It Is Wrong To Take Life: language & mockery in the Shing era [01JN]

In City of Illusions, the Shing have shattered the old League of All Worlds and dominated the Earth—whose people they allow to live quiet pastoral lives subject to only one rarely enforced Law: It Is Wrong To Take Life.

The power of the Shing, the legend says, is that they are able to mindlie—a skill that goes beyond the normal human telepathic capabilities in the Hainish universe. Everything about the Shing is some kind of falsehood or mockery. They have elevated animals with the power of speech: flocks of birds chatter with human words, and wild pigs and chickens squawk the Shing Law to human hunters (“It is wrong to take life!”).

Le Guin’s focus on mockery and falseness as the form of evil reminds me of Tolkien. In The Silmarillion, Melkor’s every prideful effort to emulate God is transformed into a mockery and a counterfeit of the object of his imitation. That something is “untrue” is what makes it evil. It is very clear that the humans of Shing Earth see things in much the same way—the pleading appeal of the pig and the chicken to the Shing’s Law against killing is a nuisance and a symbol of a poisoned world whose right and natural order has been perverted.

The narrative perspective of City of Illusions is that only a race in which killing runs deep could conceive of an absolute Law against all killing; and the Shing do things worse than killing anyway, like erasing people’s memory or letting people kill each other. Thus reassured of the hypocrisy and essential falseness of the Shing, we can get on with the “liberation” of all the Earth’s species from Laws that go against the true natural order, which is (naturally) that animals who cannot speak Man’s languages must serve Man in the the only form intelligible to his insatiable appetite: protein, blood, and fat.

Perhaps it is true that the Shing do protest too much and that their Law testifies to their own vicious nature, but of all known races in our own known universe, there is none so dedicated to killing as Humankind, and our own statutes provide for the lawful killing of humans and non-humans alike at scales that defy belief and all sense of morality—even Human morality. City of Illusions suggests that even if the birds and pigs were given intelligible voice, Man would view their pleas as mockery.