"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.
He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.
“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.
Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”
The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let anybody else read them!”
Shevek made no response.
“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4; p. 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).
As regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here--that counts as pt 1 of the present series). And I intended to return to it regularly. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory (recall also here; this one on Thomas More; and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene.
Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. (Yes, I am a fan.)
As an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the literature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible).
What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. That's not surprising; inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. Yet, we realize rather quickly that in many ways it's a bogus argument because the interests that are being served are primarily his own careerist ones. For despite the absence of profit as a motive -- Annares is anarchist society without (private) property and commerce -- the Sciences Institute itself has become hierarchical in structure and a source of social benefits not the least prestige. And through his office and political maneuvering, Sabul controls gate-keeping rather severely (e.g., publication locally and access to information from and with international networks).
And the reason why the inductive risk argument works so well with Shevek is that the social responsibilities of science (and other practices) are very important in Annares, which teeters constantly on the edge of famine, and where all the social mores are organized around mutual aid and local control by local syndics. Part of Le Guin's wizardry in the book is that she simultaneously makes the potential oppressiveness of such little platoons local syndics highly visible and felt, while not destroying the ideal behind it. Like all important ideas that can be communicated to others, inductive risk can be abused. Of course, in this case it is a reflexive problem (it's the inductive risk of inductive risk). And it is striking that it can be abused so badly in a society where social consequences are taken so seriously. In lots of other contexts, the scientists themselves might well resist the idea that their work should be evaluated in light of social consequences--that's other people's responsibility and problem.
Interestingly enough, despite rejecting property, and embracing mutual aid, the scientists of Annares, the idealistic Shevek not excepted, crave credit/recognition for their scientific work. When Shevek is arm-twisted into sharing credit with his boss (Sabul), we see him experiencing misery. And he looks for ways to receive the credit he thinks he deserves. Sabul and Shevek end up bargaining (through barter and withholding labor/benefits) over credit. And it is one of his motives to challenge (and eventually leave) the Physics syndic. On first principles, one would have expected anonymous or collective publication -- so, either put all the names of the syndic on it or just the name of the syndic -- to be the norm in Annares. But Le Guin discerns, not implausible, that even when profit motive is eliminated by society, status and recognition are important pulls.
To be clear, when Le Guin turns to science's functioning in A-Io (on the planet Urras),--an excessively patriarchal-state-capitalist society [a critic calls it "plutocratic-oligarchic" at one point], which appears as a kind of a mirror-hybrid between the UK and US of the 1970s, but still highly familiar--profit and bureaucratic advancement are also not the only motive in science. When Atro, the doyen of science in Urras, and a champion of Shevek's theories, explains his motives he says:
“I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your Theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.
“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?” (119-120)
It's important that in the self-conception of Atro, science is in its social aspect fundamentally about prestige and recognition. In this respect he is not so different from the attitudes of Shevek.
But for Atro, it is a means to winning in a competition. In an important (1987) paper, Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception, the feminist philsopher, María Lugones, noticed, correctly, that modern advocates of play (she names Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer) tend to think of play in terms of agonistic competition, that is winning, and in which competence (under uncertainty over the come) reigns supreme. And she, quite rightly, connects these ideas to imperialist outlook. Atro fits this agonistic schema very nicely.* (I actually think the alternative, loving play, also has a platonic origin in Plato's Laws, but about that some other time.)
In fact, Atro (a scion of an old noble family) rejects the profit motive (which is otherwise very important in his society). But prestige can also be used for ends that are quite political: international standing, and international competitive advantage. And while there are plenty of hints that others in Atro's society intend to make great profits from technological advantage, even derive military advantage, Atro is keen on gifting ideas to others recognizing, a norm once ubiquitous in the academy, that in gift-economy bearing great gifts is a source of great prestige (and power).
There is one more scene that bears on this. It occurs just after the assault scene (and Shevek's response to it) that is so troubling. And after it, Shevek's character changes course in significant. It's an introspective meditation by Shevek:
To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.
On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Chapter 9, p. 225)
It's important to recognize (and this is explicit in the book), that in this respect, there is little difference between a communist state [which Chifoilisk serves], where "one [centralized] power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures [and with a] money economy.” (p. 114) And wages are determined by this power structure. And a society (A-Io, akin to ours today) in which profit is pursued, but in which the state and interlocking companies and foundations fund research. The modern state is mercantile in character, and even in the absence of actual violence, it is always lurking in the background to those who refuse or resist its coinage. (This is, in fact, the point of chapter 9.)
Here foreseeable, inductive risk really means either that science is corrupted by letting the state's coinage rule it (that is, that science's intrinsic reward scheme is displaced by extrinsic ones), or that it serves to entrench state power (by becoming "an investment or a weapon" (p. 288)) at the expense of those in the margins of society or other societies. That is, the book very clearly (and rightly!) rejects the idea that the state's and its functionaries' interests coincide with the wider proper interests. And the hard-hitting message of The Dispossessed is that all of us in the academy are, in this respect, state functionaries with more or less greater self-awareness about this.
At the end of the book, Shevek decides that the best solution is free, universal open access; a true communism of knowledge (familiar, say, from the Stoics). But it's not wholly clear whether Le Guin endorses it; because she shows that for Shevek this for all his idealism, too, is partially transactional. He receives credit and a chance at return home (or freedom). And a moment's reflection suggests that international open access may strengthen the states and oligarchs, if they can control, and they have the means to do so, their state functionaries.
*Huizinga's views on imperialism are worth a second look.
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