The Plurality of Justice: Scarcity, Abundance, and Twentieth Century Dystopias

Abstract

Contemporary American politics has become increasingly divided over perceptions of abundance and scarcity. The twenty-first century understanding of the American Dream, a longstanding promise of wealth and status, clashes against the rapid decrease in access to employment, food, and housing. Though not a novel idea in and of itself, the perception of minorities and immigrants as the capital ‘O’ Other is being increasingly weaponized by the far right and used as a scapegoat for economic decline, job loss, and class stratification. Though this is not a new political phenomenon, in the last decade the Trump administration has presented abstract concepts such as marriage, normative gender identities, and moral values as limited resources that can be somehow tainted, diminished, or altogether eradicated by the presence of homosexuality, trans identities, and secularism. The threat of scarcity, and the promise of abundance, is often utilized to sow division and reap violence, chaos, and discrimination. Understanding justice as it exists both within and outside of these conditions thus allows one to conceptualize a version of it that does not hinge upon one’s material resources. Utilizing theoretical approaches such as historical, cultural, Marxist, and postcolonial criticisms, chapters of my project will be devoted to the dystopian fictional works of Aldous Huxley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia Butler as a chronological account of twentieth century authors’ investigations into justice as an ambiguous concept warped by the material conditions of the society within which it exists. These works of literature—Brave New World, The Dispossessed, and Parable of the Sower— respectively, offer special insight into potential forms of justice by acting as thought experiments for how societies would function socially and economically within states of extreme abundance and scarcity.