Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

• a recommendation for the Culture series by Banks from a friend of the author
  • “In Thailand, they have this thing called the Dog. You see the Dog wherever you go, hanging around by the side of the road, skulking around markets. The thing is, it’s not a breed, it’s more like the universal dog. You could take any dog, of any breed, release it into the streets, and within a couple of generations it will have reverted to the Dog. That’s what the Culture is, it’s like the evolutionary winner of the contest between all cultures, the ultimate basin of attraction.”
• modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. The most influential example of this is undoubtedly Frank Herbert’s Dune, which imagines an advanced galactic civilization, but where society is dominated by warring “houses,” organized as extended clans, all under the nominal authority of an “emperor.” Part of the appeal obviously lies in the juxtaposition of a social structure that belongs to the distant past–one that could be lifted, almost without modification, from a fantasy novel–and futuristic technology.
• Such a postulate can be entertaining, to the extent that it involves a dramatic rejection of Marx’s view, that the development of the forces of production drives the relations of production (“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."). Put in more contemporary terms, Marx’s claim is that there are functional relations between technology and social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old way. Marx was, in this regard, certainly right, hence the sociological naiveté that lies at the heart of Dune. Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense–a feudal society could not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would underminde feudal social relations.
• The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints–and thus, he imagines a situation in which all culture has become purely memetic.
• The basic building-block of life for Dawkins, one may recall, is “the replicator,” understood simply as “that which reproduces itself.” His key observation is that one can find replicators not just in the biological sphere, but in human social behaviour. In many cases, these “memes” produce obvious benefits to their host, so it is not difficult to see how they succeed in reproducing themselves–consider, for instnace, the human practise of using fire to cook food, which is reproduced culturally. In other cases, however, cultural patterns get reproduced, not because they offer any particular benefits–in some cases they are even costly to the host–but because they have a particularly effective “trick,” when it comes to getting themselves reproduced.
• To say that a culture is functional is to say that it contributes, and is constrained in various ways by the need to contribute, to the material reproduction of society. Social institutions are fundamentally structured by the collective action problems that must be overcome, in orer for people to produce sufficient food, to provide security, to educate the young, to reproduce the social order, and eventually, to produce the various fruits of civilization. These institutions are roughly matched by a set of personality structures, produced through socialization, that make individuals disposed to conform to the roles specified by these institutions (i.e. to be a warrior, a laborer, a teacher, etc.). The term “culture” is used to refer to the symbolic or informational correlates of these institutions and personality structures, which is reproduced intergenerationally.
• A society that is under constant military threat will have a culture that celebrates martial virtues, a society that features a cooperative economy will strongly stigmatize laziness, an egalitarian society will treat bossiness as a major personality flaw, an industrial society with highly regimented work schedules will prize punctuality, and so on.
• it is difficult to create bureaucracies in cultures that strongly value family ties, because the latter generate nepotism and corruption.
• the dominant trend in human societies, over the past century, has been significant convergence with respect to institutional structure. Most importantly, there has been practically universal acceptance of the need for a market economy and a bureaucratic state as the only desirable social structure at the national level. One can think of this as the basic blueprint of a “successful” society. This has led to an incredible narrowing of cultural possibilities, as cultures that are functionally incompatible with capitalism or bureaucracy are slowly extinguished or transformed.
• One interesting consequence of this process is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures”–e.g., American, Japanese, European–there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None ar particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.
• If one compares belief systems, one can see that Confucianism is powerful largely because of its functional qualities–it was one of the earliest drivers of state-formation, and has generated an extremely stable and resilient social structure in Chinese civilization.
• The culture did not spread directly through imitation, but rather through the strength of the institutions that it was functionally related to. For similar reasons, its capacity to spread beyond the bounds of the state systems that it supported was quite limited. Christianity, on the other hand, is powerful more because of its viral properties–it is very good at spreading itself. It is actualy much less successful at generating stable states.
• [In Consider Phlebas] the Idirans, for all their flaws, have a certain depth, or seriousness, that is conspicuously lacking in the Culture. Their actions have meaning. To put it in philosophical terms, their lives are structured by what Charles Taylor refers to as “strong evaluation.”
• Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
• The easiest way to explain [the Culture’s] Contact is to say that it operates on exactly the opposite principle of the Star Trek Federation’s “Prime Directive.” The latter prohibits any interference in the affairs of “pre-Warp” civilizations, which is to say, technologically underdeveloped worlds. The Culture, by contrast, is governed by the opposite principle; it tries to interfere as widely and fulsomely as possible. The primary function of its Contact branch is to subtly (or not-so subtly) shape the development of all civilizations, in order to ensure that the “good guys” win.
• People are often asked, as an exercise in armchair philosophy, whether one should strangle baby Hitler in his crib, if one had the ability to travel back in time. And yet the Culture has the power to do the equivalent, turning this hypothetical choice into a real one. The idea that one should just sit back and do nothing, as the Federation’s Prime Directive suggests, is morally counterintuitive to say the least.
• There are two ways of framing this intervention. From the “insider” perspective, Contact is ensuring the truth and justice prevail (or that the “good guys” win). But from an “outsider” perspective, what the Culture is doing is reproducing itself. It is taing every society that it encounters and changing it, in order to turn it into another copy of the Culture.
• There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move a way from ascribed toward achieved sources of identity.
• “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into.
• When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation.
• Sociologically, there are generally two ways in which citizens of modern societies resolve the crisis of meaning. The first is by choosing to embrace a traditional identity–call this “neotraditionalism”–celebrating the supposed authenticity of an ascriptive category. […] The other option is moral affirmation of freedom itself, as the sole meaningful value. This is often accompanied by a proselytizing desire to bring freedom to others.
• the Culture […] exists only to reproduce itself. It derives its entire sense of purpose, its raison d’être, from a set of activities that result in it seeking out and converting all societies to its own culture. Of course, this is now how people of the Culture themselves perceive it. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just “doing the right thing.” This self-deception is, of course, part of what makes the Culture so effective at reproducing itself.
• From a certain perspective, the Culture is not all that different from Star Trek’s Borg. The difference is that Banks tricks the reader into, in effect, sympathizing with the Borg.
• Summing up: Banks’s conception of the Culture is driven by three central ideas. First, there is the thought that, in the future, basic problems of social organization will be given essentially technocratic solutions, and so the competition betwen cultures will be based upon their viral qualities, not their functional attributes. Second, there is postulation of Contact as essentially the reproduction mechanism of the Culture. And finally, there is the suggestion that the operations of Contact serve not just as an idle distraction, but in fact provides a solution to an existential crisis that is at the core of the Culture. This is what gives the Culture its ultraviral quality: its only reason for existence is to reproduce itself.