Education Is Not Always Enough
Taking a brief break from the classics of science fiction and major works of fantasy, I picked up acclaimed author Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2004 novel, Never Let Me Go.
Given the author’s distinguished career, winning the Man Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day and the Nobel in Literature in 2017, it’s reasonable to expect this novel to fall into the broad “literature” category as opposed to, say, low fantasy or romance. And its style certainly bears this out. It’s a very real world with very real people; no dragons or cyberhacking or ninja assassins here. But Never Let Me Go falls squarely into dystopian science fiction. Perhaps the major difference is that the novel’s dystopia doesn’t receive a lot of fanfare; we don’t see violent riots or roiling revolutions. Instead, an uncanny dread clouds every conversation, every decision, and every setting like a slipper crushing a skull. This dystopia is too civilized for jackboots.
It’s also a dystopia seen from the inside. There’s the old fable about the frog jumping into a cooking pot. If the water is boiling, the frog immediately jumps out. But if the water is tepid, and the cook slowly turns up the heat, then the frog lingers until it's cooked alive. This dystopia feels rather like that, as it follows so many characters that are quite unable to see the forest for the trees; they don’t see the atrocities because they are the atrocities.
There’s really no way to review this novel without divulging a major spoiler, so you’ve been warned. Never Let Me Go follows three characters: Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Kathy serves as the primary narrator, relating the plot like a story she’s conveying to a friend. She bounces around through time, wandering off on expository tangents, before returning to the central thread that binds the three characters together. There’s an informal quality to the language, with reluctant admissions, parenthetical asides, precise stream-of-consciousness; all that is to say it reads like confessional literature.
Our three main characters grow up in a boarding school named Halisham. There are several years worth of students above and below them, giving the impression of a buzzing campus filled with curious, naïve children going through that universal process of figuring out who they are. They take classes in the traditional subjects: English, history, geography, physical education. Art classes, and artwork the students produce, receive a particular attention that is important to my larger reading of this work. But more on that shortly.
The characters have no surnames, only last initials. And that leads you to quickly realize that they have no parents. No one does. Mothers and fathers are concepts--words--known to the students, but not beings that exist as fixtures in their lives.
Over the course of the novel, we learn that Kathy and her friends are clones. “Clones of who?” is a question I can hear the reader asking immediately. We never know and it’s a question of strikingly little importance, even to the characters themselves. The point is they are the genetic offspring of someone out in the world, perhaps living or dead, and they’ve been birthed to serve as organ donors. That is their sole purpose in life.
Whole crops of clones attend boarding schools like Halisham until they reach their mid-teens. Upon leaving the only world they’ve ever known, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy move to the Cottages, a rustic estate somewhere deep in the English countryside, where the teens explore their individual identities and burgeoning sexualities. After this brief, idyllic respite, the clones graduate to become “carers,” younger clones typically aiding older clones during their convalescence after donating whatever was cut from their bodies.
Many of the students quickly grow weary of being carers, and abandon this job after a couple years and become donors, a step that will eventually, inevitably claim their lives. Most clones survive their first donation, though many perish on their second or third. One of the main characters dies after a second donation, another after the fourth, leaving only one of the trio left alive by the end of the novel.
That’s the dystopia: clones born and raised to suffer and die young. But the story isn’t dedicated to the exploration of the world that led up to this grotesque situation, or ways it might be remedied. Toward the very end of the novel, two of the characters visit their aged headmistress, Miss Emily. The passage below is all the history we get:
“After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. Suddenly there were . . . all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere . . . There were arguments. But by the time people became concerned about . . . about students . . . whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process” (p. 262-263).
The world as described by Miss Emily places Never Let Me Go squarely in the realm of dystopian science fiction. A scientific innovation run amok allows humanity to produce people from scratch, rear them in a sterile, merciful naivete, and then carve organs from them until they die. There aren’t any robot overlords. There aren’t leather-clad fascists or mustachioed villains. It is a story of humanity’s ingenuity outstripping its ethics, a premise not at all removed from our world.
But Miss Emily’s description of a casually murderous society brings to mind a work of nonfiction I read recently: Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Dr. Kendi is a professor at American University, though he wears many other hats including author and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. He’s produced a number of other books since this one, including How to Be an Anti-Racist and Stamped, written in conjunction with the author Jason Reynolds.
Stamped from the Beginning is a history of racism in America focused mainly on slavery and its poisonous legacy leading up to the present day. The book revolves around five historical figures: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis, a contemporary academic still engaged in conversations on race, gender, and class. Taking these figures as the center of gravity, Kendi explores the racist and antiracist struggles orbiting the lives of these individuals, their work, their friends and family, professions, and the nation as a whole.
It was Miss Emily’s explanation in combination with Kendi’s heartbreaking history lesson, that first opened my eyes to the parallels between these clones harvested for their organs and enslaved persons toiling in fields. In both arenas, the bodies of a particular group are viewed as both expendable and, crucially, absolutely necessary. The world of Never Let Me Go couldn’t see a way around rearing humans solely as spare parts, just like the antebellum South and much of America’s economy depended on generations of enslaved Black bodies. Both social structures stole time and freedom from individuals for heinous, inequitably distributed material benefit.
And in both slavery and clone harvesting, it’s vital that neither group be perceived as fully human. As I mentioned earlier, the artwork Halisham students produce becomes a curious focus at the school. Instructors push children to make art, and make it as beautiful and meaningful as they can. Occasionally, a strikingly severe woman in a sharp gray suit known only as Madame collects the best pieces and hauls them away. The students, never having been told why this happens, develop their own theories. Many assume it goes to an art gallery. Tommy’s theory, however, is unique.
There’s a longstanding rumor that if two clone-students fall in love, they can request for a deferral from their donating duties, just some time away for two people to be together before doctors rip out their innards like a stolen car in a chop shop. Tommy says, “Suppose two people come up and say they're in love. [Madame] can find the art they’ve done over years and years. She can see if they go. If they match. Don’t forget, Kath, what she’s got reveals our souls.” (p. 176).
Art, in Never Let Me Go, is thought of--at least among the students--as a way to reveal the inner character of the clone. It is a way to prove that they have souls. Unfortunately, rumors about the gallery and the deferral turn out to be false. The former headmistress, Miss Emily, explains:
“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all . . . We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies . . . we were organizing large events all around the country. There’d be cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people coming to attend. There were speeches, large funds pledged. ‘There, look!’ we could say. ‘Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’” (p. 260-262).
Kathy is shocked when she learns people actually question her humanity. But I don’t think it’s too far removed from reality to think that people in our world would question a clone’s worth. I can imagine a lot of quarters of our society outright rejecting them as members of humanity, as being anything but artificial, soulless medical fodder. Even Madame, one of the students’ most ardent supporters, cannot see the grown-up clones as people. “You poor creatures,” she says as she leaves Kathy and Tommy to their disappointment (p. 272). Creatures. Things. Objects. Alive as a fact, but afforded no other protections other than the meager comfort charitably provided by their childhood caregivers.
By the end of the novel, it comes to pass that Halisham and other schools like it have closed. Self-interested politicians and rich philanthropists stopped donating money, particularly after an obliquely referenced scandal involving genetically engineered super children. Compassionate schools were replaced by “government homes” for clones of which Miss Emily says, “you’d not sleep for days if you saw what still goes on in some of those places” (p. 265).
This, too, reminds me of several passages from Kendi’s painful review of history. In his work, Kendi identifies three strategies that America has attempted to use to combat racist ideas, two of them being “uplift suasion and education persuasion” (p. 502).
In brief, uplift suasion is the idea that in order to join civilized society, Black people needed to exhibit upstanding, estimable qualities like honesty, fortitude, and humility. While it’s not bad to have these qualities, the subtext of this idea is that slavery transformed Black people into animals, something less than human. And they needed to prove to the white majority that they deserved to be a part of the American experiment. Unfortunately, as Kendi painstakingly proves with example after example, “the more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash” (p. 505).
The most benign version of this is thinking that one Black person that excels is the exception, an exceptional being but not representative of the entire race’s capacity for excellence. On the far side, however, the more a Black person uplifts, the more they invade the rights and privileges once only afforded to rich white male landholders, the stronger the backlash. President Obama and the mountains of implicit and overt racism he faced before, during, and after his presidency are a contemporary example of this dynamic in action.
Educational persuasion is a second common approach to combating racist ideology. This involves educating the larger populace about a marginalized group. In Never Let Me Go, that’s what the artwork is all about. A small, motivated group of people is fighting an uphill battle to prove that these children, these biological donor machines, are human. And for a while, it works. They fight the good fight. But they lose. The kindest schools close, its empathetic teachers are fired, and the next iteration of clones are born and raised in government factories.
Kendi describes a similar trend as well. W.E.B. DuBois spent his youth believing that, “a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts” (p. 505). But after decades of work, DuBois finally realized a profound truth: “Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved” (p. 506).
The idea of the school is a powerful figure in this fight for social recognition. Halisham’s leaders, like Miss Emily and Madame, use the school as a familiar figure in society to make what seems to the reader to be a rather clear case: clones are people. Dr. Angela Davis, in her own work, Women, Race, & Class, notes the twin goals of Blacks post-Civil War: the ballot and education (p. 100). She goes on to describe a number of schools established by prominent women both before and after the Civil War. These strident advocates of education include Katy Ferguson, a formerly enslaved person, Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, and Myrtilla Miner (p. 102). These women suffered abuse and assault, risking imprisonment and their very lives to bring education to a people that yearned for it not because they thought it made them more human but because they recognized the power of knowledge. Some schools were burned down. Others lived on, eventually merging into colleges, universities, or absorbed into public school systems. But whatever the outcome, and despite education in many forms, racism lived on.
The point is that neither version of schools--Halisham or, say, HBCUs--or their cultured, intellectual alumni managed to convince the general population of the rights of their students. Kendi states that this is the “false construction of the race problem: the idea that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, which lead to racist policies. In fact, self-interest leads to racist policies, which lead to racist ideas leading to all the ignorance and hate” (p. 506). The world doesn’t change willingly. It tends to change when the self-interested goals of those in power see an advantage in making change.
I’m afraid this lesson comes too late for the characters in Never Let Me Go. Most of our main characters are dead by the end of the book. And there is no change on the horizon. No clone union leading protests or boycotts. No clone Moses or messiah. There is only a gray future and inevitable death under the knife. It’s a chilling end to a very human story.
But this is the purpose of dystopian science fiction. It is there to show us the world a pace ahead and perhaps a step to the side. It’s there to illuminate a possible future. It’s there to point out a pothole, a barrier, a precipice. The only question is if we can react in time. As I write this in 2020, CRISPR technology has made gene editing a reality. Police departments and authoritarian regimes alike are rolling out facial recognition software and utilizing big data in ways that will end privacy as we know it. Climate change deniers are voted into office en masse all around the globe. Far too often, those in power seek only their self-interested ends without regard to the right or wrong of a thing, without regard to the people swept away by their knowing, callous indifference.
Ishiguro’s novel isn’t one of those works of science fiction that accurately predicts a future beyond anything we can imagine. As bad as things are now--organs harvested from Uighurs by the Chinese government, for example--I find it hard to imagine a future where we grow humans from scratch, raise them, and kill them. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but let’s hope not. In this way, I think technology has already solved that problem. If we can grow an ear on a mouse’s back or use 3D printers to construct individually tailored hearts, the labor and capital required to raise a person for thirty years just to slaughter them seems like a monumental waste of time and resources.
But looking into the future wasn’t Ishiguro’s goal, I think. With Never Let Me Go, he reveals a dangerous blind spot in humanity’s collective psyche. We, as a species, look before leaping. Sometimes with our lives but certainly with technology. The atom bomb escaped Pandora’s Box before the scientists on the Manhattan Project could wipe off the chalkboard and many people alive today remember a time when nuclear annihilation felt inevitable.
But we’re especially reckless when the survival of the “us”--the in-group, the powerful--is presented as the rationale for acting radically and rashly. The urge, sincere or politically-manipulated, to protect our friends and family--our abstract concept of family--becomes an all-consuming fanaticism that leads us to commit great acts of horror on “them,” even if we once called them friend and neighbor. Even if they are our mirror reflections.
I’d say that Never Let Me Go, and the dystopia genre in general, is there to give us a reason to zig instead of zag, a warning sign, cautioning us to slow our steps as we stumble blindly into the 21st century. I wish I had more hope for us as a species, that we wouldn’t commit heinous acts of terror against people that should be our allies. But when our leaders weaponize hate, when our scientists see only profitable progress and not consequences, the future I see isn’t just bleak, but covered in ash. Sometimes, when I think of the future, the world of Never Let Me Go feels almost overly optimistic--even with its horrifying clone crimes--since I think we might actually be on the path that leads to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
