On literature and religion

I’ve written before about the connections I’ve found when thinking about literature and religion, and also about science fiction and religion (here and here, if not elsewhere!). Recently I found myself back with the theme…

It’s possible to see religion as something human beings have evolved or developed as a way of coming to terms with our own eventual mortality, a knowledge we have because of our powers of perception, reasoning and understanding, and a knowledge which might otherwise blight our existence. We are here, briefly, conscious of what goes on around us, we live, experience, remember things and cannot really understand it all coming to a stop, even though before we existed, everything was going on fine without us…

If there were no god, no heaven, no afterlife, then, nevertheless there are still impulses in us (some of us?) that take us away from the purely material plane onto one which has been called spiritual, acknowledging an aspect of how our minds work. I say some of us, because I know there are people who do not seem to be bothered by thoughts of this kind, or else deal with them in a different way from me, and appear to get on quite happily with their lives… the world is surely large enough for all of us. But some of us do experience a need or a drive to make sense of it all.

So for me, and others like me, religion is a way of addressing those spiritual impulses or leanings; for us there are very real issues that we engage with, that take us onto different levels of awareness or consciousness, that address our existential angst, I suppose.

Then I turned my thoughts to a novel I’ve always rated highly, for lots of different reasons: A for Andromeda, by Ivan Yefremov. It’s a Soviet utopia, set a thousand or so years in the future after the inevitable triumph of socialism has transformed the whole planet, and humans are turned towards the cosmos and other worlds. No religion of any kind is mentioned; clearly it has died out under conditions of actually existing socialism, though it is referred to as an aspect of humankind’s primitive past. Yefremov nevertheless allows his characters to be awed by the beauty and wonder of the cosmos and the natural beauty of the world, too, in ways which today we might call spiritual. But he is the only SF writer I know to have imagined the end of religion.

Olaf Stapledon‘s epic Last and First Men is different altogether. If humans cannot cope with the prospect of disappearance and individual annihilation, we are offered another picture, of our race evolving, mutating and moving to other planets in the solar system over geological time periods, during which we (?) become totally different species. And with a pang we realise that pretty early on in his imagined cycle, our particular humanity and its civilisations and achievements vanish, obliterated by the vastness of time and geological change, with absolutely no trace left behind…not just individual, but collective death.

Many less ambitious writers have written post-apocalyptic novels, and it’s a marvel that one of the few objects that usually survives the cataclysm that starts the novel is a copy of the Bible, so that humanity can safely ‘rediscover’ God, often in an even more warped version than many believers seem to find attractive today. John Wyndham‘s The Chrysalids is a good example: post-disaster mutants are an abomination in His sight and must be hunted down and destroyed. No change there then. But for me the saddest of all is Walter Miller‘s A Canticle for Leibowitz, where, after a nuclear holocaust, monks are again the repositories of knowledge and learning, carefully salvaging the knowledge of our past; eventually, thanks to their efforts, ‘civilisation’ re-emerges after hundreds of years, only to travel down exactly the same pathway to another nuclear war…

I’m not really sure where this has led me, sceptical about much religion and the miseries it has caused (though I don’t only blame religion for human misery) and yet, from my own upbringing inevitably drawn to the spiritual that I find in myself and others, and all around me. None of this balances the knowledge that I only have a tiny amount of time to enjoy what our world offers.

John Wyndham: The Chrysalids

A long time since I last read this one, and for my money it’s still the best of Wyndham‘s SF novels. Despite being written over sixty years ago, it hasn’t dated badly; the post-nuclear apocalyptic scenario is still pretty convincing, as is the concern with genetic mutations from that time, and the religious screwball craziness of the United States is as valid as ever…

Nuclear war has devastated the Eastern US, where the story is set; little or nothing is known of further afield. Mutations are rife, among humans, animals and crops, and in the region where the story is set, formerly north-eastern Canada, are seen as punishment for man’s sins that led to the ‘Tribulation’ some three centuries ago, and in this fundamentalist Christian society are ruthlessly extirpated and destroyed.

Wyndham writes well, and his story has a leisurely pace, fitting the sort of times and paces he’s creating; his master-stroke is his careful choice of an adolescent as his narrator, and one who gradually comes to realise that actually he carries a mutation, along with a handful of others nearby. It’s not a visible one, however – it’s a form of telepathy and ability to read and tune into the thoughts of others similarly affected. This puts them in considerable, though not immediate danger.

Eventually they are betrayed and have to flee, and come into contact with a whole society of telepaths who have colonised New Zealand and rebuilt a technological society; they come to their rescue. And yet, Wyndham leaves us with a sense of unease at the end, too, because although our endangered few from Canada are rescued and taken to a place where they will no longer be at risk of extermination, the Zealanders seem cold, calculating, almost un-human… as of course they actually are if though-reading and telepathy are widespread in their world, and they are very ready to dismiss those who are not, as primitives…

This is what’s different about good SF – see my previous post – there’s a reasonable plot, some decent characterisation, in that I actually cared about the fate of some of the characters, and the futuristic or science-fictional elements are rather more plausible. There’s material to make a reader think; we are challenged by the idea that a better future for some may not be for all…