Lethal Minds

It was in the 1950s that the dreams of H.G. Wells seemed set for realities; man at last to colonise the planets. Some believed we’d create a utopian paradise amongst the stars. Others were sceptical of such a vision; for every blank page invites horrible scribbles. Draw a palace of wonders? Some twerp to cross it out. Arthur C. Clarke oscillates between these two views; his old world beliefs struggling with new world technologies. The City and the Stars. Why think outer space will save us when inner space still defeats the human….

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For all the intergalactic paraphernalia this is a novel about growing up. A whole city - a complete civilisation - his being forced to mature; by learning the truth, and engaging with a universe beyond its heavily protected boundaries. No longer to repeat the endless cycles of childhood and adolescence; these people must become adults; to break out of the schoolroom, with all the risks this entails. Once again explorers. Once more to conquer unknown realms. No longer girls and boys, but men and women.

What’s happened? A ‘Unique’ has broken out of Diaspar, to make contact with the another community - Lys, a cluster of small, independent villages, whose self-reliance has bred super-intelligent humans. Change, suddenly, is in the atmosphere.

Investigating a once majestic fortress Alvin and Hilvar - a friend from Lys - discover a robot, who helps Alvin - the Unique - travel the universe. Together, man and machine visit a purely artificial constellation, the Seven Suns, where they find a pure intelligence, a mind without matter; the ideal of a former civilisation that has since left the galaxy. Although at first there is no history, for only fragments are left; this once perfect mind damaged beyond coherent recall. They have to wait for the great intellects of Lys to piece together this lost past. This done, and the adventure over, Alvin returns home, to a new, reinvigorated, community, which may join with Lys, to create a dynamic social force, breaking out of its long stasis. Alvin settles back into his new life. No more to travel the space-ways.

What the book describes is an initiation rite, when a young man endures a series of trials which break the habits of childhood, transmuting him into an adult. At the end of the rite secrets are revealed which bind him to his place and its traditions; they are a magic power - here, knowledge of the City’s origins - that gives him a special position, as custodian of its historical continuity, the guardian of its founders’ vision. He returns to the City a new person in a Diaspar that is still recognisably the same (the scenario of many traditional societies). But there is a difference. Alvin’s home is changing, for it too has gone through its own rite. An entire population forced to learn that its beliefs are a myth, designed by the City’s founders to scare them into dependence on the Great Computer, that benevolent dictator of their lives. Adults, it seems, cannot be trusted to run the universe.

Yet built into the system are rare opportunities for freedom - those Uniques - who are given the possibility of freeing Diaspar from its bondage. Even those who’d witnessed the destructiveness of man, his ideal of a pure reason just another weapon in the armoury, couldn’t give up on liberty. Despite designing a perfect world, able to sustain itself without violence, and with intellectual excitement and physical comfort, the idea of freedom lives on. No extinct species this. For it is freedom that defines us. It is why Alvin, despite all the pleasures of the City, feels empty, lost. Thus his urge to escape this gigantic nursery.

Why only Alvin? Uniqueness our essence, but it causes so many problems; better to pretend it does not exist, or is a fault in Nature’s programming, rectified by Scientific Man. Nevertheless, it is a force, an energy, that cannot be erased…. The founders have tried to build in some control, through a targeted release.

The novel is a work of realism: only a tiny minority to voluntarily surrender their comforts to the risks, the hardships, of a free life. Even the Jester, designed to bring controlled chaos into the City - sporadic random excitement keeps life interesting - cannot contemplate the world outside Diaspar with equanimity. He is scared by the very thought of that world, which instinct tells him will, if it enters this society, wreck what is in fact a marvellous life. Alvin is unique. He is also true to his nature: a typically selfish and short-sighted teenager, who, driven by an egoistic curiosity, doesn’t think of the effects of his actions. Adventure is all. When he does think of the future, he fools himself that it will be better. Klutz! Should any society put itself at the mercy of such an innocent egotist? The author’s answer appears to be ja! For this being 1950s sci-fi, the quest is for the rational, believed to define our humanity. It is Kant’s belief that only through the exercise of our reason can we be mature and independent. Freedom and the rational are one, and together they find the truth, a beneficent entity. A curiously adolescent faith.

The vision is flawed. The more intelligent you are the better you will be, this is the idea. It is not so. High intelligence, despite the beliefs of both Diaspar and Lys, is not an automatic good. Indeed, the history of the cosmos proves this idea wrong. In the attempt to create a pure mind the old humans, with their galactic empire, produced a creature who hated all matter and tried to destroy it. Here is a profound truth. The rational is evil, it is a Devil who almost wiped out the universe, before that empire caged it in the Black Sun. A happy ending, then? No! One when that sun dies, this Devil will be free…. 

An excursus. Is the Black Sun a metaphysical version of Diaspar? A fully rational mind, powerful and mature, able to detach and distant itself from the emotions, from sentimentality, is too dangerous to be set free; in the Black Sun it is caged; repressed in Diaspar, it allows a civilised society, one content with living a bounded but quiet existence, to survive. To roam at will…won’t humans recreate the same conditions as before? For along with our full creative powers comes destruction; the new instinctively doing away with the old; nothing to obstruct the play of the mind, so insouciance about consequences. It is not clear from the novel, but we suspect an author’s irony.

The intellect adds an unstable element to the world. The idea when it conflicts, as it must, with matter - as obstacle, irritant, as tough opponent, a site of resistance, an enemy - produces unforeseen consequences, many bad. It is why we need the wisdom of ages, those centuries of experience, which has learnt the results of reason’s unfettered ways. A tyrant or…again we suspect the author - Vanamonde is pure intellect - a child! Oh, in billions of years he will grow to full maturity. Nevertheless, the facts of the present is what must be considered. There is something childish about the exceptionally clever; it’s what makes them uniquely dangerous, innocent of the damage they do. Matter. It changes the value of anything. What’s good in the mind - such a marvellous concept! - quickly corrupts when that mind is confronted by opposition. The idea must be realised! Who cares about cost? What’s the destruction of a few hundred buildings, a couple of thousands souls, to improve this society, create the miraculous future?

Alvin is a case study. He has a benign vision of the future, a place of not just harmony but growth. A lovely notion. Yet, is it feasible to think this life will be different from the past? Growth is good, but is apt to get out of control. A few weeds decorate a garden, many strangle it…. Already people are talking about the colonisation of the Earth. The vision of the old conquests has returned. His adventure, an adolescent at play, is turning into dreams of invasion, conquest and imperial expansion; a new space empire to be formed. The primeval desires are reborn. And new myths are being spun to clothe them in virtuous clothing, uniforms disguised as dresses, jackboots a hippy’s sandals.

We have smashed a myth! So what, you are creating new ones….

Should a million people change a way of life because one person is fed up with it? A highly nihilistic vision. A rational utopia, protecting both humans and the universe from humanity’s insatiable curiosity, aka its epistemological greed, is to end because of the untutorable instincts of a teenager, himself quickly bored with what he finds. Is this Clarke’s message? Does he really believe the mind a terrible trap…the truth, for sure, but we thought sci-fi had to wait for Ballard to enlighten the technological dunderheads. If we listen just to the words this is a romantic vision, of the undaunted intellect discovering new realms, of space, of mind. But what are the products of these minds? The utopian City is a prison, Diaspar’s Great Computer its panopticon. While in Lys, a high intelligence - these are Oxbridge intellects - has created its own bounds, preferring the safety of myth to the excitements of exploration; fearing the City they stress their own vulnerability. With his teenage innocence Alvin assumes a fusion of City and Village will benefit both. Maybe. Yet much will be lost. And if we draw up a balance sheet…but why risk losing two perfectly functioning societies? For what? For some future hope, it’s mad search for a mythical human race that has vanished into the other galaxy after almost destroying this one…. Isn’t this madness? A sober assessment is that the future will resemble the past, and indeed Hilvar, Alvin’s intellectual superior, has had a vision of an apocalypse, where Vanamonde and the Devil fight it out. The ultimate battle between Good and Evil, when pure intellect pummels pure intellect, and everything else is destroyed, the contestants blind to all other lifeforms. It is what happens when absolutes rule our lives.

 

Things will get bad even before then. A child’s optimism should not be the basis of a civilisation. The founders of Diaspar knew what they were doing, but there were two flaws in their design. One, this belief in liberty. The second, in establishing a nursery they ensured that its inhabitants would never be adult. Fine if there are always parents - those computers - to look after you. But then they added indeterminacy; those Uniques who might escape the City’s conditioning and transform it. Is this wise? So many lives to be put at the mercy of clever teenagers….What reason is this? Because the founders still thought in human terms. Here was the mistake, the mistake of the modern world. If you want to create a zoo, where both the beasts and the environment are safe, you have take away our freedom, tame our wild instincts. To domesticate humans you have to treat us as animals. The City and the Stars a pre-Darwinian vision, where mind has replaced the Christian God and science not religion discovers the heavens. To be truly modern we have be more hard-nosed than this. To create an artificial paradise we must remove our nature altogether. Machines or insects? Take your pick. Either to secure a world where the collective can survive intact, the City no longer at the mercy of its citizens.

Review: The City and the Stars