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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Octavia Butler

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Returning to Butler

A view of dry, cracked earth, from directly above.
Photo credit: Dan Gold

I started my winter vacation tonight and so am on my way back to Maryland. For the week at home, I picked a few books off my shelf, including Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents.

I held Parable of the Talents in my hands. Then I thought about this week’s headlines and I put it away again.

The last time I read Octavia Butler, I was living in a dusty West Texan semi-rural town that’s decades away from a major water shortage. I was shell-shocked by the time I got to the last page. The Parable of the Sower, the book that precedes The Parable of the Talents in this series, envisions an America on the cusp of breakdown and facing a climate-change-fueled drought while it crumbles under the weight of heightened economic instability and inequity.

We walk through the story with lead Lauren Olamina and her brother, watching how they respond as their society dissipates into humans pack-hunting other humans for their stuff and legislators using institutional power to advance authoritarian control. As Lauren plots how to survive, she draws strength and perspective from a humanistic-religious philosophy she intuits and calls Earthseed:

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.” —Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower

Some people, inspired by Butler, have come to take Earthseed very seriously. And some of them are technocrats with a lot of money to put into transhumanism and extraplanetary exploration.

I don’t now remember how Butler’s first Parable book ends—as I say, I was shell-shocked. I just know that what’s happening these days reminds me much too much of what I read five years ago.

There was a link to an ISIS torture video on Twitter today, just like any other link sprinkled in between baby goat pictures and arguments about relationships. I didn’t click on it and I’ve blocked social media videos from auto-playing ever since the summer of Black death.

This week, too, another European market turned into a trauma site because someone drove their van into a crowd of people. I haven’t clicked on stories about that either; watching friends ask Berliner friends to check-in was enough.

And I have been avoiding Butler’s second book for a whole five years. But the patterns that Butler envisioned when she wrote have kept working themselves out in our world, and it seems that what I need most right now is not more avoidance, but more imagination and more courage to perceive reality and other reality options that could just as easily become normal life as the mayhem we have right now.

So after I swallowed my resistance tonight, I picked The Parable of the Talents back off my shelves and packed it in my bag.

And I will finally, finally read it.

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Building from the ground up

Octavia Estelle Butler signing a copy of Fledgling after speaking and answering questions from the audience. The event was part of a promotional tour for the book.
Photo by Nikolas Coukouma (CC BY-SA-2.5)
“Build from the ground up,” she said. “Don’t try to retro-fit.”

I’d been watching too many shed design and refurbishment shows on cable, and mentioned a longstanding daydream about building a shed/reading room/art space/introvert cave to a friend who’s been a realtor for years.

“Having to run A/C through those old houses in D.C.? Changing all the windows? Oh, no. Build it right the first time.”

I love this principle. And if societies were more like sheds, this is exactly what we’d do.

The problem is that what’s considered “right” in both shed- and society-building changes with each generation. Engineering and ethical standards evolve. And in so many spheres, from technical design to human rights, yesterday’s good is barely today’s average.

Retrofitting two-hundred-year-old national value systems provokes so much backlash, so much violence. That violence isn’t just the frustration of the long-unheard, as King said of rioters during the 20th Century’s civil rights movement. The violence is also and largely the dominant culture rejecting what it perceives as outsiders attempting to change the rules under its nose.

The rules, the status quo says, are fine.

But all is not well. The insulation is shot; the windows are draughty; the AC keeps breaking down; people are killed fast and killed slow.  The root of the status quo keeps producing rotten outcomes because everything, everything, bears after its kind.

So how do we proceed? Reformists and radicals have disagreed on this in every historical movement and still do today.

Reformists imagine that less energy is needed to tweak, twist, or redirect what already exists than to create from scratch. I get it. Radicals look at the root, recognize it’s got to go, and want to dig it out: for them it seems less trouble to build from scratch than to manage the resistance of everyone who’s already attached to the present. I get it.

Our writers and prophets tell us we can build new worlds while still in the midst of old ones. It must be possible: there’s no way to live in a house we’re tearing down. Whatever the appearance, though, we have to keep molding the world we have so it can become the world we want. And whatever the outcomes―we aren’t promised anything―we have to keep pressing. Octavia Butler put it thus:

The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist.” ―Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower