John’s group and David’s group are finally not all that different from one another; their very antagonism ties them together. John puts aside his disturbed feelings after the first killings, and convinces himself that they were justified for reasons of policy; he see this as the best way to manage his group efficiently. David more simply just revels self-righteously in the call to murder, since this helps him push forward his own project of domination. John’s people continue to be the innovators, but David’s people quickly imitate and adopt all of their inventions. David and his men are overt rapists, in a way that John and his followers are not (or at least not yet); but we can see the same tendencies of male domination at work on both sides.
By the second and third volumes of Beckett’s trilogy, taking place two centuries after Dark Eden, the “Johnfolk” and the “Davidfolk” have divided most of the known world between them. The two societies are enemies, and they come to war. But both societies are male-dominated and extremely hierarchical, with privileged ruling groups, militias to enforce order, and the vast majority of the people forced into incessant and difficult labor. We can only conclude that John’s stress on innovation, and David’s stress on tradition, are in fact two sides of the same coin. They are both ultimately grounded in resentment: John resents what he sees as the Family’s oppressive traditions, and David resents what he sees as the undue independence of young people and of women. They both channel discontent into urges for expansion, in contrast to the steady state of the earlier Family. And they both undermine communal solidarity, by subordinating it to the commands of an individual masculine will.
In tracing these developments, the Eden trilogy might well be described as a work of speculative anthropology. Beckett offers us an updated, and highly self-reflexive, version of the sort of nineteenth-century ethnographic speculation that we find in books like Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Mother-Right (1861), Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), and above all Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). These works all tell the story of a primordial matriarchal and egalitarian communism, and of a secular Fall from this state into one of patriarchy and wide class divisions.
These nineteenth-century works were largely deprecated in the twentieth century, on the grounds that they make overly broad generalizations on the basis of piecemeal empirical evidence. But it is worth noting that, despite all the discoveries and research advances of the past century, our evidence on human origins and human evolution is still unavoidably piecemeal, and likely to remain so. The question of human social and cultural development requires speculation of one sort or another, since there is too much that can never be objectively traced and reconstructed. In social history, no less than in evolutionary biology, we cannot get anywhere without organizing our data into narratives; and these narratives must involve some sort of speculation, since the information upon which they are based is necessarily incomplete.
However, not all forms of narrative speculation are equal. Consider, for instance, the discipline of so-called “evolutionary psychology.” It claims that universal “human nature” is genetically determined and socially invariant, and that it consists of instincts and traits that evolved in primordial human populations over the course of the Pleistocene, and have been unchanged since (Barkow et al. 1995). Evolutionary psychology’s flat denial of sociocultural influences and differences coincides with its tendency to read our present circumstances and assumptions back into all of evolutionary history. Thus it uncritically adopts, and projects all the way back into the Pleistocene, both a “1950s ethos” with regard to gender norms, and a distinctly neoliberal conception of Homo economicus (according to which atomistic individuals compete in zero-sum games for relative advantage).
The evidence for the story told by evolutionary psychology remains exceedingly slender and dubious (see, e.g., the critiques by Kitcher 1985 and by Richardson 2007). And its assumptions are overly narrow and reductionistic; for instance, it has no room for an evolutionary approach that includes feedback from cultural development (such as that of Tomlinson 2018). But perhaps we should be wary of simply denouncing evolutionary psychology for its “just-so stories,” as so many of its opponents, from Stephen Jay Gould onward, have done (Gottleib 2012). The problem is not that evolutionary psychology resorts to storytelling per se, but rather that its stories are so lame and simplistic. These stories tend to isolate individual traits from their broader contexts, and give univocal explanations for these traits. Such explanations always come down to saying that a particular trait gives the organism that inherits it a particular adaptive advantage; but no consideration is given to how the various adaptations interact with and feed back upon one another, or how they alter and feed back upon the very environments to which they are supposed to adapt. These stories also fail to come to grips with the way that they themselves work as stories; they pretend to be more objective, more generalizable, and more empirically grounded, than they actually are. Evolutionary psychology is particularly poor at coming to grips with aesthetics. This is a serious problem, since aesthetic considerations are deeply embedded both in the act of telling stories, and in the life situations to which these stories refer.
In contrast, science fiction writers like Chris Beckett, and the nineteenth-century speculative anthropologists upon whom he implicitly draws, tell far better and richer stories than the evolutionary psychologists do. Engels relied upon the best anthropology of his own day, much of which is now obsolete; but he was closely attentive to the complex interactions between social and economic conditions and gender relations. In general, the narratives of speculative anthropology are far more sophisticated and incisive, and far more aware of multiple, overlapping and interacting, causes, than are those of evolutionary psychology. Where evolutionary psychology sees our contemporary gender stereotypes and economic traits as having existed for all of human history as a result of narrowly adaptive mechanisms, speculative anthropology rather seeks to envision the particular historical and social conditions that could have led to the emergence of particular stereotypes and traits.
Of course, Dark Eden differs from the texts of Bachofen, Morgan, and Engels, in that it is overtly a work of science fiction. I consider this an advantage. Beckett’s account of social transformation, unlike these earlier ones, has the virtue of being explicitly and self-consciously an act of fabulation. Of course, Beckett tries to make his speculations as plausible and far-reaching as possible; but he does not claim that they tell us, once and for all, who and what we really (deeply and truly) are. Rather, Dark Eden presents itself as a heuristic parable. The novel offers us a speculative reconstruction of human origins; but it calls attention to this very act of reconstruction as a narrative fabulation in its own right.
This is why the novel’s speculative storytelling includes so much reflection on storytelling itself. When Angela and Tommy are first stranded on Eden, they are faced with the task of rebuilding human civilization from scratch. But they do not do this in a vacuum; like Robinson Crusoe, they have a legacy from the past. Karl Marx sarcastically notes that Robinson Crusoe starts out, not only with all the stuff that he is salvages from the shipwreck, but also with his already-ingrained bourgeois values and assumptions. Even as he builds himself a shelter, and makes his own garments and tools, so also he “soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books” (Marx 1976). Angela and Tommy similarly rely, at the very least, upon their memories of life on Earth, or what might be called their intellectual capital. Even six generations later, the people of Eden are still dominated by the narratives that have thus been handed down to them.
Later in the novel, even as John Redlantern disrupts the Family, he is acutely aware that his own actions are themselves already the elements of a new narrative:
It wasn’t just in the future that this meeting would become a story to be acted out. Even now, even when it was happening for the first time round, it had already become a story in a way, with me as an act
or in it, playing a part, and not just being myself. I was acting me.
Of course, this goes along with how John shapes himself as an agent, manipulating his own image, and holding back from revealing his inner thoughts to others. We might well say that John, unlike everyone else before him in Eden, is conscious of being a historical figure. This self-consciousness is the reason why his actions move the story of Eden out of the realm of myth, and into that of history. John is aware of his present actions as part of a story-in-process, because he realizes that his actions have the power to determine the future, by moving it onto a new path. But John also discovers that the story in which he sees himself as an actor is not entirely his to control:
It had never occurred to me before that the story of John Redlantern might end up as the story of a famous killer, the first one in Eden ever to do for another human being. But now that story suddenly took shape in my mind.
John cannot entirely shape the future, because he cannot eliminate unplanned circumstances and unintended outcomes from his story. As Marx famously wrote, human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.” In Dark Eden, this even applies, on a meta-level, to the emergence of history itself.
In reflecting upon its own narrative process, Dark Eden forcibly calls our attention to the way that the “origin” it recounts is already tainted – or at the very least, already fictional. It is not a true origin, since it derives from the previous history of human beings on Earth. There is no true origin, therefore, but only an imperfect repetition – or perhaps an adaptation, using this word as much in the literary sense as in the biological one. The story of human beings adapting to the somewhat different conditions of life on the dark planet Eden is itself an adaptation, under different circumstances, of a story that is already old, already played out on Earth. As a work of science fiction, Dark Eden views both the “primitive” and the “advanced” states of humankind retrospectively, through a kind of inverted extrapolation. It gives us a future that recapitulates our past, and for which our own future is already its own vanished past.
How does all this relate to our present historical moment, the time in which Dark Eden was written, and in which it is now being read? The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that
science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. The other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem. Together the two views combine and pop into a vision of History, extending magically into the future.
(Robinson 2019)
Following this logic of double action, we might well say that John Redlantern prefigures (or should I say postfigures?) what we currently call an entrepreneurial type, somebody like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, whose modus operandi is to “move fast and break things” (Taplin 2017). And we might equally well say that David Redlantern prefigures what we currently call a populist, quasi-fascistic demagogue, somebody like Donald Trump, who loudly demands the restoration of old values, but does not really believe in them, and really aims only at untrammeled domination. Several recent social theorists, most notably Melinda Cooper, have argued that the neoliberal cult of innovation and the neoconservative cult of the family and tradition are in fact mutually interdependent, two sides of the same coin (Cooper 2017). Dark Eden envisions the joint emergence (or better, re-emergence) of these two tendencies, co-dependent precisely in their hostility to one another. Beckett’s outlook is grim; but in accounting for the highly contingent development of the two sides, he offers us a multidimensional “vision of History,” of the sort that Robinson calls for. Even as Dark Eden recapitulates the steps that helped lead to our actual deplorable social configuration, it helps us to realize that this configuration is not given once and for all. The way we live now, just like the way they come to live in Eden, requires particular conditions of emergence. This means that there may also be particular conditions under which it could be transformed, or pass away.
Is there truly no alternative (to cite Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase) to the bifurcation envisioned by Dark Eden? In passing, Beckett at least lets us glimpse two versions of a less hierarchical, and less exploitative way of life after the fall of primitive communism. One of these is the vision of Tina Spiketree, who feels – as strongly as John does – the need to escape from the stifling conservatism of Family, but who also objects to what she rightly sees as the noxious consequences (gender hierarchy, private ownership, and authoritarianism) of John’s charismatic form of leadership.
The other divergent vision is expressed in the person of John’s cousin, Jeff Redlantern. Jeff is a clawfoot, which means that he cannot walk very easily, or very far. Due to his disability, Jeff is spared from the expectations of normative masculinity that mark both John and David:
Other boys became men by putting on the masks of men, and shutting out of their heads all the things that didn’t fit with their masks, but if you were a clawfoot no one expected you to wear that mask, or to shut those things out of your head. That was why I saw things that other people didn’t see.
As a result, other people in Eden find Jeff a bit strange. We might even say – to use a term that applies in our own world, but that is unknown in Eden – that Jeff is a person who is located somewhere along the autistic spectrum. This is manifested in various ways. For one thing, he never tires of the wonder of sheer existence: he frequently cries out things like “We’re here! … This is happening. We really are here!” Tina remarks that Jeff is “interested interested in everything”; and even John recognizes that Jeff is able “to see the wide world beyond” what everyone else pays attention to. He will “never settle for seeing only one side of a thing.” Jeff is always aware that there are many other perspectives besides his own; he reflects that, even if he were to die, “the world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through … even when someone died, the secret awakeness that had been looking out of their eyes would always still be there.”
Thanks to this open sensibility, Jeff is quite original and inventive. It is he, for instance, who first domesticates the woollybucks, large herbivores on Eden. He is able to empathize with these animals, despite their alien weirdness that repels everyone else. By riding on the back of a woollybuck, Jeff is able to compensate for his disability, traveling far distances without having to walk. Despite his inventiveness, however, Jeff has none of John’s mania about innovation for its own sake, and none of John’s ambitions to be a leader, and to manipulate and control other people.
In the second and third volumes of the trilogy, we learn that, after the events recounted in Dark Eden, both Tina and Jeff seceded from John’s group, and founded their own communities on more egalitarian lines. Their survival is quite tenuous, however. In the course of these volumes, Jeff’s people are not far enough away to escape subordination to the Davidfolk. Half Sky, the community founded by Tina, is widely scorned by the patriarchal Davidfolk and Johnfolk. It sounds like a utopia; men and women remain on equal terms, and leaders are chosen democratically. But Half Sky only survives for the moment thanks to its geographical distance from the other societies of Eden. In the long run, it remains under military threat.
Probably all speculation – not just about human origins, but also about potential future directions – requires a certain degree of reversion and recapitulation. Just as the people of Eden cannot possibly imagine what bright sunlight is really like, so there are doubtless conditions that we are unable to conceive adequately. Most likely, we are not even able to grasp how off the mark we are. As a result, we are all too often compelled to fall back upon the very formulations that have already disappointed us. This is perhaps why Fredric Jameson ultimately concludes that the utopia imagined by science fiction can have no positive content, but can only be “a radical break or secession … from
political possibilities as well as from reality itself” (Jameson 2005). Chris Beckett touches upon this dilemma in his own way, by giving us a speculative fabulation of the very limits of fabulation.
Chapter 7
Splendor and Misery
Splendor and Misery is a 2016 album by the experimental hip hop group clipping. (consisting of Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes). The group describes this work, on its Bandcamp page, as “an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him” (clipping. 2016). We might say that Splendor and Misery is a space opera, in a more literal sense of the term than usual. The narrative fits the common definition of the genre, as it unfolds in the far future, and involves an adventure on a starship in interstellar space. But this science fictional storyline is largely conveyed through musical (or more broadly, sonic) means. Also, most of the album’s tracks are more concerned with exploring the wider ramifications of the story, than with elaborating the plot in detail. In this way, it is quite different from a written science fiction narrative. Such reflective storytelling in music, with rapping and singing plus noise plus a few music videos, makes for something like the twenty-first-century equivalent of nineteenth-century opera. Splendor and Misery is entirely devoid of Wagnerian grandiosity; it is quite short (37 minutes), and – despite its cosmic implications – it is intimate in scope. But much as Wagner’s operas do, albeit from a vastly different political and cultural position, Splendor and Misery offers us a mythically resonant critique of modernity.
Extreme Fabulations Page 14