“The Hunger Games, The Giver and Divergent all depict rebellions against the state, and promote a tacit right-wing libertarianism”

Over
at the Guardian, Ewan Morrison is pissed off that
young-adult novels don’t preach a left-wing, progressive vision. In
fact, he writes, many of the most popular titles actually undermine
the collectivism at the heart of
so many utopias-gone-bad:

Books such as The Giver, Divergent
and the Hunger
Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not,
substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims
of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social
planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that
the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that
human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live.
These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic
individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature
against evil social planners….

Jeebus, the sourness runs strong in this one. Morrison is in
such a rush to denounce the neoliberalism of the books that he
manages to misrepresent them. Far from being anti-community, these
books are anti-collectivist, at least when the group is based on
involuntary servitude, perceived mental and physical capacities
(mostly the result of genetics in these books), or accidents of
geography. To the extent that they—like virtually all novels—rely
on individual protagonists, those heroes are all about political
and social equality rather than any sort of elevation of the great
man or woman at the expense of others. None of the books he cites
is against community per se. They are against reactionary states
that rule by dictate rather than democracy (whether in a the voting
booth or the marketplace).

And there’s this:

This generation of YA dystopian novels is really our neoliberal
society dreaming its last nightmares about the threat from
communism, socialism and the planned society. We’ve simplified it
to make it a story we can tell to children and in so doing we’ve
calmed the child inside us….

If you see yourself as a left-leaning progressive parent, you
might want to exercise some of that oppressive parental control and
limit your kids exposure to the “freedom” expressed in YA dystopian
fiction. But let’s not worry about it too much, the good thing
about laissez-faire capitalism is that things come in waves and
pass out of fashion quickly.

More
here. Whatevs, Morrison, whatevs. What is it about
the growing surveillance state in the U.K. and the U.S. that might
freak the kids out a bit and cause them to long for a place beyond
all-seeing adults who get to tell them what jobs they will take?
And while communism and socialism seem pretty well dead (not coming
back in fashion anywhere these days, really, despite coff, coff
“late capitalism”‘s desperate need for novelty), the planned
society really is not a favorite with anybody except the planners
themselves. Don’t blame markets for that one. The 20th century was
chockful of nuts who planned everybody’s life for them. Didn’t work
out too swell.

Morrison would do better to park his cranky post-Marxist
POV for a second and check out Amy Sturgis’ essay about the
changing tenor of young-adult dystopias in the current issue of
Reason. Yes, agrees Sturgis, there’s plenty of
individualism and respect for markets as places of mutually
satisfying exchanges in The Hunger Games,
Divergent, and the like. But there’s also a weird disdain
for technology and the possibilities of life, too:

We’re left with a chicken-and-egg dilemma. As a Gen Xer, I like
to think my generation redefined all things cynical and emo. A
heaping dose of bleakness doesn’t bother me. I toss back dystopias
like vitamins, convinced they will do me good. One of my favorite
novels is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826).
Here’s a quick synopsis: Everybody dies.

That said, I view the changing tides in the YA dystopian sea—the
absence of sensawunda, the technophobia and anti-modernity, the
protagonists’ reduced ambitions—with sober attention. Gen X
pessimism carried with it a healthy disrespect for authority.
Millennials and the fiction they consume manage to be both more
reverent and more resigned, blase about the technological marvels
around them.

I may have known I’d never get my triphibian atomicar, but I
never expected a smartphone, either. Today we all hold more complex
and sophisticated technology in the palms of our hands than sent
humanity to the moon. Yet what giant step for man can the members
of the next generation achieve when the most their heroes can hope
for is to survive?

That’s a nuanced reading not just of three books recently made
into movies but a wider set of young-adult dystopias that, like
most good books, can’t be reduced to a simple political fable.

Read the whole thing.