In the Hills, the Cities

These days I tend to read a lot more non fiction than fiction. There always seems to be another non fiction book that I have to read, which references another that I really need to get hold of and so on. Time is limited and you can’t do it all. Nonetheless, on reflection I feel I really should make more time for fiction. Reading non fiction can be great for exposing oneself to a relentless barrage of knowledge and awareness of arguments and analyses but it is often the ideas of fiction that have often been most thought provoking and helped give some framing to my thinking about what is happening in the world. Fiction can be a safe place to explore perspectives that may be radical and stray beyond the boundaries of the consensus. It is one of the reasons why Sci Fi and Horror genres often produce the most thought provoking work. 

One story which has been referenced by several commentators recently (Peter Hitchens and Paul Kingsnorth stand out) is ‘That Hideous Strength’ by CS Lewis, which chimes with current fears of a transhumanist techno dystopia which seems to be emerging with the rise of AI.

For me, several short stories stand out for provoking thought and reflection. Two are by J G Ballard. The first, Chronopolis, highlights the dangers of losing our humanity to the dictates of The Machine. The second, 'The Garden of Time’ gives a somewhat poetic vision to the creeping sense of dread and inevitability many of us feel when faced with humanity's inability to tackle a whole range of growing threats to our existence. These are of course my interpretations and they may be way off, but that’s not the point. Humans need narratives, they need stories to make sense of the world. That is why myths have always played such a crucial role in society. The dominant narrative since the enlightenment has been the story of progress but that one seems to be losing its power. The Whiggish view of History is on its last legs as it has lost touch with people’s lived experience since the turn of this century. More and more people are concerned that our direction of movement is not towards the sunlit uplands but towards something much darker.

That is where the third of the stories I want to discuss comes in. It is Clive Barker’s ‘In the Hills the Cities’, found in his Books of Blood series. I read it as a teenager and it has haunted me ever since.  It is set in what at the time was still Yugoslavia, and strangely enough I read it whilst sitting in the back seat of the family car driving through that country on a road trip to Cyprus. It struck me then as one of the more disturbing stories in the collection but subsequent events have caused me to revisit the central motif of the story and add new interpretations of it in light of them. Barker writes about two cities which compete with each other as giants made up of the city inhabitants. Later, when I came across the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan it brought the story to mind and looking online it seems I’m not the only one to make the connection;

https://matthewrettino.com/2022/12/06/n-the-hills-the-cities/

I don’t know whether it is the image of Leviathan itself or my association with the fighting giants of Popolac and Podujevo, but the image has always been one that I found vaguely creepy.  The almighty, all encompassing state with the power to crush any and all who resist, its terrifying bulk topped with that impassive face. I put the story to the back of my mind until, several years later, fighting broke out between Serbs, Bosnians and Croats and the image of the fighting giants returned to me, seeming incredibly apt and almost prophetic. People who had happily existed side by side ended up fighting each other and causing horrendous devastation. Just like the experience of the citizens of Popolac and Podujevo, things got out of hand and once they did there was no way to control it, the giant lurched on on its destructive path and the desperate people caught up in it had no choice but to go with it, impotent to change their fate once things had been set in motion.

This same theme of a giant created by man that then strips its creators of their autonomy has returned to me once again lately as I survey modern politics and economics. Capitalism and technological development were created by humans but seem to have taken on a life of their own, sweeping us towards disaster, stripping us of our agency and autonomy as we lurch on with a mounting sense of horror at where things are headed, utterly powerless to do anything about it. We are there to serve the economy now, our lives are shaped by technology now. Karl Polanyi highlighted in ‘The Great Transformation’ how the appropriate place for an economy is embedded in society. It is there to serve society. But at some point, the economy broke free and the servant became the master. A Faustian bargain has been struck and we have sold our souls to the forces of the market, corporate finance and globalisation. To coin a phrase, ‘There is no alternative’. We know that the earth's resources are finite. We know (if we actually pause to allow our rational minds to consider the issue) that economic growth on a finite planet cannot continue and at some point the giant will come crashing down with horrendous consequences. Yet still we lurch on. Labour, Conservative, Republican, Democrat. No matter who gets into power, no-one is willing to challenge the course we are fixed upon. The global elite pose as leaders but they too are at the mercy of cold, soulless market forces, pushing us towards a disaster that they have no answer to (though it is increasingly evident that they are desperately searching for schemes to save their own necks when the proverbial hits the fan). As Keir Starmer says ‘Growth is the only game in town.’  If that is the case, the town will, sooner or later, meet the same fate as the towns of Popolac and Podujevo. Anybody who challenges the growth fetish is regarded as mad. To quote somebody a bit wiser than Starmer, ‘But we’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy.’