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Butlerian Jihad

Throughout the Dune novels, Frank Herbert frequently referred to the the Butlerian Jihad, the war in which humans wrested their freedom from "thinking machines." In their novel "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad", Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson bring to life the story of that war, a tale previously seen only in tantalizing hints and clues. Serena Butler's passionate grief ignites the struggle that will liberate humans from their machine masters; here is the tale of the Zensunni Wanderers, who escape bondage to flee to the desert world where they declare themselves the Free Men of Dune. And here is the backward, nearly forgotten planet of Arrakis, where traders have discovered the remarkable properties of the spice melange.

The name could very easily be a literary allusion to Samuel Butler, whose 1872 novel Erewhon depicted a people who had destroyed machines for fear they would be out-evolved by them. Samuel Butler [1835-1902] was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. The most daringly original side of Butlers's "Erewhon" ('nowhere,' scrambled), first published in 1872, was "The Book of the Machines." This part of the work was expanded, with some modifications, from an earlier essay. Here is Butler's reverence for the material and mechanical to overcome matter, but there is also a lurking fear that the machines may come to mean too much, may be able to do too much, to the detriment of man. In Erewhon, in fact, there are two distinct views put forward on this topic: the first is the elaborated view of the machines, by a sort of physical symbiogenesis, getting the upper hand and acquiring a definite identity, and consciousness; the second view, that really held by Butler himself, was expanded from his article, "Lucubratio Ebria." The chief point in this second examination of the machines is that they are to be considered as "extra corporeal limbs"; thus, as one writer has put it, to Butler "all contrivances and inventions are extensions of the personality of him who uses them"; they are supplementary limbs which man can tack on to himself; devices which alone raise him above the level of ferae naturae; apparatus which, unlike the lower animals, he does not keep entirely within his own body.

Having regard to these supplementary limbs, millionaires, in Butler's view, are the most highly organised creatures in society — creatures who at will can tack on to their identity a special train or part of a P.&O. boat. The principal varieties of the race are to be found then, not in racial differences, but among the rich and poor, who are respectively examples of the most perfect human machinate mammal and the least perfect. Between the rich and the poor a wider gulf is fixed than between any other two human groups.

Butler wrote a remarkably prescient description of Moore's Law, nearly a century before the pronouncement of Moores Law. Bulter noted "... a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. ... what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can Still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless? ... Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannize over us even more completely.

"True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of the machines-they serve that they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided he creates a better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their development. It is for neglecting them that he incurs their wrath, or for using inferior machines, or for not making sufficient exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them without replacing them; yet these are the very things we ought to do, and do quickly; for though our rebellion against their infant power will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if that rebellion is delayed?

"They have preyed upon man's grovelling preference for his material over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying that element of Struggle and warfare without which no race can advance.... The machines being of themselves unable to Struggle, have got man to do their Struggling for them: as long as he fulfils this function duly, all goes well with him-at least he thinks so; but the moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition; and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die.

"So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How many men at this hour are living in a State of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?"

From Erewhon, Chapter 9, "... about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which I propose to give extracts later on), proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the country with him and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions".