Rare News Desk
On Monday, the Guardian published an amazing exercise in self-parody in the form of writer Ewan Morrison wringing his digital hands over the lessons within Young Adult dystopian novels including The Hunger Games and Divergent series, and the newly adapted to film ‘90s teen classic The Giver.
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Dystopias have been the latest YA fiction craze ever since The Hunger Games became the new Harry Potter, and this troubles Morrison greatly. These books, all of which involve rebellion against a totalitarian state, are it seems the last gasp of the fear of communism and central planning. Frustratingly, and because of all our secret right-wing yearnings, in none of these books is the villain big business or other left-acceptable evils. No, it’s the state who troubles our heroines and heroes.
Is this where the left is now, rejecting any fiction that features a dangerous government as the foe? How embarrassing.
Socialist George Orwell wrote two of the best condemnations of the Soviet Union and totalitarianism in general with 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell was mistaken in some of his beliefs, but he was brave enough to critique the people who had taken those ideals and — in his mind — twisted them into an oppressive horror.
Is the left that Morrison subscribes to too terrified to admit that the 20th century was full of collectivist state errors which cost scores of millions of lives? Is The Hunger Games references to animal poaching and trading in black markets the “submission” to capitalism that Morrison fears? Horrors upon horrors.
It’s easy to mock, but Morrison’s fear that stories of individuals striving for freedom are mere propaganda for the kiddies is deeply disturbing. Thirty-six and a half million copies of The Hunger Games series have been sold, and that is fantastic. The books have only so-so writing quality, but they encourage bravery, kindness, and keeping principles in the face of terrible situations.
Furthermore, they show that even wars against tyrants will lead to ruin, death, and the survivors will never be the same. Boldest of all — and here must be the real problem for Morrison — the final Hunger Games book suggests that after all that, a new government may be just as bad as the original. In fact, central power might be the real problem.
Morrison has different ideas about proper fictional enemies. He mourns the decline of left-wing cyberpunk, and sci-fi that feared a future that showed corporate control over everything. Yes, he approvingly mentions Margaret Atwood, whose brilliant Handmaid’s Tale is a story of American turning into a theocracy. The Handmaid’s Tale is in many ways a left feminist nightmare, but the hypocritical, all-controlling state makes the story accessible to anyone fearful of power.
And that is what Morrison doesn’t understand, that good fiction is good. And since his collectivist ideas have enough of a toehold in colleges and academia, his ideological privilege means he need not ever question them as long as he chooses his company carefully.
Liberals are the eternally pessimistic utopians. They believe that people need to be forced to help one another, and that left to their own devices they will go feral. Yet, they seem to believe in the possibility of violence-free, gun-free, all things equal utopias if only we pass the right sort of laws, and bring in a higher caliber leader. Though they believe in the possibility of that perfect, “no place,” provided that the right sorts of leaders were put in charge. They don’t usually refuse to admit that governments can go bad and did throughout the 20th century.
Even if I weren’t a radical libertarian, I would like to think I would be able to recognize the inherent, pleasing drama of scrappy band vs. The Man. Morrison’s complaining piece invites the question, who does he root for in Star Wars? (I’m assuming it’s not the anti-government Rebel Alliance.) Big versus little, individuals versus the group, is basic conflict and therefore makes for a good story.
If you object to that on some kind of warped principle, you miss out on a large chunk of fiction. And if you prefer utopians that never turn dystopian, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 socialist nationalist Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is both ideologically horrifying, and a terrific sleep aid.
At the end of the day, The Hunger Games can be what you make of it. The left can point to heroine Katniss Everdeen’s poverty in future-Appalachia and make it a teaching moment about income inequality. On the other hand, libertarian lessons about black markets, power, and war can indeed be extrapolated from the story of Katniss’s fight against the cruel Capitol.
And The Giver, even if it does feel uncomfortably familiar to the Marxist-sympathetic, is an exaggeration of the reality that governments have time and again attempted to socially engineer human beings into different animals. The purest, cruelest states such as North Korea turn parents against children, and punish whole families if one person commits an ideological crime.
Morrison, by expressing such horror that The Giver’s anti-family world now counts as a nightmare, sounds like a Marxist parody. He writes these YA books are “a huge indictment of the history of the left and a promotion of the right.”
One could spend endless numbers of words describing the real world utopians that turned into nightmares for people the world over. Or, one could simply point out that the most compelling villains always began as good, and then became corrupted, or power-mad.
Morrison rails and rails. And then his ending paragraph — perhaps intended to be vaguely flippant, but it doesn’t read that way — suggests his comrade parents find different entertainment for their kids because of these books’ anti-progressive messages. (Also capitalism is totally about to die.)
Or, parents could encourage their kids to read, and for younger ones to discuss books with them afterward. And older readers could simply take these YA books as the fiction they are, and then develop their left, right, moderate, or libertarian ideologies from ten thousand other sources.
That Morrison would prefer children to stay away from these dystopian novels entirely proves his authoritarian tendencies run deep. They also suggest that he fears these books have something better within their pages than he and his dour collectivism can offer.
