This summer marks the tenth anniversary of the film The Giver, and thirty-one years since Lois Lowry’s eponymous novel was published. I vividly remember the powerful impact the novel made on me as a young reader in grade school and, as I listened to the audiobook with my children in recent weeks, it was apparent that it deserves appreciation as a genuine masterpiece that teaches many enduring truths that are apparent by the lights of reason and faith.
The story is set in some distant future, in a nameless “Community,” and follows the main protagonist, Jonas, who is about to turn twelve, a milestone when he will be assigned his profession for life. The Community is strictly ordered by a code of rules that prizes uniformity and utility. Individuality and choice are thus extremely limited, and most of the important decisions are made by a committee of elders, who prize overall utility and efficiency of labor. Rules strictly regulate behavior from a very young age—above all, speech. Precision of language is required and drilled, and “rudeness” is forbidden. The natural environment itself is climate controlled, flattened, and sanitized of anything dangerous—flora, fauna, and inclement weather included. Life in the Community is apparently clean, healthy, and free of crime, poverty, and faction. It is, above all, safe.
The Community therefore adopts as its highest principle safety or, we might say, an extreme form of safetyism. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain, safetyism in our world is the product of “concept creep,” in which “safety” as physical security has expanded to include emotional security. Jonas’ Community has taken emotional safetyism to its logical conclusion: the extreme attenuation or practical elimination of emotional life. James Madison summed up a true theorem posited by classical and Christian philosophical anthropology when he wrote that “the latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man.” Hence, any utopian scheme to eliminate negative outcomes characteristic of human society like faction, strife, poverty, economic inequality, crime, and war must strike at their causes, passions like hatred, fear, sorrow, covetousness, and indolence. But this entails concomitant removal of many good things, including their contraries like love, hope, joy, and the replacement of virtue with techne.
Precision of language is required and drilled, and “rudeness” is forbidden.
An orderly and peaceable citizenry can be assured through their pliancy. And their pliancy depends on bland and vapid emotional lives, in which nobody feels anything more than superficial emotions. The dystopian twist in the world of The Giver is that, in addition to coerced pharmacological numbing and the strict rules, emotional blandness is secured by a mass forgetting of the past. For, if one cannot remember weddings or wars, sledding or frostbite, Christmas morning or Good Friday, or even the greenness of trees and the redness of blood, then one is contented with a pain-free existence painted in hues of gray. So the Community locked and stored away all memories of anything before the Community in the mind of one man, The Receiver of Memory.
When Jonas is selected to be the new Receiver of Memory, he begins the painful process of receiving memories from the outgoing Receiver, now the Giver. Jonas has the ability to vividly relive each memory as if he were personally transported back in time into the memory. He experiences first-person all that the Community has eliminated: sledding down a snow-covered hill, sailing toward a sunset, bleeding out on a battlefield.
Jonas begins to realize that the uniformity, control, and utilitarianism necessary to enforce safetyism depends on instrumentalizing and ultimately quashing the bonds of family.
When he asks the Giver what his favorite memory is, he freely offers it to him (despite the fact that when the Giver transmits a memory, it is then partially or totally lost to his own recollection). Jonas finds himself in a room next to a hearth, surrounded by people, with the smells of a delicious home-cooked meal wafting from the next room. In the corner is a tree oddly inside the room, festooned with twinkling lights. And packages lie about the floor, brightly wrapped and ribboned, which small children pick up and begin to unwrap, as parents and grandparents look on and smile.
When Jonas comes to, the Giver asks what he perceived. “‘Warmth,’ Jonas replied, “and happiness. And—let me think. Family . . . and something else—I can’t quite get the word for it . . . ‘Love,’ the Giver told him.” Jonas is attracted to this vision of the family, but worries that living that way would be “dangerous.”
Old concepts are instead emptied of their true meaning and redefined by the regime to serve its purposes.
Indeed, the family inherently carries risk with it—that is, risk of attachment to a potential rival to the Community and hence a potential source of disunity. But, like all clever tyrannies, the Community did not abolish the family entirely. As is frequently the case in dystopias, old concepts are instead emptied of their true meaning and redefined by the regime to serve its purposes. As in Orwell’s 1984, when the Party proclaims “War is Peace,” or in the futuristic town of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where “Firefighters” engage in arsonous book burnings, Lowry’s Community radically subverts and replaces the family with the “family unit.”
Unlike the traditional human family, “family units” are the product of the technocratic expertise of enlightened bureaucrats. Spouses are applied for and, if one’s application is approved, are assigned. Marriages are not actuated by free choice, erotic love, and lifelong commitment. Adults take pills that suppress “stirrings” (sexual desire). Children are not the product of sex, but of a technically overseen process of artificial insemination using “Birthmothers.” After birth, children are taken from their Birthmothers and reared for their first year of life by expert “Nurturers,” until such time as they are assigned to a “family unit.” Couples are allowed to adopt up to two children—and they rear them until they complete their training in their assigned professions and live independently as adult citizens. The spousal “bond,” such as it is, then dissolves as the former parents go to live with the Childless Adults, until they are unable to perform useful work, at which time they go to the House of the Old to prepare for “Release.”
The memory of the family celebrating Christmas is the turning point for Jonas, who begins secretly bonding with a small child, Gabriel (whose name, it should not be missed, derives from one of only three angels named in the Bible, the one who delivered the Annunciation, in which God’s plan to sanctify the family through the Incarnation was revealed). Jonas’ father brought Gabriel home temporarily in the hope of nurturing him toward the milestones necessary to be assigned a permanent family unit. Jonas discovers he can transmit memories to Gabriel, which help soothe him to sleep through the night. But when Gabriel is returned to the nurturing center, and Gabriel fusses without Jonas’ loving care, he is scheduled for Release.
The concept of Release broods like a thunderstorm on the horizon throughout the novel. At times, one is led to think that it means a peaceful exile from the Community for misfits. But it turns out to be something much darker: euthanasia by lethal injection. Jonas is horrified to learn of the true nature of Release when he watches a recording of his father performing a release on a newborn twin in what is undoubtedly one of the most powerful pro-life scenes in juvenile literature. After carefully weighing the identical twins, his father takes the slightly lighter one and injects a lethal drug into his head, boxes up the dead body, and sends him down the trash receptacle, saying in a sing-song voice, “Bye-bye, little guy.”
Twins cannot be permitted for the same reason that the traditional family must be eliminated. No one can know their true parentage or blood relations because the bonds of biological families are an obstacle to the safetyist goals of the Community. For they are the cradle of storge, the natural familial love between parents, children, and siblings. This love is the germ of love of one’s own, which can become destructive in the form of faction, nepotism, jingoism, and the like. Better to eliminate the former than risk the latter.
Safetyism promises an egalitarian utopia in which everyone’s basic nutritional and hygienic needs are met, and which all are promised equal freedom from physical and emotional turmoil. And yet, as ever, the utopian promise rests on lies, for crime has not actually been eliminated. Criminal violations of the moral law are simply reclassified. Murder is euphemistically renamed and performed behind closed doors on clean operating tables with sanitized needles. Men and women are robbed of their right to marriage and marital love. Babies are stolen from their mothers. Children are robbed of their right to be raised by their parents and grandparents—and vice versa. And persons are denied the right to pursue and speak the truth and live their life in accord with it. In the end, Jonas makes a fateful choice to embrace truth, the turmoil of emotional life, and the toils of liberty, cultivating virtue, and family.
This dystopian novel, at its best, holds up a funhouse mirror to our own society. We connect with the setting, the plot, the characters, and themes insofar as we see ourselves in them, albeit, with our negative qualities exaggerated. Our society has severed sex from procreation, procreation from marriage, marriage from parenthood, and parenthood from childhood education; and increasingly encourages emotions divorced from reality, memory ignorant of history, death for the vulnerable, and contentment without virtue. Parents and children alike ought to read and reflect upon the teachings of The Giver and remember what we are at risk of forgetting altogether.