Ten months before suffering a blood clot that ended his life, Frank Herbert addressed an audience of engineering students at UCLA. He said, "I'm going to declare a heresy for you.”
Heresy? It was a curious word coming from a celebrated science fiction author. To so much as hint that there could be anything called a heresy in the futuristic age of 1985 was its own little form of heresy when preached from a university pulpit. But careful readers of Herbert’s famous Dune series will understand his meaning:
“All science – if you go back into its roots, saying Why do I believe this? Well, I believe this because of these tests and this proof. Well, why do I believe this? Why did I set up this test? Why did I believe that proof? – all science goes back to something that we believe because we believe it. We believe it because we believe it, and we have no proof for it. It's like a religion.” —UCLA address, 1985
In Herbert’s time (the six-book Dune series was published between 1965 and 1985), the heresy seemed less obvious than it does today. Science had always enjoyed a degree of popular approval in America for its built-in assumptions of reason and logic. An aura of neutrality had mostly shielded it from the waves of hostility it encountered from nearly every corner of society at one point or another. That aura is evaporating, however, and the shields are coming down. What does an enlightened society do when its foundation begins to crack? In Dune, Herbert offers a solution.
From the introduction of Darwinian evolution in public schools and progressive eugenics to the managerial rollout of the New Deal and secret Cold War government projects, the applications of science have periodically come under fire from left, right, and middle. But applications do not strike at the heart of Herbert’s meaning about science as a religion, neither do the perennial criticisms of scientific indifference to human life nor popular fears of a technocratic takeover.
Herbert highlights something more epistemic and methodological. For scientists, precedent may be found in that attribution to Newton, hypotheses non fingo (I frame no hypotheses). For the philosophers, it is a brand of anti-foundationalism. Nietzscheans may recognize within it a critique similar to that which their German prophet lobbed at scientists for misplacing their faith in an ultimate value of truth. For the rest of us, it is only just emerging in the social consciousness with stunning clarity.
If science really is like a religion, as Herbert claims it is, then it appears its foundational orthodoxies are now being challenged in the public square. We see disaffected scientists attracting passionate online followings for publicly criticizing their own field and its practitioners. They are drawing attention to a lack of progress being made, as though science itself has stalled. Their critics counter that this is how science is supposed to be – slow and methodical. To what end? No one knows anymore.
Critics argue effectively that central to the big scientific sleep we are witnessing is a multi-billion-dollar academic publishing industry which itself rests on the dubious foundations of tenure-starved PhDs, conflicts of interest, bloated and unjustified funding, quests for personal affirmation, unproved paradigms, a glut of mediocrity, enforced conformity, and inside-the-box thinking.
The general public is catching on. Look no further than the populist reproach of health science leaders, vaccination protocols, and government-sanctioned virus research in the midst and wake of the COVID-19 era. Those who lived through it will remember the priestly class – those who ran the institutions – calling on the layman to remain faithful, to “trust the science.” A critic of vaccine research and the pharmaceutical industry’s legal immunities now occupies a Presidential cabinet position.
For these reasons and more, Herbert’s critique lands easy on us. His immediate context was not so conducive. America’s secular culture in the 20th century had been fundamentally altered by atomic technology and sedated by a steady drip of scholarship coming from comparative religion departments. General relativity turned to general relativism. Revolutions, sexual and otherwise, accompanied a century drenched in blood. Absurdist art movements addressed confusing wars. Russia launched satellites, NASA conquered the moon, string theory held promise, and hippies took drugs. The Roman Catholic Church convened a world council just to reinvent itself. It issued no anathemas. For progress’ sake, Christianity was, surely, on the way out. And anyway, where was God to be found in a hyper-modern world of tube televisions and suburban bliss? Why look to the heavens for wisdom when IBM could store the world on magnetic tape?
Yet, it is to those very rationalists that Herbert directs his point: The Western mind believes it has sloughed off the superstition and exclusivity of religion only to fall prey to a new blind faith in the gospel of science. It is our haughty and rigid belief about the nature of nature that had Herbert so worked up, and his entire Dune series is his corrective.
His philosophy is intertwined with his novels. The most perceptive characters in the Dune series consistently voice Herbertian beliefs. It is no coincidence that in Children of Dune, the Lady Jessica, the most capable member of her order, cites her Bene Gesserit manual when she says, “All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.” In Chapterhouse: Dune, the warrior Duncan Idaho ruminates on the science of interstellar travel through foldspace and concludes, “It works because it works [. . . ] Faith. Like any other religion.” How heretical for a sci-fi series. How Herbertian.
Beneath the analytical personalities and famously calculated actions of its characters and factions, Dune is a story that pokes those with a solely rational view of the universe right in their cerebral cortex. It doesn’t jettison science. It uses science as a determinative basis for concluding that the universe is actually far from predictable. In fact, it’s magic.
“This says our universe is magical. It says all arbitrary forms are transient and subject to magical changes. Science has led us to this interpretation as though it placed us on a track from which we cannot deviate.” —Heretics of Dune
That the universe might be magical is a point well taken. New information is used to usher in unforeseen paradigms, and unknown information constantly lies beyond our ability to perceive it. We have only so much resolution in our eyes. We are unable to see X-rays without special instruments. Quantum action is too small to see, too frenetic to track. We analyze only what we can sense, and we only analyze to the extent our brains and biology allow. Our own behavior is often a mystery to us. We cannot physically process all things that exist. Not all things can be digitized, and we trust a computer only so far as we can verify its results ourselves. Hurricanes still flood cities. People still die. Starbucks still gets your drink wrong. The mysteries of the universe.
Somehow we still think we’ve got a discernible, verifiable, harness-able world on our hands, but chaos reigns supreme. Because of our own limitations in perceiving and dealing with it, the universe could rightly be seen as a magical place, at least according to Herbert and his astute characters.
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” —Dune
Then again, the universe being magical is not a purely objective deduction. Herbert was personally invested in the view.
“As we increase what we think we know, we increase our exposure to what we do not know. This is one of the inevitable laws of our universe. But isn’t it more interesting to live in a universe where there are unknowns, to discover new lands to explore, than to live in an absolute box where, when you find the edge, That’s it, baby, no place to go from there. [. . .] I like the fact that we live in a universe where anything may happen because the alternative to me is a constricting dead end.” —UCLA address, 1985
Herbert channeled his philosophy and rollicking intellect into his stories with great success. He once said, “If you want to say something, you’ve got to put the message in a pot.” Dune is Herbert’s pot, and his message came at the tail end, or singlehandedly ended, the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His most impressive feat was upending the futurism propounded by Analog magazine’s famous editor John W. Campbell who relished the idea of seeing the future.
So much literature published by Campbell had explored the wonder of taking trips into the future and returning to the past to tell of it that Herbert believes it was the complete foreknowledge he gave his character Paul Atreides that caused Campbell to reject the manuscript for the sequel, Dune Messiah, after having serialized the first novel in Analog.
“I had destroyed one of his gods,” Herbert surmised in a 1969 interview. Contrary to internet lore, often asserted as fact, that Campbell just didn’t want to publish an anti-hero arc, Herbert believed that Campbell rejected the sequel because Paul’s prescience, which entailed absolute prediction, was presented as such a complete omniscience that seeing the future had become a terrible bore. In the story, Paul’s gift even generates resentment instead of reverence across the empire and leads to an attempt on his life.
Herbert’s negative view of absolute prediction created friction with the optimistic outlook of futurism inherent to the sci-fi genre and by extension the wider Western culture of belief in progress. Knowing the future, it turns out, wasn’t so dandy for those who could do it and actually stifled interest in it.
Paul’s complete prescience, induced by consuming a deadly drug, allows him to see and experience an unavoidable future. It allows him to take control of the empire in the span of a few chapters, but by book two it drives a jagged blade through the beauty and possibilities of knowing the future. Full prescience actually eliminates all real possibilities and terminates into one single inevitability. How boring is that? And, if every reader on the street thought this way about knowing the future, how bad would it be for science fiction sales?
This paralyzing view of knowing the future becomes the central thesis from which characters in the later books operate in their mission to eschew prescience and embrace chaos in a magic universe.
Herbert’s outlook is embodied in the fourth novel, God-Emperor of Dune, in which the giant worm-man, Leto II, is so bored by his all-knowing prescience and the absolute power it has afforded him that his dominant emotion is only mild amusement when other characters say or do something mildly surprising, surprisingly stupid, or stupidly violent.
“I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.” —God Emperor of Dune
There, in the doldrums of absolute prophecy, Herbert casts a ray of light. The universe is magic, remember? And a magic universe that preserves the possibility of free will conquers all, even total prediction. Thus, like the Bene Gesserit order before him, Leto II starts up his own human breeding program which this time produces a mutation that allows those who possess it to avoid Leto’s prescient sight. Absolute prediction, then, can be circumvented through biological changes.
Herbert’s belief in the unpredictable will have its scientific critics. Werner Heisenberg’s early 20th century quantum uncertainty principle is foundational to Herbert’s hope for an indeterminate, free-will-having universe (Heisenberg is directly cited in Children of Dune). But Bert Borgmans says recent studies in brain science favor determinism in human thought and action, meaning quantum uncertainties do not scale to the biological level. He writes: “My guess is that Herbert was still realist enough to be a determinist, but had the vague hope that Heisenberg could save us all.”
Sofia Carozza, a Catholic neuroscientist, warns against such reductionistic claims coming from the popular interpretations of her field. She believes most neuroscientists actually reject the idea that their field has disproven free will. “Freedom is not something that we can localize and quantify in the brain,” said Carozza. “Therefore, it's not something that we can disprove by looking at patterns of brain activity.” Free will preserved, then. Herbert would have given a secular amen to that.
In his address at UCLA, Herbert does use an example of indeterminacy at the human scale to attack the “mythology of futurism” (cf. John W. Campbell) and the corresponding “Presbyterian” view (cf. Calvinism) by performing an autopsy on the missed predictions of Roosevelt’s 1930s cohort known as the Brain Trust. Transistors, atomic energy, antibiotics, faster-than-sound travel, space probes – none of these were predicted by the Brain Trust, and if something called the Brain Trust can’t accurately predict the future, well…
The Dune-iverse thus produces unexpected inventions which inevitably arise in a magic universe. Leto II’s prophetic abilities drive his unhappy subjects to develop no-rooms and no-ships that can hide their occupants from his prescience, throwing yet another wrench in prediction. The ultimate advancement takes place in book five, Heretics of Dune, in which the character Miles Teg undergoes a radically painful interrogation only to break free into a greater state of awareness in which he is able to see the unseeable no-ships. In the magic universe, no one, neither the prophet nor his opponents, can predict what will truly happen.
This singular idea is Herbert’s north star. You cannot predict chaos, so you might as well go with the flow. Breaking from pattern and throwing off the shackles of prior forms is what will enable mankind to avoid a potential species extinction, which is the ultimate vision of the worm-man, Leto II. Far from lamenting the rebellious methods being developed to subvert his prescience and undermine his rule, he embraces them. His tyranny is an intentional paradox. His merciless conduct is necessary to achieve the noble goal of saving the human race. He desires that humanity reject his manufactured peace after he dies and spread wildly across the universe. He calls it his Golden Path – the ultimate way of survival in the magic universe.
“I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto’s Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seed their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.” —God Emperor of Dune
One must acknowledge the chaos, find one’s place in it, and move with it. This emerges, in part, from Herbert’s one semi-religious commitment in life: his self-styled, Zen-informed philosophy of “self-development.” This includes the Zen concept of learning to accept an ever-changing reality, which plays a fundamental role in Dune. This semi-religious attitude fits well with a magic universe that is always in flux, yet it never fully departs from the analytical underpinnings that support Zen Buddhist thinking, which many have deemed constructs of philosophical reason rather than movements of unfalsifiable religion. There is method in the magic.
Herbert may not need Heisenberg, either, since Chaos Theory is itself a subject of scientific inquiry. Chaos can be grounded in deterministic conditions yet still result in a world of unpredictable possibilities. Semblances of magic can therefore be extracted from Herbert’s testable means and methods. He is beckoning Western readers into infinite possibilities without requiring them to dig up the long-buried superstitions of their ancestors.
“Universal prescience is an empty myth. Only the most powerful local currents of Time may be foretold. But in an infinite universe, local can be so gigantic that your mind shrinks from it.” —Children of Dune
Herbert’s cynical view of religion finds a balance with his total commitment to shocking the small mind of the physicalist out of his formal delusions. Many Dune passages could easily be found among the koans of Zen, and maybe, just maybe, you will find a new kind of enlightenment in the confusion. How else does the God Emperor, Leto II, profess belief in a divinity while he himself accepts humanity’s worship?
“What is it you really want to know, Siona?”
“What you believe!”
“Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now—I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention.” —God Emperor of Dune
Herbert’s acknowledgement of extant chaos is attractive because it coincides, in part, with the biblical narrative. Chaos is so powerful that humans have yet to prove themselves capable of taming it. In the Bible, God first brings some order to the chaos of the seas by raising land and living things apart from it. Mankind is placed within the chaos and given the responsibility of subduing it. Man taxonomizes every species and exercises dominion by planting edible food and multiplying his team of gardeners as the forces of chaos rage outside. When man fails in his mission to bring order to chaos, choosing instead to join in it, God ultimately steps in and, by the end of the cosmic story, eliminates chaos altogether.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” —Revelation 21:1
This is where the Christian view diverges from Herbert. In Herbert’s magic universe, no god is available to step in except for a contingently immortal worm-man who lives for thousands of years and through absolute control teaches an unwitting humanity to stop fighting the chaos and embrace it. In his view, a comfortable society set in its ways is a society poised for destruction.
“Creative anarchy is the path to survival in this universe.” —Chapterhouse: Dune
For Herbert, species survival must be bought at any price, a seemingly noble cause that sadly devolves into perversity. We must embrace the infinite futures, which sounds exciting, but to get there requires a complete deconstruction of good and evil. By the end, one is left wondering if humanity’s survival justifies the inhumanity it takes to achieve it.
It is here that the magic universe and its endless possibilities show their cards. The literary achievement of Herbert’s fulcrum novel, God Emperor of Dune, is undeniable, but while its central paradox is the point, it nevertheless remains a contradiction. Despite Herbert’s stated desire to warn mankind about tyrants through his Dune books, Leto II’s tyrannical rule over the masses is what finally solves the problem of mankind’s survival. Leto’s Golden Path is designed to enslave mankind to one day free it. To get people to see infinite possibilities on the horizon, you must first oppress them.
“My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.” —God Emperor of Dune
The ghost of Nietzsche necessarily haunts the entire series. The God Emperor is the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the over-man, who finds a way to transcend everyone and everything through his sheer will to power. He alone is willing to disfigure himself by taking on a nearly indestructible worm body and endure lonely eons to save mankind. This Übermensch makes his own luck, forms the universe in his own image, crushes dissent, creates his own reality. This is what mankind can look forward to in the magic universe. This is the kind of deal we can expect to strike because it’s the best offer on Herbert’s table. Mankind won’t earn its freedom without spending some time as the God Emperor’s slave.
Then there is Duncan Idaho who becomes perhaps the most important character in the series – certainly the most recurring. In a literalistic depiction of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, the cells of Duncan’s dead body are collected and engineered into an endless succession of clones, called gholas, in a never-ending cycle of birth, life, and death. In the magic universe where this type of cloning is possible, humans may be reduced to iterative purposes where someone is brought back through cell regeneration in axlotl tanks, which turn out to be human females converted into ghola-making machines. The infinite universe is synonymous with dehumanization and demands the soulless march of adaptation, not necessarily progress, for the sake of survival.
“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.” —Dune
The last two books of the series, virtually unfilmable, offer endless possibilities at the cost of shocking degeneracy, a merciless survival ethic, and a cavalier approach to human life. The callous breeding programs of previous books, for example, give way to sexual mind hacking as a form of civilizational control. The act of sex is refined into a mechanistic process in which all the right ignitions at the just the right time can drive someone mad with ecstasy and enslave them to your will. Fending off this threat of sexual domination requires the Bene Gesserit to adapt by doubling down on sex as a matter of training, making it more routine and more utilitarian and more meaningless than one could have ever thought possible.
The most shocking scene in the series, which entirely shipwrecks a casual infatuation with Herbert’s philosophy, comes near the end of the last book, Chapterhouse: Dune. The scene is so objectionable that readers will be excused if they choose to read no further in the series or in this present analysis. In brief, the 10-year-old ghola of the great Miles Teg, a military commander for the Bene Gesserit order, holds memories from a past life ready to be awakened that could save the sisterhood from destruction at the hands of their arch enemy, the Honored Matres. To unlock Teg’s crucial memories, the Mother Superior Darwi Odrade (the book’s protagonist) believes the only way to awaken these memories is to force the 10-year-old boy into sexual liaisons with a reverend mother trained in the sexual imprinting that characterizes the final two books.
Odrade’s conscience weighs in only briefly as she and her sisters gather to watch the rape. The charge that comes to her mind is voyeurism. It stings her, but it is seen as merely human and “extremely non-Bene Gesserit thinking.” An objection from her trainee and the reluctance of the chosen imprinter for the task are dismissed as “cultural residue.” The tired old morality that may have once restricted such an act of desperation from going forward is superseded by the will to survive, which we are led to believe calls for the rape of a 10-year-old.
The characters’ actions, no matter how heinous, are not really subject to cosmic approval or censure. The rape of Miles Teg enjoys only success. Expediency is a requirement in Herbert’s universe, and even the actions of tyrants, whom Herbert disliked, still play a crucial role in establishing an everlasting existence for mankind in whatever physical and moral form the species takes. Shocking behavior is only evaluated by its effectiveness or ineffectiveness in its service to humanity’s genealogical survival.
“Moneo, Moneo,” Leto said, his voice low and resonant, “a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right. The right is known because it endures.” —God Emperor of Dune
By the end of the series, the basic motto of Dune, “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul” (a quote from the fictional Orange Catholic Bible), and all the stuff about testing humans using the gom jabbar to weed out dangerous leaders dominated by their animal nature, are essentially abandoned. For all the disdain the Bene Gesserit sisters retain for Paul’s son, the God Emperor whom they call ‘the tyrant,’ they adopt arguably worse policies in his wake. Formerly repulsed by the idea of a woman being transformed into a ghola-breeding axlotl tank, they end up using the tanks anyway for their own ends. Even the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad about rejecting thinking machines are finally swept away by the sisterhood’s acceptance of cyborgs.
This bold thematic development ironically undercuts Herbert’s attempt early in the series to cast Paul Atreides as a no-good, genocidal figure. The jihad that Paul wages across the known universe makes the Holocaust look like a silly misunderstanding in Herbert’s telling. In Dune Messiah, an ancient ruler, ‘a Hitler,’ is directly referenced as a measly killer of six million compared to Paul’s 61 billion. But the dissolution of morals in Herbert’s subsequent books leaves one asking, So what?
Even if it ends in moral ruin, Herbert’s magic universe should still appeal to a science-first society hungry for more than the material but still unable to accept anything beyond the material. It may provide a temporary offramp for the Western intellect seeking to transcend current corporeal and experimental limits. Seekers may therefore fall back on Herbert before making the leap into neo-paganism. The old gods still beckon, but Herbert offers gods of his own. His magic is rooted in science, which allows the 21st century techno-pilgrim to journey into mystery without being asked to accept supernatural mythologies or forsake the Enlightenment doctrines of his culture.
The greatest treasure of the series is the worldly wisdom it offers the receptive reader. Much of the political philosophy that saturates Dune expertly teaches readers how to understand power and identify society’s pressure points. If the United States one day collapses Roman Empire-style, readers of Dune will have been the first to see the cracks forming.
“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.” —Children of Dune
Herbert has earned his place in the American corpus. He brought magic back into the world and did it through science, not apart from it. The Dune series, perhaps more than ever, has the potential to light a fire in a corner of the soul that has gone cold in the modern West and do so without appealing to something like a soul or to a god who may have created it. Where medieval magic turned to enlightened science and left a void in its wake, Herbert offers a magic universe drawn from the same void.
But there is another path even more richly adorned and expertly blazed than the Golden Path of Dune, for there are still those in our Western culture who take mankind seriously as a species unique on both physical and spiritual terms. Contra Herbert’s philosophy, their belief is found in a true standard presented finally in the God-man, not the man-god, and the idea that we are fundamentally human as opposed to high ape because we are measured by His standard. The survival of the species is not excluded in this schema, but our conduct in the chaos matters more than our ability to withstand it. It is not about survival, then, but about redemption.
We are living a moment in time when Herbert’s statements about the illusory nature of scientific predicates are either proving correct or appear to be doing so. If the scientific revolution’s uncontrollable flood of discoveries could destroy an entire medieval conception of the world, the present dearth of discoveries could destroy our own. On that new hill, an empty cart teeters on sloping tracks to take us one of two ways: an age of dimmed concern for paradigmatic disruption, dominated by a new scholasticism that touches religious and non-religious people alike, or it will take us into an age of unexpected breakthroughs that change our conception of reality as we know it through the retrieval of alchemical freedoms of thought and experiment.
In the latter scenario, Herbert will be proved right a second time – the first being at the Enlightenment – in his belief that arbitrary forms are indeed transient. The former scenario, if it persists, will drive Herbert into the dirt. But are Christians prepared for either outcome? If you think basic conundrums of societal advancement are seldom broached in the local church, regarding this looming fate there is nary a whisper. It approaches nonetheless.
Make no mistake. We have been cut off from the security of the pre-modern world, and we cannot regain entry. Herbert is leading the pack toward a new mountain while we ourselves circle the desert.
McGuire Boles is a ghostwriter, digital producer, and Bible study leader in Dallas. He graduated from Texas A&M University and received an M.A. in Arts & Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas.
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