Dune, Postmodernity and Time

If you look at Dune’s timeline modernity hasn’t been sidestepped, it’s been transcended. They passed through the ultimate expression of modernity which was the Rule of Machines and the Technocrats in charge of them to create a new Postmodern synthesis.

Jehanne Butler’s forced abortion by AI because of a population management algorithm is an archetypal example of modernity rooted in the ideals of rational technocratic progress.

Dune shows a future that has passed through technocratic modernity, found it wanting because it negated human agency, and created new syntheses that yoke the ancient to the trans modern.

In that regard, it may be labeled archaic-futurist.

Such a synthesis is frustrating for any agenda that believes in unilinear historical progress. This is true for neoliberalism and socialism as they are both rooted in the modernist assumption of continual development.

Both socialism and neoliberalism are modern children of the enlightenment based on the concept of historical progress over time. Human history isn’t necessarily an advancing line to the future. In turn, modernity’s notion of “progress” is rooted in its historical biases based on the Western religious notions of salvation over time.

Dune demonstrates the Postmodern idea of hybridity and creative appropriation.

Here the entirety of human history is source material that humans can tap to creatively shape new ways of being that draw from that history in novel ways.

This is expressed in the book through a fascinating synthesis of the distant past and the far future. Dune’s Neo-Feudal Imperium is conjoined with the democratic voting of the Landsradd combined with a market economy (Choam), human potential movement (Bene Gesserit), and high technology (Spacing Guild).

This is novel synthesis is only possible if you’ve already passed through the modern and created a postmodern creative mashup of what you want human society to be.

In Dune They found modernist technocracy run by AI extremely problematic because it negated human choice (Butler having a forced abortion.) They chose to create a hybrid model of the past and present because it better enabled human potential after the Butlerian Jihad. They did this by mashing up facets of human history removed from the narrative of linear progress.

They went back to the future.

In that regard, Dune’s approach to human development is more cyclical or spiral in nature mirroring cultures with spiral notions of time.

That this could be a model of human society is confounding for linear models of developmental progress that believe things will continue to improve as we leave the past behind and head towards the promised land of the “Future.”

We are not necessarily getting any smarter.