Erewhon: 150th Anniversary Edition Read online

  This shared belief amongst the authors of these New Zealand-based utopias that white supremacy would eventuate in this country (and implicitly, at least according to the Inhabitant, in other worlds as well) connects to the eugenic ideas and practices that the theory of evolution has unfortunately inspired. Of the three utopias, however, it is Erewhon that grapples most with the concept.

  Conformity and undermining in Erewhonian eugenics

  Butler’s complex response to the theory of evolution presents in the text as more than the removal of the Indigenous population and denigration of their physical and cultural characteristics. In the very deliberate conformity of the Erewhonian population to their society’s physical ideal—Higgs observes that they are a vigorous and amazingly beautiful people who place a high premium on good health—Erewhon engages with the practice of eugenics in imaginatively ambiguous ways.

  The perceived physical superiority of the general population of Erewhon is underlined by its treatment of illness as criminal behaviour. Health, in this isolated and conformist community, is truly a matter for the body politic; individuals must answer to the wider community for their physical condition. There is no sympathy for illness or infirmity, and any physical incapacity is at once reviled and considered the worst of moral failings. When Higgs attends the trial of a man in the end stages of consumption, he observes this social prejudice given solid legal form. The judge berates the prisoner, stating that he has previously been convicted of bronchitis, that he has been jailed on “no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character,”40 and that the prisoner’s stubborn ill-health can only derive from “a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious.”41 The prisoner is sentenced to imprisonment and hard labour for the rest of his life—although he is so deathly unwell it seems clear he will not survive for long—and Higgs can only reason that the judge “was fully persuaded that the infliction of pain upon the weak and sickly was the only means of preventing weakness and sickliness from spreading.”42 There is no medical care offered; within the text, hospitals are routinely associated with conditions such as ugliness or theft. Those with physical ailments are left to shift for themselves, and in as much privacy as possible, lest knowledge of their infirmity lead to prosecution.

  If illness and incapacity are regarded as symptoms of poor moral character, then the opposite is also true. Good health is reflective of admirable standing, and this derives from an attitude that reveres physical strength above all else. It is almost unsurprising to find that the same lack of sympathy given to the sick is also afforded to those who are exploited or abused by others. If an orphan or a widow is so weak as to be stolen from, then they can only have deserved it. If Butler draws on the evolutionary argument of the survival of the fittest, then the Erewhonian methods of determining “the fittest” are, if not actually rational, based on an unpleasantly eugenic series of inferences.

  That Erewhon is influenced by the idea of eugenics is plain. Members of the community have “an extreme dislike to marrying into what they consider unhealthy families”: that is, both physical and moral failings are considered to have hereditary elements.43 They are also not to be used within society as excuses for disruptive behaviour, as the judge says to the consumptive:

  It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice.44

  The desire not to marry (and by implication reproduce with) unhealthy members of unhealthy families is an argument for eugenics on a domestic scale, one which would ideally, according to the Erewhonians, breed bad characters and bad bodies out of the general population.

  In Erewhon, Butler is clearly producing a satiric commentary on the treatment of health and criminality, but it is a commentary that is embedded in his own cultural background, where illness was at least partially linked to moral failing. To today’s readers, that perception may seem historical, but to Butler it was a commonly held belief of the time and place in which he lived. Jens Jørgensen notes, for instance, that “in the 1870s”—i.e., exactly at the time Erewhon was being written and published—“medical practitioners and observers believed that diseases were caused by a combination of four factors: heredity, climate, miasmas, and immoderate lifestyles.”45 Diseases such as syphilis and consumption, for instance, could be linked not only to environmental factors but to immoral behaviour and inherited physical weakness. Readers of other late nineteenth-century texts, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), might also note the links between culpability and contagion—the highly sexualized presentation of Lucy Westenra, for instance, has seen her descent into vampirism interpreted through a distinctly syphilitic lens. If Butler himself lived in a society where sickness resulted, even partially, from hereditary causes and poor character, then it is unsurprising such attitudes have leaked into his utopian creation. In a highly conformist and generally orderly and clean environment, as Erewhon appears to be, the emphasis on personal fault as the primary cause of illness may well appear reasonable. All Butler has done is to push this attitude to extremes.

  A particularly interesting application of this ethos can be seen in the treatment of pregnancy and childbirth. Both of these can cause sickness, injury, and pain, all of which are, according to Erewhonian custom, conditions to be reviled and punished. Given that avoiding reproduction entirely would result in the extinction of the Erewhonians, however, pragmatism—generally held in short supply in that country—means that excuses need to be found. Such solutions as the Erewhonians come up with centre on concealment and blame.

  These strategies are both necessary and well-established. If suffering from morning sickness or swollen ankles makes one morally suspect, then it is best to avoid company so a reputation for good health can be maintained. Arguably, this has the effect of making pregnancy even less desirable, turning it into a tightrope navigation that can have long-lasting effects: if the state of ill-health resulting from childbearing “has been dangerous and protracted, it is almost impossible for a woman to recover her former position in society.”46 Neither contraception nor abortion are mentioned within the text as possible alternatives to pregnancy, although given the possible complications (and consequences) of childbearing, these might be considered rational options. Both pregnancy and labour are hidden for as long as possible so as not to expose others in society to their negative effects. Such concealment even extends to husbands and fathers, as the mothers anticipate “a severe scolding as soon as the misdemeanor is discovered.”47 This is hardly fair, given that the women of Erewhon don’t get pregnant by themselves, but this is a society where the health of individuals reflects upon their families. Recall the “extreme dislike” of marriage into an unhealthy family, and imagine the fear that the daughters of a sickly mother may inherit both her ill-health and her criminal culpability. A hostile reception from the prospective father may even insulate him somewhat if his wife fails to remain healthy while birthing his children. Readers may query the levels of affection between husbands and wives here, but Butler appears to consider their relationships to be much closer than those between parents and children. Health is a serious matter, and if all else fails: blame the baby.

  Erewhonian infants are considered to have preexisting life as “incessantly complaining”48 souls who lack the sense to enjoy their pleasant disembodied state, and who have chosen to inflict themselves upon their parents, literally pestering them until they reluctantly allow the little nuisance to join them. Any birth is followed, several days afterwards, by a ceremony in which the infant is reviled for its presence, “for the very fact of intrusion into a peaceful family shows a depravity on the part of the child.”49 The danger to the parents (actually, to their mothers, but the text has a limited interest in women, which may explain the lack of any reference to the avoidance or termination of pregnancy) of repeated childbearing is thus ascribed in large part to the unborn. At this ceremony, the baby then enters into a formal contract where, by proxy, they accept responsibility for any misfortune or illness they might experience in the future. This helps to insulate their parents from blame, for if a child is responsible for their own sickly condition, then it is no fault of the parents or family. They may continue to enjoy the reputation of good health without being overly tainted by association with their offspring (although a low level of suspicion is likely to attach to the whole regardless). Family feeling in such circumstances is as much resentful as affectionate.

  A citizen of Erewhon gives, however, a particularly interesting description of the unborn as “our natural enemies.”50 Given the potential impacts on the health of their parents, this is perhaps understandable, but in the context of a eugenicist society, “our natural enemies” lends itself to a secondary reading showing the consequences of natural selection in a conformist society. The methods used to achieve the accepted standard of health reflect an acceptance of natural selection within the text . . . but only so far. Another comment intersects in interesting ways with “our natural enemies,” and it concerns itself with evolution over a more extensive time scale.An Erewhonian thinker comments that “could I believe that ten hundred thousand years ago a single one of my ancestors was another kind of being to myself, I should lose all self-respect, and take no further pleasure or interest in life.”51 Natural selection within the community is accepted, but the extrapolation of natural selection to species evolution is not.

  This is a fear rooted in the potential ramifications of human evolution sparked by the publication of On the Origin of Species. The misunderstanding of human evolution that leads to the phrase “descended from
monkeys,” for example, raises the possibility that our far-flung descendants may also consider us in equally unflattering terms. The inescapable corollary of that Erewhonian quote is this: “Could I believe that ten hundred thousand years in the future a single one of my descendants was another kind of being to myself, I should lose all self-respect . . .” and so on. Conformity, then, in the population of Erewhon, requires a fundamental limitation of form. That form remains recognizably human and may be perfected within the established limits, but push evolution too far, and a people prejudiced against “another kind of being” may well consider those beings to be “natural enemies” . . . even if they are descendants.

  The horror of nonhumans achieving a status superior to that of humans, having power over those humans, and essentially treating them as the people of Erewhon treat unhealthy or Indigenous populations, is arguably a major cause of Erewhon’s abhorrence of modern technology—Higgs observes that they “were about as far advanced as Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century.”52 Higgs is discovered to be in possession of a pocket watch, and this causes his hosts “grave displeasure.”53 The watch is relegated to a museum that is filled with a number of abandoned technologies: “There were fragments of steam engines, all broken and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and part of a crank.”54 These items are kept as curiosities, but they also function as warnings regarding the fragility of human supremacy. A society that thinks of their children as natural enemies, that looks upon nonhuman ancestors with loathing, and which will surely think of nonhuman descendants as the same, will not abide being supplanted by non-biological means.

  Higgs learns that the technological capabilities of Erewhon were, hundreds of years previously, far superior to that of his own modern culture. It was, in fact, “advancing with prodigious rapidity,”55 until an academic, who clearly had science fictional leanings of his own, began to think of evolution in a different way than the purely biological. He wrote a book proving that “machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.”56 He must have been a pretty convincing storyteller, because fear of the looming rise of the machines spread through Erewhonian society like wildfire. The Erewhonians felt that the machines had to be put down, and the sooner the better. Extremely simple technologies were preserved, but the more complex were destroyed, and their return denied forever.

  This is indicative of a profoundly fearful attitude. I say that knowing full well the history of science fiction and the wide range of responses to artificial intelligence within the genre. Imagined coexistence is possible sometimes, but in other futures there is only conflict. The fear of becoming diminished or oppressed, of having to acknowledge another kind of being as not only different but fundamentally superior? That is a fear that permeates Erewhonian society. The individual whose body is a broken cog within the body politic, or the child of a far future who might have different blood, or no blood at all—these fears combine to create a community that clings to conservatism, by which I mean the ongoing refusal to accept change. Fans of science fiction may be naturally skeptical. Science fiction is, after all, a genre that thrives on change, and on the sense of wonder that navigating change can bring. There is likely to be little sympathy for technological stasis, for the destruction of the machines, but it should be remembered: The destruction and the eugenics are only symptoms. What both these reactions really address is the inability to coexist productively with the Other. That coexistence is relatively easy when the machines are mindless tools that exist to make life easier. A washing machine is not an instrument of oppression; arguably it is quite the opposite. What Butler first describes in that early essay, “Darwin Among the Machines,” and what the people of Erewhon fear are intelligent machines, machines with agency—machines that are no longer content to be tools, and who are so superior in intelligence, strength, and creativity that they become not tools but apex tool-users. And the most useful tool that these superior machines could hope to have?

  That would be us. With the rise of the machines, humans risk becoming the Other. And given how the three New Zealand-based utopias discussed here treat the Indigenous Other, that is not an enticing prospect.

  Women in Erewhon and in the other New Zealand utopias

  Another example of dealing with the Other—or not dealing with them, as the case may be—lies in the treatment of women. That necessary acknowledgement of “another kind of being” and how they can ascend to power and status of their own is as applicable to gender as it is to race and technology. Erewhon, as noted above, has little interest in any racial issues that are not an absentminded sort of annihilation, and its treatment of gender is little better. This reflects, of course, the perennial question of any utopia: who defines that utopia, and who is it for? Erewhon may be satire, but the themes that Butler chooses to explore are those that most interest him, and the role of women is not one of those things.

  Arguably, so little time is spent on it because Butler has, consciously or unconsciously, lifted the primarily domestic roles assigned to women in his own community and dumped them wholesale into his own utopian society, conforming to his own cultural values without analysis or critical thought. This may also reflect what Peter Mudford refers to as Butler’s “fear of women” and his “impoverished” attempts at depicting relationships between the sexes;57 certainly Erewhon is the least well-developed of the three New Zealand utopias in this regard. This limitation, too, can be linked back to the idea of conformity: not only to the expected role of women at the time of writing but to the paucity of education available to women in Erewhon. The higher education available at the Colleges of Unreason is dedicated to grossly impractical and useless explorations of irrationality, and only men are shown to receive it. Restricting women from higher education restricts the number of minds and experiences that may query established dogma—a limitation that, alongside the machine-inspired refusal of the scientific method, materially impacts the development of critical thought in Erewhon (as indeed it does in any society that chooses to educate only half of its populace).

  Notably, of these three New Zealand utopias, it is only Butler’s that does not depict access to education as an important and necessary development for women—or more specifically, for white women. Women of colour are as absent as their male counterparts. Admittedly, the Inhabitant’s The Great Romance is not much more thorough in this regard than Erewhon; Edith Weir is largely a much-younger and idealized helpmeet to the man who, after nearly two centuries of suspended animation, wakes to find himself in the future. Edith is clearly well-educated, and the relations between the genders are on a substantially more-equal footing than that found in the Inhabitant’s own time and place. This is achieved primarily via a universal telepathy that has broken down many of the barriers between men and women and helped to level a number of playing fields. Consider, for instance, Edith’s assertion that “law and ceremony and promise are hardly needed now. Should a man deceive a woman not one in all these throngs you see would speak to him, whilst she would receive daily comfort,”58 and compare it to the Erewhonian argument that much of the blame falls upon the exploited party.