By The Dispossessed is the first Ursula K. LeGuin novel I read. I read her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” a few years ago, but just never had picked up any of her longer work. And quite soon after starting The Dispossessed I was wondering why, exactly, I had waited so long to read her novels.
About the Book
Title: The Dispossessed
Author: Ursula K. LeGuin
Published: 1974
Genre: science fiction/fantasy, speculative fiction, literary fiction, classics
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“Centuries ago, the moon Anarres was settled by utopian anarchists who left the Earthlike planet Urras in search of a better world, a new beginning. Now a brilliant physicist, Shevek, determines to reunite the two civilizations that have been separated by hatred since long before he was born.”
My Thoughts
The Dispossessed is actually part of a longer series called The Hainish Cycle, but it (thankfully) can be read as a standalone novel. (That said, I am certainly interested in reading the other books in the series after this)
The book centers around a clash of civilizations of sorts: the planet Urras, and its moon, Anarres, which was settled by a group of anarchists from Urras called the Odonians and has been isolationist since then.
The two societies keep themselves separate; no one from Urras has set foot on Anarres or vice versa, for years… until the events of the story.
Shevek, an Einstein-type physicist working on some esoteric yet potentially highly-profitable theory, leaves Anarres to seek out better scientific opportunities on Urras. He is welcomed with open arms by the Urrasti nation of A-Io, the hyper-capitalist society from which the Odonians had originally fled.
The Dispossessed as a Thought Experiment in Political Philosophy
I loved how this book explored the idea of anarchism while avoiding both idealism and reactionism. Additionally the writing was great. Eloquent yet succinct, passionate and yet balanced.
Anarres is also far from a paradise; on the barren moon, they must make due with few natural resources. Also, the downsides of a collectivist society are not shied away from; these drawbacks are part of what drives Shevek out of Anarres.
I also absolutely loved that LeGuin elevated the philosophical discussion of governance by developing the political situations of more than one Urrasti nation. There are three nations discussed in the story: A-Io the wealthy capitalist country; Thu, a socialist country modeled after statist leftism, and Benbili, an unstable region whose political upheaval is both engineered and leveraged by A-Io and Thu in their own power struggle.
(Hmm… remind you of anything from the 20th century?)
At the Iotian science academy, Shevek encounters a colleague who is implied to be a spy for the Thuvian government, and lambasts Shevek with many of the same critiques that authoritarian leftists levy at anarchists and other libertarian strains of leftism now as well, like: how can a decentralized, demilitarized society defend itself from the encroachments of imperialism?
In the world of The Dispossessed, Anarres has never actually had to fend off Urrasti attackers because the settlement was essentially a bargain with the Iotian state. A movement called Odonism, which in this world is an anarcho-syndicalist political philosophy identified with an activist called Odo, had been becoming increasingly popular and destablizing and causing a lot of problems for the state. Eventually, the government offered Anarres to the insurrectionists, basically saying: okay, you can set up your stateless, classless, moneyless society here, just get out of our hair please.
Because of this agreement, though, Anarres’s ability to function under siege has never been tested.
Anarres is also completely reliant on Urras for resources. This is in large part because of the poor terrain and climate on Anarres, and might well be different if they had been able to set up their society on a more habitable planet. But I like this book because it forces the reader to grapple with these questions. It doesn’t preach to you or bombard you with pleas to support one of the societies over the other: it simply presents them.
When he first gets to Urras, Shevek is taken in by the wealth around him. Urras has commodities that would never be produced on Anarres, and people there live in luxury that no one on Anarres has seen. However, the longer he spends on Urras, the more Shevek comes to miss his home planet. He becomes steadily more aware of the dark side of this alien society — poverty, state violence, and the subsuming of all human creativity to the profit motive.
Human Nature, Capitalism and the State
What was especially interesting to me was how LeGuin took the story’s societal dichotomy a step further to explore how social conditions shape “human nature” itself.
Growing up in America, I absorbed the idea that human nature is inherently competitive, selfish, authoritarian and hostile, which is why the state is necessary (Something something Hobbes’s “state of nature”) and why capitalism is efficacious.
It was not until I was an adult that I encountered the claim that perhaps some or even most of this human nature is socially-determined, contingent upon the conditions of society. It’s a comforting thought — to imagine that if we fix “the system”, we can escape our supposed Lord of the Flies tendencies.
I’m not sure how much I believe in this explanation (To my friends, I joke that I am locked out of most coherent ideologies because I have simultaneous tendencies towards anarchism and towards misanthropy), but it does give me hope. The nature vs. nurture debate has never been black-and-white.
The Dispossessed is split into chapters that alternate between Shevek’s present experiences on Urras and his past on Anarres. The Anarres chapters extend all the way back to his childhood, and some of the most memorable scenes from the book are LeGuin’s depictions of the social dynamics on Anarres.
In our society, a world without prisons or police sounds ludicrous to most people, but to the children on Anarres, the idea of being imprisoned by the state is just as alien and ridiculous. Even their linguistic structures are different on Anarres and Urras, with the Anarres language, for example, avoiding possessive pronouns.
The Ethics of Societal Structures
Few people would deny that capitalism has, broadly, improved living standards for people (at least in the nations that came out on top). But underneath the surface is a dark underbelly of exploitation and disparity that cannot be ignored. Would a collectivist society like Anarres be preferable? Would it be better to take a cut in luxuries in order to ensure egalitarianism? And what if this experiment was done on a planet with bountiful natural resources, like, say, the non-fictional Earth? Could humans even swing it? In the words of Kropotkin, are we good enough?
I really don’t know, but I felt quite ponderous after finishing this book.
“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Have you read The Dispossesed by Ursula K. LeGuin? If so, what did you think? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!
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