It is one of the most outrageous violations of human rights imaginable. It involves controlling which human beings may breed with others or even the sterilization or culling (i.e., murder) of supposedly undesirable specimens.
Eugenics (literally ‘‘wellborn’’) is the effort to breed human beings like domestic animals to achieve some apparently desirable new trait or to shift the composition of a population. Inasmuch as the historical phenomena of the rapid rise to power and striking initial success of Adolph Hitler were among Herbert’s inspirations, it is not surprising that eugenics is an important theme of Dune. All of these qualities are combined in Paul, who as the Kwisatz Haderach of the Bene Gesserit and the messiah of the Fremen represents a new level of human evolution and potential. Schools were started to train human talents.’’ This is manifested in the prophetic abilities of the Spacing Guild navigators, in the seemingly magical powers of perception and self-control perfected by the Bene Gesserit, and in the computing ability of the mentats. The abandonment of computers during the Butlerian Jihad ‘‘forced human minds to develop. The exploration of technological advancement is rejected in favor of the exploration of human advancement. Herbert wanted to reverse that development and imagine to what heights and extremes the training of human abilities could reach. The initial objection to the use of firearms in war at the end of the Middle Ages was that a knight who had trained at arms for ten years could be killed on the battlefield by a peasant with a musket who had trained for ten minutes. Herbert purposefully ignores technological advancement to emphasize the development of purely human potential. The shields work similarly: they make firearms and energy weapons such as lasers practically useless, so soldiers have reverted to fighting with swords, whose relatively slow movements can penetrate the shields. The characters might as well be magically transported from Caladan to Arrakis so that they can get on with the action. In fact, Herbert uses the ships and navigators of the Spacing Guild to avoid having to deal realistically with the effect of space travel on society. They can hardly be said to be technological marvels since they have no conceivable basis in physics and so are more nearly devices of fantasy than of scientific extrapolation. Even items such as the interstellar travel used by the Spacing Guild and the shields used as personal protection by soldiers function rather strangely in the book. In general, the level of technology in Dune is relatively primitive the water reprocessing stillsuits used by the Fremen have a ‘‘green’’ rather than a high-tech feel. For instance, the ornithopters used as aircraft on Arrakis underperform modern helicopters and jets. Many of the technological ideas used in Dune in 1965 have already been surpassed by modern science. There are certainly some instances of superscience in Dune, but Herbert’s treatment of such marvels stands far apart from most science fiction.
The fantastic advance of technology has always been a common theme of science fiction. Herbert treats this through fiction in the messianic role Paul plays for the Fremen and the eugenics program of the Bene Gesserit, as well as in the anti-eugenic disaster unleashed across the galaxy by the Fremen. Herbert’s original inspiration was the messianic cult of personality that was attached to Adolf Hitler, who exploited the power it gave him to start World War II and the Holocaust. The main theme of Dune is the disastrous effect that messianic religious belief can have on human society.