Necessity

[jsburbidge]

This book is, first, an enormous sleight of hand. The first few sentences set the reader up for a plot - the interaction of Platonic and space going humans, a reverse First Contact story, and all that we get, on-page, is a bit if radio conversation. (We end up more or less knowing how it all comes out, but the closest we get to the other humans is seeing them from a spaceport window.)

To be fair, it's pretty clear that the humans on Plato will be at least as alien to the rest of humanity as the aliens are. They have no real grasp of money and none at all of profit.

No, the book turns out to be about just what the title says - Necessity, Ananke.

If the first book can be considered to be centred on Athene via the playing out of her experiment with the city, ending with the Last Debate, and the second book to be centred on Apollo, then this book, I think, is centred on Zeus, for all of his appearing in only one scene.

Walton's Zeus is a layering of a personality derived from Homer over a deus philosophorum. In fact, Walton's entire model of the gods is an interesting blend of Plato and old Homeric-level polytheism. She entirely avoids the extended hierarchies of being of Neoplatonism: there are no extended emanations to separate a god who is the ultimate God from a creator. Zeus, like the Christian God, fills both roles (in fact, it's clear that he is the Christian God the Father as well, for a somewhat hyper-Arian reading of Christianity). Her gods are very non-Platonic - emotional, quarrelsome, changeable (again with the possible exception of Zeus). In a thoroughly Homeric way, the boundaries between Zeus and shadowy ancient powers like Necessity are blurred. They are, in fact, the Homeric Gods, except for Zeus, slotted into a world where the Forms have some sort status but are not anything like what Plato thought they were.

Further, in postulating a model where there is no unicity in the good, Walton departs from Aristotelianism as well as Platonism: of all the writers in that mode of which I know she is reminiscent only of Dante (Gilson's Dante the Philosopher points out that Dante, in both the De Monarchia and the Commedia, asserts a duality of good ends, a secular and a sacred, corresponding to the Empire and the Church).

The climax of the book sheds a most un-mythological light over the underpinnings of the universe: instead of Chaos and Old Night swirling around the ramparts, the preface to time turns out to be the ground of being / Necessity / in some sense Zeus.

There are, of course, other layers: a human (well, mainly human) love story, a beginning of a thoroughly Platonic city beyond anything seen so far, the hinted beginning of a whole new story regarding the general emancipation of the workers, and the promised but half averted inverse first contact story.
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It's worthwhile thinking for a bit about the foundation of the narrative of all three books, taken together: that it would be possible to create a civilization, a culture, with essentially Platonic values, even if there were ways in which the attempt fell short (or succeeded only when the citizens are not humans but AIs). After all, though the first book ends with a massive shake-up of the experiment, by the end of the third it seems to have settled down into a reasonably stable state, surprising (at least) Sokrates.

It's worthwhile because western society has generally embarked on an analogous experiment.

Up until relatively recently it was not only taken for granted that a great deal of antisocial and violent behaviour was simply a part of society (largely tied to young males) but society also generally accepted the principles of the tribe or the small village - treating as untrustworthy, immoral or simply "other" anyone born 20 miles away. This was just "human nature".

One classic line is "boys will be boys", and this applied to a whole range of things from property damage, to harassing lower-status people ("bullying", in a childhood context), to sexual assault. Think of the tolerance extended to fraternity misbehaviours.

We have, by and large, stopped doing that, although there are hold-outs. When it happens in any visible way, there's an uproar.

Much of the enterprise of the 21st Century is tied up with a rejection of sexism, racism, and interpersonal violence. Schools in my jurisdiction spend an immense amount of time imprinting an anti-bullying, anti-discrimination worldview on their charges.

We are, in effect, betting a lot on the probability that the human psyche is reprogrammable, maybe not to Wilson/Leary levels, but pretty thoroughly.

In that light, Walton's depiction of a society where it has been broadly possible to imprint a Platonic mold onto it's members can be seen as a parallel to our own society.