Beggars in Spain

While modern democratic societies are built on the dual ideas of individualism and equality, Leisha comes to believe these two ideas are fundamentally opposed to one another. After all, her thinking goes, how can everyone be equals if they're all individuals? Leisha explains this to Miri late in the book: “When individuals are free to become anything at all, some will become geniuses and some will become resentful beggars. […] You can't have both equality and the freedom to pursue individual excellence” (397).

Much of the real-life scholarship on individualism and equality stems from the work of the 19th-century French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, who is said to have coined the term “individualism.” Though Tocqueville goes unmentioned in Beggars in Spain, his ideas about equality and the individual loom large over much of the novel's philosophical and moral debates. While Leisha considers individualism and equality to be diametrically opposed, the way Tocqueville characterizes the relationship between the terms is more complicated. In his landmark 1838 book Democracy in America, he writes, “Individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions” (Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: G. Dearborn and Co. 1838.). The fact that individualism grows out of equality, even as it threatens it, helps explain why the two struggle to coexist. That said, Tocqueville differs from Leisha in that he makes an important distinction between individualism and freedom, two terms that Leisha seems to equate. For Tocqueville, individualism is a democratic excess that threatens to isolate a person from one's community and “to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart” (Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: G. Dearborn and Co. 1838.). Freedom, on the other hand, is not the freedom to behave by whatever standards an individual chooses. Rather, freedom has a strong moral component. Tocqueville tied this morality to religion, but for the purpose of dissecting Beggars in Spain—in which religion is nearly absent—morality could easily be tied to terms like community or family. Tocqueville writes, “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith” (Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: G. Dearborn and Co. 1838.).

A sense of morality may be what is missing from the most ambitious example in the book of a community seeking to simultaneously prize individual achievement and social cohesion: Sanctuary. In the words of Leisha, Jennifer “tried to create a community that put just as much value on its own solidarity—the 'equality' of those who were included as members—as on those members' individual diverse achievements” (397). In chasing that dream and even coming close to achieving it, Jennifer commits a series of heinous acts of murder and euthanasia to purge her community of potential mediocrity. Miri puts it bluntly: “In narrowing her definitions of community, my grandmother killed by brother Tony” (398).

Although the science fiction “hook” of the novel is the controversial subject of genetic modification, Kress never explicitly debates the merits or ethics of this technological development. This is consistent with her broader approach toward technology, in that she is far more concerned with the political and psychological ramifications of these developments as opposed to teasing out some sense of morality—or lack thereof—inherent in them. To Kress, technological advances like human genetic engineering cannot be stopped, and what's more important is ensuring the social bonds that hold humanity together can withstand them. For example, the dramatic cleavages in society that will erupt in the novel as a result of the Sleepless are not the fault of genetic engineering itself but rather the systemic class distinctions that make genetic engineering a possibility only for the upper echelons of society. It is more than simply the raw sum of affording genemods. Early in the book, readers learn of a Sleepless baby who was shaken to death because her mother couldn't bear the child crying 24 hours a day. In a meeting with the Biotech Institute, Camden says, “You should have picked only parents wealthy enough to afford nurses in shifts” (7).

While the technological divides between wealthy and poor caused by Sleeplessness are probably far more dramatic than anything in the real world, there are certainly contemporary analogues to Kenzo Yagai's invention of Y-energy. The dramatic increases in productivity allowed by Y-energy, along with its relative affordability, is akin to how Internet and mobile technologies have connected billions. Internet and mobile technologies have allowed digital deserts both in the United States and globally to become connected to the rest of the world in a way that was never before possible; this leaves the parts of the globe that are still victims of pre-existing digital divides that much farther behind. While Leisha repeatedly cites Y-energy as evidence that the achievements of the few benefit everyone, the book offers a couple counterpoints to this belief. For example, Richard mentions that in the developing world “Y-energy is mostly only available only in big cities” (60). And at the beginning of the book, Roger mentions “redlining in Y-energy installations” (5), indicating that specific communities have been denied Y-energy services on the basis of their cultural or socioeconomic identities.