Atheism, Anarchism and Relativism in
Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea.
More and less than what you might think.
Burton Weltman
Introduction: Defining Atheism, Anarchism and Relativism.
Atheist, anarchist, ethical relativist. Not what you might expect as the resume of a popular author of children’s books. But that was Ursula Le Guin.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was one of the most popular and influential authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and remains so today. Mainly writing science fiction for adults and fantasy stories for adolescents, genres that were generally considered shallow, escapist and mere entertainment, Le Guin elevated these genres to literary status with entertaining but serious works that provoke readers, young and old, to think critically about themselves and their societies.
Le Guin had an unconventional agenda for an author of popular children’s books. She was an avowed atheist, anarchist and relativist, and her religious, political and ethical views are embedded in her stories. Le Guin took advantage of the imaginative leeway given to science fiction and fantasy writers in order to propose a variety of “what if” scenarios intended to get at the roots of what it means to be human and what might be better ways for us to live. Implicitly but pervasively, Le Guin’s works incorporate a radical social and intellectual agenda. Subversive but sensible and quietly convincing, her enduring popularity and influence testify to the success of her efforts.
Le Guin did not conform to the conventional image of a radical. She was a humanist at heart and she couched her views in ways that made sense to readers, very different from the nonsense that is usually attributed to atheists, anarchists and relativists. Her views reflected the original definitions, and the literal meanings, of those ideas. And she harked back to the promising ways that the terms were originally intended to be understood by their proponents, as opposed to the ominous meanings the words have since acquired from their opponents. These original definitions can be summarized as follows:
Atheism: a belief system in which the idea of a deity is considered irrelevant, as opposed to theism in which a deity is affirmed, and as opposed to anti-theism in which the possibility of a deity is denied and which has become the conventional definition of “atheism.”
Anarchism: a social system based on relative equality and voluntary cooperation among people, as opposed to statism which is based on hierarchy and a coercive central government, and as opposed to libertarianism which is an anti-social system based on self-centered individualism and which has become the conventional interpretation of “anarchism.”
Relativism: a philosophy in which the validity of something is based on the extent to which it measures up to a recognized standard, as opposed to absolutism in which things are judged definitively right or wrong, and as opposed to nihilism in which all things are subjective and anything goes and which has become the conventional interpretation of “relativism.”
This essay focuses on A Wizard of Earthsea, the first in Le Guin’s series of Earthsea books. Intended primarily for adolescents, it is one of Le Guin’s most popular fantasy stories. And although she never explicitly discusses atheism, anarchism or relativism in the book, I think the story implicitly promotes these ideas as the book’s underlying message, albeit with meanings different than the way the terms are conventionally understood. The result is an unconventional message that, nonetheless, comes across as common sense.
The Setting: A Magical World.
It’s a magical world and it is baffling. Some people can seemingly control this or that part of it but there seems to be no one in charge of the whole. Things happen for no apparent reason and people come and go, who knows why or where or how. People use languages that you don’t understand and speak about things you don’t comprehend. Some can make things appear and disappear at will. Others are so powerful that they merely have to say a word and a thing is done. Still others have fears you cannot understand but that make you anxious. Things sometimes work as you expect and sometimes do not, and for reasons that are beyond you. Apparently dumb creatures and inanimate objects often seem to be alive and able choose to do or not do what they will. And everyone tells you to be careful, not to reach too far for fear of failing and falling.
If this seems like the setting for a fantasy story, it is. It is essentially the setting of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel A Wizard of Earthsea (hereafter Wizard). But is it also for real? First published in 1968, Wizard is set in a world full of wizards, dragons, demons, sentient rocks, and living natural forces, all of whom do strange and wonderous things. It is a fantastic setting but it is also intended, I think, as an abstract of the real world as it is experienced by most people, particularly children. Much as we try to tame the world through our thoughts and deeds, it is still, in Le Guin’s telling, a strange and untamed place at bottom. And we feel it as such. She has, however, things to tell us as to how we might cope with it.
The world according to Le Guin is ultimately incomprehensible, but not entirely unfathomable. And to the extent the world can be fathomed and possibly tamed, the principles of atheism, anarchism and relativism seem to be key. These theories and their practices are, I think, an underlying meaning and message of Wizard. They form the parameters of people’s lives in the book, informing their beliefs and unbeliefs, regardless of what they have been taught or say they believe. And, Le Guin seems to be saying that this goes for us in the real world as it does for characters in her fantasy universe. Le Guin’s message seems to be that recognizing these principles and working within their parameters is a key to coping successfully with life.
The Reality of Fantasy: Believe it or not.
Le Guin was one of the most heralded American authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A writer of science fiction and fantasy, categories of fiction that are generally derided as shallow escapism, she elevated those genres to the status of serious, thoughtful and thought-provoking literature. Although Le Guin won virtually every fantasy and science fiction award available, she always said that she did not want to be known as a science fiction or fantasy writer, but simply as a writer, and hopefully a good one. And she was. Michel Chabon called her “The greatest American writer of her generation,” regardless of genre. Her popularity among readers and influence among other writers was widespread during her life and continues to the present day.[1]
Le Guin was a prolific author. She published some twenty novels, one hundred short stories, thirteen children’s books, six books of poetry and four collections of essays over a sixty-year period starting in the late 1950’s. Wizard was the first of a series of six Earthsea fantasy books intended primarily for adolescents. Le Guin also published eight Hainish Cycle science fiction books intended primarily for adults. But her readership overlapped all age groups and extended far beyond devotees of science fiction and fantasy.
Le Guin was a serious writer who wrote about serious issues, albeit in a somewhat fantastical garb. Unlike many practitioners of science fiction and fantasy, she did not write about fairy tale queens or space cowboys. Nor did she extoll the status quo. Science fiction and fantasy have historically had a generally conservative bias, glorifying uniquely strong heroes who dominated their enemies, predominated over everyone else, and saved the status quo. Not Le Guin
Science fiction and fantasy have also generally featured fantastic contrivances and magical miracles. While Le Guin’s stories include these things, culture was her metier, and she was essentially an author of social science fiction and anthropological fantasy. “What if’s” about society were her interest. It was an interest and orientation that she picked up from her parents.
Le Guin was the daughter of two prominent anthropologists, Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, who helped change the face of social science in the early twentieth century. Her father was largely responsible for a shift in the field of anthropology away from the racist and ethnocentric theories that were predominant during the nineteenth century. Those theories had proclaimed modern Western society as the highest form of civilization, toward which all of history had been tending, and against which all other cultures should be measured to their disadvantage.
The Kroebers promoted a multicultural perspective that respected various forms of civilization, both past and present, as valuable human creations to be considered on their own terms, and not denigrated because they differed from modern Western norms. Le Guin reflected the interests and perspectives of her parents in her own writings, which are largely anthropological in form and multicultural in content. Her stories present a variety of “what-if” social and psychological situations, and they invariably promote multicultural messages.
Le Guin’s stories can tell readers a lot about what they feel is real, even though they don’t believe the stories are real. Science fiction and fantasy can resonate with our feelings about things, even if our reason tells us otherwise. I believe that is one reason why science fiction and fantasy stories are popular. We can feel them without having to strain our brains figuring them out. And by dressing real life up in fantastical costume, Le Guin can get away with incorporating such unconventional themes as atheism, anarchism and relativism into her books.
Le Guin’s novel Wizard is a fantasy story that resonates with our feelings about things. Operating largely on a subliminal level, and weaving in themes of atheism, anarchism and relativism, her story reinforces some of our feelings while redirecting others. So that while our rational selves tell us that the magical setting is unreal and the story is only make-believe, we nonetheless feel that the story represents in disguised form the way the world really is. And that makes for the influence of Le Guin’s atheism, anarchism and relativism.
The Story: The Coming of Age of a Wizard.
A Wizard of Earthsea is set in a fictional archipelago called Earthsea. Earthsea is a loose conglomeration of islands with no central government either for the confederation or on most of the individual islands. The story centers on a boy from the island of Gont, which is home to a small, loosely governed, essentially anarchic village of peasant farmers, goatherds and craftsmen. The boy, whose birth-name is Duny and nickname is Sparrowhawk, was essentially an orphan, his mother having died shortly after his birth and his father ignoring him and letting him run free. As a result, Duny grew up wild, unfriended, and lonely. Until he showed signs of magical power.[2]
Gont was the birthplace of many wizards and Duny demonstrated some minor magical powers as a young boy. A turning point in Duny’s life came when he saved his village from a murderous band of barbarians called the Kargads by conjuring a great fog in which the invaders got lost. The Kargads were “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns,” unlike the dark-skinned peaceful Gonians.
The Kargads were also very religious and dictatorially governed by priests and noblemen, very much unlike the unreligious and unregimented Gontians. Having no central government or army, the Gontians were defenseless against the Kargads until Duny did his magic and they were saved. The boy, therefrom, went in one magical stroke from the status of unwanted juvenile delinquent to the stature of local hero.[3]
Recognizing Duny’s great natural power, the chief wizard on the island, named Ogion, took the boy under his wing and told him two most important things. First, he told Duny that everyone and everything has a true name and that knowing someone’s or something’s true name gives one magical power over that person or thing. Almost all magic comes from knowing the names of people and things. Ogion then told Duny that Duny’s true name was Ged, something he must keep secret from all but his most trusted comrades.[4]
The second thing Ogion told the boy was that natural power as great as Ged’s must not go untamed, uncontrolled and untrained. So, Ogion took it upon himself to begin Ged’s education. The first and foremost lesson Ogion taught Ged was the need for respect for the universe and restraint with respect to his magical powers. Ged must learn to understand “the Balance and the Pattern [of the universe] which the true wizard knows and serves, and which keeps him from using his spells unless real need demands.” For every action, there is inevitably a reaction, Ogion preached, and every person, but especially a person as powerful as a wizard, should understand the potential for unintended and undesirable consequences before taking an action. “Before you speak or do, you must know the price that is to pay,” Ogion concluded.[5]
After some initial training, Ogion sent Ged off to a wizard school on the island of Roke, the most magical place in the archipelago. There, Ged learned much practical and powerful magic but also was repeatedly catechized in the necessity for humility in the face of the universe and restraint in the use of his powers. Students were warned that “You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand until you know what good and evil will follow that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium.” And you must try not to upset that balance. In turn, everything in the universe – animal, vegetable and mineral – has a being that you must respect.[6]
Ged’s instructors were most insistent that people, and especially wizards, must not act carelessly or with selfish and prideful motives. This is a lesson that Ged found very hard to learn. Surely, he said to himself, since he was a wizard, he must be “powerful enough to do what he pleased and balance the world as seemed best to him.” Ged insisted to himself that even if he occasionally made a mess of things, he would be able to fix things afterwards. Thinking and acting on this proudful basis led to Ged’s tragic mistake.[7]
Ged did wonderfully well at the school but, nonetheless, suffered from feelings of inferiority because unlike most of the other students who came to the school from wealthy and powerful families, Ged was from a poor non-magical family on a poor obscure island. His feelings of inferiority led him to recurring surges of boastful behavior.[8]
In the course of a bragging duel with another student, Ged tried to resurrect a dead woman. This was something his mentor Ogion had specifically warned him against as having potentially awful unintended consequences. Ged’s effort failed disastrously and resulted in “a ripping open of the fabric of the world,” thereby allowing a shadow demon to escape into the living world from the world of the dead. Ged had disrupted the balance of the universe. He had unleashed a demon that could not only destroy him but possibly the whole world.[9]
The rest of the story describes Ged’s efforts to defeat the shadow and restore balance to the world, in the course of which he learns lessons of humility and restraint that his mentors had been trying to teach him.
With the shadow in pursuit, Ged fled Roke and wandered around the archipelago, taking a series of humble wizarding posts. As the shadow kept following him, he kept moving around, trying to keep one step ahead of it. In the course of this rambling, Ged confirmed his great powers in killing several dragons that were threatening a small island and getting the chief dragon to make a binding promise to never again threaten anywhere in the archipelago. It was an extraordinary feat that no wizard had achieved before and that had been thought impossible.[10]
Ged concluded from this adventure that humility can lead to great deeds and that you can learn from everyone and everything. “From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years, he strove to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”[11]
Ged also determined to stop running from the shadow and to confront it instead. No sooner, however, did he make this resolve and turn toward the shadow than the shadow started running away from him. Ged sailed to the ends of the earth with a fellow wizard name Vetch, chasing the shadow and trying to learn its name so that he could tame it. “I am bound to the foul thing,” he told Vetch, “and will be so forever unless I can learn the word that masters it: its name.”[12]
In the end, Ged confronted the shadow and grasped hold of it, vowing to die in its grasp if need be in order to rid the world of it. In so doing, he discovered that the shadow’s name was his own name, Ged, and that the shadow was merely his other self, his dark side. In grasping the shadow and saying his name, “Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.” Ged was saved and so was the world. The narrator concludes that “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death and with his own name, had made himself whole.”[13]
The story has a semi-happy ending with a chastened Ged in some ways wiser but in some ways weaker. He never completely recovers from the effort of conquering himself and his shadow. He has, however, learned lessons of humility and solidarity with all things in the universe. That “All power is one in source and end.” That nature is all and we are all aspects of nature. That “My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars.” [14]
Although some important conflicts have been resolved in Ged’s life and in the universe, the struggle between the dark forces and the light, and the effort to keep the universe in balance, are still ongoing, to be described in the later Earthsea books. And it is a struggle in which the principles and practices of atheism, anarchism and relativism seem to be keys to preserving the balance and making progress in the universe.
Atheism: It isn’t what most people think.
Le Guin was an avowed atheist and her atheism is reflected in Wizard.[15] But with a twist.
The twist is that Le Guin’s atheism reflected the original and literal meaning of the word, which is not the way most people think of it. When you put an “a” in front of a word, it signifies indifference to what the word represents, not opposition to it. Apolitical, for example, means indifference to politics, not opposition to politics, which would be anti-political. Asocial means indifference to society, not opposition to society, which would be anti-social.
And, so, atheism literally means indifference to the idea of God, not rejection of the idea of God, which would be anti-theism. Unfortunately for the logic of our language and our ideas about religion, religious true believers, who have no doubt that God exists and no doubts about what it is God wants us to do, have hijacked the word “atheism” and warped it in the public mind to mean anti-theism, as though anyone who is indifferent to God is actually opposed to God.
Atheists may, in fact, feel that there is something that in some way is responsible for creating and sustaining the universe. Something like the Force in the Star Wars sagas. We humans seem to be hard-wired into finding causes for things. We want to know the why of things. If the universe exists, then it is hard for us not to feel that something caused it and keeps it going, even if there is no evidence or reason to believe it, and even if it then begs the question of what caused that something. Our confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that the universe will not at any moment dissolve into nothingness, seemingly attests to that feeling.
But as soon as you try to put that feeling into words and make an idea or belief out of it, atheists claim that you stumble into nonsense. You come up with formulations that cannot be reasoned with and stories that can be sustained only with blind faith. And when different groups of people have blind faith in competing nonsensical views of something like God, you end up with a recipe for irreconcilable conflicts. Better to keep the idea of God out of the conversation.
The word “atheism” was coined during the sixteenth century in the midst of the bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. It was coined by people who themselves believed in God but who concluded that it was not right, righteous or necessary for them to try to impose their set of beliefs on others who believed otherwise. They wanted to put an end to the religious wars, and they did not think it was necessary for everyone to believe the same religious ideas in order to live together peacefully.
The original atheists did not intend to deny the existence of God. They just wanted to take God out of social life and save God from being the source of social strife. In their minds, atheism was effectively a way to honor Him by keeping people from squabbling over Him and killing each other in His name. What they essentially wanted was to separate Church and State as the founding American fathers eventually tried to do with the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The intent of the atheists was to leave God to people’s personal and private lives. If some people got it wrong and there was a God who resented it, then they would go to Hell when they died. But that was their choice. Atheism meant that whatever you believed or disbelieved about God was irrelevant to me, and we should focus on cooperatively living together.
Atheism was a sensible idea that was too reasonable to gain much traction at that time. Not surprisingly, Protestants and Catholics, who had been slaughtering each other in the name of their respective versions of God, temporarily backed off from their mutual animosity in order to join forces in massacring those who proposed to end the violence in the form of atheism. And they quickly warped “atheism” to mean anti-theism, which is how the word is commonly misused to the present day.
In Wizard, unsympathetic characters are portrayed as religious fanatics, superstitious fetishists, and aggressors against peaceful people. Sympathetic characters are atheists in the sense that they feel that there is something in the universe, some force and sense of order that keeps things going and that must be respected if things aren’t going to fall apart. But it is a natural order – magic included – rather than a supernatural thing or God. The balance in Le Guin’s universe is, thus, an example of e pluribus unum, unity out of diversity and diversity out of unity.
This diversity includes non-human beings and Wizard reflects a respect for the capabilities and sensibilities of non-human beings which requires humility from humans. Reflecting recent developments in science, humans in Le Guin’s universe aren’t so superior to other creatures as we used to think. The universe is full of creatures who have all sorts of natural powers, which includes magic in Wizard. The goal of life is to use your powers in a way that respects others and reinforces the balance of the universe. It is a balance that includes death, dark shadows and evil things to balance and accentuate life, light and the good.
This lesson is exemplified in the oldest creation song in the archipelago in Wizard which includes the verse “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life.”[16]
In sum, Ged learns that having great power means also accepting great responsibility and, especially, exercising great restraint. With these lessons comes a deep humility that makes him fit to live in the anarchic society of the archipelago.
Anarchism: It isn’t what most people fear.
Le Guin was a self-styled anarchist and her anarchist views are reflected in Wizard[17] But, as with her atheism, she was an anarchist with a twist.
In conventional parlance, anarchism is scorned as nonsense at best and mayhem at worst. Anarchists are disdained as either utopians who foolishly believe in the perfectibility of humans and society, or extreme individualists who selfishly believe in everyone for themselves, or angry nihilists who believe in blowing up the existing social order. Le Guin was none of these things. She believed that, with due respect to all who came before us and regard for all who will come after us, we should try to make a better world, one that is based on the original principles and literal meaning of anarchism.
Just as the word “atheism” consists of “theism” plus the prefix “a,” the word “anarchy” is a combination of “archy” plus “a,” with an “n” thrown in to make it sound OK. “Archy” means government and the suffix can be attached to many different prefixes to make words that reflect different approaches to government. Monarchy, for example, adding the prefix “mon,” meaning one, to “archy” means rule by one person. Patriarchy, adding the prefix for father to “archy,” means rule by fathers or, more generally, men. Matriarchy means, in turn, rule by mothers or women. Anarchy is a combination of “a” or “an,” meaning indifference or irrelevance, and “archy,” with a combined meaning of indifference to government and the irrelevance of government.
The word “anarchism” apparently made its first appearance in English during the sixteenth century during the bloody religious wars and dynastic struggles that characterized that age. This was the era in which modern nation states developed and in which European society transitioned from a relatively decentralized feudal system of nobles to a system of absolute monarchs.
Reflecting and reinforcing this transition, kings claimed to be the defenders of the true religion, which could be either Catholicism or Protestantism, depending on the country. Taking on this holy role ostensibly gave them God’s sanction for exercising dictatorial powers. It also exacerbated the religious wars, with everyone fighting for their version of God’s will.
Just as the theory of atheism developed out of a desire to end the religious conflicts of that era, the theory of anarchism developed out of a desire to end the dynastic conflicts of nobles against kings and kings against each other, and to rein in the brutal dictatorships. The word “anarchism” was derived from the Latin “anarchia” which was itself derived from the Greek “anarcho,” and it originally meant a society without a chief or ruler.
The word “anarchism” was initially a neutral term that did not imply disorder and did not suggest approval or disapproval. Nonetheless, for obvious reasons, nobles, kings and their respective supporters, even as they fought each other, came universally to condemn the theory and practice of anarchy. As a result of their joint efforts, the term acquired the negative connotations that it conventionally has today. But not without complication and contradiction.
Most dictionaries have a primary and a secondary definition for anarchism, and they aren’t consistent with each other.[18] The primary definition invariably runs something like “A state of disorder due to the absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.” The operative terms in this definition are disorder and the opposition to any controls. Chaos is the implication, and the word has negative connotations.
The secondary definition of anarchism usually runs something like “A society based on voluntary cooperation and without political institutions or hierarchical government.” The operative terms in this definition are the existence of cooperation and the absence of dominance over people. There is no implication of disorder, let alone chaos, and no connotation of a complete absence of controls. To the contrary, this definition could be expressed as a mirror image of the first definition, something like “A state of order due to the absence or nonrecognition of authority.” In this definition, the word has positive connotations.
The first definition, the negative one, reflects the conventional view of anarchism. The second definition, the more positive one, is closer to the original idea of anarchism and close to the view reflected in Le Guin’s books. Anarchists, in this view, eschew government but not in favor of a free-for-all chaotic individualism. The word “government” is of medieval origin and stems from a French word that is itself derived from a Latin and Greek term referencing a ship captain. As such, it originally refers to someone, a governor, who directs and controls a society and who has arbitrary discretion to order people around. This is what anarchists opposed.
And this is essentially the meaning of an axiom often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least.” Jefferson was not opposed to people coming together to solve problems but he preferred that they do it cooperatively rather than dictatorially. He was not opposed to public works or programs. He merely preferred public enterprises to be conducted as much as feasible at the local level, where people could operate them on a face-to-face cooperative basis. He distrusted governors but not government.
Many eighteenth-century European-American settlements actually operated on what could be considered a semi-anarchist basis, with people sharing the land and their produce, and with most community decisions made in common council. And most towns had large public sectors, from mills to toll roads, that were collectively controlled via town councils. This is essentially the way most communities in Wizard seem to operate. Anarchism does not mean laissez-faire free enterprise or libertarian individualism or maximizing the private sector and minimizing the public sector. It means, to the contrary, maximizing the public sector but though bottom-up cooperation rather than top-down dictation.
Although cooperation is a key to anarchism, the system does not require people to be good. The story in Wizard is, for example, mainly about Ged coming to accept his dark side, which is perfectly consistent with anarchism. Anarchism merely requires people to be mostly sensible. The idea is that working together on common projects brings out the positive in people and helps keep the negative in check. And where that is not enough, anarchists are not necessarily against rules, just against the rule of some people over others. Not perfect but good enough.
Anarchism is easier to imagine and implement in small-scale, face-to-face communities with a low level of technology, such as existed in early European settlements in America and in Le Guin’s fantasy stories. But Le Guin doesn’t leave it at that, which would essentially be an admission of the irrelevance of anarchism given our highly complex and large-scale societies. In her science fiction stories, Le Guin imagines complex anarchic societies full of technology.
In The Dispossessed, for example, she imagines a complex high-tech society which is set on the moon. Computers are a key to its success – they enable the administration of things as opposed to the domination over people – and it works. It is not perfect. Complications and conflicts regularly arise, some of which threaten the chaos that opponents of anarchism predict. But the characters struggle on. Le Guin is not a utopian. But she shows how things could work with a will and a way, and a common sense of common decency.
Relativism: It isn’t relative.
Le Guin was a professed cultural relativist. As noted above, it is an idea she picked up from her father, Alfred Kroeber, who was one of the first anthropologists to promote cultural relativism. Le Guin adopted it but, as with her atheism and anarchism, she was a relativist with a twist.
Relativism is a theory that is generally defined in contrast with absolutism. Relativism is conventionally defined as “The doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.”[19] The implication is that anything can be considered true or ethical depending on the society in which you live. In this conventional view, relativists ostensibly believe there is no universal truth, good or evil, and there is no stable benchmark with which to evaluate potential truths, good and evil.
By contrast, absolutism is generally defined as “the acceptance of or belief in absolute principles in political, philosophical, ethical or theological matters.” [20] Absolutists believe in absolute truth and falsity, and in moral absolutes. Right is right and wrong is wrong no matter what your culture. And relativists, they say, are just plain wrong. Either there has to be a set of truths that are certain or there is nothing but chaos.
Absolutists and relativists have been battling each other over epistemology and ethics since at least the ancient Greeks, as exemplified by the absolutist Plato and the relativist Protagoras. Protagoras was a Sophist to whom is attributed the axiom that “Man is the measure of all things.” Relativists cite this axiom in support of their position, but absolutists cite this same axiom against them. At the heart of the conflict between absolutists and relativists is the different ways in which they interpret this axiom. The axiom also exemplifies a way in which relativists and absolutists often talk past each other because they start with different definitions of key terms.
To absolutists, the axiom means that every individual man and every individual culture can decide for himself/itself what is true and what is good, and there is no common ground. The axiom ostensibly exemplifies a hardcore relativism, i.e., a skepticism in which nothing is true or false, a nihilism in which nothing is right or wrong, and a solipsism in which no one can really know anyone else. To absolutists, relativism is the epistemological and ethical complement to an atheism that is anti-theist and an anarchism that is pure chaos.
To most relativists, the axiom has a very different meaning. It is a statement of humanism that says merely that epistemological and ethical truths are made by humans. Truth, they say, does not come from God or some Platonic universe of ideals, but from people struggling to define themselves as humans and work together. And people do this by measuring themselves against others, defining themselves through comparing and contrasting themselves with others, and looking for ways to bridge the gaps and break down the barriers between them. To relativists, absolutist theories and practices comprise one of the biggest barriers to peaceful coexistence and to cooperation among different people and cultures.
Absolutists have largely won the definitional battle and theirs has become the conventional definition of relativism. In this view, relativism is equated with subjectivism – everyone has their own code of right and wrong – and cynicism – there is no legitimate way to judge right from wrong – and even nihilism – there is no right and wrong. In the conventional view, cultural relativism means that every culture has its own ethical standards and someone from one culture cannot judge the ethics or behavior of people from another. For that reason, cultural relativists supposedly cannot condemn other cultures’ practices of torture, racism, sexism and other things that mainstream Americans rightly reject.
This is not what Kroeber and Le Guin had in mind. Nor most other self-styled relativists.
By definition, in order for something to be relative to something else, there has to be a third thing that they have in common which makes for the relation between them. In physics, the theory of relativity posits the speed of light as a limit which is used to describe the relativity of moving things. Likewise, in the theory of cultural relativity, two cultures that are relative to each other have to have some cultural thing in common to identify their relativity. For Kroeber and Le Guin, that common benchmark is human nature and a common sense of decency.
Kroeber recognized the boundaries and blinders that made it difficult for people from one culture to understand and empathize with those from another. But he emphasized that intercultural understanding was doable because at bottom all people seem to share a common sense of decency and fairness. People are naturally empathetic. In fact, they know themselves largely through understanding others, and comparing and contrasting themselves with others. His work with Ishi, the last of the Yahi, exemplifies his views.
In 1911, Kroeber was working at the University of California, Berkeley when he was introduced to a man who called himself Ishi and who was the last surviving member of his Native-American Yahi community. The rest of the Yahis had either been killed by white people or had died of white people’s diseases, to which Ishi also eventually succumbed. The Yahis had existed for many eons as a very small low technology community akin to what we consider Stone Age societies to have been like, until they had been annihilated as vermin by white people moving West in the late 1800’s.
When Kroeber came upon him, Ishi was a middle-aged man barely surviving by foraging in the back woods of northern California. He had no inkling of modern society. He had never seen an automobile, an airplane, a multi-story building, a group of more than fifty people at a time, or any type of mechanical or electrical contrivance. And Kroeber and his colleagues who were taking care of Ishi spoke a language he could not understand and they could not understand his. Saved by white people whose fellows had slaughtered his family and friends, and taken into a totally alien society, Ishi could have been overwhelmed by culture shock. But he wasn’t.
Ishi kept his cool and acclimated well to his new situation. While he mourned the loss of his family and his former way of life Ishi, according to Kroeber, accepted his new circumstances and “was content that it should be so, participating as fully as he could in the new life.” Moden technology amused Ishi but did not faze him, and he quickly learned to use what was available to him. Extolling Ishi’s adaptability. Kroeber exclaimed that “Ishi was the last wild Indian in North America, a man of Stone Age culture subjected for the first time when he was past middle age to twentieth-century culture.” Ishi was, nonetheless, able to adapt to his new circumstances without losing his former identity or Yahi culture.[21]
Kroeber particularly emphasized Ishi’s ability to share in the common humanity of the strange people with whom he had come to live. Ishi’s adaptability was a testament to Kroeber’s theories of multicultural relativism. The cultural differences and barriers in this case were about as extreme as you could imagine, but they were not impenetrable on either Ishi’s side or Kroeber’s.[22] These are the sort of situations that Le Guin wrote about in her stories.
Almost all of Le Guin’s stories are about people trying to make contact with different sorts of beings, not all of them human, or adapt to different cultures, not all of them humane. In Wizard, for example, Ged has to deal with inhumane humans like the Kargads and with inhumane dragons. He deals with the Kargads by using what is effectively a Judo move in which the Kargads destroyed themselves by stumbling wildly and furiously around in the fog that Ged had conjured. He deals with the dragons, whose language and ways of thinking are virtually impenetrable to humans, by empathetically working out a peace agreement with them.
What the Kroebers found in their anthropological work, and Le Guin portrayed in her stories, was that cultural barriers could be overcome with empathy and common human decency. What was needed was greater recognition and respect for something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would want to be treated if you were in their situation, a version of which exists in virtually every culture. The Golden Rule is a relativistic but realistic benchmark for humane behavior. It is not a prescriptive absolute that tells you specifically what you must do in any given situation. It is a pragmatic starting point for evaluating whether what you are doing is the right thing.
The Golden Rule is a relativistic test that can be applied in many different ways depending on the culture and the situation. And well-intentioned people can disagree as to its application. But it gives you a reasonable guideline and basis for discussion as to what should be done. It is an answer to the question “Relative to what?” It appeals to something that seems to be universal in humans – empathy – and that is what makes relativism reasonable. Empathy is what enables us to understand others and reason with them. And since we know ourselves only through knowing and caring for others, it is arguably what defines us as humans no matter our culture.
Atheism, anarchism and relativism in their original forms, and as Le Guin seems to promote them, are both more and less than most people think. More sensible, less radical, more feasible, less scary. As portrayed in Wizard and her other stories, Le Guin’s atheism, anarchism and relativism come across as an attractive form of humanism. These theories and their practices, in their original forms, can also be seen as a variation of the well-nigh universal Golden Rule.
The fact that such unconventional underlying messages in Le Guin’s books have been taken in stride for so long by so many readers, both young and old, is a testament to her skills as a writer but maybe also to the attraction of the ideas she promoted. It may also be an indication of directions in which our culture might be heading.
BW 4/23
[1] Johathan Herman. “Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018): Author, Activist, Amateur Scholar of Religion.” Religious Studies News. 10/16/18. Mark Woods. “Ursula Le Guin: What the atheist writer taught this Christian.” Christian Today. 1/24/18. Rick de Yangpert. “Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea taught Pagan path to many.” The Wild Hunt. 2/4/18. Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Ursula K. Le Guin.” Freedom from Religion Foundation. Accessed 3/20/23.
[2]Ursula K. Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea. Boston: Clarion Books, P.1.
[3] Ibid. Pp. 7,.9, 14
[4] Ibid. P. 15.
[5] Ibid. Pp. 5, 19. 24
[6] Ibid. P. 25.
[7] Ibid. Pp. 47-48.
[8] Ibid. P. .66.
[9] Ibid. Pp. 67-68.
[10] Ibid. Pp.84-101.
[11] Ibid. P.90.
[12] Ibid. P. 173.
[13] Ibid. Pp 194, 196
[14] Ibid. P.178
[15] Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Ursula K. Le Guin.” Freedom from Religion Foundation. Accessed 3/20/23.
[16] Ursula K Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea. Boston: Clarion Books. P. 196.
[17] Lewis Call. “Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.” SubStance #113. Vol 26, No 2, 2007. Victor Urbanowicz.“Personal and Political in The Dispossessed.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol 5, #15, Part 2, July 1978.
[18] “Anarchism.” Google’s English Dictionary.
[19] Relativism. Oxford Languages Dictionary.
[20] Absolutism. Oxford Languages Dictionary.
[21] Theodora Kroeber. Ishi in Two Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. P.9.
[22] Ibid. P..250.
historyaschoice 