Jerusalem Demsas: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think she has greater hope for it, but she’s telling us, “Unless you come up with something new, this is what you’re going to get.” It’s quite horrible. The Terran, I think, ambassador in the work — he praises the non-communal society, Urras, as the best of all the worlds that exist. Earth, or Terra, has also been destroyed, something that sounds a lot like climate change, so the only place that works at all is the one that’s a consumer society, has a lot of gender inequality, rampant income inequality, and a lot of war. I think part of Le Guin’s message, which was very 1974 — maybe more true than people realize today — is you only get a shot at the good parts of the non-communal society by tolerating this pretty high risk of war, that it keeps things dynamic in some way. I don’t know. The fact that she gives . . . The protagonist is from the anarchist world, and he is the one who has the major scientific breakthrough that everyone is trying to get their hands on. The fact that he hasn’t returned to his home planet at the end — we don’t know if he actually lands and is safe there — I think is a clearer message of how . . . I feel like a lot of the words that she uses to describe the capitalist society are quite disdainful. Not that she thinks somehow that her original world is perfect, but it’s pretty clear to me that she doesn’t think it’s worth it. She doesn’t think it’s worth it, the pain, the suffering, everything that’s hidden there. Even the property owner who becomes friends with our protagonist is pretty upset with his life there. At the same time, there’s this larger point that she’s making, which is that you shouldn’t expect any society — even one that claims to be utopian, even one that has a lot of your shared ideals — to be satisfactory at any point. I think it’s pretty clear that she has, as you said, greater hope for the anarchist planet. I view Shevek, the protagonist, the scientist, as pretty selfish. He’s quite a bit like Gulliver. What he really wants to do is travel. One theme of this novel is that there are some things you can only learn by traveling, and he learns those things. He wants to learn them. He leaves his family. The very last sentences of the novel make it clear he comes back empty-handed. For all the talk about the scientific breakthrough, I think he never has anything. There’s never a part of the novel where it’s useful or even revealed or published. When you read throughout how the breakthrough is discussed, it sounds like nonsense. I think there’s a bit of underlying, maybe satire. Does he have anything anyway?…

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