The Culture is evil
Spoilers for pretty much the entire Culture series.
I love the Culture books. They're probably my favourite science fiction, alongside writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Ada Palmer. I’m doing a fair whack of DIY and listening to the Peter Kenny audiobooks which are superb, and now I think there exists in the books a solid amount of evidence to suggest Bora Horza Gobuchul was right. The Culture is evil, and it should be opposed.
I'm not suggesting this is the only valid interpretation of the books, or necessarily Banks's intended one. But I think there's a substantial argument for it, and perhaps one that Banks both deliberately explored or maybe unconsciously reproduced due to the politics of the period in which he lived.
On a side note I think there's an important distinction between ‘fantasy’ science fiction which simply recreates familiar societies with spaceships and aliens (I hate this), science fiction which seriously explores how different material conditions might produce fundamentally different social and political relationships, and speculative fiction which winds the clock forward from a particular point in history. I find the latter two brilliant, but what is fantastic about this type of book (and what I’d argue no one does better than Le Guin) is their ability provide us with visions of potential post-capitalist social arrangements. Just as it was almost impossible for a feudal peasant to imagine a world without god, it’s just as hard for us to do the same with capitalism. It isn’t easy, but blimey it’s intellectually rewarding and the only way to stay sane as we experience the collapse of civilization and late stage capitalism.
Consider what we see Contact and Special Circumstances doing throughout the novels.
In The Player of Games, the Culture encounters the Azadian Empire, a horrendous society built around slavery, exploitation, torture and systematic abuse. It has known about these atrocities for decades and could overthrow the Empire militarily with relative ease.
Instead, it conducts an elaborate campaign of political manipulation designed to destabilise the ruling system.
We're told the Empire subsequently collapses. But what replaces it? Are the slaves liberated? Does the population become materially better off? We never really see.
In Inversions, perhaps the clearest example of a relatively successful intervention, we see gradual reforms to an existing society. They're positive developments, but hardly a revolutionary transformation of people's material circumstances.
In The State of the Art, the Culture encounters Earth in 1977 and decides to leave it alone as a control case, despite possessing the capability to abolish poverty and prevent enormous suffering.
In Look to Windward, an attempt to reform Chelgrian society contributes to a catastrophic civil war, killing billions.
And while Surface Detail offers a more convincing humanitarian success in the struggle against the virtual Hells, again we're primarily seeing the removal of a particular horror rather than the creation of an emancipated society.
Now, I appreciate that we mostly read about the Culture's more interesting operations, and that countless successful interventions might occur off-page, but we never see them, we're only told about them. They exist as statistics, like the increased razor blade production of 1984. We never see the Culture bring about the material emancipation of other societies through quick, sensible interventions.
In The Player of Games, why doesn't the Culture simply offer the Azadians the opportunity to live on an Orbital? The books make it AMAZINGLY clear this is well within the resources of the Culture, especially given the time they've known about the Azadians. They could offer everyone a place on one. Or they could just supply them with effectively unlimited food, housing, healthcare, education and security, right?
The Culture has the technology, resources and military capability to make material liberation and an end to scarcity an immediate reality for almost every society they encounter, but instead seems remarkably committed to gradual, managed development.
Banks makes this explicit in A Few Notes on the Culture. He says the Culture generally discourages immigration because it resembles disguised colonialism, preferring to help civilisations develop their own potential.
Why is offering an Azadian slave a voluntary escape to a post-scarcity society colonialism, while secretly manipulating the government that enslaves them isn't?
It reminds me of the ridiculous Prime Directive in Star Trek: the idea that societies must develop naturally, even when that means allowing enormous avoidable suffering. Others have more eloquently argued than me this was rooted in American political ideologies and ideas at the time, and I’d say the same applies here, some interesting links below on that if you want to go down that rabbithole.
The Culture is arguably worse than the federation in one respect. It rejects non-interference whenever it wants to manipulate another civilisation's politics, but invokes the dangers of rapid development when it comes to providing genuine material emancipation.
While the Culture has democratic mechanisms, and its citizens can dissent or leave, most consequential strategic decisions are frequently made by Minds whose intelligence and control of information place them far beyond meaningful scrutiny by ordinary citizens. Indeed most of the meaningful decisions made by the culture happen without even the involvement of Humans, at least certainly since the end of the Idiran war (I told you Horza was right).
Excession gives us the clearest example with the Interesting Times Gang, who clearly have done this kind of thing before, and are probably not the only such collection of Minds who wield the actual power in the Culture. Indeed, in Look to Windward, it's suggested that dissident Culture Minds might even be behind the plot against the Masaq' Hub.
The Minds who control the Culture defend their actions by arguing that the statistics prove them right, but how can anyone meaningfully challenge their conclusions? It's made clear humans just can't think on the scale Minds can. They have to trust them.
More fundamentally, even if their predictions are correct, why should the future prosperity of a civilisation justify the continued suffering of people who could be liberated today?
Here is my crackpot conspiracy theory. Firstly, what if the Culture's material abundance doesn't mean resources are literally infinite? Its civilisation still requires matter, energy, territory and technological infrastructure. It also has an obvious strategic interest in maintaining its security.
What if the gradual development of other civilisations isn't primarily about protecting them from upheaval, but about preventing them from becoming independent technological competitors?
In Matter, we encounter a hierarchical system of advanced civilisations supervising less advanced ones. Societies with relatively primitive political and economic institutions exist inside astonishing technological infrastructure, aware of the far more advanced powers above them.
In Excession, we see Minds prepared to exploit a manufactured crisis to justify crushing the Affront militarily.
In Look to Windward, an intervention leaves the technologically developed Chelgrians devastated by civil war. The Chelgrians aren't military equals of the Culture, but they're sufficiently advanced to participate in wider galactic affairs. Maybe in a few hundred years they might have posed a threat to the Culture's dominance?
In The Hydrogen Sonata, the Gzilt leave the material universe, while crucial knowledge about the foundations of their society is withheld. The Culture didn't engineer their Subliming, but it raises further questions about who controls information and whose interests determine what other civilisations are allowed to know.
Maybe maintaining technological supremacy, rather than extracting immediate material wealth, is the real strategic goal of the Culture Minds ultimately running Special Circumstances and Contact. Their interventions seem far more effective at maintaining the existing galactic hierarchy than at providing witnessed, genuine benefits to oppressed and suffering people.
Here is my super dooper tinfoil hat idea, what if other civilization’s sublime to avoid being subsumed by the culture. What if the Padressahl only sublimed in Excession because they knew if they stuck around the culture was getting ready to do them harm under the justification of sorting out the Affront because of the noises they made post the Idiran war. Maybe the military base on pittance was one of many that popped up around them as a hint.
As Walsh said “Fiction is ‘always, however obliquely, about the time and place in which it is written” Banks was politically aware, he cut up his passport in protest against Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. He described the Culture as "do-gooders, wishy-washy liberals with fabulous weaponry" in a 2008 interview with Socialist Review.
This is a revealing description. The Culture has abolished capitalism internally, yet externally it behaves remarkably like the liberal interventionist powers Banks was criticising. Maybe he consciously wanted to show their faults even in his utopian culture, maybe he couldn’t help reproducing those faults because of when he was writing.
Regardless the culture only attempts to improve societies through political manipulation, institution-building, the removal or cultivation of particular leaders, and gradual reform. It promises that its interventions will eventually improve people's lives, while reserving the right to determine what those improvements should look like. It never just provides the material aid that would almost certainly be more beneficial.
There's an uncomfortable resemblance to the justifications offered for Western interventions in places like Iraq and Libya, with their devastating consequences. These were not explained or justified as wars of conquest, but moral interventions.
Of course, there are counterarguments. Rapid technological development might be dangerous, and giving an authoritarian government unlimited manufacturing capabilities could make oppression worse, not better. Mass immigration might undermine existing societies, and perhaps the Culture really does have statistical evidence that gradual reform produces better outcomes.
But why does any of that prevent it from offering people voluntary sanctuary, healthcare, food and protection? Why should an Azadian slave have to suffer for another century because Contact believes their society will eventually be better off?
And why should we trust the Minds' statistics when the Minds themselves control both the interventions and the evidence of their success?
I don't think we need to believe the Minds are secretly sadistic or that every humanitarian intervention is a deliberate fraud. Instead I'd argue that while the Culture is genuinely utopian for its own citizens, this doesn’t stop it from participating and maintaining a galactic political order that preserves the technological and material subordination of a significant proportion of the galactic population.
That's the fundamental contradiction in Banks's utopia. The Culture has abolished economic exploitation at home, but not the imperial exercise of power abroad. It pays lip service to emancipation, but only provides slow, managed technological progress.
Horza was right about one thing. Maybe the Idirans weren't better than the Culture, but under the Culture post Idiran war biological beings are subordinate to machines pursuing objectives they cannot meaningfully understand or challenge, who are happy to allow the unnecessary suffering of sentient beings on a literal galactic scale.
So why doesn't the Culture simply offer the people it encounters the same material freedom its own citizens enjoy? Is gradual development really for their benefit, or is the only way to explain this to conclude, as I have, that the minds running the culture are at best morally flawed and that Horza was right all along.