Other perspectives

When women rebel

When women rebel against a patriarchal society, a man may protect a rebellious woman from harm even though he considers feminism outrageous and feminists repugnant. Perhaps he loves the woman, or perhaps he just knows her as an individual—someone whose consciousness extends far beyond the dogma of her cause, someone whose being is more than her group identity.

The success of the rebellion won’t depend on such men. It’ll depend on the women’s own wit, determination, and luck.

But a rebellion against patriarchy is extraordinarily chancy, wide open to surprising twists and turns. The intervention of some man, whether reluctant, ignorant, or crazy, can be fortuitous for the women.

Whether anything like that happens or not, the victorious women will have to decide what to do with the no-longer-patriarchal men. Do the men deserve clemency, or are they incorrigibly misogynistic? The women will argue the question among themselves—and now the decision will reflect the men’s luck.

How can women overthrow oppression?

Many societies in the past, in the present, and in the fictional future oppress women. How can they stop?

They can’t, not spontaneously. Only when confronted by some challenge from without—a dire threat posed by another society, a change in the weather, the loss of a key resource—can they change their ways, urgently trying to adapt to the new condition.

In such a crisis a society might increase its oppression of women, decrease it, or keep it the same; and whatever the society does might help its effort to adapt, hinder it, or have no effect.

Nothing is certain. But just for this reason, sometimes women can seize an opportunity to overthrow oppression and win, even against seemingly impossible odds.

And when they do—and if the society also manages to adapt and survive—how will the men give up their belief in male superiority? They’ll simply forget it, seeing that it’s no longer operative. Men don’t establish patriarchy because they believe in male superiority, they believe in male superiority because they live in a society where patriarchy has already been established.

They’ll have some memory of their former supremacy and misogyny, but it will be the kind of memory that an adult has of himself as a child. And the women will remember their former oppression and resentment the same way.

This-earth, real-people future fiction

Earth’s future looks bleak. Humankind’s future looks bleak. In ecological terms, we’re overshooting the earth’s long-term carrying capacity, which means we’re taking more from the earth than it can replenish. And at the same time, we’re poisoning the earth—with crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill and other pollutants dangerous to life.

Why don’t we stop? Perhaps because we haven’t fully realized what conditions our descendants will have to live in if we keep on.

We have a pretty good idea of the conditions our ancestors lived in. Past conditions are richly described in fact-based historiography and vividly portrayed in historical fiction. Future conditions, on the other hand, can only be imagined. But writers of speculative fiction like Margaret Atwood imagine them almost as plausibly and portray them just as vividly as those in historical fiction.

This type of speculative fiction—to distinguish it from other types, let’s call it this-earth, real-people future fiction—often portrays the future world as a dystopia, a grim place for humans. Which it will be, if we don’t stop overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity and poisoning its air, land, and water. But the dystopias portrayed in this fiction aren’t prophecies, they’re warnings. The writers believe we can stop, as some isolated societies in overshoot have done in the past. Jared Diamond tells about them in his book Collapse. He also tells about one society, Easter Island, that failed to stop. It became a grim place indeed.

What if we were to heed these warnings and avert dystopia? What would the world be like then? Well, at the very least, Nature would be recovering and humankind would be getting along fairly well. How could this happen? The answer, of course, is: through various developments, some of which we can imagine today.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, whose school of thought is known as deep ecology, stimulates the imagination of such developments. A future world inspired by deep ecology could be called an ecotopia.

This-earth, real-people future fiction portrays future worlds that are either dystopias or ecotopias. When we realize that our descendants might be living in a dystopia, we’re warned. When we realize that they could live in an ecotopia, we have something to hope for.