Positive Liberty

Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” takes place in a fictional era when government planning has succeeded so magnificently that people have begun to lose the will to live: All is planned, and all is successful. Individuals live for a predetermined length of time, but unlike in Logan’s Run, life expectancy has been radically extended — up to four hundred years in nearly all cases. Danger has been wiped out of human life, with diseases, accidents, and old age effectively eliminated.

And people are sick of it. Limitless abundance prevails, and as a result the urge to life has begun to disappear. Humanity lays dying, a victim of its own success. Something must be done. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” therefore comes at a pivotal moment in the fictional universe where nearly all of Smith’s fiction is set. Yet its story does not directly concern the great deeds done at the top, but rather a love affair between two ordinary people.

In Smith’s fictional universe, the Instrumentality of Mankind is a nearly omnipotent organization that runs all human affairs and guarantees humanity’s security and freedom. The Instrumentality might be viewed as a concretization of Hegel’s universal mind, and indeed this is just what I cannot help but think of it as, throughout the many stories where it appears. The Instrumentality represents the sum of the capacities and freedoms of all of mankind, and it directs the business of the species in a way both more and less than a state would do. It is the realization of the universal, directing consciousness of mankind.

As the backstory to “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the Instrumentality has decided to act decisively to stop the decline of humanity: It has instituted a project known as the Rediscovery of Man. The Rediscovery entails the revival of ancient customs, ancient dangers, and — most interestingly for us — ancient nationalities. Wherever possible, all of these are revived through a combination of hypnogogy and the deliberate loosening of controls on natural phenomena, such as the weather, diseases, and ordinary physical dangers.

(In Smith’s universe, all such challenges had been conquered centuries ago, and the inhabitants are now so ignorant of human suffering that they have never even seen a skeleton before. I know, it’s a bit overwrought. So was Heinlein. Deal with it.)

Following the Rediscovery, people once more send letters using postage stamps; after a gap of thousands of years, they again read the newspaper. The Instrumentality hasn’t quite figured out paper money yet (can you blame them?), but they’re working on it. In a typical Cordwainer Smith set piece, people “dance in the streets” as cholera is reintroduced to Tasmania. We need danger, the author says, and none too subtly. Danger itself is what drives life, and the universal mind has just now recalled it to service.

One of those dangers is nationalism, in a form directed by the Instrumentality itself. Just as Hegel saw world history being driven by the universal mind, which found its moments in the various nation-states, Smith gives us the Instrumentality, which reintroduces nationalism as part of its plan to reinvigorate humanity.

“Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” opens just after its protagonists awaken from their reprogramming and discover themselves to be French: the first French to walk the earth in fourteen millennia. “We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people,” Smith’s narrator declares at the opening of the story. In this he echoes Wordsworth:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!–Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Wordsworth’s lines were about the French Revolution, and comparisons here are clearly appropriate: The French Revolution was also a dawn of nationalist feeling, and was also conceived of as delivering mankind from a stale, decaying social system. Hegel, awed by the figure of Napoleon, found precisely these elements of the French Revolution to be the most salient, and not the promise of universal human liberty. Which only makes sense given what we have read of him.

Yet the protagonists of “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” had little idea of what all of this meant for them, and I would argue that there is a very great dramatic irony to their Frenchness, one that points back to the largest theme in all of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction: the problem of differences within the family of mankind.

Being “French” requires more than just cafes and self-destructive romanticism, although both are well-represented in this story. Frenchness also entails the racialized relationship between colonizer and colonized, about which the protagonists knew as little as they did of skeletons. This, I would argue, is the relationship in which they find themselves, although they only understood it very imperfectly.

The France of the author’s own time was, as he well appreciated, a colonial power, pursuing its destiny in the intensely nationalistic milieu of post-Hegel Europe. It had perpetrated some grave cruelties in that time, and it was then — circa 1961 — in the process of losing its foreign colonies through a series of brutal conflicts.

The narrator — newly given the French name Paul — describes meeting the love of his life in terms which could hardly be more obvious for us, but which he does not seem personally to have appreciated. He departs from his hypnogogic reprogramming and immediately meets Virginia, a woman now significantly possessed of a colonial name. As Paul puts it, her “head was covered with tight brown curls; her eyes were a brown so deep and so rich that it took sunlight, with her squinting against it, to bring forth the treasures of her irises.” Paul finds himself reciting the following poem as he walks for the first time with Virginia, whom he now realizes he is in love with:

She wasn’t the woman I came to seek
I met her by the purest chance
She did not speak the French of France
But the surded French of Martinique.

The Instrumentality, we infer, has played a tremendous trick on them both, and the author has set up a dramatic irony: Paul is a white and colonist Frenchman, now in love with a black and colonized Frenchwoman. Previously, Virginia was merely a human woman of dark complexion; race, like nationality, had died out under the Instrumentality — but now it has made a return, and the contrast, invested with new significance, intrigues Paul in a way he had not expected. Virginia certainly wasn’t the woman he had come to seek: Before this she was merely an acquaintance, and nothing more, and certainly no one he might have sought out to fall in love with. Now they stand in a different relation to one another, and an alluring one for them both.

Another note on the poem Paul quoted (which seems to have been written by Smith): “Surded” may mean murmured or muted; it derives from the French word sourd, meaning deaf. And Virginia is indeed deaf to the danger growing around her.

Paul takes his burgeoning love with Virginia in stride. He finds it normal, natural, and wonderful. Virginia, however, doubts it. She repeatedly asks Paul how they know that their love is authentic, rather than just a trick played upon them by the Instrumentality. Here she describes her dilemma:

Paul, Paul, Paul, why does it happen so fast. I want to love you. I do love you. But I don’t want to be made to love you. I want it to be the real me. . . .

Why do I love Paul? Are the Lords [of the Instrumentality] and their machines controlling everything in us? I want to be me. . . .

Isn’t there a chance that we were told to love each other? What sort of a life would it be if our happiness, our own selves, depended on a thread in a machine or on a mechanical voice which spoke to us when we were asleep and learning French?

The colonizer feels secure in the position he has been granted by the state/Instrumentality. He sees his feelings as authentic. Why? Because they accord with the universal mind at this moment of its development. Paul even considers the possibility that Virginia raises — and accepts it. “It will seem just the same,” he thinks to himself. A love directed by others, or by the logic of the collective, is just the same as an ordinary, individual love. (Can he know this? It’s a reasonable question to ask, given how love affairs were yet another re-introduction just then taking place, and how this was Paul’s very first one.)

But because Paul’s own particular will so thoroughly coincides with that of the universal mind, the Instrumentality, the possibility cannot trouble him. This, incidentally, is what Hegel had in mind by “freedom” — the unity of the particular will with the universal will, such that the individual readily complies with the forward march of history. Hegel’s Prussians, who represented for him a similar authentic freedom, experienced consciousness as follows: “[I]t exists in feeling as faith, love, and hope, the reconciliation and resolution of all contradiction.” They were endowed, he assured us, with “fidelity, and comradeship of free men.”

Paul does not doubt that his love is authentic, as with all of his other emotions, since he occupies what appears to him a place of social power, in which his authenticity is assured. Might doesn’t make right, but it can certainly be hard to tell the difference. Even in love.

In Hegelian terms, Virginia is experiencing alienation. She wonders whether she has been manipulated into feeling her love, strong as it may be: Is this just another trick of the Instrumentality? Has her love been programmed by the colonial situation — the Rediscovery of Man — itself? Her own relationship to the Instrumentality is one of doubt, and she perceives her particular will as possibly at odds with the universal.

Virginia’s powerlessness and fears of inauthenticity lead her to seek out the ancient computer known as the Abba-Dingo, in the hope that it will give her an answer to her doubts. Like other colonized peoples, she finds refuge from the state in an indigenous belief system, one which the colonizer dismisses as superstition.

And yet — and yet. The Abba-Dingo turns out to speak the truth, and the Instrumentality has allowed them both a terrible fate. Virginia dies on the perilous journey back from the Abba-Dingo, and Paul is left alone. The purposes of the universal mind are satisfied. Humanity has become aware again of difference, of race and nationality, to tragic effect.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature about the rediscovery of this aspect of man is that it forms part of a growing realization by characters throughout this fictional universe — notably in Smith’s greatest masterpiece, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” — that there exists a shared humanity across ever wider divisions, including the division that separates true humans from the “underpeople,” sentient human-appearing entities made from the genetic stock of animals. The story of the underpeople is morally and thematically the most important arc in Smith’s work, and “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” touches on it in ways I have not fully brought out here. Yet the central love affair of the story can also serve as a commentary on the plight of the underpeople, and on the idea, found throughout Smith’s work, that we must perpetually widen the circle of humanity.

The underpeople are used as slaves, without regard to their feelings, dignity, or safety. They are Smith’s stand-ins for African-Americans, but also for all colonized people more generally. They’re a stand-in for the wrongs that went with exploration of the galaxy — which is only ever a substitute for the exploration of our own planet, and the wrongs committed here. For these evils to be undone, the planning had to be abandoned; the old ways of mankind had to be rediscovered. And for these to be rediscovered, Virginia and millions of others had to suffer and die across the generations. In the end, even Paul is alienated, because he cannot, with his limited perspective, appreciate this cruel but universal truth.

All actions, including world-historical actions, culminate with individuals as subjects giving actuality to the substantial. They are the living instruments of what is in substance the deed of the world mind and they are therefore directly at one with that deed though it is concealed from them and is not their aim and object. For the deeds of the world mind, therefore, they receive no honour or thanks either from their contemporaries or from public opinion in later ages. — G.W.F. Hegel

That’s all for this week. Fourier’s on deck for next week.

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