On my first interaction with “The People of Sand and Slag” what I experienced was something like great excitement for the future. The story, on further readings and in retrospect, is truly sad, mourning something that is lost-- something “human.” I think the first time I read the story, I was only able to see the great gains of “humanity” in its power over death, treading into the realms of near-immortality; this is a future human resolved into a sort of creature with awesome control over everything. As humanity seems to have been able to develop anything it needs with its control over the mechanics of cells and structuring molecules, using even the debris around them to stay alive, saying, “Mud makes us tick”-- the phrase “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” takes on a new meaning, here-- it has attained a sort of immortality and immunity from pain (“Jack laughed and...sliced his arm off”) (Bacigalupi 43, 45). Along that line of progress, though, something has perceptively been lost, and that is almost too sad to bear. Why is what humans have lost so inescapably sad? I think the answer lies somewhere in the fact that what many people would use to define humanity as “humanity” was lost somewhere between where we are now and the future in which Bacigalupi invents. That something is missing is easily obvious, but why it's sad is not so easily seen; comparing Paolo Bacigalupi's short story with Philip K. Dick's text Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, what is lost becomes more visible through Rick Deckard's interactions with androids and animals. What is lost, more than a physical difference, is an overall sense of empathy in humanity that animals are able to lay bare.
On further readings, the peak of disgust and sadness that I have engaged with in the text of “The People of Sand and Slag” was when Jaak talked about the dog: “I don’t know. That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any bio-job out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog….” (Bacigalupi 51). Humanity seems to continually be gaining by technology, but where something is gained something has been lost. What is lost seems to be summed up in the ideas of Isidore the chickenhead about what he thinks a bounty hunter is-- “something merciless that carried a printed list and a gun, that moved machine-like through the flat, bureaucratic job of killing. A thing without emotions, or even a face; a thing that if killed got replaced immediately by another resembling it. And so on, until everyone real and alive had been shot” (Dick 158). I like Isidore's definition of what it is to be alive-- to have a face and to feel emotion-- the opposite of a machine. Unlike the dog, what humans have lost in “The People of Sand and Slag” is distinction and emotion; they have somehow merged with the dust or the kipple of Dick's future. They are made mostly of sand, the end result of the entropy of the world. Instead of combating that beast entropy any longer, the humans have somehow merged themselves with the dust; ironically, what humanity seems to have lost in merging with and creating things out of kipple is inherently what nature lacks as well-- empathy. “Humans” of the future are like nature, indifferent. They can only create shells of humans and shells of themselves and pour themselves into that, but that seems to be the extent of what they have and what they are.
Thus what is lost, down this road, is what we know humanity to be. Even now, “humans” are not what they used to be. In Jeremy Rifkin's “Empathic Civilisation”, Rifkin discusses how the way human brains were wired in the past is much different from the way they are wired now (we are now plugged into new gadgets and connections, and we see a global picture of the world). That “human” even 20 years ago is different from the “human” we are encountering today (Rifkin). To be human is not a constant and stable idea, and it is in steady flux. Humans in Bacigalupi's future, then, have changed to the point that they have basically achieved immortality, possibly the ultimate gain that we can have from technology. It seems to have come at the price of eliminating everything that is not human or “other”, something that can tell us what we aren't, so we know what we presumably are. The sadness that seems to inform the text of “The People of Sand and Slag” is the sadness that this technological immortality now equates to total sameness. It is the idea that now there is no sentient existence outside of ourselves that we cannot fully comprehend that makes us “human” right now. It is the validation of something that is not human that makes us tick in a sense that is definitely more than that of the physical mud-- it makes us tick in a sort of emotional sense. It is that validation that Deckard sought as he gazed into the eyes of the ostrich (Dick 27). The new sand people do not bemoan their situation and their losses; maybe because they do not know what they have lost, just like Rachael did not feel the loss of the sheep that she pushed off the building or Pris the pain the spider felt when she cut off its legs (Dick 206, 226). Why do we, as humans, mourn the loss of this kind of life? It may be because what we are clinging to, right now as humans trying to remain human, is empathy. For us, in a sentence: empathy makes us human. Empathy is based on the fear of death and our understanding that others are also subject to death and that pain can move us closer to death or decreases the pleasure we have in this relatively short time on earth (Rifkin). Maybe that is why Jaak says that the last poet on earth, who rejected weeviltech and who decided to die rather than to live in a world without natural animals, thought that “being human meant having animals” (Bacigalupi 51). Without death, there is no empathy. Without empathy, there is no humanity.
Animals are important to us to prove that we have empathy. Conversely, in Bacigalupi's future, animals aren't important any more because empathy isn't important anymore. Whereas Deckard's obsession with animals seems to come from his need to prove to himself that he is human and not an android, and that androids are definitely not human. His entire career is based on this assumption-- that androids are inferior to humans, and what makes them inferior is their lack of empathy. This is why the Voight-Kampf, or empathic response test is so important, because in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the only decisive division between human and android is empathy. This starts to get sticky and complicated because there are also many humans who don't have empathy. Deckard seems robotically cold in his systematic killing of the sentient android at the beginning of the novel, with the deaths of androids simply equating to money for him-- “And now let's visit Mr. Polokov, he said to himself. He patted his laser tube” (Dick 86). Just like Deckard in this scene, not all humans have empathy. Thus, any system that begins to claim a sort of superiority of this kind is destined to end in violence that is hard to justify, because it will call for the destruction of anything that does not meet the criteria for its tests; if it doesn't have empathy, it doesn't fit in our regimented theory of humanity, so kill it. But can we ever justify killing or ending a life? This could be why we mourn the loss of empathy, which, in this argument, is what makes us human. We mourn its loss because empathy keeps humanity in check (there will be no big bombs if we understand and sympathize with the pain we will be causing) and urges humanity to push toward a freer and more untethered way of life for as many people as we can. Animals come into play here because if we can empathize with something that is “weaker” than us, something that is “dependent” on us, we can empathize with each other, our equals, and that makes us human. Most of the novel is dealing with Deckard's anxiety over empathy-- his job depends on empathy being what makes life meaningful. He could not shoot an android that had empathy. However, is there more to his anxiety than just his dependence on it for a clean conscience in his line of work? Could it be that there really is nothing of true value to distinguish humans from androids, from one life to another, and that idea makes him anxious?
In Dick's futuristic world, humans are dominant and everything else serves a sort of “subservient” role. In this sense, I mean that humans see animals and androids as their lesser-counterparts, as if their lives did not mean as much as a human's. Even on this point, though, there is a hierarchy, and humans desire to keep animals alive, but killing an android doesn't mean anything. It seems that animals have a specific role in humans' lives, but could an android ever fit that role? Rachael eventually has a specific role where she seduces Deckard. Up to that point, Deckard had never seen an android as a being that could be a part of a relationship. So can androids look a human in the eye and have something behind that gaze that justifies humans as much as an animal can? For Deckard, it seems like it could be, because Rachael says to him, “You're not going to be able to hunt androids any longer... So don't look sad. Please” (Dick 198). He won't be able to hunt androids any longer because he feels a sense of “otherness”, or at least life that he had never sensed before Rachael. However, where it gets blurry is where Bacigalupi again brings in the idea that things created by humans can't be anything but human, just shells filled with our own selves, which destroys a sense of otherness. So androids do have lives, but are they as valuable as a “real” animal's life that has all the aura and mystique? Or is all life simply life? Either way, it seems that Deckard is able to have a relationship with an android, whether it is better than or more valuable than a relationship with an animal or not, so retiring androids becomes problematic. He is worried about empathy again.
If androids are alive, but they don't have empathy, and humans are to become, essentially, androids, is this new future of sand and slag to be worried about? Is the loss of humanity as we know it to be mourned? Does the mechanization of humanity equate to the end of life? Deckard ends up saying, “...it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are” (Dick 241). Dick's text seems to try to blur the distinctions between lives, or at least problematize our definitions of life-- maybe empathy does not exactly mean life or humanity. He seems to be trying to say that no life is more or less significant than another, because life is life. Then why is it so important to Deckard to have a real animal rather than an electric one? This starts to get tricky when we want to believe that all life is life, and it is all important, but there is a part of us, as humans, that does not want to surrender what we are, to say that all life is equal, without any special “aura”. But then, can we create a system of classification of “human” that somehow includes all humans and excludes everything non-human? There seems to be an abundance of overlap in this case- the android Phil Resch has a pet squirrel that he treats with warmth and with what could admittedly be called empathy. Have we ruled out that the people of sand and slag as non-humans? Or does Jaak feel something like empathy when the dog crawls all over him, licking his face, and Jaak says that “there was something friendly about it. I couldn't help smiling as I drifted back to sleep” (Bacigalupi 52)? For any one thing that a person could use to classify something as human, an android or animal somewhere has that characteristic. On the other hand, any trait or classification that could be used to look down on any “other” as non-human could be just as easily seen in many humans.
Then couldn't life simply be life? And couldn't any life then justify another life? Do we have to hang on so tight to what we might today call “human”? Nature seems to have a good sense of equilibrium that balances out loss with gain and vice versa. So what humanity presumably lost in “The People of Sand and Slag”, it must have gained something in return. However, despite the dog's best attempts at awakening a slumbering empathy in the people of Bacigalupi's story, they still ate it. Two of the people ate it without remorse. But Jaak says, “Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it” (Bacigalupi 54). Maybe empathy will never die, but it will show up in places we would not expect. Even so, it required an animal to bring it out of Jaak...
Works Cited
Bacigalupi, Paolo. "The People of Sand and Slag." Wastelands. San
Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2008: 39-54.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. New York: Del
Rey, 1968.
Rifkin, Jeremy, Prod. The Empathic Civilisation. 2010. Web. 7 Nov 2011.
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