Tipos de datos utilizados en modelado ecológico

I summarise definitions of the genres appropriate to my discussion below, giving a relational overview of how utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia relate to each other. This will allow the utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian images that are

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analysed to be placed within this relational framework. Although I am tracing family resemblances with modern genres in the biblical case study passage, not attempting to argue to have found an example of a genre in the Bible, I add a comment on genre and form criticism in section 6.1.4.

6.1.1. Utopia

Utopia is generally seen to be a fictional vision of a world significantly better than the author’s empirical environment. Suvin’s definition of utopia is helpful:

Utopia is the verbal construction of a quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on the estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.⁴⁶¹

I would like to supplement Suvin’s definition with Roemer’s definition, which is:

A literary utopia is a fairly detailed description of an imaginary community, society, or world – a “fiction” that encourages readers to experience vicariously a culture that represents a prescriptive, normative alternative to their own culture.⁴⁶²

Roemer’s definition mentions the effect the utopia may have on a reader.

Thus Roemer’s definition helps to locate the creation of an effect of estrangement between the fictional world of the text and the reader, as well as changing readerships. These definitions are used as close descriptions of what I would call the ideal type of utopia. Other definitions work in their specific contexts and are no less appropriate.

6.1.2. Dystopia

The rise of literary dystopias, including the first use of the term, occurs in the late 19^th century, coinciding with industrialisation and automatisation.⁴⁶³ The

461 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 49.

462 Roemer, America as Utopia, 3.

463 “In the twentieth century, the dark side of Utopia – dystopian accounts of places worse than the ones we live in – took its place in the narrative catalogue of the West and developed in several forms throughout the rest of the century. No doubt prompted by H.G. Wells’s science fictional visions of modernity, a number of other works – E.M. Forster’s story ‘The Machine

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Bible was produced in a pre-modern, pre-industrial context. Compared to a modern reader, its intended readers would have approached the text with different fears and a different historical awareness. Uncritically applying the term dystopia and the explanation of its popularity from the late 19^th until the early 21^st century to the Bible is an anachronistic mistake.

However, I am a reader approaching the biblical text with an early 21^st century awareness of the failed utopias of the past, including the dystopian outcomes of supposedly utopian political regimes. I am aware of many pieces from the corpus of dystopian literature available, therefore it is possible to make comparisons and establish connections. The concern here is not so much to look back upon a biblical past but to gauge the possible trajectories that the biblical text can have in the present or in the future (hence also my discussion of the Bible as being understandable in today’s and tomorrow’s world as science fiction in the following chapter).

Especially with regard to dystopia, in the strictest sense, we have to be aware that it will take a post-19^th century reader to even recognise the stock motifs of this genre. The term dystopia, according to the OED,⁴⁶⁴ was first used in the late 19^th century to describe the opposite of utopia: a place or society, in which circumstances are fundamentally worse, not better.

As Sargent points out, dystopian elements can be found in a variety of other categories linked to utopia, such as “flawed utopia” or “critical utopia”. He observes that

[flawed utopia] fits two categories of works. The first is more numerous and shows the ultimately dystopian nature of apparent perfection. Within this subset, a common trope is to demonstrate that the reason/perfection of computers/machines is anti-human. The other category, which is the focus of this essay, poses the fundamental dilemma of what cost we are willing to pay or require others to pay to achieve a good life.⁴⁶⁵

Stops’ and, more famously, works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – came to represent the classical, or canonical, form of dystopia.” Moylan and Baccolini, Dark Horizons, 1.

464 The OED reports the term’s first use by John Stuart Mill in a speech in 1868, but in 1952, G.

Negley and J. Max Patrick wrote in Quest for Utopia (xvii, 298): “The Mundus Alter et Idem [of Joseph Hall] is […] the opposite of eutopia, the ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is permissable to coin a word.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

465 Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Cost of Eutopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (London: Routledge, 2003), 226.

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Putting my urge to critique Sargent’s eagerness to categorise aside for the moment, what can be clearly seen from this statement is that such dystopian tropes, which show the “dystopian nature of apparent perfection” and are linked to a certain fear of mechanical or computerised perfection, would indeed only be possible after industrialisation. The second of Sargent’s categories poses an essentially utilitarian question, which would have been possible to ask even before industrialisation.

A family resemblance to dystopias can be seen in texts which address a situation of coercion not necessarily directly linked to industrialisation or mechanisation. Maria Varsam argues that there are distinct parallels between slave narratives and dystopian writings.⁴⁶⁶ Slave narratives (or texts that bear very close family resemblances) are present in the Bible. In these stories dystopian traits can be seen even before the common dystopian themes of dehumanisation due to mechanisation or computers could have become popular.

The element of dehumanisation is present in slave narratives, but it is the dehumanisation of humans by humans – not by machines or computers.

When themes such as loss of free will or loss of agency, as well as questions of self and other appear, some themes can be called dystopian or proto-dystopian, even in the Bible. It is important, especially when speaking of dystopia, to be aware of the anachronism. It takes a post-industrialisation reader to call these images dystopian, but dismissing the observation that images of dehumanisation, slavery, and coercion (dystopian tropes) are present in the Bible and available as blueprints for hypothetical committed readers, would be to derail an important conversation about the precarious potential of the Bible.

6.1.3. Anti-utopia

There is a difference between anti-utopia and dystopia. It will become helpful to differentiate between dystopia and anti-utopia below, when I am discussing different levels of affinity to utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia found in Numbers 13 on narrator, character, and audience level. Anti-utopias are a critique of the utopian impulse and of utopias and their writers. They want to alert to issues such as the possibility of utopia turning into totalitarianism if enforced in reality,

466 Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia: Slavery and Its Others.”

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or that too much wishful thinking in utopias and an exclusive focus on a critique of the present in both utopia and dystopia can lead to neglecting the transformative potential of utopias.⁴⁶⁷ As such anti-utopian thought is a modern phenomenon too, which can only arise in response to utopias and utopian thought. Since I will argue that we can detect anti-utopian family resemblances in the behaviour of the characters of the biblical case study, I will briefly outline here what differentiates an anti-utopia from a dystopia.

Some dystopias could be called anti-utopian, if their writer sought specifically to criticise utopia. Pfaelzer surveys three works that would seem to fit this particular stance.⁴⁶⁸ The novels Pfaelzer describes are parodies of utopias, containing familiar utopian elements but exaggerating them to show the unviability of utopias. Pfaelzer calls these anti-utopian novels dystopias. She says that the subject matter of dystopia “is the phenomenon of utopianism itself, its literary and political assertion that we can conceive of a future different from and better than the present.”⁴⁶⁹ I disagree with Pfaelzer’s use of the term dystopia to refer to novels that seek to criticise utopias by offering a utopian satire or parody. The dystopian impulse is actually very similar to the utopian one and not a critique of utopia; both extrapolate from a given reality to let the reader (returning to Roemer’s definition) experience vicariously a possible alternative world, either to endorse an idea (utopia) or to warn of tendencies seen in reality (dystopia). Anti-utopias would aim to criticise and reject altogether this technique of constructing hypothetical alternate worlds to contrast a given reality.

6.1.4. Form criticism and treatment of “genre” in this chapter

As mentioned in my introduction, the contribution here is not to demonstrate the presence of a modern genre in the Bible nor is it to prove the presence of ancient genres within Numbers 13. The ideal typical or family resemblance approach to definitions aims to show that by reading a text informed by what we know about

467 This is main issue discussed in Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times:

Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,” 16.

468 The three examples are The Republic of the Future: or, Socialism a Reality (1887) by Anna Bowman Dodd, Looking Further Backward (1890) by Arthur Dudley Vinton, and The Isle of Feminine (1893) by Charles Elliot Niswonger. Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America.

469 Ibid., 94.

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a certain phenomenon (here, utopia and dystopia), new dimensions of an old text will come into view, for example the dystopian side of Number 13.

Having compiled enough evidence I have said that Numbers 13 is utopian.

(We have the word in today’s world, we might as well use it.) In some sense, what is done here links in with form criticism:

Form criticism may be characterized as the study of patterns of speech in relation to their roles in human life. More specifically, it deals with types of complete units of expression, although one should recognize that the limits of a unit are to some extent ambiguous.⁴⁷⁰

The ambiguity of Numbers 13 has slipped into focus from the beginning: it is both locative and utopian, its committed readers Bradford and Mather exercised some textual work to highlight one side of the (at least) two sides that are present, it contains maps but is not found in reality. Below I will assess the dystopian and utopian ambiguity.

Rather than pointing out where the boundaries of units of expression are (my unit is arbitrary: a biblical chapter), the focus here is very much on their relation to human life. However, the case study of Numbers 13 is not put into a relationship with the lives of biblical writers or members of a late Persian period community but with the lives of biblical scholars, Puritan pilgrims, and Trekkies. What is hopefully becoming apparent and will hopefully be perfectly apparent at the very end of this thesis is that I am convinced that the relations such patterns of speech have with human lives are not stable but fluctuate. I have found that arbitrary categorisations and synchronic definitions do not help to gauge a fluctuating phenomenon. In some sense my observations do depend on the identification of topoi.⁴⁷¹ However, they are not seen as monolithic.⁴⁷²

“A major remaining task of OT form criticism is to examine closely the relation of content, as well as of style, to the various aspects of life, with the

470 Martin J. Buss, “The Study of Forms,” in Old Testament Form Criticism, ed. John H. Hayes (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1974), 1.

471 “Recurring elements of thought became known as topoi.” Ibid., 6.

472 “Jewish and Christian exegetes learned extensively from established rhetorical and poetic theory. They rarely did so slavishly, however; attempts were made to create special categories for biblical material when that seemed necessary or appropriate. Neither the borrowing nor the originating of concepts appears always successful in hindsight, but is it otherwise in modern scholarship?” Ibid., 11.

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hope of providing analogies for the present.”⁴⁷³ Here analogies of the present are brought to topoi found in the Bible, which will then draw analogies for the present out of the text again. It is not the goal, however, to find a “relatively simple classification system for the handling of complex data.”⁴⁷⁴ The data – the biblical text (in today’s world and in conjunction with its readers) – is complex for a reason: it negotiated and continues to negotiate complicated issues of ethics, belief, self and other, territory, and law. My goal is not to propose yet another classification system, as stressed from the beginning.

If “[…] form criticism is best taken as dealing primarily with fairly general aspects, rather than with irrational particularities,”⁴⁷⁵ it is not quite what is being done here. Particularly chapter 7 on science fiction deals with irrational particularities of the case study scene. Although there appear to be many convergences with the description of form criticism given, Weber’s advocating the ideal type as a methodological strategy to encounter complex phenomena was chosen over an approach that favours generalisation or categorisation. In this sense, I use the term genre in the interest of intelligibility. “Genre” is understood (even if not made explicit every time) to be a relatively arbitrary category.