Mini-Cast #14: The Re-Arrival Part II

So just before the age of the industrial revolution and mass production, religion became dismissed by famous intelligentsia like Voltaire and Frederick the Great as a backward world-conception, while freedom and equality became the watchwords of this soon to be three-hundred year era within whose exhausted end we now seem to exist. But what mean freedom and equality in an era when we are completely addicted to screens that collect data about our every choice with nearly as little autonomy over our ability to ignore the screens as slaves? The human mind will soon be mapped, mastered, even recreated by this scientific force built by we ourselves. A monument to human achievement so great that it clearly has potential to be millions of times more powerful than any of us, and therefore is already changing the nature of humanity as drastically as literacy changed pre-historic man; and changing us in ways we'll never begin to fathom until the changes happen.

So on that bright note, let's change gears for a moment and speak of something that seems a lot less lofty; the movie which started these speculations: Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams. I don't know if Arrival stands anywhere near the semi-summit of my personal pantheon. It's not generally my kind of movie... but I do know that when seeing it on the giant screen of the Parkway Theater, I had a sublime experience and had it in spite of everything about the movie but its ideas and images executed on the most elementary level: its characters are not characters, they're two-dimensional mouthpieces for incredibly basic sentences to emit gimmicky plot exposition which itself only exists to set up its concepts and images, but what concepts and images! I don't want to reveal too much, but there were so many moments in this movie whose images science and language inspire in ecstatic ways that only religion could previously provide.

Science fiction is so far from my preferred genre. Einstein famously said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. You can judge the size of my mind for yourself by listening here, but if it's a small mind who prefers discussing people, then my mind is proudly miniscule. Most of my day is spent think about other people and trying to understand what thoughts motivate their actions - whether they're people I know, or people I read about. I read a lot, but I am a person, and as most people do, I often prefer the company of people; so when not among people, I prefer reading about people. So I guess it follows necessarily that I generally prefer realistic stories about human behavior to stories based about ideas. To me, the ability of humans to portray themselves and understand how to create their own best lives is the height of human achievement precisely because it perpetuates us and gives us the most stable environment from which we can grow our human potential to its maximum size. But once part of our potential grows to an imbalanced size, it's impossible for the imbalance not to destroy many parts of the human plant which are smaller.

As I said in our very first podcast, art is a societal seismograph. It's impossible to look at the art of any period without some insight into what its creators and audiences were thinking, feeling, and sensing. The stability of viewing the world in realistic terms can often feel like a prison from which there is no release or escape, so if there's none of either, then the only other option is to change our perception of the prison itself - and the first step in the process of changing our prison walls is to find a way of perceiving the prison that transcends its walls - meaning to find transcendent concepts. But anybody who wants to destroy the prison first has to perceive that there's a life outside the prison walls. And therefore, since art is the most direct way we perceive meaning, these concepts of transcendent possibilities will show up in art long before they show up in life. Obviously before billions of humans could adapt Christianity, a book had to be assembled that evangelized a transcendent concept of an infinite being who controls infinity - obviously meaning the Bible. Dante wrote a work which speculated it possible we can perceive a map of the entire afterlife, and not in Latin but in vernacular Florentine Italian, and relatively soon thereafter countries began codifying their regional dialects into national languages. Milton portrays a rebellion against God, and soon many millions begin throwing God away entirely. Wagner portrays a world where a man from a hero race can becomes a hero who overtakes the Gods, and soon the entire German people act as though they all expect to be sent to Valhalla tomorrow. George Lucas conceives of battle stations so powerful they can destroy entire worlds and then.....

(pause a beat)

Show up in life these concepts inevitably do. Eventually, no matter how hard you try to perceive the prison walls differently, the walls still reveals themselves sometimes as a prison, and the more they do, the more disappointed we grow at the lack of change.

We still have no idea of how science will affect the world, let alone science fiction. But particularly in these eras of newfound instability, it lets us imagine how the instability affects our world, for good and ill. What is undeniable, however, is that science is potentially a force as powerful or more powerful than the divine, because it can conceivably work all the miracles and abominations which our ancestors once imagined God did routinely upon earth, and do so in reality.

Much more often than its devotees want to admit, science fiction is necessarily short on human qualities. It has to be. If the subtleties of the characters or prose are what's most memorable, that means that the concepts and images of science fiction have not imprinted sufficiently on our memories. Perhaps you might as well write realistic fiction. In this way, science fiction is no different from other, extremely different, forms of conceptual fiction from previous eras: romantic poetry and opera, religious art, religious texts themselves. All of these are usually short on human-size qualities, and are so by necessity. The best of it is inevitably larger than life because it must create entire alternative worlds, so if they want to to illuminate the possibilities of something as large as our own world, their world had better be the same size. As the rules of our own world change, science fiction can posit, both metaphorically and literally, the different ways the changes will affect us.

I very much like the company all the various nerds who prefer all this transcendent stuff to the life-size, they're inevitably interesting people of imagination who can conceive of the world differently from the mundane way it is. But I fear their ideas very much. I fear the facet of human character that would so rock the human boat that they would deliberately throw over a large quotient of passengers from the deck for the alleged betterment of all who remain. Perhaps the fault is mine, but it is nevertheless my fear.

Once these new ideas, be they intersectional or libertarian, communist or fascist, Jacobin or Ultra-Royalist, enter the human bloodstream, they don't leave, and until a new balance and stability is found that takes them into account, Noah's Ark seems as though it will sink along with all the animals of the earth. Noah's Ark is clearly one of the original conceptual fictions, but a deluge that destroys the world from human iniquity is now a very real possibility, and there is a lot of conceptual fiction which shows how it can happen.