A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks

Personally I think "Look to Windward" is probably the best general introduction to the culture.

Speaking of trailers - every time I hear Coldplay's "Paradise" a trailer to Consider Phlebas plays in my head!

In a democratic society, the laws are, broadly speaking, an expression of the voice of the people. The laws of my country of residence require that I give a significant amount of my income, plus 25% VAT on anything I buy. That's a societal choice, and the popular consensus is that it is a fine system, and the lesser inequality and better social services resulting from it make it entirely worth it.

Another most sacred American Libertarian tenet is the notion of personal responsibility and credit, that each of us in a free market is solely and entirely to blame for our poverty and deserve all the profit and wealth we obtain, that in a free society society is not responsible for our personal condition nor us for society's. How does the importance you give to "when in-grained into society" in your straw-man setup jive with that?

Perhaps the important distinction you missed is "American Libertarianism", as opposed to libertarianism in general, which runs the gamut from Ayn Randian worship of selfishness, laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights to libertarian socialism and Libertarian Marxism.

Some people will thrive no matter what: centuries of warlordism, robber barons, gangsterism and piracy prove that.

But most people who make a lot of money -- whether from a well-paid job, running a successful business, or a fruitful investment portfolio -- can only do so, and can only enjoy the benefits of doing so, with the support of the trappings of a modern civilised society. E.g.:

- a settled body of law, with a justice system to enforce it

- a more or less ordered and peaceful society

- a more or less stable currency

- civil infrastructure, including transport, utilities and communications

- public health (private medicine will only go so far in protecting the rich in a society rife with infection; plus employees and customers dying of preventable conditions is bad for business)

- public education (all but the most menial jobs require at least basic literacy and numeracy, and most require significantly more)

- some kind of safety net for the poor (impoverished people make poor customers, and angry young impoverished people can get a bit handy at the barricades)

These cost money.

The rich get to be rich, and to enjoy their riches, because of the taxes they (and everyone else) pay, not in spite of them.

I think the problem, and this is just a personal theory, is that many libertarian ideas need to come in duplets or triplets to be effective. Take carbon emissions for a quick (and not completely accurate) example. I've had conversations with libertarians that have argued that carbon emissions should not be fined, capped, traded, or in any way regulated. Basically, when the people care enough about the environment, they will vote effectively with their dollars.

Crazily enough, this could actually work, but it needs help. Either carbon emissions would have to be valued (so that companies had to pay to emit carbon, most likely via a tax), or all products would be required to state how much carbon was emitted in that item's production, as well as educated as to what that meant, so they could make an informed decision.

In reality, the first idea will be picked up and heavily trumpeted by the energy industry (no government taxation!), but the follow up ideas will be completely ignored or torpedoed. As a result, you end up with the type of modern American Libertarianism you describe. The more this sort of selective trumpeting occurs, the more self-describing libertarians will self-select membership, and the more radical the group may become.

That nolan chart is a great example. When I first saw it, it was and still is a great way of introducing people to various types of political theories. But the example you linked is horrendous. The questions underneath the economic freedom section are incredibly misleading, and the result of decades of selective trumpeting. They are NOT the same questions I was shown when I was originally shown the nolan chart all those years ago.

Citation needed

Firstly, as below, [citation needed]. Secondly, for God's sakes, the Culture is not merely post-scarcity, it is actually post-human. If they spot a moral flaw in their own nature that makes a happy, fulfilled society impossible, they can engineer it away with ease. They may have done so, in the youth of their species, when they were as stupid and naive as evolution could make them.

I disagree. There are quite a few looks at the lives of ordinary Culture citizens, and they indicate pretty strongly that this dilemma (if it indeed still exists) is resolved by individualizing lifestyles to the point where "do I have more than my neighbours?" becomes a meaningless question. And to me this does not seem far-fetched or something "humanity is not and never has been" at all; right now, "keeping up with the Joneses" is already a concept of diminishing importance as people find other ways to feel accomplished.

I don't really feel his books feature much sadism or horror, it's more a playful disregard for current mores, or a recasting of current taboos in a future where those wouldn't exist - taboos are remarkably fluid. The novels certainly are not intended as hyper-realism, realistic social models or character studies, nor do I think Banks would see them as such. I disagree that his writing is brilliant stylistically, it's interesting and playful, but often pretty lacklustre in terms of craft (plot, character development, language). The ideas he likes to explore I find intriguing however.

It is true that Banks never really explored how Culture society would function, or really how a post-scarcity model would work - all that is just assumed to exist and function well in the books, however I think he was more interested in exploring the accommodation of humans to intelligent machines, the questions raised by extremely powerful and developed civilisations clashing with civilisations which are not as developed, the contradiction of an ostensibly peace-loving yet heavily militarised culture, and the implications of transcending normal human life. These are questions we will have to address at some point even in our narrow world (we haven't yet), and I find it interesting to read his take on them.

So I think while you're right in some sense that the Culture is implausible (or at least not made plausible), the focus is not on the Culture simply because it's a backdrop, and gets him to the place where he can talk about these interesting questions.

As for your alleged empirical fact -- the implication is that almost no-one is wealthy, which is either manifestly untrue or your definition of happiness isn't useful.

I'll also post a limited defense of why most of Culture novels take place outside the Culture (note that first third of "Player of Games" is a pretty big exception to this): to paraphrase Banks quoting Niven, "stories about happy people are boring".

On the other hand, is the hypersadism needed? The levels are simply numbing, beyond gratuitous, so a few books on it simply fails to shock. On the other hand, Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" featured a much smaller amount of violence (as done by Emergents) it did happen to be realistic and managed to create great amount of empathy (at several points, I was close to simply putting the book down due to the bleak and hopeless situation of some of the characters) with the characters (who -- both humans and aliens -- seemed a lot more alien than culture's non-Homo Sapiens Pan-Humans). Of course comparing "hard SF" to Banks is quite a stretch, but the "non-alien aliens" and "hypersadism" aspects subtracted rather than added to Banks.

On the other hand, Banks' manages to do what very few can: the characters are great, multidimensional, and show development; the big ideas are big, and yet story-telling and plot aren't sacrificed. There are very few other SF writers who are able to do this (Gene Wolfe, Stan Robinson come to mind).

I'm going to stay out of the discussion of libertarianism (there's a corollary to Godwin's law: unless a certain German leader -- not Frederich the Great or Angela Merkel -- is mentioned first, any online conversation will ultimately end up becoming a debate about libertarianism), but I'll leave these few links out there:

http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/15/the-endless-lives-of-i... (a positive libertarian review of Banks' work, which acknowledges Banks' explicit rejection of libertarianism)

http://a.b.i-b.tripod.com/html/faq_text.htm -- see the question about "Top Ten" SF novels according to Banks, the first is quite explicitly libertarian "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (there's debate as to whether Heinlein himself was a libertarian, but it's undeniable that at least some of his works are libertarian fiction; OTOH "Beyond the Horizon" is quite Culture-ish in terms of describing a post-scarcity society).

There's also "The Dispossesed" amongst those books which describes an non-property owning anarchist society ( I haven't read it, although it's on my list). For an example of very well written anarcho-capitalist SF, I strongly recommend Vinge's The Peace War, The Ungoverned, and Marooned in Realtime. The Ungoverned goes as far as describe private ownership of nuclear weapons, and yet the novels/novellas avoid the "shill political screed" feel some of the other explicitly "libertarian SF" works have.

It's so nice when somebody takes a tiny, contingent finding from some small-n social science studies and blows it up into an incontrovertible framing for the entire world. Nice in that I can quickly ignore pretty much anything they say from that point forward.