Heaven and Nature
I read with interest this article by Ross Douthat: http://pewforum.org/news/rss.php?NewsID=19306
He writes:
He goes on to say:
He concludes:
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
My comments:
I have three unrelated comments. First unrelated comment: it is difficult to separate the author’s intent from the needs of story telling. While I have not even the slightest particle of doubt that the film-maker here is playing out his liberal leftwing white giult-trip fantasy power-trip, I will point out that such fantasies elegently serve the needs of story telling, especially in that niche of genre writing known as Planetary Romances.
In yarns as various as DUNE and FLASH GORDON and PRINCESS OF MARS, the young protagonist (whether a scion of House Atreides or a polo player from Earth or a clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia) is dropped among the exotic and violent natives of a foreign world, and, gaining their trust and assuming the mantle of leadership, leads them in a successful rebellion against the powers that be, be it Baron Harkonnen or Ming the Merciless or even the hordes of Green Martians.
Using a polo player (or prince from Delta Pavonis III) as your viewpoint allows the author to showcase the strangeness of the exotic and violent natives. We see them through his eyes, and if he is more like us than they are, it allows for reader identification with the hero, but also emphasizes the alien-ness of the aliens.
Having your hero kick ass and take names among the natives is more interesting than having him come to a messy and abrupt death in the radioactive gladiatorial flame-pits of Mongo, or merely be crys-knifed to death for his moisture to be drained into tribal reclaimators.
Having him rise to a leadership position means that what he decides or does has more moment. More is at stake in your plot when the fate of worlds and galactic empires hangs in the balance.
Also, while in real life, the god of battles is usually on the side with the biggest battalions, in drama, the nine goddesses of poetry want the little tailor to defeat the giant, little David to defeat Goliath of Gath. Ergo having your polo-player or prince from Delta Pav or clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia end up as native rebel leader easily segues between the first half of your story (our boy dropped among exotic otherworldly natives) your mid-story (our boy becomes a man) to your end story (Our man now battles and overcomes not only his adopted peoples’ foe, but his personal foe).
There is also a bit of what we might call ‘conqueror’s psychology’ involved: since you don’t want to beat up weaklings, conqueror’s often respect and even envy the conquered people, and so the daydream about "what if I were one of them–could I be as brave?" is an appealing one.
It is also a melancholy one–a theme that continually crops up in these planetary romances is the wish fulfillment that time could stand still or run backward, so that the glory days when matters of honor were decided by swordfights would return. Rousseau in a famous passage reflects that the noble savage cannot be bound because he owns no property.
Whatever the merit of demerit of the philosophical point being made here (and I personally think it to be without merit) the emotional image is a powerful one: the savages who roam the forests of America live without property and hence without servility, as free and unburdened as the fleet deer or the loping wolf! This is the basis of Tarzan stories and all his imitators. But it is a melancholy idea. We here living in the walls of civilized and technological society are the unsuccessful Neanderthals, the one who could not hunt Mastodons–you wear a tie and work in an office instead.
For some reason, we feel we are exiles here on earth, as if our true home lies elsewhere, but was lost. The idea of ripping off your office nicktie and running out into the woods to live as nature intended has a certain appeal. (I myself think the reason is a spiritual one, and a literal one, that we actually are exiles just as much as Tolkien’s elves. But the feeling is not limited to those who think likewise. As far as I know, only John Galt ever was perfectly at home on Earth, but he was a fictional character. By his own admission, he is a prelapsarian man, born without original sin, so this might explain his sense of comfort.)
Second comment: I often wonder if the original BUCK ROGERS could be made these days. If you’ve read the original, Rogers is overcome by radioactive gas, waking up in the Twenty-Fifth Century, where the United States has been overrun by technologically-superior Han hordes from China using anti-gravitic airships, opposed now only by scattered and oppressed resistance fighters. Now, in real life, Tammurlane and Attila did invade Europe, and the hordes almost overran the continent. To me, with my rightwing eyes, BUCK ROGERS looks like what most science fiction yarns are — some past story set in the future, the way FOUNDATION by Asimov was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire set in the future. Leftwingers look at the story as horribly racist, a tale about evil Yellow Men and bold White Men defeating them.
My question is this: if you were given the task of remaking BUCK ROGERS to avoid the accusation of racism, how could you do it? One way is James Cameron’s way in AVATAR: you just switch races, and have the White Guys be the technologically superior Han warlords, and the Blue Guys be the scattered but plucky resistance fighters.
(Albeit I am actually curious if any of my readers who are left-of-center would be kind enough to respond. How would you retell the story of the Mongol invasions, if you wanted to do a BUCK ROGERS update? Is the story idea simply verboten according to the rules of political correctness?)
Third comment: the abandonment of self-consciousness is an idea that reappears from time to time in science fiction stories. BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts is centered on the speculation that the development of self-awareness is an evolutionary dead end, and that intellectual beings without self-awareness would be more efficient. The merging of the individual mind into a large group mind is also a time honored theme, which appears in such books as Olaf Stabledon’s LAST AND FIRST MEN, and perhaps (here my memory is hazy) in the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END. The idea has a certain Oriental air of pessimistic spiritualism to it, as of Buddhists willing to quench their individuality in the cosmic oneness from which all life springs.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
