In the realm of fantasy there is value placed on the thing that came before. Game of Thrones has the Old Gods, the Narnia Chronicles has the Deep Magic, Lord of the Rings has its The Silmarillion. These beautiful narratives know that there is something underneath. A deeper truth, a validity of the times before.
Listening to the Ezra Klein podcast today, he was interviewing a Senator from Texas by the name of James Talarico. It was a conversation that was largely about American Christianity and the political left. Ezra made a statement that caught my ear when he mentioned that liberalism struggles to provide a moral compass.
I have noticed that much of the best tech criticism comes from religious figures and communities. And one reason I think is because modern liberalism — neoliberalism, you might call it — I think has a lot of trouble with moral judgment. It is built on the interest of the consumer. – Ezra Klein
That idea pops up often in the philosophy discussions that I listen to. The liberal project that created much of the modern world is designed to defend the existence of a plurality of moral structure, but doesn’t provide one.
It made me think of two books that I’ve read lately. The first is The Oresteia, a collection of three plays written by Aeschylus in 458BC Athens. In the play, following the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War a cycle of murders erupt in his family. Where a son kills the mother for killing the father for killing the daughter. It’s a vicious cycle of revenge killings sanctioned by the deities called the Furies. They were the gods one turned to when seeking revenge or justice for severe crimes like patricide, impiety, and perjury. The cycle of revenge is arrested when a court of justice is established for the very first time under the wise guidance of the goddess Athena. Following the verdict the blood thirsty Furies are subdued but not banished, they are given a new home under the court and the city. A reminder that something deep still lurks under the halls of justice, giving it substance.
The second is Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World written in 1932. In it Huxley creates a totalitarian materialistic world where the morals and ethics cater to an elite class, so long as society isn’t questioned. All information of the before times is shamed, suppressed and hidden away. The new world is sanitized and orderly. Children aren’t born but created in labs, no mothers or fathers. People are conditioned through subliminal conditioning and hormonal manipulation to accept their class and profession, a platonic contentment. Everyone belongs to everyone, without marriage society is a free love zone. Anxiety is suppressed with a drug called Soma, freely distributed amongst the population. But, some semblance of the before time is kept sealed off in Savage Reservations where one can go with a special pass. It’s not so much a reverent home than a ghetto and spectacle for old ways of living. There children are born and the people have unsanctioned and unsanitary religious beliefs. But from there, “John the Savage” gets loose in the new world leading to a lonely and confused existence in the stable and sanitized Brave New World.
They are stories at the opposite ends. Brave New World, is a sanitized and orderly dystopian future that has suppressed all memory of the Deep Magic into obsolescence. The Oresteia, a leap into a new civil order that remembers the old ways and places a home for them under the city.
In light of these I think about Ezra Klein’s comment about the ability of religious communities to provide a moral compass. In the time of Aeschylus, a new order was being installed with the old order given place in the foundation of what was being created. 2500 years later Huxley communicates an anxiety that was being born in the wake of an industrial and technological revolution, an anxiety of what we may have lost and forgotten in this rapid advancement. A number of Huxley’s contemporaries wrote similarly – George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But I can’t go much further without considering the warnings of a reactionary dystopia. The novel that Margaret Atwood wrote for us in A Handmaid’s Tale. In her novel the Furies have not been merely remembered, they have been let back loose in the world and given control building a ridged religious totalitarian regime. It’s almost a mirror of Brave New World.
There is something about our modern era that is wrestling with this relationship to our before times, and I don’t know where it will end. But when some are pulling us into the sanitized techno dystopia of Brave New World, others are pushing us into a violent rebirth of a Handmaid’s Tale. There is something incredibly appealing about the reverence for the past and optimism for the future in The Oresteia.
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