Social Change in SF/Fantasy

I’m trying to rest today, but this article got me thinking …

There are times, in medieval British history, when one could reasonably think that history repeats itself.

The story is always the same. Pushed too far, the commoners revolt. Being often armed and dangerous, these revolts come very close to success. And then the monarch promises compromise and reform and the rebels disband, only to be hunted down like dogs once the government reasserted its power. Richard II, Henry VI and Henry VIII all came very close to losing their thrones to peasants. And while the rebels sometimes managed to get the government to change its mind – the poll tax of 1381 was scrapped after the revolt – it was rare for them to achieve much of anything.

Indeed, even when Charles I had proven himself a treacherous and utterly untrustworthy monarch – and he was stripped of all effective power – Parliament hesitated before executing him. He was the king!

Kings had been killed before, of course. Edward II had been murdered after he’d been overthrown (unless you believe he was held prisoner after his reported death.) Richard II was murdered after his overthrow. The Princes in the Tower vanished and were widely believed to have been murdered by Richard III. But they were all murdered by their successors or, in one case, a high-ranking nobleman. (Roger Mortimer was savaged by historians after he was overthrown and executed too, perhaps because he wasn’t crowned king himself.) The idea of the commoners overthrowing and killing the king was unthinkable.

Part of this, of course, was the myth of ‘evil counsellors.’ The myth insisted that all the bad things were done by the king’s counsellors, not the king himself. If the king actually knew what was being done in his name, the story went, he would act immediately to punish the evil-doers and rule wisely and justly from that moment on. There was very little actual truth in the myth, but it served a useful purpose. Rebels demanded the heads of ‘evil counsellors,’ not the king himself. And if matters got too far out of hand, those counsellors could be sacrificed to preserve the monarchy.

But a more fundamental point was that people of that era – even as late as the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite Rebellion – believed firmly in the social hierarchy. The crowned and anointed king was at the top, followed by the various orders of noblemen and churchmen all the way down to peasants and serfs. This was how they thought things were supposed to be – the peasants wanted good rulers, not chaos. And those who did question the social order were often considered dangerous heretics. John Ball, for example, was rapidly smacked down when he moved from questioning the church – a cause that many noblemen privately supported – to questioning the noblemen themselves. His famous question – “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” – was not one they wanted the peasants to ask.

The author condemns the social structure of JK Rowling’s Wizarding World – and, more fundamentally, insists that Hermione’s lust for social justice – particularly for the House Elves – fades as she adopts a pragmatic approach to civil rights. Equality is a fine thing to fight for when you’re a passionate teenager, she notes, but dreams fade into incremental bureaucratic reality when you grow up, get married, and get serious.

It’s a valid point. But it also bears some examination.

It is instructive to note that Hermione makes a number of fundamental mistakes when trying to free the elves. First, she refuses to accept that the majority of elves see nothing wrong with their treatment. Second, she is unable to grasp that not everyone shares her opinion of the situation; Ron, for example, sees nothing wrong with how the elves are treated despite not owning an elf himself. (Or, for that matter, having any real prospect of owning one.) And third, directly related to the second, she is unable to put together a coherent argument that might convince people who are neutral or leaning towards the other side. Like the vast majority of social justice warriors, Hermione assumed that her emotional reaction to House Elf enslavement – and she was right to regard it as horrific – was sufficient to force everyone else to act. She made no attempt to understand those she was trying to help – and their oppressors.

(A statement that is flatly incorrect.)

Rowling depicted the results quite accurately. Harry and Ron, her closest friends, have to be bullied into supporting her – it’s clear they find it embarrassing – while everyone else laughs at her. She gains nothing from her rather strident approach to the whole situation, while making life harder for everyone else in her dorm (as the House Elves are reluctant to clean the room.) And trying to give the elves clothes is pointless when she doesn’t own the elves and therefore cannot free them!

Societies – real as well as fictional – exist the way they do because of certain underlying realities. Throughout history, women were often regarded as second-class citizens; although it was far from uncommon for women to build power bases of their own, they did this by working within the system and manipulating it. This was not just because men were physically stronger than women, although that played a part. It was because a woman had a very real chance of dying in childbirth, even if she got the best medical care available at the time. There is no suggestion that Pompey the Great ever mistreated Julia Caesar – indeed, he was regarded as shamefully infatuated with his young bride – but that didn’t stop her dying in childbirth.

There are other points, of course. Farmers would try to have large families because they needed hands to help on the farm. Male children were often seen as more important than female children because boys stayed to work the farm while girls married out (often as soon as they could bear children themselves) and went to work for their husband’s family. The high mortality rate in the past often meant that a peasant would be married several times, with a brood of children and stepchildren that would confuse anyone trying to work out their relationships. There was always something to do on the farm, for everyone: sowing the fields, feeding the animals, cleaning the house, cooking, sewing … the tasks were endless.

This isn’t something that is easy to comprehend. Emma Watson, upon being cast as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, asked what Belle did with her time. She even insisted that the live-action Belle be an inventor. But in saying that, Emma Watson only revealed her own ignorance. A young girl growing up in such a place, without a mother, would have no shortage of things to do. She would be expected to keep house for her father: cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. There were no mod-cons to make it easy, either. Belle would have had to do everything by hand …

… And Gaston would have been seen as a great catch. Belle’s father would have been overjoyed if such a man had been courting his daughter. And no one would have cared about Belle’s opinion at all.

Those who want social change, therefore, face two problems. First, there are plenty of people amongst the ‘downtrodden’ who fear change and what it may bring in its wake. This isn’t entirely an unreasonable concern. The French Revolution was necessary, but the Terror was chaotic – resulting in civil wars within the civil war – and the lives of many Frenchmen grew worse even before Napoleon took over. Educating one’s children might lead to them putting on airs and graces, instead of working on the farm. There actually was a brain-drain from the Russian countryside before the Revolution because the educated no longer had a place in the villages.

Second, perhaps more importantly, the people on top don’t want social change. Why should they? History tells us that if the people had waited for the elites to grant them social change, they’d still be waiting. Why would a slaveholder in Dixie give up his slaves? Freeing the slaves would mean losing the plantation – at the very least, he’d have to pay the former slaves to work – while keeping them might save his land and profits. Why exactly would he want to support abolition? Worse, perhaps, a number of men who don’t own slaves would also oppose abolition. They wouldn’t want free blacks to enter the labour market, thus driving wages down.

The writer of the article then refers to The Goblin Emperor, a book I got about a third of the way through before giving up. Her snide observation that the anarchists are regarded as insane misses the point that insane is exactly how they’d be regarded, back in the past. And this would be true of anyone who wanted too much change, too quickly. Like it or not, the rapid spread of the internet has caused us problems we have yet to resolve – in hindsight, would it have been wiser to go slower? But no one could direct the storm once it had begun …

The Goblin Emperor is apparently disappointing because social change is very slow. (I didn’t get that far, so I don’t know how true this is.) But social change – real social change – requires generations. It’s easy to smear radicals as … well, radicals. Those who want change must be prepared to argue for it – and they must have a valid answer when someone asks, as they will, ‘what’s in it for me?’

More importantly, directed social change requires an understanding of how society actually works. A lone king or emperor may not be able to accomplish much, even if – in theory – he is all-powerful. Noblemen, or the church, or even the bureaucracy will turn against him if he pushes for too much, too fast. Sometimes this will be as minor and petty as refusing to accept that a commoner can be given a knighthood, sometimes it will be more significant – insisting on keeping a monopoly, perhaps. A person who rages against the machine without understanding how the machine works will not be able to play John Galt and stop the motor of the world.

And yet, societies do change.

Sometimes, something happens that loosens the bonds of society. The Black Death killed hundreds of thousands of people, but it also allowed the survivors to start demanding better terms or they’d move elsewhere. Wages, accordingly, went up. At the same time, it also induced the gentry and nobility to start taking more interest in local postings … which upped the corruption in local government.

Other changes were technological. The spread of reading and writing allowed ideas to move from place to place, encouraging social change. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Huckleberry Finn and Oliver Twist promoted social change by making reasonable arguments and illustrating the hypocrisy of reactionaries. So too did books like The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. It was no longer possible to shoot the messenger, once books and broadsheets became popular. Steam technology allowed faster movement from place to place, while improvements to farming technology eliminated the economic impetus for chattel slavery.

And still other changes were medical. The Pill allowed women to enter the workforce, as well as decoupling sex and reproduction. This caused other changes … premarital sex was no longer sinful, at least for the women, and virginity was no longer so highly prized. And so on and so on …

A writer who tries to use social change as the centre of the novel, therefore, faces two significant problems. On one hand, he must make social change interesting; on the other, he will face people who will argue that that ‘it wouldn’t have happened like that.’ Naomi Alderman’s The Power starts to collapse into an incoherent mess as her background overwhelms the foreground. It is very difficult to get a story out of pure social change. I would like a universe where we all develop the power to teleport, but how would I turn the social change into a story?

It’s a problem I have grappled with myself, when writing Schooled in Magic. It was always my intention to show what the influx of new ideas – first, ideas introduced by Emily; second, adaptations and improvements made by the locals – would do to a society that was, in many ways, stagnant. Emily’s education was not the best, but she knew enough to introduce everything from simple letters and numbers to paper and printing presses. (A secondary advantage is that she can imagine newer and better ways to use magic, causing yet another set of revolutions.)

This has happened in the real world, to some extent. Cortes – the Conqueror of Mexico – was a middling general by European standards. But he had a far more advanced playbook than the Aztecs and was able to use the weaknesses in their society to bring them down. Emily’s mindset allows her to make intellectual leaps that are beyond most of the locals – to them, she came out of nowhere. Her limited knowledge is more than enough to change the world.

But these changes have effects that are bad as well as good. A new banking system allows commoners to horde money, but it also kicks off a financial bubble that eventually – inevitably – explodes. Broadsheets (newspapers) allow more and more people to become aware of the world outside their spheres of interest, yet they also undermine the social order and threaten the position of the kings and princes (and sorcerers). Steam railways change the world by allowing movement over far greater distances. Newer and better understandings – germs, for example – have their own effects. Even something as simple as standardised measurements can turn the world upside down.

And yet, these changes take time. By ‘now,’ most of the low-hanging fruits have been picked. Greater changes will take time, far more time. And there will be people who have an interest in trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

And changes take time in the real world too.

The writer asks why SF has lost its ability to imagine alternatives to capitalism. But the blunt truth is that most SF utopias – The Culture, for example – require technological breakthroughs that have not – yet – happened. It also relies upon super-intelligent AIs – the Minds – to run the society. Star Trek: The Next Generation has the same problem. The human race may have evolved – Captain Picard: “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives” – but it has done so because of technological advances that have eliminated everything from hunger to (most) disease. There is no fundamental need for humans to acquire wealth in such surroundings because they don’t need it. This is a better world, but – from a storytelling point of view – it’s also boring.

It’s also worth noting that capitalism – and competition, and enlightened self-interest – have done more for the lives of the poor than any other form of government. Communism is nothing more than the equal distribution of poverty, the ultimate end result of the steady reduction of interest in actually working. Why work when the rewards of not working are just the same? Socialism is a dead end without the technology to make it work. Fascism and monarchism – and direct democracy – have their own limits; some obvious and brutal, some so small that they appear insignificant until too late. Social change is not always a part of epic fantasy – from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones – because the basic structure of their worlds mandates against it.

In conclusion, I’d like to make a simple observation.

The reference to Hillary Clinton made me smile, for all sorts of reasons. One of them was Hillary – or her ghost-writer – comparing her to Cersei Lannister, particularly when Cersei is made to walk the streets naked as a punishment for her crimes. (Ironically, Englishwomen were often spared the worst when a king was on the throne, whatever their crimes; Mary and Elizabeth had far less hesitation in executing their sisters.) But there is no doubt that Cersei Lannister was guilty of everything from incest to murdering her husband and abusing her children. It was a cruel and gendered punishment (a man would have been executed) but it was not undeserved. If Hillary Clinton identifies with Cersei, does that mean that Hillary is guilty too? She certainly has the ‘evil counsellors’ – Anthony Weiner copped a great deal of the blame for her loss, rather than Hillary herself.

And one might also argue that one of the reasons Trump won was simply that he was more popular than Hillary – he certainly enjoyed a broader base of support – something that is not unlike to Henry VI being more popular than Richard II.

But there is a more serious point. The writer calls the Clintons a de facto aristocratic family – and one of the things aristocracies do is slow progress. Hillary Clinton had countless advantages when she took the field against Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 – in the latter, she had the nomination stitched up ahead of time – but she lost both times. And part of the reason she lost is that she didn’t have an inherent understanding of politics, unlike Obama, Trump and Bill Clinton. But how could she have developed one when she never had to face a serious challenge until it was too late?

The monarchies – and aristocrats – want to ensure that there are no social changes which undermine their power. (This is as true of the Bushes as it is of the Clintons, as well as the Plantagenets, Tudors and Stuarts.) But this slows development to a crawl. Worse, the aristocrats lose touch with reality. On one hand, Hillary Clinton and the DNC was unable to adapt to a new reality; on the other, moderate reformers in the past got eliminated, clearing the way for rather less moderate reformers. One can argue that the RNC crushed the Tea Party, thus clearing the way for a man who proved a far more capable enemy – Donald Trump.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson of fantasy is not that knights and dragons and damsels in distress are cool, but that no one in their right mind would want to live there, let alone surrender their lives to a monarch …

… And, if you want social change, you have to start by understanding why society works the way it does.