Le Guin and god: quarreling with the one, critiquing pure reason

Extrapolation, Winter, 2006 by Richard D. Erlich

With Ike Rose in the significantly named 1991 story, "Newton's Sleep," we get a central character Le Guin describes as "a truly rational man who denies the existence of the irrational, which is to say, a true believer who can't see how and why the true belief isn't working" (FIS 11). Ike is Jewish but secular; what belief he has--in Reason--is given an objective correlative in SPES: a transcendent space habitat at a Lagrangian point above the Earth. (17) Ike must learn to deal with a reality that includes repossession of the satellite by Earth, or, perhaps more correctly stated, the fact that we humans need to drop a "smugly antiseptic" vision of space travel and remember that we "have to take our dirt with us wherever we go. We are dirt. We are Earth," or so Le Guin insists to end her Introduction to Fisherman of the Inland Sea.

That insistence on our dirt-iness began at least with Eye of the Heron and continues in "Paradises Lost," a new story ending the 2002 collection The Birthday of the World; it is a theme that will bring us back to the topic of religion as such--and to Le Guin's basic disagreements with Christianity.

"Paradises Lost" is a generation-starship story, and, as in such stories generally, life on the starship eventually gets a little weird. Some of the people on the ship seek their bliss rather more than Joseph Campbell might approve of--the satiric technique of reductio ad finem and/or absurdum--believing they have found bliss in the voyage of the significantly named starship Discovery. (18) When they approach New Earth, many on the Discovery, the "angels," don't want to land. Others do want to land, and this simple conflict sets up a highly philosophical story.

The male lead in "Paradises" tells us that "[...] in the archangelic teachings, 'outside' is equated with danger, physical and spiritual--sin, evil--and with death. Nothing else. There is nothing good outside the ship. Inside is positive, outside negative. Pure dualism" (325; see Rochelle 83). Inside the Discovery is their world, civilization and Nature: nature inside a human construct, inside culture--Nature under human control (BotW 277). The "angels" want to send the Discovery on and on in a straight-line of living Bliss, not stop and colonize a New Earth, nor return to Old Earth. "Gradually the choices narrowed, became absolute. Go out into the dark [outside the ship] and be left there, or continue on the bright and endless voyage. The unknown, or the known. Risk, or safety. Exile, or home" (BotW 345).

Worse, is a kind of separation that involves a denial of connection with history and futurity, and with mortality. The High Priest Tuhulme in the Yomesh Canon tells us the darkness respected by the older Way of the Handdarata as "Source and End" does not exist: In Meshe "There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time.[...] There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one." And then in a formulation that will disturb people who know their Justinian and Dr. Goebbels, "One center, one seeing, one law, one light. Look now into the Eye of Meshe!" (LHD 164; ch. 12). (19) The angels in a story some thirty-three years later are handled more gently than the Yomeshta, and "A Pragmatist," representing conservatives, is given his due (346); still we can be very sure the high-ranking angel Patel Inbliss has important insights but is wrong-headed in his conclusions: