There’s not much to do in Iowa City other than read – or make cloth masks – given the fact of coronavirus and COVID-19. As I said earlier, one of those recent books is The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I dropped a hint in the earlier post that The Naked Sun is relevant to our current situation. How? By revealing the slow social disintegration of the planet Solaria.
Let’s think a bit more about that.
The Detective as Sociologist
The Naked Sun is a sequel to the 1950s robot novel The Caves of Steel. I wrote about the latter book earlier, but it’s a sci-fi mystery novel about a police detective – Elijah Baley – who solves a murder with his robot partner – R. Daneel Olivaw. Baley lives in a New York City bursting under the threat of robots replacing human labor. And Olivaw is a robot who looks identical to a human.
The human and robot team reunite to solve another murder – this one on Solaria. But that’s not Baley’s only mission. Earth wants him to monitor Solarian society while he’s there. The Solarians have a powerful robot economy, but what are their weaknesses? What makes them tick? Asimov’s approach reminds me of Émile Durkheim. Especially the Durkheim of the early years, e.g., The Division of Labor in Society. The idea here is that people are more the product of society than vice-versa.
Automation and Robots
Solaria depends on robots, sometimes laughably so. Each estate has thousands, with quite a few performing only very specialized functions. There are robots, for example, that do nothing other than keep a personal library. Others that only prepare food. And so on.
At one point, Elijah Baley interviews a Solarian sociologist. The sociologist explains his own theory: the economic forces and social impact creating robots also cause key problems. An outside stimulus – in this case, social prestige – produces technological advance and automation. As a result, people avoid one another. Why visit your neighbors when you can build a massive estate, live off robot labor, and view them with more and more life-like technology?
All these forces enter a feedback loop. More technology leads to greater desire to avoid seeing one’s neighbors. That requires yet greater technology, more robots, more wealth, et al.
Once a society relies on this level of technology – as the theory goes – it can’t go back. It leads inevitably to smaller populations of wealthier and more tech-savvy estates. People see each other less and less, until eventually they just stop having kids. This eventually happens in the case of Solaria, though it doesn’t enter Asimov’s plot until the later novel Foundation and Earth.
Seeing and Viewing
In the context of coronavirus and COVID-19, this is where things get interesting for me. Runaway automation and a robot society produces a sharp distinction between seeing and viewing. Solarians view each other through screens and 3-D personification rather than see each other in person. In fact, they do almost all social interaction via viewing: talk with each other, play chess, take walks, et al. They’re grossed out by the very possibility of being in one another’s personal presence.
Sound familiar now?
Of course, for us, prestige isn’t the reason why we’re using Zoom for personal contact. It’s risk of disease. Unlike Solaria, we say it’s temporary. We say it now, anyway.
Will it be? If so, how temporary? Some of us will keep working from home, using Zoom for meetings, ordering food and other goods online, et al. for some time. For some of us, it’ll be due to continuing fear of infection. But for others, it’ll just be easier. We’ll be working through the social implications of all this for months and even years.
The Naked Sun
Solarian society moves into an irreversible state of decay. Yes, it’s wealthy and advanced. But it lacks something. The sociologist I mentioned above is the best one on the planet, but he’s still terrible. He hasn’t read any key works in his field, and he doesn’t understand or use any key methods. He even thinks he invented sociology!
In short, he’s a wealthy dilettante, as is pretty much every Solarian in The Naked Sun. But Solaria isn’t just a planet full of harmless dilettantes. Its people rely on technology to the point of apathy and aversion toward personal contact of any kind. They don’t invent anything interesting or learn with one another. They’re too afraid of smelling other people.
Has the U.S. reached this point? Of course not. Will it? It’s very unlikely. But what if we’re still afraid to see each other after COVID-19? What if we continue relying on Zoom, online ordering, et al.? The Naked Sun at least shows what a limit case might look like. Will Iowa City ever again have its pedestrian mall agora?
If so, what will we lose?
Postscript: Slavery and Robots
I’ve focused on the social implications of personal isolation in this post. It’s rather the obvious angle giving our current situation. But there’s a critique of race and slavery underlying the narrative in The Naked Sun. And it’s hard to miss.
First – and most obviously – Solarians use robots for work in both the field and the home. The structure is rather parallel to American slavery. The characters even hint at this at the edges. The Solarian sociologist, for example, refers to Spartan slavery in his own work. A kind of robot slave plantation is at the heart of the Solarian economic machine enabling technology and lack of personal contact.
Second – and most jarringly – Elijah Baley calls several robots ‘boy’ in the book. He did this occasionally in The Caves of Steel, though it doesn’t stand out in quite the same way as it does here. In The Naked Sun, he uses the word ‘boy’ to put robots ‘in their place,’ as it were. The parallels between this and racist language in the slave and Jim Crow era are unmistakable.
Surely Asimov did this on purpose, but it’s hard to tell precisely what he meant to say. Perhaps his point is that sentient robots are de-humanized unfairly in the story. While the point is probably a liberal one, Asimov should be careful here. Robots – though they are sentient in The Naked Sun – lack some human features. It’s a stretch to compare them too directly to people hit by racist, sexist, et al. systems. Asimov’s intent seems noble, but his execution perhaps ineffective.
