Dystopian literature and social commentary

Dystopia

The idea of the dystopia is related to the idea of the utopia, and it has become a staple in speculative literature and film. A dystopia is a society that does not work for the benefit of its members, while a utopia is one that is ideal. The idea of the utopia was made well-known by Thomas More, and the idea of the dystopia in fiction emerged soon after and continues to be a key element in science fiction in literature and film.

Sir Thomas More is probably best known for his confrontation with King Henry VIII, for which he lost his life. He was a statesman as well as a political and social philosopher. His most famous work is his Utopia, a book in which he created his version of a perfect society and gave his name to such conceptions ever after as "utopias." The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning good place. In the book, More describes a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are governed entirely by reason. More included discussions of a large number of topics covering the institutions of society, including penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism, divorce, euthanasia, and women's rights (Maynard 41).

Russell a. Ames finds that More expressed the various reforming concepts of the statesman, the lawyer, the merchant, the humanist, and the man of religion, purposes that were intertwined and indistinguishable. Many of the Utopian customs and ordinances directly reflected More's views of problems then current, especially religious problems. It is also believed that More often made his Utopians do things which are not approved because they followed reason rather than the imperatives of the Christian religion:

The Utopians, guided by reason and also by their basically sound religion, have almost achieved a truly Christian ideal which they live by while we Christians do not. (Ames 160)

In literature, the dystopia was addressed by many writers in works intended to be critical of their own time. In recent years, the dystopian writings of many continue to use their own social order as a starting place to produce a work critical of that society by mirroring portions of it in the new society they create. George Orwell saw the world of his novel 1984 as a dystopia, or a government that does not work and that harms its citizens. He analyzes the idea in two works, 1984 and Animal Farm, and what links the two most directly is that both are anti-utopian in nature, for Orwell had developed a certainty that government in a utopian society would always be corrupted and would lose sight of its principles because of expediency. In 1984, George Orwell warned of the seductions of government thought control as he saw them developing in the Soviet Union and elsewhere because of the tensions after World War II. Orwell showed a world in which thought control has been honed to a science and where every member of society shares in the underlying belief that thought control was a good and necessary thing.

Philip Rahv refers to Orwell as a genuine humanist and as a man who passed through the school of the revolutionary movement without being seduced by its doctrinaire attitudes. Instead, Orwell remained committed to the primary traditions of the British empirical mind, which Rahv believes left him immune to dogmatism:

It can be said that Orwell is the best kind of witness, the most reliable and scrupulous. All the more appalling, then, is the vision not of the remote but of the very close future evoked in his new novel, 1984 -- a vision entirely composed of images of loss, disaster, and unspeakable degradation. (Rahv 13)

Big Brother is modeled on Stalin. Goldstein, the dissident leader of Ingsoc, corresponds to Trotsky. The tenets of Communism are recognizable in the rules of Oceania, and the concept of doublethink is similar to the technique practiced by communists and their dupes. Rahv also notes that while the book can be seen as prophetic, the real importance of the work is in its ability to engage in the currents of the time:

Through the invention of a society of which he can be imaginatively in full command, Orwell is enabled all the more effectively to probe the consequences for the human soul of the system of oligarchic collectivism... (Rahv 16)

Orwell disliked and distrusted both Churchill and Stalin. He saw in the Tehran and Yalta conferences nothing more than a cynical plan for perpetuating an unjust system. This would be the germ of the political situation in 1984, with a world divided by three superpowers:

What 1984 does is to gather almost all the ideas, arguments, and problems of Orwell's previous work, fiction and nonfiction alike, and concentrate them in their most frightening, challenging form. To make the continuity even more striking, it does so by an infrastructure, immediately recognizable from his other fiction, in which the isolated hero-victim tries vainly to resist a hostile society and to seek a better life but is forced, after a series of misunderstandings and disappointments, to capitulate. (Reilly 5)

In 1984, the Party subjugates the will of the majority to the will of the Party itself. The way this is accomplished with Julia and Winston is telling, for the Party uses fear and a form of brainwashing to make these individuals complicit in their own subjugation. They make the two want to please. This is partially out of fear, though not simply the fear of normal punishment. Instead, the Party uses psychological means to find out what each individual fears most, and this is then used to break their spirit and bend their will.

One of the means taken to control the population is the careful use of language, which in Orwell's term is called Doublespeak, or seeming to say one thing while meaning another. This is a familiar concept used by government to sugarcoat terminology so as to make it seem more benign than it is or to counter criticism before it develops. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth is dedicated to altering history and creating lies, but the shift in language need not be so blatant as that. We hear terms all the time which in some degree sanitize the behavior being described. Instead of talking about genocide or outright murder, we talk of "ethnic cleansing." What Orwell suggests is that governments create terms that are less harsh than reality in order to make policies more palatable to the people at large, and in extreme cases, the new term may be an outright lie, as in calling a censorship group the Ministry of Truth.

Other writers have shown a dystopian vision in different ways. Ayn Rand railed in hjer novel Atlas Shrugged against what she saw as the loss of personal liberty that marked contemporary society. She saw government as having become hopelessly bureaucratic in nature, with the bureaucracy dedicated to reducing whatever personal liberty was left. The novel takes place in a vaguely defined future, but Rand meant many of the elements of this future to be seen as already existing in the present. The book was a warning against certain trends discerned by the author in the society of her time, specifically a warning against socialism or any hint of socialism. Rand foresees a world in which Europe is already socialist and where the United States is following Europe into socialism. James T. Baker says of the novel that it is difficult to classify because it is both philosophy and fiction, satire and deadly serious commentary:

If it is meant to be a love story, it follows none of the usual patterns of spiritual attraction and self-sacrifice, none of the pain and tragedy, none of the fulfillment of other love stories. As social criticism it indicts but does not recommend, and it fails to create a recognizable world to be improved. As a dystopia it provides bone-chilling descriptions of a world gone wrong; but as a utopia its projections are vague and unlikely. Rand gleefully suffocates hundreds of hated socialists on a train, yet she fails to offer details for the better world waiting to be built when such people are gone. (Baker 63)

The novel sets two societies against each other. The one is the society of socialism as it was thought to be developing by Rand, and the other was the reaction to socialism, a reaction that leads a small group to form a sort of utopian community based on the principles that Rand believes should exist in a society and that she believes did exist before certain governmental and bureaucratic impositions were made. The world as it has come to exist is represented in the novel by the bureaucratic mesh of Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, a company run by the heroine, Dagny Taggart. Her brother James is the titular head of the company, but he is a weak individual. Most of the operation of the company is left to Dagny, and she finds that this task is made all the more difficult by the networks of bureaus, councils, and committees that have been placed between herself and the actual operation of the company. The actions of these collective groups lead only to frustration, a lack of responsibility, ineptitude, and inefficiency.

What sort of world does this lead to? The people who are most capable seem to be disappearing, while the least capable are left in charge. Dagny wants to know why the capable people are disappearing, and she has to find the answer to this question in order to understand what is happening throughout society. The old virtues, virtues that sustained the business community and that made America great in the past, are no longer in force. People once took pride in their work and in the act of earning their own way. These things seem to have disappeared just as have the capable workers. The consequences are all around as things keep breaking down -- systems, machinery, people.

The villains in this story are socialists, or more descriptively those who oppose individualism and free enterprise. Wesley Mouch is representative of this group. He is a collectivist who sees the need for social programs and welfare systems that in essence protect the workers from having to work at all. He sees the big factories and manufacturing plants as places whose ownership should be divided among the workers, while he views the leaders at the top as parasites who make no contribution to the general welfare. In the structure of the novel, Mouch is one of those responsible for the long slide of the economic system into torpor and decay, while Dagny and the men with whom she becomes allied fight to stop this slide and to return the economy to an individualistic base.

In the novel, Rand presents good characters as those who believe in personal achievement and individual effort, while the bad characters are those who accept collectivism and who do not value the individual as much as they do the general welfare. In Dagny's view in the beginning, the good characters are those who seem to be disappearing, while the bad characters are those left behind to inflict damage and to destroy through their own ineptitude. One set of good characters can be clearly identified by their association with the mountain community where the new free enterprise system has been created. Rand is not very subtle in the way she differentiates the good from the bad characters. It is not unlike the old westerns where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. This utopian community is known as Galt's Gulch and is the brainchild of the shadowy figure of John Galt, the ultimate good guy in the structure of the novel and the man who is soon revered by all those who oppose the collectivist mentality that has infected society. This community has as its motto that no one in it will ever live for the sake of another nor allow another to live for their sake. Instead, individual effort and individual achievement are to be elevated to a high degree. This is how Rand defines morality and alternatively defines immorality. Moral action is individual, personal action taken by the individual with no external authority.

It is John Galt who spells out the essence of the moral life when he makes his broadcast after commandeering the airwaves. This is said to be a rational philosophy in opposition to what he calls the "cult of zero-worship" that he says has captured the national will. The society he pictures in the outside world is a society in which the weak sap the strength of the strong, and he calls for all of those who are strong enough to take themselves out of such a society and vanish rather than allowing themselves to be used by the weak.

This is the way Rand envisions a socialist society. She sees the weak as those who cannot compete and cannot make it on their own. She would reject any form of the welfare state as no more than a case of the weak feeding off the strong. The heroes are those who assert their individuality and succeed. Francisco expresses the view that seems to infuse Atlas Shrugged, namely that the making of money is a measure of success and proof of the assertion of individuality. He denies that money is the root of all evil:

Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. (Rand 387)

For Dagny, the railroad represents the essence of what life should be about and what it would be about were it not for the intrusive and destructive welfare state and collectivist mentality: "A train has two great attributes of life, she thought, motion and purpose; this had been like a living entity, but now it was only a number of dead freight cars and engines" (Rand 335). This is what is happening to society as well -- it is becoming a series of dead freight cars and engines, and indeed here the engines have vanished. Society has lost its purpose, and without this there is no motion.

In Rand's assessment, the only solution is a revolution in which there is a reversal of the usual revolution from the bottom. In this case, the revolution will destroy the bureaucratic nature of society, and the elite will then return from their exile to rebuild. The rebuilding effort will be the real revolution, and it will bring society back to what it should have remained -- a system of free enterprise without interference and without a parasitic class living off the successful.

Technology has an important place in the new society. It is a tool leading to increased wealth and production. For others, Technology can pose a threat, often set against normal human emotions and effort, as is seen in Brave New World, the futuristic novel by Aldous Huxley, where the primary accepted emotion is happiness, while other emotions, especially any that might threaten happiness, are denied. Love is a positive emotion, but love has within it the potential for negative responses, for hurt feelings, for pain, and so is to be eliminated in the utopian society. The love that develops between Bernard and Lenina is therefore something that the two have difficulty recognizing for what it is because love is an unfamiliar emotion and one that society has in effect demonized. Yet clearly love cannot be eliminated entirely. Lenina indeed experiences feelings of a growing need for long-term intimacy before she meets Bernard, and her friend excoriates her for it:

It's such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man... And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. (Huxley 40)

This is true not only of sexual love but of love between mother and son, as is evident in the story of John and Linda. Linda mouths all the accepted ideas about having children like a savage and being ashamed of having a child, but there are feelings within her that are stronger than social conditioning:

But she didn't hit him. After a little time, he opened his eyes again and saw that she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her. suddenly she put her arms around him and kissed him again and again. (Huxley 128)

Yet it is made clear what this society believes about such relationships in families:

Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! (Huxley 37)

Individuality is also downgraded by this society, and emotions we would accept as self-esteem have been eliminated in favor of a communal "emotion." The accepted view in this society is that "everyone belongs to everyone else":

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable. (Huxley 39-40)

The social controllers have eliminated these emotions through a number of conditioning methods, but the primary means of eliminating them has been to eliminate the family, the crucible where emotional bonds are formed and where the need for later bonds to supplant those between parent and child is formed. The elimination of the family has gone so far as to make the family and its relationships appear socially undesirable, psychologically unhealthy, and un-human. Human beings are touted as more advanced than animals and thus as no longer in need of the bonds and crutches animals require. The controllers have eliminated these emotions in the name of efficiency. They see only the negative aspects of every emotion, every bond, and they believe that the community as a whole will thrive more ably if individual concerns are eliminated so that everyone is "happy" being part of a community rather than being concerned about love, ambition, or self.

One of the more dystopian societies seen in early films was that in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). The story involves a great city with two separated populations, one of the pampered citizens of the surface and the other of the slaves who live in the depths and work the machines. The two groups know nothing of one another. The city is run by Joh Fredersen, whose son Freder is in the Pleasure Gardens one day and sees Maria, a girl from the subterranean city. Freder is much taken with Maria's beauty, but he is also astonished to learn of the life led by the workers. Fredersen seeks the help of the demented genius Rotwang, who knows the secrets of the lower world and who is willing to foment revolution to gain control himself.

What follows is Freder's descent into the depths and his attempts to help the workers, who are rallied by the revolutionary Maria. Rotwang creates a robot, captures the real Maria, and transfers her face to the robot, and in this way he can make the workers, who are still following Maria, do whatever he wants.

To this end, he is in the pay of Joh Fredersen, though here the film becomes muddied as Fredersen seems to be fomenting revolution himself, which is difficult to justify in terms of maintaining control as he so obviously wants.

The lines of social demarcation are also clearly drawn in Soylent Green (1973, Richard Fleischer), a film in which the population explosion is extrapolated into the next century to show a society where there are simply too many people. The fact that there is not enough of the staples of life to go around has produced a society in which class distinctions are very strong and based on degree of wealth. In some ways, this is an extension of circumstances seen in our inner cities today where the very rich and the very poor are the only ones who live there, and they do so in very different lifestyles separated by armed guards if necessary. This is what the world of Soylent Green shows as well. The lower classes actually lack nearly everything we take for granted, though much of the film focuses on the specific issue of food. However, in one scene the working-class detective, Thorn, visits an upper class apartment and becomes fascinated with all that he finds in the bathroom, things he has never seen and certainly does not own himself. Among these things are much that we take for granted, like running water and soap.