Walkiing Away

An article on the front page of the SMH, 20170703, describes the evolving re-segregation and stratification of Australia's education system as being driven by a feedback loop based on the growing income and wealth inequality in our country.

Somehow, this took me away on this ramble, to mention an old book, and a newly published one.  One was buried for a while by social and legal dissaproval - the other would have been ridiculed, and even prosecuted, if published then, but seems so pertinent now that would be a shame not to read it.

The egalitarianism that served our society so well, that was begun by World War I and developed further by World War II, is being eroded.  In Australia, the two Wars, with their attendant slaughter of adult males, and the necessary breaking of class and gender stratification so that food and industrial production could be maintained and improved, helped break down the British style of class structure that had arrived here with the First Fleet.

The Great Depression that brought so many of the wealthy down into poverty, and forced so many families and individuals onto the road in search of work and sustenance, also helped to build the foundations of a genuinely egalitarian society.

The foundations, but not the whole edifice; even while the struggle to complete the structure continued, other forces - political, social, and religious - fought, and still fight (Tony Abbott being a good example) to thwart the progress made thus far, and to take us back to some mythical "Golden Age"

For some reason, I was put in mind of the enormous uproar amongst the "upper classes" when Lady Chatterley's Lover came to their notice.  Although it was several times and in a number of places the subject of bans and obscenity prosecutions, it seems more likely that the real fear was the breach it made in the walls the kept the "lower classes" in their place.

Obscene and erotic books, visual art, and poetry, were quite common, and rarely drew the ire of the establishment (who were often avid purchasers or collectors), but a book that transgressed class barriers in such a way drew immediate and ferocious condemnation.  There was plenty written, even at the time, that acknowledged the often quite promiscuous and decadant life-styles of the upper classes, even though that clashed directly with the morality that the long rule of Queen Victoria had worked deep into the grain of the middle and lower classes of British society - so it seems unlikely that the mere mention of bawdy goings on, or the use of explicit language was, of itself, the primary sin committed by the writer and the publishers.

Lawrence had touched a sore spot in the psyche of the nobility similar to the one that drove so many lynchings in the USA, where white men seemed to live in constant fear that the black men would be"too attractive" to white women.  Even today, in so many places and cultures, there can be found strong sanctions against what is considered, locally, to be miscegenation - it is not the exclusive prerogative of Anglo or Western European societies.  Similarly, at a family level, parents can often be found trying to impose a degree of class or cultural selectivity on the mating or marital choices of their progeny.

In both Britain and the USA, a part of the population was enjoying a great degree of power over another part, based on custom and often arbitrary distinctions.  In Britain, the clothing worn, the dialect or accent spoken, and a knowledge of complex and arcane rules of social behaviour, would mark a man or a woman as being of a certain class.

In the USA, skin colour seemed a more certain indicator of the treatment an individual would receive from society, the legal system, and the economic system, though the ruling classes still tried to enforce a societal structure that ran contrary to the widely held belief that unrestricted social mobility was available to any citizen willing to try and better himself.

Herself was a different matter, much of the time - much of the advice given in books and periodicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries suggested ways in which women could make themselves interesting enough to be able to hitch themselves to some upwardly mobile man's wagon.  There are still plenty of books, periodicals, and tv shows promoting that theme.

Australia had inherited the British class system, but promptly set about subverting it by promoting freed convicts to positions of wealth and power - of course, we had the Aboriginal Australians to look down upon, as well as immigrants of "non-white" background, so there was always a "lower class" above which the rest of society could complacently sit.

So, here we are, well through the second decade of the 21st century, over 7 decades on from the end of WW II, and half a century on from the hopeful blossoming of egalitarian movements that some called "the dawning of the age of Aquarius" - and the battle of the forces of hope and generosity versus the forces of greed and regressions continues as fiercely as ever.

For a long time, we told stories about the good guys winning, and setting the world on a course to becoming a better place for all its occupants, but while we were patting ourselves on the back and celebrating the inevitability of progress, the counter attack was already under way.  The Science Fiction shelves blossomed with futuristic hopes and utopian scenarios - though a darker under-current always lurked.  That current seems to have swirled to the surface - even the newest movies in the Star Wars franchise are so much grittier and darker than the first three.  You never saw an Imperial Trooper with dirt or blood on his uniform in those days.

Is that why so much of the storytelling of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries is dystopian?  The YA shelves in our libraries, once full of hopeful adventure and heroes journies, now drip with dark tales of dire worlds, fractured societies, and desperate quests for safety and survival.

Nowhere have I encountered writing that more thoroughly works through this whirlpool of hope and nihilism, greed and generosity, love and hatred, that fills our bookshelves, and our daily newsfeeds and tv screens, than Cory Doctorow's Walkaway.

It is a big read, and an intense one - every word carries meaning.  It is one book where the discussion of the politics and science of what the human race is doing to itself, the planet, and each other, is essential not only to the story but to the development of the characters.  The emotional ride is like a BMX heading off the top of Mount Kosciuszko with no brakes.  Give it a go - like any work of such intensity, the journey won't kill you, but you won't finish it unscathed.