Dune: Good and Evil
Virtue and decadence on Arrakis
Jude: After a little hiccup in the posting schedule, we’re back today to follow-up our look at Good and Evil in Lord of the Rings with a companion examination of Dune. Our discussion of Lord of the Rings is way too long to summarize properly, but surely I can say that one thing that distinguishes it from a lot of more modern fiction is that good and evil are nearly always conveniently labeled. The Dark Lord isn’t a good guy, the Grey Pilgrim is. Even without those labels, the names “Sauron” and “Gandalf” alone tell you what you need to know just by sound. So—
Thomas: Not so fast. Although supposedly compiled by Hobbits, Lord of the Rings is at minimum deeply influenced by Elvish propaganda. “Sauron” is not his name, it’s an Elvish word meaning “the abhorred” or “the abominable”. It’s a mocking pun on his actual name, Mairon, and so a sort of Elvish version of Donald Trump’s nicknames for his enemies.
Jude: Okay, sure, but let’s not get into revisionist readings of Tolkien in a Dune article. I was just trying to say that compared to Lord of the Rings, Dune is comparatively more willing to deal in shades of gray.
Thomas: I guess it’s more gray, but it’s not that much more gray seeing as right from the outset, the text strongly encourages us to see the Atreides as Good and the Harkonnens as Bad. That gets a little more complex later, but it never goes away. The whole “Paul’s jihad is bad actually” twist doesn’t change the fact that Harkonnens are always bad. Paul himself is still a good man, he’s just revealed to be powerless in the face of destiny.
I think it’s also worth noting that this is a book that moves from scene to scene at a fast pace and is bursting with ideas, but Herbert finds it necessary to linger on the Harkonnens in scenes that pound into the reader’s skull that they are evil.
Jude: Maybe he does that because he feels he can’t just call him the Dark Baron and move on. Having villains doing over-the-top evil things as they go about their business is certainly a much older dramatic device than Dune. I think you can go back at least as far as Shakespeare, or forward to Star Wars where you have Tarkin blowing up an entire planet pour encourager les autres and Vader disrupting a meeting by choking someone for displaying too much atheism.
Thomas: Tolkien does this a bit himself, most notably in Two Towers when Uglúk beheaded one of Grishnákh's followers.
Jude: But beyond even the scenes where the Baron and his sons are present themselves, Herbert takes pains to emphasize that the Harkonnens are tyrannical rulers.
Thomas: Yeah, but considering the Atreides are happy to rule as space feudalists themselves, I think we should be a little skeptical about this. Are the Harkonnens really so bad? There’s at least some gestures towards the idea that the real trouble with the Harkonnens is that they are nouveaux riche latecomers and not a true ancient house.
Jude: They supposedly go back all the way to old Earth, so they really are ancient, but they got demoted when an Atreides accused a Harkonnen of cowardice after a battle. Hence the feud.
Thomas: And how long ago was this battle?
Jude: Uh…surely this detail doesn’t matter, let’s just—
Thomas: How long before the events of Dune was it?
Jude: Sigh…ten thousand years earlier.
Thomas: Ten thousand years.
Jude: Or so the various wikis say. There are posthumous prequels about this, but I think Dune itself has nearly all the relevant information: the cowardice accusation starting the feud at the dawn of the current dynasty and the dynasty lasting ten thousand years.
Thomas: Well, needless to say, that is very dumb. No one today has a family is mad at another one for something that happened between two people in a cave ten thousand years ago. In fact there are some estimates that say an individual who lived just five thousand years ago is the ancestor of every human alive today.
Jude: Please direct your complaints about this to Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Maybe they can retcon this somehow. The bottom line is that the Harkonnens were exiled, or dishonored, or something, but through canny business dealings they bought their way up to Great House status. So functionally they are “new men” despite simultaneously being a really old house.
Thomas: I think that’s interesting because there has been tons of fiction, including lots written much more recently than 1965, that just slides into the assumption that being true nobility is good and that upstarts are bad, even though we live in a world that has almost entirely rejected the idea of nobility. Whatever you think of business people in general, climbing the ladder through business merit like the Harkonnens apparently did is considered much more admirable than just being born to the purple.
We get a lot from the Baron’s perspective in Dune and often he seems like the smartest person in the novel, easily outmaneuvering Leto, fooling Hawat, and coming really close to having all his schemes succeed magnificently. He would come close to being a sympathetic character were it not for the lies, torture, murder, and repeated sexual assaults.
Jude: That’s really not close at all.
Thomas: No, it’s not. I guess that’s why Herbert spends so much time on the evil deeds.
Jude: Apart from the Baron’s many personal crimes, he’s also portrayed as a tyrant. For example, he enacts high taxes to enrich himself personally while keeping the people poor.
Thomas: True, whereas Duke Leto…also taxes people. But less? No one likes high taxes, obviously, but in the medieval feudalism that this setting is based on, rulers raise taxes because they (or some previous ruler) are ambitious and need to pay for something important. Occasionally that can be something like a series of massive buildings, but the main thing that’s expensive enough to require high taxes is war.
Jude: We’re told the Harkonnens have to pay an absolutely massive amount of money to the Spacing Guild to launch their attack. That’s got to come from somewhere.
Thomas: Sure, but the crisis is happening in the first place because the Atreides are training their own military force that is rivaling that of the Emperor. Training a good army is exactly the kind of expense that leads a feudal ruler to need more taxes. We aren’t told how people on Caladan feel about all this, but Leto does say that they ruled Caladan with “sea power”, not with “the consent of the governed” or “low taxes and high quality government services”.
Jude: Well, the other tyrannical thing we see from the Harkonnens is they wage a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Fremen. And perhaps more generally, they show no concern for fortunes of the people they rule. Gurney Halleck got a scar in Harkonnen “slave pits”. The Atreides certainly are never said to have slave pits, but I have a sinking feeling you’re going to say that the novel never says they don’t have slave pits.
Thomas: I won’t, but if I did, I would be right. The real issue is that despite working as a speechwriter for a U.S. Senator, Herbert doesn’t care all that much about government policy. He at least mentions taxes, so that puts him ahead of Tolkien, and he’s very interested in what I would call sociology, but there aren’t many details about the governments.
Jude: Yeah, I think what he does spend time establishing is that Leto is a Good Leader, which Herbert defines as someone who cares at least a little bit about the people working for him, listens to their advice, and trusts them enough to delegate. The scene where Kynes is surprised Leto wants to save the men working on a spice harvester is particularly notable, but nearly every scene with Leto involves him acting like a pretty good boss, albeit one who’s very picky about how he’s addressed. Whereas the Baron is a Bad Leader and every scene with both his subordinates and his relatives is marked by toxic behavior on all sides. Leto inspires his men, whereas the Baron rules through fear, intimidation and, in one or two cases, by getting his underlings addicted to drugs. You know, there might be money to made here. Lead Like Leto: Axioms For Business Success. Written by Princess Irulan, of course.
Thomas: I worry it might get outsold by Killing the Competition: Harkonnen Lessons for the Modern CEO. But I think it’s interesting that the text specifically calls out that Leto—unlike, it seems, the Harkonnens—prioritizes propaganda. Based on Princess Irulan’s post-jihad corpus it seems like Paul continued that pattern. It’s interesting that such a loaded term is used for the “good duke”. Leto notices the little people, but that mostly leads to him recognizing the need to manipulate them.
Jude: I’m not sure that’s right. The Baron tells Rabban to “squeeze” Arrakis, and that’s certainly part of the Harkonnen tyranny theme, but this is actually part of an elaborate game of bad cop, good cop. The plan is for Feyd-Rautha to replace Rabban, lighten people’s burdens, and therefore become loved by the populace.
Thomas: Does that actually work? Are there some good historical analogues for this? Everyone hates a guy, then his relative takes over who is slightly less oppressive and now everyone loves him?
Jude: There have been an awful lot of monarchs, to say nothing of dukes and barons, so I can’t say no. But I don’t really know of any examples.
Thomas: I think for most of human history, central governments were pretty weak and so regions frequently rebel the moment they can spot what might be an opportunity. Despite the fact that the Fremen feel like analogues to Arabs in the time of Mohammed, the Fremen style of ethnic guerrilla resistance feels very modern, as do the instruments of control that the Harkonnen (and Atreides) use. I think if you just look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you don’t see any good analogues for the Feyd-Rautha plan or even the Atreides coming in and being liked, because ethnic or national identity has been so important in establishing legitimacy. A people like the Fremen today really wouldn’t want to accept rule by non-Fremen. This is never really discussed in the novel and Frank Herbert doesn’t engage with the idea of self-determination even though it had been a major trend for at least the prior fifty years.
Jude: Dune is a blended setting, so while the aircraft and high-tech soldiers remind us of the occupation of Iraq or Vietnam, the government is feudal, and in the associated historical periods, national and even ethnic identity was a lot weaker. We’re told the Fremen think they’re superior to the cityfolk, but you get the sense the Fremen just want to be left alone, not that they dream of ruling the cities.
Thomas: Historically, people of the “less civilized” regions get a lot of luxury products from trading with cities, or raiding them, and that leads them to want to take over cities and get even more of the luxury goods for themselves. The setting of Dune is perfectly set up for this phenomenon: you would think the Fremen would bust into cities and either take the water, or just take over the infrastructure and live water-rich lives. Since the story requires them to be the ultimate warriors, it’s not clear how anyone would stop them from doing this. But the Fremen look down on “water-fat” city living and seem to prefer to live in their desert sietches, pinning their hopes on their Rube Goldberg geoengineering project. I guess it’s noble to work for centuries to expand the pie for your great-grandchildren instead of stealing someone else’s slice today, but…this just isn’t how the world works.
Jude: I feel like, as usual, we’ve gotten way off topic. We are talking about the book’s notions of good and evil, and I want to note that the text does not endorse the idea that the Baron’s plan with Feyd-Rautha would actually work. He clearly doesn’t understand the Fremen culture, perhaps because he doesn’t stop to notice “little people”.
Thomas: Rabban is supposed to be an uncaring, evil ruler but he seems to understand the Fremen much better, though the Baron ignores his advice.
Jude: Which just goes to show I think we should expect the Baron’s good cop scheme to fail even were it enacted. Leto’s efforts to cultivate the Fremen are portrayed much more positively, and while we never see if they would have worked, I think we’re supposed to assume they would have.
Thomas: The Fremen are relevant, though, because we’ve said Leto is good and the Baron is bad, but what about the Fremen? At times they feel like Noble Savages, like glamorized Native Americans or perhaps the Na’vi of Avatar.
Jude: Yet we’re told they have sophisticated factories and, to your point about luxury goods from cities, they apparently are better at manufacturing things like stillsuits than the city people are.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s Herbert trying to have it both ways. He’s writing for a science fiction audience, and if you just have high tech city people getting beat up by burly desert fighters, that’s a bit too much like having to root for the jocks against the nerds. So the Fremen are “surprisingly sophisticated” while nevertheless living a simpler and more authentic life that’s in touch with nature.
Jude: Again, it’s a blended setting. That’s part of what makes it interesting. I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it doesn’t work as historical fiction. I think for our good and evil dicotomy, the Fremen aren’t all good or all evil. They are a primal, chaotic force. The book is not sympathetic to their marriage customs (Paul refuses to sleep with Jamis’ wife) and especially rejects their idea that to lead you have to kill the former leader.
Thomas: It’s nice that Paul pushes back on this and the Fremen aren’t always right about everything, I guess, but the leader thing in particular is such an idiotic idea I almost want to say it’s racist to even have the Fremen espouse it. I wonder if this book the origin of this notion? I refuse to believe there is any historical basis for a leadership principle that would result in leaders taking over the tribe at nineteen and being in charge until they are about twenty-five and killed by an ambitious nineteen year old. Is it Dune’s fault that there’ve been a dozen Star Trek episodes desperately trying to make us believe that the Klingon navy functions as an effective spacefaring military force in which officers get promoted by assassinating their superiors?
Jude: That’s an interesting question, but answering it would require actual research…
Thomas: Yeah, that’s not happening.
Jude: So we’ll just have to say the Fremen are just a mixed bag. They are praiseworthy in many ways, but they also have some silly traditions and cultural practices, the most important of which is their religion. Noble Savages are usually portrayed as more spiritual than “civilized” people, and the Fremen are more interested in spirituality and religion than the city people, but boy does the text not endorse this. As we’ve said before, to a degree that’s incredible for a book written in 1965, Frank Herbert is here to say the Fremen religion is incredibly dumb, allows them to get exploited by outsiders, and creates the conditions for a horrible war that causes a massive amount of suffering.
Thomas: True, though of course you have to read carefully to see that. You could imagine a version of Dune where the Harkonnens are also religious, so that religion is clearly identified with the bad guys. Instead, they seem like atheists, whereas the Atreides have “Orange Catholic Bibles”. I guess the Harkonnens are atheist, the Atreides are Unitarians, and the Fremen are, of course, fundamentalists.
Jude: I think by 1965 we’d reached a time where elites were often explicitly atheist, and Herbert definitely wants his bad guys to be decadent elites. The Baron himself is painted as a man of unrestrained appetites, a glutton for food and sex.
Thomas: And revenge!
Jude: Hmm, let’s come back to revenge. First I want to say that his lack of athleticism in a culture that seems to pride itself on dueling is supposed to be repugnant but might make him accidentally sympathetic to the modern reader. So might his homosexuality. It would be easy to spin a revisionist story around the idea he suffered as a boy due to his sexual identity and that society’s cruelty to him made him what he is.
Thomas: We don’t actually see any evidence that society rejects his homosexuality. It seems widely known and tolerated. He doesn’t even seem to have a nominal wife. That could be some unexpected tolerance on Herbert’s part, but I think it’s more likely that the wider society’s acceptance of the Baron’s homosexuality is—for Herbert—more evidence of its decadence.
Jude: Maybe, although it’s not enough that the Baron is homosexual, Herbert emphasizes again and again his sexual desire is expressed through sadistic violence and, probably, pedophilia.
Thomas: Evil-pedophile-homosexual is considered a toxic archetype now since it is seen as reinforcing the incorrect prejudice that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but so far Herbert seems to have gotten a pass.
Jude: Yes, although here the pedophilia thing has a dramatic function in that it allows the Baron to believably threaten our heroic protagonist with sexual violence.
Thomas: Heightening dramatic tension via the threat of sexual violence is another thing that is, well, not “cancelable” per se since George R. R. Martin is doing fine, but it’s frowned upon by a vocal set of readers as both exploitative and triggering.
Jude: We don’t have time to get into all that, but I think it’s important to acknowledge in passing that these are probably the two aspects of the book that will be most alienating for modern readers.
Thomas: I think the alienation goes beyond just those elements being present, though. Last time you let me spend a long time digging into Tolkien’s concept of evil. Frank Herbert in some ways has a simpler conception: the Baron is uses deception, torture, and murder to achieve his ends. That’s evil, and even more, his failings are somehow fully replicated from the top to the bottom of the Harkonnen organization. I guess because he doesn’t hide his evil ways, the book just assumes that only evil people sign up to work for him. The only low-level Harkonnen soldiers we meet directly in the story are the men who take Paul and Jessica into the desert, and they are ready for murder and rape at a moment’s notice.
So the Baron is an evil villain and his foot soldiers are represented as not just complicit but just as bad themselves, so killing them is a morally uncomplicated virtuous act. Last time I complained about the orcs not being allowed to surrender. No one surrenders in Dune, because surrendering to the Harkonnens results in torture and surrendering to the Fremen probably results in swift execution.
Jude: The Emperor and his people surrender at the end. And don’t the Sardaukar in the cave surrender as well?
Thomas: Okay, true, but those were both special cases. But I was saying all that to establish that while Herbert has a straightforward conception of evil, he has some very outdated notions about decadence, and while that might not be quite the same thing as evil, it’s a major theme in the story and does mostly line up with the good and evil characters. Leto and the Atreides more broadly are clearly the least decadent element of the existing feudal regime, whereas the evil Harkonnens are the most.
Jude: Maybe. Might the Emperor be the most decadent? I guess we need to define it better. In Herbert’s view, living a difficult life toughens you up, so it follows that powerful people in a fundamentally peaceful feudal empire become weak and decadent. The Fremen are strong because they live in such adverse conditions, whereas the Sardaukar are from a hellish planet and are still strong, but they’ve gotten just a bit soft. Whereas pretty much the rest of the civilization has been living with air conditioning and showers for far too long.
None of that is Frank Herbert’s idea, really. The notion that civilization makes people soft goes back at least to the Roman Empire and can still be found in present-day memes.
Thomas: Yes, but it’s important to note that historian Bret Devreaux makes a compelling case that for all its longevity, this idea about tough barbarians and soft civilized people is not, in fact, true.
Jude: Yes, but at any rate, decadence for Herbert consists of delighting in the pleasures of food and sex. The Baron gratifies his every desire whereas the Fremen live tightly disciplined lives.
Thomas: I would go farther, and this is where modern readers chafe, and should chafe: for Herbert, decadence has a strong whiff of the feminine about it.
Jude: Fremen women are as tough as the men, though, or nearly so.
Thomas: Yes, but beyond just “self-discipline”, the virtues that are being lost in civilization and that are celebrated in the Fremen are clearly masculine virtues. Fremen fight, they are very sensitive to any signs of disrespect, they use dueling both to resolve simple disputes and to “elect” leaders. Loyalty is celebrated, but weakness is abhorred. There’s almost no notion of caring for others; if someone is too weak to contribute, they are killed for the good of the tribe.
Contrast that to Count Fenrig, who is smart and capable but completely emasculated by the Bene Gesserit, both figuratively when his wife seduces Feyd-Rautha and literally, seeing as the breeding program caused him to be born a eunuch.
There’s no explanation for why the Atreides have somewhat escaped this trap, but they clearly retain some of these masculine virtues. They’re so masculine, in fact, that all the Atreides characters are male: Leto, Paul, Gurney Halleck, and Duncan Idaho. Even after twenty years in the family, Jessica is portrayed as fundamentally an outsider.
Jude: Herbert definitely has some odd ideas about masculinity but I’m not sure that’s totally right. I think his idea is maybe a bit simpler: strength comes through harsh self-discipline, so enjoying any pleasure is suspect. We don’t see much of Leto, but he seems like a workaholic. The only thing we hear of Atreides dukes doing for fun is hunting bulls, which is surely a very manly, even martial, hobby.
Feyd-Rautha, meanwhile, fights duels and that seems like a manly, martial hobby, but it’s all fake because his opponents are drugged. The real problem, though, might be that we see him dueling from his perspective and he loves doing it. He’s getting lots of pleasure from it and the text, I think, portrays this as indecent even beyond the obvious sadistic elements.
Thomas: Yeah, we have to assume that when Leto’s father went bull hunting, he did so with grim determination and he never enjoyed it more than a little bit.
Jude: Meanwhile we get an anecdote where Princess Irulan very approvingly describes the Emperor as rejecting a dancing girl as “too beautiful”. If this was just bro-code masculinity, surely the most beautiful girl is the most desirable. But the text is suspicious of pleasure in nearly all its forms.
Thomas: The Fremen do have some sort of drug-fueled orgy, but I guess that’s a very limited form of release that’s heavily bounded by ritual. You mentioned ancient antecedents for the idea of decadence, but maybe this is all just a variation of Roman-era stoicism.
Jude: It’s probably in that tradition, but the Romans were suspicious of romantic love and actually thought it was a bit unmanly to be in love with your wife. Christianity spent almost two millennia fighting that attitude, so it’s become a fairly alien notion to us today. Certainly Dune approves of Leto’s love for Jessica and Paul’s love for Chani, but even there, self-discipline is crucial: they don’t marry their lovers. The text considers that tragic, I think, but doesn’t ever manage to disapprove of it. By not marrying (in Leto’s case) or marrying for political convenience (in Paul’s), they’re denying their own desires and being tough, rational men.
Thomas: There’s a lesson in all this for Dune fans. You can enjoy Dune, but it’s best read with grim determination and not too much pleasure. If you enjoy reading it too much, you might start reading the posthumous books, which is sort of the Dune reader equivalent of Feyd-Rautha fighting against drugged opponents.
Jude: That seems like a nice, practical note to wrap up with. Next time we’re going to finally turn to consider the famous adaptations of these two books and talk about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy of films.