“Persecution is worse than killing.” So reads the 191st verse of the second Surah of the Quran. The quote, which is part of a passage that addresses the moral rectitude of violence, is sometimes interpreted as guidance about the conditions under which self-defence ought to be permitted. The basic idea is that, in the face of sustained persecution, there is a point at which defence through violence is the morally just course of action.
A version of the quote (‘killing’ is replaced with the more evocative ‘carnage’) opens the 1987 novel Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, the first book in his Culture series that deals with the hyper-advanced society of the same name. Set against the backdrop of war between the Culture, a human-like civilisation governed by machines, and the martial, god-fearing, and alien Idirans, the book acts as an organising principle around which Banks deals with the incompatibility of the ideas and ideals held by the two groups. Superficially, the Culture’s war reminds me of Paul Verhoeven’s comments about his adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: “Everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking Bugs!”
Cosmic conflict aside, this is a book about the Culture. The wider struggle primarily exists to provide a society whose socioeconomic texture contrasts sharply with the Culture’s, well, culture. Despite its importance to the narrative, the war is presented as a sure-thing from the get-go. One of the Culture’s all-knowing machines, known as Minds, explains within the first couple of chapters that failing to recover a lost one of their number (the central premise of the story) would at worst stave off eventual victory for “somewhere between three and seven months”.
“The Culture had placed its bets, long before the war started, on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had it. That was good enough for the Culture. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies, and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of safety harnesses.”
— Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
The stakes aren’t about whether the Culture will ultimately win the day, but rather about what victory really costs. Banks wants us to consider if the Culture—with its glossy, easy utopianism and high-handed technocracy—is really the model society that it seems. That is the question raised by the book’s title, which references a line from T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land: “O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” The point is to remind us that youth, beauty, and vitality are transient, and that death is a universal and inescapable part of the human condition.
The Waste Land was written in the aftermath of the First World War, serving as a thinly veiled commentary on what Eliot saw as the widespread disintegration and disillusionment of society as the people of Europe began to reflect and rebuild. At the most basic level Banks invites us to connect its fragmented portrayal of a world losing its coherence with the AI-mediated reality of the Culture, with all of the tricky questions about autonomy, morality, and the nature of human identity that the comparison brings with it.
Eliot’s The Waste Land is a poem about loss, life, and death. It was written as a reflection on the state of 1920s European society, marked by spiritual barrenness and a profound sense of disenchantment. Made up of five sections, which span turn of the century London to ancient Carthage, the poem’s disjointed structure, shifting perspectives, and discordant voices paint a picture of a society lost in itself. It reflects a world struggling to find meaning after upheaval, drawing into focus the trauma of a generation whose faith in god, king, and country had been stretched to breaking point. It was, as it turned out, neither sweet nor fitting to die for one’s country.
Water is the central motif of The Waste Land. It symbolises life and death, despair and hope, progress and conservation. The absence of water, or the presence of stagnant water, throughout the poem foregrounds what Eliot saw as the spiritual and moral drought of the time. Some connect the call of thunder towards the end of the poem with the possibility of life, renewal, and purification, with the much-anticipated arrival of rain evoking cycles of decay and regeneration.
This is the context in which Phlebas the Phoenician is introduced in the fourth (and shortest) section. Phlebas is a Carthaginian sailor and trader whose death stands in for the fleeting nature of life and the inevitable passage of time. Banks’ decision to title his novel after Phlebas is a contemplation on the cyclical nature of civilisation and the role of individuals within these grand narratives. As he explained: “I guess this approach [emphasising the limits of individual power] has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF’s [speculative fiction] 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know.”
At their core, both are stories about the search for meaning within a web of moral, material, and cultural forces that set the scope for the types of lives we can lead. Just as Eliot grapples with the disillusionment of a world emerging from the ashes of war, so does Banks project these anxieties into a future dominated by space travel, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
The Unreal City
An island of consistency in the poem’s sea of vignettes, the Unreal City is first introduced to describe London’s financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank in the 1920s. The Unreal City appears twice again throughout The Waste Land: once amidst allusions to banking and commerce in the third section, and again as the poem draws to a close and the heavens begin to open.
The scene of the Unreal City, which depicts crowds walking over London Bridge, is borrowed from the vision of Paris described in Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem Les Sept Vieillards. Baudelaire’s poem, amongst other things, includes a group of three-legged men walking around in circles: a fitting description of the Culture’s foe, the Idirans, who are described as a tripedal race whose society is based on orderly repetition.
The passage also recalls Dante Alighieri's Inferno, one part of the epic poem The Divine Comedy. The sentence "I had not thought death had undone so many" is a direct allusion to Dante's description of the souls of the damned in hell, which is a translation of the line "non avrei mai creduto, che tanta morte n’avesse disfatta." Eliot uses the phrase to draw a parallel between the tormented souls Dante encounters in Inferno and the listless crowd crossing London Bridge in the modern, industrial world. It aims to emphasise a vein of despair bubbling under the surface of early twentieth century England, which (perhaps somewhat bluntly) is meant to recall the misery of the souls in Dante’s hell.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street
— The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
For Banks, the Culture is the Unreal City. It is a post-scarcity, energy-abundant, space-faring society run by advanced machines that have eliminated disease, ageing, danger, hunger, and want. Most of its citizens live lives devoted to creative self-expression, extreme body modification, and endless hedonistic pleasures enabled by implanted drug glands. These genetic alterations secrete, on command, compounds that alter moods and perceptions directly into the person's bloodstream. Like the drug soma from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction. Culture inhabitants, we are told, have also altered themselves to enhance sexual pleasure.
In between socialising and getting high on command, they fill their years drifting from one hobbyist game and virtual reality to the next, with the exception of some who enlist in a division of the Culture known as ‘Contact’ concerned with discovering, cataloguing, and interacting with other civilisations. For the Minds who govern, wage war, and make decisions—though people are able to vote on issues via referenda—the drive to discover is the Culture’s raison d'être. That also holds true for the people who live in the Culture. Banks says that “the humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful.”
The duty of the Contact division and its agents, the main tenet of the Culture’s secular evangelism (which is sort of like the liberalising impulse at the core of Fukuyama’s The End of History on steroids) is the ‘benign’ transformation of foreign cultures in its image. Of course, the logic behind expansion is self-referential: it happens because the Culture is strong; and the Culture is strong because it happens. Just as a virus replicates without regard for the host, the growth of the Culture takes no cues from the wants, needs, hopes, or fears of the citizens who live within fluid borders subject to a constant process of disintegration and reconstitution.
Like Eliot’s urbanites, the Culture’s citizens contend with lives rich in stimulation but—according to their critics—lacking in the stuff that matters. One of those detractors is Banks’ protagonist, the humanoid Horza, who brusquely asks a Culture agent who works for the Contact division: “Did life in your great utopia really get so boring that you needed a war?”
He wonders whether, having solved the problems that united societies in shared struggle, the Culture has dissolved the bonds and beliefs that moored identity. With no resource scarce enough to fight over, no work necessary for survival, and unlimited freedom to transform personal roles and social relationships, not much remains for the citizens of the Culture to define duty, character, or their place in the universe.
It is the old idea that utopia cannot exist by definition, because even a post-scarcity society would come with something missing: the inexorable drive for meaning that makes humans human. That contradiction is plain in Thomas More’s 1516 book that coined the term, ‘utopia’ literally meaning ‘not-place’ in Greek.
The Culture is a civilisation that is both post-material and hyper-flexible. Its residents can modify identities, change sex, carve out new roles, and enter new virtual realities at will. Banks says that this in itself is a positive force for equality: when the essence of an individual is so fluid, people may naturally drift towards those states that are most beneficial within society. The thinking here is that these changes should create upward pressure to eliminate differences in the way in which races and genders are treated.
Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and symbiotic with - language itself).
— Iain M. Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture
This sense of impermanence colours Eliot’s Unreal City passage, with ghostlike commuters reflecting a population numbed and disconnected, struggling to come to terms with the shattering of their belief structures. The loss of a sense of belonging in the wake of the rapid transformation of a society coming down from the high of total war feeds the portrayal of city inhabitants as isolated individuals buffeted by forces beyond understanding or control.
It is wrong, though, to view the post-war as solely about a society coming to terms with the state’s capacity for warmaking. The horrors of the trenches notwithstanding, the First World War represented a copernican moment: society was reorganised around the wholesale mobilisation of populations designed to bolster the capacity of the state to fight. Food was rationed, women entered the workforce en masse to create munitions, men were sent overseas to fight, and children stepped into the holes their parents left behind.
At the end of it, adoption of new technologies in areas like radio communication (such as the widespread use of crystal set radios) and medical technology (including the use of antiseptics and advancements in surgical techniques) collided with emerging labour patterns and the acceleration of urbanisation to signal the beginning of a new way of living. In the UK, the war culminated with the extension of the franchise in 1918 (to men over 21 and women over 30) and the dissolution of the worst elements of the class barriers that had previously defined British society.
For the Culture, familial structures and personal relationships exhibit a diverse range of forms. The most typical arrangement involves multi-generational groups loosely connected by family ties, cohabiting in shared or neighbouring homes. Children in this setting typically have a mother, possibly a father, but siblings are less common, replaced by a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins. In instances of poor parenting, which includes educational neglect, it is deemed appropriate for those in the child's close community, with the assistance of the Minds, to intervene in a child's upbringing.
It is a society that represents a logical end-point for the forces of technologisation and liberalisation. Through advanced industry and science, the Culture provides abundant material comforts that have successfully eliminated scarcity, discomfort, and threat to life itself. Most of its inhabitants live solely for pleasure, disconnected from a sense of struggle (or satisfaction) in a world where the vast majority of roles—with the exception of those engaged with the Contact section—have vanished.
The Culture represents what Nietzsche called ‘thoughtless ingenuity’ or the idea that technological progress comes at the expense of humanity’s ability to fulfil its most basic psychological needs. By this account, abundance leads to hedonism, and hedonism shears away the foundations undergirding moral codes and social duties. And with no material needs, physical threat, nor social obligation, little remains to delineate between virtue and vice. In the end, that’s why Horza calls the Culture ‘boring’ — not merely as a result of the lack of danger but because of the absence of the reference points that define moral and immoral. As Banks explains: “The Culture is quite self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything matters, and nothing does.”
Banks’ own criticisms have been picked up and expanded by readers, with Gavin Leech's Against the Culture listing a number of arguments including that the Culture is insufficiently post-human, that it represents a form of ‘reverse alignment’ in which human preferences are subordinate to the preferences of machines, that the Culture fails to adequately provide a sense of meaning for its inhabitants, and that it exists primarily for the purposes of self-replication.
Leech also argues that “Banks was incapable of writing a pure utopia” due to his politics. While I agree with the Nagelian sentiment (after all, there is no such thing as the view from nowhere), this type of thinking skirts the idea that utopia is a contradiction in terms. I say that not because I’m pessimistic about technology’s ability to improve society, but rather because no change in material circumstances will ever be capable of fully reconciling the human condition. Of course, things can and should get better, but a perfect world is not the same as a great one.
Turn the wheel and look to windward
The Carthaginian sailor, Phlebas, is meant to remind us that there can be no life without death. In our world, that fact holds true for individuals just as it does for civilisations. In the world of the Culture, it does not. For its citizens, life tends to last around 400 years. It begins with normal ageing until the mid-twenties, after which the rate at which a person grows old tends to dramatically slow. People can, though, choose a few different fates. They can opt to have their personality transcribed into an AI, decide to go into storage to be awoken at some point in the future, or, you know, just resolve to live forever.
Apparently, that doesn’t tend to happen often because death is generally accepted as natural, right, and even polite. As Banks put it: “death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life.”
But that philosophy doesn’t seem to apply to the Culture writ large. Having reached about as close to utopia as possible, the Culture is a civilisation that doesn’t really have anywhere else to go. That it is ruled by machines doesn’t just compound the problem, it is the problem. That’s why, in Consider Phlebas, the protagonist Horza argues that the Culture represents the subordination of biological life to synthetic intelligence. It is true that Culture is able to grow, change, and evolve in just about any physical capacity one can imagine. Biological transformations, the production of ships and materiel on the grandest of scales, and even the transportation of its population in what are essentially mobile planets is not a problem. Yet, at the same time, radical political or social change is not possible for a civilisation running on superintelligent autopilot. It is the old paradox from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo stretched out over the scope of a galaxy: “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.”
It is, after all, those “who turn the wheel and look to windward” that Eliot implores to consider Phlebas. For the inhabitants of the Culture, the problem is that they live in a society that prevents them from moving forward, from growing, from adventuring, from making mistakes, and from—if they so choose—running out of time altogether. Of course, there is no prevention by force (nothing is compulsory in the Culture!) but rather through a form of influence produced by a post-material society in which comfort comes with a cost.
I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life - boring, old-fashioned, biological life; smelly, fallible, and short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end. The trouble is that to take your mind off it you try to drag everyone else down there with you. The worst thing that could happen to the galaxy would be if the Culture wins this war.
— Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
To round things out, I want to return to the quote that Banks uses to open Consider Phlebas: “Persecution is worse than killing.” Banks was an avowed atheist, and was clearly not centering the Idirans as a model society, but we should remember that the justification for war works just as well for both civilisations. Theist or atheist, evangelism is still evangelism.
Ultimately, the Culture doesn’t aim to simply conquer territory, but to undermine—and, eventually, transform—the belief structures on which rival civilisations are based. As described in an excellent essay by Joseph Heath, "Each side posed an existential threat to the other, not in the sense that it threatened physical annihilation, but because its victory would have undermined the belief that gave the other side its sense of meaningfulness or purpose in life.” And while I don’t think there’s much meaning to be had for the people of the Culture, I do think that the expansionary impulse allows them to pretend otherwise.
That’s why the Culture, the logical end-point for liberal-secular societies, goes to war: it has no choice. In a society without scarcity, where technology provides the means to reconfigure social and physical identity, and where decisions are delegated to machines that are intellectually superior to those in their custody, there is only one thing left to do.
Go forth and multiply.
Harry, this is really a feast for the mind. A superb reading.
It is interesting how liberal constructions of identity and family emerge from a techno-dominant framework in this text. How the author both affirms those constructions yet is distancing himself from the overall framework. The result is a very complicated mirroring process between textual and actual world. So much to think about here...
And, yes, war is a recreational activity. That point hits home very hard in your conclusion.
Nice work!