what do i think of the caves of steel?
on the surface, this is yet another sherlock holmes style detective story merely set in a universe with robots, and that features a robot in the role of our dear watson. i sleuthed that out with little effort; it was elementary. clearly. no shit; really. but, this isn't of a lot of interest to me, or to history. it's really the background universe that's of some interest, and the ideas he's setting off against each other in the whodunnit, rather than the whodunnit it, itself. i'm consequently not going to concern myself much with plot. so, what is this really about?
as asimov has passed into the realm of classics departments (something i've pointed out before), his texts have picked up a lot of religious hubris, a lot of it in an apparent misreading of his work that is intended to interpret him through the filter of his much less talented and very shady contemporary, l. ron hubbard. somehow, the openly atheist asimov has become recast as a secret religionist, or even a sympathizer of radical islam. as i am going to be reclaiming asimov for the atheist left as i do this, let's get the point clear, before we start - this is a direct quote from asimov, from 1982, when he was acting president of the american humanist society:
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
that's pretty unambiguous, i'd say.
now, that doesn't mean that asimov won't explore religious ideas, usually in an attempt to discredit them, and he clearly does very frequently do so. asimov was very much in the now lost tradition of intellectual liberalism (stemming from the likes of mill) that argued that it is better to expose one's opponents than ignore them. so, just because asimov talks about religion, or gives religion a voice in his texts, doesn't mean he's secretly aligned with it, given that all evidence suggests the opposite, and in a fairly aggressive way. it would seem odd that the classics departments seem so eager to misunderstand him, apparently on purpose.
so, there are some religious references here, but the book is not about religion, and none of the organizations are really intended to represent any sort of religious body, nor does asimov really defend or attack religion in any substantive manner. the religious references are mild cultural throwaways with little real depth or meaning at all.
so, if the text is not about religion, what is it about? the answer is that the text is about communism. i told you from the start that i was going to implement a marxist reading of asimov, which i think is the most accurate one in terms of his intent. so, here we go...
let's just get the setting down, first.
so, we're many eons into the future, and the earth is being recolonized by humans that had previously colonized places outside of the solar system, many centuries after the earth had abandoned further colonizing outer space. as the humans that left the earth did not have anarchy in reproduction, they are physically and mentally more robust and have far more advanced developments in technology (including far more advanced robots); however, they have also lost the vigour created by the randomness of natural selection, and are more prone to disease. for that reason, the earth is walled off from the colony by a force field and contact between the native humans and the returning colonists is strictly minimal. on the earth, humans have mostly retreated indoors (into caves of steel) by moving into giant hive-like cities that have no contact with natural phenomena like wind, rain or sun. the people in these cities live in a techno-communist dystopia with strong orwellian undertones, and this may be one of the earliest actual articulations of such a thing. a secret society of "medievalists" opposes this, is concerned about the job-killing effects of mechanization and wants to go "back to the soil". through the course of the text, it is explained that the colonists have returned to earth to convince the earth to return to active colonization, as it is perceived that overpopulation on the earth may lead to it becoming a threat to other planets. the story ends with the colonists deciding on a plan to co-opt the medievalist movement, and convert it into a pro-colonization movement, from the inside.
this was published in 1953, which was just after 1984 (a clear influence on the youngish asimov) and in the scariest parts of the cold war, coming out of world war two.
i think it's easy enough to naively misinterpret this as being about conservative religious groups fighting against technology, but it's less clear to me how anybody could think asimov was taking the side of the conservative, primitivist medievalists, if for no other reason than that the story is clearly written from the opposing perspective. you shouldn't need to know anything about asimov to realize it's a critique of primitvism, rather than an articulation of support for it. but, even that reading is, i think, missing the real point - what asimov is really setting up here is not a conflict between pro and anti technological forces, but rather a conflict between the unorganized utopian socialism of actual workers and the vanguard force of what marx called "scientific" socialism, in the bureaucracy of government. and, if we are to adopt the sherlock holmes approach in addressing this, the clues are pretty heavy-handed. no shit. really...
asimov tends to correct marx, a little, on the topic. marx is insistent that workers will take control of the means of production, and place robots under their command; asimov, with the hindsight of the luddite movement, and the general development of the democratic party (including the "progressive" movement) in the post-reconstruction years, seems to realize that the fourierism of utopian socialism is a better reflection of worker psychology. the most recent manifestation of this is the reaction to globalization, where remnants of the left found themselves in a struggle against workers, to try to prevent them from retreating inwards, but this fundamental mistake by marx is empirically demonstrable so long as we've had any sort of machines. we don't tend to want to take control of the machines, as we should; we want to destroy them, instead. asimov's insight into human behaviour is pretty valuable, here - whether it's innate or taught, we're a pretty conservative species, socially, and we tend to collapse into the most reactionary tendencies with little prodding. asimov clearly doesn't enjoy this, but he realizes the truth of it. so, asimov doesn't imagine that the future is run by a corrupt worker's committee that went fascist at the first hint of power, so much as he imagines that the workers of the distant future are still the same old utopian socialists from the 1840s, or the 1930s, and a communist vanguard has developed out of capital to run society, instead.
remember: the idea of capitalism competing with socialism is a bourgeois strawman that is incoherent in a marxist framework, as socialism arises from capitalism in an evolutionary process, and does not abolish it in a competitive process. to a marxist, capital ought to be on the side of socialism. but, the anti-technology conservatism of primitivism and ludditism is a serious, reactionary force to be reckoned with. so, the real opponents of communism become the proletariat, itself - unless they can be co-opted to realize their irrational and reactionary tendencies.
so, his vision of new york (one of the caves of steel) is a techno-communist dystopia that seems to essentially be a parody of the kibbutz system, but it's entirely top down, and retains all kinds of remnants of hierarchy, with irony, but not dripping with it. asimov subtlety critiques this, but he seems to feel it's inevitable, and doesn't really get excited about it. the kinds of restrictions on every day life that might be viciously criticized by the anarchist orwell or by a more liberal critique of socialism are written of passively, and even approvingly, by asimov; to asimov, it is merely efficiency at work, and there's little use in irrationally resisting it. and, to some extent, he's right, even if we don't know the real limits of production on this planet, as of yet.
there are indeed discussions of malthus that seem to underlie the vision that i'll leave out of this analysis. that is ultimately what he's getting at: overpopulation. while we keep putting this off, we're in the midst of an energy crisis that we've been dealing with since the 70s (and asimov very astutely talks about running out of uranium in a distant nuclear-powered future, after we've run out of coal, which is why it's not an answer to the problems we have today) and a lot of the problems he's talking about are actually startlingly current. i've recently started eating nutritional yeast as a meat replacement (albeit mostly for health reasons), and i've written repeatedly about the need to move to hydroponics, as the soil rapidly depletes in value.
so, does that mean i'm on the side of the vanguard and opposed to the medievalists? while asimov clearly comes down on the side of embracing robots via his character of baley, which is not surprising, he doesn't clearly take a side, here. but, let's recall what he's placing in opposition to one another: this is a conflict between "utopian" and "scientific" socialism, and really about infighting on the left. it's really not any sort of broad ideological discourse that requires taking a firm position on. in the end, he presents a dialectic to resolve the conflict, by constructing an algorithm to let the vanguard work through the utopian movements via co-option. and, if it was that easy, right?
but, my answer is not really. asimov was a liberal (i keep saying that.) of the old-timey variety, which meant he was a communist in slow motion, or a communist in theory but with reservations in practice. his brand of liberalism wanted communism in the end, but didn't see a way to get there. so, he's really writing about tactics, via a narrative about robots.
i'm an anarchist, and i'm coming down on this in a very different way - while i share marx' critique of fourierism, which would have been very similar to his never written critique of progressivism, i am exceedingly distrustful of vanguards. so, i'd have to argue that his technocracy, as dystopian as it is, really isn't all that realistic; if you allow for a dictatorship of resources, you're going to end up with decadence and corruption of the worst sort, you're not going to get this ordered meritocracy that he's projecting. further, i thoroughly reject marx' strawmen arguments against proudhon and bakunin, as utopians; i think it's marx that harboured the stronger sympathies for religion, and even because he understood it as a tool of oppression, and that it is marx that comes off as more utopian. so, i'm going to fall somewhere in between here, and i'm going to suggest that asimov's dialectical solution is more than a little naive, even as i point out that it might also be trite - it might be somewhat of a sarcastic joke. there has to be a better way to place the technology into common ownership that allows for distributive justice and real democracy, which is what the left should be and is supposed to be about.
but, that's what this is - it's an allegory of the conflict between utopian and scientific socialism, and one that leaves an anarchist a little on the sidelines.
i actually kind of want to do the second part of this right away, so i'm going to just get to it and could potentially be done by mid-afternoon.
