Science fiction does not appeal to everyone. If you aren't a science fiction fan, Dune will not change your mind about the genre. Science fiction appeals to me because when it is well-written-and most science fiction in my view is not well-written-it requires what I call prophetic imagination on the part of both authors and readers. It imagines what could be. On one level this prophetic imagination has to do with science and technology. Science fiction authors regularly imagine viable technologies before the scientific community invents them. In Frank Herbert's first book, published in the early 1950s as The Dragon in the Sea, he wrote about an underwater barge that could be used to carry oil. He never patented the idea for his barge, which was unfortunate because both Japan and the Soviet Union developed different versions of Herbert's barge without his knowledge. He lost out on millions of dollars.

But when I refer to science fiction's prophetic imagination, I'm not speaking about technology. The best science fiction is not an exploration of technology, but an exploration of human nature. Although the technology in Dune is fabulous, it is Herbert's prophetic imagination regarding human nature that makes Dune a literary masterpiece. His ability to imagine the evolution of human nature perhaps 100,000 years into the future and to ground his imagining in a unique understanding of philosophy, politics, religion, and, most critically for him, ecology, gives his work a spiritual quality I don't find in most fiction.

When we Unitarian Universalists speak about the sources of our living tradition, we say we honor the "words and deeds of prophetic women and men," "humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science," and the "spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature." Frank Herbert belongs in all three categories, 'prophetic,' 'humanist,' and 'Earth-centered.' I think of him as a prophetic ecological humanist, and it is the task of this sermon to tell you why.

Throughout his life Frank Herbert harbored deep rage at the way people in the industrialized world generally, and in the United States specifically, fail to protect the environment, continually deploy technologies that destroy the environment, and through societal addiction to these technologies, have lost or are rapidly losing their sense of relationship to the environment. Frank Herbert seethed at the environmental devastation he witnessed, and trembled at the environmental catastrophes he saw coming.¹ Because of this, he held Native Americans in high regard. Through his friendships with Indians in Washington and Oregon where he lived much of his life, and through his research on tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest, he came to see Native Americans as the people who understood best what the United States had lost. Though Herbert may have over-romanticized Native Americans, he nevertheless learned much from them and developed a keen understanding of humanity's relationship to the earth. Native American world-views affirmed a maxim Herbert used often-and which appears in the text of Dune-"the highest function of ecology is understanding consequences."²

In the 1950s there were parts of Washington State where sand dunes were encroaching upon areas of arable land due to the mis-use of water resources. This upset Herbert; he wanted to write about it. He envisioned a novel whose protagonist restored desert lands to farms and forests. He couldn't make this plot exciting, so he incorporated it into a more complex plot and Dune was born. For those not familiar with the book, Dune is the name of a small, desert planet on the far edges of a 10,000-year-old interstellar empire. We read that Dune is largely uninhabited and uninhabitable. Frequent and violent sandstorms make it virtually impossible to land ships anywhere but in the north polar regions which are sheltered by mountains. Oppressive heat makes it impossible to survive in the open desert. Giant sand worms attack and destroy anything that moves across the desert surface. At least that's what off-worlders believe.

The indigenous people of Dune, the Fremen, know a different reality. Though off-worlders believe Fremen are primitive, as the book progresses we realize Fremen are not at all what they seem. They possess a highly sophisticated technology that enables them to live well in the desert despite its inhospitableness. They succeed in the desert because they live in harmony with their environment, rather than attempting to control it. They alone know how to travel swiftly across the face of the planet by riding the great worms. They alone know where the planet's water is stored. They alone understand the ecology of the planet and are even engaged in a planet-wide effort to reclaim some of the desert for a future paradise. Many of their values, especially their ecological values, are the values Herbert saw in Native American communities.

Also like Native Americans, the Fremen are a colonized people. The Imperium historically keeps a large and brutal military presence on Dune so that it can have access to the planet's one commodity, the spice melange. Melange, it turns out, is the backbone of the empire. Among its many qualities, it gives some humans the ability to see, in limited ways, into the future, and this enables space travel. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say there is no viable means of space travel in Herbert's universe without the spice. And without space travel there is no empire. Imperial leaders continually express a critical economic assumption: "the spice must flow." From an economic standpoint Dune is the most important planet in the empire.

Put aside the Fremen comparison to Native Americans. Can you think of any place on our planet where the environment features mostly desert, where there is essentially one commodity upon which the entire economy of the planet depends, where there is a history of the indigenous people being colonized either by foreign powers or by their own governments in league with foreign powers? More so today than in the early 1960s, Dune could be Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia. As much as Herbert based Fremen ecological sensibility on Native Americans, he based their language, their communal discipline, their anti-colonial military insurgency, and their religious fundamentalism on Arab Muslim extremists.³

A Fremen leader explains to his son: "religion and law among our masses must be one and the same. . . . An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery."⁴ Today we might readily expect Muslim extremists in the Middle East to use such language in their madrasahs as they build a movement for theocratic rule. It is language we may have begun anticipating after the Iranian revolution of 1979. It is language we have come to expect from Sunni and Shi'ite clergy in Iraq. As a society, we are much more sensitive to and even frightened today by such language when Muslims use it. But remember: this was presented as fiction in 1965. This was a time in which Americans generally felt no threat from the Middle East. Rather, their greatest enemy was the Soviet Union. This is Frank Herbert's prophetic imagination. His protagonists are religious fundamentalists living in a society whose environment is home to humanity's most important commodity. Dune, published in 1965, imagines the rise of a fundamentalist movement much like the one we witness in the Middle East today. Frank Herbert could see the Iranian revolution coming. He could see Al Qaida coming. He didn't know what their names or their configurations would be, but he understood that oppressed people will fight back against colonizers; and if their religion lends itself to extremism, they will eventually begin to exhibit extremist tendencies and their religious discipline-no matter how disillusioned it may be-will fortify them with bravery. In Arabic the term for freedom fighters is fedayin. Herbert gave the Fremen freedom fighters of Dune the name Fedaykin. He called their struggle against oppression a jihad, long before the average American was familiar with this particular usage of the term.⁵

Americans of the early 1960s were not completely unfamiliar with the Middle East. For example, Americans knew about Egypt's modernizing president, Nasser. Furthermore, I believe 1961 was the year the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" won seven academy awards. I don't know if Frank Herbert ever saw the movie, but in preparation for writing Dune he studied the life of T.E. Lawrence, a British officer who helped unite the Arabic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula against the declining Turkish empire during World War I. As the legend goes, Lawrence became a messiah figure to the Arabs.

The Fremen of Dune have a prophecy, that an off-worlder will one day unite their tribes against their colonial rulers. This is the book's main plot: the arrival on Dune of Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto whom the emperor has just given control of spice production. It turns out the emperor has done this to trap and destroy the Atreides family. He is really in league with their arch enemies, the Harkonnens, with whom he attacks the Atreides, killing the Duke and forcing Paul and his mother to flee into the desert. The two Atreides fugitives are taken in by the Fremen, who quickly come to believe Paul is their long-promised messiah, or Mahdi, an Arabic term for messiah that Herbert incorporates into the Fremen language. Through the character of Paul, who takes the Fremen name, Muad'Dib, Herbert makes his most probing claims about religion.

It turns out that the old Fremen prophecy predicting Paul's arrival is not authentic. It was planted among the Fremen by a powerful religious organization called the Bene Gesserit. The Bene Gesserit are women, regarded variously as witches, truthsayers, priestesses, and formidable military adversaries. They are a secretive society whom Herbert patterned after the Jesuits.⁶ They are also Herbert's nod to the feminist movement that was taking hold in the United States at the time. He imagined a powerful organization of women who could control religion, culture, and politics from behind the scenes. (I'm not sure how well Herbert understood feminism, but I give him credit for trying.) The Bene Gesserit express Herbert's cynicism about religion. They use and shape religion to serve their own interests. It is their standard practice to cultivate messianic beliefs on various planets so that in the event one of their own becomes stranded or somehow endangered, they can make use of the prophecy to protect themselves. It turns out that Paul's mother, Jessica, is Bene Gesserit and knows full well how to use the prophecy to gain Fremen protection, admiration, and allegiance.

Herbert is not only expressing cynicism about the way powerful people use religion; I believe he is also warning his readers it can happen in the United States. When I hear Republican campaign strategists speak about energizing their evangelical Christian base, I see religion being used as a tool. They do not care about evangelical Christianity. They care about power and they cloak their designs in Christian mythology in order to court Christian votes. Conservative Israelis have done the same thing with Jewish Orthodoxy, and Arab political leaders have done the same thing with Islam. Through the Bene Gesserit Herbert is presenting a version of the old English labor movement's dictum, later borrowed by Marx and Engels: religion is the opiate of the masses. In looking at the rise of the religious right in the United States in the 1980s, I am prepared to say that Frank Herbert saw it coming. He didn't know how or where, but he knew it was possible. This, again, is prophetic imagination.

Herbert's reflections on the nature of religion go still deeper, both in ways that religious liberals can appreciate and ways that may frighten us. Remember the spice enables some humans to see into the future in limited ways. Paul Atreides turns out to be one of those people. For a variety of reasons, he is uniquely impacted by the omnipresence of spice in the desert. Through a series of dreams and waking visions he journeys to the Alam al-Mithal. This is an Arabic term which refers to the seat of creative imagination in the human psyche, the source of mystical experience. Herbert has incorporated it into Fremen culture with essentially the same meaning: the mystical realm where all physical limitations disappear. Paul sees thousands of different possible futures, the consequences of choices that confront him. He is Herbert's consummate ecologist in that he fully understands the consequences of his actions. Herbert seems to be asking what defines a god. Surely an ability to see the future is part of the definition. So not only is Paul a false Fremen messiah, in the sense that the prophecy was fabricated by the Bene Gesserit; he is also a genuine messiah in the sense that everything he says will happen actually happens. Human or divine? How can we tell? Herbert fears this inability to discern the difference between human and divine. His book warns against elevating any human to divine status. His message to both those who would manipulate religion for political reasons, and those who embrace an individual as a god seems to be, "be careful what you ask for, you might just get it."

As the book progresses, Paul is continually disturbed that more and more future paths seem to lead to what he calls his "terrible purpose." In dreams and waking visions he sees himself leading the Fremen Jihad across the known universe, destroying the lives of billions. He struggles mightily to resist this terrible purpose, but in the end he feels he can do nothing; his messianic power has stretched beyond anyone's ability to contain it. Even if he dies, the Fremen will follow his revolutionary trajectory. As Paul's most rational Fremen advisor, the stoic Stilgar, gets caught up in his mystique, he laments, "I have seen a friend become a worshipper."⁷ What is the line between human and divine? At this point in the story, nobody can tell. At the novel's climax the Fremen are victorious. But the reader is not quite sure whether to feel elated or horrified. As readers we are socialized into identifying with the heroic protagonist. We want to cheer for Paul and the Fremen, and on one level we do because the victory is so spectacularly written. But we also know, if we have read closely, that Paul and the Fremen are about to impose on humanity a regime far more oppressive than the one they've just conquered. Herbert writes, with an almost Emersonian sense of self-reliance, "no more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero."⁸

Further, in the course of their rise to imperial power-their movement from earth-people to military bureaucrats-the Fremen will lose their values and their ecologically-minded way of life. This may very well be Herbert's appraisal of the history of the monotheistic world religions, each one having risen in its own time to imperial status; each one having lost the essence of its original truths. Dune is Frank Herbert's warning to humanity. His indictments are searing. Beware the corrupting influences of power on the best qualities of religion. Do not assume the revolutionary personality knows what is best for the masses. Resist idolatries of mind and spirit. Good and evil become illusion, and naming them becomes nothing more than a trick of statecraft, a power-play to manipulate loyalties. As Karl Marx once wrote, so Herbert seems to plead with us: "critique everything." Look deeply at the claims of those who would rule. Look deeply at the claims of those who offer visions and solutions. Look deeply at those who claim to speak for God. And let us be realistic when it comes to the way we live our lives. Let us know with fullness the qualities of our environment, and let this knowing teach us to understand the consequences of our actions. Let us work for a genuine reclamation of the deserts of our lives, so that our children will have something truly valuable to receive from us when they come of age. I call this prophetic ecological humanism. These are the dreams of the dreamer of Dune. Amen and blessed be.