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A U N I V E R S E O F W O N D E R
Appreciation of Iain M.
R E C E N T
P O S T S
2 Editorial
–
Sci
Phi
Journal
2023/3
3 Meno’s
Dream
4 Welcome
To
Many years ago, a friend of mine who knows about these
The
sorts of things handed me a book and said “Here, you have to Zineverse!
read this.” It was a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons.
I glanced over the jacket copy. “What’s the Culture?” I asked. 5 A
Rejection ERROR fo
“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of hard to explain.” She settled in Invalid do
for what looked to be a long conversation.
“In Thailand, they have this thing called the Dog. You see the
Dog wherever you go, hanging around by the side of the road,
skulking around markets. The thing is, it’s not a breed, it’s
more like the universal dog. You could take any dog, of any
breed, release it into the streets, and within a couple of
generations it will have reverted to the Dog. That’s what the
Culture is, it’s like the evolutionary winner of the contest
between all cultures, the ultimate basin of attraction.”
“I’m in,” I said.
“Oh, and there’s this great part where the main character
gets his head cut off – or I guess you would say, his body cut
off – and so the drone gives him a hat as a get-well
present…”
In the end, I didn’t love Use of Weapons, but I liked it enough
to pick up a copy of Banks’s previous book, Consider Phlebas,
and read it through. Here I found a much more satisfactory
elaboration of the basic premise of his world. For me, it
established Banks as one the great visionaries of late 20th
century science fiction.
Compared to the other “visionary” writers working at the
time – William Gibson, Neal Stephenson – Banks is
underappreciated. This is because Gibson and Stephenson in
certain ways anticipated the evolution of technology, and
considered what the world would look like as transformed by
“cyberspace.” Both were crucial in helping us to understand
that the real technological revolution occurring in our society
was not mechanical, but involved the collection, transmission
and processing of information.
Banks, by contrast, imagined a future transformed by the
evolution of culture first and foremost, and by technology
only secondarily. His insights were, I would contend, more
profound. But they are less well appreciated, because the
dynamics of culture surround us so completely, and inform
our understanding of the world so entirely, that we struggle
to find a perspective from which we can observe the long-
term trends.
In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to
say about the evolution of culture and society that it has
become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a
technologically advanced future that contains archaic social
structures. The most influential example of this is
undoubtedly Frank Herbert’s Dune, which imagines an
advanced galactic civilization, but where society is dominated
by warring “houses,” organized as extended clans, all under
the nominal authority of an “emperor.” Part of the appeal
obviously lies in the juxtaposition of a social structure that
belongs to the distant past – one that could be lifted, almost
without modification, from a fantasy novel – and futuristic
technology.
Such a postulate can be entertaining, to the extent that it
involves a dramatic rejection of Marx’s view, that the
development of the forces of production drives the relations
of production (“The hand-mill gives you society with the
feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial
capitalist.”1). Put in more contemporary terms, Marx’s claim
is that there are functional relations between technology and
social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old
way. Marx was, in this regard, certainly right, hence the
sociological naiveté that lies at the heart of Dune. Feudalism
with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could
not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would
undermine feudal social relations.
Dune at least exhibits a certain exuberance, positing a
scenario in which social evolution and technological
evolution appear to have run in opposite directions. The
lazier version of this, which has become wearily familiar to
followers of the science fiction genre, is to imagine a future
that is a thinly veiled version of Imperial Rome. Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation series, which essentially takes the “fall
of the Roman empire” as the template for its scenario,
probably initiated the trend. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek
relentlessly exploited classical references (the twin stars,
Romulus and Remus, etc.) and storylines. And of course
George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise features the fall of the
“republic” and the rise of the “empire.” What all these worlds
have in common is that they postulate humans in a futuristic
scenario confronting political and social challenges that are
taken from our distant past.
In this context, what distinguishes Banks’s work is that he
imagines a scenario in which technological development has
also driven changes in the social structure, such that the
social and political challenges people confront are new.
Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having thought
carefully about the social and political consequences of
technological development. For example, once a society has
semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise
individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal
justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who
commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned –
involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that
person from committing any crime again. Not only does this
reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by
a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful
deterrent to crime.
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current
trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets
work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance,
once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the
central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one
of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that
is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more
fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe
is that he imagines a scenario in which technological
development has freed culture from all functional constraints
– and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has
become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important
idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking.
The term “meme” was introduced by Richard Dawkins, in an
attempt to articulate some cultural equivalent to the role that
the “gene” plays in biological evolution.2 The basic building-
block of life for Dawkins, one may recall, is “the replicator,”
understood simply as “that which reproduces itself.” His key
observation is that one can find replicators not just in the
biological sphere, but in human social behaviour. In many
cases, these “memes” produce obvious benefits to their host,
so it is not difficult to see how they succeed in reproducing
themselves – consider, for instance, the human practice of
using fire to cook food, which is reproduced culturally. In
other cases, however, cultural patterns get reproduced, not
because they offer any particular benefits – in some cases
they are even costly to the host – but because they have a
particularly effective “trick,” when it comes to getting
themselves reproduced.
To say that a culture is functional is to say that it contributes,
and is constrained in various ways by the need to contribute,
to the material reproduction of society. Social institutions are
fundamentally structured by the collective action problems
that must be overcome, in order for people to produce
sufficient food, to provide security, to educate the young, to
reproduce the social order, and eventually, to produce the
various fruits of civilization. These institutions are roughly
matched by a set of personality structures, produced through
socialization, that make individuals disposed to conform to
the roles specified by these institutions (i.e. to be a warrior, a
laborer, a teacher, etc.). The term “culture” is used to refer to
the symbolic or informational correlates of these institutions
and personality structures, which is reproduced
intergenerationally.3
Flipping through the annals of ethnography, one cannot but
be struck by the “fit” that exists – most often – between the
culture of a society and the demands that its institutional
structures make. A society that is under constant military
threat will have a culture that celebrates martial virtues, a
society that features a cooperative economy will strongly
stigmatize laziness, an egalitarian society will treat bossiness
as a major personality flaw, an industrial society with highly
regimented work schedules will prize punctuality, and so on.
There are, of course, instances in which there is a poor match
between the two (i.e. where the culture is dysfunctional). And,
of course, one of the chief impediments to changing the
institutional structures of many societies is that the culture is
not “adapted” to the new pattern. (Thus, for example, it is
difficult to create bureaucracies in cultures that strongly
value family ties, because the latter generate nepotism and
corruption.)
Again, turning to the annals of ethnography, what one sees is
extraordinary pluralism and inventiveness in human
societies. But it is pluralism of both culture and social
structure.
These cultures have, historically, competed with one another,
with some becoming larger and more dominant, others
fading away or being extinguished entirely. A similar dynamic
can be seen in the competition between languages with many
becoming extinct, while others – such as Mandarin, English
and Spanish – becoming “hyperlanguages” that become
more powerful the more they grow. Similarly, one can see the
emergence of “hypercultures,” which serve as basins of
attraction for all of the others.
Historically, in this process of competition among cultures, a
dominant source of competitive advantage has been the
ability to promote a desirable social structure, or an effective
system of cooperation. Consider the enormous influence that
Roman culture exercised in the West. The fact that, one
thousand years after the fall of Rome, schoolboys were still
memorizing Cicero, the Justinian code remained de facto law
throughout vast regions, and Latin was still the written
language of the learned classes of Europe, is an extraordinary
legacy. The major reason for imitation of the Romans was
simply that their culture is one that sustained the greatest,
most long-lasting empire the West has ever seen.
Similarly, Han culture was able to spread throughout China in
large part through the institutions that it promoted, not just
the imperial system, but the vast bureaucracy that sustained
it, along with the competitive examination system that
promoted effective administration.
Societies with strong institutions become wealthier, more
powerful militarily, or some combination of the two. These
are the ones whose culture reproduces, either because it is
imitated, or because it is imposed on others.4 And yet the
dominant trend in human societies, over the past century,
has been significant convergence with respect to
institutional structure. Most importantly, there has been
practically universal acceptance of the need for a market
economy and a bureaucratic state as the only desirable social
structure at the national level. One can think of this as the
basic blueprint of a “successful” society. This has led to an
incredible narrowing of cultural possibilities, as cultures that
are functionally incompatible with capitalism or bureaucracy
are slowly extinguished or transformed.
This winnowing down of cultural possibilities is what
constitutes the trend that is often falsely described as
“Westernization.” Much of it is actually just a process of
adaptation that any society must undergo, in order to bring
its culture into alignment with the functional requirements
of capitalism and bureaucracy. It is not that other cultures are
becoming more “Western,” it is that all cultures, including
Western ones, are converging around a small number of
variants.5
One interesting consequence of this process is that the
competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized.
The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve
many of the traditional problems of social integration in an
almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the
modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European
– there is little to choose from a functional point of view.
None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of
constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to
compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the
culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.
Consider again Dawkins’s seminal discussion of the meme. In
order to get itself reproduced, a meme does not necessarily
have to produce any benefits for its host. A particularly
compelling example that Dawkins gives is that of the chain
letter, or its modern email or twitter equivalent. Even if the
contents are not particularly compelling, the letter typically
provides some half-way plausible story about why you should
send a copy to everyone you know. The story need not be
entirely persuasive, of course, it only needs to be plausible
enough to persuade a fraction of the population to pass it on
to a sufficiently large number of people.
Dawkins went on to suggest that many religions are
susceptible to explanation along similar lines. For instance,
one of the major factors driving the spread of Christianity is
the fact that it imbues many of its followers with missionary
zeal, and thus the desire to convert unbelievers. The Chinese,
it may be recalled, undertook several major sea voyages to
Africa in the 15th century. They left no lasting impact upon
the continent, because upon arrival, having found nothing of
interest to them, they simply turned around and went home.
Europeans, by contrast, while primarily focused on navigating
around the continent, brought along with them priests, who
noticed millions of souls in need of salvation. And so they set
up shop.
If one compares belief systems, one can see that
Confucianism is powerful largely because of its functional
qualities – it was one of the earliest drivers of state-
formation, and has generated an extremely stable and
resilient social structure in Chinese civilization. More
generally, one cannot explain the spread of Han culture
without pointing to the intimate connection between that
culture and the set of social institutions that it both inspired
and reinforced. The culture did not spread directly through
imitation, but rather through the strength of the institutions
that it was functionally related to. For similar reasons, its
capacity to spread beyond the bounds of the state systems
that it supported was quite limited. Christianity, on the other
hand, is powerful more because of its viral properties – it is
very good at spreading itself. It is actually much less
successful at generating stable states. It is the qualities that
allowed it to take over the Roman empire from within that
explain much of its success in non-Western countries (such
as Korea, or Ghana) today.
Now consider Banks’s scenario. Consider the process that is
generating modern hypercultures, and imagine it continuing
for another three or four hundred years. The first
consequence is that the culture will become entirely
defunctionalized. Banks imagines a scenario in which all of
the endemic problems of human society have been given
essentially technological solutions (in much the same way
that drones have solved the problem of criminal justice).
Most importantly, he imagines that the fundamental
problem of scarcity has been solved, and so there is no longer
any obligation for anyone to work (although, of course,
people remain free to do so if they wish). All important
decisions are made by a benevolent technocracy of AIs (or the
“Minds”).
And so what is left for humanity (or, more accurately,
humanoids)? At the individual level, Banks imagines a life
very much like the one described by Bernard Suits in The
Grasshopper – everything becomes a game, and thus at some
level, non-serious.6 But where Banks went further than Suits
was in thinking about the social consequences. What happens
when culture becomes freed from all functional constraints?
It seems clear that, in the interplanetary competition that
develops, the culture that emerges will be the most virulent,
or the most contagious. In other words, “the Culture” will
simply be that which is best at reproducing itself, by
appealing to the sensibilities and tastes of humanoid life-
forms.
This is in fact why Horza, the protagonist of Consider
Phlebas, dislikes the Culture. The book is set during the
Idiran-Culture war, and is unusual among the Culture novels
in that its protagonist is fighting on the side of the Idirans,
and therefore provides an outsider’s perspective on the
Culture. The Idirans are presented as the archetype of an old-
fashioned functional culture – their political structure is that
of a religiously integrated, hierarchical, authoritarian empire.
The war between the Idirans and the Culture is peculiarly
asymmetrical, since the Culture is not an empire, or even a
“polity” in any traditional sense of the term, it is simply a
culture. It has no capital city, or even any “territory” in the
conventional sense. (“During the war’s first phase, the
Culture spent most of its time falling back from the rapidly
expanding Idiran sphere, completing its war-production
change-over and building up its fleet of warships… The
Culture was able to use almost the entire galaxy to hide in. Its
whole existence was mobile in essence; even Orbitals could be
shifted, or simply abandoned, populations moved. The
Idirans were religiously committed to taking and holding all
they could; to maintaining frontiers, to securing planets and
moons; above all, to keeping Idir safe, at any price.”7)
Horza is not an Idiran, but rather one of the last surviving
members of a doppelganger species. The question
throughout the novel – and the question put to him, rather
forcefully, by the Culture agent Perosteck Balveda – is why he
is fighting on the Idiran side, given that they are, rather self-
evidently, religious fanatics, with an exclusive and zealous
conviction in the superiority of their own species. (“It was
clear to [the Idirans] from the start that their jihad to ‘calm,
integrate and instruct’ these other species and bring them
under the direct eye of their God had to continue and expand,
or be meaningless.”8) The Culture, by contrast, is all about
peaceful coexistence, tolerance and equality. So why would a
member of an otherwise uninvolved third species choose the
Idiran side?
The difference, for Horza, is that the Idirans, for all their
flaws, have a certain depth, or seriousness, that is
conspicuously lacking in the Culture. Their actions have
meaning. To put it in philosophical terms, their lives are
structured by what Charles Taylor refers to as “strong
evaluation.”9 (Indeed, the inability of the Culture to take the
war that it is fighting seriously serves as one of the most
consistent sources of entertainment in all the Culture novels,
as reflected in ship names, which are generally tongue-in-
cheek such as: What are the Civilian Applications? or the
Thug-class Value Judgement , the Torturer-class Xenophobe,
the Abominator-class Falling Outside the Normal Moral
Constraints, etc.)
Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as
producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without
heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist has been
taken over by the AIs, leaving for humanity nothing but the
role of “sensualists without heart.”10 Thus the chief
attraction of the Culture is the promise of non-stop partying
and unlimited sex and drugs. (Genetic and surgical
modification provide Culture members with the ability to
make almost unlimited changes to their bodies, which
typically include enhanced genitalia that allow them to
experience intense, extended, and repeated orgasms, as well
as the installation of specialized glands that produce a range
of psychoactive chemicals, to dull pain, to produce euphoria,
to remain awake, or to produce almost any other feeling that
might seem desirable.)
One can see then why Horza might dislike the Culture. On the
surface, his complaint is that they surrendered their
humanity to machines. But what he really wants is a culture
that can serve as a source of deeper meaning, which is the
one thing that the Culture conspicuously fails to provide – on
the contrary, it turns everything into a joke. The Culture may
be irresistible, but for essentially stupid reasons. (“Horza
tried not to appear as scornful as he felt. Here we go again, he
thought. He tried to count the number of times he’d had to
listen to people – usually from third- or low fourth-level
societies, usually fairly human-basic, and more often than
not male – talking in hushed, enviously admiring tones
about how It’s More Fun in the Culture… I suppose we’ll hear
about those wonderful drug glands next, Horza thought.”11)
It is precisely because of this decadence, as well as lack of
seriousness, that the Idirans themselves assumed that their
victory over the Culture was a foregone conclusion. When one
compares the soft decadence of the Culture to the harsh
militarism of the Idirans, it just seemed obvious that the
Culture would not fight, but would quickly fold. This was,
however, a miscalculation. In fact, the Culture would never
give up.12 Understanding why goes to the heart of what
makes the Culture what it is – the ultimate meme complex
(or “memeplex”). It has to do with the special role that
Contact plays in the Culture.
The idea of Contact also involves a brilliant extrapolation, on
Banks’s part, from existing trends in liberal societies. The
easiest way to explain Contact is to say that it operates on
exactly the opposite principle of the Star Trek Federation’s
“Prime Directive.” The latter prohibits any interference in the
affairs of “pre-Warp” civilizations, which is to say,
technologically underdeveloped worlds. The Culture, by
contrast, is governed by the opposite principle; it tries to
interfere as widely and fulsomely as possible. The primary
function of its Contact branch is to subtly (or not-so subtly)
shape the development of all civilizations, in order to ensure
that the “good guys” win.
This is, of course, difficult to do without sometimes
compromising the Culture’s own values, which is why Contact
has a subsection, known as Special Circumstances, whose job
is to break any eggs required to make the proverbial
omelette. (The idea, of course, is that this is all done in a way
that does not set any precedents, hence the “special
circumstances.”) SC agents are the closest that one can find
to “heroes” in the majority of Culture novels. But there is
always a certain ambiguity about their role.
Contact’s mission is one that most readers find intuitively
satisfactory. If there is a contest occurring, on some primitive
world, between a fascist dictatorship and a freedom-loving
democracy, does it not seem right that a technologically
advanced alien race should do what it can to ensure that the
freedom-loving democrats win? People are often asked, as an
exercise in armchair philosophy, whether one should strangle
baby Hitler in his crib, if one had the ability to travel back in
time. And yet the Culture has the power to do the equivalent,
turning this hypothetical choice into a real one. The idea that
one should just sit back and do nothing, as the Federation’s
Prime Directive suggests, is morally counterintuitive to say
the least.
But what does it mean to say that Contact arranges things so
that the “good guys” win? It means that it interferes on the
side that shares the same values as the Culture. There is more
at stake here than just individual freedom. For instance, with
the development of technology, every society eventually has
to decide how to recognize machine intelligence, and to
decide whether AIs should be granted full legal and moral
personhood. The Culture, naturally, has a view on this
question, but that’s because the Culture is run by a
benevolent technocracy of intelligent machines. Thus
Contact and Special Circumstances will interfere, in order to
prevent what they call “carbon fascists” (i.e. those who claim
that “only human subjective experience has any intrinsic
value”13) from emerging as the dominant political faction on
any world.
There are two ways of framing this intervention. From the
“insider” perspective, Contact is ensuring the truth and
justice prevail (or that the “good guys” win). But from an
“outsider” perspective, what the Culture is doing is
reproducing itself. It is taking every society that it encounters
and changing it, in order to turn it into another copy of the
Culture.14 Furthermore, it is not just doing this as a casual
pastime. Contact, in its own way, embodies the “prime
directive” of the Culture. It is the heart and soul of the
Culture, and for many of its inhabitants, its raison d’être, its
only source of meaning. But it is also the central mechanism
through which the Culture spreads. This is what gives the
Culture its virulence – at a fundamental level, it exists only to
reproduce itself. It has no other purpose.
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from
within itself was one common to both the descendants
of its original human stock and the machines they had
(at however great a remove) brought into being: the
urge not to feel useless. The Culture’s sole justification
for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its
population enjoyed was its good works; the secular
evangelism of the Contact Section, not simply finding,
cataloguing, investigating and analysing other, less
advanced civilisations but – where the circumstances
appeared to Contact to justify so doing – actually
interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical process
of those other cultures.15
43 COMMENTS
Samuel Skinner
13 November 2017 at 3:38 pm
2 things
1) The culture relies on unlimited resources-
thanks to sci-magic, they have an alternate
dimension they can pull energy from. This is a
major departure from reality where scarcity is the
reason for our social structures.
2) Memes fall before the power of evolution.
Specifically, if the Culture’s culture makes people
less likely to reproduce (which it does since it is an
extrapolation of liberalism which is below
replacement), then it will systematically select for
people who reject its culture. In other words, the
Amish take over.
Internally, it will also select for human r-
strategists, people who have as many children as
possible and put in as little investment as possible.
If the Minds take measures to stop this, it will
select for people who can get just before the cut-
off point for Mind intervention.
The culture described in the books is inherently
unstable and will fall into one of those two
positions.
Reply
Benjamin Wald
13 November 2017 at 7:46 pm
Samuel Skinner
14 November 2017 at 4:11 pm
Reply
Symon
12 February 2018 at 2:25 pm
In what world do you
leave, to think that part-
time work and “easy”
access to grand-parents is
enough to counterbalance
the cost of having
children?
Part-time work, for
instance, isn’t a solution
to having to choose
between a fulfilling
carreer, as Benjamin put
it, and bearing children.
It’s just choosing children.
And if grand-parents were
so easy to access, daycare
wouldn’t be so
overcrowded.
Reply
Vladimir
16 October 2023 at 8:35
pm
I suspect that
children are
needed as long as
they are
economically
functional, so
agreeing more
with the tendency
to “no-children”
approach where
no more humans
are needed to
produce stuff. But
“Contact” could
produce children
by itself, in this
case using Aldous
Huxley approach
in his famous
book. A society
producing
children by itself
would
exterminate the
last non-
liberalism, the
children-needs-
to-obey-parents
conformism. Just
adding to this
beautiful
discussion.
David H
9 February 2018 at 2:59 pm
Reply
Dustin
10 February 2018 at 10:11 pm
Reply
Donna
16 October 2023 at 12:29 pm
Reply
JenniferRM
14 November 2017 at 3:23 am
Kaleberg
15 November 2017 at 4:18 am
Reply
Samuel Skinner
15 November 2017 at 5:42 pm
Reply
Jé Maverick
11 February 2018 at 2:16 pm
Reply
D.O.
22 February 2018 at 6:29 am
Reply
Martin Landry
16 October 2023 at 1:16 pm
Vladimir
16 October 2023 at 8:50 pm
Who knows.
Reply
Y
22 February 2018 at 9:59 am
Reply
Andy
17 August 2020 at 12:43 pm
Reply
Cory
7 April 2022 at 4:27 am
K
26 October 2022 at 10:20 pm
Reply
Jennifer
19 August 2023 at 3:54 pm
I would also like to see author attribution here. Is
there a reason that’s not included in your
templates?
Reply
Reply
Jennifer Leigh
24 August 2023 at 11:16 am
Reply
K
13 September 2023 at 2:03 pm
Holu
16 October 2023 at 1:14 am
this is ass
Reply
paul
16 October 2023 at 3:06 am
Reply
Nicholas
16 October 2023 at 3:11 am
Reply
Joe schmoe
16 October 2023 at 5:59 am
Reply
John S
16 October 2023 at 6:14 am
John S
16 October 2023 at 6:40 am
Reply
Lenny Schafer
16 October 2023 at 6:35 am
Reply
Joseph page
16 October 2023 at 6:37 am
Meh.
Reply
Lenny Schafer
16 October 2023 at 6:57 am
Reply
RD
16 October 2023 at 7:08 am
Reply
Alvaro
16 October 2023 at 10:33 am
Reply
Jennifer Leigh
16 October 2023 at 1:15 pm
Reply
ERIC W
16 October 2023 at 5:21 pm
Chas Newport
16 October 2023 at 8:38 pm
Reply
Bri
16 October 2023 at 7:23 pm
Reply
Neysch Neysch
16 October 2023 at 8:44 pm
Thanks
Reply
rob
17 October 2023 at 3:42 am
Reply
Tue Sorensen
18 October 2023 at 4:09 am
Reply
Anton
18 October 2023 at 8:19 am
Reply
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