engineered simplicity

This Week in Reading

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake takes place in a post apocalyptic future. The novel jumps back and forth in time, though both narratives start further into a dystopian timeline than where I am currently reading it from. In the latter timeline, Snowman lives in a ravaged world amongst Crakers-- simple, human-like creatures that are completely unaware of human history or traditional societal practices. In the earlier timeline, Snowman is still known as Jimmy and lives on a bio-engineering compound with his parents, who are developing products designed to improve a failing world. The novel moves between Snowman and Jimmy to reveal how the past became the present; how one world fell into utter destruction and a new one rose up in it’s ashes.

In the earlier dystopian universe that Jimmy lives in, scientists are breeding pigs that can grow human organs, splicing genes to produce creatures that sprout easily harvestable chicken thighs. They are editing the biological fabric of the world to solve human problems. Utopia is not profitable under capitalism, so these bio-miracle pills that cure disease must secretly create new problems that corporations can sell solutions for indefinitely.

Human evolution is marked not by technological breakthroughs but by progressively more advanced problems. Human knowledge grows exponentially, but only to keep up with our expanding human needs. We say we are progressing, but we are just creating more needs to be met and more problems to be solved. We invented a hair dryer and then we invented a power adapter so we can use our hair dryer in Europe and then we invented a diffuser attachment for the hair dryer so our hair can be dry but not frizzy and then we started selling heat protectant in little spray bottles so that our hair can be dry and also not frizzy and also not damaged from the hair dryer that we had survived for millennia without.

In the face of an ever-complicating world, a government hovering at the brink of dystopia, and a planet that is slowly being bulldozed into one clean gray parking lot, people have begun to gravitate towards easy answers. In times of hardship, society falls back on religion that can provide simple explanations for the chaos we live in (it is God's will). In response to complex geopolitical problems, politicians offer up straightforward sounding solutions (building a wall, not letting anyone in a turban onto an airplane.)

People want simplicity not only in the world, but also in their own lives. The easiest access point to this concept is to watch a Netflix show about the magical art of tidying up and refolding all of your tshirts into neat envelopes. More extreme practitioners are building tiny houses on flatbed trailers and diving headfirst into modern homesteading. Minimalists will rush to tell you that a zero-waste lifestyles isn't about throwing away all your possessions and replacing them with ethically produced goods in neutral tones in clean shapes-- and this is true-- but there is nothing simple about simplicity. If it was easy to not want anything we wouldn’t need minimalist bloggers to tell us how to do it.

In an attempt to live lighter, easier lives we have developed complicated systems to help us achieve this goal. Silicon Valley CEOs are trying to break away from their screens and get in touch with salt-of-the-earth hobbies like bread baking and chicken rearing, but they are unable to truly embrace simplicity— they prepare organic meals for their heirloom chickens that reside in cedar chicken coops with central heat, try to “debug” the ancient craft of mixing salt, flour, water, and yeast into a loaf. While it is easy to mock Bay Area programmers unable to leave well enough alone, they are by no means the only culprits, just the most visible ones. This is after all, the appeal of Konmari— finally, a 4 foot 8 inch Japanese woman has engineered a five phase process to help us organize our lives. Tiny houses encourage their occupants to limit their possessions, but are also obsessively designed to help them store those things as ergonomically as possible. This is not a criticism of minimalism. I too read The Magical Art of Tidying Up a few years back, check in weekly with zero waste Youtubers. I think a lot about my values and priorities, but in reality, creating a life that centers around them requires a good deal of scheduling and list-making.

In Oryx and Crake the solution to an ever-complicating web of human problems was to develop a new kind of human. A breed of human designed to sidestep the needs and desires that had cause humanity to destroy the planet and themselves, a breed of human that was unburdened by centuries of history and ingrained prejudice. These Crakers were incapable of racism because they did not perceive variation in skin tone. They leave a minimal ecological footprint by eating only grass and their own excrement. Conflict born of lust and jealousy have been eliminated because Crakers only feel sexual desire at designated points of their mating cycle. They have never seen clothing, have never heard a story, have no conception of religion. They are the primitive ideal we are subconsciously trying to emulate with our paleo diets and capsule wardrobes. But their existence is not a reversal of evolution. They did not return to a caveman like state of being. The Crakers are hyper engineered beings born of genetic modification. They are the future, not the past

We say we want simplicity but what we are actually trying do is return to a perceived simpler time, when we weren’t worried about the battery life of our iPhones and instead felt wet bread dough under our palms. We are trying to evolve into a prior iteration of human existence. And we are trying to reach the past by continue to hurtle forward along a path towards the future.

Further Reading:

This was my least favorite Margaret Atwood book I’ve read. Her most popular novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is a modern classic for a reason. I also enjoyed Cat Eye (though it is not sci-fi, which I did not realize before I started reading)