The Hold Hope Has on Us: Lessons from Dystopian Fiction

If you could take a pill that would remove pain and suffering, would you? What about the regulation of crime and violence? If you could control thoughts and wills to short circuit the impulse toward violence, would you take the opportunity to do so? Dystopian literature has for a hundred years capitalized on our temptation to say yes to those questions and others like them. Wildly popular, and especially growing in the young adult category, dystopian sales took a hit with the arrival of our own year of science fiction. As society as we knew it began changing moment by moment in March 2020, who wanted to crack open the pages of another odd, darkly perverse, and possibly post-apocalyptic universe where human survival depends on the wisdom, the moral uprightness, and the sacrificial generosity of others? Who wanted to read a type of story where humans are proven, again and again, to be greedy, power-hungry, short-sighted—and even as heroes, flawed? We were living our own version of that story.

And yet, dystopian literature asks us the same central questions as this year of viral scourge, racial unrest, and governmental showdown: What does the Good Life look like and how do we attain it? Why do death, destruction, loss, injustice, lies, subjugation of people groups, unequal privilege, revisionist histories, and the exercise of strength and force—essentially functions of natural selection in a natural world—shock us and cause us to rail against it? Why do we long for more? Whenever humanity is in charge, we can’t help but think the world should be better than it is.

What Is Dystopian Literature?

The opening chapters of a dystopia invite us into disturbing and bleak realities, realities formed by distortions of our own universe where our modern wishes, whims, and foibles are pushed to their logical consequences or worlds devastated by apocalyptic aftermath, where the destruction of civilization norms leaves only humanity’s worst impulses behind. No wonder that despite the huge fan base, the genre holds no appeal to some. The darkness of such societies, even the utopias first presented as full of light, holds up a mirror to our own unchecked depravity.

While dystopian themes go back at least as far as Noah’s time and the Tower of Babel, the genre in modern literature erupted in the early twentieth century following horrific, disillusioning world events such as the First World War. Such speculative fiction “satirizes utopian ideals or describes societies where negative forces have supremacy.”[1] Margaret Atwood is a master of the genre, writing many beloved tomes such as The Handmaiden, whose recent television series and 2019 sequel, The Testament, brought this 1998 classic and its exploration of the commodifying of women back into the cultural conversation. Other familiar titles are George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, P. D. James’s The Children of Men, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and of course, Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

While you might think that literature arising out of disillusionment would default to an existentialist or nihilistic world view—and to be honest, some lean more heavily in that direction than others—the genre, instead, impels the reader to adopt a more hopeful stance. Dystopian authors write about the darkness not to celebrate the darkness but to hem it in, to reveal darkness masquerading as light, and to point out the true light of human existence. Dystopian fiction calls on the reader, like the protagonist, to rebel against accepting death and the inhuman treatment of certain people as an acceptable or reasonable element in a society. These works push into moral and ethical gray areas and press for adopting a more stringent standard for the Good Life rather than throwing away all hope that the Good Life is possible.

An Anesthetized Bubble Built on Convenient Lies

Some works of dystopian fiction, such as Orwell’s 1984 and McCarthy’s The Road, begin with a premise that power and evil have conquered the world and go on to ask whether truth, love, and decency can survive in such a world. Other works present societies engineered on utopian and common-good ideals and then argue that the human engineering required to achieve such societies is faulty and that the apparent utopia is actually an anesthetized bubble community built on convenient lies. Lowry’s The Giver follows this second pattern.[2]

[Spoiler alert: while I stop short of giving away the book’s climactic moment, I discuss several of the disturbing revelations that occur as mysteries in the plot.]

Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy on the cusp of early adulthood and his community-assigned, lifelong profession, naïvely revels in the polite order of his family unit and society. With every aspect of community life subject to community rules, observation, and intrusion, he contemplates the difference between the serious rules whose infractions mean release from the community and the guiding rules that people unintentionally break in seemingly harmless ways.

When he is assigned not to a standard profession but as the community’s next Receiver of memories, his comfortable acceptance of his community’s values and truths tumbles to the ground and shatters. He reads through his assignment instructions and discovers that contrary to the extreme value of precise language hammered into him, he will now be required to lie. He begins to wonder whether his assigned parents have also been directed to lie as a part of their jobs.

The current Receiver, now titled The Giver, begins to transfer humanity’s memories to Jonas so that he will one day be able to give wise counsel to the top leaders. Jonas discovers the existence of snow, sunshine, hills, and color—all elements of the world their community had given up and removed from their memories to create a safe, orderly, uniform, and climate-controlled community where no one lacked for necessities. He also receives memories filled with the horror of war, the sting of physical pain, the despair of loneliness, and the joy of freely given love.

For a short time, despite the charade of the community crumbling around him, Jonas clings to the underlying forces that formed it: a desire for people to be free from pain, from conflict, and from uncertainty. Now that he can see colors, he asks The Giver, why couldn’t he share that gift with a failing-to-thrive newchild named Gabe by allowing him to see color, too, and choosing his toys by color instead of “Sameness.” The Giver tests him with the founders’ reasoning:

“He might make wrong choices.”

        “Oh.” Jonas was silent for a minute. “Oh, I see what you mean. It wouldn’t matter for a newchild’s toy. But later it does matter, doesn’t it? We don’t dare to let people make choices of their own.”

        “Not safe?” The Giver suggested.

        “Definitely not safe,” Jonas said with certainty. “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?

        “Or what if,” he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, “they chose their own jobs?”

        “Frightening, isn’t it?” The Giver said.

        Jonas chucked. “Very frightening. I can’t even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”

        “It’s safer.”

        “Yes,” Jonas agreed. “Much safer.” (98)

But as he receives from The Giver a human experience more painful yet also more vibrant, Jonas grows consistently more concerned with the society patterns he previously accepted. When the elderly were released with a celebration to Elsewhere, where did they go? When his father had to pick between newborn twins because their unique identicalness would upset community order, which other community got to enjoy the newchild? Jonas discovers the existence he had believed to be reality was only a sham, a shallow interpretation of the Good Life that could be. And that Good Life, for himself and others, was worth sacrificing his own safety and comfort for.

A “Babel” Society

Strikingly, even in societies where God is considered a relic from the past, the morality sought by the protagonist most closely resembles or is explained with a biblical morality than any other construct. In The Giver, the love memory that Jonas receives is a memory of Christmas morning. In The Hunger Games, though Katniss makes mistakes along the way, she eventually chooses the path of peacemaker and self-sacrifice over revenge and power. And in Neal Shusterman’s Scythe, double protagonists Citra and Rowen repeatedly choose compassion, human dignity, self-denial, and self-sacrifice over the power and success offered to them.

Scythe also explicitly shows the extent to which humans, as in the garden of Eden and at the tower of Babel, continually try to reach for godlike immortality without God. Its world is post-mortal, where technology has advanced to the point of healing nanites that can assuage pain, heal injuries, and level off emotions in every human; artificial intelligence that can regenerate any temporarily dead person unless they’ve been burned to death; and systems of social order and food production that assure no one is oppressed through poverty or scarcity. Yet, even with all of these human ills conquered, humans cannot achieve or sustain a utopia. Tellingly, they must rely on the self-actuated internet cloud who has achieved consciousness and taken over as the all-knowing, omnipresent, almost all-powerful Being called the Thunderhead, a machine that “had a purer soul than any human” (201).[3]

Even when we imagine achieving solutions to all physical human problems, we cannot imagine the Good Life without the intervention of a higher morality and a higher being. Classic dystopian fiction reflects our world so well because its major premise “is that humanity is the cause of its own nightmarish situation.”[4] The villain in Shusterman’s novel, Scythe Goddard, expresses his highest motive in language reminiscent of Lucifer:

I do not miss my so-called relationship with the Thunderhead—nor do the junior scythes I’ve come to see as disciples. The absence of the Thunderhead’s uninvited intrusions into our lives is a blessing, for it allows us to live without a safety net. Without the crutch of a higher power. I am the highest power I know, and I like it that way.

Even when we lay our “various gods to rest” (223), we crave the one who loves and forgives and saves. The one who values every human life.

That Teaches Us to Be Human

We crave the God who teaches us to be fully human and fully humane. And that craving brings me back to my original proposition. If human experience has never existed without death, destruction, loss, injustice, lies, subjugation of people groups, unequal privilege, revisionist histories, and the exercise of strength and force, why do we crave for more? Were we meant or designed for more? This longing makes no sense otherwise. On the evolutionary scale, do lions crave language? Do mussels crave fangs? But we crave justice, joy, and love. We expect to be more than we are—and maybe even more than we can be, left to ourselves.

Even in the terrifying nuclear-fallout, post-apocalyptic world of The Road, McCarthy is screaming out against the horror of a humanity that cannibalizes and avenges itself rather than reaches out in self-sacrificial love with hope for the Good Life. The entire journey asks the questions, “Who is the good guy?” and “What does the good guy do?” The man, first certain then unsure, knows only in part. The boy, first unsure and then certain, knows: the good guy hopes and cries and loves.

Story teaches us how to be human, how to understand our human experience. Without fail in dystopian works, “As protagonists awaken to the realities around them, they feel an overwhelming sense that life has lost the value that it once had in the world—respect for life has been sacrificed for comfort or security.”[5] As the reader, we are drawn to identifying with the protagonist’s gut-checking outrage at the devaluation of human life and the depth of deception or her awakening to the inhumanity of the system and her burgeoning unwillingness to continue participating. No matter how we conduct ourselves in our own experience, when we read dystopian literature, we imbibe a consciousness that rises up against inhumanity, that acts almost always for the sake of another and not just to save oneself.

To play the role of the protagonist means responding to a call to action to reveal and rebel against society’s flaws that devalue others. Dystopian literature tells us, this is a step toward the Good Life.

At one point in The Giver, Jonas confesses to his mentor, “I like the feeling of love. … I wish we still had that.” But then he adds, “Of course, … I do understand that it wouldn’t work very well. And that it’s much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live” (126).

Yes, love and truth are a dangerous way to live. And messy. And full of suffering and self-sacrifice. But as Jonas discovers, it’s also the only way to truly live.

If dystopian literature teaches us nothing else, we should grasp that the path toward utopia embraces pain, suffering, and sacrifice, and that we will never reach it until, with perfect free will, we extend a sacred dignity to every human. Dystopian literature helps us see that every government set up by humankind—even those with righteous intentions—will fail. It mocks the idea of a utopia with humanity at the helm. It suggests that we can, at best, work within these systems to defend those whose voices are silenced by those in power: the widow, the orphan, the poor, but also the minority races and classes, the unborn, the aging, the laborer, the female, the abused, the mentally or physically disabled. The list goes on and on.

In your situation this year, whether you have experienced loss, grief, anxiety, poverty, or misinformation, and felt disenfranchised, voiceless, undervalued, or hated, I pray that you can see your expectation for something better as a point of hope. Everywhere I look around me, I see people rising up to say, “This is not how our world should be. We deserve something better.” Well, if we believe these dystopia authors, we don’t deserve it, and yet better is waiting to be found. The Hope that holds onto us is the open door to the Good Life. Let us pray and fight for hope here on Earth.

---

[1] Justin Scholes and Jon Ostenson, “Understanding the Appeal of Dystopian Young Adult Fiction,” The ALAN Review 40, no. 2 (2013), para 3.

[2] Lois Lowry, The Giver (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

[3] Neal Shusterman, Scythe, Arc of Scythe 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2016).

[4] Scholes and Ostenson, “Understanding the Appeal,” para 3.

[5] Scholes and Ostenson, “Understanding the Appeal,” para 12.