by Alexander Moseley by Alexander Moseley
I have just finished two novels by authors at different ends of the fame scale: internationally renown Canadian author Margaret Atwood's latest work, Oryx and Crake, and a locally known author, with whom I correspond on the joys and tribulations of self-publishing, Robert Rennick's first novel The Fallen.
Firstly Robert's work: set on the Isle of Wight where I am presently enjoying a literary sojourn writing the sequel to Wither This Land, The Fallen follows the adventures and investigations of a local journalist following the story of a girl found at the bottom of the local cliffs; accident, murder, or suicide being the three logical possibilities. The novel's easy to fly through and is appropriate holiday literature. It reads like a grittier version of the English murder mysteries and kept me up till 4am last night. I mention the book because it has a link with Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake – namely both authors refer to the child-sex and web-site pornographic publication industries. A sad reflection of modern times.
Incidentally, I was wondering whether the ubiquity of adult-oriented spam enticing voyeurs to enjoy all kinds of ocular attractions/distractions motivated either writer? The internet has unleashed a vast panoply of opportunities for enjoying a global market from the comfort of one's home for all types of consumption, and as markets expand so do the opportunities for those engaged in ethically peripheral or immoral practices. The opening up of the East Bloc following the end of the Cold War led to a surge of stories on slavery and child exploitation, and the collapse of the inflated Asian economic bubble had the effect of expanding such nefarious trades. But criminality attracts publicity, and when tied to the exploitation of children it attracts media hysteria and knee-jerk legislation to control, regulate, prohibit, and licence entire markets and range of activities for law-abiding folk. The usual illogical retort by the protectionists and interventionists follows: "Child abuse is an evil committed by people making choices, therefore let's abolish choice." Or: "free trade includes the evil trade of child prostitution – ban free trade!" Why's this wrong? – have a read of Steven Yates's article on logical fallacies. But neither author goes off on a rant about the evils of child sex trade per se, but both present them as elements to their unfolding plots, and, as such, they reflect an element of modern culture or indeed of the depravity of a minority that often takes disproportional media headlines.
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is set in the future in a new post-apocalyptic dystopia. The narrator, u2018Snowman', is a male survivor of a global plague unleashed by geniuses working for genetic-engineering companies. While struggling to survive – he is, as far as he knows, the only human survivor – he reflects on glimpses of life before the disaster, and slowly as the book proceeds the reasons why things went wrong are unravelled by Snowman.
A very different future was presented in Atwood's earlier vision of dystopia.
In 1985 – publishing a year after the dreaded Orwellian year 1984 – Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, which relates an America taken over by totalitarian Christian fundamentalists. Written from the point of view of a woman, it tells the story of her effective imprisonment as an Old Testament handmaid to a patriarch, Fred: her purpose in life is to produce children for him and her name reflects his ownership – she is Of-Fred: Offred; she lives in constant fear of her life as detractors are stoned to death or hanged. But the system cannot abolish Offred's privacy of the mind and its desires – and therein lies the plot's tension.
The style and format of The Handmaid's Tale I recall finding strange (but then I was new to Atwood's work) and can be off-putting for some readers; but while the novel produces a similar impression to viewing a post-modernist painting, it should not be missed. In a very interesting Guardian article (which I found through lewrockell.com's search engine), Atwood describes the impact George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 had on her when she was young: she is certainly a literary defender of individuality and ably reflects on the potential direction society could take should it pursue certain ideological strands to their conclusion (discussed below). In many respects, in Oryx and Crake, Atwood merges Huxley's Brave New World with Animal Farm in her vision of large science companies playing with genetic codes.
But the Canadian writer is not easily boxed – in fact she comes down heavily on those who would like to drop her into an –ism formula. I recall a lecture she gave at York University, Ontario, where she had taught: asked if she was a feminist, she expressed her misgivings about the term and after a few minutes' explanation left the audience reeling from the implied attempt to catch and label her. However, while her philosophical biases are evident (and she advances theories libertarians and objectivists would reject), her wit, satire, and irony constantly twist and turn – she is a master of pluralism of meaning yet does not fall into annihilating meaning as post-modernists would enjoy (if they can enjoy anything!). In that respect I find her akin to St Augustine, whose City of God and Confessions I've recently waded through. – both writers' literary works leave one wondering about the person behind the pen. (Nonetheless, I can sympathise: I have had to assert with several journalists interested in my novel that the ideas therein are more important than the author – that some of the ideas are designed to provoke reflection and push the implications of ideas and may not u2018reflect the views of the author.' I'm not keen on being boxed into an –ism either. Boxing – as in labelling rather than pugilism – is for collectivists and those with a shallow sense of self who sadly seek an identity in a box. [Hey, kid, look what Santa's brought you – your own identity all wrapped up with a plastic ribbon. There you go, open it!] Could such people be called u2018identyists' and the search for a convenient identity u2018identityism' or u2018boxists' and u2018boxism' … ?)
Atwood is certainly a respectable craftsman in wrapping the power of ideas up in prose. Updating the potential apocalypse for recent scientific and cultural developments, Oryx and Crake draws on various contemporary cultural and hence ideational developments, the most important for the novel being the potential horror of u2018what would happen if the reins of progress slip from our hands' as the official website for the book asks. Snowman's reflections describe a world that had become increasingly anarchic and even feudal. Government is never mentioned (unless that is what Atwood calls the CorpSeCorps, who are like FBI types); instead, across North America, people either live and work in the dangerous u2018pleeblands' or the u2018Compounds' run by what can be described as quasi-governmental companies, who employ their own security measures and who, like in Orwell's vision of 1984, are good at uncovering the dealings of your private life if you begin to question the wisdom of life in the Compounds of the purposes to which everyone works.
The governing ethic of the Compounds is utilitarian – everything is ethically acceptable so long as it is for the good of the Compound. Here, Atwood's critique is a rather standard but always useful reminder of what may be lost in an enforced application of sacrifices demanded for the public good.
Such Compounds of course do exist: where government fails to provide the service of protection, private services evolve to meet demand. But in Atwood's vision, they have produced separate social strata in which the elite, working for the companies, have all their requirements looked after without the need to enter the cities and suburbs populated by the allegedly less intelligent, where violence, disease, lack of hygiene, and sex markets seem to rule. Not that sex is missing from life in the Compounds: indeed, the universities offer sexual services as part of their student welfare program! Herein we have elements of course of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, as well as standard Hegelian-Marxist thinking that society naturally bifurcates into rulers and ruled rather than a complex web of mutually beneficial voluntary arrangements and trades.
The scenario of Oryx and Crake, falling into the genre of science-fiction, is highly reminiscent not just of Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm, but also H.G.Well's Food of the Gods, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and other romanticist reactions to scientific progress and standard fears drilled into us in school of what may happen if we let the mad scientist have his way with electricity, atomic energy, fossil fuels, lasers, genetic engineering, etc. So is Atwood against progress and science? No. As she says in her web-site interview: "Please don't make the mistake of thinking that Oryx and Crake is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral." Is she against testing on animals – probably, given the link to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) an animal rights organisation which allegedly funds or at least supports animal liberation campaigns and hunt sabotage. Atwood is certainly concerned about the rate of animal extinction caused by human activity which thereby, she believes diminishes u2018God's presence' or u2018the expression of God': "If I were the Biblical God I would be very annoyed. He made the thing and saw that it was good. And now people are scribbling all over the artwork." (Yet what did He think about that meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs, or the millions of extinctions that naturally occurred before humans evolved?)
But then, she's not averse to contradicting her argument, and although her rejection of being u2018boxed' is understandable, it is less acceptable to permit and espouse a logical fallacy: Atwood allows the expression of God through organic and inorganic matter (a pantheist vision, which she outlines in her interview and admits to not always understanding herself) but adds that only when organic matter is destroyed is God's presence thereby limited.
She makes a couple of errors here: Firstly she argues that "The forms of "God", both inorganic and organic, have since multiplied exceedingly." But matter is neither created nor destroyed. Its reformulation into different elements is another thing – what exists, exists. Secondly, she argues that in destroying matter (i.e., re-read as resolving organic into inorganic elements), man is destroying God. That would make man greater than God – a fallacy that St Augustine argued against somewhere in his City of God, but forgive me for not having my annotated copy at my side – and if we were that capable we could easily recreate matter, which of course we can't.
On the one hand, she should logically argue that since matter cannot be destroyed, the resolution of an organic body into inorganic compounds does not alter God's presence in the universe; or, on the other hand, she should argue that only living matter can be deemed a reflection of God's presence in the universe, and hence the destruction of a living entity limits God's presence – this seems to reflect better what she is claiming. However, the latter theory generates a host of ethical-theological problems: taking an extreme example, one could ask whether cancerous cells reflect God's presence and should be worshipped?
But in her interview, Atwood retreats from reason and logic to embrace a Humean vision of human nature – it's not reason that guides people, it's emotion. Accordingly, if she feels that God is in both organic and inorganic matter but is only destroyed when man (and presumably not any other species?) kills organisms, then her feelings must be respected. Nonetheless, here's another glaring fallacy: just because her feelings wish for X, and her statement is a true reflection of her feelings, it is not necessarily the case that X must be true. Such a position negates Aristotle's basic law of logic – the law of non-contradiction. Again, see Steven Yates's summary on this.
Moving on with the literary critique: if we take Mises's premise that all human action is resoluble into ideas, then we can enjoy a more enlightening read of Oryx and Crake. Rather than dismissing the book as an anti-capitalist environmentalist tree-hugging novel riding on the bandwagon of fears (real or misplaced) concerning genetic engineering and global warming (and thereby labelling the book as generally belonging to lefty anti-capitalist literature), we should pay attention to the ideas motivating the characters.
Snowman reminds me of Flood, the main character in my Wither This Land (gee, plug plug again, well some one has to: I'm self-published and don't enjoy the benefits of a marketing agent!).
But what befalls a man who has no ideas? … [Flood] pursued an image: the man without ideas floats; he must be disconnected from the world, which means that he is attracted to those closest to him. Perhaps, another insight fluttered, in the battles that take place for the minds of men, the thoughtless mimic the loudest – they fall in with the crowd and flow with the current, whichever way it flows. They do not really care which direction their lives take. (p.1)
Snowman is a man without ideas – that is, he has no vision of how he ought to live his life or what the good ought to be. He is accordingly amoral (even though he sometimes reflects atavistic echoes of older moralities) and, for Atwood, he is a slave to his passions – specifically his sexual desires. His best friend, Crake, however, apparently has a vision of what life and his role in it ought to be: u2018apparently', for both men grow up as products of their culture, a culture that is very much embedded in our contemporary world. Here Atwood is at her most enjoyable and satirical. As we gain glimpses of their maturation, the two friends become products of a passive consumerism, expending their intellect on computer games (Kwiktime Osama, Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Extincathon) and surfing the net for porn and real-time executions and euthanasia (Noodie News, Hott Tots, and my disturbing favourite that Atwood coins: nitee-nite.com). Oryx, whom they both meet later in life, was in a child-porn web-cast they came across: her story is one of a flight from poverty via exploitation – yet Oryx is relatively more philosophical, or at least Stoical, about her fate than Snowman, who rails against the people who exploited her. Thereby Atwood mocks the consumer-supporter of the industry: Snowman the viewer is also Snowman the consumer. Her past cannot be morally written off as Snowman angrily would like to write it off, for after all, Oryx retorts, it enabled her to leave poverty in Asia and to find work in America and to be with him: such pitiable conditions become the symbolic origin of the new poor huddled masses seeking freedom in America.
In snippets we learn more of Snowman's relationship with Oryx, who maintains a somewhat intriguing secretive life and thereby sustains her independence in a world sold out to corporations: his love for her is rent by a fiery jealousy of her previous life – surely the sex was not real, he implores in his frequent digging into her past. "All sex is real," she replies (p.144): a phrase that cuts to the core of the darker, unthinking, impassive elements so in ascendant in our culture. Continental philosophers are particularly good at describing the relationships between viewer and viewed imbued in television and now downloadable films and live web-cam broadcasts – of the implied but contrived intimacy between the subject and object; Roger Scruton's Philosophy of Sex, is well worth reading for a particularly engaging analysis of sexual morality and the present decline of moral standards. "All sex is real," says Oryx – indeed, let us not forget.
Beyond Atwood's own confused metaphysics, there are problems with the logic of Oryx and Crake. In any literary vision of the future, jumps and omissions have to be made, but two strong assumptions must be challenged (there are several but two will suffice here). The first is a comment on one of the reasons the world ended up in such a disastrous state:
"As a species," says Crake, "we're in deep trouble … Demand for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geo-political areas, hence the famines and the droughts; but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone." (p.295)
Of course, this is Crake's particularly bad understanding of economics: but he is supposed to be the whiz kid genetic engineering innovator who understands social dynamics. But nowhere in the book – or in any regular environmentalist harangues about resource use and depletion – are price rises mentioned. If a resource is depleted, its price rises, thereby cutting consumption and giving an incentive to find alternatives. Only indirectly, coming to Atwood's support here, could we say that the genetic engineering companies are spurred on by resource consumption to come up with tailor-made alternatives such as ChickieNobs and Happicuppa coffee and all the products to appease humanity's vanities – from breast implants to the next generation viagara style pill BlyssPlus and Snowman gets a job working as a PR-man for u2018AnooYoo'.
The reversal or indeed rejection of Say's Law (that supply creates demand) is a common error in future scenarios that have humanity perishing from having depleted the planet's resources. (For a wonderfully precise criticism of such thinking see George Reisman's Capitalism.) But then the u2018evils of business' thesis is further propounded:
"The best diseases, from a business point of view," said Crake, "would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally – that is for maximum profit – the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It's a fine calculation." (p.211)
And, of course, that is what the big bad companies get up to: producing products that get people hooked into buying them. The underlying assumption is that all consumers (the pleebs) are so incredibly stupid that they cannot know they are being duped (although Crake admits later that they're not as daft as he was led to expect); so, the implication goes, people ought to rebel against either the evils of the corporations or the evil of human nature that would forever return us to this predicament. We cannot be sure this is Atwood's view or simply the view of Crake, who begins to see through the conspiracy; either way, it is a rather stale (circa 1920s) and false indictment of capitalism. But the confused motivations running through Crake's enigmatic comments and silences also leaves the reader questioning Crake's ultimate motivations. Now requiring the reader to think and reflect and to return to the narrative is certainly the characteristic of a good book.
The second problematic assumption is the genius of Crake. His upbringing is intellectually sparse to say the least, but he possesses oodles of natural wit and intelligence – this, we are led to believe, enables him to become a renown and highly respected bio-engineering researcher. Atwood takes him to the best university u2018Watson-Crick U' (the Eastern Sea-board universities having sunk in globally rising tides, as has New York, which has since been rebuilt, no doubt in the upper state as New New York), where he receives an excellent education – but the shallowness of his intellectual culture is worrying for the plot's development.
Arguably, this can be read as a point being made by the persistently elusive and not always logical Atwood: Crake writes that his university is populated by a
"high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude…" (193).
(Interestingly, I was lambasted by a tax-payer funded short dumpy warthog left-wing screaming academic for being rude after giving a similar labelling description of rationalists, who would wish to rule the world through the computer screen as they do the Sim-city, Civilization, etc. games, and whose shallow culture and lack of social interaction does render them dangerous: don't you just love irony?)
Crake's not far off social ineptitude himself, so he calls in his old friend Snowman to work on his project to help balance his own lack, "I needed someone to talk to" (p.306). Thus we are presented with another mad scientist genius who threatens the world (if that's what Crake is up to: discuss). Of course the scenario of the computer nerd rising to bio-engineering genius is not beyond human possibilities – genius often lies hidden, but, as JS Mill noted, the intelligent mind is an incredibly fragile entity that requires a fertile intellectual soil to permit its flourishing: Crake's sporadic surfing of the web for marginally diminishing titillations doesn't correspond with the usual necessary fecund conditions for even later academic brilliance. (There is a detectable passing reference to the recent film on the alleged genius of John Nash in u2018Beautiful Mind': Crake possesses u2018an elegant mind' writes Atwood.)
Nonetheless, swallowing the erroneous economic theory that sustains the global disaster scenario (after all, Austrian economists have to do this so often to enjoy the world of good literature), we are presented with Snowman's struggle to live. The situation is of a new Robinson Crusoe (the reference is direct: he later discovers a foot print in the sand even); Snowman is almost without assistance in a very hostile environment: he forages in houses now being taken over by nature's foliage for remnants to sustain him. His life is constantly threatened from infection and predation. In a previous conversation between Crake and Snowman, Atwood offers a more lucid economic description and clarification of what the loss of intellectual capital could mean:
"Let's suppose for the sake of argument," said Crake one evening, "that civilization as we know it gets destroyed … Once it's flattened, it could never be rebuilt." …
"It could be put back together," said Jimmy [alias Snowman]… "They'd still have the instructions."
"Actually not," said Crake. "It's not like the wheel, it's too complex now. Suppose the instructions survived, suppose there were any people left with the knowledge to read them. Those people would be few and far between, and they wouldn't have the tools. Remember, no electricity. Then once those people died, that would be it. They'd have no apprentices, they'd have no successors … All it takes … is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game gone forever." (p.223)
The interdependency of people through markets that produces today's hitherto never experienced levels of prosperity is a product of freedom and of the vast intellectual capital inheritance of rules and know-how generated as the division and specialisation of labour expands. Destroy that link and Crake is right – that inheritance and all of its benefits would be lost. St Augustine recognised that the Eternal City of Rome would survive the temporary ravages of barbarian hordes, because civilisation possesses deep resources and a flexibility that shallow division-of-labour societies do not possess. Crake envisages the more disastrous wiping out of the present generation, leaving few if any survivors from a mass extinction – and of course, civilisation, which depends so much on the intricate ever-changing matrices of interdependent relationships, would be destroyed.
The apocalypse of Oryx and Crake can also be considered symbolically; although Atwood's vision is of a single dominating destruction that is unleashed simultaneously around the globe, much of the novel touches on the cultural forces that lead to the finality: and there we return to the pluralistic cultural momentums that are slowly cutting the strands both from our past moral codes that have until now sustained our adaptation to an increasingly complex open society and the knowledge and know-how required to understand firstly our present use of resources and the potential for them in the future. One of my characters quips to himself: "But death by a thousand cuts: which one would kill you? That was what the land was suffering from." Atwood's cultural critique is appropriately broad, dipping into many areas of contemporary life that we often raise objections to. If ideas do enable us to direct our lives, the present lack of logic (reflected in the author's own thinking!) and the disparagement of high culture (i.e., culture that requires brain activity rather than the passivity of web-surfing), then the roots of civilisation's future decline and fall are presently embedding themselves amongst the flowers.
Finally, although the story is told from the perspective of those caught up in the emerging but wholly unexpected apocalypse, the rebellious figures, who dare to drop out of the system or challenge the direction humanity is taking – Atwood's usual characters – are what we would characterise as eco-warriors or Greenpeace activists. They are the present anti-GM lobby, the anti animal-testing lobby, or more generally the anti-progress lobby. Their presence is whispered about – hinted at – and their noble cause overshadowed by the great leap forwards science makes and the unquestioning attitude of the Compound inhabitants (backed by the execution of those who are caught rebelling) reminiscent of the Stepford Wives.
Despite the logical flaws and aspects that would send the typical LewRockwell/Mises.org reader up the wall – and others may find more in the science of Oryx and Crake – Atwood continues to produce an enjoyably broad range of imagery that lingers in the mind long after reading her novels and hence earns her position in the pantheon of great writers.
