📚 On Legacy: In the Context of Lowry's The Giver

What The Giver can teach us about the fine line between caste systems and functioning families.

The Giver is many things, but in some very important ways it is the story about what you give up when you orient a society around mass producing families instead of letting them happen organically. To me it's always been a story about the dangers of specialization, and the importance of a society that values fuzzy emotions instead of pure rationality.

For those lucky souls who did not have to read The Giver in elementary school, Lois Lowry's famous novel tells the story of Jonas, a young boy from a community of people who are forced to forget everything. Jobs are assigned to people in this community by what is essentially a leadership committee. Jonas is chosen to become the Receiver of Memories. It's a very special but difficult position not only because it's very lonely, but because only the Receiver of Memories really understands the alternatives to this society's structure. Through Jonas, Lowry explores the consequences of forgetting and the power of tradition. The Giver was nominated for several awards and is often mandatory reading for elementary-aged children, but so are many books.

The Giver is special to me because it's the story I think of every time I think about about orphanages, day cares, nepotism, caste systems – and inheritance. Especially now that I've got a toddler, I think about these things a lot, not least of which because there are so many pressures to behave ethically and so many different bits of conflicting bits of opinion on what that looks like.

Given the dangers of writing about culture wars on the internet – to one's mental health and happiness, to say nothing of one's livelihood – I'm generally reluctant to talk about things like parenting best practices, the impact of daycare on young children, the comparative advantages that come from having a parent who works in a lucrative field that they can prepare a child for outside of the regular education system, or how I think inheritance law should look. I prefer to leave the public parts of those debates to other, more educated people.

It's my habit to look at ancient history and foreign societies instead, since that's where my expertise lies and because that makes it a little less fraught when helping people can draw their own conclusions.

To that end, I want to talk briefly about the origins of caste systems in Africa.

Christopher Ehret describes the process something like this:

When ironworking first became a thing in Africa, the ironworkers surrounded their activities with taboos and rituals to ensure success, which, intentionally or not, basically created a monopoly. Eventually, other specialists like the leatherworkers and the potters started to claim similar kinds of ritual-esque status for themselves, passing their skills down via lineage. This was at first pretty similar to guilds, but then the occupational groupings started marrying in-round and then became castes.

In short, the argument goes, caste systems are an ossified product of the attempt to teach one’s children exclusive skills they can leverage for status. It’s the opposite of upward mobility, and our society is built on the idea that everyone can rise. The American Dream is one of entrepreneurial spirit, of moving fast and breaking things, of working hard and getting ahead. It’s produced a culture of highly skilled professionals and people who believe that if you put in 80 hours of work a week, you will be rewarded. It’s produced a country that is on some axes incontrovertibly great — or, if you prefer, exceptional: Bret Devereaux goes into more detail about the exceptionality of the United States, but his point is not that America is "good" but that it is unique on some important metrics. Alexander the Great might not be a "great guy" on any of the metrics we usually mean that term... but on the definition of "great" that means "big" instead of "ethical," well, he definitely led an army that conquered a whole lot.

But realistically it’s impossible to get away from the reality that even in America, people still go out of their way to raise their children in their own image.

It sounds better when you phrase it that way, instead of bald statements like “people try to raise their kids in communities where people generally look and act like them,” or “the children of software engineers tend to socialize with the children of other software engineers” or the reality that it is easier to be a successful lawyer if your grandpa owns the law firm where your father is a partner and your aunt used to work before heading into politics.

The Giver imagines a different world, one that looks like a utopia on the surface but is presented as dystopic in reality; the leaders hide things like "we euthanize babies and old people in order to maintain a stable population." Toward the end of the book, the protagonist risks death to flee the community in order to save the life of a baby his family was assigned responsibility for. They also take babies from their birth mother around their first birthday and assign them to a family where they will be raised without art, color, history, or the freedom to choose their own career path. At 12, they're assigned jobs based on aptitudes as determined by the leadership council.

It's always seemed to me like a warning of what kinds of problems happen if you try to give everyone true equality, where parents' wealth and background makes the playing field uneven for children. The book is a warning, and yet, one of the things I don't remember discussing about it in school was how Jonas was an outlier in his community; people chose to live like that and many were living reasonably happy lives.

Yet here’s some food for thought; the easiest path to becoming a king may be to be the son of a king, but the rulers in Roman history we tend to respect most were those who came up through relative obscurity. Justin I was a shepherd. Even Augustus & Marcus Aurelius weren't really born into their roles. The first ruler of the Han Dynasty was Liu Bang (256–195 BC), also known as Emperor Gaozu. From a peasant upbringing, he rose to become a brilliant politician, strategist, and ultimately the ruler of China. King Sargon of Akkad—who built what was probably the world's first empire in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago—was the illegitimate child of a priestess.

Often when I ponder the ideal rules for a fictional monarchy, first among them is to disqualify the immediate relatives of the king from the throne — because while geniuses may be statistically more likely to breed geniuses, reversion to the mean is probably the phenomenon to be more worried about, and with kings, unlike potters or ironworkers, you only get one shot to pick a good one. A bad king can screw over a society a lot worse than a single incompetent smith.

Genetics, talent, social relationships, and upbringing all play a role in what people wind up doing, and how well they end up doing it. One of the hardest questions in designing the world of Civil Mage was the question of how much of a role genetics and upbringing should play in the magic system. Should genetic inheritance be the main corollary to Irella's power, or training – that sort of thing.

In the end, I elected for a bit of both. Her talent for magic is inborn, but how she uses it was taught by the Temple of the Architect, and it would be very difficult for her to re-specialize at this stage of her life... even though she was born Voldshee, who, as you'll see, typically use their magic for necromancy, not civil engineering...

💭 Did you ever read The Giver? Do you ever struggle to find the ethical path between engaging in unfair nepotism and ... being a good parent? I'd love to hear your thoughts on either.