Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth Read Free Page A

takes the science and industry which affords the Worldly Man his pleasures, and scorns his pursuit of mere pleasure: truth, hard truth, absolute truth is the object of the Cultist’s search. Nothing exists but matter and hard facts, and the question of how to organize human life on earth is a deduction from facts. Any opposition or lack of enthusiasm is seen as treason.
    Don’t be misled by my example to think I am singling out libertarian writers for scorn. Socialists like H.G. Wells and atheists like Philip Pullman would serve just as well. What gives the Cultist his particular flavor is the humorlessness, the intolerance, and the zeal of his pursuit. I call it Cultic because the poor fool is trying to place a simplistic or mechanistic understanding of the universe in the place of divine revelation: he serves an idol.
    The Cultist believes he has discovered the secret to a life of happiness on Earth, and the discoveries always retain an eerie simplicity. I remember hearing one science fiction writer once saying how everything in life would be better if only religion were abolished. Really? Everything? Religion is the source of
all
evils? Cultists of other breeds select a different one, a simple scapegoat whose abolition will usher in the Utopia: for Ayn Rand, eliminating altruism is the panacea; for H.G. Wells, eliminating private property. I can think of at least one feminist SF writer who thinks the abolition of men would do it, or, at least, of all masculinity.
    The Cultist, whether he wishes it or not, is always an enemy of virtue. This is because the nature of virtue is a matter of the careful balancing of extremes between two relative evils, and the extreme repudiation of absolute evils. The Cultist is an absolutist, and admits of no balance, no median. The Cultist is bedeviled by the alluring simplicity of his panacea, his one idea, and so compromises with absolute evils as if they were matters of taste. It is no accident that both Heinlein and Rand praise keeping one’s oaths in their writings, and both portray favorably the violation of matrimonial oaths by fornications and adulteries.
    In the same way the Cultist rebels against the worldliness of the Worldly Man, the Occultist rebels against the Cultist, and insists that there is more than just a material world and one brief and stoical life lived within it.
    Ursula K. Le Guin seems to me to be the most famous and most articulate representative of this stance within the science fiction community: while her books have favorably portrayed an anarchist utopia (as in
The Dispossessed
), she lacks the grinding dogmatism of an Ayn Rand. Note the gentle parable of
Lathe of Heaven
, that no direct solution to problems actually solves them, or the explicit teaching of the relativity of all truth in
Four Ways to Forgiveness
.
    I don’t mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.
    In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next.
    Postmodernism, which rejects the concept of one overarching explanation for reality, is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known.
    Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of science and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing.
    The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain