Source of book: I own this
Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, our book club went to meeting on Zoom for safety and legal compliance. Somehow or another, we ended up reading Parable of the Sower, which felt disconcertingly relevant.
Well, here we are again. We decided to read the sequel, Parable of the Talents, which just happens to have a demagogic president who wraps himself in the flag and violent fundamentalist religion. And literally uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan.
Likewise, you can find out of control wildfires in the Los Angeles area, driven by climate change, people losing themselves in virtual reality and AI, and even measles out breaks in….wait for it…March of 2025. Not to mention a pointless invasion of Canada.
Octavia Butler died in 2006, and this book was published in 1998. So yes, she was a bit of a prophet.
Not that MAGA is a new slogan. All Trump has done is recycle all of the old KKK rhetoric and slogans from a century ago. After all, the Klan never went away. It just rebranded under names like The Heritage Foundation. And, it has become clear, Evangelicalism. (“Christian America” as the book calls it…)
Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness that ““Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” In this sense, Butler had no need to “predict” the future. All she did was notice the here and now, reimagine it.
The two “parable” books form a series and should be read in order. They follow the continuing adventures (if that is the right word) of Lauren Olamina, the founder of the Earthseed cult during a time of incredible social upheaval. The second book references the events of the first book a lot, so I strongly recommend reading Sower before Talents.
The story picks up in Mendocino County, coastal northern California, where the group has settled on Bankole’s family land. They have built a community - Acorn - where they subsist on what they can grow or barter from nearby towns.
But there is a threat. Violent religious fundamentalism (think Christian Al Qaida…or Doug Wilson perhaps) has found common cause with politician Andrew Jarret, who becomes president on a platform of restoring order and America’s greatness. He claims the crusader gangs that are out to exterminate other religions (including more liberal Christians) aren’t under his orders, but that seems unlikely.
I hesitate to say more than that, because the plot twists are an important part of the experience of the book. I guess I will just hint that there will be some thinly veiled explorations of things from US history that many of my fellow white people would rather forget or deny.
As I put it during our meeting, there is nothing in this book that Americans haven’t already done. Nothing. We just did it to “other people.”
So, you have a peaceful village razed, its inhabitants enslaved, and attempts made to convert them to the “true faith.”
You have a form of enslavement all too typical in our history, with regular rapes and beatings.
You have “fine upstanding” white males with wives and children who also moonlight as slave guards and get orgasmic from their abuse of women of color.
Yep, it’s all there.
Like the other book, however, there is still a significant amount of hope. The human spirit lives on, despite those who sear their consciences and give themselves over to the abuse of others.
The book also focuses on the life of Lauren’s daughter, Larkin (aka Asha Vere), who is stolen from her by Jarret’s raiders as an infant.
Larkin never buys into the whole “Earthseed” idea - that of dispersing human civilization to the cosmos. And, interestingly, this is the one part of the book that seems most like a Musk wet dream. It is one thing to believe in “God is Change,” and quite another to strive for that heaven away from earth in outer space.
The book itself explores that tension a lot, as the competing voices of Lauren and Larkin wrestle for control of the underlying narrative.
There are so many great lines in the book. I found that Butler’s vision of fundamentalist religion was so very much in line with my own experience - and even more for my wife with the cult she was raised in and their terror of children reading books. (Her parents weren’t like that, but others very much were, and my wife was shunned in part because of her desire for a life outside of the cult.)
The book is psychologically perceptive, and the characters are complicated and nuanced. Even the best of people have flaws, and many more are a mix of good and bad. Hard times don’t always bring out the best in everyone.
I did take a bunch of notes. I wish I could remember all of our discussion - we had a really good one this time at our club, including a couple of new participants who happen to be friends of mine. I’ll share a few of the things that stood out to me, though.
First comes from the introduction by Toshi Reagon. She contrasts the Earthseed people with the Jarret people in a key way. If you believe in something beyond yourself, and can envision a future, you can work to create it. If you can accept and embrace change, you can work within it. Not so much for MAGA in fiction and in real life.
But if you are not, you might find yourself in a oneness of fear and hatred, only wanting and serving one thing. You might think you own the elements themselves and all other living creatures must bend to serve your narrow-minded vision of domination. You might look at the map and, as slave masters did centuries ago, think it is a plaything for your pleasure only. You will never learn.
Reagan quotes one of the “Earthseed Scriptures” - the poems written by Lauren in her book of the religion she founds.
Embrace diversity
Unite -
Or be robbed,
ruled
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
The prologue, in the voice of Larkin, is fascinating. In it, she expresses her frustration with who her mother was.
I’ve never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was - so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me.
This is a fascinating line. I think it holds true for many - probably most - of the children of great people. You know, the ones who change the world. Great artists, thinkers, writers, musicians, leaders. The kids tend to come second to the “great cause” which consumes them. That is what Larkin expresses here, and is a thread that runs through the entire book. As she points out later, Earthseed was Lauren’s favorite child, and Larkin would never have been her passion.
Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
The universe
And God
Share this wholeness,
Each
Defining the other.
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes
God.
Near the beginning is also an interesting musing on The Pox, the mysterious disease that ravages the country before the first book. Bankole, the old doctor, has a perspective that fits all too well the experience of Covid, and will likely define the next pandemic even more, given Trump/Musk’s gutting of public health.
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that this is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
This is actually the MAGA and DOGE goal. Make like far worse for the masses of people, while transferring ever more to the obscenely rich. Who needs education? Who needs a living wage? Who needs public health or even access to healthcare? Who needs a planet, for that matter? There is money to be made and who cares about the rest…
There is another harrowing line later, when it becomes clear that Jarret will likely win. Lauren understands that even if they try to build relationships with the people that surround them, that will not save them if things get violent.
I doubted that would prove true - at least not on a large scale. We would meet more people, make more friends, and some of these would be loyal. The rest…well, the best we could hope from them would be that they ignore us if we get into trouble. That might be the kindest gesture they could manage - to turn their backs and not join the mob. Others, whether we thought of them as friends or not, would be all too willing to join the mob and to stomp us and rob us if stomping and robbing became a test of courage or a test of loyalty to country, religion, or race.
There is something appealing about the Earthseed religion (as Larkin later notes) and I would be rather down with the mutual aid parts of it, even if I didn’t buy into the space seed stuff. This line, perhaps, is the best argument in favor of such a religion.
“It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.”
Or, perhaps this one:
Beware:
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease.
The appeal of the community is genuine, and I thought this was a particularly interesting way Lauren describes her goal.
“I was building a community - a group of families and single people who were still human.”
That’s one of the things I love about our book club. It really is a community that is still human. We don’t always agree on everything political, but we are committed to human empathy and reason and mutual care.
Lauren further describes her “scriptures” in a way I wish we would view all sacred writings.
“I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was - is - a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.”
Another line sure seemed appropriate to our own times. As America (in the book) lurches toward a catastrophic and pointless war with Canada, Lauren notes:
It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.
I also made a note about the way that Jarret’s government removed children from families, usually because they were poor or homeless. And also because their parents were considered “heathens.”
This is actually an accurate description of the reason that the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted. Roughly half of all Indian children were being removed from their homes and placed in foster homes. Both because they were poor, and because that way their culture and religion could be taken away from them. As I said, nothing in this book hasn’t already been done.
Further expanding this idea, Lauren notes that “a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and different is a good idea.” (That’s MAGA in a nutshell.) In a nod to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, she notes the way children can be made to fabricate memories and falsely accuse their parents of abuse.
The crusaders deliberately divided siblings because if they were together, they might support one another in secret heathen practices or beliefs. But if each child was isolated and dropped in a family of good Christian Americans, then each would be changed. Parent pressure, peer pressure, and time would remake them as good Christian Americans.
As Larkin puts it, “so much evil done in God’s name.” And also, “Breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.” After the enslavement episode, Lauren talks about the difficulty of trying to “put ourselves together as respectable human beings again.”
There is so much in Larkin’s “reeducation” experience that sounded familiar.
Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad.
I have experienced this - and, oddly, increasingly so as I got older and my parents descended into moral stupidity. Stupid faith became mandatory, while thinking and questioning became bad. This next passage also resonates:
There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans - about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce [Larkin’s foster mother] wasn’t that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelligence should have been, and I suffered for it.
That feels right for my parents. Not bad enough to kill, but willing to kill the relationship with their child rather than consider change - too rigid and literal-minded to embrace even normal intelligence.
Yet another bit that sounded so much like my wife’s cult experience was this one.
It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more.
And this description fits exactly the “Culture War Christianity” I was raised in, and is currently viewing Trump as their lord and savior.
The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness…I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life.
The Jarret parallel to Trump is also far too accurate for comfort. (Although Jarret seems to lack the racial hatred which drives Trump and MAGA - it’s genuinely about religion for Jarret.) But the things people project onto both is similar, as is the truth about what they both are at heart.
The religious sorts see Jarret as a “man of god.” Others see him as standing for “order, good jobs, honest cops” - law and order.
Those who are not of his camp hate and fear him - and rightly call him a hypocrite. But who sees him the most accurately?
The thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.
The book also describes the catastrophe of the war with Canada.
Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitterness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide.
And also, climate change meant the US was dependent on Canada for food. Just a stupid war. This ultimately led to Jarret’s downfall.
In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter. I don’t mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did.
And, as Lauren rallies her people again, even as she knows they must split up to stay safe, even with the true believers choosing delusion, this will pass.
“Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret. We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have survived.”
Late in the book, Lauren notes that with time, the popularity of Jarret’s religion has faded. What is left has settled into being just another denomination. Earthseed, meanwhile, continues to grow because it offers what Christianity can’t - or won’t.
But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.
I think we are seeing the start of this right now. Trump and Elon’s kind of “governance” is bad for business, bad for the Constitution, and really bad for most Americans. People are starting to wake up to that, and more will, particularly if the goal of ending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid succeeds.
While predicting the future is a fool’s game, I do believe that someday, Trump and Elon will be gone - probably dead or fled to Russia - and the American people will still be here. No one, no matter how powerful, can succeed in declaring war on most of their own citizens.
Lauren ends up teaching wherever she goes. I definitely identify with that. Had I not been forced into law school because it was the only cult option, I likely would have become a teacher. These days, I teach for the local law school, for an adult class through our local community college, and find a lot of my practice is about education.
Lauren says, “It seems I’ve always taught.” And so have I. I too taught my younger siblings. I am literally the reason they got an education in math and science during high school. But wherever I go now, I find myself educating. It is who I am. Even this blog is an attempt at education - and not in the sense of lecturing, but in enlightening, and encouraging learning through discussion and reading.
Here is another poem that really spoke to me:
All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them,
Will determine who you become.
Prayer has always been a fraught topic for me. Maybe part of it is that my mother buried herself in prayer, and never understood why I couldn’t do the same. Definitely part of it is how Evangelicals treat prayer as a begging session. Just pester the Old Guy Upstairs enough, and you can manipulate him into loving you more than he does other people.
I mean, that’s “the power of prayer,” right? God treats you better than other people. This always bothered me. And it certainly seemed to be a bad basis for a relationship.
To be clear, I’ve always talked to God and the universe. Still do. But like Lauren, I think that the power of prayer is what it does to us. It helps us focus and think and sustains our determination to act. We pray. And we act.
Toward the end of the book, Lauren ends up with a companion, Len, who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing, but with parents who played favorites and essentially abused and neglected her.
This stemmed from the fact that she, like Lauren, is a “sharer.” This physical hyperempathy comes from the use of a performance-enhancing drug. In Len’s case, both parents used it. This exchange is illuminating.
“Oh my. And you were the evidence of their misbehavior, the constant reminder. I suppose they couldn’t forgive you for that.”
She thought about that for a while. “You’re right. People do blame you for the things they do to you.”
I think this is true about my parents, although I am not sure I entirely understand why. Certainly they bear some guilt for having denied me my own self-determination as to college and career. The way forward I ended up finding involved my wife working to have the steady paycheck and benefits so I didn’t have to grind out billable hours and never see my family like so many young lawyers do.
Perhaps this is one reason my wife and I have been blamed so much. Why we have been scapegoated in our family as the black sheep. We are the constant reminder of what my parents did. And they can’t forgive us for that.
I also want to mention another way that the American society of the book and MAGA line up really well. MAGA and the American right wing generally have never gotten over Brown v. Board of Education, and have been working to undermine and even destroy public education for decades. In the book, they get their way, and education is no longer free. Either you pay a private school, or you homeschool. With predictable results.
“So,” Nia said, ‘poor, semiliterate, and illiterate people become financially responsible for their children’s elementary education. If they were alcoholics or addicts or prostitutes or if they had all they could do just to feed their kids and maybe keep some sort of roof over their heads, that was just too bad! And no one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them.”
I know people who think this way. Hell, I was raised in this subculture. As if we weren’t all in a society together.
For right wing homeschoolers of my generation (and following), there is a genuine hostility to the very idea of public education. In part, this is based on the problem that reality skews to the left - it turns out that white males aren’t the undisputed superior humans, for example, and LGBTQ people exist as a part of nature. So any reasonable education that isn’t religious and ethnosupremacist indoctrination will be problematic for inveterate bigots.
But there was something else, just barely below the surface. White conservative homeschoolers burned with resentment that their tax dollars were, as Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney put it, being used “to give a pretended education to the brats of the black paupers.” It really was just racism the whole way down.
Larkin, despite growing up in Christian America, eventually loses her faith. I fully understand this, and it is an ongoing journey for me.
But the truth is, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love.
Ultimately, I have come to feel this way about my birth parents. I don’t think my mom ever liked me. Certainly not after I hit puberty and stopped being a little kid. There has been plenty of empty claims about love, but loving actions toward me and mine have been absent.
As with Larkin who never saw her foster parents again after she left home, when I became estranged from my parents five years ago, they never bothered to pursue me. The most I have gotten is some threats of hell and blame for her own actions from my mom. It has been complete radio silence from my dad. I guess I never really mattered, did I? They never even learned how to like me for who I was.
I’ll end with one line about Len, who seems kind of like me in a number of ways, not least her personality.
Len is a likeable person to work with. She learns fast, complains endlessly, and does an excellent job, however long it takes. Most of the time, she enjoys herself. The complaining was just one of her quirks.
At its core, the book is a uniquely African-American perspective. Which, I think, is why it is hopeful in the worst of circumstances. They have already lived this. As one of Carson McCullers’ (black) characters puts it, “So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.”
We white folk feel panicky because we really haven’t experienced this. We have been carefully protected and insulated from the effects of our systems of oppression and inequality. Which means that, like Len, we will have to work a bit harder to build the necessary resilience.
As The Parable of the Talents asserts, the battle between good and evil never really ends, but it can be fought, and good can succeed. You need that seed. And you need to use your talents. May people of good will do it together in our time.