YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority
A "progressive parent" friend of mine was recently expressing enthusiasm over the fact that his children had taken to reading Young Adult dystopian novels. They were dying to see the new feature film adaptation of the book The Giver (see Sarah Palin's review, here), after having ploughed through the quartet of bestselling books by Lois Lowry. They had absorbed the blockbuster film adaptations of Divergent and The Hunger Games and had hungrily consumed the associated merchandise . They'd also made hundreds of new friends from all over the world who "shared" the same passion for dystopian teen icons Katniss, Tris and Jonas through the tens of thousands of Twitter fan accounts.
My friend thought teenage dystopian fiction to be a great improvement on the Harry Potter cult that had been filling children's heads with right-wing dreams of public schools and supernatural powers. He felt that YA dystopias were a good way of teaching kids to "question authority" - these books, after all, had protagonists who exposed the lies of their societies, they were standing up against those in power. Dystopian YA was, he claimed, a great left-wing educational tool. My friend could not have been more wrong.
Twenty years ago he would have been right. He was projecting from his fond memories of the dystopian novels and films of his own childhood, from the free-market-will-bring-hell-on earth period of speculative fiction. This was a tradition which sprang from HG Wells and his engagement with communism (see his discussion with Stalin from 1937) and which filtered into the 1960s through left-engaged authors like Philip K Dick. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (adapted for screen as Blade Runner) saw a post-apocalyptic world in which a massive private global corporation had replaced governments and nations.
A similar picture of dictatorship - albeit a Christian fundamentalist anti-feminist one - formed the oppressive dystopia in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, while second wave feminist scholars read the cyberpunk movement in fiction through an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist lens. The science fiction of William Gibson was also championed by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. In this period the capitalist dystopia was a respected left wing "cultural strategy" and its dominance endured till around 1993 which, coincidentally or not, was the time of the fall of the old left and the rise of neoliberalism. The dystopian narratives which are currently consuming the minds of millions of teens worldwide are now communicating right-wing ideas.
You might say, wait, they're all about freedom and truth and oppressive societies, but the kind of freedom that's being advocated in The Hunger Games and Divergent is, as Salon magazine recently pointed out, more like "agit-prop for capitalism".
What marks these dystopias out from previous ones is that, almost without exception, the bad guys are not the corporations but the state and those well-meaning liberal leftists who want to make the world a better place. 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.
Of course, there is not some secret underground bunker filled with a Bilderberg-group-type-fraternity of neoliberals & neocons dictating what Young Adult authors write and neither is there a conspiracy among right-wing media moguls to implant reactionary messages through the mass media into the minds of the young and impressionable. This is one of those zeitgeist moments where the subconscious of a culture emerges into visibility. We might be giving ourselves right-wing messages because, whether or not we realise it, we have come to accept them as incontestable. 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.
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-free-market-hunger-games-the-giver-divergent
