I’ve recently started the final book in the Dune series, “Chapterhouse Dune” by Frank Herbert. I’m a big fan of the Dune universe’ story so far, and the sixth book has focused almost exclusively on the Bene Gesserit and their struggle for survival against the Honoured Matres. This content has given me the scope to consider the Bene Gesserit more comprehensively (they’ve always been a part of the stories of course, but never before have they been in such focus).
To be blunt: it’s my stipulation that the Bene Gesserit are a Sisterhood without a cause; that any real sense of purpose has eluded them for millennia within the Dune universe timeline, and that they themselves create the problems they seek to solve. Let’s explore this!
First, a primer - what are the Bene Gesserit, or as I refer to them in this article, the BG?
We’ll start with an obsession of the BG’s: what is human and what isn’t. The most memorable scene in the first book for me is the trial of Paul Atreides administered by the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam with the Gom Jabbar (Reverend Mothers are leaders of the BG, somewhat equivalent to Cardinals in the Catholic Church, with the Mother Superior being equivalent to the Pope). The purpose of this test is to see whether or not Paul is an “animal”, as in less than human. Paul places his hand into a box which causes an astounding amount of pain, and if he can endure this pain, he is proven to be human. If he pulls his hand out of the box to escape the pain, he is stabbed with the Gom Jabbar - a poisonous needle. Paul successfully endures the pain, and in doing so, awakens something within himself which had until then only been slowly revealing itself - the kwisatz haderach, or KH.
The entire purpose to this point of the BG’s existence is to create this epitome of humanity, the kwisatz haderach: a male BG who can access both male and female ancestral memories and gain prescience (BG Reverend Mothers can only access female ancestry). The KH is supposed to be a Mentat (human computer/logician), a Guild Navigator (capable of seeing through time & space), and a BG - capable of all the skills a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother possesses. So the KH, as Paul and Leto II (Paul’s son) demonstrate, is prescient, extraordinarily intelligent, and able to read memories stretching back thousands of generations. A further examination of the kwisatz haderach is for another time however - let’s stayed focused on BG and their total rejection of what makes a human human.
If I were to compare a human to a deer, and seek to find a difference, what would I find? A great many differences of course, but the major defining difference is that of intelligence. Deer aren’t stupid, it’s just that humans are very smart. All species that we know to have intelligence also develop emotions - a deer can feel outright joy & outright fear, and many things in-between. Humans’ greater intelligence also gives us greater emotional range. We feel joy and fear, but also rage, ambition, jealousy, community spirit, etc. So it would seem, the thing that separates a human from a deer is most of all emotion - all the intellect in the world is useless if you don’t have a feeling for something to use it for.
The BG see emotion in any depth as a weakness and something to avoid. Affection is somewhat tolerated, but love never is. Love clouds the eyes of the lower ranking BGs, which may pull them in a different direction to what the BG leadership want. If you have a BG acolyte who loves to spend time gardening but is very good at controlling the weather in a planetary system, the solution is obvious: hijack her brain into not loving gardening anymore, and hey presto! You’ve got an excellent weather engineer.
This to me is the great irony, and also the great tragedy, of the Bene Gesserit: they insist that they serve humanity, yet they reject any kind of emotional investment - the very thing which separates humankind from any other species. Take the Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother - and a BG. Before the trial with the Gom Jabbar, Reverend Mother Mohiam - Jessica’s former teacher - instructs Jessica to bring Paul to her. Jessica knows what is about to happen, that her son is highly likely to die, and when this mother brings her son to this trial by fire, it is considered odd that she shows anything beyond a modicum of emotion. The Bene Gesserit are purposefully pursing sociopathy as a governing doctrine, wilfully repressing the perfectly natural responses of wanting to protect and preserve the ones you love. They subject teenagers to torture & threat of imminent death (and many other far worse things besides) to prove that they are “human” while rejecting the emotional complexity that make us more than other forms of life.
Another point to make - when they’re not deciding which matrilineal lines should be crossed with patrilineal lines, the BG serve as advisors to the great and powerful. The Reverend Mother Mohiam is the Emperor’s “Truthsayer” - essentially a human lie detector. The Emperor is the most powerful person in the galaxy, but a kwisatz haderach would quickly eclipse him, goes the BG logic. The BG would then be responsible for and in control of the most powerful person in history.
Let’s have a quick thought experiment. Say you are the kwisatz haderach - you can remember everything that had ever happened to your ancestors, and you can see the thousands of different futures possible and recognise how to bring each one about. Do you think you’d need or want an advisor? It’s a bit like factory workers brainwashing their managers into purchasing a workforce of robots - the BG are doing themselves out of their purpose. After wielding extreme influence over not only the Emperor but every other noble house, and after creating a prescient superhuman, what would they spend their time doing? Even if (and it’s a big if) the BG could reliably control the KH they created, why would they have to? He can see which future is the best possible for the BG, and he can create it - so what advising is there to do? The BG suffer from a very bad case of the “dog which caught the car” problem.
If we bring it back to Paul Atreides for a bit, and more importantly his son the God Emperor Leto II, we see two kwisatz haderachs that the Bene Gesserit do not control. (A quick note: the KH came about one generation too early for the BG’s plans; Paul was supposed to be a girl but the Lady Jessica loved her partner Duke Leto so much that she decided to give him a male heir. The female Atreides was supposed to partner with the male Harkonnen, and thus bring the BG-controlled kwisatz haderah into the universe.)
So, this order spends thousands of years building to this moment and was betrayed by the love of one Bene Gesserit - one can understand their frustration with emotions overwhelming a laid-out plan. Paul feels trapped by his prescience, able to see what is coming but unable to stop it (in my opinion, the trigger for the Jihad that rolls across the universe in Paul’s name occurs days before he embraces his prescience). He blames the Bene Gesserit for this, he feels as though he’s been manipulated so many times that even his manipulators are losing track of what their plan is. He punishes the BG for this, rendering them irrelevant to galactic affairs in his reign as Emperor, and his son, the extremely long-lived Leto II, follows in his footsteps.
Now the Bene Gesserit are in the situation of having created a prescient superhuman that doesn’t trust them & certainly ins’t controlled by them - they’ve been sidelined by their own creation. For the short reign of Paul Muad’Dib Atreides as the Padishah Emperor, followed by the 3,500 years of the God Emperor’s reign, the Bene Gesserit are left searching for a purpose. They never find one, far as I can tell - what to do after failing so spectacularly? They are an order without a cause - except to never let a kwisatz haderach exist again.
Enter Miles Teg, a Bashar with Atreides ancestry. Now, there is where we move less from one person’s recollection of a long-winding story into my own opinion: Miles Teg is the Bene Gesserit’s greatest servant, and almost becomes a kwisatz haderach in his last moments. In my view, the best chapters in “Heretics of Dune” are where we follow Miles Teg’s transformation into something more than the greatest general to ever live. He like Paul is subjected to an astounding amount of pain, which has a pattern of awakening the Atreides into this incipient KH state (Herbert clearly believes enlightenment only comes after enduring hardship - his fictional take is a severe case, but I think he’s onto something). Miles Teg’s mother was a Bene Gesserit, and it’s clear from his memories that he loved him more than she was supposed to; she shared secrets of how her Sisterhood worked, and consequentially he becomes the Sisterhood’s finest servant for the three centuries of his natural life. Seems like a strong argument for the quite understandable case of “If you support a child emotionally and show them love, they will become better than they would otherwise”.
I can only speak for myself, but it feels like the Bene Gesserit shoot themselves in the foot time after time. They pursue this eugenics experiment for thousands of years, succeed in creating this prescient superhuman but can’t quite control him (as if you could control a man who had ancestor memories and prescience, but I digress), search for meaning for the next 3,500 years only to end up concluding that your new purpose is to reverse your old purpose, create an excellent servant (whose only so excellent because his mother tells him things she shouldn’t) who then almost becomes another of these prescient superhumans, to end up being hunted to death by an off-shoot of your own order who left for another part of the universe only to come back specifically to kill you.
To conclude: the Bene Gesserit are a very important part of the Dune universe which can’t help but screw things up. Yes they’ve had other successes, but as far as I can tell every time there’s a threat to the BG, it’s because they created it. Maybe they are human after all.