Thoughts on the Butlerian Jihad

I overheard a conversation between a group of students who had recently watched Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Dune. If the film was set in the distant future, one of them asked, why were there no computers in the film? The group agreed that this absence was “a bit weird” but that it was a good film nonetheless.

Now, as anyone who has read the books can tell you, the reason for the absence of advanced technology in Dune is the Butlerian Jihad, an event that took place ten millennia before the book’s narrative begins. Humanity rose up against ‘thinking machines’ and robots and destroyed them all. To prevent a future return to the same stage of technological development, they formulated a new religious maxim: “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” It is the Butlerian Jihad that is the ultimate cause of many of the circumstances that drive the book’s plot, and yet it is rarely referred to in the narrative. It operates as tacit knowledge that all the book’s protagonists share, and thus do not need to state, and points to a complex and carefully structured background underlying the narrative.

In contemporary scifi and fantasy writing it is sadly the case that subtle and nuanced world-building is the exception rather than the rule. As fictional horror author Garth Marenghi once declared, subtext is for cowards. The contemporary scifi novel often groans under the weight of lengthy, pedantic exegesis of the customs, history, and geography of its fictional universe. In the age of creative deficit that has gifted us the needless spin-off/prequel/sequel/reboot, it was only a matter of time before someone ransacked Herbert’s literary corpse, determined to shine light on the magic and render explicit and literal what was intended to be implicit and allusive.

Frank Herbert’s literary resurrection men are Kevin J. Anderson, a writer with a long record of spin-off novels for scifi and superhero franchises, and Frank Herbert’s son Brian. The pair produce Dune prequels with the same regularity and individuality as an industrial assembly line, including in 2002 Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. In their narrative the universe has been enslaved by machines under the control of an AI overlord, Omnius. One of its subordinates kills the baby of a woman named Serena Butler. Serena launches a holy war against the machines which becomes known as ‘the Butlerian Jihad.’ 

My issue with this intellectual flattening of the Dune narrative is that it renders James Herbert’s original account generic. It now conforms seamlessly with the recurrent trope in science fiction of evil machines versus good humans. The machines seek the extermination of all human life. Humanity, simply for the sake of survival, must defeat the machines. Whilst this trope might provide the setting for some entertaining adventures, it is rather simplistic, and reduces human-machine relations to a ‘them-or-us’ duality. Either humans destroy the machines, or the machines destroy the humans.

Through repetition this narrative bleeds out of science fiction and merges with other technological narratives. Specifically, narratives under the umbrella category of ‘technological determinism’, a school of thought traceable from at least the mid-19^th century onwards. Determinists thinkers tend to hold at least one of two positions: that technological development shapes social development, and not vice versa, and that technology advances autonomously under its own laws of development that are beyond human control. 

The machines vs humans trope overlaps with key tenets of popular technological determinism. The ‘autonomous technology’ strand with the idea that technological development will result in machine consciousnesses that will ultimately seek to destroy us, and the ‘determinist’ strand with the idea that technology is ultimately a means of social control and destruction, rather than empowerment. The most problematic effect of the dualistic scifi trope is that it reformulates the human-machine conflict as an event, a discrete moment in time. The machine consciousness develops an AI Overlord, a cybernetic Blofeld controlling everything, who then attacks humanity. This narrative compresses a justifiable concern about the direction of technological development into a singular moment of crisis (when the machines turn on us) with a clearly demarcated bad guy (the machine Overlord). And when the latter-day technological determinist expresses concerns about technology, their concerns can be dismissed on the grounds that the present technological situation does not meet one or more of the scifi crisis criteria. Where is the evil AI consciousness, one may ask? Where have the machines turned on us? And if the answer is ‘nowhere’, then all is well.

However in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, one finds that the war against machines is rather different from the standard them/us crisis model. The ‘Butlerian Jihad’ was almost certainly a reference by Herbert to the writer, Samuel Butler, and his novel Erewhon, which describes a fictional State in which advanced technology has been abolished. The Erewhonians were persuaded that the machines should be destroyed not because they had developed consciousness but because the current rate of technological development strongly indicated that this would occur at some point in the future. In other words, it was a pre-emptive move driven by choice rather than a crisis-response forced upon them by existential necessity. Furthermore, the danger posed to humanity by the rise of artificial consciousnesses was not extermination, but domestication. That the Erewhonians, prizing material comfort over spiritual development, would dedicate themselves to the evolution of the machine. And that as the machine grew more complex, the humans would become ever more dependent upon it. And that over time the machine would maintain humans for their utility, rather than vice versa, much as we maintain certain animals for their utility to us. 

Butler, and Herbert, portray the endpoint of machine-human relations not as a dualistic conflict for survival, but a future in which humanity stands in relation to technology as “an affectionate machine-tickling aphid.” This future is formed incrementally as humans devote their lives to the needs of the technological apparatus, rather than their own development, and race to create artificially the consciousness that they already possess themselves. The Butlerian Jihad, as Herbert originally described it, was a war against “the god of machine-logic.” This god was not an individual, let alone an AI Overlord, but the elevation of the mechanical as the model for all human activity and aspiration. And the significant outcome of the war against the machines was not the destruction of all thinking-machines but the elevation of a new maxim: “Man may not be replaced.” Herbert’s narrative warns of a lack of foresight and self-betrayal, and that the ‘victory’ of machines over humanity comes not suddenly, from without, but gradually, from within. Today as we see the increasing dependence of the student body on generative AI, and the tendency amongst academic leaders to turn this loss of cognitive capacity into a virtue, perhaps we should reconsider the rationale behind Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.     

Works Cited

Butler, S. 1932. Erewhon. London: Dent.

Herbert, B. & Anderson, K. J. 2002. The Butlerian Jihad. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Herbert, F. 2005. Dune. New York: Ace.