer, it has been chipping at our genetic profile.

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Pinch Yourself To Find Out How Much It Hurts Others On closer inspection, the last two admonitions about the road to utopia being paved by natural and cultural selection are far from anomalous. All seven admonitions, in fact, make as much sense from a sociobiological as from a sociopolitical standpoint. This reflects the underappreciated fact that genes and culture coevolve in a process known as Double Inheritance Theory (DIT). The First Admonition embodies the core element of moral codes worldwide: thou shalt not kill. Naturally, from the biblical Yahweh commanding the Israelites to smite their foes to modern states butchering one another in the name of democracy, killing has always been legitimized in certain circumstances. Self-sacrifice may be an adaptive trait, but altruism is on the whole notably less intense than the instinct for self- and kin preservation. When people get angry or hungry enough, they murder or eat one another. When new dominant males kill the offspring of the displaced ones, they have good adaptive reasons for doing so—hence the risk for human stepchildren. Against this background, Malamud’s beast fable rings true to nature. The raid on and butchery of Cohn’s child are consistent with predation. In this interpretation, the chimps see the human as a different species—never mind his honorary membership of the tribe. On the other hand, if they regard Cohn as a chimp, their actions make equal adaptive sense. By deposing the dominant male and killing his progeny, they induce Mary Madelyn into estrus and get a shot at replacing his genes with theirs. Pointedly, through all this the posse is murderous but cooperative. Instead of every chimp for himself, it is united we stand. Their actions are not prosocial, but they are social. The Second Admonition tries to prise morality away from doctrinal religion. “The world isn’t ready for simple pacifism or Christian humility”, sneers Frazier in Walden Two, and he could be Malamud’s spokesman.6 Historically, religion has been a flashpoint for intolerance, splitting believers into sects and pitting them against each other. Yet religions also provide some of the most inclusive identities of all, except that their markers are not genetic but cultural. There is no billion-strong blood family on the planet, but there are more than a billion Roman Catholics (roughly the same as atheists) united under the Fisherman’s Ring. With God as the shepherd-in-chief, various religious systems stamp on the faithful a common identity, papering over the genetic differences. Black and white Methodists, Ashkenazi and Coptic Jews, Iraqi and Saudi Shiites kneel side by side because, while fencing off outsiders, their faiths stamp them with an in-group marker. The Third Admonition dials up the moral golden rule, vividly paraphrased by a Pashto proverb: Pinch yourself to find out how much it hurts others. As my own research confirms, it is found in every society. Go to any place on earth, and you’ll find a proverb that echoes Matthew 7:12, the biblical version of the

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golden rule. Before Jesus, of course, there was Seneca, Plato, and even Confucius with their takes of the timeless truth summed up by Vonnegut in one of his early utopias: You’ve got to be kind.7 Not surprisingly, the golden rule ranked high with most utopian communes. The Straight Edge Industrial Settlement, physically divided between lower Manhattan and New Jersey, was one of the many united behind it. Its constitution, which in pith lay somewhere between marriage vows and the Gettysburg Address, was nothing less than a paraphrase of the golden rule. It read in its entirety: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”.8 The Third Admonition and the golden rule are there to buck the adaptive distinctions we make between the in-group and the out-group. From corals and shoaling fish to ants, termites, rodents, flocking herbivores, and primates—to say nothing of species that aggregate in family groups—social and colonial animals dominate the world. To live alongside one another, all must have evolved ways of telling friend from foe and, equally important, of handling either. Sharp distinctions between insiders and outsiders are bred into our genome. And because morality evolved mainly to harmonize in-group life, it is biased against outsiders, to which social animals are commonly xenophobic and potentially hostile. It is more than a matter of giving trespassers the evil eye. Individuals who stray into other groups’ territories open themselves to attacks that may be lethal. Aggression of this kind has been reported for nearly all social species.9

Gene-Culture Coevolution The Fourth Admonition reflects the species-specific demands made by our culture, social life, and intelligence. Human evolution selected for prolonged childhood—the lengthiest in any animal that ever lived—for a reason. The complexity of information to be absorbed by every member of our species calls for brains that couldn’t pass through any birth canal. Solution? Give birth when the brain is still small, although already pushing at the limits of female anatomy, and lengthen childhood. The Fifth Admonition roots for prosociality via egalitarianism and resource sharing. Looking out for number one (individual fitness) sits at the top of everyone’s list. Naturally, behaviours good for me are seldom good for the group. But—and it is a big BUT—groups also compete against one another, and the more cohesive they are, the better chance they stand of outcompeting the competition. This yin and yang of multilevel selection means that the selfish gene cannot be the whole story. This is not the same as saying that there’s a gene for cooperative behaviour, let alone altruism. But in the public mind, not to mention more than one biologist, the conceptual core of modern biology is still synonymous with Richard Dawkins’s famous meme from his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene.10

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We are survival machines for our genes, proposed Dawkins, programmed to generate copies of our twisted strands of genetic code. We may do so with the aid of the group or even by contributing to the welfare of the group, but with the ultimate goal of propagating our DNA. If acts of selflessness and altruism occur on the way, they occur only to propagate the selfish gene beyond the individual carrying it. The Sixth Admonition doesn’t merely encourage a rethinking of the selfish gene in more prosocial terms—it demands it. Certainly, self-sacrifice and self-interest are for the most part reluctant bedfellows. That, however, doesn’t always make self-sacrifice maladaptive. Put simply, self-sacrifice is not always bad for you or your not-so-selfish gene. There is, in short, no need to look outside evolution to explain why me-first is not always an enemy of we-first. Formed by the same evolutionary pressures that shaped such forms of social conduct as favouring kin and reciprocal backscratching, a sense of fairness and altruism are as adaptive as a sense of hearing and egoism. We are moral and immoral in the ways we adapt our behavioural codes to our adaptive behaviours. Evolution is about adaptation but not just about adaptation. And the Seventh Admonition reinforces the point by stressing the interplay between genetic and social factors. Biology has moved on from the days when Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, framed the nature-nurture dialectic. Nowadays his thesis and antithesis appear more like the Escher lithograph of one hand drawing another in a closed loop—in short, like a synthesis. It is this synthesis, known as gene-culture coevolution, that played the role of a twin Rolls-Royce engine that lifted hominids from the plains of Africa to the height of scientific, artistic, and material sophistication we enjoy today. How did it happen? Although some things are still subject to debate, one is not. Humans are adapted for culture in ways that even our closest cousins, the great apes, are not. The key difference is our adaptation for understanding other agents as agents, meaning as intentional beings. This uniquely allows us to share a point of view—and thus information—by drawing attention to intention. We love to share information about what we think and feel. But we succeed in doing so only thanks to the shared presets for intention and attention and the theory-of-mind module that enacts it. The evidence from human ontogeny and primatology is rich and compelling. Mind reading, or more precisely intention reading, develops in all normal infants by the age of one. As soon as they start to point referentially, for example to a toy, they keenly attend to the adults’ grasp of what is going on. Tellingly, if the adult reacts by showering them with attention but ignoring the toy, they persist in pointing to it. Don’t attend to me, you big oaf, attend to what I want you to attend to!11 But while infants acquire the ability to engage others mentally already in this prelinguistic phase, apes never develop it at all. They don’t lack the perceptional and motor skills to follow, for instance, the direction of a pointing finger. But

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they just don’t “get it”. And this is precisely where human-level communication kicks in. Our everyday interactions are full of apparent dead-ends, such as: I know a good pizza place. Nah, got a test tomorrow. You don’t logically or semantically get from being told about a pizza place to an invitation for pizza to being informed of a test to being rebuffed because of a need to bone up. Except that in a shared cultural space it’s tacitly understood that tests require study time, that pizza is an affordable date, and a dozen other things implied in this bare-bones dialogue.

Monkey-See-Monkey-Do Side by side with theory of mind, shared (“we”) intentionality is what drove human cognition. The results are visible all around: the ratcheting of learning skills and the explosion of culture. Naturally, primates have culture, too. Chimps and bonobos, for example, teach the young how to use tools to crack nuts and they exchange sex for meat. But they display almost no shared intentionality.12 The crucial factor in cultural evolution is its fantastic rate. Molecular genetics shows that Homo sapiens separated from apes only some six million years ago. Fossil records suggest that for the next four million years our species continued as ape-like australopithecines. Our aptitude for attributing beliefs and intentions is thus less than two million years old, and perhaps as little as a million.13 This is a very short time for any cognitive adaptation to emerge. Something, however, did manifestly select for human cognition in spectacular ways. You are the living proof of that. What was it? Given the speed and the ratcheting effects of this cognitive evolution—perhaps we had better say revolution—there is really only one agent of change to fit the job description: culture. At bottom, material and symbolic culture reflects our biological imperatives. To some degree, however, these imperatives also reflect cultural selection. Without culture in the picture, we couldn’t explain some of the conspicuous aspects of our social life, starting with the fact that human societies are so different from those of other primates. At the other end, of course, there are countless differences between tribal-scale human groups in their social organization. Genetic differentiation among groups cannot by itself explain variation in group behaviour. The experience of partitioned nations, from (East) Germany to (North) Korea, (Northern) Ireland, and (North) Vietnam—not to mention China and Taiwan—is unequivocal in this respect. So is cross-cultural adoption, whereby children effortlessly embrace the new culture and not that of their genetic parents. Neither can ecological factors be the answer. After all, all environments on Earth have long been impacted by culture, so that even if the hypothesis were

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FIGURE 8.1  Evolutionary

studies and cultural studies. Something did manifestly select for human cognition in spectacular ways. You are the living proof of that. What was it? Given the speed and the ratcheting effects of this cognitive evolution—perhaps we had better say revolution—there is really only one agent of change to fit the job description: culture.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

right, it would be wrong, since ecological factors mesh too closely with cultural. Likewise, the ecological hypothesis would predict similar behaviours in similar habitats, which is not always the case. This is not to argue that ecology never selects for behaviour. Harsh habitats often yield Viking-type raiders. Seasonal variation produces cultural adaptations

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for food preservation and storage. Arid ecologies nurture group cooperation needed to complete irrigation systems. But some behavioural adaptations, such as the patterns of domination between Dinka and Nuer tribes in South Sudan, or the distinctions between Yankee culture and Southern culture of honour, cannot be explained by ecological factors alone.14 Genetic and cultural selection have walked arm in arm since the Pleistocene— less than two million years ago. The result is civilization as we know it: ICBMs, the Big Mac, Trump Tower. But this still leaves the question of what acted as the evolutionary cognitive ratchet. Here mirror neurons—so-called in distinction from canonical neurons—look more and more like the missing link between natural and cultural selection. All the fuss about them owes to the stunning fact that mirror neurons detect and simulate other beings’ cognitive and emotional states.15 That’s right: cognitive and emotional states. It turns out that, when you point to anything you want to draw my attention to, your intentional action and the indicated structure speak directly to my evolved brain. My brain detects your intentions even before “I” do. Eerily, mirror neurons fire up not when they detect movements or gestures, but when they grasp the purpose behind movements or gestures. At the cortical level, the brain doesn’t work by tracking motor activity. It doesn’t work, in other words, in terms of extending a forelimb and closing its digital protrusions around a tapered yellow cylinder. It works in terms of reaching for a banana to eat it. Mirror neurons, and hence we, understand what we do in terms of goal-directed actions.16 It is not, in other words, a case of monkey-see-monkey-do mimicry. How do we know this? Because when the same motor activity is repeated in a different context—miming the gesture without grasping anything or even without intending to—mirror neurons don’t fire. Somehow the wet chips in our brains tune in to other intentional beings’ minds, embedding us in a shared network of intentions in action. Remember, all this happens without any reflection or inferential mediation. It’s an automatic and instant cortical grasp of what’s going on the heat of the moment, a looking-glass reflex of our evolved brain. But there is more. The discharge of these neurons is similar when an action is performed and when it’s only observed. And it’s not just cognition, either. When I see you frown, look around, and spread your hands palms up while raising your shoulders, I can tell that you are puzzled. But even before then I am ready to offer help, because my brain—to be precise, my visceromotor system—understands your pantomime and feels your discomfort. This neural what-you-see-is-what-you-get is remarkable since morality hinges on empathy, the capacity for putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.

Unabomber Aristotle spent years pounding the precepts of goodness into Alexander, who went on to slash and burn his way across the known world. So much for moral

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education as a conduit of moral virtue. But although we are selfish by nature, morality is not a cultural overlay, and a thin one at that. The rudiments of altruism are preloaded into humans—a view which, incidentally, goes back to Aristotle. In everyday parlance, altruism comes bundled up with goodness. Not so in biology, where it is defined operationally rather than intrinsically. Regardless of the motives behind it, if an action that benefits others is costly to you, it is regarded as altruistic. On this picture, altruism extends even to aggressive or hostile behaviour. Bees that die after stinging or army ants that get eaten before their numbers engulf the prey are altruistic, even though both are out to kill. Just because actions benefit someone else’s survival, they mustn’t therefore be regarded as good in some transcendent moral sense. By the same token, however, selflessness must not be refined out of the everyday economy of social life. Fortified with these caveats, let’s look at altruism again. Suddenly it seems to be everywhere. Far from an esoteric attribute of the likes of St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, benefiting others at cost to self dominates the social landscape. Granted, just because we are all altruists doesn’t mean that all instances of self-sacrifice are equal. But there is no arguing that, from time to time at least, we act out of other-directed motives. Or is there? Cynics can always find alternative reasons for even the most altruistic acts. A soldier smothering a fragmenting grenade with his body earns not only posthumous fame but a lifetime pension for his family. On this interpretation, his apparent altruism might be actually self-serving or at best a roundabout kind of kin selection. The brotherhood in arms, goes the story, especially in small tight-knit frontline units, activates such ultimate selfsacrifice as a sublimated form of “kinship”. But what about families who report felonious kin to the police in the knowledge that the latter will be sent away for life or even to the chair? Theodore John Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wasn’t nabbed as a result of a years-long FBI investigation. He would have presumably continued his reign of terror had not his brother recognized his writing style and opinions in the published manifesto and tipped the Feebs. What was in it for the brother, in the absence of any financial reward? Heartlessness does not explain much, since in many cases families turn in members whom they love and support during the trial and later in jail. A doubting Thomas, who knocks everyone’s impure motives, raises the bar so high that he writes even a possibility of altruism out of the social equation. This is not so, however, if we allow that self-sacrifice may overlap with selfinterest. Moral philosophers might, of course, find much amiss with this thesis. True morality, they will protest, extends the willing obligation to the entire human race. Wouldn’t it be nice? I put more stock, however, in the novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s often-quoted (and even more often misattributed to Stalin) remark that, while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. We would

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have to be a very different species to empathize with abstractions such as humanity with the same intensity as with blood relatives and intimate friends. By these lofty standards, moreover, a Martian anthropologist would have to conclude that practically everyone on earth is immoral, given that we ordinarily limit our radius of goodwill to our inner circle of family, neighbours, and associates. So do, for that matter, chimps and bonobos.17 Our Martian would conclude, therefore, that human and animal morality lie on a continuum, no matter how far from each other. He would not conclude that they are the same, of course—not by a long shot. Moral judgments that apply to the Nuremberg trials do not apply to animal predation or aggression, or the other way round. But neither would he waste his time dusting our frontal lobes for God’s fingerprints. Human morality, he would conclude, is as much a consequence of evolution as is our brain architecture, anatomy, propensity for counterfactual thinking, and even our proverbs.

Proselfish and Prosocial Morality is a trait emergent because of a basic fact of existence. Just like many other social animals, we have always needed others to watch our backs in the struggle for survival. The view that evolution made us moral is, however, at odds with religious belief that people alone possess moral sense by the grace of God. According to the church, morality separates us from animals, even those closest to us, the great apes. Moral sense could never be mistaken for moral instinct. We are our primate cousins’ cousins, but not when it comes to altruism. Nonsense, counters Malamud, making the link between evolution and morality the backbone of the Admonitions. Not for nothing does his hero repeatedly urge the apes to evolve into—as opposed to merely behave like—altruistic living beings. We are altruistic as a consequence of the same selective pressures that have made us egocentric. Adaptively, it’s not difficult to grasp why. Cooperatives tend to outperform self-oriented individuals. As a Spanish proverb coaxes, Three helping each other are as good as six. But, you may object, something doesn’t quite add up. Egoism betters individual fitness, but altruism betters group fitness. What gives? To illustrate what is at stake, take Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. This legendary logician proved that no system past a certain (quite low, in fact) threshold of complexity can be shown to be consistent. It could, in other words, be unmitigated nonsense and you would never know. To prove that it is consistent, you need to climb to a hierarchically higher level. There, indeed, you can prove that the level below is—or isn’t—consistent. But if you think you just got out of paying for lunch, forget it. The upper level lets you verify the consistency of the level below but only at a price. Now to determine that your second floor is soundly constructed you need

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to climb to the third; for the third to the fourth; and so on. It is like the chicken-oregg regression. To have consistent eggs, first you have to verify that the chicken itself is in good order, which means verifying the consistency of the egg it came from, and so on. The process iterates independent of scale because it’s a fractal. Multilevel selection is another fractal. Think of it as a recursive function of two adaptive forces: proselfish and prosocial or, as I call them, me-first and wefirst. When competition between group members becomes suppressed, you get internally cohesive collectives. At the level of collectives, however, competition reemerges as the driving force. Even as within-group cooperation suppresses the me-first impulse, it reappears at the next level in the biological hierarchy. And so it goes, all the way up—and down. From the primitive eukaryotes all the way up to the earth’s biosphere, all the intermediate levels iterate this process. It is like the game of whack-a-mole. Whack selfishness here and it pops up over there. This is essentially how the proselfish and prosocial vectors divide and rule. One rules the ground floor and the other the upper floor, even if both are found at every level. But what, you might ask, about intergroup migration in primates and protohumans? If individuals swap groups often enough, doesn’t that dilute group identity and thus multilevel selection? After all, in groups so fluid as to be virtually indefinite from the genetic standpoint, there is little for group selection to work on. No group, no group selection, no multilevel selection. Despite a substantial intergroup drift of predominantly young females, most primates organize their lives around groups dominated by alpha families. You could, argue, in fact, that the weakness of multilevel selection is a factor behind their being primates and not humans. In contrast, hominids socialized in units that went beyond family groups or even the 150-strong forager-hunter band sizes. Their group identity relied not just on genetic markets but also on ­symbols—language, customs, ideology, religion. As such, it was largely independent of intergroup migration.

Team USA Groups with higher levels of we-first behaviours and, consequently, higher levels of cohesion will tend to outcompete rivals and spread the groupish genes. The me-first drive has not, of course, died out. Far from it, if only because individual interests are best served if everybody except me is altruistic—the Ab Holt school of life. At every level me-first renegades must, therefore, be kept in check by local police. In humans the job is handled at various levels by the immune system. For the most part our cellular organelles, their aggregates (cells), and their aggregates (internal organs) work well as a team. This is good because their heave-ho has to synchronize if we are to live. Cancer cells, cooperative as they are with one another, are supreme individualists when considered as a whole. Refusing to

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play ball on the somatic level, cancer is truly a blind assassin, with dire results for the host and for itself. Even as your internal organs work together in order to give you a leg up in the game of life, a level up the aggregate of organs that is you must compete against other aggregates—other human beings. Think of the cutthroat world of the National Basketball Association (NBA), where players compete for maxpayout contracts. Even those like Melo or Kobe, who don’t naturally take to teamwork, put their shoulder to the wheel to outgun other teams. Guess what? The yin-yang vectors reappear the next level up. Now the very competitors who previously battled one another as the Knicks or the Lakers bury the hatchet and congeal into Team USA to compete against other national teams. Rivalry shifts into a lower gear. Collaboration comes into its own. A level up or down, this process is everywhere because multilevel selection is a fundamental fact of life. Selfishness runs with altruism within a group, which runs with competition against other groups, which runs with altruism within groups of groups, which runs with competition against other groups of groups. Multilevel selection runs our lives because it’s a fractal present at every level of existence. This includes the level that normally shapes our destinies: the world of people and societies, of selfish impulses and social norms. Remember the communal goodwill and social unity in More’s utopia? It too comes at a price. In the course of engineering a perfect society, Utopus conquers a “savage” people, seizes their land, forces them to labour on a canal that transforms a peninsula into an island, and terrorizes the neighbouring states.18 Utopia for some, business as usual for others. Similarly, Walden Two exemplifies the utopian double standard in dealings with other communities: If we buy up half the farms which do business in a particular town, we control the town. The feed dealers, hardware stores, and farm machinery salesmen depend on us. We can put them out of business or control them through our trade. The real estate values in the town can be manipulated at will, and the town itself gradually wiped out.19 Unwittingly, Skinner illustrates the within-group cooperation and betweengroup rivalry by which evolution acts on populations. Groups of individuals act as single organisms when within-group selection is suppressed. More altruistic groups with a higher coefficient of cohesion outperform groups rent by internal strife and spread their groupish genes. Utopians of the world unite!

Paleoanthropologists Have It Easy In most people the default setting is to trust until proven otherwise—and sometimes even then. This preset is by and large beneficial both to the individual and

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to society. Social progress entails complexity, complexity entails cooperation, and cooperation entails trust. Data shows that communities with higher levels of trust display higher levels of cooperation, higher growth rates, and more stable public institutions.20 Other things being equal, economies and communities grow richer because they attract information in the form of innovators, visionaries, scholars, reformers, and culture-makers. Like gas to a car, information is a catalyst of economic engine. Conversely, growth is stunted by institutional or cultural stagnation. Paranoid about security, dictators and other hardline protectionists impede the flow of information with negative results for the economy. Social distrust nixes the formation of information networks where ideas can spark off one another and increase know-how. It’s all about cooperation and trust. In the long run, altruism is better for the economy than cutthroat competition. And at home, cooperation breeds wellness. Trusting individuals are by and large happier, healthier, and even more entrepreneurial. This prosocial predisposition makes it, of course, vulnerable to exploitation. Freeloading, from elaborate financial pyramid schemes to communitarian snakeoil grift, parasitizes our trusting natures and good hearts. In short, the me-first and we-first instincts are at it again. Society has a vested interest in promoting the latter, but inevitably there is a tipping point. The more trust all around, the more probable that someone will try to cheat. Given that these evolutionary forces are so fundamental, they ought to stretch back far into prehistory. But if so, shouldn’t there be evidence of them from the beginning of recorded social life? But where might literary archeologists search for such evidence? Paleoanthropologists have it easy. They dig for fossils to find out who we were and how we lived. But where would literary scholars do the excavating? And what would these literary fossils look like? The answer has been staring us in the face for as long as there’s been oral memory. There is a body of artifacts preserved from times immemorial and available for examination though not in musty museums, but in the living canons of folklore. Like hemoglobin cells, these living fossils continuously course through the arteries of society, some evergreen, some falling into disuse, daily testing their fitness against the times. They are, of course, proverbs. Communitarianism by definition takes exception to individualism. Dedicated to promoting commonwealth, it’s predicated on valuing groupish needs over selfish desires. This should be reflected in proverbs, which perpetuate the communal ethos via the oral tradition. Communities can’t afford to be indifferent to the verbal and social coin they use in interpersonal commerce. All, beginning with the earliest ones, would have had vested interest in promoting cohesion, tolerance, and fairness. Find this early social coin and you should learn something of these interests. And finding it, as you’re about to find out, is not that difficult. Communities make every effort to preserve these lessons of prosociality for their didactic

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content. When Deuteronomy says that Israel shall be the proverb among all nations, it underscores the exemplary quality of proverbs as wellsprings of social and prosocial wisdom.

Notes 1. Page 198; for the earliest versions of the moral code in ancient Attica, see Brandt; for Malamud on constitutional ideals, see Talking Horse, 145–146. 2. Lasher. 3. On Judeo-Christian elements in the Admonitions, see Mesher; for a case against empathy, see Bloom. 4. Hutton; Johnston; Swirski (2010), Chapter 3. 5. 187. 6. Walden Two, 93. 7. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Library of America, Vol. 1: 260. 8. Hinds, 548. 9. Berreby; E. O. Wilson (2000). 10. On the question of authorship and priority of that concept, see Yaznevich, 149–150. 11. Liszkowski; Behne et al.; Tomasello et al. 12. Tomasello; Tomasello et al.; Tomasello and Rakoczy; Baron-Cohen; Wellman, Dunbar; Stone. 13. In 2009 the International Union of Geological Sciences changed the start date for the Pleistocene from 1.806 to 2.588 million years before present. 14. See Richerson and Boyd for the discussion of these by now canonical examples; also Tomasello; Enfield. 15. Di Pellegrino et al.; Rizzolatti and Fogassi; Iacoboni. 16. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, esp. 124; Blakeslee; on indicated structures in aesthetics, see Swirski (2010). 17. De Waal et al (2006); Richards; Broom. 18. Utopia, 50. 19. Walden Two, 215. 20. Hidalgo.

9 PROVERBIAL WISDOM

From “Cinderella” to “Snow White” The folklore around the world has always brimmed with tales of little people, elflike beings said to be like us but on a diminutive scale. On most accounts, they dwelled in forests but in any case on the periphery of human society. Although widespread and haunting, legends of hobbits were never given much credence by science until 2003, when fossil remains were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. Once examined, the skeletal fragments led to three astonishing conclusions. First, the remains were those of a new human species. Second, the normally formed adult in question was only a metre tall. Finally, the skeleton was just between sixty and a hundred thousand years old. This falls squarely within the time frame of the Upper Paleolithic—in anthropological terms, practically yesterday. At that time our ancestors were recognizable as our ancestors not only in the anatomical and morphological sense but also in the cultural. They buried their dead, socialized in multifamily tribal groups, and differentiated their status and social roles. Most of all, they had language, with everything that entails, including the capacity for telling stories about the world and the people in it, such as folklore’s little people. Back in the nineteenth century, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm took this storytelling tradition at face value. Avid fairy-tale collectors and philologists, they speculated that some of the widely popular tales they came across, from “Cinderella” to “Snow White”, were rooted in our shared cultural history going back to the roots of the Indo-European languages.

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Other ethnographers bristled at this expansive timescale. Rather than having circulated orally for ages, they argued, the tales congealed into their canonical forms only at the time they were first printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It wasn’t until 2016 that the dispute was resolved—but it was a bombshell. Some folktales, it turned out, predate even the classical myths.1 Borrowing their analytic tools from evolutionary biologists, a team of ­cultural anthropologists set out to examine stories that recur around the world, such as myths and fairy tales. In the process they stumbled on something extraordinary. Employing phylogenetic methods to track relations between oral history and culture—language, music, marriage customs, or material culture—the team showed that folk staples like “Beauty and The Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin” were four thousand years old. This means that they have been faithfully transmitted for ages before being first put on parchment or vellum. The team also traced “Jack and the Beanstalk” to a family of stories known as “The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure”, dating those to the time when the Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than five thousand years ago. The Grimms were right, after all. The biggest thunderbolt, however, proved to be “The Ironworker and The Devil”, a story about a blacksmith who sells his soul to the Horned One to gain supernatural powers. This precursor to “Doctor Faustus” was found to go back six thousand years, all the way to the Bronze Age. In all this the study relied on oral traditions, adapting a tree of Indo-European languages to trace these shared tales back in time. The moral is simple but persuasive. Cultural memory of prehistorical times may be stronger and more accurate than the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t ethos of Snapchat would suggest. Even as material culture can vanish quickly, oral traditions can be strikingly resilient, if corruptible often in proportion to their complexity and length. The briefer and punchier the message, on the other hand, the less prone it is to the vagaries of the ages-long version of “telephone” that is oral transmission. And there is arguably no shorter and pithier variety of oral literature than proverbs.

The Wit of One But the Wisdom of Many Although no book of proverbs has ever won the Nobel Prize, this alone says little about their literary and social value. A better measure of that value than the blatantly politicized votes of the Swedish Academy is the wellspring of our culture: the Old Testament. The Book of Kings notes that Solomon, the epitome of wisdom, bequeathed no fewer than three thousand proverbs on the principles of good life in good society. Equally to the point, the Book of Proverbs proudly calls itself a manual for living.2

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Proverbs are, indeed, the wit of one but the wisdom of many. The reason we trot them out in every social context in every corner of the globe is precisely because they compress so much wit and wisdom into such a compact delivery platform. Folktales, parables, and exempla are, didactically speaking, long-winded and diffuse. In contrast, proverbs are small and swift like snipers’ bullets. Granted, it is not always easy to separate them from other miniature forms: apothegms, aphorisms, epigrams, maxims, adages, bon mots, dicta, and so on. Some distinctions, however, offer themselves on the basis of features associated with oral transmission. Handed down from generation to generation, proverbs tend toward easy memorization and recall. Brevity and pith invariably top the list (In the friendship of asses, look out for kicks: Behar). Next comes that universal mnemonic device, symmetry (What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is my own: Tamil). In much the same vein, so do parallelism and parataxis—placing clauses one after the other without any connectives (Where the power, there the law: Russian). Another variety of symmetry and parataxis is chiasmus (A stranger, being a benefactor, is a relative; a relative not conferring a benefit is a stranger: Burmese). Other features, not always preserved in translation, are the standard tools of oral traditions, beginning with rhyme (In time of test, family is best: Burmese). The same goes for alliteration and caesura (Be good with the good, bad with the bad: Latin) as well as personification and metaphor (Relatives are scorpions: Tunisian). All of these are, as we can now confirm, not rhetorical garnishes but essential ingredients of psychological suasion. Research shows that proverbs are judged more insightful when they rhyme, and ideas are judged more intelligent and credible when couched in simple diction.3 While some proverbs sound anachronistic to the modern ear, this has less to do with their spirit than with the letter, which reflects pre-urban habitats and affairs. Expressing timeless attitudes and interpersonal obligations, they do it in reference to farm life (If the cattle are scattered, the tiger seizes them: Burmese), harvested produce (Nine measures of grain for relations, but ten for strangers: Tamil), and domestic animals (When the cat and mouse agree, the grocer is ruined: Iranian). But even if their vehicle may be out of date, their tenor is not, just because social dynamics have not changed much since the Bronze Age and before. Stripped of the internet and pinstripe suit, as in Malamud’s, Vonnegut’s, or Atwood’s version of utopia, every urbanite is a pre-urbanite to the bone. Most of the world’s city-zens are, in fact, only a generation or two removed from the country, starting with China, where two hundred million have swapped lanterns for city lights just in the last thirty years. Proverbs are time capsules buried in the memories of speakers of a language. Some are homespun tipoffs (Lying and gossiping go hand in hand: Spanish). Others work as admonitions (Do not stretch your feet beyond your carpet:

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Lebanese), or commandments (Love thy neighbour: Greek). Others still incline toward paradox (A pair of women’s breasts has more pulling power than a pair of oxen: Mexican). They are self-help manuals for social and moral choices: crumbs of ancient life sealed in proverbial resin. Proverbs are ready-made recipes for negotiating the treacherous shallows and rapids of communal life. They are the axle grease that smooths the bearings of social truck, especially at the points of high friction. Whether proindividual or, more often, prosocial, they are living fossils of individuals and societies long gone. Proverbs, just as Bruno Bettelheim argued for myths and folktales in The Uses of Enchantment, order complex or even contradictory social experience, only even more economically.

Tribal Voices Trapped in Amber But there is a problem. Some proverbs directly contradict others, staring each other down across continents or even across the room. Even as Italians warn that A short tail won’t keep off flies, Koreans rebut that If the tail is too long, it will be trampled on. More familiar advice to look before you leap flies in the face of the reminder that he who hesitates is lost. Undeniably, proverbs can be cherrypicked to suit the need of the moment and it is worth asking why. One reason is obvious. Proverbs aren’t logically consistent axioms for group living because different strategies are useful in different situations. Just as there is no winning biological adaptation for all ecological niches and all times, there is no one behavioural strategy that optimizes for all individuals and all societies. As a Chinese proverb says: The wise adapt themselves to circumstances as water moulds itself to the pitcher. Instead of explaining the contradictions away, however, I want to put them in the spotlight. Although few proverbs have fixed dates of birth, it is reasonable to place the oldest ones on the timescale stretching from the folklore about hobbits to folktales about selling out to evil. The earliest examples of proverbial wisdom ought to, in other words, predate such complex and literate forms as fairy tales or legends by a long margin. After all, transmission over eons attests to their timeless utility. Early proverbs, I contend, should date back to the beginning of language itself rather than only to the splintering of the Indo-European language group. And having been forged to capture the constants of social interplay—who needs a proverb for a situational one-off?—they should reflect these constants. Specifically, they should reflect evolutionary pressures brought to bear on individuals in a group. To the extent that proverbs embody deep-seated economies of community life, some of them ought to contradict others. Given that social conduct embodies the tug-of-war between me-first and we-first, and given that moralistic proverbs address themselves to social conduct, they ought to reflect this tension.

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Some should root for the individual, highlighting the risks of trusting others. Others should boost altruism, while flogging antisociality. The tension between what’s good for me and what’s good for society is not a modern invention. The earliest Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian texts record advice on how individuals should conduct themselves in society, testifying to the universal tension between the priorities of individuals and groups. Most nudge us toward prosociality in forms that look just like proverbs in their easy portability and memorability. Let me firm all this up into five testable predictions. The first three are more general. Insofar as proverbs preserve the intergenerational wisdom of all societies, in any statistically viable sample we ought to find: 1. A high degree of overlap and redundancy among proverbs from diverse cultures and geographical regions, detectable especially in moralistic advice aimed at selfish or groupish behaviours; 2. A large number of proverbs dealing with kin (families, relatives, marriages, husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings), communal life (friends, neighbours, group leaders, visitors, strangers), and social intercourse (debt, exchange, assets, losses, fairness, reputation); 3. A preponderance of men’s point of view—the majority of tribal groups being patriarchal and patrilineal—detectable in proverbs dealing with menwomen relationships: marriage, love, fidelity, in-laws, and so on. My database consisted of proverbs from cultures and regions around the world, to the total of over forty thousand. The older the society and the language, the

wisdom. Egyptian scribe’s exercise tablet from The Instructions of Amenemhat (circa 1500 bc) advises: Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you . . . Trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates.

FIGURE 9.1 Proverbial

Credit: David Liam Moran/CC BY-SA 3.0.

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better, with Asia and Africa leading the way. Proverbs, I reasoned, are tribal voices trapped in amber. Embodying their “genetic line”, they are both prehistorical artifacts and modern pickaxes with which we can excavate our shared cultural inheritance. My findings were consistent with the three hypotheses. There is vast overlap across societies. We reinvent the proverbial wheel over and over again, so much that virtually all proverbs I list in this chapter have their equivalents in other cultures. All have their version of When in Rome, do as the Romans do, or in Behar Suit your appearance to the country. All have the golden rule, including the Egyptians nearly four thousand years ago: Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do. Human nature respects no national boundaries. Folk—not to say proverbial— wisdom accrues from experience that is transpersonal and transcultural in nature. This is as true of the biblical and classical sources that for historical reasons tower in the Western cultures as of the parts of the world where people still pursue nomadic or agrarian ways of life. Mirroring our evolutionary priorities, communal life and social intercourse dominate the agenda. Vast numbers of proverbs are preoccupied with blood family, hereditary traits, lineages, marriages, qualities of wives, fidelity, parenting, offspring, incest, and the like. They also echo the patriarchal point of view, one consequence of which, I discovered, is a universal hatred of mothers-in-law and nary a word about wicked fathers-in-law.4

Me-First-We-First My next two hypotheses were more specific and geared toward teasing out the adaptive tension between egoistic (me-first) and altruistic (we-first) behaviours. 4. In proverbs dealing with social life, there ought to be direct contradictions between egoistic sentiments and prosocial ones, reflecting the pressures of within-group and between-group selection; their relative ratios ought to be constant across cultures; 5. There should be a significant prevalence of prosocial proverbs over egoistic ones, reflecting both the need to police self-serving and antisocial behaviours and the privileged position of a group as a social arbiter; their relative ratios ought to be constant across cultures. When analyzed, the data proved consistent with the hypotheses. Proverbs dealing with social and moral life do display stark and direct contradictions. Ralph Waldo Emerson, also an inquirer into the “aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded”, would approve of folklore universally shrugging off consistency.5 Although I can reproduce only a small sample below, it clearly illuminates the transcultural nature of multilevel selection. Engineering social grease by

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retrofitting individuals with social grace, all the pairs you see have equivalents in many, and in many cases all, societies. In fact, direct opposites are often found side by side, as in the opening examples from Burmese, Tamil, Yoruba, and Chinese cultures: By association with whatever friend safety increases (Burmese) By association with whatever friend safety diminishes (Burmese) The visitor’s host is the visitor’s father (Tamil) Visitors and fish stink after three days (Tamil) The gods respond to one according to the goodness of one’s heart (Yoruba) It is some people’s fate always to get the short end of things (Yoruba) Do not violate your conscience (Chinese) Be particular about your conscience and you will have nothing to eat (Chinese) Those who pry into other people’s affairs will hear what they do not like (Libyan) A quarrel that doesn’t concern you is pleasant to hear about (African Hausa) A boat doesn’t go forward if everyone is rowing his own way (Swahili) If all men pulled in one direction, the world would topple over (Yiddish) A bad person is better than an empty house (African Ga-Adangbe) Can meat be kept on trust with a jackal? (Behar) In a village divided against itself even a monkey will not abide (Tamil) Two cocks do not crow from the same roof (African Anang) Your family may chew you but it will not swallow you (Arabic) The malice of relatives is like a scorpion’s sting (Egyptian) Whoever comes first, grinds first (German) If you rise too early, the dew will get you (African Wolof ) There is no virtue in a promise unless it be kept (Danish) Old promises are left behind (Maori) A voluntary burden is no burden (Italian) Everyone lays a burden on the willing horse (Irish) A near neighbour is better than a distant cousin (Italian) Love your neighbour, but don’t pull down the fence (German) Possessions make trust vital (Sumerian) Love thy neighbour, but don’t let him into your house (Maltese) Better one true friend than a hundred relations (Italian) An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship (Spanish) A loan, though old, is no gift (Hungarian) A long continued loan usually confers ownership (Irish) It is more noble to pardon than to punish (Arabic) Pardon one offence, and you invite many (Latin) Revenge is a tree that bears no fruit (Dutch) Revenge is the pleasure of gods (French) He who lives for himself is truly dead to others (Latin) All fingers face in one direction; the thumb alone goes its own way (Yoruba)

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A thing is bigger for being shared (Gaelic) Your partner is your opponent (Egyptian) Authority does not depend on age (African Ovambo) Learn your way from old people (Estonian) A word of kindness is better than a fat pie (Russian) Too much kindness is of no profit to a child or man (Turkish) The children of the same mother do not always agree (African Wolof ) The child of a snake is also a snake (African Bemba) Adversity makes a great man (Japanese) Adversity tries virtue (Arabic)

Charity Begins at Home Proverbs are not circulated by individuals but by communities. As such, they ought to represent the needs of groups by promoting prosociality and putting down egoism. As extant tribal societies teach us, the pressure they bear on individuals to conform to the group ethic can be enormous. Sharing hunting spoils is common not because hunters are naturally good-hearted, but because it is universally expected of them—and buys them all-round goodwill and moral one-upmanship. I found this, indeed, to be the case. Moralistic advice against putting on airs, not repaying debts, forgetting obligations, breaking one’s word, oppressing the less fortunate, not sharing wealth, being lazy, gossipy, vindictive, deceitful, envious, self-centred, jealous, hypocritical, materialistic, or exploitative is the norm. The examples below, culled from thousands of others, should be familiar in their universal spirit. If one does not counsel one’s brother, one will share in the misfortune (Yoruba) Riches are not the only wealth (Icelandic) If the family lives in harmony, all affairs will prosper (Chinese) They don’t unload the caravan for one lame donkey (Iranian) The career of falsehood is short (Pashto) A chief is known by his subjects (Hawaiian) A bad coconut spoils the good ones (Swahili) Kind words wear out no tongues (Danish) The colour does not come off a zebra (African Ovambo) Cheerful company shortens the miles (German) The confession of a fault removes half its guilt (Tamil) Courtesy that is one side cannot last long (French) A common danger produces unity (Slovakian) A good deed bears interest (Estonian) A single finger cannot catch fleas (Haitian) Give a little and you gain a lot (Pashto)

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Charity begins at home (English) A good man protects three villages; a good dog, three houses (Chinese) The staves of ten men make the load of one (Behar) Though you go fifty miles for it, you must have society (Tamil) Love thy neighbour as yourself (Bible) Do not go to his house if he does not come to yours (Tunisian) Credit is invisible fortune (Japanese) Society is ancient as the world (French) However, given the fundamental inclination to take care of number one, we should also see doubt cast on the utility of others. At times family, neighbours, and acquaintances can be less than useful or easy to live with. This should be visible in instructions against prosociality. Again, in terms of propositional logic, this makes no sense. If I extol one course of action, I shouldn’t extol its opposite. But socially it does. Evolution works on what it can get, and what it gets here is different levels of natural selection. At different times individualism and altruism make adaptive and behavioural sense. The number of antisocial proverbs, however, should be significantly smaller than the number of injunctions against egoism. Although, for illustrative purposes, my sample below is the same size as the prosocial sentiments above, the numerical disparity between the two is dramatic, as it should be. Societies that punish leeches, or at least instill the ethic that cheaters should be punished, are more likely to thrive. The best neighbours are vacant lots (French) With your brothers eat and drink, but have no business (Vietnamese) Distance preserves friendship (Iranian) Every peddler praises his own needles (Spanish) A man is a tiger in his own affairs (Tamil) People seldom wish that others prosper (Yoruba) The camel carries the burden, the dog does the panting (Turkish) If you do not ask their help, all men are good natured (Chinese) Better to be alone than in bad company (Spanish) To accept a favour is to lose your liberty (Polish) Everybody collects coals under his own kettle (Finnish) A stolen orange is better tasting than your own (African Bemba) If you want to please everybody, you’ll die before your time (Yiddish) There are only two good men—one dead, the other unborn (Chinese) Unguarded property teaches people to steal (Lebanese) Relatives are friends from necessity (Russian) Self-preservation is the first law of nature (English) When you go out to buy, don’t show your silver (Chinese) A good man is always made to toil (Tamil)

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Kind hearts are soonest wronged (French) Too much trust breeds disappointments (Filipino) Fence your own vineyard, and keep your eyes from those of others (Greek) The first time it’s a favour, the second, a rule (Chinese) Never do business with a relative (Turkish)

God Takes Care of a Blind Cow Of special interest to my study is the relative frequency of prosocial and proindividual proverbs. Before I present the results, let’s take a quick tour of the kitchen where they were prepared. As with all ancient artifacts, proverbs present difficulties. It’s not even that they are authorless, ageless, and lacking a clear place of origin. The biggest problem is that of selection, which is to say representability. Some criteria must have been used by the collectors and anthologists—often but not always the same individuals—to pick their proverbs from the mayfly swarms of others. But the nature of these criteria is rarely stated upfront. One possibility is that those that made the cut represented the rest. Conversely, they could have stood out by virtue of being non-representative. The personalities, which is to say biases, of the anthologists may have left their mark on the dataset. The titles, such as Illuminating Wit, Inspiring Wisdom, Wisdom in Loose Form, or All Men’s Wisdom also tell a story. The anthologists may appreciate wit, but they are drawn like moths to wisdom. This suggests that moralizing proverbs may have been oversampled from the original soup. Their didactic slant may have looked more like the proverbial salt of the earth than the more frivolous or morally murky examples that may have been around. There is also the problem of proverbs often being classified according to the subject matter. Needless to say, if you hunt for proverbs about family, your trophies will reflect your bias. Moreover, taxonomical arbitrariness means that proverbs about family may drift to other sections, say on “nature” or “husbandry”, as  per their surface imagery. Although this can be taken care of by randomizing, the data may already be off-centred by the collector or publisher’s idea of what was collectible or publishable. The central caveat, however, is inherent to all literary sources: interpretation. Your culture or upbringing may make you more (or less) sensitive to expressions of egoism or altruism, making your calculations of what counts as prosociality different from mine. This is compounded by the very nature of the beast. Proverbs are always short, occasionally less pious, and often more nuanced than they are given credit for. This makes their morals not always a slam dunk. Proverbs that go after vices or foibles are certainly moralistic, telling us how to spot folks who are lazy, foxy, nasty, and so on. But take the perennial Not all that glitters is gold. Is it prosocial or proindividual? And is it even moralistic? Taken literally, it only warns us against relying on first impressions. Taken

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figuratively, however, it warns of flashy personalities and anything else that is too good to be true. The second interpretation is solidly proindividual, prescribing caution if not mistrust in relationships. At the same time, it is also prosocial, giving sound advice—one that benefits society at large—to all who would befriend blowhards. Or take the Behar God takes care of a blind cow. Does it profess that it is godlike to help those less fortunate, which would make it prosocial? Or does it counsel us to keep our alms to ourselves, insofar as God takes care of those in need? Or is it purposely ambiguous to tease out our value system? Rooting out personal vices and errors of judgment makes not only for better individuals but also for better collectives. Stamping out social exploitation helps, on the other hand, not only the collective but also any individual living in it. One hand washes the other, with the result that both end up clean. Fortunately, balancing the ambiguity of interpretation, most moralistic proverbs are clearly me-first or we-first in nature—as, on reflection, they should be. All the same, to counter the ambiguity, I ran the analysis twice. The two runs fixed the floor and the ceiling for the two categories: prosocial and proindividual. The first run used a narrow definition, the other an inclusive one. The results yielded minimum and maximum values and a good basis for comparison. We can, after all, expect the relative frequencies of proverbial altruism to be higher than those of egoism. But how much higher exactly? And are these values constant across the globe, or are some cultures more invested in social engineering than others?

Frederick Douglass For all our interest in multilevel selection, the majority of proverbs are neither we-first nor me-first in character. Instead, they remark on life in general, give almanac-type advice to farmers, take note of oddities and regularities, and so on. Indeed, on the narrow definition of what qualifies as moralistic, an average of 83.5 percent of proverbs were neither groupish nor selfish.6 On the inclusive definition, the share of moralistic (either we-first or me-first) proverbs rose to more than half. In the next stage of analysis I discarded the non-moralistic (neutral) proverbs to isolate the prosocial and proindividual ones. Strikingly, the relative ratios of we-first and me-first proverbs turned out to be highly similar across cultures. The slight variation in the data was well within the expected sample scatter, making the findings statistically significant.7 Figure 9.2 graphs the relative shares of we-first and me-first proverbs in nine sample collections. On average selfish advice makes up only a fifth of moralistic proverbs, confirming my hypothesis that prosociality should predominate.8 Figure 9.3 graphs the changes in these distributions in a subset of four collections for which I used an inclusive definition of moralistic proverbs. Crucially,

PROSOCIAL

PROINDIVIDUAL

100

80

60

40

20

0

Chr Cor Jen Mer Mi1 Mi2 Owo Sca Ste

FIGURE 9.2 Relative shares of we-first (moralistic) and me-first (selfish) proverbs in

nine sample collections.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

100

80

60

40

20

0

Cor Mer Mi1 Sca

NARROW DEFINITION FIGURE 9.3 Changes

Cor Mer Mi1 Sca

BROAD DEFINITION

in the relative shares in four collections for which I used an inclusive definition of moralistic proverbs.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

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it reaffirms that the relative shares of selfish and groupish advice don’t differ among the collections. On the narrow definition, it initially appeared that the four collections might differ in their proportions of moralistic proverbs. However, the differences ironed out on the broad definition, graphically visible in Figure 9.3.9 At the end of the day, it turns out, cultures differ not so much in the relative shares of proindividual or prosocial advice as in how broadly they phrase it. On the narrow definition, a small but significant proportion—in one case a full half—takes the side of the individual.10 The broad definition boosts the prosocial category. This is true even for the one collection where all moralistic proverbs were prosocial even on the narrow definition. On the broad definition, their raw number went up, still without producing a single proindividual proverb. Policing altruism, societies make their bottom line loud and clear. So much for the results. Now for the conclusions. Similar levels of prosocial policing, as reflected in the ratios of prosocial proverbs, have been detected in all the languages and cultures under study. The data strongly suggests that I have detected a phenomenon true for all languages and cultures on Earth—past and present. Given that even now there are seven thousand languages in existence, from Albanian to Zulu, this is a staggering spread over which to identify a cultural pattern. To be so constant over such a vast cultural landscape—a good proxy for the planet at large—the pattern identified in the proverbs must be rooted in biology. The data were drawn, after all, from a dazzling variety of cultures, some of which can be assumed to have had zero contact during the era when the proverbs originated. The fact that unrelated compilations display similar rates of prosocial bias also bolsters my conclusions, and even more so that none was compiled with my inquiry in mind. This brings us to one final fascinating question. Does the relative ratio of the prosocial and proindividual proverbs reflect the intensity of the we-first and mefirst instincts in real life? For now just a hypothesis, it’s a reminder that my study of the adaptive origins of moralistic proverbs is only one piece of the puzzle that is the neo-Darwinian account of paleomorality. Even this piece, however, attests to the need to plan for the evolved human nature in utopia. Naturally, at the end of the day proverbs reward study not only as records of human paleomorality but also as oral literature, whose resonance makes itself felt in a number of social contexts. One of the more consequential ones is, in fact, American politics, as attested by the abolitionist oratory of the 1872 American vice presidential candidate, Frederick Douglass.11 With pitch-perfect rhetoric, Douglass leaned heavily on biblical proverbs to bolster the moral gravitas in his abolitionist philippics. Using the authentic voice of the people boosted his authoritativeness, with the added cachet of echoing timeless social wisdom in the fight against slavery. As collective statements, it must be said, proverbs are well suited to being used as moral and political

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weapons, a lesson not lost on generations of American politicians always in search of that folksy touch.

God’s Grace Selective pressures of evolution have hardwired us to spot patterns in the inkblots of life. The value of integrating a predator’s face in twilight shrubbery is immediate and universal. However, the price we pay for this adaptation is that sometimes we detect something in nothing. Especially at night, a pair of burning eyes and a row of ivories could be conjured up by an overactive brain. But, in general, the brain that played it safer got to live longer. Better safe than sorry, indeed. This predisposition to find patterns and meanings carries over to other areas of life. Neuroimaging studies document, in fact, something curious about the parietal lobe, the region of the brain that senses where our body ends and the outside world begins. Meditation, mantra-induced trance, or avid prayer can suppress this adaptive mechanism. The result is a sense of dissolution of self and a feeling of oneness with the universe or God. Believe it or not, the perception of God’s grace and everything it subjectively entails may be a by-product of the adaptive biology of the brain.12 We are disposed by theory of mind and mirror neurons to detect agency, sometimes even when it is not there. This carries over to supernatural agency, whether it manifests itself in religious, causal, or judiciary (compensational) form. The idea of supernatural justice either in world or in the afterlife is crucial in that it helps spread the belief in reward and punishment in proportion to our deeds. The idea that people get their just deserts is hard to shake off even by nonbelievers, who ought to know better. In 2009, however, Evolutionary Psychology reported a novel twist to the old story: a strong antagonistic correlation between utopia and religiosity.13 The data are eloquent. Countries with the lowest levels of social dysfunction— as measured by rates of homelessness, unemployment, abortion, teen pregnancies, STDs, homicide, incarceration, divorce, and seventeen other factors—are invariably the most secular. Countries bedevilled by social problems, such as the United States, are among the most religious, as reflected in frequency of prayer, church attendance, self-confessed belief, and so forth. Behind the correlation lies causality. With the easing of socioeconomic woes, religiosity ebbs. Conversely, dystopia turns the religious tap on. The ease with which people drift away from God when conditions improve challenge the popular view in some countries, including notably America, that religious practice is the bedrock of existence. Rather it seems to be a flexible coping mechanism. When dysfunctionality reaches certain levels, people deal with it by turning their eyes toward heaven. This doesn’t mean that social problems alone account for religiosity, much as it doesn’t mean that we have no evolutionary predilection for God—for seeing

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the supernatural in the natural. It simply means that religiosity may be less effective at engineering utopia than are social programs, and that social programs may, in fact, control levels of religiosity. This should come as a shock in the United States where, beginning with the White House and the Hill, it’s politically incorrect to admit that God may be an adaptation and sometimes even maladaptation. The ongoing social experiment that is the United States is of great interest to other countries, not least because for a century now Uncle Sam has taken on the mantle of the leader of the Western world. But never mind America First. Humanity itself gives little indication that it is fit to take care of the planet. Although evolution selected us and not any other species for intelligence, ­Malamud—echoed by Disch, Vonnegut, Atwood—is not convinced that we were nature’s best choice. Global stewardship calls for a global consciousness, neither of which is much in evidence. While politicians hide inaction in planet-friendly rhetoric, scientists peg the global rise in temperatures at 1 to 6 degrees Celsius by the century’s end. Never mind the upper range, shrug the optimists. Never mind the lower, retort the pessimists. Trust who you will, but the Second Flood may not arrive with a nuclear bang. It may come with barely a whisper as icecaps melt and sink into the oceans which overrun coastal resorts where tourists fan themselves with dog-eared copies of The Year of the Flood.

Notes 1. BBC News (2016). 2. Proverbs, 1:3. 3. McGlone and Tofigbakhsh; Oppenheimer et al. 4. Hatred of mothers-in-law may be more likely among women—the conflict between the first important woman in a man’s life and the upstart of a wife—but there’s almost no trace of the equivalent conflict on the male side; that the mother-wife conflict should focus on a man suggests that patriarchy has to do with it. 5. Emerson (1841). 6. To be exact, between 9.8 percent and 23.2 percent, with 95 percent probability. 7. Fisher’s Exact Test (p = 0.10). From left to right, the collections are Christian; Cordry; Jensen; Mertvago; Mieder (1989); Mieder (1998); Owomoyela; Scarborough; Stewart. 8. The extremes are 6.7 percent in Mieder (1989), 36 percent in Owomoyela. 9. Fisher’s Exact Test was used to deal with the low numbers of proindividual proverbs; an initial sign that the share of selfish proverbs may vary among cultures (p = 0.04 on the narrow definition), was disconfirmed using the broader definition (p = 0.14). 10. The sample of native North American proverbs was only sixty, which could account for the difference; on the broad definition the sample converged on the values from the larger collections. 11. Mieder (2001). 12. Newberg et al. 13. Paul; on evolution and religion, see Bulbulia et  al.; Voland and Schiefenhovel; Feierman.

PART IV

Uchronia Kurt Vonnegut

10 THE ISLANDS OF THE DAY BEFORE

Groundhog Day Most modern utopias are really uchronias, with ideal places replaced by ideal times. Put differently, most modern utopias are travellers in time, whisking us off to better futures at the speed of thought. Galápagos, to pick the first book off the shelf, shuttles in a blink of an eye between the late twentieth century—itself the near future of the book’s publication—and back-to-nature utopia a million years on. Vonnegut’s last book Timequake resorts to an even more explicit variety of time travel. A rift in the space-time continuum rewinds the universe roughly ten years before the cosmic engine shifts back into forward again. Now, as time grinds its way through the same ten years, everyone on Earth is forced to relive them one groundhog day after another, waiting for free will to kick back in. If siting utopia on Earth was a no-brainer for more than two thousand years after Plato, today it is effectively a non-starter, fuelling a subgenre of Twin Earth or Earth-type utopias out in space. But far from being a brainchild of modernity, time-travel utopia is virtually as old as utopia itself. Long before the suspended animation of Julian West there were dream visions of Cockaigne, prehistorical golden ages, and tribal paradises lost in the dawn of time. Be that as it may, over the course of the twentieth century time travel has become virtually synonymous with science fiction. Does this make Kurt Vonnegut a practitioner of the genre? You bet, if you believe the young man who, in a letter from 1950, confided of his hopes to build a reputation as a science fiction writer.1 Not on your life, if you believe the established artist, who never tired of trotting out Mother Night, Jailbird, and Bluebeard as proof that he was nothing of the sort.

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Today, flanked by three volumes of his works issued by the Library of America, Vonnegut can safely thumb his nose at science fiction, much as his fellow member of the Library of America canon, Mark Twain. If the comparison between these two of America’s favourite humourists and satirists is by now a matter of course, it is partly because the younger writer eagerly sought it out. Reviewing Galápagos, Disch took such pairing for granted, likening Vonnegut to one “droll, disingenuous, utterly middle-American, if now high middle-aged, Huck Finn”.2 In Timequake, Vonnegut himself makes the same point with the help of his alter ego, Kilgore Trout. Lionizing Twain as the funniest American of his time, the elderly Trout tacitly claims that title for his fellow time traveller in the book, the utopian socialist Kurt Vonnegut. Adding fuel to these comparisons, Twain himself was drawn to time travel and utopia, notably in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, whose hero awakens in the Dark Ages and brings the knights of the round table up to speed in modern science. An engineer by profession, Hank Morgan sets out like Calvin Cohn to engineer a modern utopia. As expected of Twain, the anachronisms between the chivalric England and the mechanical know-how of the American Gilded Age are good for a few laughs. But as Hank betters only the medieval technology but not the men who wield it, a Yankee paradise turns into a slaughterhouse when feudal battles give way to warfare on industrial scale.

Cynics Are Lapsed Romantics Most cynics are lapsed romantics who, while wishing it were otherwise, can no longer believe in human goodness—in utopia, if you will. True enough, as with Twain, later in life Vonnegut’s drollness would acquire dark, even misanthropic, hues. In 1990, a New York Times review sized up his mix of idealism and pessimism in these words: “He is a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe”.3 Belief, in Vonnegut’s case, had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with human rights and humane values. Both are the flip side of even his rowdiest farces, befitting a writer who from 1992 until his death in 2007 held the post of honorary president of the American Humanist Association, practicing its motto of doing good without a god. Vonnegut’s activism on behalf of free speech and human rights—in 1993, flanked by Atwood and other literary heavyweights, he petitioned against the murder of journalists in Turkey—was one reason why many readers were willing to take even his fictions at face value.4 There has always been a strong autobiographical current in Vonnegut’s fiction and it only grew stronger with time. Many of his later novels open with lengthy personal prologues, padding—grumbled his detractors—thin booklets into thin books. The books themselves thin the narrative thread, coming more and more to resemble essayistic memoirs. By the time of Timequake, true life crowds out

FIGURE 10.1 Old-fashioned

humanism: RefuseFascism.org. No! In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

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the story so much that some literary critics balked at calling it a novel, calling it the autobiography of a novel instead.5 The term aptly describes the episodic montage of narrative fragments, loopy thought experiments, no-holds-barred social riffing, and confessional autobiography in which real people and wacky characters shake hands, trade pleasantries, and hoist Uncle Sam on a skewer before roasting him to a crisp. A similar autobiographical collage is Fates Worse Than Death, released in 1991, the year to which Timequake jolts back the universe. Guess what? Timequake recycles half of the Fates Worse Than Death in an intertextual wink to readers who would read the same words twice: first as nonfiction, then as a novel. By the time of Timequake fiction and nonfiction rub shoulders on every page while Vonnegut pops in and out as Kilgore Trout, as Kurt Vonnegut, and as himself. But be careful. While they bear the same name, the two Kurts are not one. For one, the timequaker Vonnegut is married to the widow of another character. Even more to the point, he outlives his creator. “The date yesterday was November 11th, 2010”, writes the fictive Kurt, by which time his namesake has been three years dead.6 The ghost who narrates Galápagos is another incarnation of the author. He is—in a manner of speaking—the flesh and blood of a fictive writer who has over the decades become Vonnegut’s mask to slip on when convenient. Fittingly, the Second Flood to which he bears witness is an evolutionary fugue on the central themes from Vonnegut’s life, from utopian idealism and historical cynicism to father-son conflicts and the eschatology of that overweening species, Homo sapiens sapiens.

What Are People For? As with most writers, Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano contains in embryonic form the themes to which he kept returning for the next half a century. The principal one, in his case, takes the form of a question that beats from the heart of every utopia: “What are people for?”7 In the context it is not surprising that, even as Player Piano borrows left and right from the dystopian Brave New World, it was reprinted in a Bantam paperback as Utopia 14.8 Vonnegut’s question cannot but bring to mind Norbert Wiener’s bestseller The Human Use of Human Beings, published just two years earlier. Working at the time as a publicist for General Electric, Vonnegut would have almost certainly heard of Wiener, celebrated as the father of cybernetics. And he would have heard of the book, which advocated a radical—not to say utopian—­makeover in attitudes to work and society in the looming age of automation. A key passage from Vonnegut’s utopia God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater points, in fact, to the title of Wiener’s book: In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So—if

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we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as so often has been suggested, rub them out.9 Vonnegut would return to the idea of social paradise with a regularity verging on fixation. Already Player Piano sketched an alternative to the capitalist individualism of the American Dream. The hero buys a rundown farm and tries to kick-start a new way of life away from automated production lines and corporate rat race. Filled with rustic values, the farm is a kissing cousin of the Village, where Alexa’s sister finds her utopia in 334. Time and again, with or without biblical overtones, modern utopias resurrect the trope of prodigal sons and daughters returning to the rural homestead. Somehow agrarian life is supposed to turn mean-street egoists into mellow altruists, as if Mao’s cultural revolution or Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism had never taken place. Quashing another myth of the soil cultivating the soul, members of the Twin Oaks commune would report that a lot of them were just as depressed as their friends in the city.10 All the same, during the Sixties even Vonnegut’s son Mark got bitten by the utopian bug. Co-founding a hippie commune at Lake Powell in Canada, he lived out the rustic life in the name of engineering a better version of himself. Later in the decade his father would meet up with hippie leaders, cultivating an image of a countercultural rebel. In 1972 he even confided of his “Utopian dreaming”, centred on the formation of “good gangs”.11 In the spirit of utopian dreaming, Vonnegut even toyed with the idea of founding a non-profit organization called Life Engineering, which was to combine social engineering with social conscience. In 1972 he actually lobbied Democratic vice president candidate Sargent Shriver to adopt Lonesome No More as his campaign slogan. Seeing as this was the subtitle of Vonnegut’s loony quasiutopia Slapstick, the politician politely declined. The ultimate expression of social engineering spilling from novels to real life, however, are Vonnegut’s amendments to the Constitution, rolled out in his essays, speeches, and not least Timequake. Nothing testifies to his utopian idealism like these putative laws of the land. Article XXXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage. Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the communities, and the attendant dignities. Article XXX: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.12

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If only these articles could squeak by a venom-spitting deadlocked Congress, what a wonderful world this would be. Just like the world of the Sixties’ bubblegum rock, in which you don’t need to know much history or biology because utopia is just a puppy love away. There is only one problem. Like nature, human nature is deeply asymmetrical. It, too, has its own kind of entropy. In a closed physical system entropy can never decrease, which is why we don’t see shattered wine glasses reassemble themselves and why we don’t see dead people show up on the dance floor. When you think about it, however, the second law of thermodynamics has an equivalent in the second law of sociodynamics. Contra Vonnegut, it says that you cannot legislate love for your fellow man. You can only legislate against its lack, as it scales up from social bullying to genocide.

A Garden of Eden Here Utopia in our time has never been far from Vonnegut’s mind. Tellingly it has always borne the hallmarks of socialism right from George Orwell, whom the young man read nonstop and whose life and morals he regarded as exemplary. In 1995, as he was completing Timequake for the first time, he poignantly recalled the utopian dreams of his and Orwell’s generation. With the Great Depression and the Second World War over, he wrote, “we planned to build a Garden of Eden here”.13 Naturally, as soon as you begin to dream of utopia, social engineering cannot be far behind. Not unexpectedly, therefore, in his correspondence Vonnegut returns time and again to what he calls the extraordinarily important idea he picked up from anthropology. Culture, he notes time and again, is like a gadget that can be tinkered with just like a Model T Ford.14 Vonnegut goes on to reiterate his belief in social engineering, contending that it’s not that difficult to identify some of America’s ills, from the cult of firearms and of physical aggression to downgrading women as second-class citizens. Uncle Sam, he shrugs, can surely build a better version of itself. In the same breath, however, he rips into literary critics who charge him with giving the illusion of knowing how to fix our society without spelling out these fixes. It must be flattering to have one’s fictions taken seriously enough to arouse complaints that they contain no blueprint for utopia. Come to think of it, however, this is not exactly a novelist’s job description. In the day when the White House itself routinely trucks in make-believe, it may be understandable why some people look to writers for blueprints of social policy. But in doing so, they overlook the difference between fiction and politics. This is not to say that Vonnegut’s fiction doesn’t aim to affect its readers and, down the road, their attitudes. Take Cat’s Cradle, a story of a truthfully false prophet Bokonon, who preaches the concept of karass. The story may be all whimsical make-believe, but the concept is one that the author invested a lot in.

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To judge by the number of those who for more than half a century now have identified themselves as Bokononists on census bureau forms, he is not the only one. As in God’s Grace, karass is about extending the willing obligation to people unrelated to us by blood. True, we do it often enough through marriage, adoption, or friendship. But karass is about extending the willing obligation to utter strangers and ultimately to all humanity. It is about welcoming all people on Earth as one extended family, which genetically speaking we are. It is about making good on Shylock’s plaint that, no matter how different we are, if you prick us, tickle us, and poison us, we all bleed, laugh, and die. Blood can bind a hundred kin into a clan. Religion can tether a billion souls into a super-congregation. But humanism transcends such bonds, transferring them onto all of humankind. This ultimate commonwealth can bestow the ultimate sense of belonging, shared experience, and strength in numbers onto anyone anywhere on the planet. And if karass sounds like a blue-sky utopia, this is precisely why it returns time and again in Vonnegut’s novels. In Cat’s Cradle, two social engineers draw up blueprints for a tropical paradise where everyone ultimately embraces the tenets of Bokononism, including karass. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a multimillionaire turned social worker aids strangers as if they were his family. In Slapstick, an American president social-engineers extended families that foster social wisdom, private decency, and direct democracy.15 In Jailbird, a bag lady who heads the biggest corporation on the planet plans to hand her fairy-tale riches over to the people. In Galápagos, a worldwide catastrophe leaves in its wake an eco-friendly Earth perpetually cleansed of murder and war, with humanity whittled down to a single family line. And so it goes right up to Timequake, which scrambles spacetime itself to issue a wake-up call for all of humankind. “You were sick”, explains Kilgore Trout to every American he encounters sleepwalking through life, “but now you’re well, and there’s work to do”.16

Nothing in This Book Is True Timequake, Vonnegut’s elegy to lost time, pines for the golden age when Americans used to measure their lives by the stories they read. And if this sounds idealistic, not to say utopian, then utopian fiction is idealistic to a fault. Instead of describing things as they are, as nonfiction does, it flees from reality in order to tell us tales of make-believe. It introduces places and faces that never were and asks us to take them—and it—seriously. But few writers exploit this paradox as subtly as Vonnegut does in Cat’s Cradle. Nothing in this book is true, asserts the preface to the book. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary? No worries; neither have generations of readers and literary critics. What could be more banal than a novelist telling us that he wrote a work of fiction? Appearances, however, can be misleading, and to see why, we need to strip the sentence to its logical nuts and bolts.

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As a preface, and thus as nonfiction, it asserts that nothing in the book is true. So far so good, since Cat’s Cradle is fiction. However, the preface is also part of the book. Hence, if the sentence is true, it must be false since something in the book—namely the preface—is true. This is, however, just the first twist of the loop, because if “Nothing in this book is true” is false, then something in the book must be true. Since it’s not the story of Bokonon and ice-nine, which is wild fiction, it must be the preface. But if the preface is true, the same chain of reasoning kicks in. So, if the preface is true, it’s false, and if it’s false, it’s true. We are trapped in the liar’s paradox. You may be familiar with the ancient form of the paradox: All Cretans are liars, says Cretan. The canonical formulation, This sentence is false, is probably the source of Vonnegut’s own variant on the theme. Note that, although the above examples are self-referential, they need not be. Take the conjunction of sentences: The other sentence is false and The other sentence is true. Neither is self-referential, but together they are up to their necks in paradox. Try this at home. Take a length of tape, give it a 180-degree twist, and splice the ends together. Now you are holding a Möbius loop, a three-dimensional model of the liar’s paradox. Though the tape had two sides, the loop has only one. But, like the liar’s paradox, it hides it by looping back onto itself and racing three-dimensional figure eights into infinity. Thanks to the Polish logician Alfred Tarski, we know how to climb out of this particular logical well. Paradoxes of this sort can be voided by distinguishing sentences made in the object language from meta-sentences about sentences. This disables the conjunction, in effect cutting the loop open. But what about Vonnegut’s own loop? Can anyone fully understand Cat’s Cradle without understanding the logic trap sprung on the reader in the preface? Maybe, maybe not. After all, the paradox in the preface perfectly illuminates the crux of Bokononism, the paradoxical creed at the crux of the novel. By bringing to light the contradictions at the heart of this made-up religious system, it shines the light of epiphany on the contradictions at the heart of other creeds, be they religious or utopian. Although we cannot be said to understand anything if our premises harbour an absurdity, most religions and utopias get around it by taking cue from Tertullian and embracing the absurd. But there is one source of contradictions so nonsensical in their logical, physical, and causal consequences that no amount of faith can accommodate them in the real world. This is why, in the real world, time travel is confined to the pages of fiction.

Darwin’s Islands Galápagos, proclaims the leading Vonnegut scholar, is a novel of “gentle humor, not destructive satire”.17 Another finds it optimistic in its “predication”—by which he means prediction—of the future of the human race. Which only shows

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that, even though they wrote books about Galápagos, they either hadn’t read it, or forgot what it was about, or just didn’t understand it. Galápagos depicts a calamitous financial and economic meltdown, the latest in what it calls a series of murderous twentieth-century catastrophes. The Earth buckles under continental droughts, starvation, and hunger riots. Wars rage, missiles fly, and the world order implodes like a soap bubble. Meanwhile, an ova-gobbling pandemic wipes out humankind in a single generation. As billions go into the night, on one of Darwin’s islands a handful of survivors jump-start a million-year devolution into blubbery seals. All this, mind you, is gentle humour and optimism about the future—if you believe the scholars. As even this brief sketch reveals, however, Galápagos is precisely the opposite: a satire of a decidedly destructive kind. On its receiving end lies humanity, as rudely wise as in Disch and Malamud, and that errant series of copying errors we call evolution. Evolution, jeers Vonnegut, selected for our big brains and, indirectly, for big ideas such as the stock market which breed social equivalents of heart attacks and corporate equivalents of syphilis. Time and time again, as he plots the survival of our species by the skin of our teeth, he blasts human brainpower as a near-fatal defect. But is it really? Since no one can be blamed for the random genetic mutations that erupt in the global pandemic, Vonnegut’s beef is not with evolution but with the capitalist world order. Even more to the point, dissing brainpower presupposes brainpower, undermining his entire line of attack. Seals don’t write or read social satire, and any brain big enough to go after big brains gives itself the lie. This is not to mention that taking intelligence out of humanity amounts to letting stupidity and ignorance run amok. Or that, when it comes to containing virulent outbreaks like Ebola or SARS, big brains always prove the best line of defence. Vonnegut never tires, however, of repeating that the grunting, chortling, farting seals who are our descendants are superior to us in every way. Never mind that they feed on an unvarying diet of seaweed and fish. Or that during food shortages, they starve to death in droves. Or that, even at the best of times, they are devoured alive by orcas and sharks. On balance, the narrative premise behind Vonnegut’s lampoon on evolution turns out to be as leaky as a gold-digger’s pan. Take away the human brains, the root of all evil in Galápagos, and what’s left? Peaceable, ecologically welladjusted seals are still only seals. And although the narrator stubbornly calls them humans, it makes as much sense as calling us fish because we share our evolutionary line with fish. All these sleights of hand catch up with Vonnegut when he eulogizes the innocence of the seal population. It is true that seals don’t murder one another or wage colonial wars. Except that doesn’t make them innocent in the moral sense. Plants, planets, and seals are not innocent. They just are. Innocence entails free will—the capacity for choosing to be or not to be innocent—that seals conspicuously lack but big-brain humans don’t.

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Like Einstein on an Elevator “I have been ruminating extra-hard about natural selection”, mused Vonnegut, “like Einstein on an elevator, pondering, every time the thing started or stopped, what the fuck was really going on”.18 His 1999 letter to biologist Stephen Jay Gould shows that his preoccupation with evolution didn’t end with Galápagos. Nor, for that matter, did his preoccupation with time travel, epitomized by Einstein’s iconic thought experiment which ushered in general relativity and spacetime entanglement. The two men met shortly after the publication of Galápagos when Gould came to listen to one of Vonnegut’s lectures. As it turned out, Vonnegut’s take on rapid evolutionary change was music to Gould’s ears, who told him that Galápagos was pretty good science and that fur-covered human mutants were not uncommon.19 He also began to assign it to his students at Harvard. Evolutionary change can be rapid indeed. During the last two thousand years—just a hundred generations since the Celts tried to fend off the Roman invaders—even the population of Great Britain has undergone a measurable mutation. Today’s Britons are not only taller, but have a greater share of blueeyed blonds and blondes than at the time of Julius Caesar. The blondes also have wider hips to accommodate births of babies with larger heads.20 This means that, even as Vonnegut rants against big brains, the evolutionary gradients are taking us exactly in the opposite direction. What’s more, in subtle ways we have already taken evolution into our own hands, again steering it toward bigger brains and bigger heads. Moreover, the consequences of our interventions are detectable on a global scale. In the past, mothers ran a mortal risk if their babies couldn’t be born the natural way. Solution? Cesarean section, so popular nowadays that in America it accounts for one in three deliveries. Now, however, the genes behind the ­problem—large baby head and narrow birth canal—are not flushed from the gene pool as when mothers and infants perished at birth. As a result, small pelvises and large baby heads spread into the population, though at a rate that doesn’t threaten the species.21 Another place where, in spite of Gould’s assurance, Vonnegut’s evolutionary novel is not good science is that humans are not the only species to lie and deceive. Not to search too far, the great apes are not only capable of deception but, like us, of recognizing deceptive intentions. In evolutionary terms cheating is actually common, from freeriders to females of bird species sneaking sex on the side and tricking their mates into rearing other males’ offspring. The purpose of Vonnegut’s assault on our brainpower and our civilization is to decentralize humankind in the cosmic scheme of things. Paradoxically, of course, putting us at the centre of this Copernican shift only drags us back into the picture. It is the human race, after all, that is the subject of de-anthropocentrization.

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We are like Adam and Eve who, when booted from paradise, were still the focus of their social engineer’s wrath. In the novel, the second garden east of Eden is found a thousand miles west of Ecuador on one of the Galápagos Islands, where the human race gets a fresh start. Away from the continental landmasses, it is the only place where the ovadevouring bacterium doesn’t reach—or so we are asked to believe. Over time this isolation is a critical factor in the evolution of a new language, new culture, and ultimately new species. Evidently more interested in putting down big brains than in developing the anthropology of island life, Vonnegut allots the bulk of the book to near apocalypse rather than time-removed utopia. More’s the pity, given the dramatic potential inherent in bio-engineering deaggression from our species, latent in many hippies’ memories of communes being like islands with radically different cultures from the human mainland.22

Greater Love Hath No Man Than This Vonnegut’s novels teem with spoilers thanks to their timelines, which seesaw between the present and the future. But Galápagos takes this to another level, affixing stars to the names of characters who are about to die. This narrative determinism is boosted by the presence of Mandarax, a handheld computer similar in its role to that of the tragic chorus. Throughout the novel it delivers literary quotes—including the proverbial Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends—that gloss the action at hand.23 Given this pall of predetermination reminiscent of a classical tragedy, the suspense in Vonnegut comes not from what happens but how it happens. A tragedy will enact its course—not to say curse—no matter what lengths the hero might go to in order to outrun his fate. Analogously, a comedy will resolve itself in personal restitution and social reintegration no matter how many castaways and outcasts it produces on the way to the Hollywood ending. Another way of saying this is that tragedy and comedy are ontologically distinct from the real world. In our world there is no teleology that guides events to a foretold outcome, be it tragic or joyful. The universe is not intentionally disposed toward us. It is indeterministic and neutral. And, as tragedy and comedy, so dystopia and utopia. With physics determined by metaphysics, utopia and dystopia diverge on either side of realism. The positive amplitude belongs to utopia which, ontologically speaking, is unrealistic in the manner of comedy. Both have inbuilt compensatory mechanisms for bringing out smiles all around. On the other end of realism lies dystopia, as deterministic in character but negative in amplitude. The metaphysical slant is encoded into their respective etymologies. The good in eutopia and the bad in dystopia fix their respective natures, so much

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so that to violate them would be to step outside the genre. A last-minute prole revolution that frees Winston Smith and ends party tyranny is a no-no in terms of the dystopian contract. Analogously, an ova-devouring pandemic that wipes out human life from Nowhere to Erewhon might make a good story, but not utopia. As my examples suggest, however, genres and ontologies can be hybridized with the help of time jumps, just like they are in Galápagos. The apocalyptic near future, a year ahead of publication, and the ecotopia a million years downstream don’t easily map onto the same narrative canvas. But they don’t have to when the narrator can travel in time—snap—just like that. To modern utopia, time travel is as indispensable as roux is to gumbo, even as time travel in the form of compression, dilation, flashbacks, and flash-forwards is present in virtually all narratives. Modern utopians, be they writers or reformers, see themselves as realists with a progressivist vision. But their realism necessarily lies in the distant future because prognosticating for next week is simple meteorology. Put differently, utopia is a child of the future just because this is where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.

Notes 1. Wakefield, 33. 2. Disch (2005), 67; see also Granville Hicks; for Vonnegut’s self-comparison with Twain, see Allen, 275. 3. McInerney. 4. “Murder in Turkey”, New York Review of Books 13 May, 1993. 5. Klinkowitz (2004), 151; on the nature of fiction, see Swirski (2010). 6. Timequake, Vol. 3: 604. 7. Player Piano, 320; echoed by “What in the hell are people for?” in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vol. 1: 204. 8. Vonnegut in Allen, 93. 9. Vol. 1: 332; italics Vonnegut’s. 10. Reece, 192; Kuhlman. 11. Wakefield, 181; on life engineering, see Allen, 243. 12. Numbering misordered by Vonnegut (Vol. 3: 603, 620); see Wakefield, 362. 13. Wakefield, 364. 14. Wakefield 318; 316. 15. Timequake (Vol. 3: 619) refers to large Ibo families making collective decisions; these are, however, genetic kin. 16. Vol. 3: 614; cf. Vonnegut’s “work to do” in his putative Article XXXIX of the US Constitution. 17. Klinkowitz (2004), 127; Shields, 368. 18. Wakefield, 381. 19. Freese, 555–557, 581–582. 20. The Economist (2016), “Not”. 21. Briggs. 22. Andersen, 39. 23. Vol. 2: 694.

11 DO THE CHRONOMOTION WITH ME

Joe Pesci Shrimp The first story of his to arouse censors, laughed Vonnegut in a letter from 1996, was about time travellers to the Holy Land at the time of the Crucifixion.1 In the spirit of the times, they get to meet and even measure Jesus, who turns out to be a Joe Pesci shrimp at five foot three. Pandemonium ensues when the time travellers come back home with the tidings. Time travel, modern utopia’s weapon of choice, returns in Vonnegut’s last novel. The timequake in Timequake hits on 13 February, 2001, an anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the event that stamped such a profound emotional caesura on his life. Derailed, time falls behind schedule to 17 February, 1991. Paradoxically, as with anything involving time travel, the timequake hits therefore on 17 February, 1991 too. No less paradoxically, the timeslip ends on the day it began, 13 February, 2001. Mirroring the internal chronology, the genesis of Timequake records its own series of time loops. The first version of the book was completed at the end of 1995. Scrapped, it would never be seen again save for the passages salvaged for the second version, the one that would go to the printer. “I  have finished Timequake yet again”, joked Vonnegut in 1997. “It’s beyond post-modern. It’s positively posthumous”.2 But Vonnegut’s correspondence reveals that the idea for a time-looping novel had been rattling in his head for a good ten years before it eventually saw the light of day. From time to time, as in a letter from 1993, he would explicitly toy with a premise whereby everyone on Earth has to relive ten years of the past.3 Timequake proper, or Timequake 2, as Vonnegut would sometimes call it, was eventually released in 1997. It would climb to number seven on the New York

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Times fiction list, buoyed by elegiac reviews that praised the novelist as much as the novel. More than one noted that, in its mordant playfulness, it sounded a lot like one of Voltaire’s contes philosophiques, earlier masterpieces of fantastic satire and satirical fantasy. Back in the eighteenth century, once the Enlightenment philosophy had ditched the yoke of theology, it became free to engage in often biting social criticism. Montesquieu in France, Locke in England, and Franklin in America put their talents at the service of humanitarian philosophy, pursuing it principally in essay form. But when it came to the philosophical tall tale, it was Voltaire’s Candide and Micromégas that set the gold standard. Sounding for all the world like it was dashed off by Kilgore Trout, the latter narrates the arrival of two gigantic visitors from the stellar system of Sirius. The pair pluck a vessel right out of the Baltic Sea and begin to interrogate the Lilliputian humans about their times and mores, exposing the cruelty and folly of the allegedly enlightened society. Ousting humankind from the centre of their universe, Micromégas is an eighteenth-century Timequake minus the timequake.

Scrambled Eggs Just like in John le Carré, who also can never tell a story straight from the beginning to the end, time warps are Vonnegut’s favourite narrative device. Chopping timelines into suey that readers will need to put together is more than a matter of his technique. It is a matter of style. So essential, in fact, are flashbacks and flash-forwards to his brand of storytelling that they amount to an architectonic principle. By the time we get to the storylines, the temporal dimension gets even more out of joint. In The Sirens of Titan, for example, time is fully deterministic. A region of spacetime in which all of time exists simultaneously creates a closed-loop universe as predetermined as anything in Oedipus Rex. Just as in Sophocles’s play, in The Sirens of Titan the tragedy of human agency is that there isn’t any. Characters, including one named Chrono, are merely pawns on the cosmic chessboard, acting out the master plan of a master planner. In Slaughterhouse-Five, an alien race practices storytelling without sequentiality. Time for them is not a matter of a beginning, middle, and end. Nor is it a matter of cause and effect or plot and moral. Their storytelling is said to be manifold and simultaneous, a sum of all times presented all at once. Time travel on their terms is the easiest thing in the world. It is not a matter of moving forward or backward but in any direction at all. All this comes to a head in the storytelling experiment with free will and the experience of time that is Timequake. It’s an open question how much of its dream-like character owes to Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992), another slender and plotless book that made waves at the time when Vonnegut was wrestling with time-loops. Lightman, too, conjures up a mosaic of time

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distortions thick with novelistic potential by dint of running against the eternal problem of free will. Vonnegut’s novel fractures the continuity of spacetime in the name of illuminating the truth of the proverb about an unexamined life not being worth living. With a sense of satirical gravitas going back to Voltaire, Timequake fashions itself into a self-help book in the tradition of Franklin’s autobiography. It is a recollection of a life in the tranquility of twilight, full of friendly advice from a politically incorrect Dr. Phil. By way of a scrambled-eggs chronology, Vonnegut mixes and remixes a handful of themes into the books’ leitmotifs. They are, in no particular order, time travel, social engineering, storytelling as modelling, an autobiography of a German American, and the end of a life, a century, and a millennium. This is a Vonnegut novel we’re talking about, of course, so all this is interspersed with satirical horseplay by means of which Vonnegut kebabs the excesses of our civilization. At first blush, Timequake may look just like a slapdash collection of personal and historical ins and outs, no more than fodder for rhetorical flourishes and ironic editorializing. Vonnegut’s ruminations on his craft provide good reasons to believe, however, that the free-associative exterior hides a finicky design, as becomes a self-confessed “basher” who couldn’t move forward until the sentence he was working on was pitch-perfect.4 This is not to deny that the book promotes redundancy, be it in the form of repetition, refrain, periphrasis, or amplification, to the rank of a compositional principle. But stylistically, like old-school rappers, Vonnegut practices minimalist aesthetics. Staccato sentences are chiselled to perfection and paragraphs artfully lineated to set off anthropology at its most ironic. The result, concluded Disch in his review, is “a patchwork of one-liners, catchphrases, and tangential anecdotes that yields a sum wonderfully larger than its parts”.5

Ten Years in Spacetime As time-travel fiction goes, Timequake is in many ways smart about how it goes about it. For starters, going back in time does nothing to change the past. This is a refreshing break from threadbare, tail-chasing time loops where you travel in time, date your mother, and end up becoming your own father. After all, once you open the door to chronomotion, any kind of nonsense becomes possible. Second, when the time arrow is reversed, Vonnegut’s universe reverts to an earlier state in line with what we know of astrophysics. This is to say that, by going back in time, the universe contracts. The duration of the timequake is, after all, not ten years in time but in spacetime. Picture an inflating balloon. If you go back in time, you will find the balloon occupying a smaller volume of space. Like balloon, like universe. This is why, if you could travel to King Arthur’s court, you would see the distribution and magnitude of stars in the sky very

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different from ours. Going back in time, Vonnegut realizes, is not simply a matter of deleting you here and inserting you there (or rather then). It is backdating the entire spacetime: astro-engineering on the scale of the universe. Yet, even as he gets many things right, Vonnegut sounds a false note when it comes to the memory of lost time. In Timequake, the afflicted timequakers remember their past, which for ten years is also their future, but are condemned to repeat it down to the last detail. Their memories, however, trip the logic of Vonnegut’s thought experiment insofar as the end of the timequake doesn’t follow from its premises. Remember: the timequakers don’t experience amnesia.6 They remember everything prior to the timeslip. Although they are powerless to change any part of their ten-year rerun, they know every detail of their lives up to the moment when spacetime ripped— just like you know every detail of the last ten years of your life. But in the novel, when the timeslip runs out its course and free will returns, the timequakers act like they have no memory of it at all. Cars hurtle unattended to their driver’s death. Pilots fail to navigate the planes that crash to the ground (never mind that most planes are on autopilot). Instead of welcoming the end of what is in effect a ten-year prison sentence served in the confines of their skins, people act as if they were still in the timequake. Try this at home. You are now reading section “Ten Years in Spacetime” in Chapter 11. Go back to the beginning of Chapter 11 and reread it. As you will see—or as you can easily thought-experiment in your head—there comes a moment when you remember that you’re about to reach the end of your rerun. By the time you get to this paragraph you know this is where the timeslip kicked in. It ought to be the same in Vonnegut’s novel. Once you arrive at the moment when time slipped, you should be aware of it. After all, you have waited ten years for this moment to arrive. You might be fearful of the rerun trapping you in a perpetual loop, but having such fears already means that the rerun is over—or you would have remembered such fears from before. Any way you look at it, the inaction and apathy of the timequakers are narrative wool over the reader’s eyes. Faced with such fundamental confusion about timeslips, it’s time to slow down, take a deep breath, and sort out the entanglements of our literary freedom to bend physics and logic at will. Projections into the future may be the mainstay of modern utopias, but there are better and worse, which is to say more and less time-effective, ways of mining this precious commodity. Let us then rewind the clock and start—where else?—at the beginning.

The Pissing While You, me, and everyone else are accomplished time travellers. Every day of our lives we move into the future so effortlessly that we hardly spare a thought to the oddity of being borne by the river of time. So embedded is the experience

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of time into the evolution of life in Earth that what is finite, immaterial, and variable seems to us the most eternal, tangible, and constant thing in the world. It is for no other reason that, even as Newton shook the universe by taming gravity mathematically, his equations only entrenched our notion of time. True and mathematical time, he wrote in Principia, from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external.7 Time is an independent variable—what could be more compelling? Nothing, except that he was wrong on both counts. Not only does time vary but it varies precisely because it is related to something external, namely space. Newton’s ideas of space and time can be traced back to Aristotle, who held that the universe had no beginning. Time and space, he maintained, exist in a steady state, as natural and constant as life itself. They are a backdrop of an eternal cosmic theatre, in which human actors go about their business. Two thousand years hence, the only thing we know for sure is that our notion of time is more slippery than a greased pig. Galápagos depicts a civilizational collapse followed by a rift in the ways we reckon time. Like in many back-to-nature utopias, leaving civilization behind often meant going back to natural time measured not by caesium clocks but by human action. Modern chronometers and calendars were not fully standardized, after all, until the twentieth century. For eons before no one had any use for standard mean time or daylight saving time. Unsurprisingly, our natural ways of reckoning time have found their way into language itself. Precolonial Madagascar, for example, had a word for the time it took to cook rice and another to denote the time it took to roast locust. Burmese monks used to refer to daybreak by a phrase that there was light enough to see the veins in your hand. Medieval English used to carve out time with a colourful interval known as the pissing while. Fuzzier, if more intuitive, our premodern ways of slicing time were intimately related to the rhythms of human life and to our internal (circadian) clocks. Hinting at its evolutionary utility, nearly all terrestrial creatures have a molecular period of about twenty-four hours. So do all human beings, with trillions of cellular clocks keeping time while our body functions wane and wax as the day goes by. Nighttime is our downtime. Blood pressure peaks around noon. Physical coordination is at the top of the cycle in the afternoon, and muscle force in the late afternoon. All of us naturally dice up time into discrete units, each equal to the next and all coming at the same rate. One of the paradoxes of living in spacetime, however, is that events separate in time—say, the publication of Galápagos and Timequake thirteen years apart—may be simultaneous to someone moving relative to us. Interestingly, although it was Einstein who proved this counterintuitive aspect of time, he was not the first to bring it to the public at large. Nor does the honour go to H. G. Wells and The Time Machine. The man who beat him to the punch was Edward Page Mitchell, writer and editor for

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The New York Sun. His 1881 story “The Clock That Went Backwards” was the first to draw explicit attention to all kinds of causal mayhem triggered by time travel. A true original, it predated even the game-changing experiment by two American physicists who ran headlong into the universal constant at the centre of our story. In 1887 Albert A. Michelson and Edward Morley set out to measure Earth’s velocity relative to ether, a substance then thought to permeate the universe (giving light waves a medium in which to vibrate). Their plan was to clock the speed of light along Earth’s path in space and traverse to it. In the first case C and Earth’s velocity should add up to a value higher than C. In the second case they should work against each other, lowering the value of C. The results were absurd. Time and time again, the difference in the speed of light was zero. C was constant, no matter how it was measured. Given that speed is distance divided by time, this meant that time or distance—or both— bent like silly putty. The stage was set for Einstein and the scientific as well as pop-cultural revolution that would turn time travel into a household phrase like Corn Flakes.8

V Comes Back Greater Than C Everyone knows that time travel is all hokeypokey. It is surprising, therefore, to find it popping up in the context of real science. Even more surprisingly, it involves some of the biggest names in physics and mathematics, not to mention heaps of astronomical and cyclotron data. In each case, time travel amounts to travelling faster than light as per special relativity, which sets strict constraints on what we can do with time. Let’s begin with Kurt Gödel of the incompleteness theorems fame, whom we briefly encountered in Chapter 7. In his spare time Gödel worked out a solution to the field equations of general relativity. His solution—there are many ­others—describes a rotating universe in which one could in theory travel to any point in the past or in the future. Although going back in time is ruled out by the laws of physics, that leaves the future, albeit only in principle (Gödel’s model rules out our cosmos, which is neither rotating nor in a steady state). As for the past, even if you could physically travel to the days before—which you can—you could not change anything anyway. In a rotating universe, timelines are not like straight lines with an absolute past and future. They are like loops, with the upshot that every “before” is also “after”. Although it’s meaningless to say that an event happened in the past, as opposed to saying that it happened before or after some other event, the order of events is immutable. You can’t be your own father. There is no indication that Vonnegut was aware of Gödel’s model, but his intuitions about the past in Timequake are right on the money:

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The Universe had shrunk a little bit, then resumed expansion, making everybody and everything a robot of their own past, and demonstrating, incidentally, that the past was unmalleable and indestructible.9 The 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Richard Feynman for his work on quantum gravity. While at it, Feynman came up with a stunner. Quantum theory, he pointed out, is consistent with antiparticles being particles that travel back in time or vice versa. Don’t worry if you can’t wrap your head around it. His fanciful reading of mathematical equations merely shows that common sense, which evolved for dealing with mid-scale objects and causally related events, is not equipped to deal with the world of quanta.10 Experimental studies of quantum nonlocality—known more colourfully as a spooky action at a distance—appear, however, to call into question the inviolability of the speed of light. It is odd enough that tunnelling particles vanish in front of a barrier and pop up on the other side. But the really weird part is this. When you calculate the average velocity V needed to cover the distance, V comes back greater than C.11 The experiments do not lie. On average, the tunnelling particles arrive earlier than expected, seemingly outracing light. The problem is that at the quantum level particles are not sharp points but smudgy waves of probability. These average velocities don’t mean that they race faster than light, only that the waves get reshaped as they edge close to C. The million-dollar question, which is roughly the value of the Nobel Prize, is what such distortions amount to in physical terms. For all their squabbling, there is one thing that quantum physicists agree on. Although tunnelling and entanglement over arbitrary distances are quite real, the evolution of probabilities during measurements cannot be used to send messages in violation of special relativity. In plain English, you cannot outrace light. No travel faster than light, no travel in time.

The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe Time’s arrow has always been assumed to be an emergent property. But as of 1998 this assumption has a huge question mark painted on it. This is because, as it turns out, some fundamental properties of matter are not time-invariant. Never mind the second law of thermodynamics, which only describes the statistical distribution of energy. We’re talking about quantum processes involving fundamental bits of matter called kaons. Like most particles, kaons can transform spontaneously into their antimatter counterparts (antikaons). Nothing exceptional about that, except it happens more slowly than the reverse process of antikaons losing the “anti” when transforming into kaons. The best theory to date to account for this difference is that the two kinds of particles travel at different rates in time.

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This is not a one-off experimental wrinkle that will be ironed out in the wash when bigger and better particle smashers are put to the job. The same asymmetry has been observed with particles called B-mesons and anti-B-mesons. Time really flows faster in one direction. In contrast, Einstein’s relativity equations don’t have an inbuilt time arrow. They work equally well whether you write them forward or backward, much as any equation in classical physics. This is far from the end of bizarre theories involving time, all of which sound like something straight from Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe. If you recall, Adams tosses out a theory that, if anyone ever fathoms what the universe is for, it will be instantly replaced by something even more bizarre. There is another theory, he continues, that this has already happened. Nuts as this sounds, so does reality. There is, for example, a real theory proposed to account for the fact that, as confirmed by eye-wateringly precise experiments, all particles of a kind are identical across the universe. The theory says that there is really just one particle of each kind—one electron, one kaon, one B-meson, and so on—that travels back and forth in time, so that it ends up everywhere at once. Assuming this is true, no wonder we always measure the same values. Each time we face the same old electron. But even this pales next to the latest news from cosmology departments. Up till now scientists believed that the universe had a beginning with time in the big bang. The latest theory, truly more bizarre than the one it replaced, says that this need no longer be the case. Note that this doesn’t mean that time didn’t have a beginning. But it means that it didn’t have to have a beginning, meaning that we can’t prove that it did. If all this sounds like a recipe for instant headache, philosophers and science fiction writers continue to fill libraries with books starring tachyons, makebelieve particles that move faster than light. Anyone is free, of course, to make believe whatever they wish, including time travel. If it’s to work in our universe, however, it must obey the laws of physics that put up stop signs at every turn. Consider, for example, what it means to go back six months in time. You are beamed to where you were then and instantly die in space. Earth, after all, rotates around the sun over a period of one year and half a year ago it was on the other side. To go back six months and find yourself on Earth you’d have to do what Vonnegut describes in Timequake—backdate the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the Milky Way, and the rest of the universe to where they were half a year ago. Or take the fact that planetary orbits degenerate over time, which brings Earth gradually closer to the sun. Travel in time far enough and the coordinates will bring you into deadly contact either with a very hard place or with very empty space. The only solution is, once again, to rearrange the entire universe back to the state it was at the desired time. Once again we are talking about astroengineering all of spacetime to suit one time traveller.

FIGURE 11.1 Pros

and cons of time travel. Consider, for example, what it means to go back six months in time. You are beamed to where you were then and instantly die in space. Earth, after all, rotates around the sun over a period of one year and half a year ago it was on the other side. To go back six months and find yourself on Earth you’d have to do what Vonnegut describes in Timequake—backdate the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the Milky Way, and the rest of the universe to where they were half a year ago.

Credit: Artertainment Productions.

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Let’s not even mention the rude fact that backdating the universe calls for energies on the scale of the universe. Or that deleting you from now violates energy conservation laws, much as inserting you then. Physics aside, there is always logic to trip anyone dreaming of getting rich quick by investing with the East India Company back when and living off the compound interest upon returning to the present.

Tinseltown Filmflam Is Homer Simpson, of TV’s The Simpsons, the father of Bart? Since we are talking of a true biological relationship—as opposed to being a stepfather or a foster father—the answer is naturally Yes. Now consider the following four scenarios.12 Number one, Homer dies but his reproductive cells are preserved. Marge visits the fertility clinic and nine months later gives birth to Bart. Is Homer the father of Bart? Sure. Number two, Homer dies but doesn’t leave any reproductive cells. However, since all cells have identical genetic makeup, as long as there are some from Homer’s body the clinic can extract the chromosomes required to conceive. Marge okays the procedure and nine months later gives birth to Bart. Is Homer the father of Bart? The word from all audiences I have lectured on this is that, yes, he is. Number three, Homer dies but doesn’t leave any cells, reproductive or not. He does, however, leave a will expressing a wish that Marge bear him a son. By now the technology is so advanced that you can tailor chromosomes to the client’s needs. Marge produces a wealth of videographic data, Homer’s medical and school records, and everything else to help geneticists sculpt a suitable fertility package. Nine months later she gives birth to Bart. Is Homer the father of Bart? Now only some people think so. Scenario four is largely the same as three, only this time, whether by accident or evil design, only seventy-four percent (you can tweak the number to your specifications) of Homer-willed genetic material ends up in the fertility package. Unaware, Marge goes ahead and gives birth to Bart. Is Homer still the father of Bart? Almost no one is prepared to say so. Crucially, however, whichever way they lean, they can tell you why. Note that, in cases three and four, Homer’s fatherhood is decidable only in terms of cultural norms at the time of the procedure. No appeal to the state of the matter can supply the answer. But futuristic as they sound, both cases are decidable. It’s not meaningless to ask about Homer’s fatherhood and expect an answer: Yes or No.  This is emphatically not so with causal loops, which breed paradoxes faster than do bacteria in agar. And all date-your-own-mother or kill-your-own-grandmother paradoxes of philosophical and science fiction are exactly that—causal paradoxes that illuminate precisely why things couldn’t happen the way they are described.

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From The Terminator  (1983) to Interstellar (2014), Hollywood filmflam takes the path of least resistance, sweeping incoherence under the carpet with high-octane adventure or melodrama. Paper over the causal illogic with nonstop action and pray that no one looks behind the wallpaper. After all, once time travel is possible, you can always go back to an earlier date to undo whatever happened later—and so can anyone else. It is designer history to the max which erases any notion of a (stable) present, past, or future. But, as amply demonstrated by Timequake, storytellers can also harness time travel to shed light on real lives and real problems. Fantastic realism may be an oxymoron but, at its narrative best, it can be employed to model insights into the individual and collective psyche confronted with the extremes of future shock.

Future Shock Time travel has a number of analogies in many real-life situations. On the final pages of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut himself describes his protagonist awakening from a year-long catatonic spell without a shred of memory of the elapsed time. Subjectively, he only shut his eyes and opened them a year later. Although Vonnegut doesn’t dwell on the analogy, Rosewater’s amnesia takes him into the future in a blink of an eye. Awakenings (1990), an award-winning film about Oliver Sachs’s experiments with L-dopa, shows a heart-wrenching example of such time-travel in real life. In practice, the effects of languishing in catatonia are indistinguishable from boarding a rocket, flying in suspended animation to the stars at near lightspeed, and returning to Earth decades in the future. Any form of prolonged physical and mental isolation can have effects similar to time travel into the future. Recall the USSR cosmonaut who, after a year in the space station, suffered a culture shock when the country that had sent him into orbit was no longer on his return to earth (the authorities ordered a news blackout to shield him while he was in space). A similar psychological displacement is reported by prisoners released after lengthy terms in jail, aggravated by solitary confinement. In Timequake, Vonnegut himself brings up a letter he got from a jailbird about to face the moment when free will would kick in again. The novelist’s choice of words, right down to the mention of a ten-year sentence, suggests that doing time is like being in a region of space where time stops for a stretch. Another form of time displacement comes from longer life spans. Globally, since 1900 more years have been added to our lives than in all of history combined. In 1915 life expectancy in the United States was a mere fifty-four years. A century later it was seventy-nine. Instead of passing away at fifty-four, Americans now travel to the future for an extra twenty-five years. Another domain for time-travel fiction is human psychology. Temporal displacement can track the déjà vu effects of undergoing an experience many times

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in a row. Incidentally, while taking this very tack, Hollywood’s comedy Groundhog Day (1993) avoids the problems with memory that trip Timequake. When the hero, played by Bill Murray, gets trapped in a time loop, he remembers each rerun and over countless iterations undergoes a gamut of emotions, from shock to indifference to—in a ham-fisted finale—reconciliation. Finally, on the scale of society, time travel can model the largest questions of history, beginning with whether the course of history is evitable. Sensitivity to perturbations upstream means a chaotic model of history, where the smallest causes have large unpredictable effects (the butterfly effect). Such is the thesis developed by Ray Bradbury in “The Sound of Thunder”, in which one misstep during a T-Rex safari sends time travellers back to a radically different present. A counter-thesis is developed by Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Once he’s done engineering the Middle Ages into an industrial utopia, the hero recoils as the Dark Ages live up to the name. Ironically, Twain’s take on the non-chaotic (ergodic) character of history is a gloss on Leibniz’s utopian metaphysics. The German polymath famously argued that our world is the best of all possible worlds insofar as any attempt at social engineering would only cause more suffering. Twain’s hero learns the lesson the hard way.

Notes 1. Wakefield, 366. 2. Wakefield, 371–372. 3. Wakefield, 352. 4. Timequake, Vol. 3: 578. 5. On SF, 67; for an early analysis of Vonnegut style, see Scholes (1967). 6. Timequake is explicit: “Talk about remembering the future!” Vol. 3: 503. 7. Newton, 6. 8. Burdick; Barrow; Wittmann; Gleick. 9. Vol. 3: 562. 10. See Swirski (2007), Chapters 3 and 4. 11. Chiao, Kwiat, Steinberg (1993). 12. See Lem, 136–139; for more on Lem and science in fiction, see Swirski (1997, 2006, 2013, 2014, 2015b).

12 THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

Hollywood After Dark For  social engineers, people are collections of quantifiers, behind which lie attributes. The hard part in convincing people that social engineering is not bunk is convincing them that the attributes are not arbitrary and the quantifiers accurate. Who wouldn’t be uneasy seeing his subjective uniqueness reduced to a row of numbers fed into an algorithm for utopia? Suppose, however, there was a way to quantify and optimize the best society. Would this spell the end of unhappiness? On the face of it, being unhappy in utopia sounds irrational. If you wish for social bliss and your wishes come true, what is to stop you from wallowing in that bliss? Nothing, Vonnegut would chime in, except our big brains. For starters, your wishes may be contradictory. They may fluctuate over time. They may bring unforeseen aftereffects. They may step on the toes of other wishers. Most of all, social utopia is not a cure for inner neuroses, anxieties, existential angst, depression, fear of death, and other ways in which you could be twisted inside even when living on Easy Street. Look at Hollywood after dark. Utopia without does not guarantee utopia within. Together with intelligence and adaptability, our brains come with evolutionary baggage that makes for a bumpy ride on our journey in life. Clinical psychology teems with case studies of intelligent and successful patients tearing themselves apart from the inside. Literary classics from Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment are no less compelling as records of inner conflicts and flat-out wars.1 Evidently, we are not always rational when it comes to our own happiness— perhaps especially when it comes to our own happiness. Occasionally, in fact, we are our worst enemies. Far from always acting in our best interests, we yield

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to irrational and even self-destructive impulses, as if suborned by aliens in our psyche. Dr. Jekyll and his inner demon, Mr. Hyde, are outliers on a continuum with William Wilson and Raskolnikov. Just as with individuals, social policies that look good on paper seldom work as intended in real life. No planners can fully predict the effects of social engineering insofar as the sum total of social contracts—laws, customs, reciprocal expectations—always underdetermines behaviour. And where there is a vacuum, people are sure to fill it in unforeseen ways. This is true even for such rock-bottom axioms of social theory as deterrence. Accepted universally in jurisprudence and legislature, deterrence theory says that, all things being equal, penalties always reduce harmful behaviour. This is Social Engineering 101: slap a fine on speeding and watch it wither on the vine. Deterrence theory relies on three other behavioural regularities. A penalty is most effective when it is certain and immediate. When it is lifted, the antisocial behaviour reappears. And its efficacy erodes over time. All this sounds pretty compelling, except for a recent experiment that blew a hole the size of Calcutta in the paradigm.2 To test the axioms behind deterrence, with the consent of several Haifa kindergartens scientists imposed a fine on parents who failed to pick up their kids on time. You would think the deterrent should deter. What happened was just the opposite. The number of derelict parents shot up. Huh? Parents clearly felt they could absorb the fine as the price of doing business with the kindergarten. Self-image can be as strong a motivator as self-interest, but in this case the guilt about being seen as bad parents and social parasites was erased by the fine. Moreover, when the fines were lifted, parents did not revert to the original baseline. They continued to arrive late at high rates. The fine on arriving late turned moral guilt into a commodity. It is easy to spot the hitch. The fine was set too low. A stiffer penalty would have likely brought the sought results. All the same, there is a lesson here for social engineers who would mobilize our self-interest in the service of common good. It is not that we should not try to engineer prosocial behaviours. But we should be very careful about it and up-front about the pitfalls.

Man Is Wolf to Man The merits and demerits of individualism have been tilted over since the birth of the nation. Both sides of the argument were notably rehearsed by Alexis de Tocqueville as he fretted over the clash of ideals embodied in the American frontier. On the one hand there was mutual interdependence of far-flung settlements which, even as they competed for resources, relied on one another for trade and security. Riding roughshod over cooperation, however, was the individualisms of the frontiersmen who

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owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.3 Even as he doffed his hat to these self-made lumps of American democracy, Tocqueville came down roundly on the side of the commonwealth. Tyrants of all kinds, he warned, are apt to foster self-reliance and self-interest insofar as it serves to disunite the masses. When me-first outguns we-first, divide-andconquer cannot be far behind. The proverbial wisdom of the crowds comes to nought if every man in the crowd trusts only his own counsel. Without trust in his fellow man and a social contract to shore up that trust, everyone is out to get the best deal for himself. Whenever participants in any social area—whether migrant labourers or monopolistic trust members—fail to enforce a jointly favourable strategy, they go home with a jointly lower payoff. As the interests of individuals trump those of the collectives, the consequences are often felt by all. Overfishers deplete fisheries with eventual unemployment for all. Toadying up to bosses by not leaving work first drives others to follow suit, causing exhaustion and unproductivity on a scale that requires government intervention (in South Korea and Japan). A nuclear arms race, where one side’s outlays are anted up by the other, fuels reciprocal escalation. All these seemingly unrelated social processes are perfect examples of rational thinking gone haywire.4 This fundamental tension between the individual and the collective pops up everywhere, from veneer theory to proverbs to utopia. Stripped to the core, it asks: is man wolf to man, as Plautus and Thomas Hobbes colourfully described it? Does free will create freeriders? If acting against our best interests is a handicap in the evolutionary race, why should we even try to be moral? In many ways the most clear-headed, because the least sentimental, account of this tension can be found in Hobbes. The author of Leviathan is customarily seen as a moral nihilist just because his political philosophy refuses to appeal to the good of others as a basis for moral behaviour. Hobbes was, however, a shrewder thinker than he is given credit for and his case for me-first remains valid to this day. Hobbes is an arch-realist. His starting point is that social leeches are not just all around us. They are us. He freely admits that moral rules—which he puts on par with the laws of nature—could bootstrap society into utopia. If everyone followed them, everyone would be better off. But, unlike optimists like More or Bellamy, he has no illusions about defectors. In fact, he maintains that any rational citizen ought to defect to better his lot. Think about it. Logically, even if you recognize that everyone will be better off if everyone plays by the golden rule, this does not mean that you ought to. As a matter of fact, human nature being what it is, many would embrace utopia

Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Hobbes takes it for granted that everyone looks out for number one, if need be at the expense of others. This puts him at odds with the utopian assumption that people are we-first cooperators. It is a nice sentiment to espouse, he would say. But individual and group preferences seldom sit to breakfast at the same table with any degree of success.

FIGURE 12.1 Kurt

Credit: Peter Swirski.

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precisely because it would allow them to hitch a free ride on the backs of everyone else. You are always better off if everyone—except you—takes the moral high ground. Hobbes takes it for granted that everyone looks out for number one, if need be at the expense of others. This puts him at odds with the utopian assumption that people are we-first cooperators. It is a nice sentiment to espouse, he would say. But individual and group preferences seldom sit to breakfast at the same table with any degree of success. Not for nothing does Galápagos star a couple of human predators more ruthless than Ab Holt: serial bigamist James Wait and let’s-make-a-deal mogul Andrew MacIntosh. Our biology does make us cooperative, and in some cases even altruistic. We all have good reasons for wanting to live in society governed by high moral precepts. But, shrugs Hobbes, it will never happen unless it is in every egoists’ interest to abide by those precepts. Irrational as it sounds, it must become in our selfish interest to be unselfish. Nothing else will stop defections from commonwealth.

Prisoner’s Dilemma Although competition and cooperation pull in opposite directions, almost every type of social interaction is a mix of both. And with social stakes high, everyone is on the lookout for a better way to play. Luckily, the twentieth century saw the birth of game theory devoted to optimizing all manner of social truck, from economic trade-offs to strategic treaties to the game of life. But no sooner was it up and running than it ran into a brick wall in the form of a game that cast doubt on our notions of rationality—starting with the rationality of utopia. Before we look under the hood of the dilemma, a few words about the field that spawned it. It may be the centrepiece of social theory, but game theory is a misnomer that reflects its roots in parlour games. Parlour games are theorists’ paradise. They are stripped of social details, have clear-cut rules, and typically match players in zero-sum competition. It is trying to extend strategic solutions from parlour games to real life that proves the proverb about the devil being in the details. The best way to understand game theory is by contrast with decision theory. Decision theory optimizes decision-making for one person. Game theory optimizes decision-making when the moves of one player depend on the moves of another—and vice versa. Game theory, if you like, is a study of strategic interdependence or a strategic study of interdependence. And the iconic example of its strategic give-and-take is a class of games known as Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). PD was invented back in 1950 by two RAND game theorists, Merrill Flood and Melvin Drescher.5 Playing on paper with rules and payoffs, little did they realize that they created a schematic representation of a dilemma that crops up everywhere there is a partial conflict of interest—which is pretty much

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everywhere. Nor could they know that decades of studying this head-scratcher would lead experts to conclude that the best way to play PDs is to avoid them altogether. PD and its strategic entanglements lead to paradoxes as surely as time travel does. For starters, consider this. For every conflict pitting two players against each other like gladiators locked in mortal combat, there is a solution known as minimax. True, it is not very attractive, but it is the best you can do in a zero-sum conflict. Now take players who are not at each other’s throats. You would think that, since their goals partly coincide, it is easier to arrive at a mutually beneficial solution. It is not. This is not the fault of the theory, wonky reasoning, or social rules that may keep players in the dark. Even when players meet and analyze the situation together, they still tend to make decisions that harm both (mostly because they try to beat the other guy rather than, as Hobbes would have it, get the most for themselves). Seeing payoffs in relative terms, they are willing to take a loss as long as the other guy’s loss is even worse. In terms of classical economics, this is irrational. On the other hand, classic models of rationality have as little to do with real human beings as utopia does with the United States. Rationality is assumed to be strung evenly on a straight line, with perfect rationality at one end and perfect absence of it at the other. In actuality, it is a strategic grab-bag of attributes and, as such, a very different kind of animal.6 The easiest way to illustrate the difference is to look at threat scenarios. Many standard traits of rationality can become drawbacks against an opponent indifferent to threats by virtue of genuine or feigned inability to act rationally. Madmen, zealots, children, or nuclear doomsday machines cannot be threatened as effectively as folks with known ability to hear, comprehend, and act freely. By the same token, threat efficacy rises as a function of perceived irrationality. A hardened al-Qa’ida operative, known to hold his life in contempt, can threaten to detonate the semtex strapped to his belt with more credibility than a timid civil servant. This is why Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, an unobtrusive man all his life, is dubbed a harmless crank and not a social radical when one day he refuses to play by the rules. The power of game theory lies in its ability to evaluate the strategic basis of paradoxes of rationality which, despite all appearances of madness, can be tactically sound. This is to say that, far from being an inherent attribute, rationality is actually a function of our ability to make decisions. As such it can be manipulated almost at will and, as a matter of fact, often is. Most bargaining processes, including arms, border, or hostage negotiations, provide ready-made examples of such manipulation—in essence, of cheating at the rationality game. The ramifications of this radiate to virtually all areas of human life, from school test evaluations, to systems of jurisprudence like the

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American that lean heavily on precedent, to superpower nuclear-arms diplomacy, and not least to utopia.

No One Goes Hungry Utopia is about the willing obligation, the moral imperative, the all-embracing family. It is about prosociality, about me-first making peace with we-first, about parts adding to a sum larger than themselves. In short, utopia is about cooperation running ahead of competition. But how to incentivize cooperation, how to stabilize it, and how to discipline those who go astray? Strikingly, the very same questions lie at the heart of Prisoner’s Dilemma. PD is about cooperation running circles around competition and the other way round. It is about strategizing in lockstep with the other guy in order to get the best payoff for yourself in a duet that entices both of you to cooperate, if merely to defect. Fleecing the sucker breeds retaliation, which breeds cooperation, which breeds defection, and round and round it goes. For nearly seventy years PD has perplexed game and social theorists alike by playing up the tug-of-war between the groupish and selfish parts of human nature. Everyone agrees on how the game ought to be played. Trapped in PD, the best you can do is avoid the worst. This seems hardly like a blueprint for utopia. But there’s a twist to the story that holds the key not only to the dilemma but also to Galápagos, Timequake, and much more besides. PD and utopia both bring into focus what makes us cooperate rather than compete. Not surprisingly, both train their cross-hairs on freeriders. Freeriders are a plague on every society and it is easy to see why. The temptation to cop a free ride arises whenever self-interest does not perfectly align with group interest, which is almost always. Think of freeriders in the context of sharing nature’s resources, which are always finite. Enlarging your share of food or mating privileges comes at someone else’s loss. The following scenario represents decisions faced by countries overfishing depleted stocks, but the payoffs model all kinds of other situations: citizens cheating on taxes, communards failing to wash their dishes, nations violating pollution reduction treaties, or even animals overexploiting their biotopes.

I Fish My Share I Overfish

Others Fish Their Share

Others Overfish

3,3 (No one goes very hungry) 5,0 (I eat like a king, others do not go noticeably less hungry)

0,5 (I go hungry, others don’t) 1,1 (All eat like kings, resources deplete, in time all go hungry)

The best scenario for me is to be the sole overfisher. The rationale is ironclad. My stomach is minute compared to that of the group. If I cheat by overfishing, it

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will make a huge difference to me and no one will spot the difference, especially if I flog everyone to practice restraint. Of course, if everyone does the same, all end up in the bottom right corner, with the lowest joint payoff—not nearly as good as when everyone cooperates (top left).7 The same train of thought animates the old Chinese parable about wise men invited to a wine tasting. Each one figures that his share is too small to be missed and brings a wineskin full of water instead. All end up sipping pure H2O, pronouncing it first-rate vintage to keep up the charade. All wish they had stuck to the rules. But if they had, the same strategic reasoning would have kicked in again. Don’t be blindsided by the rationalizations of human agents. The dilemma traps unthinking animals just as well. Of course, it makes no sense to treat impalas or gibbons as rational decision makers. But the dynamics are the same for deliberating humans and instinct-driven animals, only the latter’s payoffs are survival rates rather than utilities. No matter what, overexploiters always do better than those who only eat or fish their due. The worst situation for a good guy, in fact, is to be the only one in a crowd of egoists. Rationally or instinctively, therefore, everyone should overeat or overfish, with everyone’s payoffs taking a hit. When they cooperate, however, altruists do better for each and for all. The above game has only one stable strategy (1,1)—the lowest joint payoff. Unrewarding as it is, this is how anyone should play a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma. Real life, however, is seldom a one-shot deal. And as soon as you begin to run into the same people again and again, the rationale changes. Facing a sequence of social interactions, it is harder to justify defecting. The better angels of our nature have a chance to come out to play. The same goes for natural selection. With the bottom line fixed by genetic line, mother nature does select for behaviours that maximize survival rates. But in nature most interactions are, in fact, iterated. Animals are territorial, which means that they run into the same competitors again and again. The dilemma of sharing a food source is iterated over many encounters and many personality types. And as we are about to see, this changes the dynamic dramatically.

Blue Meanie Enter Robert Axelrod, political scientist and game theorist, who wrote his name into the annals of game theory with a series of tournaments he ran in 1980. A tournament in this context is nothing more than a series of iterated PDs, with the key word being “iterated”. This is not a strategic equivalent of a hit-and-run. It is an evolving cycle of run-ins between players who keep track of how they did against one another before. Axelrod wanted to test the effect of iteration on cooperation. The awareness of past plays and their projection into the future should have a measurable effect on players’ personalities, preferences, and patterns of play. With this in mind,

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he invited game theorists in economics, sociology, political science, psychology, and math to his tournament. The price of admission was to devise the best strategy to play PD. Players had to specify their strategies—complete sets of instructions what to do for any play—ahead of time. During the tourney they could only communicate through their decisions: cooperate or not. For convenience’s sake, instead of people sitting across the table and calling their shots, the whole thing was programmed into a computer, like in a computer chess tournament. The payoffs were scored as per a matrix exactly like the one above.

Cooperate Not Cooperate/Defect

Cooperate

Not Cooperate/Defect

3,3 5,0

0,5 1,1

All strategies played one another round-robin. They also played themselves and a program that randomized cooperation and defection. It helps to think of strategies as personalities. Some are utopians who will cooperate come hell or high water. Some are Andrew MacIntosh: me-first to the max. Most are in between, with all shades of selfishness and niceness. The randomizer is a fatalist who puts his lot in the hands of chance. The cooperative utopian will do well against other utopians. But he will get bruised every time he tries to be nice to an egoist. Being sweet and dumb as candy, he will never induce the latter to change his ways by slashing his score from 5 to 1. Frozen in the amber of time, he is unable to learn from his own and others’ plays. The incurable defector doesn’t fare better. Against an egoist you cannot do better than defect and, with the cat out of the bag, the payoffs lock at their second lowest. Clearly, it is best to avoid both utopia and total war. But how exactly? Once the scores were tallied, everyone was in for a surprise. The winner was the simplest strategy of all. Called TIT FOR TAT (TFT), it said only this: cooperate on the first move, then do whatever the other guy did last time. It proved to be the undisputed champ over more sophisticated strategies representing all manner of personalities. Why was TFT so successful? Because it was nice, provocable, and forgiving. Again, think of real-life behaviour. Like in the jargon of game theory, niceness means that on the first play you give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. With the golden rule the default, you begin by cooperating. If you run into a utopian, both of you end up cooperating till kingdom come. But the real world is overrun by defectors who will take advantage of anyone too nice for it. Against non-cooperators utopian strategies get hammered by sticking to cooperation. But not TFT. Being provocable means that it plays

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tit-for-tat, giving the other player a taste of how he played in the previous round. Playing a compulsive defector, it will defect, locking both into an equilibrium from which neither has any incentive to come out. That’s okay—no one can do better against a blue meanie. But, crucially, TFT is also forgiving. It has a short attention span. This means that, as soon as the other side cooperates again, on the next play it rewards him with a handshake. We are back to (3,3) payoffs and inevitably to the temptation to defect. But there is a crucial difference between TFT and James Wait or Andrew MacIntosh. TFT never defects first.

TFT What came next was even less foreseeable. Intrigued by the success of TFT, Axelrod announced a second tournament. The rules were the same, only now everyone knew who had come up tops before. The tacit challenge was to dethrone the champ. Once again experts in psychology, social dynamics, behavioural economics, political horse-trading, and biological fitness set to work in the hope of besting the best. With more than sixty entrants, TFT again won hands down. It was then that Axelrod began to wonder about a scenario that has utopia written all over it. Could cooperation emerge among defectors without any form of central authority? To test this, he devised the third tournament, whose implications are debated to this day. Given TFT’s proven all-round fitness, the third tournament was designed to make encounters more like those in natural habitats. The tournament became essentially a meta-tournament. At the end of each iteration, strategies were rewarded with reproductive rights, a PD equivalent of the Regents. These were in proportion to the score. The better a player performed, the greater the number of offspring (replicas of itself ) seeded into the next generation. The game of PD became a game of life based on descent with feedback. Because all this was interactive and iterative, the effectiveness of a strategy— its fitness—depended not only on its own characteristics but also on those with which it interacted. The aim was to see which behaviours would displace others in the long run of cohabitation. Would utopians feed off each other and overrun the world? Would me-firsters? Would TFT prove a strategic strongman or a lemon? Over the first few generations, weak strategies, such as random, quickly fell by the wayside. A few dozen generations later, they were followed by the utopians. Interestingly, the winners at this stage were not only TFT and similar strategies but also predators who defected more than they cooperated. But then these populations of James Waits and Andrew MacIntoshes hit a roadblock. To put it in terms of ecology, the exploitative strategies ran out of prey in the form of unsophisticated—you can also call them amnesiac—cooperators. And being unable to adapt, they began to starve in terms of scores and, consequently,

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progeny. Against nice but no-nonsense strategies like TFT, the predators triggered the second lowest payoff. But playing conditional cooperators like itself and its relatives, TFT always did better than the egoists. Being fruitful multiplied the numbers of descendants, who did even better in the next generation, having more cooperators to boost each other’s scores with, and so on. Over hundreds of generations, TFT emerged as the most numerous— which is to say, the most effective—player in the simulation. In biological terms, it was viable, robust, and stable. It could gain a foothold even in predominantly predatory habitats, thrive in diversified environments, and resist invasions. But the coolest thing about TFT was that it radiated social good by exerting pressure on others to cooperate. In a population of TFTs you cannot do better than play TFT, resulting in universal cooperation. This paradise on earth is not, however, filled with bleeding hearts. TFT is nice only to nice guys. If you defect, it will punish you swiftly and surely. In contrast, a utopian would bleed himself to death trying to coax a James Wait or Andrew MacIntosh into cooperation. Cooperation blossoms. The golden rule—do not defect because, if the other guy did, it would hurt you—comes into its own. But it also has a backbone against a bully, a freeloader, or a classical economist. Speaking softly but carrying a big stick, it fosters team-building. A colony of TFT is stable against predators, over generations replacing their “genes” with its own, like Vonnegut’s seals do in Galápagos.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The paradox in the Prisoner’s Dilemma feeds on the difference between the payoffs either player can get on his own and the payoffs they could get by coordinating their moves. Cooperation is but a phase of competition is but a phase of cooperation—and round and round it goes. Little wonder that the questions posed by Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation are the same that assail all utopian reformers: When should a person cooperate, and when should a person be selfish, in an ongoing interaction with another person? Should a friend keep on providing favors to another friend who never reciprocates? Should a business provide prompt service to another business that is about to be bankrupt?8 Like in real life, players are able to protect their own minimum payoff. It may not be attractive, yet so long as they cannot enforce mutual goodwill, cooperation is a fool’s gold. The game is perfectly symmetrical, and without the mutual assurance that defectors will be punished, trust and security cannot gain a toehold. Like game, like utopia. Laws nurture good behaviour, but no society has the resources to police good behaviour all the time. Goodwill and mutual trust keeps societies running.

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Trust is a social capital that grows with time and effort. In close-knit communities, behavioural controls like approval and shame nurture prosocial behaviour. Repeated interactions build reciprocal trust and lay a foundation for cooperation and social cohesion. Alas, cultivating goodwill is not easy. Perversely, social trust benefits parasites who profit from everyone else’s cooperation. The best strategy for even the greatest egoist is to trumpet the utopian ethos while shirking it. You get the credit for being a good guy while profiting both from the effect on others and from cheating—so long as you are not caught. Society is the sum total of the ways in which individual interests collide or ally with those of others. PD models a strategic tangle between cooperation and conflict that turns up everywhere, starting with 334, God’s Grace, and Galápagos. In Vonnegut’s utopia, for example, the colonists come perilously close to overexploiting their food source and wiping themselves and the entire human race out—a classic islander’s dilemma. Of course, not just freeriding but fight-flight (hawk-dove) stimulus response, territoriality, mate selection, and other examples of adaptive behaviours have by now been successfully analyzed by game theorists. This includes the genesis and costs of communication in nature through the analysis of signalling games. God’s Grace even parallels the turn to game theory in ethics as it digs for the genetic roots of morality. In literature, not only novels that avail themselves of game-theoretic ideas but all novels, period, make for rich scenarios of social conflict mixed with cooperation. Writers intuitively employ a number of game-theoretic principles to the extent that such principles are part of our innate psychology. Bringing this tacit understanding to the surface can help writers, who may just happen to be utopian reformers, poke deeper into our behavioural economy. From 334, God’s Grace, Galápagos, and Oryx and Crake to the beheading games between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the tit-for-tat duels between Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve, Jane Austen’s intricate parlour games, the strategic hide-and-seek of espionage games in John Le Carré, and the geopolitical technothrillers from Tom Clancy to Larry Bond, all the way to the altruistic calculus in quasi-utopias from The Thanatos Syndrome to This Perfect Day—the sky is the limit.9

Smalltown USA Utopia is a roadmark to the future, and collectively we know where we want to go. Except we don’t want to get there too quickly. In this, we are like the erstwhile utopian visionary St. Augustine. We earnestly want to reform to be better and do better. We want to live more simply, love our neighbours more dearly, and repent more sincerely. Just not yet.

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Not perfectly rational, but perfectly human. Still, as highlighted by the strategic evolution of cooperation, there are ways to help utopia find a foothold in the present. Tellingly, they all involve mental travel in time. The longer the shadow of the future in the present, the more it fosters cooperation in all manner of social contexts. Naturally, cooperation is not always the answer. No one wants trust members to collude and fix prices. But where social cohesion is desirable, it can be helped by enlarging the footprint of the future, which can be as simple as amping up the frequency with which people run into each other. Making social bonds more attractive, it also makes them more durable. This is why cooperation typically takes root more readily in small towns than in big urban centres. Instead of ricocheting randomly off strangers in urban pinball, you run into familiar faces more frequently and over longer periods of time. Factor this into your strategic calculus and cooperation wins all around. Perhaps there really is some truth in Smalltown USA being the heartland of oldschool values. If there is anything that decades of studies of iterated PDs teach us, it is that individually and socially, we grossly undervalue niceness. Of course, PD is only a handy analytic skeleton. Flesh out its bare bones into a social context and all kinds of wrinkles are likely to appear. But the value of the skeleton is precisely in that it is invariant across all manner of superficial variations. And in this case, its invariance has the simplicity and directness of a proverb. Don’t defect first, don’t turn the other cheek, don’t hold grudges. A lifelong socialist and liberal, Vonnegut is not blind to the t­ransformative power of capitalism. In Galápagos and Timequake, however, he strips its ideological varnish to expose what lies beneath the system dedicated to the production of profits rather than social good. And what lies beneath, he concludes, is evolution at its simplest. Compete, cooperate, but carry our genes to the next relay in the relay race. But what if you can carry them more effectively as a team? Reinforcing the stereotype of a heartless head, capitalism underrates the fact that we are driven at least as much by cooperation as by market competition. We don’t work for the paycheck only. We work as much to boost our self-image and our perceived image. How we perceive our work, how our work affects others, and how others perceive us is vital to our behavioural economy and, in the final count, to the economy at large. There is nothing wrong with wealth creation, in other words, as long as it also creates commonwealth. Among literary scholars, Vonnegut’s prose has a reputation for being sociological in nature in that it “shows the moral and practical consequences of patterns of behaviour”.10 This is of course true. But then, which writer doesn’t show the moral and practical consequences of patterns of behaviour? Where the sociological impulse is defined so broadly as to exclude practically nothing, everyone is a sociologist, whether a hands-on social reformer or not.

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Notes 1. Departing from a central ego-based model of the psyche, Hofstadter (2007) proposes a model of a constellation of variably autonomous behavioural systems. 2. Gneezy and Rustichini. 3. Democracy in America, Part I, Chapter 2. 4. Intriguingly, all are modelled by a simple auction in which the second-highest bidder has to pay up in the event of coming second. 5. PD was dubbed PD by a RAND consultant Albert W. Tucker; for background, see Rapoport and Channah; Peterson; Poundstone; Shapira; Sunstein and Thaler. 6. Huck; Elster; Evans and Over; Harsanyi; Howard; Selten. 7. Row player’s payoff first; players move simultaneously. 8. vii; for recent contributions to the field now known as social selection, see Michod; Buckholtz and Marois; Boehm (2012). 9. For an example, see Swirski (2015b), Chapter 3. 10. Reed, 5.

PART V

Biotopia Margaret Atwood

13 ORYX AND CRICK

The Perfect Linchpin If there is one common strain in utopian thought across the ages, it is that there is a finite—quite small, in fact—set of principles that all rational citizens would agree on. This may sound naive, given that the only thing we ever agree on is to disagree, and oftentimes not even that. But if one day we indeed arrive at such a set of principles, they will be headed, I venture, by the principle of nonviolence. In this I find an ally in Margaret Atwood. It’s not even that over the years she has peppered her interviews with indictments such as “Violence begets violence” and “War is hell”.1 More to the point, when I wrote to her in March 2016 about deaggression, she made no bones that it was “the perfect linchpin” for Oryx and Crake. In itself, this is hardly a surprise. Time and time again, the novel compiles long lists of our barbarities: Ghenghis Khan’s skull pile, the heaps of shoes and glasses from Dachau, the burning corpse-filled churches in Rwanda, the sack of Jerusalem by the Crusaders. The Arawak Indians welcoming Christopher Columbus with garlands and gifts of fruit, smiling with delight, soon to be massacred, or tied up beneath the beds upon which their women were being raped.2 Among shelf-loads of literary critical exegeses, you would look in vain, however, for a systematic analysis of the linchpin behind Atwood’s second foray into the future, after The Handmaid’s Tale. This is perhaps what drove Harold Bloom to put down the busy industry of Atwood studies with a remark that she was vastly superior as a critic to the literary critics who ideologize or deconstruct her works.3

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Genetic engineering is a web so tangled at the molecular level that there is no hope in the near future of tailoring humanity for the utopia of tomorrow. But there is no need. Instead of designing utopians from scratch, it should be easier to edit disagreeable traits out. Such edits offer a way forward to bioengineers with a limited knowledge of the genome but a clear grasp of what they don’t like. Of course, it might yet turn out that eradicating aggression is impossible for a number of reasons. For starters, aggression may be too entwined with the instinct for self-preservation, and hence survival.4 It may be too entangled with the production of testosterone and thus indispensable to the healthy functioning of a person. It may be too enmeshed with desirable traits like curiosity and courage. But all this is no reason not to ask “What if?” What if we could eliminate the propensity for violence? What if we could put an end to war and murder? What if we could edit aggression out of our behaviour by editing it out of our genome? What if we could do it without significantly disturbing other parts of our psyche, or even without disturbing them at all? What if we could do it tomorrow? Should we? Would we? Geneticists today have already begun to edit, splice, and otherwise revise the code of life, undaunted by the scant grasp of what it would mean for them to succeed. But the idea of deaggressing our species is nothing new. Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie were so keen on eradicating war that they even donated fractions of their robber baron fortunes to set up the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And let’s not forget the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, better known as the Kellogg-Briand pact.5 The utopian tradition, from Plato to Bellamy, takes deaggression as a given. But it gives few clues as to how this miracle could ever come about. “Such a stupendous change as you describe it”, remarks Julian West to his host, “did not, of course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions”. “There was absolutely no violence”, comes the reply. Grimms’ fairy tales are more realistic than that.6 It is not until after World War II, with technoscience and social engineering joined at the hip, that speculation about how to engineer peace in utopia shifts into high gear. But where a behaviourist like Skinner turns his back on biology, Atwood takes it on whole hog. With Oryx and Crake released exactly half a century after Crick and Watson’s discovery of the molecular structure of the DNA, she names her top-dog bioengineer after Crick and cuts him loose in paradise.7

Tell That to Ted Bundy As a literary utopia, as a behaviourist blueprint for new society, and as a recipe for a kinder and gentler America, Skinner’s Walden Two is rooted in radical associationism. Any behaviour at all, declares the psychologist, can be taught

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and learned with equal ease. For him, much as for the majority of today’s social scientists, human action is a product of the social environment and little else besides. Take, for example, cultural anthropologists. Human behaviour, some claim, is not adaptively ingrained but socially entrained. Specifically, human emotions such as anger are not biological presets but cultural constructs.8 Not—to be perfectly clear—expressions of anger, which are indeed partly mediated by culture, but the emotion itself. Anger and the sympathetic nervous system are in this picture like a hat that can be donned and doffed at will to suit the circumstances. This is a dangerous fallacy. Emotions, including the most all-consuming such as anger, are the basic building blocks of the adaptive mind. As such, they nest deep beneath the level of community-specific acculturation. Belying social constructivism, they originate in the species-shared emotional palette, from which communities and individuals assemble a rainbow of cultural responses, including violence. According to Skinner, aggression is but a by-product of the social preference for aversive control. Remove coercion and the social power to punish, replace them with rational suasion and positive reinforcement, and no one will aggress again. Tell that to Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. To be sure, operant conditioning can reduce levels of violence.9 But it cannot turn the tap off altogether. Aggression is an instinctive expression of human behavioural economy— an expression of our adaptation for survival, status seeking, territoriality, and attracting mates. As such, it is not a behavioural menu option to be toggled on and off at will. The question before us is not how we can legislate, acculturate, or educate ourselves out of aggression, because we cannot. The question is whether we are willing to pay the price for editing it out of our lives and genomes. For most people bioengineering is the realm of gothic nightmares, if not fullblown paranoia. Would anyone in his right mind allow the feds to play with his head in the name of universal peace? Didn’t they exterminate people with plague-infested blankets, assign others three-fifths value of whites, and wage class wars in the name of Manifest Destiny? Didn’t they clandestinely brainwash, electroshock, lobotomize, sterilize, expose to radiation, infect with syphilis, and otherwise brutalize their fellow Americans just in the course of the twentieth century? Little wonder that most citizens break out in cold sweat not at the spectre of aggression and violence but at the thought that, under the cover of darkness, G-men might pick their bedroom locks and reprogram them and everyone else in the land of the free into robotic compliance. Flip a few neuronal switches and you could have a nation of corporate slaves, mindless shopaholics, and political patsies who pose no threat to the ruling plutocracy. Come again? We can, of course, give peace a fighting chance by creating habitats in which it can thrive. One such habitat is the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, which promotes cooperation and weeds out predators. But what if we had the biotechnology to

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go after predators and aggressors directly? What if we had a genetic master key to lock away human claws and fangs? This, in essence, is the linchpin behind Oryx and Crake.

Twelve Monkeys The future in Oryx and Crake is one of bioengineering, transgenic animals, and designer-genes posthumans. Human life is fully commodified and corporatized. Global warming, extreme weather patterns, mass species extinction, overpopulation, undernourishment, class warfare, germ warfare, human trafficking, kiddie porn, sex slavery, voyeurism, and bastardized English are everywhere. Time? Late twenty-first or twenty-second century. Place? North America, possibly Canada.10 Coastal aquifers saltify, grasslands desertify, permafrost melts down, tundra bubbles with methane. New York is flooded alongside other cities on the East Coast. Florida dries up like a prune. The Everglades burn for weeks on end. Food is scarce. Fish fingers proudly advertise twenty percent real fish. Delicacies like SoyOBurgers, SoyOBeans, and ChickieNobs feed the masses. At the other end of the scale you have the urban centre of New New York, transcontinental bullet trains, genetically modified crops, licit pills for the body and soul, shirts displaying emails on sleeves, self-cleaning clothes thanks to sweat-eating bacteria. And every day, “more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries”.11 Everything, from government to business, research, education, and security, is privatized. Genetics, cosmetics, pharmas, and artificial nutrition corporations rule the world. Biotech sits at the top of the food chain, its scientists living in walled-off Compounds, which bundle up corporate hedonism with armed-tothe-teeth security, fingerprint IDs, and round-the-clock electronic surveillance. At the bottom of the social ladder lie the pleeblands. From behind electrified fences and CorpSeCorps-manned watchtowers, they loom as a colossal conurbation where bioterrorists run riot with ordinary lawbreakers and merchants of every vice conceivable. As in 334, they are the breeding grounds for urban trash compacted by overcrowded tenements, random and targeted violence, and every deformity known to man. Marketing lingo with nonstandard fonetik spelling sells everything, language mutates faster than bioforms, biocosmetic corporations like AnooYou, HelthWyzer, or RejoovenEsence compete for science graduates who can devise new diseases that can then be remedied with new lines of products. An on- and offline network called MaddAddam carries out bioterrorist campaigns against the powers that be. Consumer culture is vacuous and ubiquitous. Into this witches’ brew Atwood tosses three lifelines, combining and recombining them up to the climax that will claim two alongside untold billions

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FIGURE 13.1  America’s

mean streets. At the bottom of the social ladder lie the pleeblands. From behind electrified fences and CorpSeCorps-manned watchtowers, they loom as a colossal conurbation where bioterrorists run riot with ordinary lawbreakers and merchants of every vice conceivable. They are the breeding grounds for urban trash compacted by overcrowded tenements, random and targeted violence, and every deformity known to man.

Credit: Peter Swirski.

around the planet. There is Jimmy, a not-too-brainy, not-too-ambitious, not-tooevil sidekick to Crake. There is Crake, genetics wiz, utopian dreamer, sociopath. And there is Oryx, former child-porn and sex-slave victim who, having seen humankind at its worst, still believes in Crake’s Paradice Project. The climax comes right from Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys—another retro-futuresque in which a scientist-environmentalist-bioterrorist releases a superbug to rid the Earth of its deadliest species. Crake has the same idea. The meek, bioengineered in his Paradice dome, will inherit the Earth. But, since the Earth is already populated, stage one is ethical cleansing on the scale of the human species. The novel opens two or three months after the apocalypse. Jimmy, the sole survivor, has led a small tribe of deaggressed, herbivorous, shit-eating posthumans out of Paradice. The Crakers are an ecotopian lifeform designed for the ultraviolet-soaked, greenhouse-baked, microbe-ravaged conditions after the apocalypse. They worship Crake, the creator of people, and Oryx, the creatrix of animals, and in their own way watch after Jimmy, their reluctant shaman and mythmaker. Typical for Atwood, there is no clear resolution. When Jimmy returns from a near-fatal trek to what is left of the RejoovenEsence Compound, he gets wind of

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the presence of strangers in paradise. Although supposedly immune to anything but death after booster shots from Crake, he is gravely ill. Crouching in the shadows, he’s watching three emaciated human figures at their campsite. Both he and they are armed with spray guns. The end.

Once Upon a Time “Once upon a time”, begins the pre-apocalyptic strand of this double-stranded story. The first chapter records the aftermath of the holocaust through Jimmy’s adult eyes. The second chapter travels back to his childhood, beginning with scenes of another man-made devastation, as piles of livestock are incinerated after a bioterrorist hit on an organ-harvesting farm. The two strands, before and after the Second Flood, will alternate their double-helix structure until the end. “Once upon a time” chimes in not only the supernatural world of folktales, where fairies and other nonhuman bioforms roam the forest, but also the beginning of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Atwood’s survivalist, utopian, apocalyptic dystopia is also a Bildungsroman and K ­ ünstlerroman— a portrait of the artist as a young man destined to look after the greatest creation since the garden east of Eden. The dramatic arc of Atwood’s novels often splits into the Before and After, with the reader sitting at the intersection, and Oryx and Crake is no different. Like in a classical tragedy, the wheel of fortune has already been set in motion. The only thing left is to rake through the detritus of what happened to find out why. But even if the plot is one big spoiler, albeit doled out with the precision of an intravenous drip, the whys and wherefores will keep you guessing long after the last page. Why did Crake eliminate everyone on Earth save Jimmy, his rival for Oryx? Why did he kill Oryx? Was it a prime example of what he once told Jimmy, namely that extreme emotions can be lethal? Why did he kill himself in a ­suicide-by-Jimmy? Was he, as Jimmy mulls it over long after it is all over, “a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who’d thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?”12 Oryx and Crake is powered by a trio of characters as cryptic as Iago, Othello, and Desdemona—two men and a woman locked in a love triangle as deadly as in any noir mystery.13 Their motives, not to call them angles, remain underdetermined and ill-understood until the end. And a big reason for that is that everything is filtered through the eyes of Jimmy, whose knowledge is fragmentary and often unreliable, beginning with what he knows of Crake. He knows that Crake’s real name is Glenn, after Glenn Gould, star Canadian pianist and boy genius with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism). But Crake himself is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. About the only thing that is certain about him is that, in contrast to Winston Churchill’s crack about the USSR, the key to his behaviour is not self-interest. It is hubris—­ Godlike, Promethean, and Frankensteinian rolled into one.

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Like God in Genesis, Crake is a creator of life in Paradice. And like God in Genesis, he is a killer, mass and serial. On the way to adulthood, he kills his mother and uncle. On the way to Paradice, he kills a couple of non-team players and the first batch of the Crakers. On the way to utopia, he kills everyone on Earth save Jimmy. Small price in Crake’s eyes for ensuring there would be no more angels of death like himself. Like the mad doctrines of nuclear deterrence or the strategic calculus of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in his demented way Crake is principled, rational, even ethical. Once he decides to exterminate the violent pestilence that is humanity, he has to go too. And humans are unregenerate killers. Witness his own apocalypse and his final act of violence when, staring straight at Jimmy, he cuts the throat of the woman he loved who played Judas with his only friend. Oryx is no less elusive and her motives no less obscure despite the long chapter  on her childhood in Southeast Asia. Yes, it fleshes out the life story of a survivor in a story about global extinction. Yes, it paints a human face on global tragedies such as overpopulation, poverty, child abuse, and violence. But does it really reveal much about the girl who speaks in platitudes, evades better than O.J. in his prime, and pacifies men around her with sex? Where Oryx is giving and forgiving, Crake is logical, empirical, and veridical, a masculine yin to her feminine yang. In terms of this binary, Jimmy is the balancing act between adaptive and rigid, aggressive and altruistic. And he is. On one hand, he is silly putty in everyone’s hands. On the other, he is a reptileblooded killer who locks three Paradice scientists out of the dome when the pandemic hits the fan. Yet throughout all this, even as the story unfolds from his point of view, his goals remain as murky as those of Oryx and Crake. Consider his one and only act of altruism, looking after the Crakers. Jimmy has never been selfless. His primary worry has always been Jimmy. Is it because of a pledge to Oryx, whom he has never helped before? Because of Crake’s request that he do so? Because of the willing obligation?

Calling Linda Lovelace Although the critical opinion is united in calling Oryx and Crake a dystopia, this is like calling Linda Lovelace an actress. Not inaccurate—just tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. After all, at the bottom of its sea of afflictions lies bioengineered utopia. No more aggression or violence. No war, murder, or torture. No greed, sadism, rape. All edited at the stroke of a pen (Atwood writes in longhand). It is difficult to miss the Edenic motifs, from the unembarrassed prelapsarian nakedness, to having the Creator’s ear, to being made in his image—all Crakers have his green eyes, now enhanced to glow in the dark. They even have immortality of sorts in that, like animals, they live without awareness of being mortal.

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It is equally difficult to miss the utopian staples from egalitarianism and eugenic controls to the abolition of property and communal child rearing, all spliced into Paradice. The architecture and décor at the Watson-Crick positively reek of Plato, with marbled colonnades and shimmering fountains, not to mention academicians sitting down to communal meals. Paradice is also a modern Atlantis, doomed by hubris to sink in the Second Flood. More than anything else, however, it is an arcadian playground of the future. When Crake plays cicerone to Jimmy, he describes his wards as “gods cavorting with willing nymphs on some golden-age Grecian frieze”.14 If the pleeblands are social purgatory and worse, the Compounds are havens of plenty and, equally to the point, safety. These corporate strongholds are direct descendants of nineteenth-century company towns, built to provide workers with healthy, safe, and progressive environments. Advertised by their landlords and seized on by their tenants as micro-utopias, they were busy engineering temperance, hygiene, and company loyalty. For all these classic motifs, Atwood situates her utopia firmly in the manqué tradition of Disch, Malamud, and Vonnegut. Indeed, the parallels among their novels are too numerous and too striking to shrug off as a coincidence. Take 334. The same walled-off compounds, teeming pleeblands, global warming, mass species extinction, overpopulation, food and energy shortages, commodification, computerization, licit drugs, militarization, and culture of violence. Take God’s Grace. Man-made Second Flood, extermination of the human race, last man leading an eco-friendly tribe of posthumans in living off the land. The same array of allusions, leitmotifs, and symbols. The same spotlight on evolution, morality, and aggression. Ironically, the talking chimps are even more human than the Crakers, being selfish, predatory, meat-eating, sexually competitive opportunists. Take Galápagos. A sterilizing virus that wipes humankind out in a generation. Economic crisis. Child prostitution. A pocket of survivors. Global ecotopia. Most of all, Darwinism to the max in the devolution and deaggression of our race. Indeed, Vonnegut could be channelling his inner Atwood—both members of Amnesty International—when he writes: “During my entire lifetime, there wasn’t a day when, somewhere on the planet, there weren’t at least three wars going on”.15 It is an open question whether Atwood plays off these novels, and whether deliberately or via cryptomnesia. The deliberate side is supported by the fact that she has clearly done her homework when it comes to the utopian and dystopian tradition.16 Interestingly, among the genre classics from Plato, Wells, Verne, and Karel Čapek to Anatole France, Orwell, and Huxley, she has always reserved a special place for the utopia manqué of Jonathan Swift. Look no further than Oryx and Crake. Her isotropic satire, to say nothing of her take on a nonhuman race living in peace and benign tolerance of a lone human among them, owes more than a passing resemblance to Gulliver’s

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Travels. It cannot be an accident, either, that Swift’s idealized race of horses is based on the utopian societies in the two works he most admired: Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia.

Paradice Is the Paradice Project an obscene practical joke by a deranged mind or the only sane option in an insane world? Does it spell the end of humankind or just the beginning? Has Crake succeeded in muzzling Mother Nature or is she just as much a force to be reckoned with as in the Stone Age? Is Paradice Paradise, be it in the Judeo-Christian or utopian sense? In the end, all these questions boil down to one. Are the Crakers human? Crake’s own words are equivocal. The biggest problem with human beings, he says in the sequel to Oryx and Crake, is human beings. Implication? When he made the Crakers, he waved humanity goodbye. In the same breath, however, he hints that they are not only perfectly human but humanly perfect. “What would you pay for the design of a perfect human being?” he asks Jimmy, implying he has done just that.17 If it is difficult to see the Crakers as people, it’s because they are so different from us. Thick-skinned, resistant to ultraviolet rays, they come in a chromatic scale of colours from the jettest black to the creamiest white. No facial or body hair on their perfectly sculpted, immunity-boosted, citrus-scented, insect-­ repellent physiques. They feed on plants and, like many herbivores, on their own feces, rich as they are in bacteria that break down cellulose. A rapid maturation gene implanted by Crake means that one-year-olds look five. By four they are adolescent. By thirty they are engineered to meet their maker, instantly and painlessly. Meantime, every three years in estrus, women’s buttocks and abdomens turn blue in a prelude to group courtship and group mating. And although they all speak good English, Jimmy’s longing for a fully human voice hints that there is something missing—a timbre, an inflection, perhaps a trace of wicked wit. But if you say they are not human, then what are they? Let us try elimination: not great apes, not monkeys, not any other animal species. That leaves humans. After all, they do have reason, material and symbolic culture, and human language. Equally to the point, they respond sexually to humans. This entails that biologically they are close enough to us to crossbreed, much as we did with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Jimmy, who after the Second Flood takes to calling himself the Abominable Snowman, is himself a link between us and the Crakers. The mythical Yeti is a man-ape, an evolutionary stepping-stone between species. Now, even as he occasionally fights repulsion, Jimmy the Yeti finds himself drawn into this tribe of Yetis, who mutate right before his eyes, developing hierarchy, religion, abstract and symbolic thinking, and not least the ability to take life.

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Deaggressed, the Crakers have no concept of violence, rape, molestation, or enslavement. Now, however, they become capable of killing fish—which, tellingly, they regard as children of Oryx—albeit reluctantly and initially not of their own accord. This is in direct violation of the imperatives spliced into their genome. Paradice was to end both intraspecies and interspecies killing. No more aggression or predation. No killing of animals even for food. The Crakers cannot but echo the Eloi, the posthuman race of the futuristic Eden of The Time Machine. Wells makes clear that the Eloi—much as the Morlocks—are our evolutionary descendants. Similarly, the super-swift cultural evolution of the Crakers rides on the back of the biological. In an atypical admission of imperfection, Crake reveals that his method guarantees only ninety-nine percent accuracy. This may sound like a lot when batting in baseball, but not when you play with life. One way to read this failure rate is that every hundredth Craker will be feral. That in itself spells trouble in paradise insofar as this individual would dominate and aggress others. As the proverb goes, one rotten apple spoils the barrel. But in reality all Crakers would evolve, varying on average one hundredth of their template over a generation. This means that in time all Crakers might shed their presets while being vulnerable to those who mutated faster. Atwood shows this via the example of pigoons—hogs doctored with human neural tissue. Bioengineered to be tuskless and harmless, after the Flood they revert to type. Cue Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park. Nature will find a way, no matter how tightly you try to shut the door in her face. In the context, the wordplay on Paradice goes beyond the Garden of Eden or the utopias of old. The homonymic pun on pair-of-dice cues the randomness of any evolutionary process. The residual failure rate pulls the rug from under Crake’s plans to deaggress the Crakers. Or does it? Perhaps, the failure rate is built-in on purpose. Crake’s utopia is not static like the classic type. It allows for change-with-feedback if his deaggressed utopians are to survive among pigoons, wolvogs, and other lifeforms embedded in the same evolutionary arms-and-claws race.

Brainstorm Oryx and Crake is a great novel, maybe Atwood’s best in her more than half a century long career. It is also a great utopian novel, precisely because it sticks a big lurid price sticker on deaggression. But it’s far from flawless. Oddly enough, even as Atwood gets the scientific milieu dead right, some of her scientific and narrative logic sports holes big enough for a pigoon to trundle through. Daughter of an entomologist, sister of a neurophysiologist, and green activist in her own right, Atwood has insider’s knowledge of the scientific milieu. “I studied chemistry and botany and zoology”, she points out, “and if I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have gone on with that”.18 Just as in the little-known film gem

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Brainstorm, she paints her scientists true to life with their obsessive compulsions, closed-circuit jokes, a sense of sacred mission, and disdain for humanists. On the other hand, her bioscientists are to a man and woman nerdy, amoral stick figures who lack baseline social skills and interest in anything except genetics. Even more problematically, she divides the world into Numbers people and Word people. Science is deified and science envy reified into social inequality. Instead of a complex social fabric, you get C. P. Snow amped up to the max. This have-brains-will-do-science caricature is too pat for a major novel from a major novelist. If you feel inundated and intimidated by the pace of science, if you mistrust biotechnology and its cavalier attitudes to gene-splicing living things, if you are a Word and not a Numbers person—why else would you reach for a book about science rather than a science book—then Oryx and Crake ladles out big bowlfuls of chicken soup for your soul. That the novel feels at times like a vessel to pour its author’s scorn and fears into is not half as bad, however, as its jarring anachronisms. The future world up to its eyeballs in futuristic biotech turns on CD-ROMs, DVDs, and pocket calculators, obsolete already at the time of the publication. The creepiest genetics of the future—and of today, since growing human replacement organs in pigs is fact, not fiction—is in the same century as the gadgetry from the turn of millennium. Then there are internal hiccups. After the apocalypse, there is no more timekeeping, symbolized by Jimmy’s broken watch. The rhythm of life reverts to natural time. Jimmy pegs the present to be two to three months after the pandemic, a short enough timespan to be fairly reliable about. It is odd, therefore, that he gripes about his shoes having disintegrated quite some time ago. Even in the tropics it takes more than a few weeks to kill a pair of shoes. The same shaky timeline is in evidence during Jimmy’s trek to what is left of the RejoovenEsence Compound, where he runs into the headless body of a security guard. Research conducted at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, better known as the original Body Farm, shows that the body would not stay fleshy after two or three months of decomposition in the tropics, especially with all kinds of fauna roaming around, starting with insects and flesh-hungry pigoons. Likewise, when Jimmy trudges on his aching and then infected feet, it is hard to understand why he does not jump on a bicycle he spots on the way, especially as his willingness to scavenge is otherwise on full display. If you say he might not know how to ride, he could at least use it to haul the goods he intends to bring back. Either way, it would lessen his exposure to the sun and the predators.

Massacres, Genocides, That Sort of Thing When Jimmy’s mom and dad fight at home, there is no physical violence, just verbal. But they fight over everything, beginning with the state of the world. When

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Jimmy’s mother rips the Compounds as manicured theme parks, his father shoots back: “You could walk around without fear”.19 The world outside, he points out, is awash with violence. Hostile bioforms, weapons of every kind, envy and fanaticism. “Didn’t she want to be safe, didn’t she want her son to be safe?” Growing up in safety, adolescent Jimmy gets hooked on an online game of Blood and Roses. It is a trading game, like Monopoly. Unlike Monopoly, you trade minor, major, massive, or mega-atrocities—massacres, genocides, that sort of thing—for gems of art, science, and other fruits of civilization. The game even suggests exchange rates. Mona Lisa for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Beethoven’s Ninth plus three Great Pyramids for the genocide in Armenia. When Jimmy gets tired of losing to Crake, they leave the game for the online wasteland of snuff sites, live executions, assisted suicides, eating live animals, extreme violence, child porn, and any other form of gratification a human soul might desire. Scant as they are, these experiences are the only clues as to Crake’s evolution from a brilliant adolescent into humanity’s executioner or, as he might see it, saviour. Were he ever to defend his draconian measures in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, however, aggression and violence would almost certainly top the list. Jimmy concedes as much as he watches over the Crakers. No more rape, abuse of children, sex slaves, sexual jealousy, wife-butchers or husbandpoisoners. No more primitive primate brain. No more, presumably, that hormonal kicker to aggression and rage: testosterone. It is true that high levels of aggression that acted as reproductive boosters in primeval societies are maladaptive in the thermonuclear age and in the main habitat of our species, which is the city. With teens and even tens of millions of urbanites crammed into human zoos and in each other’s face from dawn to dusk, we need cooperation, not testosterone. Testosterone fuels aggression, territoriality, sexual exploits, and status seeking. You want peace? Get rid of testosterone. Would it were so simple. Testosterone is not just the equivalent of gasoline poured into the behavioural fire. It is implicated in many other aspects of life, many beneficial, some essential. It not only determines men’s appearance, personality, and reproductive prowess. It regulates female behaviour, too, insofar as women produce testosterone at elevated levels during flashpoint cycles or transitional periods, such as menopause.20 Still, splice utopia and bioengineering together and you have a near future in which society harnesses genetics to eradicate aggression. But what if, in order to end violence and its ruinous consequences—from war to homicide to nonlethal types of conflict—society would have to surrender some of its civil liberties? What if global peace and social order demand, in effect, top-down restrictions on our freedom of action, the cornerstone of all societies and all social contracts? Imagine that one day we come up with a technology to impose a worldwide pax humana. Biological imperatives such as aggression are not, after all, life sentences without parole. More than any other species we are capable of giving

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nature the slip. Our sexual appetite, for example, is more unquenchable than that of most animals, yet most of us manage to maintain committed relationships. True, there is no pill yet to induce monogamy. But just like it is worth asking what would happen if there was one, it is worth contemplating a scenario where the tap of aggression could be turned off. Just. Like. That. All the more so that, for the first time in history, we have not only the capacity to multiply doomsday scenarios in fiction but also to trigger them in real life.

Notes 1. Ingersoll, 125; 127. 2. 366. 3. Bloom, 1. 4. Buss (2005); Wrangham and Peterson; Bourke; Carroll; David Livingstone Smith. 5. Hathaway and Shapiro. 6. Looking Backward, 81. 7. In the novel Crake takes the name of an extinct waterbird of the rail family. 8. Damasio; Davitz; Ekman; Haidt; Matsumoto; Nesse; Plumper; Wallbott and Scherer. 9. Swirski (2011), Chapter 1. 10. Splicing goats and spiders at the beginning of the century (page 199) implies either parallel history or the twenty-second century. 11. Pages 253–254. 12. 343; see also 166. 13. Swirski (2016); on trinity and other symbolism in the novel, see Sharon Rose Wilson; Wynne-Davies, Howells; Bouson; Gessert; DiMarco; Dodds; Lake; Stein. 14. 169. 15. Galápagos, Vol. 3: 669. 16. Ruddick. 17. 305. The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) are notably inferior; a TV adaptation of the trilogy is in the works under the title of MaddAddam. 18. Ingersoll, 46. 19. 27; following quote 53. 20. Herbert.

14 THE ADVOCATE’S DEVIL

Ethical Cleansing Atwood’s scenario of worldwide peacemaker technology shows what’s at stake. Her deaggressed utopia, premised on the elimination of the human race, is of course one that no sane person would consent to. But, if not on hers, then on what terms could we justify technological enforcement of ethical principles? Under what conditions could ethical cleansing become acceptable to the public and the authorities? Judging by the atrocities committed in every part of the world from the dawn of time, we should be willing to pay almost any price to free ourselves from violence, murder, and war. But, given a chance, would we? An informal study I have run over the last quarter century bears directly on this question. When lecturing on deaggression, I would poll audiences about their attitudes to the procedure.1 I also used email to poll individuals around the world. Here is the full text of the questionnaire. Imagine a world where radically new technological means (surgical, biotic, pharmacological, or other) allow a complete eradication of aggression in human beings. You can assume that the procedure is thoroughly safe and unfailingly successful. There are other important things to note about it: 1. It is painless and leaves absolutely no physical trace on individuals who undergo it. 2. It eradicates aggression and propensity for violence in everyone who undergoes the procedure.

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3. Aside from completely deaggressing the individuals who undergo the procedure, it does not change in any way whatsoever their psychology or behaviour. All cognitive, emotional, social and any other aspects of the person after the procedure remain exactly as they were before. Put simply, you are the same person you were before, except now you can no longer commit any violent act, be it murder, rape, spousal abuse, bullying, and so on. And you never have to fear anyone who underwent the procedure. 4. Socially, the universal implementation of deaggression would mean the end of violence, violent crime, wars, armed conflicts, and unarmed confrontations. On the other hand, the problems with implementation are serious, multiple, and obvious, beginning with the fact that whoever would not undergo the procedure would remain as they are now, i.e., capable of acts of violence (though not necessarily committed to committing them).   Please think through the implications of such a radically new world and of the deaggression procedure. Then answer three questions in the order they are presented. Be as detailed/descriptive as you like. 1. As part of a global campaign of deaggression, would you yourself consent to undergo the procedure? 2. Would you consent to deaggression if everyone else on the planet was guaranteed to undergo it? 3. What safeguards and guarantees would have to be in place for you to consent to undergo it? My premise was the same as Atwood’s. Bioengineering technologies capable of neutralizing aggression in humans (primates? mammals? chordates?) will become available in the future, conceivably even by the end of this century. What then? With an opportunity to better humankind, but with more questions than answers as to the hazards, would we proceed regardless? Should we? If so, under what circumstances? Leapfrogging technological variables in order to focus on social-engineering constants, my study tried to isolate a set of general principles regardless of the actual method of deaggression. Judging by the variety of treatments of the subject, the latter could be microsurgical as in Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars, pharmacological as in Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, chemical as in Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome, or genetic as in Oryx and Crake.2 Most likely, however, it will be biotic. All you need is suborn an endogenous retrovirus and let it do what viruses do best: invade all cells with which it comes into contact. The virus will splice its sequence into the genetic material of the host’s germ cells which, reproducing themselves, will pass that sequence to all

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future generations. You could in theory start with just one virus that, invading every host that comes its way, would spread like wildfire. Utopia now?

Earth and Eden The results of the study were a huge surprise. First of all, irrespective of age, sex, or nationality, respondents all over the world vehemently thumbed down deaggression. Only fifteen percent answered “Yes” to the first question.3 Naturally, the way it is phrased opens a vast loophole. Anyone who escaped deaggression could rule the world. The fifteen percent who opted in on principle were, in that sense, true utopians. The second question explicitly closes the loophole to pave the way for those who are equally keen on peace, but are more realistic about the potential for disaster. It does that by expressly guaranteeing that deaggression is universal. No one would be left behind to prey on the vulnerable. If you undergo the peacemaker procedure, so does everyone else. It is here that the results threw me for a loop. With the guarantee that deaggression is harmless, painless, and universal, you would think that everyone would vote for it. This would be the case if the reluctance to give peace a chance stemmed from fears about potential abuses of the procedure. It turned out, however, that people were no less concerned about deaggression itself. Admittedly, when assured that the procedure would be universal, the pro-vote rose to thirty percent.4 Yet seven out of ten respondents still balked at world peace. The opposition was so entrenched, in fact, that the study predicts a decisive rejection of deaggression all over the planet. Even on the best-case scenario, with all the safeguards in place, seven out of ten people prefer the world as is in contrast to one in which everyone is deaggressed. Asked to choose between Earth and Eden, most would cling to the world awash in blood and killing rather than take the blood and killing away. Many factors may affect a person’s attitude toward deaggression. Data show, for example, that age may be a factor, with respondents under-forty being somewhat more open. Likewise, national or cultural origins seem to correlate with deaggression, with a statistically higher number of Chinese open to the procedure. In contrast, sex has no discernible effect, challenging the popular belief that women are more dovish and peace-minding. The 114 respondents represented fifteen countries from all continents but Africa. They varied in age from the youngest of nineteen to the oldest of ­seventy-four. Importantly, conducted over a span of a generation (1993–2017), the survey factored out the effects of high-profile events such as 9/11, and other acts of terror or war. In short, the flat-out rejection of deaggression is both a true reflection and a true prediction of core sentiments around the world.5 The main thrust of opposition to the procedure stems from three worries. In the order of importance, they are: disbelief that deaggression would be universal

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(“I would need the guarantee that everybody would also do it”6), disbelief in the lack of side-effects (“I don’t believe aggression is a limited, bounded condition that could be isolated. Biology and culture are symbiotic at the deepest level”7), and disbelief in the integrity of the controllers (“I am too cynical to believe in worldwide philanthropy”8). A 25-year-old Finnish female said she would not want to live in a society full of people who want to kill, but are not able to. A 43-year-old Chinese male said that any plan in which humans exalt themselves to the power of God would become evil. A 30-year-old Hong Kong female said experiments should be conducted first so that people would know what they are getting into. A 45-year-old German female argued that deaggression amounted to controlling human beings. A 68-year-old American male thought deaggression was morally indefensible. A 66-year-old American male asked how one can be virtuous if there is no possibility of not being virtuous. A 33-year-old Chinese male said it went against human nature. A 22-year-old Russian female argued that indirect ­aggression— such as repression—would have to be turned off too. And a 35-year-old Singapore female recoiled from universal deaggression because, she said, she herself was not aggressive by nature. Quite a few naysayers admitted wishing for a deaggressed world, which they could not, however, square with the reality around them. As a 50-year old Canadian female put it, “These guarantees would only work in a utopia”. Indeed, the level of mistrust of governments, scientists, or putative controllers was sky high. Ironically, anyone armed with the technology might see this as a mandate to use it anyway, just because there would be no mandate forthcoming. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Crake does. Could this massive rejection of deaggression be a failure of the imagination? A  number of respondents insisted they needed aggression to fight off aggressors in the universally deaggressed world. If the thought experiment asks you to accept a parameter as given, and you cannot, does it mean that universal deaggression is, for some at least, literally inconceivable? Or that it taps into fears so irrational that no safeguards could overcome them? A 62-year-old Canadian male defended his “No” vote eloquently: Aggression is both functional and adaptive in humans. That is to say, it has evolved for a useful purpose, namely to conduce toward survival and reproductive success. So to artificially remove all aggressive instinct would likely endanger us in the same way as does, say, the inability to feel pain. Humans are not normally a particularly aggressive species, or we wouldn’t be able to live relatively peaceably in great cities in close proximity to millions . . . . Of course, there are many forms of gratuitous violence among humans, but given how many billions there are of us, these are normally rare enough to be newsworthy. Warmongering is gratuitous violence on a larger scale, but most people have to be coerced, seduced, or

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bribed into killing fellow humans unless their own selves, family, or tribe is threatened.

Clay Pigeons In the face of such a ringing rejection of deaggression, it is even more imperative to examine its windfalls and pitfalls. In the interest of telling the story, Atwood by and large skims over the nuts and bolts of the technology and over its moral and social ramifications. Seeing, however, as the suppression of bloodshed and violence is the linchpin of her thought experiment, no discussion could be complete without it. As with bioengineering itself, the pros of deaggression are intimately linked to the cons. If only for this reason, the following arguments and counterarguments are in no way conclusive. Rather, they are an invitation to a debate of technological solutions to moral desiderata. Here, then, are some of the charges Jimmy could level against deaggression, and some of the counters Crake could marshal in the way of a reply. JIMMY:  Deaggression

creates the ultimate shooting gallery, turning humanity into so many clay pigeons for anyone who dodged the procedure. The consequences of such asymmetry are vividly allegorized in the biblical utopia of Eden. While Adam and Eve cannot even conceive of victimizing anyone, the serpent can, making them easy marks for his machinations. CRAKE:  This is the crux of the matter. By submitting to the procedure, any person becomes vulnerable to whoever refuses to follow suit. In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, no sooner does the youth gang-leader become conditioned into non-aggression than he is brutalized by other gangbangers, without being able to lift a finger in defense. Similarly, the deaggressed Crakers are not dangerous to people—“it’s us who’s dangerous to them”.9   The temptation to beat the system would be irresistible. Anyone who eluded the peacemaker procedure could rule the earth. This alone means that millions would try. Bellamy might say that a civilization wise enough to mandate deaggression would have moved past the yearning for supremacy. More likely, it would have the foresight and the means to ensure that no one could crook the wheel.   This is to say that no rational person should consent to the procedure unless it came with ironclad guarantees of being implemented simultaneously worldwide. In practice, as with a Cold War doomsday machine, the process would have to be taken out of human hands to ward off manufactured crises that could be used as a pretext to undo the pacifist effects.   We squirm about anyone, let alone machines, flipping switches in our heads. Changing aspects of personal identity is scary and creepy. Having said that, fear and repulsion were also predicted to turn people away from

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heart transplants which, the alarmists said, would taint the personhood of the patients. Nothing like it has come to pass, and it is at least conceivable that it might be no different with deaggression. JIMMY:  So who will guard the guardians? CRAKE:  To persuade others of the benefits of deaggression, the controllers would have to undergo it themselves. Of course, they might also try to get around it, hence deaggression would have be to make inescapable. This means going local and global at the same time—not forgetting astronauts, submariners like Calvin Cohn, folks on respirators in the case of airborne agent, and so forth.   But there is much to be said even for selective deaggression. Violent convicts could have their sentences reduced or even commuted providing they underwent the procedure. Matter of fact, convictions for violent crimes might come with mandatory deaggression. If nothing else, the economies in law enforcement, healthcare, and the penal and judicial systems would be a godsend.   There is actually precedent for not requiring consent for invasive procedures. Individuals deemed incapable of making informed decisions are subjected to medical interventions by society. Less autocratically, the buildup toward deaggression may be so gradual and paved for by education and propaganda—and pilot projects so free of side effects or made to look so by corporate or federal spin doctors—that holdovers would look like lunatics.   Finally, deaggression could be implemented on the sly, like in Oryx and Crake. Utopian or megalomaniacal bioengineers could simply put us in front of a done deal. They might even refrain from taking credit for what they did. Few wars today begin with a formal declaration of hostilities. Whether you think of universal deaggression as war on humankind or just war on war, the protocol might be the same.   This is assuming we would even realize that we have been rewired into peace. Mind control past a certain level of sophistication may allow control of the subjects’ awareness of whether they are being controlled. Like the Manchurian candidate, you could be brainwashed into thinking that you have not been brainwashed at all. After all, how would you know if you did not know?

What Would You Do? JIMMY: 

Even if instituted universally, deaggression could never work since everyone would be searching for an antidote, if only out of fear that everyone else was. So says the fearful symmetry of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: in the absence of binding contracts, if you do not defect someone else will. CRAKE: This is the other technological grail. In addition to being universal, deaggression would have to be irreversible, not only at the time of the

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procedure but forever. 334 illustrates why. Contraceptives flow in tap water to keep the population bomb in check. Despite strict penalties for tampering, there are black market pills to undo sterility. The system has failed. But while one more baby may not make a difference, one wolf among the sheep does.   This seemingly impossible condition may be, however, less so than it seems. Once in place, deaggression may bootstrap deaggression into perpetuity because you might need to be de-deaggressed to want to be dedeaggressed in the first place. Still, some kind of firewall would have to be put into place since the capacity to deaggress is almost certain to come together with the capacity to de-deaggress.   The intriguing scenario is if the technology is developed by a single state, an isolated research team, or even a solitary genius. Would they feel justified in enacting it without consulting the rest of the world? Would they select to deaggress only their foes? Or would they proceed to save us from ourselves so that, awaking one day, we would find war and murder obscene relics known only from history books? JIMMY:  This is a self-justification of the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose variety. CRAKE:  The argument may be circular but it is not vicious. In the universal-andirreversible scenario there are no losers—only winners. Since few people would volunteer to undergo the procedure, this might actually convince bioengineers of its necessity. The opposition to deaggression would become the crowning argument for deaggression.   Interestingly, there may be parallels here between gene-engineering and geo-engineering. Over the course of the Industrial Revolution, and especially during the Anthropocene, we have terraformed planet Earth and triggered climate change. The response to global warming ranges, however, from the Trumpian “what, me worry?” to all hands on deck in the Solomon Islands, some of which are already underwater.   Not all states face the same level of threat, making a common front unlikely. But, feeling the knife on its throat, it is equally unlikely that any country armed with geo-engineering technology would refrain from using it just because its effects could be global. Most probably, concedes the Economist, they “would just go ahead and try it”.10 To repeat, we are not talking here about gene-­engineering. But, clearly, unilateral action may be justified in the eyes of those convinced they are doing the right thing.   Imagine it is you holding the bioengineering aces in your hand. To deaggress or not to deaggress? Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, except that on one horn of the dilemma there are no more massacres, murders, and wars. In the utopia of Walden Two, Frazier buttonholes a skeptic with this very question. “Suppose you suddenly found it possible to control the behavior of men as you wished. What would you do?”11 Well, what would you do?

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Less Than Human JIMMY: 

Deaggression strips humanity of an innate part of our evolutionary heritage, making us at best incomplete and at worse deficient—a race of robots programmed to behave. CRAKE:  As Atwood’s geneticist points out, we are hormone robots anyway, only faulty ones.12 As for the first part of the objection, the same evolutionary heritage that gave us aggression also gave us teeth which, without hesitation, we rectify with fillings, extractions, or braces. We also rectify them in children, with or without their consent.   On the same note, we have lengthened the average human life span to more than twice of what it used to be in the natural hunter-gatherer ecosystem, reversed clinical death, performed caesarean sections, separated Siamese twins, transplanted organs, attached severed limbs, relieved epilepsy using electrode implants, enabled infertile couples to have children—all of which, while widely accepted, are no less unnatural as deaggression.   Historically, it is clear that we are willing to improve on evolution so long as the results are beneficial. So much for the incompleteness thesis. As for deficiency, wife beaters or stalkers “deaggressed” by restraining orders are not made deficient by the courts’ intervention. If they are humanly deficient, it is owing to the root cause, which is their lust for violence. JIMMY:  Deaggression is the first step down the slippery slope of improving humanity until we no longer resemble who we are today. The only difference is that it is killing humanity bit by bit, rather than in one go like in Oryx and Crake. CRAKE: The Australopithecine man also bore no semblance to what we are today, yet no one argues that the change was not for the better. Ironically, any such argument would undermine itself since Australopithecus afarensis could not speak at all. At bottom, this objection is about the fear of biotechnological invasion of the body snatchers and it has been answered above. JIMMY:  Deaggression makes us less than human. CRAKE: American tribes decimated after Columbus’s arrival, plantation-era slaves in the South, or immigrant labourers treated like cattle during the Gilded Age would see this in a very different light. In the novel, the torments inflicted on Oryx may be the reason why Crake replaces humankind with a race that embodies human kindness.   Denying the power to kill or maim, deaggression makes us not less but more human. It steers us away from brutality to peaceful means of conflict resolution in all aspects of life, from superpower horse-trading to territorial disputes to marital strife. This is apart from the fact that our conception of what is human, even as reflected in our conception of human rights, differs from century to century and from society to society.

196 Biotopia JIMMY:  By

limiting the spectrum of human responses, deaggression makes life less colourful and limits the intensity of emotional response. CRAKE: Already Aristotle questioned the link between anger and violence in “On Anger”. The elimination of the threat and perhaps even the concept of physical aggression frees a whole range of emotions normally controlled by fear. Think of the relief from violence or reprisal, safety in the company of strangers, or empowerment to stand up to injustice—which, significantly, deaggression would not cure. Indeed, it might actually intensify the expression of emotions, including anger, in that we could finally get emotional over things, only with no violent consequences.

Devil Spawn JIMMY: Deaggression

usurps the divine prerogative of creating new species. “You’re interfering with the building blocks of life”, spits Jimmy’s mother to her bioengineer husband. “It’s immoral. It’s . . . sacrilegious”.13 CRAKE: The historical roots of this concern lie in the Judeo-Christian world view, according to which we were created by a transcendent but personal God in His image. With the divine finger in the mix, whoever meddles with the natural recipe for life commits a mortal sin. Of course, this is trying to close the stable doors long after the horses have escaped. We have been playing God since time immemorial through selective breeding, yet no one goes around calling Chihuahuas the devil spawn.   The list of our usurpations is endless, from cloning, abortion, and euthanasia to inoculations, fertility treatments, and organ transplants. All were decried for their godlike hubris before becoming socially accepted and legal. Deaggression is another idea ahead of its time, in principle no different from brain lesions to reduce epilepsy, doctoring serotonin during depression, or preventive jabs against smallpox or polio. JIMMY:  Getting a polio shot is not even close to getting deaggressed. CRAKE:  Undeniably, for most people curing aggression with deaggression is like curing a headache with a bullet to the head. No better proof than the fights over immunization. Although not everyone is at equal risk, vaccinations are given to all as a preventive measure. World Health Organization tallies that this saves between two to three million lives a year. The scourge of smallpox was eradicated in 1980. Polio is on the brink of becoming history.   Who would quarrel with life free of deadly disease? Well, some do. The anti-vaxxers come in all shapes and hues. The Amish thumbs down modern medicine on principle. Some vegans shy away from vaccines manufactured in eggs. Certain sects and denominations defy them as interference with the divine will. Anthroposophists argue that diseases boost resistance and therefore physical and even mental health.   Most of the holdouts just do not trust the feds’ word that immunizations are safe and necessary. And this is where the rub is. To get herd immunity,

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vaccinations must exceed the ninety-five percent threshold in a target population so that future outbreaks are confined to isolated pockets. Tell this to those Americans who think that, if there is a way to screw up, the feds will find it, and the many more who think that, if there is way to screw them, they will.   Many still remember when in 1972 the Washington Star and the New York Times splashed the government’s dirt on the front pages. For forty years the US Public Health Service had been running a covert and deadly bio-study of its citizens, monitoring untreated syphilis in nearly four hundred poor black men. The subjects were not informed about being infected, nor that they were guinea pigs. They were simply told that if they joined the study they would get free medical care.   The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male went on even after the discovery that penicillin could cure the disease. Worse, during the war, the men were exempted from the draft precisely so that they would not be treated with penicillin in the military. All this makes widespread disbelief in ironclad guarantees understandable. But the problem is not deaggression—it is the US government. JIMMY:  Deaggression takes away our freedom by robbing us of the freedom of choice. More than being good, it is the act of choosing that is of value. CRAKE: All that deaggression takes away our licence to kill. Our freedom is checked in a myriad ways by society. We must we must abide by laws, attend school, refrain from antisocial behaviour, and so on. Under the state motto of “Live Free or Die”, New Hampshire residents are not free to aggress or kill. Nor are they hurrying to scrap the laws that take these freedoms away.   A freedom-loving society is no more than a battlefield of conflicting interests unless it values other principles beside freedom. Freedom is not an absolute goal but a means to a good life—life that does not harm other lives. If anything, deaggression expands our freedom by allowing us to live without fear. In any case, no amount of deaggression could take away our freedom of choice even in principle insofar as we are too complex on the computational level to be predictable even to ourselves.14

Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover JIMMY:  Deaggression

amounts to eugenics, a practice tainted by abuse in the name of the highest humanitarian or progressive ideals. CRAKE: All true, alas. In 1920 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value spelled out the rationale for a massive program of mercy killing in one of Europe’s democratic republics. Grafting juridical logic on medical cost-benefit analyses, it advocated painless termination of incurable patients against their will. In his unpublished book after Mein Kampf, Hitler also endorsed the need for the Third Reich “to raise the value of its people in racial terms”.15

198 Biotopia   Not to gang up on Germany, the United States has on occasion been every

inch as authoritarian. In the first half of the twentieth century, it carried out forced sterilizations on more than fifty thousand Americans. These campaigns to improve the purity of the American genetic stock were cheered across the political spectrum from Charles Lindbergh and the reactionaries to Jack London and the progressivists.   Eugenics may have a bad rap nowadays, but in its time many of the greatest public figures were whole-hearted advocates. They included litterateurs

FIGURE 14.1 The inhuman use of human beings. Fritz Klein, the camp doctor, stand-

ing in a mass grave at Belsen. Klein, who was born in Austro-Hungary, was an early member of the Nazi Party and joined the SS in 1943. He worked in Auschwitz-Birkenau for a year from December 1943 where he assisted in the selection of prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. After a brief period at Neuengamme, Klein moved to Belsen in January 1945. Klein was subsequently convicted of two counts of war crimes and executed in December 1945.

Credit: Imperial War Museum (BU 4260)

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like George Bernard Shaw, scientists like Alexander Graham Bell, activist educators like W.E.B. Du Bois, economists like John Maynard Keynes, politicians like Winston Churchill, and birth control/sex education pioneers like Margaret Sanger. They also included Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.   In the run-up to Roe v. Wade, many pro-choice arguments were couched in prosocial rhetoric indistinguishable from eugenics. Humanitarian agencies, such as the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, contended that fewer illegitimate births meant fewer adults mooching the state for handouts when they grew up. Were the weak—because uneducated and poor—hereditary links to breed less, society could only benefit.   All the same, eugenic principles need not be condemned en masse. Vitamin and mineral supplements, nutritional regimens, or fluoride in toothpaste and water taps are only some ways in which we doctor entire populations, hoping for positive results. Merely because a technology can be misused is no reason to reject it out of hand. X-rays are deadly yet are employed to save lives.   Most people associate eugenics with long-discredited social Darwinism or behavioural genetics, which scours for differences among racial and ethnic groups (for example, in intelligence). There is also the stigma of Hitler endorsing America’s support of eugenics in his early stump speeches. Be that as it may, all perversions of eugenic ideals stem from their selective nature. By definition, universal deaggression is immune to this problem. JIMMY: Deaggression could not work since mental processes are inherently uncontrollable. Involuntary thoughts about forbidden topics would result in nausea and pain and, in the long run, even paranoia and neurosis. Trying to avoid thoughts that trigger negative feedback, you would inevitably be thinking about them. CRAKE: It is true that you cannot unthink a thought. But, in our procedure, deaggression does not work through behavioural conditioning, which could be prone to such side-effects. Instead, as exemplified by the Crakers, it nips the problem in the bud by rendering acts of aggression inconceivable. JIMMY: Deaggression robs us of goodness inasmuch as you need the bad to appreciate the good. CRAKE: There is no need for bloodshed and pain to appreciate life without bloodshed and pain, just as you do not need your eyes gouged out to appreciate the beauty of colours. In most cases a choice between good and not-sogood suffices to appreciate the former. Generally speaking, our capacity for counterfactual thinking, hypothetical reasoning, and fiction-making enables us to grasp the relative value of sundry acts and states.   Besides, deaggression is not a cure-all for social ills. There would be enough bad left even in the world at peace—racism, inequality, unemployment, mendacity, personal failure, peer-group or romantic rejection—to benchmark the good. In any case, the bloodshed resulting from too many

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people choosing not to do good shoots the legs from under this no-goodwithout-the-bad deontology.

One for the Old Generation, One for the New JIMMY: However

far-fetched the scenario, deaggression makes us vulnerable to non-terrestrial civilizations that could exploit our inability to defend ourselves. CRAKE:  There is no logical argument to refute this point. For reasons detailed before, deaggression would have to be universal and irreversible. The bottom line is that by pacifying Earth we would be playing the odds with cosmic invasions. Still, even although Stephen Hawking appears to take such a scenario seriously, there are solid scientific grounds for assigning to it a negligible probability.   These start with the possibility that there is no life in the universe other than on Earth, or that it could be extremely rare (low psychozoic density). Add to this the astronomical distances between stars and the lack of credible motivation for galaxy-faring civilizations to invade a small rock hurtling around a run-of-the-mill second-generation star on the fringe of a milky nebula, and you can go back to sleeping at night.   On the same grounds, an alien race would be by definition non-human and almost certainly non-humanoid. This means that we ought to be able to rise against them, depending on how finely grained our aggression filters would be. More likely and more fraught with danger is the rise of autonomous robots and military drones. Issuing a “Kill” command to a drone wouldn’t be feasible. But if you cannot ram a truck into innocent bystanders, could you order a robot to do that—assuming self-driven vehicles couldn’t be hacked to careen onto sidewalks themselves?   Could autonomous machines themselves become capable of aggression? The crucial factor here is the necessity of extending deaggression to robots which (who?) might come to develop agency and a gamut of volitional drives. After all, volitional autonomy in machines entails some form of evolution—and the other way round.16 This means that behaviours typical of humans, including the capacity to kill, might arise in droids, borgs, and bots. If so, we will need to deaggress them too. JIMMY:  What about reminders of war and killing in the form of armaments, historical records, works of literature and art, and living memories? Would they need to be deaggressed—cleansed of violent content—too? CRAKE:  In an article subtitled tellingly “The Last of the Utopians”, Skinner notes that a utopian remake might impede, if not wholly disable, the appreciation of the classics of art. If you raised children in an experimental community in the spirit of Walden Two, he argues, “when they grew up and read Dostoyevsky they wouldn’t know what in the devil he was talking about”.17

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As the clashes over Civil War statues and monuments show, it would be a small price to pay for a world at peace. JIMMY:  Deaggression would impoverish art and perhaps stifle the creative spirit in the arts and even in the sciences. It would limit the full range of emotions and responses available for contemplation and the competitive spirit needed to blaze trails and strike out in novel directions. CRAKE:  It would be a pity if a Disch, Malamud, Vonnegut, or an Atwood could not ply their art after deaggression. Still, it is not immediately certain that the inability to perform or conceive performing violent acts in real life would entail the inability to conceive them for artistic reasons. Assuming so, it is possible that some types of art or entertainment might no longer be read and enjoyed. So what?   Grand Theft Auto and other violent video games elicit impassioned calls for discontinuation even in our permissive age. The history of culture, literature, and art is strewn with discarded movements and forms—discarded because they no longer serve our current aesthetic and social values. Arising to serve the needs of a future, utopian art might very well diverge from ours not because of censorship but simply because future society may have no use for artistic depictions of violence or war.   At the same time, pain, suffering, and misfortune will eternally exist in the world and they will continue to inspire art that speaks of the existential, or merely humdrum, trials and triumphs of the human spirit. Conflict, even if only on such a basic level as between individual needs and desires and those of others or those of the collective, will always remain a fact of life.   By and large, as far as competition goes—for example in sports or artistic or intellectual pursuits—there is no reason to believe that deaggression would be in the way. It is aggression and physical violence that are the targets of the procedure, not the ability to pit one’s skills or knowledge against others. Put differently, you might still lose a championship series, be trounced in a public debate, or oppose social or political injustice, only without fearing a vendetta or a bloody reprisal.

Notes 1. Swirski (2006). 2. Swirski (2011), Chapter 4. 3. 15.7 percent; worldwide margin of error 6.6 percent, nineteen times out of twenty. 4. 30.7 percent; worldwide margin of error 8.5 percent, nineteen times out of twenty. 5. With the caveat that most respondents were educated and fairly affluent residents of the northern hemisphere, who have not themselves experienced ruinous episodes of violence. 6. 32-year old Croatian female. 7. 61-year old British female. 8. 65-year old British/Finnish male. 9. The Year of the Flood, 396.

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10. The Economist (2015), 15. 11. 240; an earlier version appeared in Swirski (2011), Chapter 4. 12. 166. 13. 57; on page 51, bioengineering is said to make you “feel like God”. 14. Barrow and Tipler. 15. In Tooze, 11. 16. Swirski (2013). 17. In Klaw, 45.

15 TALKIN’ ’BOUT MY GENE-RATION

Every War We Waged Ecologically speaking, bacteria are hands down the fittest form of life on the planet. They flourish in every corner of it, they are thousands of orders of magnitude more numerous than humankind, and they are better equipped to survive in all manner of environmental conditions. They have been around much longer than we have, while producing more offspring, mutating faster, and adapting to degrading habitats better and quicker. So what that they don’t write literature or manufacture smartphones? Who said that this should be the gauge of adaptive success? In evolutionary terms there is only one criterion of excellence and that’s survival with a view to procreation. And in this bacteria excel to the degree we could never match. This is also what’s so chilling about them since, not to rub it in, they have won every war we waged on them. Still, even their creative potential is arguably superior to that of humans, only it’s manifested biologically, rather than technologically or aesthetically. Bacteria are supreme chemists and immunologists, so much superior to us that we literally couldn’t exist without their expertise. Bacteria in our stomachs, to take the most obvious example, are the vital link between the food we eat and the energy we extract from it. But bacteria will do so much more for us when bioengineers learn to exploit their potential. Bioweapons are inevitably one realm in which they will dominate our future.1 But there will also be bacteria bred for mining, providing better grade ores by feeding on impurities. Bacteria will heal wounds by eating infected or scarring tissue. They will become corrective lenses by attaching themselves to corneas and changing their shape.

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They will safely and “greenly” store free-floating energy all around us in their mitochondria. They will preserve food by consuming rotting agents, including other species of bacteria. They will keep homes and workplaces clean by eating up the dust and dirt. They will fertilize farmlands, biodegrade industrial waste, metabolize drugs, and provide us with free skin baths while performing feats of biocomputing. Save for the bioweapons, all this may sound like another never-never utopia. Except that governments, biotech corporations, and universities are working around the clock to turn this microbial future into reality. And in 2017 they made a stunning breakthrough by creating bacteria using an expanded genetic alphabet. The DNA of all life on Earth is composed of four nucleic bases: A, T, C, and G. The genetic code of this E. coli was written with six: four natural and two synthetic.2 The scientists in question spouted the usual pablum about utopia in which new classes of bacteria lead to new classes of drugs to treat new classes of diseases. Not a word about future Oryx and Crake-style: covert germs warfare, opportunistic bacteria, hemorrhagic viruses from Ebola to Marburg running berserk, pathogens chewing through asphalt and turning highways into sand, wasps carrying genetically modified chicken pox. Nor does Atwood stop with microbial life. Her future is full of snats (snakerats), kanga-lamb, cane toads spliced with chameleons, pigoons, rakunks, bobkittens, wolvogs, spoat-giders, butterflies with wings like pancakes, and other hybrids. There are weevils resistant to all known pesticides. Mice feeding on electrical insulation. At RejoovenEsence even rocks are doped to regulate the microclimate. At the upper end of the food chain, you can design your perfect baby from a menu of features on offer by bioengineers. Gender, sexual orientation, height, colour of skin, eyes—“it’s all on order”.3 Or you can click-buy a generic one from one of the numerous for-harvest baby orchards, commercial outgrowths of our capacity to play with the code of life. Sixteen years after Oryx and Crake, most of this remains futuristic speculation. But in her interviews and essays, Atwood insisted that her novel “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent”, more than once mentioning a sheaf of newspaper clippings with which she could back up everything she had written.4 With this open invitation to read her novel as a litmus test to the future, let us take a look then at where we are today and what lies ahead.

Frankencrops Today, ninety-five percent of American soybean, corn, sugar beet, and cotton are GM—not General Motors but genetically modified. This percentage is still rising, despite Greenpeace and other eco-groups’ campaign against Frankencrops, as they call them. Instead of pushing genetic hot rods such as Golden Rice,

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bioengineers should aim at diversity and harmonization with nature, they argue. In contrast to Europe, however, in America the protests fall on deaf ears. By comparison, physicians have had strictly limited success in roping genetics to treat inherited diseases. Their technique has been to inject copies of a healthy gene into diseased tissue—thus ensuring that the modifications will die with the patient—in the hope of making it work as it ought to. But if medicine has been lagging behind agriculture, it may not be for long. If the future is coming into focus today, it is because since 2012 we have held a piece of that future in our hands. The magic wand is a gene-editor called CRISPR—Cas9, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” and an enzyme. Not coincidentally, it was developed from bacteria—to be precise from a bacterial defense system that shreds the DNA of invading viruses to pieces. CRISPR is a short string of RNA, evolution’s chemical messenger, that homes in on the targeted section of DNA. Together with the Cas9 enzyme, like scissors and glue, they do what every scientist since Viktor Frankenstein has dreamed about—cut an unwanted gene out and paste a wanted one in. And, for added value, they cut and paste with equal ease not only diseased tissue but also hereditary material. Almost immediately Chinese researchers employed it to edit genes in human embryos to correct a heritable blood disorder called beta thalassemia. Thankfully the embryos in question were all nonviable—they could not grow into adults— since the experiment failed spectacularly. All at once, all of the embryos developed a cascade of malfunctions, leaving the researchers groping for answers. It was this 2015 study that led to a nonbinding moratorium on editing DNA in any way that could be passed down across generations. It held for less than a year. By 2017 clinical trials of a heritable gene-edited cure for a form of blindness began in the United States. Also in 2017 an American-led team succeeded where the Chinese study had failed, editing genes in viable human embryos to disable a disease-causing mutation.5 Although still some way from clinical use, it is a milestone to the near future. On the one hand, this future promises protection for the unborn from ten ­thousand-plus known hereditary diseases, from many varieties of breast and ovarian cancer to Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs, beta thalassemia, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, or even early onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. On the other, you get humanity clothed in designer genes or, to call it by its proper name, eugenics. In public, most scientists counsel caution and reversibility. But the horse race is on and, if anyone looks back, it is only to check how close the competition is. Just like in Oryx and Crake, genetics is big business now. Nothing brings it home like the eye-watering $6 million paid in 2013 for Crick’s letter to his son, in which he names DNA as the code of life. With the Nobel Prize committee cheering from the stands, you have to gallop just to stay abreast. The Red Queen was never more right.

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Careful With That Axe, Eu-gene All eyes today are on “gene drive” technology, so called because it can rapidly spread the doctored gene through a population. With the help of CRISPR, genes can be edited so that they copy themselves onto both chromosomes. From then on, they will recur in every generation, driving the trait through the population. Eventually, all adults, be they insects or humans, will inherit the edited genes and so will their young. In nature, genetic change takes quite a time to spread through a population. This is because a mutation is normally inherited by only half the offspring. But gene drive allows a CRISPR-induced mutation to copy itself to both chromosomes in every generation. Since all offspring inherit the edited trait, it goes viral (exponential). In fast-breeding species like mosquitoes an edited trait can in theory spread through a habitat in a season. More powerful than a thermonuclear bomb, gene drive gives researchers the capability to alter and eliminate populations and even entire species at will. Think of deploying it to stamp out malaria-carrying mosquitoes or ticks that kill half a million children in Africa a year. Or to sterilize rodents that invade fragile island ecosystems. Or to eradicate herbicide resistance in pigweed and other invasive plants. But careful with that axe, eu-gene. The potential to engineer the opposite of utopia looms at every step, starting with the molecular mechanism at its centre. The guide RNA that sniffs out and snips out unwanted parts of the DNA is itself subject to mutations. At some point it may end up going for the wrong part of the genome. These off-target modifications could frogspawn nightmares that even Bosch would flinch from. Yet even as environmental watchdogs in the United States demand a binding moratorium and a public debate, China, South Korea, and Britain—the other leading genetic powerhouses—press on with the research. Not to be left behind, in 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which collectively serve to advise the White House, endorsed continued experimentation. They even cleared the path to controlled field trials despite risk of inadvertent release into the world. For centuries we have tinkered with the genetic profile of living things under our control, from farm animals, crops, and house pets, to the assorted species of lab animals. But gene drive is a whole new ballgame. It has the potential to transform an entire species in a span of just a few generations by modifying just a few individuals. The gene genie is out of the bottle and in the hands of geneticists, cosmeticists, and at some point perhaps even ethicists. Deaggression now? The hitch is that even if you assume one hundred percent accuracy at the genetic level—not the mere ninety-nine percent of Crake’s—editing or eliminating populations could have drastic effects on ecosystems. It could, for starters, open an ecological niche to other pests or affect predators higher up the food

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chain. Yet in 2015 scientists in California already used CRISPR to genetically modify laboratory mosquitoes in a permanent way. A small step forward to the day when we do the same with the human germline. Our capacity to do so has so far been stymied because genetic modifications could reduce an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce. Natural selection works to repair genetic glitches and, from its perspective, bioengineered edits are no better than harmful mutations. Gene drive throttles this natural defense by passing a trait to all newborns rather than the usual half, even if in the long run this should make them less fit. To top it all, in 2016 came the announcement of a ten-year project to perfect the chemical manufacture of DNA. One of its stated goals is to synthesize the entire human genome. The capacity to chemically recreate chromosomes paves the way for babies without biological parents. It is designer humanity in our time, whether it is a design for deaggression or the opposite. It sparked a public debate, too—about why there are no public debates about this modern-day Pandora’s box.

Earmouse The Methuselah Mouse in Oryx and Crake cues the lengthening of the life span of lab animals. It also cues the real-life earmouse, the first worldwide symbol of transgenic research. In 1997 photos of a naked quivering rodent with a human ear grown on its back sent a shockwave on the nascent internet. In reality, the ear was nonhuman. It was made from cow-cell cartilage, seeded into a biodegradable earshaped mould and implanted under the skin of the mouse, where it grew by itself. Be that as it may, news of the earmouse touched off an avalanche of protests against transgenic engineering. Ironically, testifying to the level of public knowledge of science, the mouse was not genetically doctored in any way. Although it was a so-called nude mouse—meaning immune-compromised to prevent transplant rejection—the strain was the result of a natural mutation and not bioengineering. The value of transgenic animals, in which genes from one species are added to another, is that they can synthesize and secrete proteins they could not in nature. We do it in livestock to boost the immune system, increase body weight, or expedite healing. We do it laboratory bunnies to provide them—like the Crakers—with glow-in-the-dark eyes. We do it with zebrafish whose entire skins have been engineered to fluoresce in all colours of the rainbow, thanks to chromatophores. Surgeons have been transplanting baboon, chimp, and pig organs into people since the turn of the 1960s, but with little success. Patients kept dying within months, most often because the immune system attacked and rejected the kidney or the heart. But things are changing almost overnight, thanks to new immunesuppressant drugs and genome-editing tools like CRISPR.

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earmouse. The Methuselah Mouse in Oryx and Crake cues the lengthening of the life span of lab animals. It also cues the real-life earmouse, the first worldwide symbol of transgenic research. In 1997 photos of a naked quivering rodent with a human ear grown on its back sent a shockwave on the nascent internet.

FIGURE 15.1 Nude

Credit: Brittany Forkus.

Although dormant retroviruses are a perennial concern, CRISPR can edit genes that cause rejection or infection. In 2015 eGenesis, a bioengineering company, edited the pig genome in dozens of places at once. That same year, a rival company, United Therapeutics, invested a hundred million dollars into making transgenic pigs for lung transplants. Also in 2015 China approved pig corneas and pig insulin-making cells to be transplanted in humans. The reason why we go to these lengths to counter life’s wear and tear is that, like all living beings, we are prone to all manner of diseases and malfunctions. Life in any species is massively complex and fine-tuned as it moves forward in time. A slight disturbance can derail the entire homeostatic train. Fortunately, a new bioengineering frontier promises trouble-free assembly lines of all kinds of replacement parts.

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All living organisms are directed by evolution to survive and reproduce. This, from the standpoint of genetic engineering, is wasteful. It takes a great deal of a pig’s or a bacteria’s resources to sustain their living and reproductive functions. Here Oryx and Crake once again intimates the future. Popular fast-food ChickieNobs come from multi-legged and multi-winged ‘chickens’ genetically sheared of all functions save for growing drumsticks and Buffalo wings. Cell-free biology, which extracts the protein-making machinery from the cells and runs them directly, is today’s answer to the fiction. The benefits from cutting out the cellular middleman are clear. It bypasses social and environmental concerns. It is cost effective: vats eat up far less space and energy than farms or labs where animals have to be housed, fed, and cleaned after. And it avoids ethical quagmires. Monkeys or bunnies have the capacity to suffer. Inanimate mitochondrial production lines are simply frontline chemistry. By the end of this decade, handbags and shoes made from vat-grown leather will be available at the retailer near you. This is thanks to GM yeast bacteria that can make proteins indistinguishable from animal collagen. As the main structural protein in animal bodies, long chains of amino-acids that make up collagen give animal skins their plasticity and strength. The jumbo-sized uniform sheets of new skins—Atwood would call them nooskins—are stronger, blemish-free, and cost not one animal life. The twenty-first century needs novel ways to tap nature’s bounty, from life-friendly pesticides to weed-resistant crops, nontoxic chemicals, and novel classes of antibiotics. We desperately need biodegradable plastics, perhaps made from alginate—wood fibre and a starchy polymer found in seaweed. Now it looks like we could make them all in mitochondrial factories spirited outside living organisms. It is like extracting the essence of life from life, if not from the gods themselves.

Clone Me a Me How much sleep have you been losing lately over bioengineering? How many books have you read to open your eyes on the biggest revolution in our worldview since we got booted out of Eden? How many scientists or for that matter politicians have you lobbied for a public debate on whether to allow GM people to step off the pages of fiction onto the street on which you live? Most citizens are too preoccupied scratching out a living to worry about the future cooked up in science labs. But if there is one scenario that lights the fire in the public belly, it is reproductive cloning. The vision of production-line Hitlers, as in Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil, is enough to make even an average couch spud feel that not everything that can be bioengineered should be. Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, meets with less resistance. This is in many ways understandable. If you or your loved ones ever faced the zero hour

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of organ failure, you know how much you would give to have a spare part in hand. And the best replacement part is a cloned and therefore immunologically perfect copy of the piece of you that is failing, be it heart, hip joint, eyes, or anything else. Genetic therapies have to match to immune systems, meaning that they need to be personalized and sometimes even handcrafted. Cloning offers a way around it. There are of, course, ethical binds about harvesting parts of your cloned twin. But if you genetically stunt the development of the clone’s neural system, the duplicate that grows in parallel with you will be no more a person than an organ bank—except that the organs are living rather than kept on ice. But there is an even more roundabout path to overcoming public resistance to human cloning, and it leads through the stables. If you ever played polo, you may be one of the few people who know what it is about. This former Olympic sport is played by mounted teams of four who whack a ball with long-handled mallets into a goal. Crucially, the score depends equally on the skill of the riders as on the horses, which can be extremely expensive to buy and extremely expensive to train. Sensing a golden opportunity in the moneyed elites’ addition to polo, Adolfo Cambiaso—arguably the world’s best player—co-founded Crestview Genetics. This bioengineering company caters to the polo set not by raising horses, but by cloning them. The price tag for a pedigreed mount is well north of half a million dollars, but the business is brisk. The company has already cloned more than fifty premier-line mounts like so many supermarket cans of Campbell tomato soup. This may be the glamorous end of the market, but cloning elite animals is a widespread breeding method in countries as far-flung as the United States and New Zealand. Milk and meat from cloned livestock is sold without even being branded as such from the United States to Argentina and Brazil—though not in Europe. Which brings us back full circle to cloning people like you and me for the good of people like you and me. When it comes to bioengineering genes, we think of preventing or repairing mutations. When it comes to bioengineering people, we think of producing mutants. The first is as acceptable as the other is scary, lowering social barriers when it comes to cloning tissues, organs, or animals. All too soon, however, we arrive at the point where bioengineering people becomes as easy as bioengineering livers. Will it be acceptable for cosmetic reasons? Medical? Ethical, for the purpose of universal deaggression? Leading American scientists sound downright utopian. The same bioethicist who co-led the panel that lifted the ban on GM embryos says that people will never have GM children for trivial reasons. The reason? “Sex is cheaper and it’s more fun than IVF”.6 Except that costs of computing muscle and genetic editing crash by the year, a multibillion sex industry rolls out ever more humanlike dolls for clients who would rather not have sex with humans, and social taboos fall left and right like rain.

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Revving Up Autoevolution There are predictions that the first human being with a permanently altered genome will be born by the end of the decade.7 Whether it happens in the 2010s or the 2020s, however, is beside the point. Designer genes and everything that entails are about to become real. Customized babies. Eugenics. Genetic fads and fashions. Prescriptions and proscriptions. It is just a matter of time before human genetic makeup becomes a matter of choice and not necessity. At this stage of our civilization, our technoscience is a product of biological evolution, just as our adaptive behaviours are. But, given the constantly accelerating pace of biotechnological progress, sooner or later we are destined to take evolution in our own hands. At that moment, this fundamental relation will be reversed. Evolution will become a product of technoscience. From that point on, the division between the natural and artificial will lose all meaning since, for the first time in the history of life on Earth, bioevolution will take a back seat to autoevolution. The introduction of the design factor— teleology—into the evolution of our species will mark a watershed. The rate of genetic modification of Homo sapiens sapiens will have been punctuated in a most dramatic manner. The pace and scope of human evolution will be limited only by the capacities of our bioengineers and the demands of the population at large. Naturalists and old-timers will want to restrict themselves to only four hands and five eyes on weekends. Libertarians will set no limits to biomorphing. Sectarian purists will scour the Qur’an, the Bible, or the Book of Mormon for clues as to what is orthodox and permitted in the genetically all-permissive age. All this is tomorrow. But the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project, better known as Sc2.0, is an international consortium dedicated to creating it today by synthesizing the genome of this popular fungus. Yeast is more than an indispensable ingredient in making alcohol or baking mouth-watering pastries and breads. It is the workhorse of genetic studies. Today, genetically modified yeast already makes vaccines, drugs, and chemicals that cannot be found in nature. But this is just a start. Synthesis is only a step to manipulating yeast in novel ways. While techniques like CRISPR manipulate only bits of DNA at a time, Sc2.0 rewrites and recreates entire genetic sequences. With this, Sc2.0 aims to design brand new yeasts that can produce never before seen proteins with never before seen properties. The ultimate goal is to develop it into a genomic ‘platform’ that, like Facebook, will enable all manner of bioengineering apps to ride on it. Ever the workhorse, never a Trojan horse. Meanwhile, in Switzerland computational neuroscientists have launched the Blue Brain Project. Instead of creating a human brain, they want to recreate one by simulating it in a computer. The brain has a hundred billion neurons that fire up to five hundred times a second. The Blue Boys model each neuron with

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equations that handle up to five hundred variables. From this they scale up the brain’s architecture by “wiring together” more and more simulated neurons. If this works—if the simulated brain behaves and responds like a real one— it will be time to play god. Side by side with genetic manipulation, real-brain simulation will open the door to the design and manufacture of a numberless variety of Crakers, first in a computer, then in Paradice. They will be simplified or amplified virtually at will, starting with their mathematical capacity, artistic sensitivity, and ethical norms. Did anyone say deaggression?

Recreational Vikings Deaggression is utopia, eutopia, youtopia, and all other topias writ large. It holds out hope for history without the smell of the skunk, society without ICBMs, civilization without Zyklon B. It holds out hope for turning our inner Morlocks into the Eloi. It promises to turn the world as we know it upside out and inside out. This is precisely why it is as hard to imagine as military history without war, the criminal code without the homicide section, or the Vikings without the violence. Funny thing is, Vikings without the violence is exactly what a recent interest in Norse lore in Norway is all about. For decades, recreational Vikings were a fringe fraternity of mock-up tenth-century raiders and slavers. Dressed to kill, they would congregate on weekend craft fairs, trading tips on where to pick up authentic maces or bearskins. These days, however, with financial aid from the government they run popular training courses on how to live like the Vikings. Rape, pillage, and murder are, of course, not on the curriculum. These latterday Vikings are politically correct and deaggressed, as reflected in their shift to crafts, environmental sustainability, and group identity. But this peaceful recasting of Norse past has also a less Disneylike component, rooted in some of the bloodiest episodes in Norway’s modern history. Norway’s notorious WWII leader, Vidkun Quisling, whose name stands for treachery, held the macho Vikings as model Aryans. So did the 2011 mass murderer Anders Breivik, who is serving the longest jail term his country can impose, which is twenty-one years. Historically, supremacist groups have always usurped the Vikings for their ideology. Stormfront, a neo-Nazi online forum, boasts a Viking cross as its logo and the Viking way of life as the engine of the Aryan race. In the absence of deaggression, where to look, then, for peace in our time? Some see feminism as the path to humanism. Because women commit fewer murders and are in general less supportive of wars—American women were against the Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars in far greater numbers than men—there is a belief that they are the answer to the world’s troubles. If only more X chromosomes were in power, things would take a turn for the better. Historical studies don’t support that view.8 Nor, for that matter, do my surveys, which show no significant difference between the sexes in their attitudes

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to deaggression. Moreover, although men are more violent than women, it is not in all contexts. Women, for instance, make up the majority of suicide bombers. And even as aggression flares up more frequently in men, it is frequently in contexts influenced by the presence and reactions of women. It is not for nothing that research reveals the astonishing number of ways in which our behavioural traits are linked to sexual selection.9 So the question remains: might a greater representation of women in positions of power, whether in politics, finance, or the military, lead to a more consensual and less confrontational attitudes in these areas or indeed society as a whole? However intriguing— not to say utopian—the idea, there is little evidence to support this claim. For one, men and women who hold power today are not necessarily typical of those who would if more women were in the top echelons. Two, behaviours and policies evolve in tandem with society. If women need balls to climb the greasy pole, more assertiveness will be in evidence once they have clawed their way up. In many ways, high politics and big business self-select for ultra-competitive, me-first, alpha-type individuals.10 Even so, feminists have tried for decades to bring Atwood into their fold. Just as resolutely she has resisted their totalizing and polarizing rhetoric. White, suburban, militant feminism, which leaves the majority of the world’s women outside the gates, practices another form of exclusion, she argued in her interviews, demurring that she had no dog in that kind of fight.11 “What is wrong with old-fashioned humanism?” you could almost hear her mutter.

The Divine Comedy The side effects of every technology are inextricably linked to the benefits. No better example than the internet. In just one generation it has become such an integral part of our society that many people cannot imagine life without it. News, entertainment, information, leisure, education, communication, and not least social life would not be what they are without the world wide web. In more than one country the right to the internet is even enshrined constitutionally, next to human and civil rights. But there is also a wide sense of unease, if not outright malaise, about where this is going. No one wants internet-wide censorship with Chinese characteristics, but the only alternative seems to be the unfettered infoglut of porn, kitsch, violence, narcissism, exhibitionism, and cyber-addiction. Any time, any day, any street around the world, billions of fingers twitch over smartphones, forests of human heads bow in synchronized waves over the screens, prides of zombies shuffle on sidewalks, the scrape of the concrete the only thing anchoring them in reality. There are other powerful forces acting on America today, from aging population to political populism, to public education that restricts free flow of ideas. The results of these trends are the new haves and have-nots: islands of high

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productivity and high-tech prosperity washed on all sides by a sea of stagnation. The bioengineering epoch promises to amplify these divisions. Ultimately, it threatens to morph the economic elites into genetic ones. Putting life-threatening diseases and life-blighting deformities to the grave is the justification that bioengineers use to continue into the unknown territory, where frequently their conscience is their only guide. Today “I was only following science” has become a civilian version of “I  was only following orders”. You cannot blame a foot soldier of science any more than you could blame a wartime platoon leader or a staff general for advancing into enemy territory in the absence of an order to halt. The war imagery, used so often in the context of science, is not an accident. War and science are both rooted in the world at large, full of death in the course of the struggle for survival. After all, more living beings are born into every generation than can survive. Natural selection knocks the weak and the unlucky out of the race. For all others, whose genetic line will go on, life is an openended drama of conflict and cooperation, punctuated by wars on average every fourteen months somewhere on the planet. Supporters of deaggression can take hope. As per the Global Peace Index, in 2017 the world was 0.28 percent more peaceful than the year before. Only don’t whip up the champagne yet. Research published that same year documents that, far from dying out as enlightenment and empathy take hold, the frequencies of war and homicidal violence have increased over the past millennia—the same five millennia during which our technological and military might has grown exponentially.12 Indeed, to take a global look at planet Earth is to despair not just of utopia, but of the planet. Right about the time when Atwood was starting to plot Oryx and Crake, if you scaled the world to the size of a global village of one hundred, it would include fifty-seven Asians, twenty-one Europeans, fourteen North and North Americans, and eight Africans. Six of the villagers would command sixty percent of the wealth, and they would all live in the United States. Half would be malnourished. Seventy would be illiterate and non-white. Only one would have finished college. Make no mistake—there is progress, and much of it has taken place during the last twenty years, which saw global poverty fall by half. Two hundred years ago, as the Industrial Revolution was gaining speed, nine out of ten people in the world lived in extreme poverty. Nowadays only one in ten does. Concealed behind this humanitarian triumph, however, is the fact that the world population has in the meantime exploded from one billion to seven and a half billion. In absolute numbers, there are not many less abject poor in the world. Is it any wonder that so many of them continue to look for utopia? Is it any wonder that over millennia the idea of a perfect, or at the very least better, society has lost none of its allure, at least to those who had nothing to begin with?

Talkin’ ’Bout My Gene-ration  215

Unsentimental, though not unsympathetic, Atwood sums up this fundamental human yearning in terms of an almost medieval tableau. You look at mankind and you see something like Dante’s The Divine Comedy. You see the Inferno at one end with everybody pulling out each other’s fingernails, as in the Amnesty International bulletins. Or you see Purgatorio, shaped like a mountain, with people climbing up it, or sitting still. Up at the top there is what used to be called Heaven with what used to be called God. Only now we’ve replaced Heaven with a kind of Utopian vision of what humanity could be if only . . . Fill in the blank. The trouble with real life is once you try to implement Utopia, you end up with the Inferno.13 Every policy and every technology are ultimately about the people who are at their centre. But if anything I said by means of this book rings true, every policy and every technology depends ultimately on human nature. In particular, it depends on the painful trade-offs between the choices we make for ourselves and for society. And so, in the immortal words of Woody Allen, as we stands at the crossroads, facing the choice between total extinction or utter hopelessness, let us pray our civilization has the wisdom to choose correctly.

Notes 1. Swirski (2013), Chapter 9. 2. BBC News (2017), “Extra”. 3. 289. 4. Atwood (2005), 285. 5. Belluck. 6. In Belluck. 7. Mukherjee. 8. The Economist (2017). 9. Hrdy; Williams; E. O. Wilson. 10. Seabright; more problematically, Konner. 11. Ingersoll; Atwood and Ingersoll. 12. Fuentes; see also BBC News (2017); Richardson; Hayes; Keeley; David Livingstone Smith. 13. Atwood and Ingersoll (1992), 122.

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INDEX

“334” (last chapter of 334) 58, 60 – 61, 70 334 (novel) 39 – 40, 47 – 50, 52 – 54, 57 – 64, 67, 69, 71 – 72, 76 – 77, 81, 84, 87, 139, 170, 178, 182, 194 Adam (Biblical character) 6, 21, 92, 96, 145, 192 Adams, Douglas 154 Aesop 94 – 95 Alexander the Great 34, 54, 111 Ali, Muhammad 51 Alice in Wonderland 72 Alice in Wonderland (character) 52 Allen, Woody 215 All Men’s Wisdom: A Comparative Anthology of Chinese and English Proverbs 127 Alyona Ivanovna 69 American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History 3, 102 American Utopia: Literature, Society, and the Human Use of Human Beings 41 Amin, Idi 15 Amnesia 49 An American Dream 69 Anarchy, State, and Utopia 13, 38 “Angouleme” 60 – 61, 69 Animal Farm 8 Aramis (character) 75 Aristotle 34, 56, 111 – 112, 151, 196 Armstrong, Neil 23

Arrow, Kenneth 39 Artsman, The 20 “Asian Shore, The” 48 Attila the Hun 15 Atwood, Margaret 15, 39 – 42, 48, 120, 132, 136, 173, 175 – 176, 178 – 182, 184, 188 – 189, 192, 195, 201, 204, 209, 213 – 215 Austen, Jane 38, 170 Awakenings 157 Axelrod, Robert 166, 168 – 169 Bacon, Francis 19 Barnaby the Scrivener (character) 164 “Beauty and The Beast” 119 Beethoven, Ludwig van 186 Being There 64 Bell, Alexander Graham 199 Bellamy, Edward 161, 176, 192 Bettelheim, Bruno 121 Beyond Freedom and Dignity 91 Bezos, Jeff 77 Bible 95, 126, 211 Big Brother (character) 49, 55, 77 Binding, Karl 197 Bishop Berkeley 34 Bluebeard 135 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits 35 “Bodies” 48, 60 – 61, 63 Bokonon (character) 140 – 142 Bond, Larry 170 Book of Mormon 211

Index  237

Borges, Jorge Luis 35 Bosch, Hieronymus 4, 206 Boys From Brazil 209 “Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, The” 119 Bradbury, Ray 158 Brainstorm 184 – 185 Brave New World 65, 138 Breivik, Anders 212 Br’er Rabbit (character) 94 – 95 Bromberg (character) 96 “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” 29 Brutus (Marcus Junius) 96 Budé, Guillaume 11 Bundy, Ted 176 – 177 Burgess, Anthony 192 Bush (George W.) 52, 91, 99, 101 Busleyden, Hieronymus van 11 Butler, Samuel 36 Buz (character) 92, 95 – 97, 101 Cabet, Étienne 18 Caesar, Julius 52, 96, 144, 195 Caliban (character) 96 Dr. Caligari (character) 40 Cambiaso, Adolfo 210 Camp Concentration 49, 72 Camus, Albert 92, 97 Candide 148 Canticle for Leibowitz, A 92 Čapek, Karel 182 Carnegie, Andrew 176 Carter, Jimmy 81 Castellaneta, Dan 96 Castro, Fidel 35 Catcher in the Rye, The 34 Cat’s Cradle 35, 96, 140 – 142 Chance (character) 64 Chapel, Arnold (character) 60, 63 – 64 Chaucer, Geoffrey 170 Chrono (character) 148 Churchill, Winston 86, 180, 199 Cinderella (character) 54, 68, 118 Clancy, Tom 170 Clinton, Hilary 86 “Clock That Went Backwards, The” 152 Clockwork Orange, A 192 Cohn, Calvin (character) 92 – 98, 101 – 102, 105 – 106, 136, 193 Cohn, Seymour 97; see also Cohn, Calvin (character) Columbus, Christopher 175, 195 Confessions of Nat Turner, The 35

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 136, 158 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge 97 Crake (character) 179 – 184, 186, 191 – 197, 199 – 201, 206 Crakers (characters) 179, 181 – 184, 186, 192, 199, 207, 212 Creffield, Franz 21 – 22 Crick, Francis 175 – 176, 182, 206 Crime and Punishment 69, 159 Critias 7 Cromwell, Oliver 15 Crusoe, Robinson (character) 18, 92, 96 Dahmer, Jeffrey 177 Daily News 51 Dali, Salvador 53 Dante, Alighieri 215 Darwin, Charles 93 – 94, 108, 130, 142 – 143, 182, 199 Dawkins, Richard 100, 107 – 108 “Death of Socrates, The” 60 – 61 Debs, Eugene V. 17, 23 Decline of the West, The 65, 67 Defense of Poetry 31, 34 de Saint-Simon, Henri 11 Descent of Man, The 94 Desdemona (character) 190 de Tocqueville, Alexis 160 Dewey, John 19 Dionysius II of Syracuse 34 Disch, Thomas M. (Michael) 39 – 40, 42, 45, 47 – 59, 62 – 64, 67 – 72, 74, 84, 132, 136, 143, 149, 182, 201 Divine Comedy, The 215 Doctor Faustus (character) 119 Dostoevski, Fyodor 38 Douglass, Frederick 41, 128, 130 Drescher, Melvin 163 Du Bois, W.E.B. 199 Dumas, Alexandre 75 Dworkin, Ronald 13 Earth Abides 91 – 92 Economist, The 14, 194 Einstein, Albert 12, 75, 144, 151 – 152, 154 Einstein’s Dreams 148 Eloi (characters) 184, 212 “Emancipation” 60 – 61, 67 – 69 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 123 Erasmus 11 Erewhon 36 Erewhon Revisited 36

238 Index

Esau (character) 96, 101 Esterhazy (character) 96 Eve (Biblical character) 6, 145, 192 “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire” 60 – 61, 64 Evolutionary Psychology 131 Evolution of Cooperation, The 169 Extraction of the Stone of Madness, The 4 Faerie Queene 95 Fate of the Earth, The 91 Fates Worse Than Death 138 FDR (Frank Delano Roosevelt) 22 Feynman, Richard 153 Finn, Huck (character) 136 Fiorina, Carly 85 Fleming, Ian 68 Flood, Merrill 163 Flynn, James R. 31 – 33 Fourier, Charles 18 France, Anatole 182 Frazier, Joe 51, 106, 194 Freeland 20, 27, 36 – 37 Frost, Robert 58 Galápagos 39 – 40, 98, 135 – 136, 138, 141 – 146, 151, 163, 165, 169 – 171, 182 Gandhi, Mahatma 64 García Márquez, Gabriel 35 Genocides, The 48 George (character) 101, 103 George, Henry 17 Gide, André 69 Gilles, Peter 11 Gilliam, Terry 179 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 19 Gilmore, Gary 35 God 6, 36, 71, 92, 94 – 97, 100, 104 – 106, 113, 127 – 128, 131 – 132, 181, 191, 196, 215 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater 138, 141, 157 God’s Grace 39 – 40, 91 – 95, 100, 102, 104, 141, 170, 182 Goldfinger 68 Golding, William 96 Goodall, Jane 94 Gould, Glenn 180 Gould, Stephen Jay 144 Green Knight (character) 169 – 170 Grimm, Jacob 118 – 119, 176 Grimm, Wilhelm 118 – 199, 176 Groundhog Day 158

Gulliver, Lemuel (character) 96 Gulliver’s Travels 182 Hamlet (character) 53 Hamon, Benoît 81 Handmaid’s Tale, The 175 Hanson, Boz (character) 60, 67 Hanson, Lottie (character) 60, 63, 69 Hanson, Nora (character) 60, 64, 70 Hanson, Shirley/Shrimp (character) 57 Hansons, the (characters) 57 – 58, 70 – 71, 79 Harper, Bill (character) 69 Hawking, Stephen 200 Hayek, Friedrich 50 Heller, Joseph 56 Hertzka, Theodor 11, 20, 27 Hesiod 8, 11 Hilton, Paris 72 Hitler, Adolf 15, 34, 101, 197 – 199, 209 Hobbes, Thomas 50, 161 – 164 Hoche, Alfred 197 Hoffa, Jimmy 83 Holt, Ab (character) 60, 63 – 64, 114, 163 Holt, Milly (character) 60 – 61, 67 Homer 96, 156 Hoover, Herbert 197, 199 Howell, William Dean 11, 20 Hurt, Victor 21 Huxley, Aldous 52, 65, 182 Hythlodaeus, Raphael (character) 9 Iago (character) 180 Illuminating Wit, Inspiring Wisdom 127 “Imp of the Perverse, The” 159 Industrial Freedom 27 Interstellar 157 In the Heat of the Night 35 In the Shadow of Man 94 Ion 34 Iron Heel 7 “Ironworker and The Devil, The” 119 Island 65 “Jack and the Beanstalk” 119 Jailbird 135, 141 James, William 19 Dr. Jekyll (character) 160 Jesus 23, 96, 101, 107, 147 Jimmy (character) 179 – 183, 185 – 186, 192 – 197, 199 – 201 Johnson, Paul 15 Jones, Jim 20 Joyce, James 180

Index  239

Judas (Biblical character) 181 Julius Caesar 96, 144 Jungle, The 19, 36 Jurassic Park 184 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 99 Kesey, Ken 26 Keynes, John Maynard 72, 199 Khan, Genghis 15, 175 Khrushchev, Nikita 99 King, Stephen 49 King Arthur (character) 149 Kinkade, Kat 28 Klein, Calvin 4, 198 Kosinski, Jerzy 64, 77 Kurosawa, Akira 36 La Fontaine, Jean de 94 – 95 Lang, Fritz 69 “Last of the Utopians, The” 200 Lawrence, D.H. 94 Laws 7 Leakey, Louis 94 Leaves of Grass 17 le Carré, John 148, 170 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 118 Lem, Stanislaw 189 Lennon, John 35 Leopold, Nathan Freudenthal 69 Leopold II 15 Les Caves du Vatican 69 Leviathan 50, 161 Levin, Ira 189, 209 Lewis, Sinclair 19 Lightman, Alan 148 Lindbergh, Charles 198 Lloyd, J. William 19 Locke, John 93 London, Jack 198 Looking Backward 6, 10, 19, 56 Lord Acton (John Dalberg-Acton) 8 Lord of the Flies 96 Lovelace, Linda 181 Ludd, Birdie (character) 60 – 61, 72 Luke (character) 96 M 69 Machiavelli, Niccolo 26 MacIntosh, Andrew (character) 163, 167 – 169 Mailer, Norman 68 – 69 Malamud, Bernard 89, 91 – 97, 100 – 102, 104 – 106, 113, 120, 132, 143, 182, 201

Malcolm, Ian (character) 184 Malthus, Thomas 68 Manchurian Candidate, The 20 Man in the Iron Mask, The 75 Mao, Zedong 3, 15, 34, 139 Marquis de Condorcet 81 Martinez, Juan (character) 60, 63 Marx, Groucho 98 Marx, Karl 27, 65, 80 Mary Madelyn (character) 92, 96, 106 M.D.: A Horror Story, The 47, 49 Mein Kampf 197 Melchior (character) 96 Melville, Herman 164 Michelson, Albert A. 152 Micromégas 148 Miller (character) 170 Miller, Alexa (character) 60, 64, 69 Miller, Gene (character) 60 Miller, Henry 21 Miller, Tancred (character) 60 Miller, Timothy 21 Mitchell, Edward Page 151 Mitchell, Esther 21 Mitchell, George 21 Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties 15 Modern Utopia, A 40 Modern Utopian 24 Mona Lisa 186 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat) 91, 148 Mörder unter uns 69 More, Thomas 9 Morgan, Hank (character) 136 Morley, Edward 152 Morlocks (characters) 184, 212 Morris, William 19 Mother Night 135 Mr. Hyde (character) 160 Mungo, Raymond 24 Murray, Bill 158 Natural, The 100 Naylor, Charles 46 Nero 34 New Atlantis 19 New Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian S-F, The 49 Newsweek 48 Newton, Isaac 151 New York Sun, The 152 New York Times 53, 136, 197

240 Index

Ninth Symphony (Beethoven’s) 186 Nixon, Richard Milhous 8, 50 – 52, 81, 100, 102 Nobel, Alfred 176 Nozick, Robert 13, 38, 50 Odyssey 96 Oedipus Rex 148 Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, and Evolution 33 Old Testament 95, 119 “On Anger” 196 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 26 One Thousand and One Nights 95 On Wings of Song 49, 71 Orwell, George 49, 52, 85, 96, 140, 182 Oryx (character) 179 – 181, 184, 195 Oryx and Crake 15, 39 – 40, 48, 67, 170, 175 – 176, 178, 180 – 185, 189, 193, 195, 204 – 205, 207 – 209, 214 Othello (character) 180 Owen, Robert 18 Paine, Thomas 81 Palmer, A. Mitchell 22 Panchatantra 95 Pandora (character) 53, 96, 207 Pangloss (character) 15 Pascal, Blaise 98 Peckham, Morse 35 Percy, Walker 189 Pericles 86 Pesci, Joe 147 Dr. Phil 149 Pinker, Steven 55 Planet of the Apes, The 96 Plato 6 – 12, 27, 34 – 35, 39 – 40, 49, 55 – 56, 61, 67, 79 – 80, 86, 107, 135, 176, 182 – 183 Plautus 161 Player Piano 138 – 139 Plockhoy, Peter Cornelis 18 Poe, Edgar Allan 159 Pol Pot 15, 139 Pope, Alexander 54 Popper, Karl 50 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 180 Power and Morality: Who Shall Guard the Guardians? 8 Principia (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica) 151 Prisoner, The 48

“Problems of Creativeness” 61 Prometheus (character) 96 Prufrock, J. Alfred (character) 60 – 61 Quisling, Vidkun 212 Qur’an 211 Rabelais, Francois 38 Rashomon 36 Raskolnikov (character) 160 Rawls, John 13 Reagan, Ronald 35, 52, 85 Reeve (character) 170 Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, The 197 Republic 7 – 8, 10, 56, 67, 183 Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe, The 154 Return From the Stars 189 “Romance of the Times to Come, A” 67; see also “Emancipation” Romeo/Womeo (character) 96 Roosevelt, Theodore 36, 197, 198, 199 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 96 “Rumpelstiltskin” 119 Ruskin, John 19 Sachs, Oliver 157, 205 Saddam, Hussein 15 Sanger, Margaret 199 Santayana, George 18 Sartre, Jean Paul 97 Saul of Tarsus (character) 96 Schaap, Frances (character) 60, 63 Schell, Jonathan 91 Selkirk, Alexander 96 Sen, Amartya 84 Seneca 34, 107 Shakespeare, William 38, 96 Shape of Things to Come, The 67 Shaw, George Bernard 199 Shriver, Sargent 139 Sidney, Philip 34, 41 Simon, David 57 Simpson, Bart (character) 156 Simpson, Homer (character) 156 Simpson, Marge (character) 156 Simpson, O.J. 181 Simpsons, The 95, 156 Sinclair, Upton 19 Sir Gawain (character) 169 – 170 Skinner, B.F. 11, 19, 27 – 28, 56, 80, 93, 115, 176 – 177, 200 Sladek, John T. 58

Index  241

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More 139, 141 Slaughterhouse-Five 148 Smith, Adam 30 Smith, Winston (character) 146 Snow, C.P. 185 “Snow White” 118 Socrates 61, 63, 68 Sophocles 148 Sophocles, Oswald 148 Sopranos, The 52 “Sound of Thunder, The” 158 Stalin, Josef 15, 112 St. Augustine 170 Steffens, Lincoln 19 Stiglitz, George 84 Stranger in a Strange Land 19 Stratton-Porter, Gene 68 Swift, Jonathan 182 – 183 Tarski, Alfred 142 “Ten Years in Spacetime” 150 Terminator, The 157 Thanatos Syndrome, The 170, 189 Thatcher, Margaret 15 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The 30 “Thesis on Social Forms and Social Controls in the USA” 49 This Perfect Day 170, 189 Thoreau, Henry David 24, 93 Three Musketeers, The 75 Timaeos 7 Time Machine, The 184, 151 Timequake 135 – 136, 138 – 141, 147 – 152, 154 – 155, 157 – 158, 165, 171 Times Literary Supplement 13 TLS (Times Literary Supplement) 34 Tolstoy, Leo 19, 38 Traubel, Horace 20 Traveller from Altruria, A 20 Treme 57 Trout, Kilgore (character) 136, 138, 141, 148 Truman, Harry 52 Trump, Donald 8, 52, 85 – 86, 99, 102, 111 Twain, Mark 21, 136, 158 Twelve Monkeys 178 – 179 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 36 Unterwager, Jack 35 Unveiling Man’s Origins 94 Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, The 121 Utopia 9 – 11, 13, 34, 38, 138, 183 Utopus (character) 95 – 96, 115

Varoufakis, Yanis 81 Verne, Jules 182 Verrazano, Giovanni da 60 Visit to Freeland, A or New Paradise Regained, The 20 Vlad the Impaler (Dracula, Vlad) 15 Voltaire 148 – 149 Vonnegut, Kurt 35, 39 – 42, 48, 96, 98, 104, 107, 120, 132 – 133, 135 – 136, 138 – 145, 147 – 150, 152, 154 – 155, 157, 159, 162, 169, 170 – 171, 182, 201 Vonnegut, Kurt (character) 138 Vonnegut, Mark 139 Voorhis, Jerry 102 Wait, James (character) 163, 168 – 169 Walden Two 19, 36 – 37, 93, 106, 115, 176, 194, 200 Wallace, Alfred Russel 93 Wall of America, The 47 Walsh, Chad 8 Washington Star, The 197 Watson, James D. 74 – 75, 176, 182 Way Propounded to Make the Poor in these and other Nations Happy by bringing together a fit, suitable, and well-qualified People into one Household-Government or little Commonwealth, A 18 Weber, Max 79 Welch, Jack 29 Wells, H.G. 40, 67, 151, 182, 184 West, Julian (character) 6, 135, 176 Whitehead, Alfred North 8 Whitman, Walt 17, 20 Wiener, Norbert 41, 138 William Wilson (character) 160 Willis, Bruce 54 Wilson, E.O. 97 Wire, The 57 Wisdom in Loose Form: the Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in Collections of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Proverbs From Around the World 127 Wolfe, Thomas 47 Wolfe, Tom 47 Word of God, The 47 Works and Days 8 Year of the Flood, The 132 Zamyatin, Evgenii 52