Butlerian Jihad
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This page is about the fictional Butlerian Jihad. For information on the book of the same name, see Dune: The Butlerian Jihad.
The Butlerian Jihad is an epic turning point in the back-story of Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. In a nutshell, thinking machines are created and are first used to serve man, but later begin to enslave mankind. The Butlerian Jihad is a crusade for the destruction of computers, robots, and anything that tries to replace the human mind with a machine (artificial intelligence).
The original Dune novel states that the Jihad ended in human victory at the Battle of Corrin. The leader of the Jihad then renamed his royal house "House Corrino", and declared himself Emperor of the Known Universe. The Emperors of the Empire of a Million Worlds were all of House Corrino for the next 10,000 years, until the events of Dune and the ascension of Paul Atreides.
A presentation of this back-story in the original Dune novels has now been made into a series of novels by Herbert's literary heirs Brian Herbert (son of Frank Herbert) and Kevin J. Anderson. They represent the Jihad as a struggle between humans and the machines, where the characters Serena Butler and Xavier Harkonnen ignite a war to liberate mankind from the grip of their mechanised overlords.
After the destruction of the intelligent machines throughout the human worlds, the commandment "Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of Man's mind" holds sway. This is the reason that we don't see computers or "thinking machines" in the original Dune novels by Frank Herbert or the movie or the TV miniseries. This lack of computers leads to a return to feudalism and facilitates a need for humans to accomplish computer-like tasks and calculations, which leads to the creation of the Mentat order and the Bene Gesserit.
However, it seems mankind cannot do without new technology and as the centuries pass fringe worlds like Ix and Tleilaxu give birth to the technological powers of the Ixians and the Bene Tleilaxu. The Ixians produce mechanical technology which skirts the boundary of using "thinking" computer technology; while the Bene Tleilaxu provide biological technology to replace the mechanical technology used before the Jihad.
Themes
The Butlerian Jihad is a useful plot device for Frank Herbert. By creating a universe which has rejected conscious machines and has reverted to a Feudal organisation, Herbert can focus on social and philosophical issues, rather than the technological. Consequently Herbert uses the Dune saga to comment about the human condition and makes direct and accurate parallels to current socio-political realities.
Although Herbert's back-story named it after its instigator, Serena Butler, the name could very easily be a literary allusion to Samuel Butler, whose novel Erewhon depicted a people who had eliminated machines for fear they would be out-evolved by them.
Another, more subtle justification for the Butlerian Jihad is also found in Frank Herbert's original novels, specifically Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting. Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution.