Knowing What Will Follow
Ursula Le Guin's warnings about magic would serve us well in our relationship with technology
“But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power... It must follow knowledge, and serve need.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
The Earthsea novels pivot dramatically at their midpoint. The original trilogy, published between 1968 and 1972 concern the wizard Ged (known as Sparrowhawk) and his journey from student, to wizard, to archmage. The later trilogy, published between 1990 and 2001, address Le Guin’s concerns that the earlier books brushed over the women of Earthsea too lightly. Le Guin later lamented that her early work was dominated by the pragmatic requirement at that time to write as “a woman pretending to think like a man”.
The second trilogy explores radically different themes, switching their point of view from the powerful - the wizards of Roke and the throne of Havnor - to that of the powerless. There’s a danger to acknowledging the two halves of the series: it may seem to undermine the merit of the earlier books, since the later novels expose an imbalance of power at work in Earthsea. This would be a great shame, as the philosophical underpinnings of the original trilogy have a great deal to say about power, knowledge, and wisdom.
The opening quote is from the first book in the series, and lays out a key premise driving both the allegory and the drama of the story. All the wizards of Earthsea are taught to take great care exercising their magical powers. The thematic focus of the first novel is the harm Ged unleashes by using his arcane talents unwisely, and the journey he undertakes to attempt to restore that which he threw out of balance. This focus on balance and equilibrium may bring to mind the Taoist philosophers, and this is not a coincidence: Le Guin had not only read but also translated Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Yet this wisdom can cross between worlds, and similar thoughts made it into the Christian and Islamic traditions via the philosophy of Aristotle.
The truth within this idea is one we can apply for ourselves, since it is not specific to magic (whatever you take that to mean), and applies to all our means for action. Indeed, what we call technology is our magic, and thus when we seek to wield our tools - and even more when we create new ones! - we would be wise to ask what good or evil will follow. The trouble is, there is no School of Wizardry on Roke island where our engineers can be sent to learn how to wield such power wisely…
Le Guin’s Master Hand is one of the nine Masters of Roke, teaching the introductory magical art of illusion and the basics of Changing. It is he who instructs his pupils with the warning above: do not disrupt the equilibrium of existence until you know what will follow from your act. If we accept the wisdom of this principle, we must reject enslaving of the sciences to commercial technology because we can never know the consequences of new tools. This would not entail rejecting all technology, but merely our default policy of ‘making everything and hoping that it works out’. We have reached a bizarre and dangerous place epitomised by the idea we will solve those problems inherent in our careless use of plastics by creating a fungus that eats plastic. I wonder what we will end up creating to eat the fungus...?
The advice that LeGuin provides through her fictional teacher of magic is that the exercise of power “must follow knowledge, and serve need.” This is a far cry from how we approach technology! All new technical insight is immediately converted into new tools, the need for which is then invented in order to profit from the invention. What a different world we all might live in if we sought first to maintain the equilibrium of life, and undertook to alter nothing until we truly knew what good or evil might follow.
As I see it, the chief problem comes about when the technology no longer serves us, but we come to serve the technology. I think things spin out of balance when this sort of Frankenstein situation takes place. The technology gets out of hand when we don't ensure that its function is to serve. This new rental-system that has emerged is a case in point. We no longer own our musical recordings or any software: these things own us, and we must pay a regular piece of our salaries to have the privilege of access. The absurdity of this rental culture extends to our bank accounts, which we must rent as a money resort for our dollars. . . yet without banking service, one cannot receive a paycheque, buy or rent a flat. Ergo the bank account no longer serves us; we serve it.
I have long been of the opinion that businesses need/should have ethics committees. They often run experiments on us and our societies, unsuspecting, unasked, and unaware. Why is it okay for companies to do anything that is not strictly illegal? Yes it would inhibit short-term progress but who knows it might unlock long-term progress and have helped us avoid crises that may yet end us all.