Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
When I first read this ponderously slow and stiffly philosophical science fiction epic, I confess to being far from deeply impressed. As a college undergraduate with a taste for the brilliantly imaginative and bizarre in my science fiction reading, Frank Herbert’s Dune presented me with no depictions of alien mentalities or descriptions of strange worlds. It seemed to be a self-important meditation on the nature of human relationships to power, written by a hippie obsessed with the passage of time and the history of religion. In a superficial sense, this is exactly what Dune is. Stylistically removed from modern tastes and reeking of 60’s incense and vaguely understood Eastern Religions, Dune demands to be approached on its own terms nevertheless. Like suffocating layers of shifting sand, the work is perfectly content for you to slog through interminable layers of stream-of-consciousness psychedelic self-absorption. Because you need to build psychic muscles. Because the sleeper inside of you needs to be awakened.
We’ve mentioned this well-known work before, and wiser minds than mine have used it to analyze our times. In fact, I’m sure this won’t be the last time we return to this text. Its power to address and provide framework for human challenges grows in the reading and it occupies a prized position on my personal shelf among works that I’ve found to contain Truth. Herbert’s ideas are intensely blinkered by his personal perspective, but the ring of Truth cannot be dulled by authorial imperfection. This is a work of profound theological and psychological weight trapped in bookstores next to Star Trek novelizations and teen vampire fiction. A lesson in that, perhaps. Ignore or ridicule the imaginative world of others, especially those you vehemently disagree with, at your peril. Herbert intentionally deals with a number of philosophical themes in his work, but a few have marked my mind deeply through repeated encounters. Time to return to the desert.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. ~ from Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind. ~ Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Pain is an unavoidable part of human experience, and how we deal with it in many ways defines who we will become. Herbert’s world is immensely harsh, a place where the humans, the power structures, and the terrain itself are all deadly enemies. The young and the old alike are cogs in a galaxy-spanning merciless machine of statecraft, and learn from infancy to prepare themselves for their unique role in the greatest of games. Every people and faction portrayed in Herbert’s work pursues a unique path, and trains their adherents according to millennia of tradition. A baroque appearance of immense age saturates the pages of this most august of science fiction tomes, and not for nothing is it frequently compared to Tolkien’s legendarium. Both authors were adept in the manufacture of imaginative worlds indicated to the reader the presence of vast unspoken and unwritten stretches beyond the lens of the book in their hand. The apparent vastness of Dune’s world heightens the experience of confusion that the reader experiences. This vastness is implacable and refuses to acknowledge the pain of the characters caught between the rollers of destiny and ambition. Dune vividly illustrates truths few of us face in a modern world of individualism writ large; for example, the reality that many of us will disappear without a trace beneath history’s sands. That the forge of greatness is fired by sacrifice, often of those you love. That endurance is the only response to certain kinds of suffering. In fact, that you may be called to endure unfair and unutterable pain in order to survive and bring order to your world. Because this is part of growing up, of becoming truly human.
Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he'll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny. ~ Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh. ~ from Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan
Growing up is the process of realizing the truths of your world, and your place in that world. This is a process that is necessary whether you embarked upon the journey at the proper time or no. It is a deeply tragic process and one which often leaves us exposed too soon to a brutal world. It is merciless, and yet deeply necessary. We are learning to become human, and Herbert memorably distinguishes between people in human bodies and those who truly fulfill their potential. Dune is at its heart a coming of age tale, and one which neatly follows into the ancient heroic and tragic paths as it tells Paul Atreides’ rise to insane heights. In doing so, it contains cautions against both naiveté and hubris. While Herbert can rightfully be criticized for characters that often act and speak as dramatic caricatures of human beings, we remember them because they are iconic in the truest sense. They collect what we wish to be, or what we fear we may be. This is one of the reasons so many have returned to Dune over their lives. It places the reader within a world that is futuristic and yet recognizable as a dramatized version of human experience, including tragedies and triumphs. Herbert makes becoming a human seem possible, and inescapable. He reminds you that you must not fear. He shepherds you through the fearsome miniature apocalypses that occur along our path.
To save one from a mistake is a gift of paradise. ~ Stilgar This is more than a second-approximation answer; it’s the straight-line computation. Depend on it. ~ Paul Atreides
Survival to adulthood requires adaptation, ruthless sacrifice, and deep understanding of environment. Logic is the constant companion of those who have the ability and desire to win. Your mind is one of your greatest weapons. Herbert returns to the theme of the mind over and over, often past the point of believability in extended sequences lauding the human ability for total mental control of the physical form. But exaggerations excepted, the core idea remains compelling. What better way to brace fledgling humans for the coming shocks of reality than to remind them to think, methodically and rigorously? A future vision where computational machines have been banned as dehumanizing, and mentat advisors duel one another through strategy and tactics played out across worlds, reminds us that humanity is not an escapable responsibility. To think well, to watch our surroundings and reason based on experience, is our high privilege. The “plans within plans within plans” arena of deadly political combat Herbert paints is quite familiar to citizens of the global internet. In a world where peddlers of diverse realities clamor for our attention, we must retain our reason. In a carnival of diverting machines, we must keep the likeness of a man’s mind. We cannot make the step beyond logic if we have not first mastered logic itself.
When one has lived with prophecy for so long, the moment of revelation is a shock. ~ The Shadout Mapes Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. ~ from The Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan
Human beings know deeply within their flesh the realities of non-logical and non-physical worlds. Describing this reality and understanding its role in our lives is one of the great tasks of human existence. Frank Herbert and I differ fundamentally and deeply in regards to our beliefs. He characterized himself as something of a spiritualist but distrusted and ridiculed orthodox religions in his life and art. And yet, Dune is a deeply and undeniably religious text. If even those who deny any truth behind religion can acknowledge its central human importance, then certainly those of us who have been given revelation’s grace should take it seriously. Herbert wrote with reckless profundity in all his work. Many authors doom themselves to trite obscurity by taking their work with only the seriousness they feel it deserves. Herbert wrote as if carving his words into stone to be bleached and scoured by millennia of alien weather. Even his most unbelievable scenes hammer the reader with grand pretension. I’ve often wished more pastors read Herbert carefully to understand that this, after all, is what many have sought and found wanting in their experience of the Christian religion. We claim to hold the unique truths underpinning the universe, and yet all too often offer it up with an attitude befitting a timeshare salesman or a bored university professor. And yet people search the world for prophecy and revelation, the voice from beyond speaking terrible purpose into their lives. Perhaps we need to return to the desert.
I unironically think that too many people, especially the young, have been trained with scientific rigor to be without power in their lives. Power is a knife fit to your hand, able to be wielded to help or to hurt. But if we fear it to the extent of suppressing and neutering the very things that equip us against the storm, then we do so at our peril. Frank Herbert asks many questions in his galactic Greek tragedy about the formation of a fearsome hero, and offers few answers. But you know that our Selections are simply plunder for our greater project. We raid the minds of history seeking ammunition for the battles we fight in the spirit. And Dune offers a cache of explosive power too tempting to pass up. As I raise my own children, I hope to carefully expose them to the reality of their world and give them the mental gear for safe journeys. More than their mental health, I seek their souls. And in such a struggle, I dare not neglect any source of strength.
For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
~ James 1:3-4