Thursday 18 August 2022

Natural Right and Relativism in Vance, Wolfe and Lewis

This year, I have read an awful lot of books by Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe and CS Lewis. This has caused me to reflect on the nature of morality and how we conceptualise it.

Wolfe, being a Catholic, wrote fiction that was infused with a commitment to the notion of natural right, which here I will use, in the Straussian sense, to refer to the notion that there are objectively good ways for human beings to live, that these derive from an underlying metaphysics, and that there are hence morally better or worse modes of life - both at the individual and societal levels. 

The Book of the New Sun, which I reread this year after having first encountered it probably 20 or more years ago, encapsulates this commitment. Some people think of Severian as an analogy for Christ, but this never passed the sniff test for me first time around, and I was gratified to read somewhere that Wolfe himself also dismissed the idea. Severian is not an analogy for Christ but for a christian, in the same manner as John Bunyan's pilgrim: his tale is one of gradual spiritual and moral growth and redemption. He begins steeped in a morally degraded culture, and over the course of the four books very slowly finds his way - through what can only be attributed to divine grace - not only to the discovery that his culture is morally degraded, but to a position in which he can attempt to change both it and himself for the better. This is basically the christian story, as I understand it at least: humankind's redemption through grace, and its slow discovery of how to be better in light of God's revelation. 

The point, to put it in a more spoilerish way, is that Severian begins as a torturer but comes ultimately to achieve empathy - albeit very imperfectly - and indeed to abolish torture. He slowly discovers, and effects, a better morality. And this happens not from the application of his own reason or intrinsic goodness but through the intervention of grace - at certain moments that I think will be evident to anybody who has read the novels and reflects on them.

(Wolfe's genius of course is that one doesn't have to be a christian to appreciate the books, whose essential premise is: here's a set of incredibly dense and symbolic novels that you could spend a lifetime unpicking, but if that's not your cup of tea, how about all this virtuoso prose, these peerless feats of imagination and a side of horrible monsters?)

Lewis's That Hideous Strength echoes the same themes as The Book of the New Sun in a more explicit way. In one of the more important sequences in the book our antihero, Mark, finds himself being forced to undergo a series of apparently arbitrary and puerile mental exercises designed to achieve absolute objectivity and hence the ability to apply pure reason. The aim of this, of course, is to be in a position to put traditional morality or conceits about natural right before what Oakeshott calls the 'tribunal of the intellect', and cast it all aside when it is inevitably found wanting. The novel's punchline - again, to get a little spoilerish - is that such a state can be attained only through utter relativism and the absolute dissolution of meaning itself: meaning only comes from living in such a way that God intended, and the application of human reason alone to the task of constructing a fresh morality in practice ends in nihilism of the most extreme kind - a war of all against all in which it is just the loudest voices that win. 

This is elucidated for us in Vance's very different approach to the question of metaphysics. In Vance's fiction, particularly the Gaean Reach novels, we find a universe in which there is no concept of natural right, either explicit or implicit - the people in that universe do not believe in it, and nor (apparently) does the author. What exists instead is innumerable cultures whose moral codes and laws rest on mere circumstance; they happen to have developed in the manner in which they have because that is what the history and evolution of those societies has produced in the millennia of their separation from Earth. The endless variety that results is one of the great charms of the Gaean Reach books, and nobody in their right mind would have them any other way, of course, but there is no denying that it is the result of an essentially relativistic understanding of morality. No culture can objectively be said to be "better" or "worse" - they are all simply different (and indeed a persistent theme in Vance's fiction is that they all seem to have malevolence simmering either right at the surface or somewhere deep within). 

This means that Vance is basically a Nietzschean, although I'm not sure he would have described himself in those terms. Since there is no underlying metaphysics upon which morality rests, and it is simply a product of evolution, it can be made subject to human reason, and if an individual human being has sufficient will and vitality he can apply his reason to constructing a moral code of his own. This is indeed what Vance's heroes almost inevitably do, albeit generally unconsciously. The trouble, though, is that the number of individuals who actually do have the will and vitality to achieve this task is very few, and what ends up happening for the mass of human beings is that the moral code which they end up following is simply imposed upon them by those who shout the loudest. When there is no notion of natural right, embodied in a tradition, to draw from, everything is up for grabs in moral terms, and a struggle emerges which is settled only by (literal or metaphorical) force. The result is societies dominated by the moral codes of the victors of such struggles - and laws and customs tending to be harsh, capricious and without any capacity for self-critique. This describes most of Vance's cultures aptly.

Whether Wolfe and Lewis or Vance is correct about how the universe and its underlying morality (or lack of it) is arranged is a question I leave for you to answer.

20 comments:

  1. "Wolfe's genius of course is that one doesn't have to be a christian to appreciate the books, whose essential premise is: here's a set of incredibly dense and symbolic novels that you could spend a lifetime unpicking, but if that's not your cup of tea, how about all this virtuoso prose, these peerless feats of imagination and a side of horrible monsters?"

    Exactly! One of the bits in New Sun that always makes me chuckle is Severian's entrance into the glade where Vodalus hangs out. The scene itself is the purest, pulpiest Frazetta - atop a lumbering prehistoric beast, a muscular, bare-chested man brandishes a huge sword, a black cloak masking his face and his body bespattered with the blood of the beast's mahout, who he's just beheaded. Yet it's described in Wolfe's typcially Jamesian prose ...

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    1. Yeah, definitely. There are so many moments like that. The battle sequence with the dwarfs riding around on the shoulders of big tall warriors has always felt to me like something out of a long running manga series.

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  2. Your comments on Vance really bring to mind Blue Planet. It's faaaaaaaaar from Vance's best work in terms of literary style (which is why a lot of Vance fans have never heard of it and the only reason I've read it is that I stumbled upon it in a used book store) but it's a fast read and due to it being different from a lot of Vance's work I think it gives an interesting window on Vance's ideas of morality.

    What is specifically interesting about Blue Planet is that it LACKS the "persistent theme in Vance's fiction is that they all seem to have malevolence simmering either right at the surface or somewhere deep within." The society in Blue Planet is, while not perfect, fairly nice overall and the villains are cast more in the role of people trying to corrupt it, which is a pretty big departure from a lot of how Vance writes societies.

    What's also interesting is that the hero of the story is fundamentally conservative and identifies with the traditional values of his society in a way that Vance's heroes rarely do. Also unlike a lot of Vance's heroes he has boatloads of rationality, will, and vitality and resembles the sort of stubborn but upstanding man of reason that you see in a lot of old school sci-fi but very rarely in Vance.

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    1. I really like Blue Planet and I actually think it's very well-written - it packs a huge amount of story and background into such a thin volume. A real feat of wordcraft.

      I agree that in many ways it's a departure from the norm for Vance but it seems to my eye to be an almost-analogy to the American Revolution in the way it depicts revolutionaries appealing to ancient liberties in the face of relatively newfound authoritarianism?

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  3. I'll admit to not having read much recently-published fantasy. Are there any newish books that seriously attempt this kind of metaphysics? For obvious and well-reported reasons, most recent "so hot right now" fantasy seems to engage more with identity/class politics than ethics.

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    1. Yes, but in its own way that kind of fantasy is very committed to a doctrine of natural right (an insistence on equality/equity). It's just that it lacks an underlying metaphysics - or, I should say, its proponents are unaware that it is based on an essentially christian one.

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  4. I love the work of all 3 of these authors, but philosophically I'm with Wolfe and Lewis.
    Also, I agree that Severian is not meant to be Christ, but I see why people think that he is; Severian affects a reconciliation between Urth and "Heaven", which is what Christians believe that Jesus did.

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    1. He also gets tempted by a diabolic figure on a mountain! Further, there's a line somewhere in Castle of the Otter where Wolfe observes that the only thing the Gospels list the carpenter Christ as making is a whip.

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    2. Does he really get tempted by Typhon, though?

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    3. Typhon tries, I should say. It certainly looks like a crude joke about the Temptation (if the Devil takes you up into a high place and shows you the kingdoms of the earth, push him off the cliff! Problem solved.)

      To make my position explicit - it's difficult to see Severian as a a pure Christ figure. His eventual assumption of worldly power makes that odd, at least. But if each Saint is held to have imitated the life of Christ in some fashion (a Martyr as Sacrifice, a Doctor of the Church as Teacher, and so forth) then the Christ-resemblance of (Saint?!) Severian is .... less unipolar, I suppose. Reflects more aspects.

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    4. Yes, I suppose you're right about Typhon.

      For me the problem with Severian as Christ is that Severian is very evidently sinful and the whole point about Christ is that he is without sin. I can't believe as a practising Catholic that Gene Wolfe would overlook that or think it appropriate to mess around with.

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  5. I think you may be right. I'm trying to avoid the "everything new is rubbish" trope, but I do think something is being lost as organised religion dies off (in the affluent West). More and more Western writers must be growing up without a fluency in Christianity that makes much older literature more accessible.

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    1. I think what deprives the work of these writers of much of its richness is that they are animated by big ideas (fine) but have no interest in where those ideas come from and no interest in justifying them or really thinking them through.

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    2. I agree, it *is* good to avoid, at least as a default, the "everything new is rubbish" trope. I admit up-front that I'm far less knowledgeable about sci-fi (both now and then) than everyone participating in this discussion (I've read a Jack Vance short story collection and, err, Narnia and Screwtape. Gene who? I may have read him in my teenage years, an epoch ago) but "everything new is rubbish" is such a tempting narrative for the ageing. Beyond that simple observation though, there are particular reasons why, right now, it's easy to believe the trope.

      I can most easily envisage it in terms of music. Of course, music for anyone past their early 20s has always been a nostalgia industry (and with the long tail of online listening, we now have little kids nostalgic for the 1960s), but there's still a persuasive edge to folks' cries of "where are today's Beatles? Or Led Zeppelins? Sex Pistols, Nirvanas, our Aphex Twins and our Massive Attacks and our..."

      Those musicians are out there, I know because I've encountered them. The reason we, even many of the young, don't get to hear them is because the landscape has changed. Money has consumed and moulded so much to its needs that, from a pretty broad range of media, "mainstream" and beyond, we hear of the same banal sort of musics that turns a profit, and that's increasingly made by people with rich parents who can afford to follow the uncertain path of the "creative".

      Crucially, the more easily accessible means of production and distribution have allowed those other, perhaps better, almost certainly poorer, artists to carry on doing what motivates them, but for smaller audiences. They're often very, very hard to find, despite occasional "breakthroughs", but for the cognoscenti, they're there.

      Clearly I'm speculating. I know next to nothing about the state of sci-fi publishing. I know a little about the state of publishing. Almost all of the interesting work is coming from small or micro-presses, or even published only online. The gatekeepers are starting to pay attention - the Booker Prize longlist was interesting this year.

      WRT to sci-fi, for sure many of those niche publishers will be printing stuff that spotlights political and identity issues, again Money makes this almost inevitable, but I'd be surprised if none were talking about metaphysics. And if they're not, I'm certain others soon will be.

      The reason is that I'm suddenly starting to see so much smart, metaphysical though elsewhere (mainly in podcasts right now, but that may just be my consumption habits). I do believe that, even if the current crop of writers don't really get "the big picture", a mycelium is about to pop some mushrooms... err, writers... that do.

      I guess, referencing another recent post, that my worldview is far more Hindu or Buddhist than Christian - these things do not just begin and end. What goes around, comes around.

      I really appreciate, by the way, the heavy analysis that you and your commenters do on posts like this one. I mean, apart from the part that I'm not much minded to read these books, when I do I struggle to extract meaning beyond the obvious. Metaphor and subtext pass me buy - I was saying to a friend just yesterday that at school, I scored highest in the year in English Language, but almost lowest in English Literature, which my teachers thought was... just weird. I love writing, I love reading, I love language. But ask me to anaylse what the words say and I'll struggle. But I do still have an interest, so it's great to sit in on smart folks discussing it.

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  6. Very nice essay as usual. Thanks!

    I'm not totally sure you're right in ascribing a personal worldview to Vance based on the sort of fictional settings he wrote, but food for though.

    I wonder if the reason wrote his fiction as you describe is that his talent lay in writing about fundamentally conflicting moral systems, and people operating without a moral compass. He could do it in a really fun/funny/thought-provoking way. Is there less latitude for that if you're writing about a universe with a true moral bottom?

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    1. I'm not sure - the approach I describe is so consistent in all of Vance's fiction, and also so consistent with what we know about his vaguely libertarian "don't step on me" personal politics, that I think it has to have been based on his actual understanding of the universe. But there's probably more to say about this in a blog post...

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    2. Perhaps so! It does all fit together very nicely. This chapter preface I just remembered from Killing Machine (ch4) would seem to strongly support your position:

      "In a sense the explosion of man across the galaxy must be considered a regression of civilization. On earth, after many thousand years of effort, men had developed a consensus as to what constituted good and evil. When men departed earth, they left behind this consensus as well."

      The idea that the difference between good and evil is a mere consensus pretty much nails what you're saying.

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    3. Though I can't shake the feeling that there is an important subtlety that is being missed.

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    4. It might be because I am coming to the end of a project to read all of Vance's fiction and have read a *lot* of his books lately, but I feel like his work almost exudes this theme - again, though, something for a longer post.

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    5. I seem to recall Vance's goateed intergalactic gumshoe, Magnus Ridolph, saying, "Morality is merely a reflection of good intent."

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