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The veiling mist of time: the shocking revelation of rereading DUNE by Frank Herbert —a reevaluation by André Jute
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Interesting. I hadn't of it that way, but you're right.
While several aspects of the economy/power structure in Dune seem to be plot holes (like what do the Fremen eat? And how do they conceal their vast numbers if they must import so much food from off-world), and yes, it seems inane that the Emperor would not move his seat of power to Arrakis, consider the real world history which parallels the books.The great world powers have fought over natural resources for millennia, but they don't particularly move their capitals and even most of their resources to capture them. The nations of the middle east, despite being heavily moved by outside powers in their hunt for oil, have not been colonized and absorbed into the extant world powers.
The US (nor Russia, nor China) hasn't picked up colonized or moved their seat of power to any middle east nation, rather we have played a lot of proxy wars with each other trying to extract as much benefit and access to oil with minimal infrastructure and actual political control as possible. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. The story is very similar.
So too have we waged political wars in what were deemed important and strategic POLITICAL countries like Vietnam, Korea, etc.
And that's just the last 100 years. The story is similar (with a bit more colonization) with the previous world powers. Britain used opium extortion to ensure trade of Tea with China, Rome did not move its empire to Egypt even though it required her resources to feed Romans. It used politics and attempts at power at a distance.
And in a good parallel with Dune, it really wasn't until they supplanted the local rule in Egypt, via Augustus, was Rome catapulted into Empire status, much as Paul was.
Sentiment and culture are powerful forces. In our own history as well as Dune, people wanted the benefits of the Spice but on their own terms and in their own traditional homes and power-bases.
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Bob R Bogle has pointed out in a comment to the second of my DUNE articles at http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/ar... that Herbert may have been cornered into this illogicality by a plot necessity "to build in the mythology of the arrival of the foreign hero-child". I give the whole par in which he makes this point, and others for which you've provided examples.
"Turning now to the central structural flaw you’ve identified (and dismissed). This is one problem with Dune, among others. I think it arose because in order to build in the mythology of the arrival of the foreign hero-child, some such development was an absolute requirement. Probably it’s true that, as you point out, by economic and political necessity, it wouldn’t have happened in the way it’s portrayed. And yet I hesitate to agree with you implicitly. While economics is one of the primary engines of history, I’m unconvinced it’s causal in anything like Newtonian physics; I’m uncertain political and economic demands necessarily forbid the plot Herbert portrays. History is a long snarl of critical pivot points in which alternative choices might have been made. Herbert could have motivated events better, true, but then writing is also about making choices, of course, and deciding which points to emphasize and which ones to blend into background."
I agree with both of you. Economics isn't necessarily as rational as the classical teachers pretend. Muddle and make-do and confusion make up the historical norm. That is one of the reasons I dismissed the hole in the logic of DUNE as interesting but near-irrelevant.
Dune
I'd venture that the main reason that you, and many others including myself, are under-sold on the logical progression of the start of Dune is because Herbert throws us in medias res and does very little explaining. We're really given no choice but to watch as the Atreides march to their downfall even though they apparently know it's coming right down to the Sardukar dressed as Harkonnen men! And there's just no time for us or the characters to react really. Their betrayal is almost immediate and the beds the Harkonnen slept in aren't even cold before they're in them again.
And we're never really offered a scene like the Banquet (which Jessica maneuvers to reveal a good deal of political exposition), to explain the Emperor's motivations and thought process to a satisfactory level.
Nor are we really given a good reason why the Harkonnen are so willing to give up a position that has made them incredibly rich, on the risk that they'd never get it back. The whole "living well is the best revenge" should have been enough for them.
History shows us plenty of people behaving irrationally though, especially over vendetta that are clearly emotionally charged but financially and politically wasteful.
Heck, it's a common Democrat criticism of the second Gulf War that it was a bit of unfinished Bush business and history will question why we'd spend so much of our own treasure to "liberate" Iraq and then NOT plunder their oil reserves.
One other element that is specific to Dune is the slow reveal to the audience as well as the slow reveal to the powers that be. Herbert implies that the Bene Gesserit and even the Spacing Guild COULD have used other drugs for their purposes and did. But he makes Spice special that it has some instant addiction / monopoly powers and that there is no turning back now.
This is a partial explanation to why the Spacing Guild, especially, who gets very little screen time in Dune, would make the critical mistake of not having control over the source of their monopoly. The reader doesn't find out that they are so addicted to Spice until the end, and I don't believe Herbert gives us a hint that other drugs were previously options for them and the BG until the Appendix.
In this manner the Spice is sort of like the parable of the frog that you can boil to death by slowly turning up the heat in its pond. It's an open question (at least in light of what we know from the first book) how well aware any of the powers KNOWS how beholden to the Spice they really are at the start of the book.
We didn't learn that lesson until the Gas crisis of the 1970s with Oil. We didn't learn it with credit until the housing market and the banking industry almost imploded. So a lot of foreseeable issues with addiction aren't clear until someone makes a play to corner the market.
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In both cases, there were prophets in the wilderness forecasting these events. But the politicians could not do the rational thing: it would have been political suicide. These "lessons" were not hard to forecast. As early as 1992 I forecast the crash that would take a decade and more to arrive, and correctly identified the cause: politically unrestrained lending for private housing (very easy to control prime rate rises if the political will is there).
That we're discussing these matters in contemporary terms just proves again the depth that Herbert achieved in this one resonant novel.
http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/ar...