By: Kassandra Dugi
‘You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.’
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
What does a novel written 50 years ago, whose futuristic setting already lies twenty years in the past, have to tell us about the world of today, much less the world of tomorrow? In the case of The Lathe of Heaven, a lot.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1971 novella tells the story of George Orr, a man who possesses the mysterious ability to alter reality with his dreams. In his efforts to suppress these dreams, he abuses various psychiatric medications, eventually landing him in the office of psychiatrist Dr William Haber, who, over weeks and months, uses George’s ability to slowly refashion the world according to his own desires.
Upon first glance, this seems like a rather simplistic science fiction story, with the lines between the hero George and villain Haber clearly demarcated. Only Haber isn’t a villain – or at least not intentionally so: although by manipulating George’s dreams he rises from a simple psychiatrist to director of one of the most important government organisations, his goal is, ultimately, a noble one: to better the fate of humanity.
Living in a dystopian early 21st century Portland, Oregon, Haber sets himself the task of confronting all the ills that plague the world he and George inhabit, from overpopulation to war. Yet his attempts at creating a utopia are futile, as one horror simply takes the place of another: overpopulation is replaced by a plague that kills six billion people, racism is solved by a uniform grey skin tone, disease and mental illness are cured by eugenics and peace between all of humanity is achieved by an alien invasion. In the hands of a lesser writer these alternate realities may be laughable, verging on ludicrous and absurd, but in the hands of LeGuin they are haunting, if not horrifying.
That humans should not play God, that our actions, even the most well-intentioned, can have unintended consequences, that power corrupts: all these are familiar tropes of the science fiction genre, going back to, arguably, its origins in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet The Lathe of Heaven has more subtle things to say, too, especially to those of us who, like George and Dr Haber, are in the business of shaping the future.
It invites us to think about how we approach solving the problems we face, so that we do not end up in the kind of realities created by George’s dreams. By having a single man, well-intentioned though he is, play God and shape reality the way he wishes, the novella asks: who gets to determine the future? Who has the right to decide what is right? When we imagine a utopia, who is this utopia for? These issues are particularly pressing when we consider the institutions and forums that determine our political futures. According to the BBC, over 600 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP27 in November 2022, making up a larger share of the delegates than the 10 countries most affected by climate change, and in total only 34% of delegates were female, despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on women. Statistics like these force us to confront the question: if climate change affects the entire planet, whose voices are heard and, equally importantly, whose are silenced?
Even more fundamentally, The Lathe of Heaven warns us about focusing on complex issues too narrowly, in isolation from one another and in ignorance of their underlying causes. If we care only about overpopulation, can the deaths of six million be justified? LeGuin’s example is extreme, yet, for instance, the focus on CO2 emissions within climate mitigation presents the adoption of electric vehicles as an unequivocal success, while ignoring the environmental and human impact of mining minerals such as lithium for vehicle batteries.
Avoiding a simplistic and isolationist focus is particularly important given the thorough interconnectedness of many of the issues we face today. They are linked not only in their concrete effects, such as the fact that climate change often harms individuals, communities or entire countries that are already economically disadvantaged, but, perhaps even more importantly, in their causes. Many of the key challenges we face today are the result of the century-long dominance of Western worldviews, values and paradigms. And so, to solve these challenges requires a fundamental shift in our way of seeing and interacting with the world and each other.
In The Lathe of Heaven, Haber’s attempts to solve humanity’s problems fail because George’s dreams are only able to change the material reality: he cannot change people’s attitudes towards race, he can only remove their biological basis, nor can he make humanity inherently peaceful, so all that is left for him is to create a common enemy to unite around. Hence, through George’s dreams, Haber creates increasingly horrifying realities not because his intentions are bad, but because they are misplaced: they still operate within the existing ideological framework that caused the very problems he is trying to solve.
Climate change, environmental degradation, social and economic inequality, war: all these are merely symptoms of a larger disease, in the world of The Lathe of Heaven as much as in our own. They are the result of a world-view with a single-minded focus on economic growth driven by consumerism, as well as a profound disconnect from the natural world. Therefore, these issues cannot be solved in isolation, by adjusting individual variables; instead, something far more fundamental is required: a radical shift in our way of seeing and being in the world, in our philosophy and ideology, that leaves behind the social, political and economic paradigms we have inherited from the previous era.
Ultimately, what we need is a broad focus on alternate futures. Moving away from a simplistic focus on solving individual problems towards a more holistic view of alternative possibilities, with new systems, societal structures and paradigms, is to begin to create a new future in the present. It means asking not “how do we abolish racism?” or “how do we end poverty?”, but “how do we create a juster, fairer society?”. When we ask such questions, we can no longer justify short-term, single-minded actions if they have harmful long-lasting consequences. Or, in the words of LeGuin, ‘The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.’
