Human rights in a resource-strapped world: The good and the bad of Hulu's "A Handmaid's Tale"

I resisted watching A Handmaid's Tale for a long time, even though everyone was talking about it and it seemed to be the darling show of the moment. Much like "Cat Person" was the right short story at the right time politically and culturally, Hulu's remake of Margaret Atwood's novel has benefited from coming to be at a time when significant segments of America feel the gains of women of the last two generations are under a counter-revolutionary attack from a conservative right. Donald Trump is seen as a marker of this counter-revolution. Handmaid has become a focal point, an easy-to-identify signifier in a cultural war. Women are dressing up in Handsmaid's garb to make a point about the lack of female voice in a misogynistic culture.

My resistance to watching it, in spite of how much everyone was talking about it, was similar to why I waited so long to watch the Christmas comedy Elf. It seemed like a story that kind of wrote itself, and I found it hard to believe it could hold enough surprises to be interesting for long. I knew the basic idea of the book: the American government is replaced by a radical theocracy. A core concept of that theocracy is the total disenfranchisement of women. The increasingly shrinking number of fertile women are used as breeding stock by the ruling class. I didn't see how there would be much I wouldn't expect.

But much like Will Ferrell can make me laugh at a joke even when I know it's coming by being utterly committed to the character, Handmaid drew me into a story I mostly knew was coming through its wonderful attention to detail and the ability of the actors to painfully incarnate the emotions of people in hopeless situations. For the women of Gilead, the Puritanical government that has replaced the United States, the time to fight back openly has passed. The women must live with the bitter knowledge that they have missed their chance to either fight or run away to Canada. (Side note: Did the Canadian government sponsor this series? Because they come off looking REALLY good in it.) Scene after scene delivers believable emotional pay-off. "The ceremony" is truly creepy time after time. It's rape, but done slowly and with community approval.

You can know it's coming and still be haunted by it

What makes the show compelling is watching how women who have been stripped of all rights and all agency struggle to find ways to fight back, to form meaningful emotional bonds, and to keep hope. I couldn't help but be reminded of the novel The Underground Railroad, which I've alluded to a few times on this blog. Both Cora the runaway slave and Offred the human baby incubator are in a political environment with so little room to maneuver, the best choice by far is to attempt to run north.

Offred has, perhaps, a little more leverage than Cora. Modern day "slavery wasn't that bad" advocates like to contend that slave owners were motivated by profit not to harm their property too severely. But white slave owning fear of rebellion was often a stronger impulse than fear of lost capital. A slave owner would sacrifice a few slaves to prevent the lot from turning. In Handmaid, no amount of rebellion seems to be enough to condemn a handmaid to death, at least not while she is still fertile. The need for babies is too strong to waste one of the few working uteri still in existence. When Ofglen is discovered to have committed "gender treason" (being gay), her partner is summarily executed, but Ofglen is sent back (after having her clitoris removed to prevent temptation) to breed more children. Offred continually finds ways to obtain leverage, whether it's playing on Serena Joy's desperate hope for a baby or Commander Waterford's need for companionship and sexual titillation. There are limits to what leverage can get her, and the season ends with us about to find out what those limits are. But she's got something to work with.

Missed opportunities

Still, the show so far leaves me wanting. We know that the environment is under duress from pollution. This is what has caused infertility among most women, and it has also apparently had an impact on the food supply. In an early episode, Offred is warned about getting certain kinds of fish that might be high in toxins. When visiting foreign dignitaries inquire about Gilead, it is a point of pride that Gilead has made strides growing oranges.

We aren't actually told this in so many words, but it's a good bet the the stress on the environment and resources had a lot to do with Gilead getting a chance to come to power in the first place. How could any militia group overthrow the world's most powerful military? Not without a lot of concern from the people that the way things are going isn't getting it done.

And herein is the first thing I haven't quite found satisfying in Handmaid. There are some really intriguing flashback moments of how it all went down, none more satisfying than the realization that Mrs. Waterford herself, although a highly intelligent and successful writer, was actually an architect of the rules meant to subjugate women and make it illegal for them to read. She was never able to publish a book on the subject, but she was the one who conceived of treating fertility as a national resource. But so far, I haven't yet found the explanation of how the revolution put Gilead in place to be understandable. I feel like the show sort of yadda-yadda-yaddas its way through parts of it by having Offred trot out the old saw about being in a bath where the water gets turned up bit by bit until you're boiled alive.

That's unsatisfying, because it's an argument used by those who fear progress as much as those who fear backsliding. What about this particular crisis made it possible for people to accept this grim society? What made it possible to erase respect for human rights to the point the handmaids lost their right to choose sexual partners?

I don't feel like the writers quite have a handle yet on their own cosmos. In adapting the book to the screen, a certain looseness has crept in. If this were a movie, and the writers made the choice to focus on the lives of the handmaids and leave the nature of the origins of calamity something of a black box, that would be fine, but in a series that aims to go on and on, the audience is going to need to feel that this world is realer. Why has this society failed to find technological solutions to its problems? Why does there seem to be no fertility treatment? Why, if it has the discipline to treat female fertility as a national resource in order to save itself, is it so carefree about male fertility? (We learn that many midwives are assigned to infertile male commanders, meaning they go through month after month of wasted ceremonies. Does nobody check the men?)

Moral certainty is a little too certain

When Offred manages to tell the visiting Mexican ambassador the truth about the lives of midwives, that they are beaten and raped and monitored, the ambassador says she's sorry. "Don't be sorry. Do something," Offred says. The ambassador responds that she can't do anything, because her country is dying. In her large hometown, a live human hasn't been born in six years. Mexico needs to trade with Gilead to obtain handmaids of its own or it will die. Offred replies, "My country is already dead." We, the audience, are meant to side with her moral indignation and believe that Offred's view is the right one. What good is it to save humanity if, in the process, we lose what makes us human?

Contrast this with the moral upside-downness of  possibly my favorite dystopian story, the musical Urinetown. In the world of the musical, years of drought have made water extremely scarce. It is illegal to urinate anywhere but in a public restroom, and there is a charge to go there. Anyone who is caught going outside the public facility is sent to Urinetown, which, in the interests of not ruining the musical if you haven't seen it, let's just say is sort of like jail.

There is a revolution against this system. Heroes rise up in the cliched way that heroes do, and the people replace the heavy-handed government with a leader who promises to share the water with the people.

The audience is meant to side with this peasant's revolt, but we're being played. The peasants' motto, "Don't give us tomorrow, just give us today" should have tipped us off. The leader who takes over after the revolt is too kind-hearted. She gives the limited water away too freely, and within a short period of time, society is on the brink of collapse because its water reserves are gone. The leader who toppled the government is now killed and replaced herself.

Is Urinetown defending dictators? I don't think so. But it is questioning the unproblematic easiness of the story where right topples might. There is a cost to an easy morality. If you apply absolutely a moral principle, even a seemingly obvious one like "people should be able to pee freely," there are costs to your absoluteness. Offred might be correct to say that her country is dead if it has lost its sense of human rights, but if the shadow group Mayday leads a revolt to topple Gilead, how will it prevent the literal death of humanity that is under duress?

This is an uncomfortable line of questioning. I'm uncomfortable writing it. Of course Gilead is wrong. That's the success of the show's close rendering of the lives of the midwives. Our empathy is activated, rightly, to feel that no matter what issues society is facing, this can't be the answer. But the show is also cheating a bit by not really putting us face to face with the issues society is facing. We only see the privileged world of the well-to-do, those who are given a handmaid. What's life like for the rest of the world? If you saw the blight there, would you feel more of a sense of understanding for how Gilead made the choices it did?

I wish people who wrote about Christians knew a few

As a side note, I was disappointed in the realization that there is a secret hotel used by the politically powerful where all of the sins of the flesh Gilead keeps under wraps are permitted. There is booze, music and dancing, and sex slaves. By making such a world, the show is demonstrating an essential contempt for the villains. This contempt doesn't make the villain more odious, it makes the villain pathetic and less frightening. Gilead would be a more formidable--and interesting-- foe if moral hypocrisy wasn't so predictably rampant. The presence of this hotel is a sign of the prejudice of the liberal mindset against religion and people who take their religion seriously. Of course there are hypocrites, but there are also Christians in America jumping in right now to fill the breach by fostering the children of families torn apart by the heroin epidemic. There are Christians who feed the poor and take medical care to other countries. The same Christians we revile for voting for Trump may have also brought medical care to Haiti, the place Trump called a "shithole." I'm not saying religion is the answer. I am no longer a Christian myself. I'm saying that it's less clearly the problem than some liberals like to pretend it is.

The intellectual argument...

I can construct an argument about why it is wrong, even if the human race depends upon it, to force the handmaids into childbearing against their will. One way to make the case is through the trolley problem, a thought experiment in ethics. In one scenario, there is a trolley car coming down the track, and there are five people on the track tied up who will be killed by the trolley. You are standing by a switch that can change the trolley to another track. But there is one person on that track tied up who will be killed. Do you pull the switch?

Almost everyone agrees the answer is yes, but critics of pure utilitarianism will add that the reason isn't simply because it's a question of saving five people versus saving one. You cannot treat people as tools, even if they are tools to accomplish something good. People are ends, not means. Flipping the switch to save five people was morally sound, and you cannot be held responsible for the unintended consequence of it killing someone else.

A variation of the scenario makes the concept of humans as ends not means clearer. A trolley is headed toward five people tied up on the track. You are standing next to a fat man on the platform. If you shove him onto the track, you are certain (I guess you're an engineer of trolleys or something) that the fat man's weight will slow down the trolley enough to stop it from killing the other five. Do you throw the fat man onto the track?

The answer is no. It's one thing for Spock, in Star Trek II, to decide that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" and sacrifice himself. It's entirely different to sacrifice someone else without consent based on that philosophy.

You might argue, based on a purely utilitarian position, that my refusal to throw the fat man on the track amounts to superstition. Sacrificing one to save five is just good math. I should do it and not hesitate. But think of what that leads you to. Do you take a healthy man and harvest his organs to save five others?

The extreme example of the problems with strict utilitarian thinking is in the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." In Ursula K. Leguin's imagining, an entire society lives in paradise, but their paradise is all predicated on one condition: the never-ending torture of a child.

...and the argument of the belly

I can make these arguments and we can see the strength of them in a society where we are all generally well-fed. Offred can make her appeal to empathy, and it will resonate with an audience in which perhaps more people are dying of diseases caused by over-eating than they are dying of being malnourished. But do these arguments ring hollow to people who are dying? If you were hungry, and the world looked like it was dying, would Gilead make more sense to you?

I hope the answer is no. I hope society would not try to build the paradise of the many on the suffering of the few. But it's foolish to try to pretend the rationale to do so isn't strong. There are five people on the track screaming, and you can save them if you just ignore that one person.

Great ethical leadership

The other day, I was discussing these very ideas with a friend of mine who is an officer in the Marine Corps. He is also a Harvard graduate, a voracious reader, and a Christian. I was keenly interested in what the Marine Corps had taught him and what he thought about making decisions in a combat scenario. If his platoon was outnumbered, and he couldn't extract them without leaving some Marines, should he sacrifice some to save most of the platoon? Given that the military believes in not leaving anyone behind, to what extent do you follow that commitment? What if you are being pursued, and there is one slow guy who, if you wait for him, will get you all killed?

He gave great answers, and he admitted that sometimes, you might be essentially throwing the fat guy off the platform, and your justification will come down to semantics. You might have to ask one group to sacrifice itself in a delaying action to save the rest of the unit. The important point to him, though, was that you don't call it a suicide mission. You call it a delaying action. You tell them to fight to the last man, to try to come out of it alive. Importantly, he felt that everyone, by signing onto the Marine Corps, had essentially given consent to be sacrificed, so it was different to him than throwing a fat man off a platform without him knowing.

On the other hand, he realized that war itself is sort of like throwing a fat man off a platform: we are killing some people against their will in the hope that it will make the world better for everyone else. In the end, he recognized that making decisions is context-dependent. There is a principle that "we leave no Marine behind." Without it, the entire band-of-brothers bond that the Corps depends on would be broken. But this is not an absolute principle. You don't kill unlimited numbers of Marines in a hopeless effort to save one person.

Preserving human rights in an resource-constrained environment requires a great ethical leader. You cannot have the pure utilitarian who cynically shakes down the poor, like in Urinetown. But that cynical utilitarian cannot be replaced with a doe-eyed idealist, either.

The best leader, in the fat man scenario, will convince the fat man to jump in front of the trolley to save others. The best leader will build a monument to the fat man and get people to call him Steve instead of just "the fat man," because damnit, the man had a name. The best leader will also fix the trolley so it doesn't run over people tied up on the tracks, so nobody else ever has to jump in front of it to stop it. That's a lot of ask of a leader, but that's the only way to avoid the extremes of a prosperous Gilead or an impoverished Mexico.

We have precious little of that kind of leadership in the real world. I'd like to see it emerge in Handsmaid's Tale, rather than a simple tale of good triumphing over evil.