Earthseed and Ideology in a World of Eco-Crisis: A Reflection on Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower”

In a situation of bare life, such as the one increasingly made more apparent by contemporary governance and exacerbated by the environmental crisis, it becomes necessary to rethink the ideological underpinnings that direct thought and action. If these are found to be lacking, insufficient, and useless, the only choice for resistance is the invention of new forms of thought, to proliferate new scientific, religious, and political discourses that simultaneously serve both bios and zoê. In the world of the Anthropocene, the ecological crisis is not an unexplainable side effect of modern life, but a logical consequence of the bourgeois ideologies that have guided the development of the world (in areas both inside and outside of what is termed “civilization.”) As the world plunges deeper into the barbarism of the Anthropocene, alternative ways of thinking must be developed. In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, we are shown a version of the world in which this barbarism has become nearly unavoidable. The shortcomings of bourgeois faith and ideologies made visible, the protagonist Lauren begins to think up a new religion: Earthseed. By examining Earthseed and the bourgeois ideologies that have brought the world to crisis in relation to the real world and the world of the novel, this paper will attempt to show the insufficiency and damaging nature of bourgeois ideologies, and the importance of alternative ideas like Earthseed in the future of the Anthropocene.

As a religion, Earthseed seems to bear little resemblance to the Abrahamic religions practiced in the West today. These religions attempt to explain metaphysical questions as well as provide an ostensibly universal ethic for their communities of followers. It is, perhaps, a curiosity that the bourgeois epoch, with all its incessant revolutionizing of society and though, has not done away with a system of ethics that is thousands of years old. However, it is not unreasonable to suspect that those who dream of a universal system of ethics do so under the assumption of a relative stability of scenarios in which ethical decisions must be made. In this sense, religion and its ethics have been quite compatible with a mode of modern thought that, as Amitav Ghosh points out, is the result of “a growing faith in ‘the regularity of bourgeois life’” (25). This bourgeois faith involves an ahistorical belief that bourgeois, liberal society is always situated at the end of history, incapable of fundamentally being altered by people or the environment. Without a rapidly changing world, religions that conceive of their purpose as providing a steadfast, eternal ethics can take root easily. In a world of persistent instability, in which the only promise is an inability to make promises about what action will have to be taken, a radical new form of religion must develop. Earthseed is this radical new religion, rejecting the anti-historical narrative of bourgeois thought and understanding that change is always possible.

Earthseed recognizes that “God is change,” and that, “as it must,” “apparent stability disintegrates” (104). Unlike the religions that have persisted in bourgeois society due to their compatibility with its faith in stability and persistent normality, Earthseed does not aim to provide a universal ethics, but to describe the principles of the life. Recognizing the everchanging quality of life in a world ravaged by the consequences of climate change, Lauren sees Earthseed as something which should adapt to the world in which it has developed rather than attempting to stand apart from it in the realm of eternally stable ideas and practices. It is a break from the Christianity with which she has been brought up. Indeed, it is with the death of her father, a Christian preacher, and then, later, the destruction of her community, which represented an anachronistic place of refuge for the old world with its bourgeois modes of thought, that Christianity retreats fully for from the text, and Lauren finally begins to preach about Earthseed to her fellow survivors.

This radical form of religion is not actually entirely new, but rather seems to, unintentionally perhaps, have its roots in the pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus and his belief that fire (as a metaphor for change) was the arche of all things. (Heraclitus, a philosopher apparently radical enough for a Parisian who, during the May of ’68 uprising, found it appropriate to scrawl a quote from him on the walls a city building) (Situationist International Anthology 449). Since ideas do not develop in a vacuum, the similarities between Earthseed and Heraclitus’ philosophy should lead us notice that they are both radical ideas which have not been included into the ideology of the bourgeois epoch. As such, they provide a fundamental break with the modes of thinking dominant in the modern era, which would do no more than persist in allowing people to fall into the tragedies that have resulted from bourgeois ideology.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that Earthseed is only interested in providing an explanation of the principles of existence. Rather, this explanation of the principle of existence being that “God is changed” means that the organizing principle of Earthseed as a community is that there is no signular, unified source of ethics that the Earthseed community must subject itself to. This contrasts both with the Christian organization of ethics, wherein they come from a singular authority (be it the Bible or the Catholic Church), and with the organization of political life in the bourgeois epoch, wherein the power over the destiny of society is situated in the hand of the bourgeois class. These systems of organization are not beholden to the community over which they exert control, but only to the whims of those who hold power. Earthseed instead attempts to allow the community to set its own ethics according to the material circumstances it finds itself in. This adaptable community-based ethics has a twofold purpose: it ensures the survival of the Earthseed community and ensures a quality of life for them. (It’s also notable that the actual texts of Earthseed are not, as is the case in Christianity, prose stories or lists of commandments, but the endlessly ambiguous texte scriptible that poetry tends to be. Even in form, Earthseed seems to value the ability of the community to shape it.) In one of the Earthseed verses, Lauren states that “One or twice/each week/A Gathering of Earthseed/is a good and necessary thing./It vents emotion, then/quiets the mind./It focuses attention, strengthens purpose, and/unifies people” (214). The point of Earthseed is not merely to describe principles, but to create a discourse that opens up the possibility of communal happiness and relative quality of life in a manner that is adapted to the actual workings of the world, trying to inhabit it successfully and happily rather than deny the volatility of it in service of a bourgeois ideology whose real goal is profit and dominance. When faced with realization that their plan is a failure, Lauren and her band of survivors don’t simply scatter and search for something else, but instead remember the dictum “God is change,” and adapts to make the best of their newfound situation.

A discourse like Earthseed, despite being fictional, also seems to be compatible with real life discourses, such as Bruno Latour’s critique of the theory of ecology, which, rather than simply attempting the vague, task of protecting nature (itself a product of bourgeois modes of thought), aims to “take charge, in an even more complete and mixed fashion, of an even greater diversity of entities and destines” (21). Sometimes local, sometimes global; sometimes considered with single actors, sometimes considered with networks; Latour’s vision of ecology, like Lauren’s religion of Earthseed is willing to “Embrace diversity/Or be destroyed” (197). Both discourses, willing to untie themselves from the prevailing discourses of the bourgeois epoch and create alternative strategies for adapting to life in the Anthropocene.

The hubristic belief of political and military technocrats everywhere assumes that the decline of the world into chaos and barbarism will follow the patterns of bourgeois society thus far, allowing it to not only be managed by them, but allowing it to be a source of profit for them. As these actual processes of decline occur, however, the inanity of this way of thinking becomes increasingly apparent. If humanity is to survive in the era of the Anthropocene, it will be necessary to imagine alternative discourses to those that presently circulate. Lauren’s religion Earthseed in the novel Parable of the Sower is one such discourse. Although fictional, it is precisely discourses like Earthseed that we will need to propose all alternatives to those of bourgeois epoch.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E.. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 1993.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University Of Chicago Press, 2016.

Knabb, Ken, editor. Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

Latour, Burno. Politics of Nature. Harvard UP, 2004.