The Three-Body Problem

I’ve not seen the show or read the sequels; I’ve read only the first book. It was originally serialized eighteen years ago, so not only am I not flying in with an urgent hot take, I assume this ground has been covered before. Nevertheless I wanted to share a few thoughts about Liu Cixin’s marvelous novel. (Spoilers galore, caveat lector.)

1. I was shocked by two things: first, how openly he writes about the madness and violence of the Cultural Revolution; and second, how spiritual the book is, from start to finish. I understand that Liu is an atheist, but it doesn’t show in the text; both the story and the way it’s told beg to be interpreted theologically.

2. A friend observed that the three-body problem itself—not least when it is pictured, as it is in the book, as three suns dancing around each other in an infinite, unpredictable, dangerous yet beautiful celestial choreography—is as obvious an image of the Trinity as you could imagine. Yet I’m not aware of ever having encountered it as an analogy or illustration before. Three-body perichoresis, anyone? Paging Saint Augustine.

3. I was worried, when Silent Spring appeared early, that the book would adopt an easy eco-radical, misanthropic posture. I was wrong. The narrative is bookended by the late appearance of another book, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and its explicit citation alerts the reader to one of the major themes of the book: the way that sincere and legitimate concern for anthropogenic harms or, more broadly, for the misadventures and evils of humanity—its deep-rooted inhumanity, toward itself and all else—can so easily bleed into hatred for humanity as such, a hatred that justifies far greater inhumane activities than the original offenses that first troubled the conscience. Philanthropy curdles into misanthropy and finally terminates in betrayal of all one ever loved or held dear.

4. This process, which Liu narrates with precision and compassion, is itself a mirror reflection of every totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism above all. The book, in other words, and whatever Liu’s intentions, is a science-fiction allegory of Chinese communism. Ye Wenjie, the catalyst of every major event in the book, goes from witness and victim of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution to exhausted, listless, post-ideological grudging participant in the regime’s scientific research, to a desperate woman willing to place her hopes in the potential of radical transformation from beyond the capacities of decadent and immoral human civilization, to true-believing Trisolarian ideologist, liar, and remorseless murderer. When she finally meets some of the women who, decades prior, participated in the crazed struggle session and fatal beating of her father, and their soulless eyes and defensive words reveal only pain, not apology, she is looking at her own reflection. The chapter’s title, “No One Repents,” is the perfect summation of where total revolution ends, having begun with wide-eyed good intentions but now drawn, inexorably, to hatred, deceit, madness, and murder—with no regrets.

5. The name Mike Evans gives to his invented ideology—or “maybe you can call it a faith”—is “Pan-Species Communism.” Bingo. It is “a natural continuation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” but in actuality (as he admits) of the French Revolution, which “we haven’t even take a step beyond.” The name of Evans’ ship is Judgment Day, and its single aim is “to invite Trisolarian civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, sinless world.” The ETO’s goal, in short, is a return to Eden and a redemption from sin via otherworldly powers. Once their prayers are answered, they will usher humanity into a utopia, with help from a manufactured exogenous event (=alien invasion). As ever, the advent of utopia cannot come without secrecy, deception, and untold bloodshed. As ever, too, it is not the weak or the powerless who are the agents of utopia’s arrival: it is, as Liu insists over and over again, the elites of academia, technological industry, and the media. (“To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for [common people]. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.”) These elites are the authors, the Red Vanguard, of a new and greater interstellar cultural revolution.

6. The vaguely named “Lord” heeded, obeyed, revered, and worshiped by members of the ETO is, it seems to me, a stand-in for Mao. An alien Mao, but Mao nonetheless—a conclusion supported by the late chapter offering a kind of window onto Trisolarian civilization and the role of the autocratic “princeps,” his consuls, their top-down control of the planet, and the immediate unsentimental “dehydration” and death penalty for anyone who makes even the smallest of mistakes.

7. Liu includes the following answer in response to an interrogator asking Ye Wenjie why she had such hope for the Trisolarians coming to earth: “If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.” To which the interrogator replies: “Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?” Ye: “…”

8. The single proton unfolded into three dimensions that swiftly reveals itself to be a kind of hyper-intelligent microcosmic civilization—a universal tao or logos embedded in all the logoi of creation, down to subatomic particles—that in turn seeks to destroy Trisolaris but is destroyed first … let’s just say I didn’t expect that scene, and I found it both frightening and sublime. Liu is a theologian, I’m telling you!

9. I’m well aware that Liu “believes in science” and that one reading of this book is that we ought to place our faith in scientific knowledge and development by using it, with true philanthropy, to benefit the whole human race (while remaining pessimistic and prepared for extraterrestrial visitors). This is not the only reading the book is patient of, though, and it’s not mine.

10. I’m eager to read the next two books. I’m also told that Ken Liu’s canonical books within the same world and story are worth reading. I hear that the Netflix adaptation is excellent, but a part of me wants to hold onto the text as text for a while before I allow Benioff and Weiss to replace my imagination with theirs. I’m particularly interested to learn why the Trisolarians don’t use the sophon to make all human beings simply go insane, as Wang Miao almost does within mere hours of seeing the countdown appear in his field of vision. Wouldn’t this remove the problem of human civilization and self-defense a full four centuries before the Trisolarians’ arrival? Just drive everyone mad, let them all die (like the “bugs” they are), then inherit the earth circa AD 2450? What am I missing?

To be clear, I’m sure it’s me. This is a brilliant novelist who deserves every benefit of the doubt. I can’t wait to keep reading.

François Furet on revolutionary consciousness

[T]he revolutionary situation was not only characterised by the power vacuum that was filled by a rush of new forces and by the 'free' activity of society. . . . It was also bound up with a kind of hypertrophy of historical consciousness and with a system of symbolic representations shared by the social actors. The revolutionary consciousness, from 1789 on, was informed by the illusion of defeating a State that had already ceased to exist, in the name of a coalition of good intentions and of forces that foreshadowed the future. From the very beginning it was ever ready to place ideas above actual history, as if it were called upon to restructure a fragmented society by means of its own concepts. Repression became intolerable only when it became ineffectual. The Revolution was the historical space that separated two powers, the embodiment of the idea that history is shaped by human action rather than by the combination of existing institutions and forces.

In that unforeseeable and accelerated drift, the idea of human action patterned its goals on the exact opposite of the traditional principles underlying the social order. The Ancien Régime had been in the hands of the king; the Revolution was the people's achievement. France had been a kingdom of subjects; it was now a nation of citizens. The old society had been based on privilege; the Revolution established equality. Thus was created the ideology of a radical break with the past, a tremendous cultural drive for equality. Henceforth everything - the economy, society and politics - yielded to the force of ideology and to the militants who embodied it; no coalition nor any institution could last under the onslaught of that torrential advance.

Here I am using the term ideology to designate the two sets of beliefs that, to my mind, constitute the very bedrock of revolutionary consciousness. The first is that all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no human misfortune not amenable to a political solution. The second is that, since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge and morality. That is why the revolutionary militants identified their private lives with their public ones and with the defence of their ideas. It was a formidable logic, which, in a laicised form, reproduced the psychological commitment that springs from religious beliefs. When politics becomes the realm of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, and when it is politics that separates the good from the wicked, we find ourselves in a historical universe whose dynamic is entirely new. As Marx realised in his early writings, the Revolution was the very incarnation of the illusion of politics: it transformed mere experience into conscious acts. It inaugurated a world that attributes every social change to known, classified and living forces; like mythical thought, it peoples the objective universe with subjective volitions, that is, as the case may be, with responsible leaders or scapegoats. In such a world, human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries, preferably traitors. The recurrence of that notion is a telling feature of the moral universe in which the revolutionary explosion took place.

No longer held together by the State, nor by the constraints that had been imposed by power and had masked its disintegration, society thus recomposed itself through ideology. Peopled by active volitions and recognising only faithful followers or adversaries, that new world had an incomparable capacity to integrate. It was the beginning of what has ever since been called 'politics', that is, a common yet contradictory language of debate and action around the central issue of power. The French Revolution, of course, did not 'invent' politics as an autonomous area of knowledge; to speak only of Christian Europe, the theory of political action as such dates back to Machiavelli, and the scholarly debate about the origin of society as an institution was well under way by the seventeenth century. But the example of the English Revolution shows that when it came to collective involvement and action, the fundamental frame of intellectual reference was still of a religious nature. What the French brought into being at the end of the eighteenth century was not politics as a laicised and distinct area of critical reflection but democratic politics as a national ideology. The secret of the success of 1789, its message and its lasting influence lie in that invention, which was unprecedented and whose legacy was to be so widespread. The English and French revolutions, though separated by more than a century, have many traits in common, none of which, however, was sufficient to bestow on the first the rôle of universal model that the second has played ever since it appeared on the stage of history. The reason is that Cromwell's Republic was too preoccupied with religious concerns and too intent upon its return to origins to develop the one notion that made Robespierre's language the prophecy of a new era: that democratic politics had come to decide the fate of individuals and peoples.

The term 'democratic politics' does not refer here to a set of rules or procedures designed to organise, on the basis of election results, the functioning of authority. Rather, it designates a system of beliefs that constitutes the new legitimacy born of the Revolution, and according to which the people', in order to establish the liberty and equality that are the objectives of collective action, must break its enemies' resistance. Having become the supreme means of putting values into action and the inevitable test of 'right' or 'wrong' will, politics could have only a public spokesman, in total harmony with those values, and enemies who remained concealed, since their designs could not be publicly admitted. The people were defined by their aspirations, and as an indistinct aggregate of individual 'right' wills. By that expedient, which precluded representation, the revolutionary consciousness was able to reconstruct an imaginary social cohesion in the name and on the basis of individual wills. That was its way of resolving the eighteenth century's great dilemma, that of conceptualising society in terms of the individual. If indeed the individual was defined in his every aspect by the aims of his political action, a set of goals as simple as a moral code would permit the Revolution to found a new language as well as a new society. Or, rather, to found a new society through a new language: today we would call that a nation; at the time it was celebrated in the fête de la Fédération. 

—François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (trans. Elborg Forster; 1978), 25-27

Tony Judt on the New Left in the '60s

It was a curiosity of the age that the generational split transcended class as well as national experience. The rhetorical expression of youthful revolt was, of course, confined to a tiny minority: even in the US in those days, most young people did not attend university and college protests did not necessarily represent youth at large. But the broader symptoms of generational dissidence—music, clothing, language—were unusually widespread thanks to television, transistor radios and the internationalization of popular culture. By the late ’60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

This breach in continuity echoed another tectonic shift. For an older generation of left-leaning politicians and voters, the relationship between ‘workers’ and socialism—between ‘the poor’ and the welfare state—had been self-evident. The ‘Left’ had long been associated with—and largely dependent upon— the urban industrial proletariat. Whatever their pragmatic attraction to the middle classes, the reforms of the New Deal, the Scandinavian social democracies and Britain’s welfare state had rested upon the presumptive support of a mass of blue collar workers and their rural allies.

But in the course of the 1950s, this blue collar proletariat was fragmenting and shrinking. Hard graft in traditional factories, mines and transport industries was giving way to automation, the rise of service industries and an increasingly feminized labor force. Even in Sweden, the social democrats could no longer hope to win elections simply by securing a majority of the traditional labor vote. The old Left, with its roots in working class communities and union organizations, could count on the instinctive collectivism and communal discipline (and subservience) of a corralled industrial work force. But that was a shrinking percentage of the population.

The new Left, as it began to call itself in those years, was something very different. To a younger generation, ‘change’ was not to be brought about by disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen. Change itself appeared to have moved on from the industrial West into the developing or ‘third’ world. Communism and capitalism alike were charged with stagnation and ‘repression’. The initiative for radical innovation and action now lay either with distant peasants or else with a new set of revolutionary constituents. In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals.

Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely those benevolent overseers responsible for liberalizing old constraints or providing for the betterment of all.

Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that ‘justice’, ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘economic security’ were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. Whatever the shortcomings of over-intrusive top-down regulation and control, these were the price of social justice—and a price well worth paying.

A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. ‘Individualism’—the assertion of every person’s claim to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large—became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing ‘your own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’, ‘making love, not war’: these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that ‘the personal is political’.

The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. Curiously, the new Left remained exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands, where they could be gathered up into anonymous social categories like ‘peasant’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘subaltern’ and the like. But back home, the individual reigned supreme.

However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.

But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private—and privately-measured—interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else—much less to impose it upon them (“do your own thing”).

True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little. Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

In distant retrospect it may appear odd that so many young people in the ’60s identified with ‘Marxism’ and radical projects of all sorts, while simultaneously disassociating themselves from conformist norms and authoritarian purposes. But Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

On the contrary, ‘Left’ took on a rather selfish air. To be on the Left, to be a radical in those years, was to be self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial in one’s concerns. Left-wing student movements were more preoccupied with college gate hours than with factory working practices; the university-attending sons of the Italian upper-middle-class beat up underpaid policemen in the name of revolutionary justice; light-hearted ironic slogans demanding sexual freedom displaced angry proletarian objections to capitalist exploiters. This is not to say that a new generation of radicals was insensitive to injustice or political malfeasance: the Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s were not insignificant. But they were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.

 These paradoxes of meritocracy—the ’60s generation was above all the successful byproduct of the very welfare states on which it poured such youthful scorn—reflected a failure of nerve. The old patrician classes had given way to a generation of well-intentioned social engineers, but neither was prepared for the radical disaffection of their children. The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest. The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well.

—Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010), pp. 85-91

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).