I spent today driving around listening to Le Guin's "Lathe of Heaven" on my iPod. Its about a man who's dreams can change reality so his shrink decides to use the dreams to make the world "better".
I read this when I was 15 and thought it was a good sci fi. Today I realized something about the book and laughed and laughed and laughed.
"Lathe of heaven" is set in Portland! What a perfect venue. Like, the dreaming Portland hippies can make the world a better place, all from the comfort of a couch. Never have to leave fortress Portland. Never have to face a contradictory opinion. Just issue metaphysical orders and watch everyone else's aspirations fall in with your own.
Of course, it doesn't work. Like a lot of Portlanders, our shrink doesn't understand his own patronizing and condescending sense of smug self-superiority. So there's no humility in his tinkering. Any and all of his whims can be indulged, even if (as it does) those whims kill billions and call alien invaders onto the planet.
What is Le Guin saying? Maybe something like this: gawd help us if mr/ms hippy ever actually gets in charge since they ain't trained for it. If you really think that "all your need is love", then there's about a million complexities you haven't quite explored yet.
5 comments:
Hi Tim, I am sorry to read that you have such a low opinion of the zeitgeist here in the Portland area. While you were here you must have become familiar with the conservative eggheads in this region that worked to deny social benefits to gay and lesbians, self-righteously proclaiming that God was on their side. They appear to have unraveled our model land-use restrictions and will now surely work at great speed to turn this area into a giant asphalt parking lot for casinos and WalMart superstores. They also recently made the Portland Schools a laughingstock of the nation (even Gary Trudeau skewered us!) by balking at efforts to fund K-12 education. These incidents contradict your description of a region filled with smug hippies who have no understanding of the complexities of political discourse. Indeed, our region is as livable as it is precisely because progressives get off the couch, fight, and occasionally win the political debate.
Exactly what progressive “tinkering” is making you scowl? The spirited defense against Bush’s lies and obfuscations about global warming? The efforts to ensure kids aren’t misled about evolutionary theory by ignorant religious conservatives?
Might I suggest the following book by Thomas Frank: “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Devour that, and I suspect you will come to your senses.
Tim, I miss you and hope you are doing well. --nick
I somehow missed the existence of this blog until today, so I'm late to the party with the comments on this one. (Tim et al might be vaguely interested in my blog also?)
Anyway…
I never really know what to make of LeGuin and her philosophy. I enjoy her writing (except for the wretched, wretched Tehanu, whose taste I am still trying to get out of my brain years later), but I definitely don't live in her philosophical and intellectual world. She may be a local, but in my humble opinion she is in no wise an Oregonian.
As open source boy here in town, though, I'm sometimes crazy enough to believe that we are dreaming the future of the world, or at least our little domain corner of it. Open software, and now hardware, is a place where we in Portland have been remarkably—some would say implausibly—successful in exerting social change on the rest of the world—to date, without any major politics or center or organization.
We've attracted some world-class organizations, certainly, which is part of our success; I certainly expect us to be—and am helping us to be—more organized and explicit about open source over the next few years. I have to say, though, that this thing my friends and I have been doing for fun, and for good, for 25 years has somehow seemed to become the thing that everyone is starting to do. Folks look to Portland as much as Redmond these days in the software business, and that's a lot.
I'm arrogant enough to think, and bold enough to hope, that our dreams are for the good of the world; thus we'll spin the Lathe of Heaven on.
Dear anonymous commenter,
I love your optimism and hope that it can infect me.
And I acknowledge the glory that is open-source (linux, gcc, graphviz, rapidsvn, svn, vim, latex, emacs, swi-prolog, etc etc etc). I dance happily to the open-source tune and I even teach it (please see http://hometimm.net/doc/06/brightcloud/ABOUT.here ).
And I think you should be very very proud that "Folks look to Portland as much as Redmond these days in the software business, and that's a lot". That's fantastic.
But let me introduce you to a certain Indian academic friend of mine. One day she was talking of poverty in her country and I launched into some polemic about how the next generation of PDAs would sweep the world bring knowledge, power, peace, happiness, truth and democracy to all the worlds' citizens.
She let me go on (and on and on and..) for a little while before pointing out that 900 million Indians would not even be able to read the PDA's screen, no matter what language it was displayed in, because they can't read anything. At all. Period.
Bigger picture, bigger world.
(Sorry about the anonymity of my previous post. I screwed up with the Blogger posting dialog. BTW, how do I get an RSS feed of this blog? I couldn't spot it right off.)
The Bright Cloud project looks cool. Let us know how it progresses.
I would never claim that open hardware / software, by itself, will solve all the world's problems. But one of the mantras of the movement (if you'll forgive my mixed metaphor) these days is "open everything". We're looking for the best path to the post-scarcity world; we're not sure whether we can find it, but we know that if we can achieve post-scarcity for anything, it ought to be for things that are infinitely, freely, and perfectly replicable and infinitely malleable.
Will magic PDAs teach Indians how to read someday? Maybe. More likely, open-everything is a step toward a world where there's no shortage of teachers and curriculum for everyone who wants to learn to read. (Of course, one of the most obvious ways to read The Lathe of Heaven is that power to change without power to predict the consequences of that change is dangerous. Darn.)
Anyway, go read some Cory Doctorow. I'm wading through his entire output right now, because it looks like I'll be Writer GoH Liaison for him at ORYCON 2006. His vision of the post-scarcity world is both challenging and fun; I think you'll like him.
Heh. About the next thing I read online after my previous post was this: "Socialism means many things, some of them untried, some of them tried with great success under capitalism. The open-source movement doesn't deserve its messianic pretensions, but exists as a living rebuke to property and profit. (For an intro see Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line.)"
Go figure.
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