Isegoria

Dune is not an ecological novel, Norman Spinrad argues:

And though melange is referred to throughout the novel as a “spice” and consumed in small quantities as such, that is not what it really is at all.

What it really is is that which could hardly speak its name in clear in the science fiction of the early 1960s, which explains why the book was such a hard sell to publishers in 1964 and 1965 even with the terminological obfuscation. Which also explains why it became a best-seller after the cultural transformations of 1967 once it was published and why it was one of the engines of those transformations.

Melange is not a fictional “spice.” Melange is a fictional psychedelic drug. Its effects are similar to those of LSD or mescaline or peyote. Only much more powerful.

DUNE, therefore, is not primarily a novel thematically centered on ecology. It is centrally a novel exploring chemically enhanced states of consciousness and their effects not only on individual personality and spirit but on culture.

One of the very first. And, after all these years, still one of the most profound.

Melange, in even small continuous doses, is addictive, turns the sclera of the eyeballs blue, has milder psychedelic effects than LSD, and, like the peyote of the American southwestern desert, an integrated sacrament of the Native American religion, is thoroughly incorporated into the culture and religion of the Fremen.

On the level of the interstellar culture, it is taken in much stronger doses by the Navigators of the Spacing Guild, who use it to attain extreme states of altered consciousness which allow them to pilot starships through a form of hyperspace, turning them into transhuman beings as part of the existential bargain.

The Bene Geserit female adepts use it for more visionary purposes, and dream of creating and/or finding the “Kwisatz Haderach,” a male capable of handling the spice on the highest level, whose consciousness will be freed thereby from conventionally perceived space and time into a kind of Einsteinian four-dimensional viewpoint which will enable him to see “the future” presciently, or, more subtly and profoundly, to surf the geodesics of probability.

Thus Herbert portrays four levels of both the use of psycho-active drugs by a society and the corresponding levels of consciousness. The Fremen incorporate melange as the sacrament of a tribal religion. The Guild Navigators employ it as a pragmatic technological augment. The Bene Gesserit use it in vision quests and mind-melding sessions.

Paul Atreides passes through these three ascending stages on his way to finally employing the drug to achieve the ultimate level, to become the Kwisatz Haderach, the fully Enlightened One, able to view the conventional realm of space and time from the outside, as Einsteinian four-space, a consciousness rendered therefore prescient up to a point, an Enlightenment that turns out to be both a godlike power and a tragic curse.

All this is set in a culture which is anachronistically archaic in a manner which is both rather too familiar and yet interestingly strange.

Stretching disbelief and contorting technological logic by staging swordfights in a space-going technology capable of using atomic weapons and inflicting an improbable monarchical political system upon it for the purpose of setting a pseudo-medieval action-adventure story on alien planets is hardly Frank Herbert’s invention, and these fictional swords-and-spaceships cultures are almost always implicitly Christian and more or less Catholic.

In DUNE too, we have an Emperor and noble vassals and a hierarchical feudal system with a theocratic underpinning. But it is not Catholic or even Christian.

Although the word “Islam” never even appears in the novel and you have to be rather conversant with the real-world referents to get it, the religious template in DUNE is Islamic, not Christian, more Eastern than Western.

The term “Padishah Emperor” certainly points to Herbert’s deliberate decision to do this, since “Shah padi Shah” means “King of Kings” in Farsi, the language of the Islamic Persian Empire.

Nor is it going too far to suppose that the grudge-nursing Fremen, exiled on Arrakis after a long and complex interstellar hegira, are cognates of the minority Shi’ite followers of Ali persecuted and reviled by dominant Sunni cultures.

And the visionary Bene Gesserit have their similarities to the mystic Sufis, Muslims who claim their sect predates Islam, and who emphasize techniques designed to induce direct mystical experience and insight, rather than ritual, rules, or a belief system.

Why Frank Herbert chose Islam as the religious and mystical underpinning of an interstellar culture that is otherwise based on that of medieval, feudal, Catholic Europe, is perhaps beyond the scope of literary analysis, a choice made somewhere in the deep subconscious regions from which artistic creation arises.

However, one can speculate…

While Islam is generally grouped with Judaism and Christianity, the monotheistic religions out of which it arose, there is one fundamental difference between Islam and its direct predecessors.

Judaism began as a tribal religion centrally concerned with the relationship between the history of the Jews and their God and its Bible was written by diverse hands over a long period of time. Christianity converted Judaism into a proselytizing universalist religion based on the story of one transhuman figure, Jesus Christ, its Bible was written in a much shorter period of time in four alternate versions (not unlike Lawrence Durrell’s ALEXANDRIA QUARTET), it is basically a biography of Jesus, and its central concerns are sin, redemption, and morality.

Islam too began as a tribal religion, that of the Arabs, and was transformed into a proselytizing universalist religion, and its holy book, the Koran, is also filled with rules and regulations.

But the Koran, unlike either Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible, was created by one man, Mohammed, over a very short period of time in historical terms; directly dictated to him by Allah, if you are a believer, and certainly in the throes of some powerful mystical and visionary experience even if you are not, since Mohammed was an illiterate who had never created a literary work before.

Thus Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, but like Buddhism, has as its core one man’s mystical and visionary awakening experience. And Mohammed, liked Buddha, made no pretense of being the Godhead, merely (if that can be the word)of directly experiencing it.

The transcendent goal of Christianity is individual immortality in a vaguely described but rather concrete heaven, to be achieved by following the rules. Thus it is basically a religion of morality.

The transcendent goal of Buddhism is the achievement of Nirvana, the ecstatic reintegration of the individual spirit with the universal Godhead from which it arose, to be achieved by meditative techniques. Thus Buddhism is an experiential religion, whose goal is achieving a transhuman state of consciousness.

Islam stands somewhere between. The Koran is as full of moral and legalistic prescriptions as the Bible, but it was written by one man in a state of mystically transcendent consciousness.

And the “heaven” of Islam, salaciously misunderstood by many, including many Muslims, is described as a state of continuous orgasm, which, seen on a mystic level, is a state of transcendent consciousness not unlike the Buddhist Nirvana.

Which perhaps explains why the Sufis, an older and thoroughly experiential religion, aimed entirely at achieving such states by ecstatic dancing, drugs, and other such means of transforming consciousness, could become an aspect of Islam and be generally accepted as such by the mainstream thereof.

And why alcohol, a drug not known for its psychedelic effects, is far more acceptable in Christian cultures than marijuana and hashish, which are far more acceptable in traditional Islamic cultures than alcohol.

Which may explain why Frank Herbert chose to employ Islamic mystical and religious referents in a novel whose central themes are the cultural, psychological, and religions relationships between a psychedelic drug and the societies based upon it, and the stepwise visionary transformation of a young boy’s consciousness by the use thereof into the transcendent consciousness of a “Kwisatz Haderach,” a being so enlightened that in the end he can even perceive the ironic tragedy of his own prescience.

Which certainly goes a long way towards explaining why DUNE could not find a major American publisher, inside the science fiction or in the mainstream, in the early 1960s, before there was anything like the Counterculture it helped to create.

And why it eventually became a long-term best-seller after the evolutionary changes in the consciousness of a generation it did so much to catalyze.

I recently cited a long-lost interview with Frank Herbert — but I only cited the third part, not the second:

One of the things I noticed as a reporter — I was a journalist longer than I’ve been on this side of the table — is that in all the marching in the streets in the ’60s, the people who were shouting “Power to the People” didn’t mean power to the people.  They meant “power to me and I’ll tell the people what to do.”  When you questioned them it was confirmed at every turn.

Power to the people will really happen when the people wake up to the fact that you can’t separate economics from politics, when they wake up to their own motivations, what they want, what can be sold to them.  Because the real pitfall of democracy is that it is demagogue-prone.  We like to have people stand up and tell us what we want to hear.  I have conditioned myself so that the minute I hear a politician standing up there saying nice things that sound good to lot of people my alarm signals go off and I say, “Why, you damned son of a bitch, you’re just another damned demagogue.

I don’t think there’s a fucking bit of difference between a bureaucracy that is instituted by a democratic regime, a state; socialist regime, a communist regime or a capitalist regime.  Take a look at us right now.  We have created a bureaucracy in this country which is completely out of the hands of the people.  Your votes do not touch it.  One day when I was working in Washington, D.C. as a speech-writer for a U.S. senator from Oregon, I was at a meeting of the Department of Commerce and a very, very high department official, a lifetime bureaucrat, was talking about another senator, who was giving them some trouble.  And this high bureaucrat called this senator a “transient.” And sure enough, that senator was defeated in the next election.  So he was a transient.  But the bureaucrat was, still there, and he retired on a separate retirement system for the federal bureaucracy.

Spandrell notes that the bureaucracy seems to rule everywhere.

By the way, part one of that Herbert interview is, amusingly, about how good the then-new Dune movie is.

Philip Wylie only wrote a few works that might qualify as science fiction, but they were quite influential: Gladiator, which likely inspired Superman, The Savage Gentleman, which likely inspired Doc Savage, and When Worlds Collide, with Edwin Balmer, which inspired Alex Raymond’s comic strip, Flash Gordon.

I’ve mentioned Gladiator before:

Reading Gladiator now, as someone who takes Superman for granted, is an almost disorienting experience; it’s almost as if Siegel and Shuster took Wylie’s work and surgically removed, even inverted, all of its dark, lost generation irony.

In Gladiator, the protagonist, Hugo Danner, is born in a small town in the Midwest — Indian Creek, Colorado — but his parents are a hen-pecked local college biology professor and an obsessively religious shrew of a woman — more backward and small-minded than salt of the earth.

Danner leaps across a river, jumps fifty feet straight up, lifts a cannon overhead with one arm, kills a shark by ripping its jaws apart, fells a charging bull with a fist between the eyes, and lifts a car by its bumper and turns it around in the road. “All of these were, in 1930, fresh and new and very exciting to read about,” Wylie’s biographer notes — but even though Superman goes on to do all of these things, the tone of Wylie’s novel couldn’t be further from a four-color comic book. When Danner joins the French Foreign Legion at the start of the Great War — which certainly sounds romantic, doesn’t it? — he ends up killing German soldiers. Many, many German soldiers. When his friend dies in an artillery barrage that he survives, he goes into a berserk rage and tears apart his enemies with his bare hands. It feels like digging his hands into warm cow manure.

The Savage Gentleman starts with a pulpy, if not quite sci-fi premise: what if you took a boy, of good stock, and raised him, away from society, to be a… well, not quite a superman, but an ideal mortal man.

In pulp-author Lester Dent‘s hands, this becomes Doc Savage, raised from birth by his father and a team of dedicated scientists to become the ultimate crime-fighting hero.

In Wylie’s novel, Henry Stone is the son of a newspaper magnate whose wife has run off. The father takes the infant boy away from New York, and, with the help of his engineer and his faithful black servant, builds a new home for all of them on an uninhabited island. There the boy is raised hunting and fishing, building and farming, studying and training. His father personally tutors him on how to behave amongst gentlemen — and warns him off women.

When Henry finally returns to civilization, in his prime, he finds his training obsolete. Times have changed:

By and large, Henry had not enjoyed what he saw. Everything was a reflection of his first impressions, colored by his father’s lessons and marred by his experience with Marian [the "sophisticated" granddaughter of his father's old lawyer]. Anyone taken from the late nineteenth century and hurled into the present day without preparation would experience the same dismay and revulsion.

Those who lived through it witnessed a change so gradual that it seemed almost inappreciable — although thousands of the older generation are still perpetually raising their hands in horror. They saw the polka become ragtime and the ragtime war music and the war music jazz. They watched corsets disappear and skirts rise and rouge come slowly to the lips of the guileless. They were shocked by the flapper who drank from a flask until the flapper became so familiar that she was commonplace and until they perceived that the skies had not yet fallen.

Other things happened step by step to that generation. Prohibition came — and they assumed that their own drinking could continue and were resentful of any effort to check it. When rebellion became a fad, they marched in the van — and as that rebellion bred gangs and political corruption, they looked on calmly, because it was not they who felt they were to blame.

Meanwhile the newspapers, and the magazines, the cinema and the radio and thousands of novels broadened their attitude toward morality.  Things were said in print that had not been put in writing since the silver age of Rome.  There were mutterings and censorships, but the movement toward tolerance and frank examination rolled over them.  Psychology developed a new sense of the reasons for human behavior that the public slowly and partially assimilated.  Thirty years of education and change marked the twentieth century.

Henry had missed them all.  He came untouched from the old era.

Wylie, writing in the 1930s, thinks “modern” psychology has some merit.

Henry’s speech to his aide, Tom, explains his position:

“I came here like Christopher Columbus. The new world was ahead of me. I was bursting with love for it, ambition, ideals. I had yearned for it for twenty years — ever since I was a child. I had been taught that it was a glorious place where a man could do a man’s work.

“What did I find? First — something so beautiful and breathtaking that I could not contain myself. The buildings and the machinery. We never imagined anything like it on the island. It seemed to me that humanity was at last reaching up toward the stars. That it had climbed out of the earth. I was ecstatic.

“Then I looked again. You have to look twice to see. The whole world is sour. Rotten. Despicable. It has emerged from the most terrible war of all time — a war that accomplished absolutely nothing. Blood in rivers in every direction and afterward — jealous piddling of little men. It’s sickening.

“Once there was in this country a standard of morals and manners. That’s gone. Vulgarity is everywhere. In the theaters and the radio and the newspapers. Nobody cares. Vicious men run through the streets with machine guns and shoot down children. Demagogues and morons and even criminals are elected political leaders. The bodies of government have become a shambles of cheap wit and expensive graft. My father warned me against women — and the women have sunk beneath the men. They’re painted prostitutes — even the old ones. Decency has deserted the best homes. Everyone fights for money. Money! There’s madness for it. Greed and exploitation. War and corruption. Stupidity and hatred.”

Rather… reactionary.