The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin

Jul 18, 2017 23:10

I'd written in here about how I should re-read this book from my childhood; it took me about a month to finish it. It took so long for a couple reasons -- I'm always reading several books at a time, and lately I've been putting most of my Metro commuting into playing a game of SpellTower instead of reading.

I felt like the book started out with unrealistic dialogue, but it got better as it went along.

This book is intended as a Taoist parable about the pointlessness of exercising power, especially when the people upon whom you are exercising this power are merely abstractions to you. If you don't know each of the people you are acting upon, how can you know whether the actions you take are good or evil? How can you know how the people will react? How can you know whether the reactions to your exercise of power will be worse than your good intentions expected?

The main character has an amazing power -- when he's sleeping, sometimes his dreams come true. But this power is unintentional, uncontrollable, and sometimes it erases people he knows, erases them forever, sometimes by killing them, but sometimes by never-borning them.

He uses drugs to try to stop having these dreams. But sleep, and dreams, are essential to human sanity, even to human life. So by trying not to have dreams, he goes insane, and ends up forced by police to take the treatment of a psychiatrist.

When the psychiatrist realizes that his patient is not really crazy, but can actually change reality via his dreams, the Doc uses hypnotism to suggest what the Doc considers to be benign dreams that will change the world for the better, hoping to cure his patient's phobia of dreaming by showing that these dreams can be used for the common good.

But every intended change for the better, is accompanied by unintended changes for the worse.

This doesn't deter the Doc from trying bigger, more dramatic changes for the better, which are still balanced out by unintended changes for the worse.

Eventually, the Doc figures out how to electronically induce the same sort of "effective" dreams in his own sleep. But in his first world-changing dream, he goes mad, and his patient must conquer his fear of his own power, to protect reality from the Doc's nightmares, by unplugging the Doc from the electronic dream machine. The Doc ends up catatonic and impotent, living the rest of his days in an institution. His former patient returns to normal life, no longer afraid of his powerful dreams. He learns to endure reality, however broken and unfixable.

-----

Everybody has daydreams about how they would change reality, presumably for the better. Le Guin's parable teaches us about the curse of unintended consequences, and that the more powerfully we try to change the world for the better, the worse the unintended consequences will be.

There is some anecdotal evidence for this parable, when we look at human history. I could probably come up with dozens of examples, but one of the biggest modern examples is the global warming and mass extinctions that are accompanying the technological advances made by humans over the past couple hundred years. As humans have become a hundred times more powerful (in GDP per capita), we've started destroying the planet.

And if we were to summon the power to fix global warming, then how much more damage would we do via unintended consequences? As I've wondered from studying what is known about the history of earth's climate, perhaps the alternative to global warming is a permanent and worsening ice age. Do we really think we can just set a global thermostat at 62 degrees Fahrenheit and leave it there forever? Such hubris ...

At times like this I think about the Oxygen Catastrophe that resulted when oceanic cytobacteria began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago, causing the first known mass extinction on earth. Yet here we are today, we humans, absolutely dependent upon this catastrophic oxygen to live.

The planet may be unfixable.

We may be unfixable.

Yet for now, we endure. And in Le Guin's parable, we can make a difference in the lives of those we know and love, even if it isn't the difference we want to make, or a difference we choose to make. Not by exercising power, but by abiding in companionship.

book review

Previous post Next post
Up