I agree that Herbert thought the breeding program was necessary. But I also think he couched it as tragically necessary. Leto II’s horrific repression was similarly tragically necessary.
I think the questions provoked by Herbert’s concepts of Mentats and Bene Gesserit might actually be fruitful to think about.
If there were no meditation traditions on Earth, then we would have no reason to suspect that jhanas, or any other advanced states of meditative achievement, exist. If there were no musical instruments, we would have no reason to suspect that a human could use fingers or breath to manipulate strings or harmonics to create intricate, polyphonic, improvised melodies. If there were no arithmetic, we would view a person who could do rudimentary mental math to be a wizard. One can extend this line of thinking to many things—reading and writing, deep strategy games like chess, high-level physical sports, and perhaps even specific fields of knowledge.
So it is probably safe to say that we “know” that a human can’t be trained to do the things that Mentats do in Dune, but I don’t think it’s safe to say that we have any idea what humans could be trained to do with unpredictable avenues of development and 20,000 years of cultural evolution.
I guess I’m not really disagreeing with anything you said, but rather advocating that we take Herbert’s ideas seriously but not literally.
This is pretty close to my thinking too. Herbert’s proposal was something like, “We have no idea what levels of human potential are out there.” He takes this idea and describes what it might look like, based on a few possible lines of development. Possibly he thought these were the most likely avenues of development, but that still seems unclear. Either way, he happened to pick examples that were wrong in the details, but the proposal stands.
I agree that Herbert thought the breeding program was necessary. But I also think he couched it as tragically necessary. Leto II’s horrific repression was similarly tragically necessary.
I think the questions provoked by Herbert’s concepts of Mentats and Bene Gesserit might actually be fruitful to think about.
If there were no meditation traditions on Earth, then we would have no reason to suspect that jhanas, or any other advanced states of meditative achievement, exist. If there were no musical instruments, we would have no reason to suspect that a human could use fingers or breath to manipulate strings or harmonics to create intricate, polyphonic, improvised melodies. If there were no arithmetic, we would view a person who could do rudimentary mental math to be a wizard. One can extend this line of thinking to many things—reading and writing, deep strategy games like chess, high-level physical sports, and perhaps even specific fields of knowledge.
So it is probably safe to say that we “know” that a human can’t be trained to do the things that Mentats do in Dune, but I don’t think it’s safe to say that we have any idea what humans could be trained to do with unpredictable avenues of development and 20,000 years of cultural evolution.
I guess I’m not really disagreeing with anything you said, but rather advocating that we take Herbert’s ideas seriously but not literally.
This is pretty close to my thinking too. Herbert’s proposal was something like, “We have no idea what levels of human potential are out there.” He takes this idea and describes what it might look like, based on a few possible lines of development. Possibly he thought these were the most likely avenues of development, but that still seems unclear. Either way, he happened to pick examples that were wrong in the details, but the proposal stands.