Desert Messiah
Republic Reborn is back. And it’s rebirth surely calls for a lengthy, meandering, digressing blog post only tangentially related to the ongoing purpose of this website, in lieu of a shorter, more tightly-written, yet less satisfying series of articles. Of course it does.
I cannot remember a more blustery, rainy, or cold October than this one. It has been glorious, and has provided the perfect backdrop for immersion into Lovecraft, Derleth, one of the Bronte sisters, the obligatory rereading of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and new favorite poet, Clark Ashton Smith.
Aside from the diet of gothic and cosmic horror that so perfectly fits into October, I’ve been held in thrall by books I’ve normally considered “summer” reads: the first four novels of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Arrakis, or Dune, a desert planet devoid of rainfall, ochre sunsets, the landscape ravaged by the coriolis wind of massive sandstorms, mile-long sandworms that glide under the dunes, the Spartan-esque Fremen natives who thrive there, and, of course, the ‘spice’, the creation of the sandworm life cycle, coveted by the entire universe for its prescience-bestowing qualities that allow for faster-than-light travel, among other qualities that you will just have to read the books to discover.
The world that Herbert created is fascinating, the complexity is such that it seems impossible to have come from just one imagination. A slightly overused trope running through much of science fiction is the ‘War against the Machines’, a la Terminator, The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, etc. It’s ubiquitous, and Dune is no different, in a sense, excepting the fact that, in Herbert’s universe, humanity had fought and won it’s war against the “thinking machines” millennia before the events of the first book. What is astonishing is that Dune was published in 1966, long before much of the ‘man versus machine’ genre really took off, or even before the potential of artificial intelligence really came into view. Herbert built a universe around the question of what safeguards would the human race put into place in order to prevent another rise of artificial intelligence. One of these is the publication, dissemination, and enforcement of the teachings of the Orange Catholic Bible, the most fundamental lesson of which is contained in the phrase, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind”.
The commandment is pregnant with meaning and weight, and you don’t even really need a novel to understand the amount of blood and war it took for the human race to rebuild anew on top of such a commandment.
Looking at our world today, it appears the fundamental goal of technological progress is to produce such a machine intelligence as soon as possible. What is it in us that drives our species toward such a creation? I’ve recently wondered what latent instincts we are unconsciously playing out over the centuries. Spiders weave webs, beavers build dams, and we work to create our successors. But I digress.
My fascination with Dune is closely connected to the story of T.E. Lawrence, and his adventures in Arabia during World War 1. Aside from the enigma of Arabs giving their allegiance and lives to a 5’2″, 27-year old, white Englishman, and what qualities those Arabs saw in Lawrence that made them disregard everything else, Dune mirrors Lawrence in the fictional character of Paul Atreides, a young outworlder who came to embody the Messiah of Fremen prophecy, leading the Fremen off Dune, and into the universe, with devastating consequences.
Our civilization is rapidly moving to a point nestled somewhere in the unknown future, where we will have to grapple with the question of whether it is wise to build machines “in the image of a man’s mind”. Automation of every aspect of our lives is a virtual certainty within the next few decades, but what price will it exact in terms of our humanity? The diversion of technological progress into machines that think for us, easing us into a comfortable, mental torpidity that will rob us of our ability to even enjoy life. The very dis-utility of thinking, of grappling with the theoretical, exercising the imagination and apprehending the elliptical, is being bargained away in a strangely Faustian situation where we give away that which makes us most human, our ability to think, in exchange for a passive existence, a freedom from thinking, which is exactly what is being sold by Silicon Valley. What is promised, and what, apparently, is being clamoured for by the culture at large, freedom from thinking, is being given at the price of every other freedom you possess as an individual. A digital Panopticon that would make Bentham blush is being constructed around us, emulsifying our ever-dulling minds in a passive, waking-dream.
As the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood reminds us in Dune, after the war with the machines, mankind had to relearn how to think. The mind was given top priority as something to be improved, not crippled with the easy slavery that thinking machines gave it. Mentats became ‘human computers’, mental disciplines were designed and adhered to with a seriousness and devotion traditionally given to the martial arts.
The lesson of Dune is a warning to our current situation: to regain our freedom, we must relearn how to think.