Parable of the Sower: Modern Utopia

Lauren Olamina, the protagonist, is a black teenager living in Los Angeles in 2024. Lauren's father is a minister who also gives lessons at a local college. She lives with her four brothers, her father, and Cory, her stepmother. They live in a specific place surrounded by a wall that serves as a secure base where people of various races and religions look out for one another. Cory is in charge of the neighborhood school. On the other side of the wall, homeless and starved people try to survive, and small bands of criminals who are high on "pyro, " a substance that makes smokers want to start fires, rove around looking for settlements to assault and burn down. Lauren's father encourages his neighbors to practice self-defense, but he disapproves of Lauren's discussion of leaving to the north with others and tells her to stop talking about it. He instead advises her to teach the survival information she knows to the people. Lauren is distinct in two respects. First, she has hyperempathy syndrome as a result of a substance that her mother abused when she was pregnant with Lauren: she experiences other people's pleasures as well as their pains as if they were her own. Lauren's understanding of the world is unusual: she admires and respects her father, but she is suspicious of the Christianity that they follow and other popular religions. In her journal, she develops a new way of thinking that she calls Earthseed. Its central tenet is that God is change and can not be stopped. However, God can be influenced. Lauren eventually compiles enough poetry and reflections to create Earthseed: The Book of the Living. Keith, Lauren's eldest younger brother and Cory's favorite child, is suspicious of organized religion as well. He is egotistical and headstrong, full of anxiety to prove everyone else himself as a man, and he is indifferent to his parents' advice. The following year, when the story takes place, he flees from home at the age of thirteen and leads a prosperous life as a gang member for a while, periodically turning up at the family residence to give a chunk of cash without seeing his father because the last time he beat him so badly. After a while, his parents had to identify his corpse. His murderers tortured him till he died but left his face detectable so that he could be identified and could be a threat to others. Lauren's father vanishes on his way back from work only a few months later and has never been seen again, even with the so-called help of police and patrols. The following summer, the neighborhood is attacked by pyromaniacs. Lauren and two others escape, involving Harry, the white resident, and Zahra, the black and the youngest wife of the neighborhood's now-dead polygamist. As seen by Zahra, the pyros killed Cory along with all of Lauren's brothers. Lauren, Harry, and Zahra flee to the shore and then northward along U. S. 101. Lauren, in need of disguising, shortens her hair and pretends that she is a male to make them appear less susceptible. They expand their group as they traveltraveling. During the journey north, Lauren starts telling her companions about Earthseed. The others' levels of curiosity vary, but none are antagonistic to Lauren's views. Lauren is now eighteen. Despite their age gap, she and Taylor Bankole, a doctor who is almost the same age as her father, fall in love. He has an estate on the northern shore, and the area is large enough for the group members to settle and establish the first Earthseed community. After overcoming dangers, the group of Earthseed believers and non-believers arrives at Bankole's land in the north, high in the hills of the redwood forest. The house had been burned down when they arrived, and five skulls inside bear witness to the family's demise. The group is shocked and trying to decide what to do next. Despite the fact that the location of the property's setting has demonstrated that there may be no guarantee of safety and security, Bankole's land remains the best place for them to build the Earthseed community and settle. Lauren and the group call their new home in a far-away location "Acorn" after each of them holds a memorial service for all they have lost in the past. The main character, the young girl Laura, is a pioneer of change. Lauren can't help thinking about the horrific events that are coming, and she's determined to do what she can, rather than turn a blind eye like others living in the same place. As it says at the beginning of the book, Lauren reads all the books she can find and gathers as much information on survival as she can. She is deeply angry with people who are trying to adapt, or rather survive, to the new modern world they live in, because all these people do is to protect themselves in the position they are in and be limited to that. They live from where they sit, just praying and hoping that nothing will happen to them. In this modern world, there is no police to call when there is an incident, theft or murder, because the police want extra money and tax fees so that they can start their investigation. The results of these searches are largely in vain because the police do not care about the events enough to stay awake for an event even if they move a hair. That's why people adopt communitarian attitudes to ensure security and peace in the places where they live, and they keep an eye on each other. The community is held together by a communitarian attitude. "We all know each other here, " Lauren's father explains, "and we rely on each other" (Parable of the Sower, 31). As a result, Butler provides militaristic "privatopia" as one model of an ideal society. To describe modern privatopia, McKenzie contends that we must return to the United States of America, in a socioeconomic situation defined by the loss of the welfare state in the jaws of rampant late capitalism. The word "privatopia" was used in North American literature to designate any exclusive urban development apart from the public environment. In the final three decades of the twentieth century, the concept of political cohesion vanished quickly. (McKenzie, 1994) While the importance of money is gradually increasing, people who cannot even afford water are starting to not buy gasoline for their vehicles and tools, which causes a decrease in the price of gasoline. However, no one drives unless it is absolutely necessary because they have to think of themselves first: “No one I know uses a gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic. It's a lot harder to give up water” (18). Apart from that, they have the last remaining Yannis Family screen: “window wall television. ” Thanks to this, they are sometimes aware of the news, but one day, when the news of astronauts from space was given, the peer darkened and is not working again. In the book, much of society's collapse seems to be due to environmental destruction, economic and political destruction, followed by financial problems, and this trio (politics, economy, and environmental problems) brings about the end of humanity. As polluted water and air, venomous chemicals, failed pharmaceutical and scientific experiments resulted in dangerously addictive drugs, people moved from being human to having animal instincts. Corporations which prevailed certain sectors of society and provided protection and infrastructure to those who can afford it, kept poor people away from protection and infrastructure. With the punitive debt policies’ coming to modern lives that damage individuals, benefited corporations are being introduced as part of this process. The Parable of the Sower, in particular, focuses on two fundamental paths to modern utopia: first, the implementation of bureaucratic logic to socioeconomic issues through the agency of the state; and second, the formation of communities of 'them' and 'us' through racial politics (Phillips). The master pattern of racial thinking has largely controlled the meaning of human variety in the contemporary age, with catastrophic implications. As Lauren travels across the "crazy, " "desperate, " and "dangerous" world of the future, the novel foregrounds an old American fantasy: a race war. That vision is played out "on the street" in Butler's novel, where "people were expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind" (31). Lauren's Books of the Living make a compelling case for the value of a transcending awareness, which sees hope in the most hopeless of seemingly imprisoned conditions. "I don't write Utopian science fiction because I don't believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society, " Butler has stated (qtd. in Beal 14). Butler's treatment of the concept of change in post-Fordism focuses on the social and political consequences arising from rejections of narratives (Nilges, 4). With the post-Fordism the increase in vehicles, pollution of the environment and the situation they are in drastically has changed. Jerry Phillips applauds Butler's endorsement of the primacy of change, which demonstrates a critical knowledge of history's dialectical process and predicts future potentiality without reverting to "simple determinisms, " resulting in a new "ethics of Being" (302). Change is no longer an ideal that promises to escape the constraints of traditional systems. Instead, change has become the central logic of our post-Fordist day; where the emancipatory demands of postmodern culture and theory are met, but with a different outcome than originally expected. The emancipatory promise that postmodern culture awaits in describing the future and a changing present has manifested itself as nothing more than the basic logic of post-Fordist capitalism in contemporary or post-Fordist culture (Nilges, 5). "God is change, " Lauren says (15). Butler's preoccupation with immortality in historical narrative, the way that time speaks to the emergence of hidden possibilities in the universe, is brought to the fore by the statement that "God is change. " Change, or God, in Lauren's opinion, has no required direction and is free of anthropomorphic attributes such as good and evil. Change has both positive and negative sides; it is inevitable. The dilemma of future potential worlds is confronted when trying to fathom the universe in continual motion. That is to say, one must study the circumstances in which a future perception becomes concretely realized as social reality. Lauren believes that we shape change and change forms us, rather than the other way. Lauren's ideas led her to create Earthseed, a new religion and ethics of being. The book is a postmodern text because it depicts people who see themselves in an ideologic and postmodern situation. Wanzo explains this situation as “a postrevolutionary period of consciousness surrounding political movements dealing with racial and sexual discrimination, colonialism, class oppression, religious fundamentalism, and environmental dangers, as well as the end of many modern technological innovations that are dismantled in apocalyptic circumstances” (74). The challenges of those who work simply to survive and have anything, the life that has fallen on them, and the pictures of violence are all recounted in great detail. These, I believe, are a reflection of how far society has sunk in their current new world; they are described to explain what individuals might become in such a scenario and how they can deviate from being human. The Parable of the Sower, as an exercise in utopianism following the end of Utopia, links itself with both prophetic and postmodern ideas. On the one hand, the novel rejects the notion that metanarratives are unnecessary: metanarratives provide human action psychological force and ethical direction. In their absence, the individual is all too willing to participate in barbaric social behaviors that appear to be eternal necessity (Phillips). The notion of change, when viewed as the driving force of the universe, leads to a dialec- tical understanding of reality. David Harvey claims that "dialectical thinking emphasizes the understanding of processes, flows, fluxes, and relations over the analysis of elements, things, structures, and organized systems" (49) This intersection of religion, logical thinking, and scientific advancement in the twenty-first century indicates that modern interpretations of historical writings can provide the basis for human existence (Ruffin).