Parables of 2020
I finished my second reading of Octavia Butler’s Parables double-volume — Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — two days before The Dark Day, September 9, 2020. I first read both volumes four or five years ago. It hit much differently this time around, felt more chilling.
I had a similar experience the second time I read The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’d initially dismissed as far-fetched. In the interim — in that case, spanning probably from 2006 about ten years to 2016 — I’d learned that, yes, misogyny really can become politicized to a degree which threatens freedom. As for the Parables, the shift between five years ago and now is that I now understand how quickly a whole society can change in response to external events. Your world one morning simply is no longer the world you knew before.
There’s a long early section of Talents that I’d love to quote in whole. It’s the very first part of Chapter 1.
I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as the “Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030 — a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if a civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs — wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.
Butler wasn’t exactly a prophet, to be clear. If anything she underestimated the effects of weather events; I also wish she hadn’t excluded Indigenous peoples and cultures, treating them as fully extinct. But she saw the world very clearly and the degree to which her President Jarrett mirrors Trump is absolutely uncanny, especially when it comes to the way their respective followers act.
By way of a serendipitous retweet from The Nap Ministry, I stumbled across a 2014 essay by adrienne maree brown that perfectly articulated what blew me away most about this double volume:
Its core concept is about living and leading in alignment with the reality of constant change, something I’m calling “emergent strategy.”
I like that term, too — emergent strategy. maree brown ended up writing a whole book with that title, which is now on my to-read list, along with Octavia’s Brood, a story collection she co-edited. I’m excited to learn more from her. I love how she explains how Butler’s ideas offered a “springboard” for her own imagination:
Her work invites us to respect the change that is outside our reach, and to shape the changes we can make. The ideas in her fiction challenge us to contend with our own choices and take responsibility for our own power.
Brilliant takeaway. It’s easy to feel despair when faced with adversity of the sort Butler writes about, not to mention being a living witness to it, but the deep sense of hope and belief in personal agency is unmistakeable.
