Thoughts on Frank Herbert’s Dune, Politics, and Religion

Thoughts on Frank Herbert’s Dune, Politics, and Religion

AFBR

I have not posted in a while, as my day job in April and May is brutal. But I am still reading thorough the Bible and am now at Acts. When I finish the protestant RSV, I plan to move to the Apocrypha and start the Quran. Essays to follow, I hope.

Along the way, this Former Believer reads many other things and often thinks/views through the lens of my own agnostic positions around religion, politics, and social sensibilities. A work I want to briefly explore here is the classic science fiction book, Dune, by Frank Herbert. Chiefly, because this first epic novel in the Dune series is replete with questions around faith, fanaticism, political tensions, drug culture, and many other like subjects of interest.

I had originally read the first three Dune books when I was somewhere between 18 and 20 years old – a good 25 or 30 years ago. My lens was then a burgeoning mishmash of conservative evangelical faith with a touch of literary and philosophical curiosity. So much went by me; so much missed even as I was captured by the depth and shadows of the powerful story elements. Then, I had no real mature way to examine what I read. I was swimming in a thick sea of images, metaphors, and allusions, just keeping my head above water.

Now, in my 50s, and, well, I hope, wiser in my assessments and interpretations of what and how I read and reread, after just finish the book again, I see new layers and appreciate the genius of Herbert’s work.

First, there is the obvious theme of religious faith and prophesy to consider. When I was much younger and much more Christian theologically, I saw any religious theme as an echo of the ‘Truth’ of the Biblical stories – or at least the specific interpretations I was taught. As my religious peers and I read C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Madeleine L'Engle, we’d mine their main images and ideas for deeper truths that could help us understand the Christian story. The same with more secular authors, as the assumption from several influential teachers was that ‘all truth is God’s truth’ and that the Holy Spirit could speak even via a non-believer. Even as the non-believers did not know it, they were showing the world aspects of the True faith – if broken and incomplete. That way, we believers could appropriate the best secular ideas for ourselves. Like, in a way, the Christian tradition rewrites the Hebrew faith for its own theology.

This position led to at least two misunderstandings and misinterpretations, especially when reading the secular or non-Christian writers. First, forcing Dune to ‘fit’ the assumed True Christian religious framework ignored the deeper, and critical, aspects of Herbert’s story for both Christian and other faith traditions. Herbert borrows largely from a mixture of traditions, especially Islamic terms, and making the Christian faith the chief marker for interpretation misses much of that.

Second, when I saw the world and all its literature through the looking glass of my conservative faith, I missed one deeply critical and important idea Herbert was expounding upon – namely, that even the most metaphysical aspects of any faith are the direct result of scientific, political, and human motives, all working together for honest and selfish, just and unjust reasons. Often in Dune, as in our world, religious reasons are found and forced to explain metaphysical claims. But in both the book and our reality, God (or a god) has little to do with it all. And this is, in part and in my opinion, a marker of this writer’s genius.

Let me give a few examples from Dune of what I mean before I end here:

-       Paul’s special purpose vs the Bene Gesserit setting this all up. Paul senses a mission to both lead and to thwart a jihad that may end humanity. But this vision is contrasted with the reality that the secret society, the Bene Gesserit, has planted prophesy about Paul’s role on the planet Dune for political reasons.

-       The faith of the Freemen seen as tribal and manipulated by very human forces. The Freemen of Dune are deeply religious personally and culturally. But many of their religious ‘truths’ were planted years before by the BG to manipulate, not only the Freemen, but many other worlds and cultures. What some see as holy truths are merely wholly invented.

-       The seeing of the future as drug-induced – like the space travel of the Guild – and not a product of an all-knowing God, who is (sort of) assumed, but completely absent. What seems very metaphysical to a young, evangelical – like so much of the Christian Bible – has an explanation rooted in science, drugs (I am looking at you, John of Revelation), political power, and natural forces. The future is vague and shadowy, like so much of assumed prophesy over the history of human experience.

-       The Orange Catholic Bible – a mix of most earthy faiths, but in the book is tweaked for political reasons over many centuries – not divinely inspired, but left for cultures to use and quote from as they see fit. The powerful in Dune have reduced all religions to one universal objective: “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.” Not a bad mantra, but hardly needing a perfect God to write. Even with a faith in an all-loving God, humans will fight to the death over what that means.

-       POINT: God and faith is wallpaper for what’s really at work in Dune. The human struggles for power and knowledge, justice and love, drive and define religion. A question this book seems to pose: Will we outgrow the need for this wallpaper or will it ever be a necessary evil we will always need to struggle with – as a tool, a club, a prod, or, like the drug-spice of the planet – and with apologies to Nietzsche – an opiate of control? Maybe the subsequent books in this series will provide an answer.