Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?
— Frank Herbert, Dune
History is not a linear journey of progress. There are no rails, no stifling certainties.
Existence is deeper, complex, changing. Man is not moved by the crude, surface-level events which we perceive day-to-day, but by tremendous forces which we dimly perceive: vast interwoven ecologies of time, history, environment, politics, religion, technology. These complex forces are in flux, alive, each bleeding into the next.
Sometimes these forces simmer for millennia, pressure slowly building; sometimes they are taut and ready to snap, bringing explosive revolutions: violent and destructive spasms and inversions. Contact between two of these forces produces moments of tremendous energy.
Through this storm, man drifts, buffeted by the forces which move around him. But rare men arise who have the vision and will to orient themselves, to cut through the storm, to command the winds to change. Sometimes, man can master the storm.
Dune is the story of a man who arrives at a moment when the tension of the forces has become unsustainable. Revolution must come. The desert will become lush, the dead boy will become emperor, the downtrodden will storm the universe. Those around him do not sense it, and are caught up in petty rivalries for power and resources which will be swept away.
But one man of rare vision understands the moment. He is able to seize it, to cut through the bloated, doomed structures and technology of the society he is born into, and to - for a time - recenter man in history. His greatness allows him to direct the course of the great forces. For a time, man rides astride the storm, commanding history and environment.
Perhaps, in our own time, such a moment is immanent. And perhaps, if adequately prepared, there will be one of us who is able to cut through our current morass and recenter man on the stage of history.
A study of Dune will help with such preparation. This essay will primarily concern the first book. The later books are fascinating and brilliant, but too self-conscious, contrived, and high-concept to effortlessly flow with the human commentary of the first.
I. THE HUMAN AND THE ANIMAL
“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked. The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen. He nodded. “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
…
“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.
“To set you free.”
The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam forces Paul Atreides to undergo the test of the gom jabbar. This is a test that separates the human from the animal.
Inhabiting only the present, the animal acts on instinct. It is given a stimulus and, lacking the true consciousness to step outside of the moment, responds unthinkingly.
… animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct … animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual …
The gom jabbar is a test that animals cannot survive. Terrible pain is inflicted on its subject, and if the subject reacts as instinct demands - withdrawal - they are killed instantly.
Humans - true humans - on the other hand, can transcend their moment, possessing the prescience to step outside of their time and the discipline to take the path that this contextualized understanding demands.
Paul survives the test through self mastery. He endures the pain until the end without pulling away.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Few are given the honor of undergoing the test, and fewer still survive it. Few men are human. But to be human is a necessary precondition to ride the storm.
The Baron Vladimir Harkonen, the great villain of Dune, represents an animal: massive, bloated, addicted, artificially supported, greedy for more. He deploys his impressive intelligence only in the pursuit of base passions, instinctually attempting to expand the system under his control without sensing the futility of his actions from the perspective of history.
Paul starts lean and becomes leaner, desiccated, shorn of technology - he strips away all but that which is human - everything but that which is necessary, not an ounce of indulgence.
II. NATURE’S REVENGE
…the Bene Gesserit operated for centuries behind the blind of a semi-mystic school while carrying on their selective breeding program among humans… The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled “Kwisatz Haderach,” a term signifying “One who can be many places at once.” In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.
The philosophy of Dune is one of man and not one of technology. Rejecting an embrace of artificial intelligence, the development of mankind’s capacities is thus entirely centered around the development of man himself.
This refinement of man is achieved through various processes: the selective pressures of harsh environments, the deep conditioning of mind and body, and the eugenic program of the Bene Gesserit, who covertly steward the bloodlines of the Great Houses through arranged marriages and selective breeding, ensuring the continuation and refinement of the traits of humans.
Herbert’s view of this program is nuanced: he recognises that the focused progeny of elites produces exceptional people, and that the engineering of the Bene Gesserit results in the genesis of Paul, who is singular in his capacities.
But Herbert also recognises the disastrous consequences of the arrogance of the eugenicist. The calculations of the Bene Gesserit are wrong: Paul was not supposed to be their messiah - he arrives a generation early, the result of a disobedient mother compelled by love. Rather than following the path that his creators have laid out for him, Paul rebels, forging his own path and subjugating them in the process. Nature has its revenge.
Paul raised his voice: “Observe her, comrades! This is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, patient in a patient cause. She could wait with her sisters - ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes required. Observe her! She knows now that the ninety generations have produced that person. Here I stand … but … I … will … never … do … her … bidding!”
(It is outside the scope of this essay, but the consequences of this arrogance are shown even more clearly in future books, when the eugenic efforts of the Bene Tleilax, who - unlike the Bene Gesserit - employ unnatural methods like artificial insemination, gene splicing, and surrogates, resulting only in death).
The realization of Paul’s potential begins with the training that has dominated his noble upbringing: “in prana and bindu, the nerve and the fiber - that he had been taught fighting in a deadly school… The boy knew the devious ways of the Bene Gesserit and he looked supple and confident.”
But to become Muad’Dib - the messiah, the man he was meant to be - his genetics and his training have to meet reality. He must go out into the wilderness and be changed by it. It is only in his contact with spice - the naturally occurring drug Melange produced only in the harshest ‘deep desert’ - that his mind is truly opened.
As this wild substance - in some sense representing the wilderness itself - saturates and consumes him, he becomes something new. In him, the raw way of the Fremen - the hardened desert fanatics - is combined with the refined nobility of his Atreides roots, and the two are forged and melded in the heat and danger of the desert into something superior to both.
He knew what this essence could do to him - the spice change that pushed his mind into prescient awareness…
Paul took a deep breath, trying to still the tempest within him… but nothing could stop this thing that had begun with a morsel of food.
Terrible purpose!
Training is no substitute for life, and life is only fully expressed in an existence in which it is risked. Only in an embrace of the fullness and peril of life can we find our destiny.
III. THE RETURN OF HISTORY
The ingestion of the spice represents an encounter with history itself. The spice radically expands Paul’s mind, allowing him to understand the present moment in such incomprehensible detail that he is able to perceive deep into the possible futures that could result from it. His life expands from a myopic struggle for survival in the moment to an exploded view of that moment situated in the history of mankind. Animal to human.
Paul’s mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery - as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul’s mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions… yet this only approximated the sensation…
I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.
It is this historically situated view that gives him the magnitude of perception necessary to survive and master the storm of the revolutionary moment, and to take on responsibility for the safeguarding of mankind itself.
Know your deep past. Meditate on your deep future.
But this tremendous time-vision comes at a cost, challenging Paul’s conception of his freedom to choose his fate. The tension between prescience and will is central to Dune. In a sense the great villain of the story is not Baron Harkonnen but determinism itself: the notion that events have been set in motion which trap the characters on a path that inexorably leads to destruction.
He knew this was among the alternatives today, a fact along lines of the future radiating from this position in time-space. The imperfect vision plagued him. The more he resisted his terrible purpose and fought against the coming of the jihad, the greater the turmoil that wove through his prescience. His entire future was becoming like a river hurtling toward a chasm - the violent nexus beyond which all was fog and clouds.
The ‘great enemy’ of determinism manifests in another key theme of the book: techno-skepticism and the imperative than man must not be replaced by machine.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,” Paul quoted.
The adoption of thinking machines represents the end of freedom. While the human attempts to navigate and master history, the machine is entirely deterministic. There is no will - only grand computational clockwork. Technological reliance is the end of man, and must be rejected entirely, the machines destroyed.
A more sophisticated view of technology is techne that enhances the human animal. The Bene Gesserit technology is the human itself, nurtured and trained to exquisite potential. The Fremen have their own, deeply embodied relationship with technology. Their techne is one of ritual, rule, way-of-being. The capacity of the human is extended as it is shaped by endless subtle lessons and tests, born of generations of experience and tradition in a hostile environment. It is one of duels, superstitions, trials, devotions, practical tools, and lessons.
Take the maker hooks of Fremen culture. When a Fremen embarking on the Hajj is hefting one, as he readies for the passing of a worm, he isn’t thinking about how many standard kilos it weighs, its color, or constituent parts. He feels its weight as an extension of himself, and knows the curvature and length as intuitively as he knows the reach of his arm. At that moment, it isn’t an object to him, but a part of the social and physical activity he’s immersed in. There’s no Fremen with a maker hook, but just the hookman. These individual relations, of extending the body and being part of a sacred cultural practice, are infinitely more interesting, authentic, and important than what metal it’s made of.
— Kristian Lund, Wiping Finite Answers from an Infinite Universe
IV. HEROISM
To the extent that Paul is a hero it is because he battles with fate itself. Recognizing himself at the center of a storm - a storm that has already destroyed his family and cast him out into the wilderness - he unceasingly fights to establish a moment of human control over the inhuman forces which buffet him.
Some paths are open to him, others are not. All contain pain, all contain death, some contain redemption. His heroism is to accept the authority that destiny has thrust upon him, and to choose knowingly.
As she spoke, he felt the drug complete its work within him, ripping away the curtains to let him see the distant gray turmoil of his future.
“You’re so quiet,” Chani said.
He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced.
On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Fremen and their Muad’Dib, the sleeping giant Fremen poised for their wild crusade across the universe.
Paul felt himself at the center, at the pivot where the whole structure turned…
“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?”
“To ones not yet dead,” he said.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Butlerian Jihad today imo.
Herbert added constraints to the world of Dune (two strong and one weak) necessary for there to be a plausible human future to portray.
The strong constraints are:
* “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
* Nuclear weapons are banned in warfare.
Violating either of these would bring all the great houses down on you.
The weak constraint is:
* Avoidance of genetic engineering. The Bene Gesserit are strongly against it, the Tleilaxu are seen as marginal freaks but allowed to generate non self reproducing tools and certainly nothing should enter the reproducing human germ line.
If there is to be a future for a recognizable humanity these seem to be minimal constraints we must also follow.