A Canticle for Leibowitz

After a nuclear holocaust, an order of Catholic monks preserves fragments of human knowledge in hopes that civilization will one day rebuild itself. Civilization does reemerge after centuries of darkness, but quickly the mistakes of the past are repeated: nationalist fervor, unethical technological advance, war. The legacy of nuclear conflict lives on in the human genome, resulting in monstrous births and mutations. Late in the third millennium, the order of Leibowitz departs for Alpha Centauri, leaving Earth to fall once more into nuclear darkness, perhaps for the final time.

Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) attempts to stage a conflict between religious faith and secular reason, and for the most part it’s successful, although you could argue it stacks the deck against secular reason. There are many powerful passages in which the irresponsibility of politicians and scientists are condemned. There is even a lengthy parable which describes the first nuclear holocaust in Christian-religious terms. Perhaps my primary criticism is that the novel is somewhat one-sided; the secular humanist worldview seems unrecoverable, and Christians have the last laugh. Indeed, a wooden carving of Leibowitz has a bemused smirk which the novel frequently references.

After each human-generated apocalypse, Nature reclaims the dead and the destroyed, and the order of Leibowitz remains to preserve the ember of knowledge for the survivors. I’d call the book, for lack of a better phrase, an attempt at “Christian satire”. The novel isn’t necessarily preachy, but perhaps I say this because the forcefulness of its condemnation is often quite lyrical and enjoyable; in other words, it's easy to be persuaded by Leibowitz. Although there are attempts to stage a genuine conflict between religious values and secular values, it seems clear in the end that the monks are the (flawed) heroes and that the cause of all this destruction is human vanity. Aside from the novel’s theological agenda, it contains some interesting speculations:

The order of Leibowitz attempts to preserve knowledge, but it doesn’t understand much of what it preserves. An electrician’s blue print, for instance, completely mystifies them. Preserving knowledge provides no guarantee that it will be useful to those who encounter it in the future. Or perhaps the idea is that “knowledge” doesn’t reside in these artifacts as much as it emerges from their “use value”; the blue print doesn’t become knowledge until it allows us to think or do something we couldn’t do before. They are able to learn some things from the memorabilia, as they call it, but there are a lot of missing pieces, and no one person has the complete picture.

The idea of preserving written texts and materials against the onslaught of time and calamity warrants further consideration. This is a common idea in speculative fiction, including Bradbury’s Fahrenheit  451. In Leibowitz, post-holocaust humans enact a great “Simplification” in which they attempt to eradicate all knowledge and learned people in retaliation for the disaster. “Bootleggers” then become “bookleggers,” and the monks memorize books in addition to protecting them – all at the risk of their lives.