Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned, biological life; smelly, fallible and short-sighted, God knows, but real life.

“Then think again, Mr. Changer,” Balveda said, arching one eyebrow. “SC allows all thoughts. That’s what some people find so frightening about it.”

Not only were they much altered from their original genetic stock, they were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate.

Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.

Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society.

This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

Still, the underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

The exchange had started when Dorolow, struck by the beauty of the great Orbital, expressed the belief that even though it was a work of base creatures, no better than humans, it was still a triumphant testimony to the power of God, as God had made Man, and all other souled creatures. Horza had disagreed, genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

The Culture would lay down the law (except, of course, that the Culture didn’t have any real laws) about what being human was, or how intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time making clear that pure intelligence didn’t really mean much on its own), or on how long people should live (though only as a rough guide, naturally), and people would accept these things without question, because everybody believed the Culture’s own propaganda, that it was fair, unbiased, disinterested, concerned only with absolute truth . . . and so on.

The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.

Horza recalled that the Culture’s attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn’t totally irrelevant—along with the person’s background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them—but you didn’t take their views seriously.

They believed in the destiny of place. Certain individuals would always belong in certain places

Horza didn’t believe in the Idirans’ religion any more than Balveda had, and indeed he could see in its over-deliberate, too-planned ideals exactly the sort of life-constricting forces he so despised in the Culture’s initially more benign ethos. But the Idirans relied on themselves, not on their machines, and so they were still part of life. To him, that made all the difference.

In ten thousand years the Idirans would be just another civilization, getting on with their own lives. The current era of conquests might be fondly remembered, but it would be irrelevant by then, explained away by some creative theology. They had been quiet and introspective before; so they would be again. In the end, they were rational. They listened to common sense before their own emotions. The only thing they believed without proof was that there was a purpose to life, that there was something which was translated in most languages as “God,” and that that God wanted a better existence for His creations. At the moment they pursued this goal themselves, believed themselves to be the arms and hands and fingers of God.

Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake.

He looked, uncomprehending, at her stricken expression, while the snow-creature died from the warmth of his hand.

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?

A certain self-disgust at being human, an understanding of the Idirans’ proud disdain for her kind, a reaffirmation that at least one thing was its own meaning, and a probably wrong, probably over-sympathetic glimpse into the character of a man she had never met and never would meet, who was separated from her by most of a galaxy and all of a morality.

“Whatever did the Culture do to you to make you hate it so?” “Nothing to me,” Horza said. “I just disagree with them.”

With something of a shock, Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life.

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Culture, not the Idirans, had to fight, and in that necessity of desperation eventually gathered a strength which—even if any real doubt had been entertained as to the eventual result—could brook no compromise.

The Idirans were already at war, conquering the species they regarded as inferior and subjugating them in a primarily religious empire which was only incidentally a commercial one as well.

Only the most fervent and fanatical sections of Idiran society urged or even contemplated a war to the finish, and even so merely counseled continuing the fight against the Culture after and despite the back-down and attempt to sue for peace which they too believed the Culture must inevitably make.

She left instructions that she was only to be revived once the Culture could statistically “prove” the war had been morally justified; in other words, when sufficient time had passed—peacefully—for it to be probable that more people would have died in the foreseeable and likely course of Idiran expansion than had in fact perished during the war.