Words&Dirt

Summary:

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a work of speculative fiction that celebrates humanity’s ability to endure and laments our tendency to self-destruct. Beginning 600 years after a catastrophic “Flame Deluge” (i.e. late-20th-century nuclear war), Part One introduces the “Order of Saint Leibowitz,” a group of Catholic monks dedicated to preserving precious scraps of information about pre-Deluge civilization. Miller then rockets the story forward another 600 years in Part Two, showing how the Order’s electrical innovations are giving birth to a new age of enlightenment. In Part Three, which takes place yet another 600 years into the future, the Order once more enjoys the fruits of civilization but must also grapple with the prospect of another nuclear war that could destroy humanity for good. Originally published in 1959, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a surprisingly funny and undeniably profound examination of human nature and history––a work of enduring relevance in our era of renewed concern about humanity’s longterm future.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• Miller’s writing is terrific and accessible, balancing nicely between elevated literary prose and more prosaic language.
• This book represents a clever record of the 1950s postwar mentality in which existential risk was the overriding source of geopolitical anxiety. Miller soberly imagines how far back humanity could be set in the wake of nuclear war, and how long it might take to claw our way back from near oblivion. This drives home the importance of expending all necessary efforts to prevent such wars, as well as other events that could cause commensurate civilizational collapse. It also brings up the ominous question of whether we are doomed to forget our past mistakes and then repeat them given a long enough timeframe. These aspects reminded me of Peter Turchin’s theory of Cliodynamics and the burgeoning philosophy of longtermism.
• To make its grim subject matter more palatable, Leibowitz contains salutary doses of irony and satire, revealing the critical link between humanity’s sense of humor and our capacity for survival.
• By structuring his story to cover more than a millennia of “future history,” Miller does an amazing job of demonstrating how history becomes mythology. He invites us to remember that we are always recontextualizing the past in light of present events and values. For readers interested in more recent spins on this idea, I recommend checking out Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. 
• Given its respected position in the American science fiction tradition, part of me wishes I had read this book many years ago. However, I think my younger self might have been too put off by the story’s religious elements to receive the insights that Leibowitz has to offer. Most of the references to Catholicism were over my head (not to mention all the Latin!), but I was still able to appreciate how Miller deploys faith as a powerful response to the limitations of human understanding––a call to skepticism and acceptance in an inherently-uncertain and often-hostile universe. Of the many qualities that rightly deserve to be called essential virtues, Leibowitz reminds us that epistemic humility is certainly one of them.
• Leibowitz is dated in ways that contemporary readers may balk at. Its lack of significant female characters is especially irksome, and Miller’s cursory depiction of Native Americans hasn’t necessarily aged well. But in the novel’s Catholic spirit, I would argue that these sins should be forgiven so we may continue to benefit from the exceptional wisdom therein.

Favorite Quotes:

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible––that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and then truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection. (145-6)

What did the world weigh? It weighs, but is not weighed. Sometimes its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labor in the balance against silver and gold. That’ll never balance. But fast and ruthless, it keeps on weighing. It spills a lot of life that way, and sometimes a little gold. And blindfolded, a king comes riding across the desert, with a set of crooked scales, a pair of loaded dice. (155)

The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and thinks: ‘Now why couldn’t he explain this in simple language.’ He can’t seem to realize that what he tried to read was the simplest possible language––for that subject matter. In fact, a great deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic simplification––an effort to invent languages in which half a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated in less than a thousand pages of so-called ‘simple’ language. (198)

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it. (225)

Neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well. (238)

The starship is an act of hope. Hope for Man elsewhere, peace somewhere, if not here and now, then someplace. (286)

The closer man came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. (288)

Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. For some may forget. Some may be lost for a time from the Faith. Teach them, and receive into the Order those among them who are called. Pass on to them the continuity. Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, but––never come back. (292)

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law––a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security. (330)

Rating: 10/10