Special Circumstances [RI8]
Popular culture on the left
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 8 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 7 here, or go on to Chapter 9 here)
Let’s look at foreign policy in left wing stories and science fiction. Of course those things aren’t the same thing; many of science fiction’s greatest writers have been of the right (Heinlen, Wyndham). But given that such a significant element of being of the radical left at this moment is about the willingness and/or ability to imagine futures beyond capitalist realism, it’s not entirely pretentious to suggest that left wing sci fi is important.
But mostly I want to talk about left wing sci fi because so much left wing sci fi has such an oddly interventionist foreign policy. Take the Culture novels of Ian M Banks. Bank’s Culture is perhaps the archetype [1] of this idea of imagining better realities, to the point where his “fully automated luxury gay [2] space communism” briefly became the new new left’s favourite meme.
Banks’ thesis, implicit in all his books, and made explicit in a 1994 Usenet posting “A few notes on the Culture” was that the fundamental idea of communism — from each according to their ability to each according to their needs — is too elegant, too efficient and too fundamentally hopeful, to ever truly and finally be defeated, but will forever persist until it is ultimately adopted. In this way communist values have a form of entropy, and represent a sort of ultimate natural state for society. What makes the Culture novels so joyful from a leftist perspective is their aggressive dialectical materialism: terrible things happen to individuals, sometimes to whole societies, entire books may be and often are bleak and depressing, but ultimately the arc of sentience cannot but bend towards utopia. The Culture can never lose, because that very idea is a category error. For me that is a message of hope more persuasive than any found in a religious text.
Banks’ economic argument for this is simply that once we find a technological solution to scarcity, capitalism — which is a means of rationing scarce products — ceases to have a purpose. The universe has more matter and more energy than any likely civilization of sentient beings could ever need, and turning that energy and matter into anything else you might possibly wish for is simply a technological problem. Further, once technology reaches the point where you can make anything out of anything else, one can create a self sufficient society aboard a spaceship which is not reliant on any external factors (beyond the need to occasionally consume resources, but those resources could be literally anything, and thus sourced from literally anywhere), and which — as it can freely manoeuvre within three dimensional space — cannot ever be encircled, enveloped or otherwise crushed. This makes hierarchy imposed through coercion effectively impossible, meaning “a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.”
Meanwhile, as Banks says,
“the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is — in the long run — independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.”
Perhaps the closest thing we have seen to this on Earth was during the golden age of piracy, where it was possible to create a reasonably self-sufficient [3] ecosystem aboard a ship which could travel, if not perhaps fully freely in three dimensions, certainly beyond the scope of controlling forces’ ability to impose a hierarchy upon them. The result was indeed, socialism within, anarchy without. Pirates, as demonstrated in the excellent Life under the Jolly Roger by Gabriel Kuhn [4] were anti-imperial proto-marxists who rejected external hierarchy, shared their loot fairly equally, often elected their captains (who were often non-white, sometimes women and sometimes gay) and exercised a degree of democratic and consensual decisionmaking, and who — while certainly not choristers — had a reputation for brutality perhaps based more on imperial propaganda than fact.
Of course the pirates were ultimately defeated, because while the Royal Navy couldn’t control the oceans they could cut off the supply of resources and ability to maintain themselves by guarding ports and shipping. For Banks to be right about the far future our spacefarers would have to be genuinely self-sufficient, or — more probably — dependent upon genuinely omnipresent resources.
Back to more immediate concerns. Banks personally had rather conventional left wing opinions on the Iraq war, Palestine and foreign policy matters of that sort. The Culture did not. The Culture were exceptionally interventionist. Indeed in the annex to the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), Banks goes so far as to say that humanitarian intervention is the only mechanism a utopian leftist society has to give itself further purpose and value. Banks has suggested that in part the Culture’s militarism was due to his need as an author to create entertaining stories, and that may well be. But, whatever his reason for putting it together, what he manufactured is a set of stories about left wing interventionism. So let’s explore that.
1988’s The Player of Games positioned intervention as a form of sport, a toying with other lives, in a way which can have fortunate and unfortunate, foreseen and unforeseen consequences, but which ultimately — particularly when used to prevent torture and destroy hierarchy — is a hell of a lot of fun.
His other books then critique that idea. Use of Weapons (1990) is a very different book, but it could almost be the same story told from the perspective of one of the pieces moved about the board in the Player of Games. It suggests that it might be a hell of a lot of fun for the generals but it is simply hell for those that fight it and those who get in its way. This melancholia is further developed in Look to Windward (2000), a wistful book about nostalgia and regret and the perspective provided by great scale and the passage of time — a perspective that nevertheless does nothing to diminish individual pain. Set in the immediate aftermath of a well intentioned but utterly failed Culture intervention, and the more thematic aftermath of the great war of Phlebas (to which this is an indirect sequel of sorts), Windward is the story of the perils of intervention, and the cycles of revenge that it can establish.
This ambiguity about violence plays out variously. Phlebas, the first book to be published, is the only one set within the first and only galactic war the Culture fought. Banks felt this experience would teach the Culture that in future matters could be handled more elegantly. As the Culture’s power grew it would reach the point where all out war is both unnecessary and unsporting.
Excession (1996) then questions this. One can debate what it concludes, but to my mind it doesn’t have a definitive conclusion — in other words it posits that this is a subject about which one can have entirely legitimate and good faith disagreements with no correct answer, for all that many lives rest upon the outcome. Inversions (1998) makes an even more explicit but even less conclusive version of that same point. It’s an odd book but insofar as Inversions has a message, it may be provided by the second of its two intertwining stories, the one where there is no intervention, but where nevertheless motives of personal revenge arising from war have a major consequence on world events. The benign and intentional consequences of intervention are therefore portrayed as not dissimilar from the malign and unintentional.
Matter (2008) is an incredibly long book without much of a point to it, but one of the things it does interestingly lay out is the geopolitics of the Culture universe and how they seek to manage the tension of attempting to avoid all out conflict while still leaving the space for humanitarian intervention. The answer it comes up with is oddly colonial: societies of equivalent tech levels operate broadly, but not entirely, mutually exclusive spheres of influence, as a consequence of which there is then within each higher technological society a nested hierarchy of lower technological species over which they provide mentorship and keep peace [5].
In this way tech equivalent confrontation (and thus total war) is avoided, but secret missions from the Culture’s notorious Special Circumstances division perform the function of humanitarian intervention. This is unsatisfactory, but also very British: replace empire with something a bit like empire but good, and send in the spies if you mess up.
So the thesis develops that all out war is to be avoided at all costs, precisely because it is the unlimited nature of potential consequences that makes it so unconscionable, but that nevertheless violence, combat, conflict of any and all forms, from the abstract to the visceral, is entirely legitimate and justified to prevent suffering as long as it takes place with a system of universally agreed rules to ensure that it is contained. This thesis reaches its logical and absurd conclusion in Surface Detail (2010). Here, building upon an idea from Matter, highly formalised sporting combats are fought across various virtual realities.
In short, and in surprisingly conventional manner, Banks has invented the UN Security Council: humanitarian intervention as a moral good but only provided it is not vetoed by great powers, as allowing great powers that right is the only way to make sure conflict doesn’t spiral out of control and become unlimited. And if that’s not good enough — you just solve the problem with deniable covert ops. His “subversive left wing foreign policy” is basically pretty much that of Jacques Chirac.
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As for those covert ops: Banks also invents the CIA. In The State of the Art (1991) he first introduces the idea that the Culture might be willing to do terrible things to get their way, and floats a frankly sinister utilitarian ends-justifies-means computer-says-kill philosophy. Look to Windward then takes this further by introducing — with what can only be described as a sadistic joy — the doctrine of “don’t fuck with the Culture”. This is the idea that in order to earn respect, progressive actors need, on occasion, to be able to instil fear, and that the only way to do that is with rare but highly theatrical acts of utterly brutal and disproportionate force “pour encourager les autres”.
Banks’ culture is of course a more sexed up, more violent, more extreme and more fun version of that other franchise about post scarcity space communists: Star Trek (1966-). Trekkies will recognise many of Banks’ dilemmas, particularly in Inversions, as variations on the famous “prime directive” which prohibits higher technology civilizations from interfering with the “natural development” (a loaded and orientalist phrase) of lower technology civilizations [6].
The Prime Directive is treated solemnly. As Captain Jean Luc Picard says, in one of the first of the monologues for which he would become famous,
“The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy…and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”
However, inevitably as with Banks, the scriptwriters have always struggled with the fact that violating the Prime Directive is much more fun than not doing so, and so Star Trek is frequently a show which wears its anticolonialism on its sleeve precisely so it can mostly honour it in the breach.
Further, as was well argued in an entertaining University of Exeter roundtable, while the Prime Directive — designed as the US counterculture’s rebuke to Vietnam — might directly contradict John Stewart Mill’s view of the role of empire to uplift “savages” into “civilization”, overall Star Trek’s attitude to the morality of intervention is heavily imbued with Victorian classical liberalism — in particular in Mill’s strong distinction between “domestic affairs” in which one mustn’t intervene, and affairs which assume a wider regional dimension, where intervention is more permissible. In other words, it creates a boundary for legitimacy based not on solidarity or the universality of human experience and the brethren of mankind, but on contagion: we must not intervene where a conflict is quarantined, we must where it isn’t — since everyone else will anyway and that grants permission to redress the balance for the forces of morality. This world view is something of a cop-out, particularly as applied to our modern world in which all things are delicately interconnected.
Now to be fair to Star Trek this reading flattens out a lot of nuance from a large and nuanced show, containing multitudes. The Prime Directive, for example, was initially just a broad social norm, only becoming a firm principle later. I’ve also completely sidestepped Deep Space Nine (1993), and its five series long arc about the Dominion War, which frequently explores issues of conflict and moral ambiguity with far greater depth. Star Trek’s only real crime is to be art, sometimes subversive art (with its cold war Marxism and civil rights era commitment to diversity) which nevertheless fits within the mainstream cultural hegemon on intervention.
Of course, outside the left Sci-Fi politics in this same tradition quickly gets much worse [7]. Stargate presents the sort of critique of the Prime Directive you might expect from a franchise which the US military went out of its way to support– albeit it does then go fairly deep into an examination of the consequences of this approach (a critique that is inevitably limited).
The premise is the familiar trope of a precursor race of ancient aliens. This time these aliens are divided into the benign, who have something approaching the Prime Directive, and the malign, who don’t, and so manage to make the universe awful. As a consequence humans must operate a literal forward-defensive strategy, in which military expeditions are sent through various wormholes (the titular “Stargates”) to establish outposts on alien, and often hostile, worlds. The inevitable consequence is the rapid militarisation of space exploration, the dragging of humanity into several intergalactic wars and quagmires, and moral dilemmas aplenty.
Ultimately, human ingenuity and gumption triumph and humanity gets to fulfil its allegedly deserved role as conqueror of half the galaxy. We are told this is a good thing: the galaxy is a failed state, fought over by barbarous warlords — the consequence of the death, at human hands, of its previous “strong man” ruler (the Iraq analogies are heavy handed) — and in dire need of civilizing. Humans, we are told, might be low tech but we are high civilization — which is why we can punch above our weight and why we go from new kids on the block to masters of the universe in an intergalactic week. Bully for us. And not only can we do this, but we must, and not only for the sake of the galaxy; if we don’t go there, they will come here.
There’s something very manifest destiny, very US exceptionalism, about Stargate. Indeed, you could argue that the show is really about the frontier forts of the old west, and it was just ported to space for a change of scene. Little wonder then that its politics are that of General Custer. It does however at least treat its alien races as, broadly, human-ish. To be treated almost as well as other humans — or at least as well as we treat humans from somewhere else. Abandon that idea and things get really nasty.
Click here for chapter 9.
[1] I’m slightly reluctant to give Banks this much credit without remarking upon what a magpie he was. Many of his best ideas are taken from Ursula K. Le Guin or Larry Niven and he lifts ideas and plots wholesale from Douglas Adams and Herman Hesse. But his books are a lot of fun, and illustrate this question of intervention particularly vividly, so we’re going to talk about them
[2] Gay here indicating merely non heteronormative. The conceit in Banks’ culture is that in the far future we will be able to change biological sex at will, and therefore most people would, frequently. Ditto childbirth, leading to an entire society of pansexual gender fluid individuals and the inevitable end of patriarchy that comes with it (shades of Le Guin’s Left hand of Darkness (1969) here, but the difference is that gender fluidity is optional). This “solution” to sexism is perhaps a little too convenient and neat; there’s something disconcertingly essentialist about it, and Banks himself doesn’t always escape heterosexual male normativity, particularly when it comes to gaze. Nevertheless, it offers a view of a universe shorn of enough bigotry to be worthy of inclusion into the meme.
[3] Of course pirates weren’t self-sufficient but parasitic upon others, which is very different in various ways, including ethical ones. Economically, however, it functions in a similar manner provided prey is plentiful.
[4] The text is excellent. My physical copy of the book is really badly made — it feels self-published, even though it isn’t.
[5] There’s an incredibly clumsy literal metaphor for this involving a multi-layered shell world. There’s also a sort of weird aside where they talk about how in addition to keeping the peace the great powers do like to start the occasional war among their acolytes just to keep things interesting. And then a deeply pretentious discussion about if we’re in a simulation or not, and is that the same as geopolitical interference, and does it matter?
I hate Matter: it’s ponderous and completely lacking Banks’ usual finesse — even the title is contrived, Banks using the word Matter in about four different ways just to show that he could, without ever thinking if he should. It does have an incredible ending though.
[6] In a series 4 episode of “Star Trek: Voyager” which aired in 1998 it is revealed that there actually exists a “Zero Directive” which overrules even the Prime Directive, and essentially states that the prime directive can be ignored if the lower technology civilization has weapons of mass destruction. Which is certainly something.
[7] This is perhaps inevitable. It has been suggested, for example in John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), that Sci Fi, as an exploration of the Other rooted in turn of the century western adventure literature, could not but be colonialist.
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