At one point in David Brin's "The Postman," the narrator intones: "Gordon's appointed postmasters would continue lying without knowing it, using the tale of a restored nation to bind the land together, until the fable wasn't needed anymore. Or until, by believing it, people made it come true." There is more than a touch of William James here, of making it so by believing in it, of the "Will to Believe." Certainly, Kevin Costner's movie version demanded a heavy dose of the willing suspension of disbelief from us when an army of postmen rode to the rescue under a restored "Old Glory," forming an unwitting parody of "cavalry to the rescue" scene in old westerns, as well as of an earlier Costner epic ... the mounted ride-by presented as holy defiance in both The Postman and Dances With Wolves.
Because Brin was crafting a book, and not painting visual symbols, his demands seem more reasonable. Despite some stretches, and unlike other reviewers, I did not see the mano-a-mano at the end as "deus ex machina," but instead a reasonable question -- are we as capable of creating one kind of "superman" as that other, most feared? The fight woven into the endstory is, after all, symbolic of a struggle between Titans (an image and a term Brin consciously employs): competing world views. If we are prepared by science fiction to accept the evil member of the "superman" twins, why not also the good? Is science fiction so jaded, or will it accept the myth of the good in people as quickly as the myth of evil?
By using the Postman as the handy symbol for "swell the music, pass around the Kleenex" scenes, Costner buries the underlying irony. The Postman as epic hero.... Brin demands that we attempt, and then understand that it is, faith in such simple images of normalcy, justice and peace that make it so. As his apocolyptic tale has it: "More people died due to the breakdown and lawlessness -- the shatt! ered web of commerce and mutual assistance -- than from all the bombs and germs, or even from the three-year dusk." It is belief that must re-weave the web, not brute power.
Brin's demand, the demand he lays equally at the feet of the idealist, the pragmatist and the intellectual, is more fundamental than the "willing suspension of disbelief" with which we watch TV reruns. We do not allow the show to end, but make it real by our belief that it is. This demand is at the core of a basic rift in philosophies of law which both book and movie drive home. To Costner's credit in an otherwise overwrought and manipulative movie, he did not lose sight of that demand.
The Holness and survivalists, in both Brin's work and Costner's, are embodiments of a conception of law as a one-sided exertion of power. Brin comes close to quoting the power-oriented political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes' classic "Leviathan" when he describes the life of women in the new order as "poor, painful and short." Against this philosophy is one that grounds law and orderliness in the notion of the reciprocal nature of the relationship between people and law, the governed and the governing. Against the power-oriented visions of law and government, Brin has set a view, well expounded in jurisprudential works by the late Lon Fuller, who saw law as an enterprise with an internal morality demanding commitment from both the government and the governed to do things well and right if it is ever to succeed. Law as more than Fascist "Law and Order," imposed from without, law as good order springing from the better side of people.
By the story medium he chose, we should assume that Brin is, after all, making a point in political philosophy. We slip further and further away from our own responsibility for our government and our laws, a responsibility which the Postman shortsightedly fails to recognize as his own when he whines about wanting someone [else] to take responsibilit! y to set things right. The further we slip, the more we silently accept the message of the Nathan Holn and his survivalist gangs. We become mere followers in a world where only a few are willing to take responsibility ... and seeing the free reign they are given, abuse it.
Unfortunately, there is in Brin's tale more than a suggestion that "extraordinary individuals" are still required, and that it is acceptable for those individuals to use the "noble lie." In this one particular, Costner surpasses Brin at least once, when the movie's Abbey admits that she knew that the Postman was not really a messenger from the restored government -- a passing moment of recognition by the "little people" that they are participating in the forging of myth into reality. In Brin's book, only the leaders, the cognoscienti, appear to be smart enough and dedicated enough to acknowledge the Big Lie yet adhere to it as a Noble Necessity.
The fundamental message, still, is a simple one, and one that America sorely needs to grasp as one of the central demands of a free and open society. We are responsible for our government and our laws. It is only by accepting responsibility that we can keep alive our part in our government and our fate. There is no Sugarloaf Mountain on which we can hide for long, and the other alternative is passive and slave-like acceptance.
