“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.”

You can rely on Ursula le Guin. Her work ties the personal with the political as engagingly as any I know and way better than most. The quote is from The Telling, a novel from 2000 that I’m just catching up on. I found the opening pages hard work, confusing in the way science fiction sometimes is, when the author thinks they can drop you right into another world and time without enough clues. But the book becomes straightforward and wonderful.

A fiercely repressive religious right has taken over Earth. A young Earth woman who has suffered deeply from it finds herself representing the equivalent of the UN on a planet where the repressive takeover comes from the other side: from a scientific secular fundamentalism, that represses a holistic religious culture.

The portrait of this displaced culture is beautifully done: it is religion without any notion of the supernatural. It is seen by the modernisers as anti-modern only because it acquires its truths slowly, conservatively: given time, truth, and honest communication, it will grow and incorporate what is good about the new while learning what is not good about it, but all in a nondogmatic way. This culture is called the Telling, because it goes forward by telling stories, which are often ambiguous, yielding their truth in the way of parables, not in the way of creeds. Just like a le Guin novel.

The point is well made: the kind of repression we secular moderns associate with religion can be accomplished just as horrifically by people trying to be secular and modern like us; while the social benefits of religion can be developed by people without creeds or even beliefs.

“Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals,” says one of the old culture’s teachers.