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Notes -
I disliked and dislike The Culture as a utopia, but now I wonder if Banks was writing his own version of Omelas. Here is someplace where you can have anything you want (within certain limits). But you, as a human, are a pet. You'll never be a Mind, and indeed there are references running through the books about how the wet meat brain level of processing is the very, very lowest even a drone falls back on only in absolute emergency. Humans just are not built for it, no matter how altered they may be.
The Culture is also hypocritical and doesn't care about it. They preach liberty and nobody should interfere with anybody else and the rest of it, but in order to maintain their hegemony, if the Minds even imagine any rival civilisation might become a threat at some undefined time in the future, they set out to undermine that civilisation. And, as pointed out in other comments, they'll use blackmail and manipulation to get the human agents to work for them. They don't engage with other civilisations on a level with them, so they play nicely there, but if you're not as developed (by the Culture norms) then expect to have your entire world turned into a game piece for the aim of "more influence, more safety, more existence" for the Culture (and if that destroys your world, well they'll cry prettily about it then decide it was the right thing to do in the end).
So the Culture resembles Omelas in that it's an utopia on the surface, but don't look too closely at the grimy underbelly. And some do try and walk away from it (the various characters who leave for other civilisations or who end up so damaged by their work for Contact or Special Circumstances that they can't fit back in).
For me the most surprising thing about reading the Culture novels was the tone of them. I had mostly experienced the Culture beforehand through people excitedly talking it up as a utopia, or describing it as what they want to build after the Singularity. To then read the books and find that, even just on the level of the basic prose, Banks doesn't like the Culture was striking. He does not describe it with the kind of enthusiasm that you would expect a utopia to merit. His characters often spend most of the story trying to escape the Culture only to fail. After all, most of the alternatives to the Culture on offer are plainly worse than it.
The Culture novels are mostly from the 1990s (the first, Consider Phlebas, is from 1987, and the last, The Hydrogen Sonata, is from 2012; but I think the most significant ones are probably The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and Look to Windward (2000)), and I think reflect the angst of a kind of end-of-history ascendant liberalism. Have we won history? Liberalism wins, everything else falls by the wayside? And while liberal polities in the 90s had problems, suppose we extend this trajectory into the future so that all those temporary problems are solved. Endless material prosperity, endless personal freedom. What now? What is left to do? And if you find this in some way insufficient - why? What's missing? To me the series seems to be grappling with that question, and it struggles to articulate a clear answer. There's this restless discomfort with the Culture, a feeling that this isn't enough, and yet the Culture is still the least-bad thing.
I feel like the Culture doesn't so much celebrate the triumph of liberal values as it does mourn their triumph. The Culture is pretty clearly its setting's stand-in for America or for the West more broadly, and it reflects a kind of pre-2000s angst about American intervention.
Thus with Idir, Azad, the Chelgrians, the Affront - the stories keep coming back to the question of when and how it is desirable for an ostensibly more enlightened, compassionate society to intervene in a weaker one.
The case the Culture could often make for themselves is twofold. Firstly, they can 'prove', in a mathematical, utilitarian sense that they are making the galaxy a better place. The Culture are good effective altruists in that their interventions reduce suffering and increase sapient welfare. They show this 'with apologetic smugness' but show it all the same. Secondly, their principles of individual sovereignty can justify many of their actions. Special Circumstances violates them a little, as with Gurgeh, but because the Culture is an anarchy that only recognises individuals, not the rights of states or communal political organisations, they can resort to this to explain their inventions.
Okay, Azad never attacked the Culture. But Azad is not a monolith - Azadian society is a strict and oppressive hierarchy, and Emperor Nicosar is not the incarnation of the will of the people. In fact the Culture itself never attacked Azad. The Culture deliberately engineered a political crisis that would cause an Azadian revolution and which, they predicted, would set Azad on the path of becoming more Culture-like. But the revolution would never have happened if the Azadian people had not wanted it. The Culture refuse to accept Nicosar's or the Azadian elite's description of what Azad wants. They speculate, probably correctly, that if you gave a secret poll to every single Azadian, most of them would want their government to be overthrown. The destruction of Azad is something like an idealised American intervention in the Middle East - the Iraqis/Iranians/Azadians will greet us as liberators. How would you make the argument against this? Azadian state sovereignty ought to prevent that? Why? Should the Culture behave more selfishly, in light of the fact that Azad posed no threat? One of the Culture's own justifications is precisely the fact that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from intervention. It proves their selflessness and the purity of their own motives.
One of my temptations would be to turn the argument back on the Culture. There wasn't a general poll of the Culture. Contact and Special Circumstances function like conspiracies. There is no group that is 'the Culture', which expresses a unified will. The Azadian intervention was the work of a small group of committed individuals within an organisation, Special Circumstances, that we are told most Cultureniks think of as sketchy and morally doubtful. So in what way are SC different to Nicosar or the Azadian elite they seek to destroy? Their answer may be as simple as, "We are selflessly acting to reduce suffering; Nicosar is selfishly acting to increase it". Is that enough?
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