Science Fiction and The Abolition of Man: Finding C. S. Lewis in Sci-Fi Film and Television 9781498232357, 1498232353

Table of contents :
Title Page
Foreword
Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Finding C. S. Lewis in Science Fiction Film and Television
Part One: Men without Chests
Chapter 2: Monster in the Mirror: The Problem with Technology is the Problem with Us
Chapter 3: Vulcans without Chests: Spiritual Disorders Portrayed in Star Trek
Chapter 4: To Seek Out New Virtue: Lewis, the Tao, and the Prime Directive
Chapter 5: Between the Good and the Evil Samaritan: Person of Interest in Light of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Chapter 6: “You Have Nowhere to Go”: Alienated Communication and Social Control in THX
Chapter 7: A Vision of Transcendence: Monstrous Intelligence and Loving Understanding
Chapter 8: The Failure of Men without Chests in Blade Runner
Part Two: The Way
Chapter 9: Technology and the Emotional Spectrum in Green Lantern: The Animated Series
Chapter 10: The Tree Before the Branches: Virtue and Rebellion in Contemporary Science Fiction
Chapter 11: Beauty in Rust: Steampunk Distinctives in Shane Acker’s 9
Chapter 12: Reclaiming Virtue and (Post)Humanity in Moon
Chapter 13: Terraforming the Human Soul: Star Trek’s Genesis Device and the Ethical Cultivation of Creation
Part Three: The Abolition of Man
Chapter 14: A Prison of Our Own Making
Chapter 15: The Dangers of the Materialist Magician
Chapter 16: The Abolition of Risk: C. S. Lewis in the The Island and Gattaca
Chapter 17: Technocratic Death Denial as Disavowal of Life: Lessons from Brave New World and The Abolition of Man
Chapter 18: Never Let Me Go and The Abolition of Man
Chapter 19: The Oppression of a Young Healthy Body in Logan’s Run and The Clonus Horror
Chapter 20: Does Forgiveness Just Happen?: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis’s “Last Step”
Chapter 21: “Flawed, Weak, Organic”: Star Trek’s Borg and the Abolition of Man
A Very Short Appendix of Recommended Reading

Citation preview

Science Fiction and the Abolition of Man Finding C. S. Lewis in Sci-Fi Film and Television

Edited by Mark J. Boone and Kevin C. Neece Foreword by Brian Godawa

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN Finding C. S. Lewis in Sci-Fi Film and Television Copyright © 2017 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Pickwick Publications An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com PAPERBACK ISBN:

978-1-4982-3234-0 HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-4982-3236-4 EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4982-3235-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Names: Boone, Mark J. and Neece, Kevin C., editors. Title: Science fiction and the abolition of man : finding C. S. Lewis in sci-fi film and television / edited by Mark J. Boone and Kevin C. Neece. Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-4982-3234-0 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4982-3236-4 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-14982-3235-7 (ebook) Subjects: LSCH: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963 | Science fiction—History and criticism | Science fiction—Religious aspects | Motion pictures—Religious aspects—Christianity | Television programs—Religious aspects—Christianity Classification: PN3433.6 B777 2017 (print) | PN3433.6 (ebook) Manufactured in the U.S.A. 12/12/16

Table of Contents Title Page Foreword Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction: Finding C. S. Lewis in Science Fiction Film and Television Part One: Men without Chests Chapter 2: Monster in the Mirror: The Problem with Technology is the Problem with Us Chapter 3: Vulcans without Chests: Spiritual Disorders Portrayed in Star Trek Chapter 4: To Seek Out New Virtue: Lewis, the Tao, and the Prime Directive Chapter 5: Between the Good and the Evil Samaritan: Person of Interest in Light of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man Chapter 6: “You Have Nowhere to Go”: Alienated Communication and Social Control in THX Chapter 7: A Vision of Transcendence: Monstrous Intelligence and Loving Understanding Chapter 8: The Failure of Men without Chests in Blade Runner Part Two: The Way Chapter 9: Technology and the Emotional Spectrum in Green Lantern: The Animated Series Chapter 10: The Tree Before the Branches:

Virtue and Rebellion in Contemporary Science Fiction Chapter 11: Beauty in Rust: Steampunk Distinctives in Shane Acker’s 9 Chapter 12: Reclaiming Virtue and (Post)Humanity in Moon Chapter 13: Terraforming the Human Soul: Star Trek’s Genesis Device and the Ethical Cultivation of Creation Part Three: The Abolition of Man Chapter 14: A Prison of Our Own Making Chapter 15: The Dangers of the Materialist Magician Chapter 16: The Abolition of Risk: C. S. Lewis in the The Island and Gattaca Chapter 17: Technocratic Death Denial as Disavowal of Life: Lessons from Brave New World and The Abolition of Man Chapter 18: Never Let Me Go and The Abolition of Man Chapter 19: The Oppression of a Young Healthy Body in Logan’s Run and The Clonus Horror Chapter 20: Does Forgiveness Just Happen?: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis’s “Last Step” Chapter 21: “Flawed, Weak, Organic”: Star Trek’s Borg and the Abolition of Man A Very Short Appendix of Recommended Reading

To Faith Boone Kirby, whose family loves C. S. Lewis and who had the chance to meet him before she had a chance to see this book about him, and to David K. Naugle, who introduced us to the love of wisdom, The Abolition of Man, and much besides.

Foreword How Story Incarnates a Sense of Morality Thank God for Netflix. hat may sound like a completely irrelevant start to a Foreword of a book about C. S. Lewis and science fiction movies. But it’s really not. With the advent of movie streaming services like Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime, and others, we now have instant access to just about every science fiction movie that has been made. Before Netflix, reading this book would have been interesting and instructive, but a bit too removed from original sources to be as helpful as it now is. Some of these movies that are analyzed in this volume are old or obscure and would have been hard to get at local video stores and therefore inaccessible to readers for reference. Maybe you have seen them long ago, but can hardly remember the details well enough to follow the line of thought in the essays. Maybe you have not seen some of the movies, thus making it difficult to fully appreciate the essays. And the process of tracking down and renting those videos from the old video stores would have been too time- and cost-prohibitive for your busy schedule. But you, the reader, no longer have such limitations. Now, you can probably find any of the movies and TV shows mentioned in this book on the popular streaming sites for a mere few bucks. And that makes these essays all the more important because relevant filmic storytelling is no longer about what’s current at the theaters or on television. Now, the movies of the past are immediately accessible to us in the present, and, with them, their cultural and spiritual impact. And isn’t that the point about exploring Lewis’s Abolition of Man? It was published over seventy years ago and yet it remains as relevant today as when it was written. You can buy it instantly on your Kindle and experience the revelation anew. That’s what I just did. I remember how it opened my eyes during my college days, and I am still amazed with refreshed insight at how everything he predicted is coming true right now.

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We have seen the results of the fact/value dichotomy in our culture enamored with scientism—resulting in the rejection of the Tao of Natural Law, and the destruction of culture by men without chests. We are now living in a time where transhumanist science has become a new religion that is achieving the ultimate mastery of some men over others, this generation over the next, through genetic tampering like never before. Obviously, science and technology are not all bad. They are neutral forces that can be used for good or evil. Consider the biblical narrative. In Genesis 2:15, God gives his command to “cultivate and keep” the Garden of Eden, but to have dominion and subdue the earth outside that Garden (Gen. 1:28). In the ancient Hebrew agrarian mind, what we would call “nature” was considered to be chaos that needed to be tamed by human technology. The wild animals domesticated and bred for food, or defended against with weapons; the disordered wilderness ordered by agricultural science and technology to bring forth food in its goodness. The earth was created for man. In this sense, science and technology are among God’s ordained means by which man brings order to the disorder of untamed nature. Extended lifespans, healed sicknesses, increased wealth and wellbeing, and decreasing poverty all represent that victory of order over chaos of the “cultural mandate” of Genesis. The modern-day idolatry of science is an abuse of God’s command. Man becomes god. Modern-day pagan earth worship seeks to defy that primeval command and debase humanity by returning to an illusory “pristine environment” untouched by the pollution of man’s technology. Ironically, its high priests are scientists driven by a self-loathing contempt. Like an autoimmune disease, they attack the very thing that created them and protects them. Rather than merely address the abuses of human dominion, anti-scientific earth worship redefines human progress as inherently abusive. Man was created for the earth. The truth of course lies between both extremes; science is neither God nor Satan. And the power of science fiction is that, as a genre of storytelling, it is a most effective means for expressing that truth. Science fiction as a genre is most often an argument for or against current ideas or worldviews by showing their ultimate ends lived out in the future. For example, the dangers of science unhampered by moral restraint leads to

monsters of our own creation that return to destroy us (Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, Fringe, The Terminator, Transcendence), or the treatment of technology as a substitute for humanity results in the dehumanizing of ourselves and a seductress that ruins us (Her, Ex Machina). Sometimes, one story contains both the dangers of improperly used science and the contrast of its proper use. Avengers: The Age of Ultron depicts an AI program created by Tony Stark to protect the world getting out of his control and transforming his protocols of saving the earth into the destruction of human life (much like the scientists in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). But then Stark creates a proper AI being (who calls himself, “I Am”) who helps save the world like a proper scientific god would. In other cases, science is not so much the main interest, but merely a tool in the background of a greater political power. Thus dystopias like those in Brave New World, 1984, Divergent, The Hunger Games, The Host, and Cloud Atlas, all illustrate the misuse of science in the hands of socialist or totalitarian states. It is the collectivist mentality that will destroy the individual using science, but it is the philosophy and not the technology that is the culprit. Technology is merely a tool in the hands of an oppressive worldview. In the same way that historical period pieces show us how we got to where we are now because of what we believed in the past, so science fiction shows us where we will end up if we continue down a certain path set by what we currently believe. The way in which stories (including sci-fi stories) makes their arguments is through incarnation. Incarnation is the physical embodiment of an idea. In a logical argument, one makes rational propositions using logic to persuade. In a story, the storyteller embodies arguments into characters dramatically, using emotion to persuade. The protagonist of the story is the hero and he embodies a worldview through the choices he makes based on how he sees the world. The antagonist or villain also embodies a worldview contrary to the one embodied by the protagonist. The drama of the story is the clash of these two worldviews, with the victor representing the superior way of seeing and living in the world. Most dystopian sci-fi films feature simple characters: usually an “everyman” as the hero, who symbolizes the individual, and a “head of the state” as the villain, who embodies the height of a collectivist worldview. Neo in The Matrix fights to defeat Agent Smith who embodies the enslaving

control of the Matrix that represents AI gone bad. Katnis in The Hunger Games struggles to break free from the control of President Snow and his minions who use ordinary people as political pawns to keep the masses docile. Tris in Divergent seeks to break out of the controlled factions over whom the Erudite leader Jeanine tries to maintain control. The individuals always triumph in an uprising because the individual cannot be suppressed forever by the collective. This is of course a very American and western worldview. It is embodied through the story by showing the dramatic oppression of the collectivist regime and we, the audience, root for the individualist to break free. The conflict between individualism and collectivism is incarnated through the drama of existential choices and experiences and through the consequences of ideas. And because we root for the protagonist, because we sympathize with him, we too will end up agreeing with his worldview because we have “lived” through the argument with him. All obstacles to his view are ultimately overcome in his victory. This incarnation of persuasion into a worldview can be seen in the very story structure of movies. Here is how it is done. I will use the classic sci-fi movie The Matrix to illustrate. First, the protagonist of the movie is the main character whose story we are watching. The protagonist is usually made sympathetic so that the audience will relate to him or cheer her on. Neo is the protagonist of The Matrix. He is an “everyman,” with a boring, lifeless job. But he’s a computer hacker by night, so even though we can’t all relate to that, we can still relate to his desire to find a way out of his hum-drum, ordinary existence. Don’t we all desire that? Secondly, the protagonist has a goal, something tangible that he wants. This is the drive of the story. It makes us want to see what happens next. Will he achieve his goal or not? Neo hears about the Matrix and wants to discover what it is. When Morpheus, the mentor character, meets him and explains that he was born blind and a slave to the Matrix, and that what he thinks is real is not, then Neo wants all the more to be free from his normal world. He takes the red pill. And for the rest of the movie, Neo’s goal is to defeat the Matrix. Next is the plan. The protagonist has a plan for how to achieve his goal. When Neo learns that there is someone prophesied to be “the One” who will

defeat the Matrix and lead them all to freedom, his plan becomes to find the One and help him in order to achieve his own freedom. All movies have an antagonist, the adversary who tries to keep the protagonist from achieving his goal. Ideally, the antagonist or villain wants the same thing as the protagonist, but for different purposes. Agent Smith represents the antagonist of the Matrix that tries to hunt down the One and stop him. So they both want the One, but Smith wants to destroy him, while Neo wants to empower him. Smith incarnates the collective nature of the Matrix and the menace of Artificial Intelligence over the freedom of humanity as embodied in the One. Both protagonist and antagonist incarnate worldviews at odds with one another. The clash of these two people with the same goals but different worldviews constitutes the existential drama that draws us in and suspends our critical faculties. The winner of their battle represents the superior way of looking at the world, the worldview of which the storytellers are persuading you. They are taking you through their “argument” existentially through the story. The protagonist elicits sympathy, but he is not perfect. Every hero has a flaw, something inside the protagonist that is keeping him from achieving his goal. Neo’s flaw is his innocence, his ignorance. He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t have a sense of his identity, so he can’t adequately fight the Matrix. Neo does not realize that he is the One. He is finally told by the Oracle that only he can defeat the Matrix. The middle of the movie consists of the protagonist seeking to achieve his goal, but being blocked by the obstacles of the antagonist and of his own internal flaw. These obstacles build up to the point where it appears that the protagonist will never achieve his goal. This is called the Apparent Defeat, and it happens near the last third of the movie and usually entails betrayal and loss. Cypher, a fellow hacker, betrays Neo by ratting him out to Agent Smith. Morpheus is captured and Neo is shot dead by Agent Smith. All is lost. This leads to the self-revelation, where the protagonist faces his inner flaw, and changes. This inner change gives him the power to overcome his outer antagonist. When Neo receives the “kiss of life” from Trinity, his identity as the One resurrects him and gives him the ability to face the antagonist and win the Final Confrontation with his enemy. Neo destroys Agent Smith with his new Christ-like power.

Lastly, we have the resolution or denouément. This is where we see the protagonist’s life now that he made the change and has overcome his adversary. His life is better because of it. It is the consequence of his redemption, the conclusion of the existential argument that the viewer has just been carried through with suspended disbelief. Neo calls the Matrix on the phone and says there are no boundaries, and he flies away, ready and newly empowered as the One to fight like never before. So Neo’s journey of self-enlightenment incarnates the worldview that the storytellers want us to learn for ourselves. Neo is the model of how we too can discover the spark of divinity that is in each one of us. This decidedly anti-Christian worldview has just used Christ imagery and ideas and subverted them with new meaning.1 Because we cheered him on, we too went through the argument existentially, rather than intellectually, and therefore experience a kind of simulacrum of the protagonist’s own change of mind or heart. We are persuaded emotionally, if not intellectually—for the worse if not for the better. So when taking a first or second look at the movies talked about in this book, remember to watch the stories with an eye towards how the story itself communicates ideas through dramatic embodiment of worldviews and not mere rational arguments. The ideas are not merely sitting on the surface of what is spoken; they are embedded within the very structure of the storytelling itself. The power of story is the power of incarnation. This power of story and imagination to influence or persuade had a significant impact on C. S. Lewis’s own writing. In his later years, he began to focus more on his fictional stories because he had experienced the profound limitations of reason and rational discourse. Of course, he didn’t negate reason, but he rediscovered the imagination. The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and, in defence of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist. It was he who after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in

symbolical or mythopeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science fiction. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavouring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say.2 Lewis’s worship and awe of God’s majesty through the powers of imagination in a universe of images can perhaps be best expressed through imaginative prose. Here Ransom, the protagonist of his novel Perelandra, looks out on the night sky and muses on his own enlightenment of freedom from the deadness of Enlightenment science and reason: A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds . . . but now that very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds. No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory— the “happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye Up in the broad fields of the sky.”3 —Brian Godawa Author of Hollywood Worldviews and the biblical fiction series Chronicles of the Nephilim and screenwriter of To End All Wars May 5, 2015

1. It is important that we understand that Christ stories are not always affirmations of the biblical Christ. The Matrix subverts the Christ story to tell a quite different story of gnostic self-salvation. It uses imagery that we are familiar with and invests it with new meaning, namely the storytellers’ own professed Nietzschean undermining of Christianity. The Matrix is a Christ story of us becoming our own Christs. 2. Letter from C. S. Lewis, quoted in Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984); http://hope.edu/academic/english/schakel/tillwehavefaces/chapter13.html. 3. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 34.

Contributors Janelle Aijian, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Baylor University in Waco, TX, in 2011, writing her dissertation on Pascal’s epistemology. Mike Alvarez (www.mfalvarez.net), Communication Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He earned his M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Goddard College, where he served various editorial roles for Pitkin Review, a biannual literary journal. He is writing a book, The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Universidad de Buenos Aires—Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Argentina. He teaches seminars on horror film and has published articles on cinema and drama in Imagofagia, Stichomythia, Anagnórisis, Lindes and UpStage Journal, and articles in books including Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, To See the Saw Movies, and Undead in the West. Thomas Britt, Associate Professor of Film and Video Studies at George Mason University. His essays are available in edited volumes and print and online journals. He is a staff writer and columnist for PopMatters. Wm. Travis Coblentz, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Apologetics at Southeastern Bible College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Baylor University in 2012. He is a scholar of ethics and the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Nietzsche. James Driscoll, M.A. in Media and Cinema Studies from DePaul University. He has published in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies and is currently preparing a series of short films on repetition and fantasy. Mark D. Eckel (www.warpandwoof.org), President of The Comenius Institute and Professor of Leadership, Education, and Discipleship for Capital

Seminary & Graduate School, part of Lancaster Bible College. He is the author of dozens of journal articles and encyclopedia entries and I Just Need Time to Think: Reflective Study as Christian Practice and When the Lights Go Down: Movie Review as Christian Practice. Canela Ailen Rodriguez Fontao earned her B.A. from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has published articles on film in Lafuga and in the books Cine y Revolucion en America Latina, Deconstructing Dads, and Changes in Bullying in Pop Culture. Nathan P. Gilmour, Associate Professor of English at Emmanuel College. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia, and he hosts the Christian Humanist Podcast and Christian Humanist Profiles, two shows on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Juan Ignacio Juvé, B.A. in Social Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lecturer about political and sociological issues. He is a lecturer in sociology, horror cinema, and popular culture. He has published in journals such as Lindes and Comunicazioni Sociali. Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis, Lewis Agonistes, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis, and Heaven and Hell: Visions of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition. Jaclyn S. Parrish, Masters student in Religion at the B. H. Carroll Institute. She holds a B.A. in English and Christian Studies from Dallas Baptist University. Lewis Pearson, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He earned his M.A. and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Baylor University. Geoffrey Reiter, Assistant Professor of English at the Baptist College of Florida and an Associate Editor at the website Christ and Pop Culture. He has published articles on such authors as George MacDonald, Arthur

Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. S. Lewis. Mark Sadler, Associate Professor of Philosophy for Northeast Lakeview College in San Antonio, Texas. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Christina Schneider, Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of the Humanities of the Julius-Maximillians-University Würzburg. She earned her M.A and her first state examination at the Julius-Maximillians-University Würzburg in 2013. Scott Shiffer, Director of Distance Education and Adjunct Professor of Theology at Criswell College. He holds a Ph.D. from the B. H. Carroll Theological Institute and is an author and speaker who studies culture and theology, and regularly contributes to the blog Thinking Through Christianity. Deanna Smid, Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brandon University. She has recently published articles on music and science fiction and is working on a monograph, The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature. Thomas Veale, a career Army infantry and public affairs officer with a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Kansas. He has served as the executive officer and course director of the freshman writing course at the United States Military Academy, West Point. Dr. Linda Wight, Lecturer in Film and Literature at Federation University Australia. Her research and teaching focuses on contemporary popular genres including science fiction, fantasy, and horror with a particular interest in gender and sexuality.

1 Introduction: Finding C. S. Lewis in Science Fiction Film and Television by Mark J. Boone

his is not a book about The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. Nor is this simply another book about science or about film—or even about science fiction film. This is a book about a cluster of related themes found both in science fiction film and in The Abolition of Man. These themes concern science and ethics. For example, some of our themes include the intentional use of technology by some to manipulate others, the unintentional enslavement to technology by its own users, and the complete loss of our humanity through the use of technology. Not all of the themes are negative, however; there are also the themes of the virtuous use of technology and of the continuing relevance of this thing—virtue—in the technological world we live in. The other authors of this book and I agree that these themes from science fiction film are given elegant expression and a coherent organization in C. S. Lewis’s philosophical masterpiece The Abolition of Man. Put differently, we agree that a number of the claims Lewis makes in the Abolition or Man are given elegant and vivid portrayal in science fiction film and television. That is why we wrote this book: to unite the organization Lewis gives to these ideas with the artistic expression in the best contemporary sci-fi film. We also wrote this book because we think these ideas are important. They are not important because we agree with them (although most of us at least do tend to agree with them), but for other reasons. They are important because Lewis’s case for them is rather compelling. They are also important because the portrayal of them in science fiction is rather compelling. These two facts suggest a third reason these ideas are important: they just might be true. Some may choose to disagree with these ideas, but if we choose to simply ignore them we do so at our peril.

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The time will come to properly explain Lewis’s thesis later on in this introduction. Now I shall state it very briefly. Lewis alleges that modern education has embarked on a project of debunking, rather than teaching, moral truths. Furthermore, Lewis warns that in a society with an increasing scientific knowledge and ability, eventually there will emerge some people who have the power to fundamentally reshape all other people. Since their sense of morality will be one that has resulted from the debunking project— i.e., their sense of morality is that there simply are no genuine moral truths— they will reshape people according to their own whims, rather than according to any moral principles they take to be true. In the end, humankind as we have always known it will cease to exist. Our thesis, stated briefly, is that the dangers about which Lewis warned us —the dangers of science without belief in objective moral truth—are nicely illustrated in science fiction film and television. For science fiction is that genre of film and television that most often explores the philosophical significance of the technological age. As such, it frequently illustrates the dangerous consequences of pursuing happiness through technological means without also cultivating virtue. These consequences include, but are not limited to, the abolition of man—the destruction or removal of that which makes us human. Science fiction film and television can thus show that the ancient insight on the necessity of virtue for happiness is just as relevant as it always was. More generally and more in keeping with Lewis’s explicit thesis, science fiction film and television can show that basic moral principles matter. Science and technology do not substitute for basic moral principles. Rather, science needs basic moral principles if it is to be of any edifying use —and if it is to avoid getting involved in devastating moral evil. A knife is useful for good in the hands of a surgeon, but for evil in the hands of a murderer. More advanced technology is the same: its moral quality depends on the ends for which it is used, and the way it is used towards those ends. Science fiction, in dealing with imaginative visions of the future, the past, and alien worlds, also deals with futuristic, advanced, and speculative forms of technology, along with speculative uses and consequences of current or— as with steampunk—antiquated technology. Alongside the promise of a better world achieved using scientific know-how and technology, there looms the danger of a worse world achieved through the same means. This is a threat to which, Lewis feared, and we also fear, our technological

culture is not always attuned. This is a cultural problem, and the cultural developments we are considering have their roots in early modern Western culture, so this is where we must begin. The next two sections of this introduction will consider two developments in modern moral philosophy. The first of these developments, illustrated by the philosophers René Descartes and Francis Bacon, is the tendency to use science and technology to attain to happiness. The second development is the loss in the modern world of the notion of moral virtue rooted in human nature, and the eventual rise of the view that moral principles have no meaning. The section after that will summarize Lewis’s response to that view in The Abolition of Man. The section after that will take one recent and very interesting case, J. J. Abrams’s series Fringe, as an example of the use of Lewis as a lens through which to view contemporary science fiction. Lastly, the final section of this introduction will summarize the rest of this book and the various ways in which the other authors have used Lewis to consider science fiction film. Two brief clarifications before we begin would be helpful. The first is simply that we do not all agree with each other when it comes to interpreting the science fiction films we discuss—or perhaps on much else. Second, and more importantly, although we the authors have some concerns that involve science, we are not concerned with scientific or technological development as such; rather, we are concerned with cultural and moral developments affecting our attitudes toward science, technology, and virtue. Lewis says in his book that “Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course . . . .”1 It may be that I or the other authors of this book will also be charged with attacking science. We, of course, also deny the charge.

The Birth of Modern Science and the Origins of the Problem The problem with modern science has some deep roots, with which it is necessary to be familiar. The problem with modern science begins in the modern era of Western philosophy, which was itself in large part a reaction to earlier eras of philosophy: the ancient and medieval. The best way to explain the modern reaction is to present an ethical insight common to all three eras of philosophy: ancient, medieval, and modern. In this section I will first

explain this insight and the pre-modern approaches to it. Then I will describe the very different approach taken by the early modern philosophers Descartes and Bacon. That insight is that we human beings are not happy because we do not have what we desire. We desire health and comfort; we desire to avoid death —both our own and that of our loved ones. We desire to have a stable way of life and control over our possessions. More often than not, we don’t get what we want. When we do get what we want, we can’t control it, and we often find it slipping away. Even when it doesn’t slip away, we worry that it will. In short, our desires do not fit the world; we desire more than the world can offer. Our desires are out of sync with what we can attain. There are two ways we could try to fix the mismatch between our desires and the world, and thus achieve a stable happiness. On the one hand, we could change our desires to fit what is actually attainable. On the other hand, we could try to find some way of changing the world so that we can get more of what we want from it, in hopes that what is attainable from the world will then be enough to satisfy our desires. The method of amending our desires to fit what is attainable is that chosen by ancient philosophy and presented in its dominant philosophical traditions: Skepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Platonism.2 This is also the approach of Christian medieval philosophy. There are, of course, differences between what these traditions regard as actually attainable and their approaches to modifying our desires to fit that reality. One of the biggest differences is between Christianity and Platonism, on the one hand, and the other traditions, on the other hand. The ancient traditions of Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism recommend desiring less. Platonism and medieval Christianity recommend redirecting our desires from this world to a higher, more perfect world (in Platonism, this means immaterial reality; in Christianity, it means God; in medieval theology, it means both). But these five traditions agree that we should desire the things of this world less, that this is the way to achieve happiness, and that the practice of virtue is what will amend our desires and make us happy. This strategy is exemplified in a book that would later become one of C. S. Lewis’s favorites: The Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth century A.D. by the Roman Christian, Boethius. In this partially fictionalized autobiography,

Philosophy is personified as a woman. She appears to Boethius in a time of distress and comforts him, healing his soul by helping him amend his desires. First she helps him give up his desires for money, power, and fame. Then she teaches him to desire to be virtuous and, ultimately, to desire God. The early modern philosophers would have read Boethius as part of their education, but they took the opposite approach; they looked for something that would enable humankind to achieve its desires. In science, the philosophers René Descartes and Francis Bacon thought they had found just the thing that would allow us to secure what we want in the world. (Another philosopher of the era, Machiavelli, thought he had found the right tool in politics.) Descartes lays out his agenda in his book The Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. The book is divided into six parts in which Descartes depicts the drama of his search for knowledge. It is the third and the sixth which most concern us here. In Part I, Descartes explains his ignorance; in Part II, he gives his criteria for knowledge. In Part IV, he finds how to get knowledge, employing his famous method of using doubt to discover certainty, and he finds a certain foundation for knowledge in the principle I think, therefore I am. In Part V, he describes what we now call Cartesian Dualism, his understanding of the universe as divided into two components, matter and mind. But in Parts III and VI something very interesting and very relevant to science and ethics takes place. Part III—in the phase of the drama when Descartes is still bereft of knowledge—presents a provisional code of ethics. It is very traditional, complete with thinly veiled references to ancient ethicists from Plato to Epicurus and the Stoics. One of its principles is employed by Boethius: I should amend my desires to fit the world. But in Part VI things have changed. Now Descartes has knowledge, and he boldly proclaims a bold new principle: Change the world using science. In his own words: For these notions made me see that it is possible to arrive at knowledge that would be very useful in life and that, in place of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools, it is possible to find a practical philosophy, by means of which . . . we might be able, in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were,

masters and possessors of nature.3 This is a striking change from Part III of the Discourse. One of the more interesting questions in reading Descartes is the question whether the principle of acceptance articulated in Part III still applies, and, if so, what its scope now is. (I myself think that Descartes does not wholly reject it.) It is very clear, at least, that the principle does not apply in the same way or to the same degree. The centerpiece of the new ethic of Descartes is the opposite of the principle of acceptance. The centerpiece is: We shall change the world to better suit our liking, using the tools of scientific knowledge and technological power. Descartes envisions an entire society contributing to this project (and politely asks for money to support his own experiments). He hints that one region of the world that shall be amended to suit us better is our own human selves. Francis Bacon’s agenda is no less ambitious. In his book Novum Organum, Bacon sets out to redesign the strategy by which we humans gain knowledge. A founding father of British Empiricism, Bacon says we should look to the end of our investigations, not to the beginning, for knowledge. Knowledge’s origins are in sensory experience, but its completion comes only after sensory experience has been guided by scientific research. Knowledge comes by inductive reasoning from experience; it does not, contrary to the more traditional practices of philosophers prior to Bacon, come by deduction. This science and the knowledge it serves have another significance. They are not ends in themselves, but means to achieving the happy life. Unlike Boethius, who accepts the way things are, Bacon insists that the way things are must be bent to human will. Nature must be conquered. In order to be conquered, its ways must be understood; this is the purpose of knowledge. Knowledge is power—power to manipulate for our own ends. “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing,” he says; “Nature is conquered only by obedience.”4 Knowledge is power not only in its purpose, but also in its application towards that purpose. Knowledge is a practical activity—the activity of manipulation. To understand the world, says Bacon, we need tools with which to manipulate things in the world. These are the tools of science, including physical tools such as laboratory instruments, but also the

conceptual tools of scientific concepts and theories. As a result of the cultural changes spearheaded by the likes of Descartes and Bacon, there has been a tendency in the modern world to use science and technology as means to the end of getting what we desire—and thus achieve the happy life. This is very different from the ancient insight that we must first learn to desire the right things if we want to be happy. In this ancient moral tradition human beings must practice certain virtues in order to bring about this modification of desire. The medieval world, while different in various ways from the ancient, maintained this tradition of seeking virtue. But in the modern world, science tends to replace virtue as the chief means of attaining happiness.

Emotivism The replacement of virtue by science as a way of achieving happiness was not the only development in the early modern world. One other topic needs a bit of explanation. The older philosophical traditions had something else in common which the modern philosophers rejected: a reliance upon a concept of human nature, the way the human person is constructed, which dictates the way he or she ought to live. This virtue which the older philosophers were always talking about meant no more than learning to live according to human nature. The modern philosophers rejected this old account of human nature. In this section I shall explain—with, I must admit, considerable brevity— why they rejected it, what they did instead, and what that led to. Prior to the modern era, the belief in human nature had become associated with certain metaphysical accounts of the immaterial essences of things. It was believed that every sort of thing—rock, tree, beast, and human—has an immaterial essence, a nature which compels it to behave a certain way. So the idea was that human nature is a non-physical essence, akin to the nonphysical essences of other things. The problem in the early modern era was that these essences didn’t seem to be necessary anymore. The problem arose when the new physical sciences began to study the physical world on its own terms. Galileo could drop a physical object, and it would behave as a merely physical object, operating according to the laws of physics, not according to the requirements of any immaterial essence. Not everyone saw the problem right away, but some philosophers—Descartes among them—saw it. Science

had no need for immaterial essences, although the old ethics did. Such philosophers realized that the new science would have a hard time coexisting with the old ethics, for they departed at a fundamental level, employing very different understandings of the nature of reality. So modern moral philosophers rejected the old human nature-based ethic, and went to great efforts to develop an understanding of ethics not based in human nature, and relying less on the old understanding of virtue that was based on human nature. Some philosophers—such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz—crafted entire new theories of the nature of reality that would allow the new sciences to flourish but would allow an ethics somewhat like the old to flourish. Some philosophers focused more directly on ethical theory; in this regard the philosophical achievements of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others are quite impressive. But eventually a different sort of idea took hold in moral philosophy, and later came to prominence in academic—and, eventually, in popular—culture. That idea was Emotivism, the thesis that moral and other value judgments do not really mean anything, but simply express our emotions. That thesis was justified by the Empiricist philosophers Locke’s and David Hume’s descriptions of how our minds work. According to Hume, all meaningful statements either are derived from sensory experience or are justified by the law of non-contradiction, which states that a statement cannot be both true in false in the same way at the same time.5 A moral principle is an ought statement, and cannot be derived from the is statements of sensory experience. But neither is a moral principle justified by the law of noncontradiction. So they are not meaningful statements at all; rather, they are just expressions of our feelings. This is the Emotivist account of—or rejection of—ethics, and it rose to great influence in English-speaking philosophy in the early decades of the twentieth century.6 More importantly, Emotivism came to wield immense cultural influence, which continues even though professional philosophers have abandoned the theory. Modern Western philosophy is, in very large part, precisely this story of an attempt to find a new ethical framework that does not rely on human nature— and the story of how the philosophers failed to do so (or, at least, failed to do so in a way that achieved any sort of general philosophical agreement or cultural consensus). This story has been told elsewhere, most notably in

Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue. If you want to know it in more detail, you could not do better than to study After Virtue and the conversation among philosophers over MacIntyre’s thesis.7 For our purposes we need only note that I think the way MacIntyre tells the story of modern philosophy is correct in its broader strokes (though it may err in some details). Thus we have seen that in the modern era of Western philosophy two developments were underway. One was the replacement of virtue ethics with scientific achievement as a strategy for attaining the good life. While science does not replace moral principles as such, it does replace the traditional ones, and the seeds are sown for a society that considers all things open to technological manipulation. Another development in the modern era was the abandonment of the very idea of meaningful ethical principles. Taken together, these developments lead to the peril of runaway technological development and manipulation of the world and, ultimately, of humanity itself. Science will be relied upon as the means of getting what we want, completely unrestrained by ethical norms. Into the morass of a culture simultaneously dedicated to scientific achievement and infatuated with the Emotivist thesis steps C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis and the Tao C. S. Lewis was a scholar of literature by profession, and is known as a theologian and Christian apologist to many. Yet he was also a philosopher. The Abolition of Man is perhaps his most philosophical work in that it is neither a work of or about literature, nor a theological analysis or defense of Christianity—though he shows himself conversant with both literature and theology. He mentions that he is a Christian and is presenting a view that Christianity holds, but he is not promoting Christianity. For, he explains, the view he is presenting is common to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, ancient Chinese philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, ancient Roman philosophy, and some modern Western philosophers. That view is a particular view on ethics, the view that moral values are objective—a view for which Lewis uses the name given it by Chinese philosophy, the Tao. What Lewis is giving us is thus neither literature nor Christian apologetics, yet it contributes to his broader Christian apologetic in that it is a defense of a necessary component of Christianity. It is an apologetic for the continuing

importance of the Tao. The apologetic is developed in three Parts. In Part I, “Men without Chests,” Lewis confronts the debunking of moral values which was so popular in the Emotivist era. He points to an English textbook he had recently seen in which it was explicitly taught that evaluative statements are just expressions of our feelings. He explains how this sort of thing kills the ability of the student to have the right emotional response to good and evil: The English teachers are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is “doing” his “English prep” and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.8 The whole point of education, according to the old conception, says Lewis, is to shape children into properly formed human beings. A properly formed human being has the right emotional responses to good and evil; he or she is pleased by the one and repulsed by the other. But our educational system shapes young people into people who can’t have these responses to good and evil. Borrowing from a medieval take on Plato’s Republic, Lewis refers to the properly formed emotions as the chest (and to the properly formed mind as the head, and the properly managed bodily desires as the belly). Thus, folks with malformed emotional responses to good and evil are “men without chests.” In Part II, “The Way,” Lewis explains why the doctrine of the Tao is fundamental. Yet he does not lose sight of education; the older view of life was that certain emotions are correct because they fit the world properly, and the older view of education is that its purpose is to cultivate the right emotions in young human beings. This view is rooted in “the doctrine of objective value,”9 the view that some moral principles are simply true for the reason that there simply is value in some things. This doctrine of fundamental objective value is irreplaceable if our behaviors are to be regulated by anything other than our own wishes. Here is a version of the argument he

gives: 1. If any moral statements are correct, then either fundamental moral principles are justified by their usefulness or by our instincts, or else fundamental moral principles are simply true by themselves. 2. What is useful is always useful for something else. 3. Therefore, what is useful is justified by something else. 4. Therefore, fundamental moral principles are not justified by their usefulness. 5. A statement about an instinct is a statement of fact: an is statement, not an ought statement. 6. No statement about what is can justify a statement about what ought to be. 7. Therefore, fundamental moral principles are not justified by our instincts. 8. Therefore, if any moral statements are correct, then some fundamental principles are simply true by themselves. In short, if there is to be any regulation of our behavior which is not rooted in our own desires, then there must be fundamental moral principles which justify both certain behaviors and certain other moral principles, but are themselves unjustified.10 The only alternative to acknowledging the unjustified Tao is a complete rejection of moral objectivity, a willful doing of what we do simply because we want to do it, with no attempt to justify it. More precisely, it is a willful doing of what those of us who happen to be in power want to do. In Part III, “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis explains why this is especially significant in a technological society. There will come a time, he speculates, when a complete psychology enables a perfected science of propaganda; combined with a complete technological expertise, this will enable those who control this technology to reshape the entire human race, both as it exists at the time and as it will exist afterwards. They will, if they take this alternative route of rejecting the Tao, end up changing human nature. They will reshape the race as they see fit—or, rather, as they like, there being no relevant sense of fitness in the absence of moral standards. They will, in effect, abolish man as he

presently exists and has always existed. Although these people, the Conditioners as he calls them, will believe themselves to be conquering nature once and for all, Lewis explains that they will in fact be surrendering to nature. For, in the absence of the Tao, they will operate according to whatever desires will happen to be strongest for them, which will be those desires determined for them by nature. Earlier I explained that there were two modern developments contributing to the situation Lewis hopes to avoid, the abolition of man. It should be noted that the first of these developments, the abandonment of virtue ethics in favor of a technological ethic of manipulation and control, is not something Lewis directly opposes in his little book. This is not to say that he supports it; he doesn’t. It is only to say that his direct attack is on Emotivism. More precisely, it is to say that Lewis’s attack is on the illusion that Emotivism and scientific power can coexist with any real sense of morality—and without significant consequences. If no moral principles are really true, then, of course, the consequences do not matter. But if in fact there are any really true moral principles, then the consequences are utterly disastrous.

Fringe: The Abolition of Man—and the People Who Stopped It The premise of J. J. Abrams’s hit show Fringe is a familiar one. There are many ways of saying it. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that we can’t keep up with it. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that we don’t usually have the chance to stop and think about what we’re going to do with it before it has already been done. Technology is “progressing” so quickly that before we know it we’re doing things with technology we shouldn’t do. Technology is moving so quickly that we can’t tell whether it is helping us progress or regress. Then there is the formulation from the pilot episode: “[S]cience and technology have advanced at such an exponential rate for so long, it may be way beyond our ability to regulate and control them.”11 And there is a formulation from G. K. Chesterton: we are learning to do so many things that we’ve forgotten there are things we shouldn’t do, and we need to relearn them.12 Lastly, there is Lewis’s formulation: man is so dazzled by his new technological powers that he may in short time abolish man.

Here I will summarize this fascinating series only very briefly by pointing to the major Lewisian themes present in its first and final seasons. The series begins with the prospect of the abolition of man, and ends with the main characters confronting its results and finding a way to prevent it. In Season 1 we meet Olivia Dunham, FBI agent and the show’s protagonist. Olivia finds herself facing a vast and coordinated conspiracy to alter mankind by using biotechnology on the edges—the fringe—of science. Season One depicts the formation of the FBI’s Fringe Division—the team of agents and special advisors tasked with facing this conspiracy. People are out there tinkering with our bodies, our brains, even our genes. We’re not sure why they are altering humanity or what sort of human they are trying to create, but Olivia doesn’t need to know those things in order to know that it’s wrong—she’s committed to protecting the humans that already exist. She doesn’t need arguments to know that this is worth doing, to know that the shadowy Conditioners (using Lewis’s term) are in the wrong. She acts with determination, motivated by a properly developed love of the good, with or without access to rational justification for it. Through the gruesome images of the results of creepy medical experiments, and through the reactions of Olivia and company, Fringe conveys the emotional response proper to the abuse of human beings in the name of science, and to the effort to tinker with human nature in the name of Progress. That response is primal revulsion, and the audience vicariously experiences it along with Olivia. What is true of Olivia is also true of the rest of Fringe Division, including Walter Bishop, a recovering sinner against the Tao. Walter has behind him an entire career of tampering with human nature; thanks to some of the experiments he did on himself, his genius is matched only by his quirkiness and instability. His son, Peter (a future lover and husband of Olivia), is no less brilliant. These three are the major (not the only) characters responsible for investigating and, ultimately, preventing the abolition of man. That prevention is not accomplished until the triumphant end of Season 5. In the meantime, main characters develop in various directions; other characters come and go; people travel through space, time, and parallel universes—altering the nature of themselves, their world, and the conflict with the Conditioners. Fringe’s tale of the abolition of man and the team that prevented it is a very complex story. Nevertheless, the theme of the abolition of man and the need to avoid it is

consistent throughout. Season 1’s specter of abolition, underway at the hands of mysterious villains associated with Walter’s past, is replaced in Season 5 by the results of a fully accomplished abolition by future scientists who were trying to improve humanity. These scientists seem to have meant well, but they are Conditioners nonetheless, and they have abolished humanity all the same. The result of their work has come to control life in our own day. The products of the Abolition are known as Observers, and they have traveled backwards through time and taken over the world! Not only are all subsequent humans the products of the Conditioners; now a swath of past humanity is enslaved to the same products. And harsh slave masters they are, these post-human beings, for they know nothing of love; they are “Observers” and observers only: pure intellect, devoid of emotion and incapable of valuing anything. Although they fulfill the purpose for which they were made—to pursue knowledge more efficiently—they are not capable of loving even the very knowledge which they seek. Their Conditioners manufactured them to be men without chests, programmed merely to know, and they carry on their creators’ ambition by manufacturing beings like themselves in the laboratory. They are not humans; as Peter observes of them, they are “nothing but tech,”13 echoing Lewis’s remark that “they are not men at all: they are artefacts.”14 In Season 5, the Fringe division’s one mission is to stop the Observers. To make a very long and interesting story very short, they do so by traveling into the future and persuading the scientists responsible for creating the observers that there is no need to remove so many human emotions. They persuade them not to create men without chests! This advice on what not to do with science is not only the main theme of the series’ beginning and finale, but is also reinforced by various stories contained within individual episodes and by pithy remarks from various characters. For example, the message of one episode in Season 4 is that we should live our lives and love each other while accepting our natural limits, rather than try too hard to overcome those limits using technology.15 A scientist formerly involved in an attempt “to make a better human being” says of his work: “Can you imagine that? The hubris of trying to improve upon God?”16 Finally, some salient words of caution come from Walter’s

former assistant Carla Warren: Walter, there has to be a line somewhere. There has to be a line we can’t cross. . . . Knowledge cannot be pursued without morality. . . . Some things are not ours to tamper with. Some things are God’s.17

The Rest of Our Book I now turn to the contributions of the other authors, and to the plethora of science fiction films and television they have explored. We have organized the book to mirror the structure of Lewis’s Abolition. The chapters of Lewis’s book (or the subjects of the three lectures from which his book is derived) are these: “Men without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man.” Our book, likewise, has three parts with the same names, with the topics and analyses of the articles in each part paralleling the topics of the parts of Lewis’s book.

Men without Chests In chapter 1 of Lewis’s book, “Men without Chests,” Lewis examines the immediate consequences of a culture that debunks the objectivity of moral truth: its youth will grow up lacking the ability to love what is good, unaware that there is any such ability which they are lacking. In our book’s Part I, “Men without Chests,” we explore the ways science fiction film portrays men without chests. One relatively simple situation portrayed in science fiction film is that in which people with atrophied moral sensibilities confront technology, misusing it as a result. Another more complex but no less important situation is the atrophy of the moral sensibilities as a direct result of science and technology—either by habitual misuse of it or simply by being so dazzled by science that other important things are forgotten. Both situations are canvassed in our book. Mark Eckel sets the stage nicely for this investigation with “Monster in the Mirror: The Problem with Technology is the Problem with Us.” Looking at the motives behind our use of technology as illustrated in various films such as The Terminator, Gattaca, Prometheus, The Island, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Eckel suggests that the fundamental problem with technology is our

less-than-pure motives in using it. He argues that science fiction shows how our technological attempts to play God demonstrate moral weakness: we seek to become God rather than to be godly. Lewis Pearson renders a great service to the reader of Lewis by exploring one of the most important sources of the Abolition: Plato’s Republic. “Vulcans without Chests: Spiritual Disorders Portrayed in Star Trek” explains how Lewis’s remark on the rightly ordered human being—“The head rules the belly through the chest”—is rooted in Plato’s analysis of the soul. Lewis argues that the disorders of the soul as Plato and Lewis describe them are manifested in various races in Star Trek: one race with no moral sensibilities to accompany their intellectual moral judgments, another with no intellect to guide their moral sensibilities, and both lacking a head ruling the belly through the chest. Deanna Smid’s “To Seek Out New Virtue: Lewis, the Tao, and the Prime Directive” examines the modern tendency to substitute technological for moral progress. Smid argues that the Star Trek films Insurrection and First Contact show that Starfleet’s Prime Directive evaluates a society by its level of technological prowess, thus distracting from the importance of moral and spiritual progress. Bedazzlement with technological power distracts, and accordingly detracts, from virtue. Artur Skweres’s contribution is “Between the Good and the Evil Samaritan: Person of Interest in Light of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.” He claims that the characters in the film live with no moral chest, no emotional connection to the good. As such, they operate independently of the Tao, yet while seeking to impose it on society. The results, Skweres explains, aren’t pretty: loss of privacy, freedom, and humanity. In “‘You Have Nowhere to Go’: Alienated Communication and Social Control in THX 1138” by James Driscoll, we get a look at the intersection of technology and capitalism run amok. A paradigmatic illustration of the creation of men without chests is a world in which human beings are reduced to their role in the vast machinery of production—reduced not only by, but also to, a sort of technology. Our natural and proper ability to view human beings as possessed of inherent value is eradicated. Driscoll explains all of this with the help of continental European philosophy. Travis Coblentz’s essay “A Vision of Transcendence: Monstrous Intelligence and Loving Understanding” also does us the service of looking

back to Plato even as it looks forward to the technological futures suggested by various science fiction films. Concerns with technology are, evidently, ancient concerns as well. Coblentz argues that a mature moral understanding — Lewis’s chest—is necessary to make the acquisition of facts a genuine good, attributing this thesis to Socrates, to Lewis, and to the film Transcendence. Mark Sadler explores “The Failure of Men without Chests in Blade Runner,” a film whose artificial and biological humans both lack a proper moral sensibility but are lucky enough to know it. Sadler explains how the film shows, as did Lewis and Plato before it, the necessity of moral sensibility to make us into humans, rather than mere minds with knowledge or animals with appetites.

The Way In chapter 2 of Lewis’s book, “The Way,” Lewis defends the doctrine of objective value that informed practically every society preceding the modern one. These are the objective values which modern society tends to debunk, whereas other societies taught their young to love them, a teaching which initiated them into the activity of being human. In our book’s Part II, “The Way,” we look at the positive side of the technological age. We consider how science fiction film suggests the importance of objective moral truth. We are especially interested in the way science fiction suggests that we are, in Peter Lawler’s words, “stuck with virtue” as the best way of attaining happiness.18 We are also interested in the way science fiction may itself take up, in its own small way, the task of cultivating the Tao—the job which, Lewis laments, formal education once performed. Scott Shiffer starts us off with “Technology and the Emotional Spectrum in Green Lantern: The Animated Series.” While this series displays men without chests, Shiffer explains how it also portrays the development of the moral chest: the cultivation of courage and of the moral sensibility to stand against evil. While Shiffer focuses on Green Lantern, one naturally suspects that a similar analysis might be applied to dozens of other works in the superhero genre of film and television. Thomas Britt gives us another look at Transcendence as well as Interstellar in “The Tree before the Branches: Virtue and Rebellion in

Contemporary Science Fiction,” making helpful connections to Lewis’s understanding of the human need for genuine, spiritual transcendence as articulated in his Mere Christianity. Britt argues that these films suggest the impossibility of satisfaction in this world, even when this world is technologically enhanced. By suggesting this, science fiction calls us higher, and by calling us higher, it shows our need for the virtues involved in pursuing higher reality. The old philosophical-religious ascent to God, replaced with science by modern philosophers, is shown by modern science fiction film and television to still be relevant. Jaclyn Parrish is our specialist in an interesting sub-genre of science fiction, steampunk. Steampunk seems to have come into being for the express purpose of examining the relationship of man and machine. Steampunk is rooted in, and often set in, the Victorian era, when steam was a major source of power. In “Beauty in Rust: Steampunk Distinctives in Shane Acker’s 9,” Parrish focuses on Shane Acker’s film 9. Parrish explores steampunk’s themes of “hopeful dystopia,” “redemptive recycling,” and the “positive partnership between man and machine.” Parrish’s thesis is that, through these themes, steampunk fiction shows us a positive way forward, a way to live well in a technological age, to move beyond the effect of technological destruction. In other words, steampunk shows us a glimpse of the good life in a pan-technological age; it teaches the Tao. Can the victims of the abolition of humanity hope to reclaim what they have lost and live by the Tao once again? In “Reclaiming Virtue and (Post)Humanity in Moon,” Linda Wight argues that that particular film suggests as much. The clones of this film, victims par excellence of technological victimization, rediscover virtue and, with it, hope. Returning to the world of Star Trek, Kevin C. Neece examines the infamous Genesis Device, from the films Star Trek II, III, and IV, and the question of terraforming. Neece considers the godlike role of the terraformer and explores the nuances of the Genesis Device narrative and questions assumptions about the ethical lessons of the story. He asserts that Star Trek does not see technology as humankind’s savior, but rather as a tool humans use, either with or without virtue, and that moral and spiritual development are more important in Star Trek’s worldview than technological advancement. In fact, he argues, technological advancement without moral development leads to disaster. With this in mind, he looks for clues in the

Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Home Soil” of what ethical terraforming might look like.

The Abolition of Man In chapter 3 of Lewis’s book, “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis explains the long-term consequences of a particularly modern problem. That problem is the convergence of scientific progress with modern moral skepticism, and the end result will be the abolition of humanity. In our book’s Part III, “The Abolition of Man,” we explore how science fiction portrays this terrifying culmination of the modern world’s dependence on technology if we neglect virtue and the Tao. It is only possible to do so much in one book. We do not apologize for focusing on film and television rather than literature in this volume, but it is still somewhat unfortunate that we cannot explore literature more. Happily, Tom Veale’s essay “A Prison of Our Own Making” goes some way towards rectifying this situation by focusing on some of the films based on classic science fiction literature—in this case Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Veale shows that in these works of classic literature, some predating Lewis’s own Abolition of Man, and in the films based upon them, Lewis’s theses are nicely illustrated. In particular, these stories show how the emergence of Lewis’s “Conditioners,” with their technological omnipotence, does not free mankind from nature, but rather imprisons mankind. In “The Dangers of the Materialist Magician” Louis Markos explores a concept which is familiar to veteran readers of Lewis, but may seem esoteric to other ordinary mortals: the “materialist magician.” Described by the demon Screwtape in Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters as Hell’s master plan for modern humanity, the materialist magician is the merging of pagan devilworship with modern materialist atheism.19 Markos explores the connections between this concept and some other works of Lewis, including The Abolition of Man, and applies it to the films Metropolis, Dark City, and Altered States. The result is a nice articulation of what the materialist magician does and of how this is illustrated in film. In the Abolition Lewis advances the striking claim that humanity’s technological power over nature is in reality nothing more than the power of

some people over others. In her essay, “The Abolition of Risk: C. S. Lewis in the Philosophies of The Island and Gattaca,” Janelle Aijian looks back to Francis Bacon, connecting his quest for technological control to this phenomenon and showing that this control turns sinister when it is turned on human nature. Specifically, when human nature is tampered with in an effort to avoid risk, the result is either that some people are consumed in the effort to keep others safe, or that those of us deemed risky are reduced to secondclass citizens. Another piece attentive to the many edifying worlds of science fiction literature is “Technocratic Death Denial as Disavowal of Life: Lessons from Brave New World and The Abolition of Man” by Mike Alvarez. In this essay on the film productions of Brave New World, Alvarez explains how the fear of death can lead to a loss of the life we are meant to live. This theme, not limited to such an investigation as ours, is nevertheless important to our investigation; for the use of technology to avoid death, if taken to its limit, reduces human beings to the components of their bodies. Lewis observes that science tends to reduce human beings to raw material, and such is the raw human material that is manipulated in the effort to escape our natural limits. Christina Schneider’s piece “Never Let Me Go and The Abolition of Man” scrutinizes the desire for health and eternal youth. She argues that this desire, empowered through advanced technology, ends up reducing humans to the value of their genes and leads to the exploitation of some by others. This, she says, is the theme of Never Let Me Go, a film focusing on the experiences of certain clones who are manufactured and consumed for the health and youth of others. The attentive and informed reader of this introduction may have noticed that Never Let Me Go is the second film I have mentioned that focuses on such clones (the first one mentioned is The Island, examined in other articles). A third such film is The Clonus Horror, examined alongside Logan’s Run in the contribution of Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Canela Ailen Rodriguez Fontao, and Juan Ignacio Juvé in “The Oppression of a Healthy Body: Greed for Youth in Logan’s Run and The Clonus Horror.” Berns, Fonao, and Juvé explore familiar themes: technological oppression of some by others, the danger of a technologically enabled pursuit of perfect health. They also explain how the use of this sort of technology reduces us to physical commodities and cuts us off from the pursuit of transcendence

which is an essential part of human nature. In our penultimate essay—“Does Forgiveness Just Happen?: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis’s ‘Last Step’”—Nathan Gilmour explores the loss of one of our essential human traits through technology. That trait is memory, which is eliminated by characters in that particular film in the hope of making life easier. However, Gilmour argues, with the help of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, that the abolition of memory in the hope of making life easier for us is also an abolition of us. Earlier articles look at various aspects of the abolition of humanity, each found by exploring the myriad worlds of science fiction: loss of memory, commodification of human beings, reversion to pagan devilry (figuratively and maybe literally), oppression of some by others, the destruction of humanity in an attempt to fix the aspects of humanity we don’t much like, our ironic enslavement to nature in an attempt to move beyond it, and the reduction of human nature to its physical aspect and the abolition of the quest for transcendence. In our final essay we get a look at a paradigmatic case of the abolition of humanity in science fiction, from one of the paradigmatic science fiction worlds of our time. That essay is “‘Flawed, Weak, Organic’: Star Trek’s Borg and the Abolition of Man” by Geoffrey Reiter. The Borg are the result of the merging of humanoid and machine in an attempt to achieve perfection. Eminently lacking in proper moral sentiment, the Borg have long since surrendered their own humanoid nature, which they failed to recognize as valuable in itself, and ruthlessly crusade to abolish the nature of man and other races. I will close this introduction by mentioning one happy consequence of our thesis. If Lewis’s thesis is correct—and if our thesis that contemporary science fiction film and television illustrate his thesis is also correct—then the genre of science fiction film and television is something of an exception to the problems Lewis described. In science fiction film and television, seen through a glass darkly, moral truth is not simply being debunked; it is frequently being taught. To see this we need to watch science fiction with discernment.20 We hope that our thesis is correct and that it has been well presented in this book, but we hope even more that we have helped some of our readers to view science fiction film and television with discernment—to see how in it evil and good, dark and light, death and life are placed before

us, that we may choose the right way and walk in it.21

Bibliography Anderson, Brad. “And Those We’ve Left Behind.” Fringe. Fox Broadcasting, 2011. Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952. Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Victor Watts. London: Penguin, 1969. Boone, Mark J. “Plutarch and Augustine on the Battlestar Galactica: Rediscovering Our Need for Virtue and Grace through Modern Fiction.” Imaginatio et Ratio: A Journal for Theology and the Arts 2.1 (2013) 18–30. Chappelle, Joe. “A Better Human Being.” Fringe. Fox Broadcasting, 2012. Chesterton, G. K. Varied Types. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1915. Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress, fourth edition. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1988. Hadot, Pierre. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Gormlee, Tommy. “Black Blotter.” Fringe. Fox Broadcasting, 2012. Graves, Alex. “Pilot.” Fringe. Fox Broadcasting, 2008. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. ———. The Screwtape Letters. New York: Macmillan, 1943. Lawler, Peter Augustine. Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005. Pesce, P. J. “An Origin Story.” Fringe. Fox Broadcasting, 2012. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 (1st ed. 1981). Murphy, Mark C. Alasdair MacIntyre. Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

1. C. S. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 86. 2. Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum are helpful in explaining this theme. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire; Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?. 3. Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 35. 4. Bacon, New Organon; Aphorism III from Book I, page 33. 5. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 4, 71–72. 6. A good representative of this tradition is Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic, especially chapter 6, “Critique of Ethics and Theology.” 7. MacIntyre, After Virtue. For a useful introduction to the scholarly reaction to MacIntyre, see

Murphy, Alasdair MacIntyre. 8. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 16–17. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. MacIntyre, by the way, thinks it is possible for an is statement to justify an ought statement. Thus, although both oppose Emotivism and promote more traditional conceptions of ethics, they give different justifications for traditional ethics. See After Virtue, chapter 5. 11. Graves, “Pilot.” 12. “. . . we are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them;” Chesterton, Varied Types, 228. 13. Pesce, “An Origin Story.” 14. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 77. 15. Anderson, “And Those We’ve Left Behind.” 16. Chappelle, “A Better Human Being.” 17. Gormlee, “Black Blotter.” 18. Lawler, Stuck with Virtue. 19. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter VII. 20. On this theme and on the importance of virtue in science fiction, see Boone, “Plutarch and Augustine on the Battlestar Galactica.” 21. Deut 30:15: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil” (English Standard Version). Jeremiah 6:16: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls . . .’” (English Standard Version).

Part I

Men without Chests “While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.” —Peter, the Apostle

2 Monster in the Mirror The Problem with Technology is the Problem with Us by Mark Eckel

For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. . . . [K]now therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. (Deut 4:32, 39 ESV)

Introduction eonard Nimoy’s Jewish upbringing created the famous Vulcan sign, “Live long and prosper.” Nimoy, recalling his days as Spock on Star Trek, explains that the spread-finger-formation originated from the Hebrew letter shin, resembling a capital “W” in English.22 Rabbis would utilize the

L

letter as the sign of God’s blessing, often linked to the Old Testament prayer imploring God’s goodness for a prosperous life.23 Hebraic dedication had its origin in God benefitting man. Humans are dependent for life, for prosperity, for everything on the limitless beneficence of God. Science fiction often reminds us of the opposite: the curse of being human is our limitation. Every step we come closer to perfection we encounter barriers that remind us of our imperfection. There is a subtle but strong commitment in futuristic writing that bends toward Utopia, the desire for completion on earth by humans. What we discover more often is a dystopia

that mandates human slavery in its many forms. From whence comes what was hopeful turned to doubt? From technological abandon. Why do we continue to pursue that which will cause us the most trouble? Because of our human belief that the only ethical boundaries are those we create for ourselves, resulting ultimately in man’s abolition. Technology, our savior, becomes our destroyer. Science fiction exists because we know there is something more (Prometheus). Ancient to modern renditions of futuristic hopes and fears depend on assumptions about humanness, knowledge, and reality which are impacted by our created technology (The Island). Our desire to circumvent time-space boundaries leads us to build machines so we can cross dimensions (The Terminator). Our devotion to knowledge ignores ethical limits so we can explore seemingly limitless curiosities (The Island of Dr. Moreau). Our dedication to progress resents any purpose other than addiction to betterment (Gattaca). Our definitions stand as totems to which we give obeisance; our interest is information over truth (The Empire Strikes Back). In what follows I explore our theological usurpations, prophetic cinematical forebodings, and the resultant technological invasions, leading in the end to educational capitulations.

Theological Usurpations What we want for ourselves we cannot have by ourselves. God’s attributes shimmer and shine in every new technological advance, reflected in every new science fiction film. Our grasp of technological grandeur is born of arrogant seed, our desire to be, our declaration that we are, God. Six distinctive, divine features are always just within reach of the next invention, the next decade, the next generation; or so we think. But, like Prendick on Moreau’s island understood, if we are all God, “Who is the number one God?” Eternality. All science fiction films have one thread woven through the fabric of the space-time continuum: we want to be God. Our “godness” is impossible without a bridge over the river Styx. If we could prevent imminent death, we could invent eternal life. Science fiction is just that: fiction. The years before and after our own cannot be revisited and cannot be attained. High definition, CGI images dancing in front of our eyes seduce us

into wonder until like all before us, they become vapor. Our temporality hints of our longing for eternality. We know it. We want it. We can’t have it. Transcendence. We want otherness but are stuck with sameness. Supernatural impulses course through our scientism—an innate desire to overcome our immanence. True to form, our first step is not toward the sanctuary but to the laboratory. We have yet to learn that looking forward demands that we look up. We need something outside ourselves, to save ourselves. Science fiction draws a large picture if we could widen our telescope; science fiction shouts if we would remove the ear buds. Sovereignty. We want to be in charge. We want control. We want to manipulate so we don’t have to capitulate. Transported to another time, another place, we are shown the cinematic possibilities of our manipulation. If we could, we would. Since we are unwilling to listen to the chaotician who warns “The question is not ‘Can we?’ but ‘Should we?’,” dinosaur control turns into a feast for beasts.24 Technological heights are Pyrrhic victories filmed to contrast our Waterloo defeats. Sci-fi attempts to control our technology often revert to technology’s control of us. Immutability. Driven by our desire for something new and novel, we contradict novelty with the contradictory desire of stability. We think change is the difference leading us to changelessness. Looking over our shoulder we discover our actions mimic millennia of the same attempts to progress with little to show but our regress. The latest technology—in whatever field of study—is only a mirror image of what is entombed in the sands of time, albeit with newer hardware. We want change until we discover it’s the change we don’t want. Impeccability. “What’s wrong with us?” echoes through the corridors of human history. Attempts to eradicate the evil, destroy the devil, or contain the contagion find us on the same roads traversed by our ancestors, going back in time. Overcoming time, we think, will lead to our salvation from evil until looking at the clock just before our last heartbeat we see the inevitable truth: turning back time does not turn us around. Against the grand utopian claim, we find the problem is us. Aseity. Self-sufficiency is the goal and the lie. “If only,” a phrase ringing in our ears, is music to our ears until we realize we will always be out of tune. Science fiction is full of the heroic individual overcoming impossible odds to

create some source of benign knowledge which allows our eternal independence. With few exceptions, fictionalized futures in film are sought by the young. We see handsome and beautiful features on screen, but are deaf to the voices of the aged Orwells, Huxleys, Mathesons, Dicks, Asimovs, and Bradburys lost amid the din of twenty-something agelessness. Our lurch toward aseity stumbles over the calendar pages of our own timelines. The six essential components of being God25 can never be ours, on screen or off, because we will always be man. Limitations, the corrosive embedded consciously or unconsciously in every science fiction plot, are the truths of each God-like attribute we desire. The allure and lure of technological prowess slithers through our lives until we awake coiled by our inventions, bitten by our intentions, and poisoned by our limitations. And we suppose no limitations because we refuse to acknowledge we cannot be God. Our acceptance of our “godness” is our rejection of limits, limits which would have been born of character. C. S. Lewis, knowing our limited nature, trumpeted our only alternative: affective muscle born of objective truth, symbolized by the metaphor of the chest in service to the same truth understood by the head.26 God’s attributes of eternality, immutability, sovereignty, impeccability, transcendence, and aseity provide the framework for our affective character development. Of first importance, we should be taught there is a God, immediately after which we learn we are not Him. All else, all education, all development of a person’s interiority hinges on these core truths. Tandem truths—there is a God and we are not He —provide the structure for educational virtue; if lacking, virtue is replaced by value, character by criteria, objectivity by subjectivity, and God by man. How do we teach humans we are not divine? Is there a measure by which subjectivity is subjected to objectivity? How will we limit and lessen the ever-present influence of so-called technological advance? What educational shifts can move us from criteria to character? Where will we begin to reject value-driven dictates exchanging them for virtuous principles? In effect, how can we learn to love what we cannot see? The answer to each question is one word: story. Stories are insidious. Stories pry their way into our mindset. Stories loosen prejudices. Stories open new vistas of thought. Stories broaden our perspectives on life. Stories help create character. Character—a person’s internal ethical code, the pectoral

muscle of men with spiritual chests—is best developed by story. If we are listening, science fiction story at times whispers, sometimes shouts, that if we think we are God, we are left to ourselves and by ourselves. Science fiction can remind us of our greatest limitations: our finitude, fallenness, and frailty. The Empire Strikes Back delivers an all-inclusive “Force” through which surges all knowledge without purpose (“There is no ‘Why?’”) nor an ethical framework other than “You will know.”27 The Terminator suggests that in order to overcome the results of earth-shattering decisions, we depend upon a messianic birth from another time, another place.28 Prometheus searches in the other direction for our origin, finding our faith in technological excess at odds with a cross.29 The Island shows scientism’s outcomes, where a few control the many and privilege always enslaves.30 The Island of Dr. Moreau confirms that control is temporary and elusive, even with the hope of perfectionism.31 Gattaca replaces “perfect” with imperfect, bringing us full circle: our attempts to be God are thwarted by our humanness.32 Science fiction stories wear the vestige of a character’s garment. In contrast to the monotonous uniform of technology, a full character wardrobe may be our last hope, prompting us toward the need for virtuous science fiction stories, filling out our shirts with chests of character.

Cinematical Forebodings “Warning, warning, warning! Danger, Will Robinson!”33 I remember those words as if they were uttered yesterday. The Robot in Lost in Space, who cautioned about a threat, served as a moral compass for the interstellar travelers known as the Robinson family. Expanding my scope of moralistic science fiction was a similar addiction to The Twilight Zone. Haunted by the specter of impending nuclear fallout from The Cold War, Rod Serling’s weekly warnings were important television drama for me in the 1960s. Soon Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973), Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1977), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), expanded frightening horizons, portents of apocalyptic doom. “Apocalypse,” the Greek word for “Revelation,” the name for the Bible’s

last book, has an expansive meaning. John the Apostle penned the book which foretold, explained, or revealed what God would do at the end of time. The word has morphed into a cultural cause of fearful foreboding. “Watch out!” or “Beware!” would mirror the intention of “apocalypse” today. In many respects, science fiction is driven not so much by what could be but by what shouldn’t be. Futuristic films are neon signs, billboards dotting the ethical landscape with their premonitions. Charlton Heston’s character laments human-made cataclysm, kneeling next to the burned out remains of our Statue of Liberty, crying, “We finally, really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!” Heston too shouts the once heard, forever remembered, dire threat, of euthanasia, “Soylent Green is humans!” When asked after the destruction of the camp how they will make it, Kurt Russell’s character in The Thing responds, “Maybe we shouldn’t.”34 Whether or not human life continues is key to understanding The Terminator. Attempting to create a military defense system, humankind looses a rogue, cybernetic doomsday. Computers rule the world, eliminating humans who are now the enemy. Embedded within Terminator’s premise— the only hope for humanity—is a theological virgin birth. Motherhood. Birth. Generation. Regeneration. We are consumed by birthing something other than ourselves to save ourselves. Birth-death, generation-destruction, and perfection-obsolescence pervade not only Terminator but a myriad of science fiction films acknowledging the obvious: we need a transcendent source of salvation. To one degree or another, all science fiction films point to the need for the supernatural to invade the natural and show that corrupt human abilities cannot create or educate the human race out of its problems. Only God is impeccable. The divine objective Source, identified in the early chapters of Lewis’s Mere Christianity, of the ethics propounded by Lewis’s Abolition is our only hope. A subjective view of truth—supposed by Lucas’s Buddhistic35 phrase through Yoda, “There is no ‘Why?’!”—cannot sustain any educational system. Lewis rails against human subjectivity in learning. The Star Wars films rightly pointed toward the problem of evil and the subsequent need for overcoming evil with good. However, a dependence upon frail human attempts to subvert evil through a yin-yang, 50–50, flip-of-the-coin, either-or possibility of triumph through a nebulous “Force” is wholly inadequate to

provide an epistemological center. Star Wars succeeds at every level as a science fiction film while building an ethical basis in mid-air. No one can live in the “reality” created by the premise that “The Force surrounds you, it’s in you.” Only the Eternal Triune Personal Creator can provide the framework not only to answer “Why?” but “How do we overcome evil with good?” We are insufficient of ourselves to address the problem of evil unless there is One who is Self-sufficient. Attempts to find our Creator have produced movies like Prometheus with its obvious concern for our ontological origins. And why would Ridley Scott be interested in such a premise? The never-ending quest for eternal life finds its Ponce de Leon in Guy Pearce’s character, the funder of such a fictional adventure. If we can link our life to our origin, we may be able to find our own Fountain of Youth. Our search for the source in space leads to genocide in the end, an end we attempt to circumvent on Earth. The circle is complete. Our search for the eternal, transcendent, immutable, and impeccable is an expedition which finds us temporal, immanent, mutable, and peccable. Not only are we “men without chests” but we fail to know how to create the chests and where to find the men who have them in the first place. If we could recreate our beginnings we could replicate our origins and control our surroundings. The Island of Dr. Moreau posits just such a scenario. Bending toward perfectionism—the perennial, utopian dream—a scientist succeeds in recreating with horrific results. The problem of Dr. Frankenstein is the problem of Dr. Moreau: the hubris of sovereignty. Technological know-how seems forever beneficent until we find ourselves hell-bent on a descent through inherent corruption. Technology has no recipe to eradicate sin; anthropology can never fully access impeccability. Everything from organ transplants to space shuttles are commonplace. We “stream,” “connect,” and “surf.” We have replaced the phrase, “If it’s possible” with “When it’s available.” We can do anything, go anywhere, or be anyone. We think ourselves to be sovereign, autonomous, and selfgoverned. But we have failed to see that when the question excludes God, the answer eludes man. Structure is a necessity for any culture. When ancient wisdom is lost, is not passed on, is not communicated, and is not enforced, the culture is in danger. Scripture reminds us that one interested in the future must begin in the past. Universal wisdom, Lewis’s Tao, should be our ultimate interest in origins. Our creations depend on the Creator.

But once given the option to become God, we cannot forego the opportunity, the possibility. We want the perfectionism of Gattaca both here and now, there and then. We relegate all imperfections to a lower-caste status; only the best are good enough. Gattaca’s perfectionism leads obviously and ominously toward The Island’s totalitarianism. Indeed all futuristic films which posit the premise of perfection almost always end in replication, replacement, and, ultimately, eradication. Ethan Hawke’s character circumvents biological perfectibility, giving hope for the masses, at the same time showing the problem of various human dominations and enslavements. A replicant discovers he exists only as a parts store to fix the original owner’s chassis; Ewan McGregor’s character’s island hope is nothing more than the real world without him in it. Lewis’s concern for usurpers who would wield their subjective power in dictatorial fashion is the subliminal message of science fiction’s questioning of perfectionism. Immutability is not something people can claim without an objective source emanating from a perfect, eternal Person. It should come as no surprise that Lewis’s non-fiction The Abolition of Man was buttressed by a science fiction trilogy. Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength find Lewis’s characters preempting the problem of evil while outwitting the powerful who use evil against others. Human use of technology in fiction exposes our motives, our continual human attempt to rise beyond the status of creatures, becoming Creators. Prendick’s soliloquy at the end of the book The Island of Doctor Moreau contemplates the end of technology untethered from an eternal, sovereign transcendence: There is—though I do not know how there is or why there is—a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live.36 And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.

Technological Invasions

Hope is the essence of science fiction films. If there is no hope, our story, the human story, does indeed end. Our mindset coerced by the brightest and best, the latest and greatest, is duped into believing we have what it takes to overcome our own problems. However, what we have become in our use of technology is creatures who have forgotten our theology. We worship the creation so we do not have to acknowledge the Creator. We sacrifice ancient wisdom at the altar of the new and improved. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes we have stopped at nothing (Eccl 1:13), but when everything was said and done (Eccl 1:14) we found the solution was beyond us (Eccl 1:15). What’s become of us is that we are (1) devoted to use rather than appreciation, (2) desirous of the future without the past, (3) wanting progress not purpose, and (4) coveting information instead of truth. As I have written elsewhere, “Many complain that technology is changing us. I suspect the opposite is true. We are changing technology so we don’t have to change.”37 Our individual and collective consciences have been seared by our blindness to the truth: we are not God. If there is a God to whom we are accountable then our first response should be to worship. What we do instead is establish our own accountability structure, Diety be damned. So laden are we with our own “godness” that we erect new technological Towers of Babel thinking that “newness” will overcome our “creatureness.” What we should learn from The Island, The Terminator, and The Island of Dr. Moreau is that our designs cannot compete with Design. Our motivations are so corrupted that desires for heaven-on-earth become only earth without Heaven. We try to fill the void of incompletion with hi-tech promises merely to find we are left completely incomplete. Yet we allow technological gadgets to usurp our attention coopting our direction toward utilitarianism and perfectionism. Reason for life, a purpose for the future, or personal meaning are left wanting when all we want is “Does it work?” Corrective medicine, preventive medicine, and work-related machines have given greater ease and safety to humans. Achievement, efficiency, and comfort, however, are no replacement for reflection and spiritual satisfaction. Concern for the computer chip has raped the soul. We rely heavily on artificial means of productivity thinking production is salvation. In the rush to make things faster, the possibility of human abuse is ever present. Humans become consumers rather than contributors, reliant

upon skills over ideas, and watchers instead of readers; we are abusers as opposed to protectors. Desire for what is “bigger and better” displaces wisdom and gratitude to the detriment of people. If people have a future in science fiction it is only found in the past. Prometheus wondered aright, “From whence do we come?,” indicating that our origins matter. The Empire Strikes Back does indeed bow toward our forbearers’ wisdom, an acknowledgment which rightly celebrates history. Gattaca knows that our progenitors are flawed but their view of life is not. How we value life depends on our shared heritage, a legacy offering an inheritance for the next generation. Removing the past, however, gives no hope in a future. Humans must remember where they have come from and to Whom they are responsible. Human creation apart from subservience to the Creator could turn science to scientism. Ethical boundaries can become an afterthought; humans might be considered just another machine. Mechanisms have but one purpose: to serve the user. Apart from being created in the image of the Personal Eternal Triune Creator humans are left to serve what they create. Technology in whatever form becomes God. Purpose outside ourselves gives humans worth, value, and dignity disparate from selfdirected production and consumption. Further, technology can separate humans from physical, communal connections with each other. Community is certainly possible at a distance through the marvels of digital gear. But if Jesus’s incarnation teaches us anything it is that meeting people where they are “in flesh” is paramount. We revel in abilities to communicate around the world but we can only be in one, real, physical space-time-place. Our commitment to technology should not usurp our commitment to incarnationally care for each other. Futuristic films scream dehumanization, as Donald Sutherland’s infamous shriek in Invasion of the Body Snatchers attests.38 Horrific screams in space can bring us back to earth. Upgrading weapons systems without a kill switch is the problem properly attested to by the Alien series. Transcendence with its cousins warns us not to allow the motherboard to become our mother. From Frankenstein to Godzilla science fiction whispers “Be careful what you wish for.” What do The Terminator, The Island, or Gattaca have in mind? Knowledge without Truth makes us numbers, not men. Technology wants quantity at the expense of humanity.

Technology wants data devoid of feeling. Technology wants spreadsheets instead of the spread of wisdom. When information is separated from Truth, questions revolve around cost instead of “What will this cost us?” Ancient, universal, eternal principles recognize what should be clear: commitment to the source of our knowledge will tell us what we will do with our knowledge.

Educational Capitulations Ben Kingsley’s famous lines in Sneakers say it best: “There’s a war out there, a world war. It’s not about who’s got the most bullets, it’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information.”39 Totalitarian regimes depend on the control of information, apathy of the populace, disrespect of history, and ennui toward virtue. Educational freedoms are undermined not by external attack as much as internal inertia. Parents, families, homes, neighborhoods, churches, and schools can be breeding grounds of lethargy. The future of any learning community—building lives from the inside outward—begins with children; the future of our children depends upon a dedication to an external good, a Tao, an eternal, personal, transcendent, independent Creator. Apart from virtue, science fiction films warn us that technology-driven education is neither a good master, nor a good teacher. Educational institutions obsessed by progress over purpose capitulate to the relentless nature of computerization. Commitment to the uber-cyber ideal includes the following educational detriments: 1. Technology becomes the scholastic message rather than the method, the telos rather than the tool. 2. Technology, rather than investing in human capital, consumes financial resources. 3. Technology restricts school vision-mission statements, conforming to what’s next instead of what’s best. 4. Technology subverts grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the ancient curricular trivium—where students no longer gain content knowledge, losing the ability to think and communicate. 5. Technology enslaves people to a career path, upending personal giftedness toward a vocation.

6. Technology elevates the technician over the teacher, the latter trailing both authoritatively and fiscally. 7. Technology subsumes creativity, demanding virtual worlds instead of physical places. 8. Technology overrides all commitments through use of technique and data. 9. Technology lulls users into believing its benefits will address any and all problems in science, medicine, economics, national security, artificial intelligence, and interpersonal relationships. 10. Technology hides the question “What does technology demand of us?” posing instead the question “What demands can technology do for us?” Time, money, novelty, and elevated expectations determine technology’s doctrine. Max Picard 1950’s warning is also an educational reminder: None of the elemental phenomenon of life, such as truth, loyalty, love, faith, can exist in this world of radio-noise, for these elemental phenomena are direct, clearly defined and clearly limited, original, firsthand phenomena, while the world of radio is the world of the circuitous, the involved, the indirect. In such a world the elemental phenomena are ruined.40 T. S. Eliot adds a poetic, prophetic voice to the “virtues” of education fixated on technology: Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?41 How can what has been lost be regained in educational directives? Good characters in science fiction often rely on ancient wisdom, a bibliographic source beyond themselves. In Star Trek, Spock displays his appreciation of the ancient philosopher Plato.42 Captain Picard recommends Shakespeare to Data,43 and to Wesley Crusher he recommends the (to characters in Star Trek) ancient American philosopher William James.44 The Day the Earth

Stood Still is an extraterrestrial warning from the heyday of scientific advances, that what we do with what we know we must restrain. Jurassic Park reminds the viewer that the question “Can we?” must be preceded by the question “Should we?,” which is contingent upon ethics outside ourselves. Close Encounters of the Third Kind pounds home what every sci-fi thriller knows: the best answer comes from a place other than our own. The Book of Eli finds Denzel Washington’s character dependent upon internalized, biblical resources for his journey.45 Were Abolition of Man designed as a theological tome, Lewis would depend upon our six theological assumptions honoring God as the basis for objective truth. “Honor” in Hebrew means a weight, a burden we carry with us. We carry the burden of truth given to us; we bear the weight of educating the next generation in eternal truth. Educational philosophy depends on a teacher’s educational theology. Lewis believed that extraterrestrial, supernatural wisdom brought into reality a structured, patterned, ordered world which is both reliable and knowable, given for human good. Educators are able to cultivate habits in children which are directed toward what God has established as creational law; the way life is to be properly lived. Virtue is the suitable ordering of one’s life after God’s ordained ends. Virtue is the development of good habits. Virtue is creating a disposition toward the good. Virtue is first to think, then to be, and finally to do good. Virtue is an invisible, immaterial quality reenergizing the scholastic need to develop what is unseen. Lewis’s Tao acknowledges that the universal nature of virtue must proceed ahead of knowledge. Technological dictates fall prey to utilitarianism and pragmatism. Technology is burdened by physical limitations, by our limitations. Attempts to become God leave us as beasts on an island of our own making. But an educational theology which draws upon an other-worldly source of wisdom changes beasts to men with chests.

Conclusion The best science fiction uses the future to critique the present. The best science fiction uses stories which reflect The Story. The best science fiction uses technology to warn against the misuse of technology. The best science fiction teaches an eternal lesson in the temporal world. In like manner, Lewis’s brilliant Abolition of Man uses the present to critique the future.

Hand-in-glove, Abolition of Man and futuristic films combine warning lights with warning sirens. Visually, verbally, we cannot escape the obvious conclusion. The problem in life is not what we can see but what we refuse to see. We create solutions to problems which fix inconvenience, leaving our ultimate destiny in the hands of others who view us as an inconvenience. We create devices to comply with our needs but realize too late that it is we who are compliant. Only when our affective selves are fashioned by the wisdom of eternity do we have the proper motives in our use of technology. Only when our reflection in the mirror is seen for what it really is will we erect boundaries for our exploits, ethics for our science. Only when our knowledge of “live long and prosper” is understood in its Hebraic roots will we practice the beneficence toward others originally given as the blessing of the Hebrew God.

Bibliography Alexander, David. “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1968. Bay, Michael. The Island. DreamWorks, 2005. Cameron, James. The Terminator. Hemdale, 1984. Carpenter, John. The Thing. Universal Studios, 1982. Eckel, Mark D. I Just Need Time to Think!: Reflective Study as Christian Practice. Bloomington, IN: WestBow, 2014. Eliot, T. S. “The Rock.” 1934. Fleischer, Walter. Soylent Green. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973. Frankenheimer, John. The Island of Dr. Moreau. New Line Cinema, 1996. Hughes, Allen, and Albert Hughes. The Book of Eli. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010. Kaufman, Philip. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. United Artists, 1978. Landau, Les. “Samaritan Snare.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1989. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man; Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Lucas, George. The Empire Strikes Back. 20th Century Fox, 1980. Martin, Soby. “Deadliest of the Species.” Lost in Space. November 22, 1967. Moyers, Bill. “Of Myth and Men.” Time, April 18, 1999. Niccol, Andrew. Gattaca. Columbia Pictures, 1997. Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Jewish Roots of Leonard Nimoy and ‘Live Long and Proper’.” Washington Post Online, February 27, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/02/27/thejewish-roots-of-leonard-nimoy-and-live-long-and-prosper/. Pfister, Wally. Transcendence. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014. Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Translated by Stanley Godman. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952. Robinson, Phil. Sneakers. Universal Studios, 1992. Schaffner, Franklin J. Planet of the Apes. Twentieth Century Fox, 1968. Scheerer, Robert. “The Defector.” Star Trek: the Next Generation. January 1, 1990.

Serling, Rod. The Twilight Zone. CBS Productions, 1959–64. Scott, Ridley. Alien. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. ———. Prometheus. 20th Century Fox, 2012. Spielberg, Steven. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia Pictures, 1977. ———. Jurassic Park. Universal Studios, 1993. Wells, H. G. The Island of Doctor Moreau. 1896. Wise, Robert. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Twentieth Century Fox, 1951.

22. Ohlheiser, “The Jewish Roots.” 23. Num 6:24–26. 24. Spielberg, Jurassic Park. 25. All human attempts to “define God” fail. The attributes ascribed within this finite essay cannot encompass the Infinite. The noted characteristics of God are among others for which theologians have ascribed the phrase “incommunicable attributes,” meaning they cannot be attributed by humans. These attributes, however, are exactly those which we desire if indeed we aspire to be God; a constant interest in science fiction films. 26. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Part 2. 27. Lucas, The Empire Strikes Back. 28. Cameron, The Terminator. 29. Scott, Prometheus. 30. Bay, The Island. 31. Frankenheimer, The Island of Dr. Moreau. 32. Niccol, Gattaca. 33. The Robot’s words are spoken to Bill Mumy’s character Will Robinson in Season 3, Episode 11 of the 1960’s television series Lost in Space. Interestingly, the episode’s title was “Deadliest of the Species.” 34. Carpenter, The Thing. 35. Bill Moyers interviews George Lucas where the Buddhist origins of the Star Wars series is revealed. Moyers, “Of Myth and Men.” 36. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau. 37. Eckel, I Just Need Time, 90. 38. Kaufman, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 39. Robinson, Sneakers. 40. Picard, The World of Silence, 206. 41. Eliot, “The Rock.” 42. Alexander, “Plato’s Stepchildren.”

43. Scheerer, “The Defector.” 44. Landau, “Samaritan Snare.” 45. Hughes and Hughes, The Book of Eli.

3 Vulcans without Chests Spiritual Disorders Portrayed in Star Trek by Lewis Pearson

Introduction . S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man describes the dysfunction that plagues a society when its inhabitants work from—or toward—a stunted or disordered picture of the human soul. His analysis comes alive when applied to science fiction utopias and dystopias, and in particular to cases of fictional civilizations that have suppressed or somehow altered the functioning or ordering of their intellect, emotions, or desires. This essay will deal primarily with Vulcans, vis-à-vis humans, from Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise. Notwithstanding the complexity of Vulcans and their history as they are sometimes explored in the franchise, by and large Vulcans and humans are juxtaposed as flipsides of the same penny, with Vulcans being mostly head, and humans being mostly chest or belly. Following Lewis’s critique in The Abolition of Man, we may come to realize that neither option is a winning side in the long run, since both fail to capture the threefold nature of the soul in its fullness, proper order, and harmony.46

C

We will begin our conversation where C. S. Lewis begins his essay The Abolition of Man, in a world where “men without chests” are mistakenly lauded as paragons of intellect and models of virtue. After this we will turn to Lewis’s account of emotions as being truth-directed in nature. We will explore the role of emotions in psychological conflict, how Vulcan suppression of emotion is actually illogical, and how emotions fit into Lewis’s three-part account of the well-ordered soul. Finally we will look at what it means to be a Vulcan without a chest, and conclude with Captain Kirk’s words of wisdom on the subject.

The Green Book The Abolition of Man consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is entitled “Men without Chests.” In this chapter Lewis takes to task the authors of a poorly written elementary-level English grammar textbook. Concealing the real names of the authors and their work, he calls them Gaius and Titius and their textbook The Green Book. Lewis points out that Gaius and Titius fail to teach grammar, because they do not explain what makes a piece of literature good or bad.47 Rather, they simply claim that any judgment of value like “That waterfall is sublime” or “Cowardice is shameful” is not a judgment about the world as it is, but rather a disguised report of an inner emotional state or feeling, and then they imply that feelings are unimportant. Thus all appeals to feeling or emotion are either distractions from reality that should be ignored, or attempts at manipulation that should be resisted.48 One problem is that these are philosophical claims, not lessons on whether particular passages of prose are demonstrating good or bad grammar and composition. Another problem is that the book also fails as an under-the-table primer in philosophy (in addition to failing at teaching grammar). In short, its philosophical claims about value judgments and emotions are false. Lewis explains that judgments of value like “That waterfall is sublime” are, in fact, statements about the objective nature of the world, and not merely reports of an inner emotional state.49 To say “That waterfall is sublime” is to say something about that waterfall’s objective features, just as much as it would be to say “That waterfall is fifty feet tall.” Since these statements are both claims about the objective nature of the waterfall, they would both remain true (or false) regardless of the inner emotional state or conscious experience of those present to behold it. If someone present at the waterfall failed to be moved to sublime feelings, that would not render false the statement “That waterfall is sublime,” any more than a blind man who could not see the waterfall’s height would render false the statement “That waterfall is fifty feet tall.” Moreover, as Lewis explains, an emotion can be considered rational if it is an appropriate and fitting response to reality.50 When explained thusly, few would fall for The Green Book’s transparently contentious—and ultimately false—metaphysical claims. One might wonder how such amateur philosophy could look enough like grammar lessons to

fool anyone. Yet it does. It succeeds because the reader’s philosophical guard is down: The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is “doing” his “English prep” and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.51 The same point could well be made about Star Trek: its very power in planting in its viewers certain assumptions about human nature depends on the fact that it is dealing with an audience that thinks it is being entertained, with no notion that their aspirations for their own lives and for their society at large may be at stake. One may argue that the case of Star Trek differs from that of the grammar book because much of the franchise’s ability to entertain comes from its engagement of the intellect. After all, part of a viewer’s enjoyment comes from thinking and talking about the shows, the characters, the plots, and so on. And yet, at the level of the assumptions he will grant, the viewer is still vulnerable, just as the schoolboy doing his English prep is vulnerable. Before a viewer starts to think about the drama that is being presented for his enjoyment and examination, he must first accept the unspoken and fundamental elements that serve as the basis of that drama. For instance, suppose someone were to sit down to watch “Amok Time,” an original series episode focused on the half-Vulcan Spock and the Vulcan mating rituals surrounding pon farr.52 To make sense of the story and feel its dramatic pull, the viewer must first accept the premise that there is a humanoid race of beings who have “succeeded” in becoming thoroughly “logical” through the extirpation—or more accurately, the suppression—of their emotions. That is to say, the charitable viewer must first accept the view that reason and emotion form a combative dichotomy, so that Vulcans as a race make sense in this dramatic universe, before he can judge how well the

episode succeeds on that assumed basis. The problem is that before he begins examining the show’s writing, character development, execution, and so on, he has already had to accept a cluster of false claims, namely that emotion is fundamentally irrational and thus is an enemy of reason. In accepting these claims for the sake of enjoying and examining the story that is based on them, the more he is moved by the drama, the less likely it is that he will be able to realize he has accepted a misguided view of human nature without argument, evidence, or even a signpost that he made such a decision. Much like the schoolboy reading The Green Book, a Trekkie may carry with him a warped picture of human nature, and never know the reason why. None of this is meant to pillory the makers of Star Trek as sinister in their intentions. Lewis’s words about Gaius and Titius may be just as apt in describing Roddenberry and his writers: “The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”53

The Ordo Amoris There is yet another problem with The Green Book. Contrary to Gaius’s and Titius’s claims, emotions and feelings are important. But a caveat is needed. A person may realize that emotions are important but misidentify the reason why, and make the mistake of prizing emotions for derivative, or even misguided, reasons. Emotions are not fundamentally important for the vague or slightly vacuous reasons that we sometimes get from a romanticist culture that seeks them as ends in themselves, or from a hedonist culture that values emotions for their rush only, or from a Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy-like personal preference for grit and gut over logic and gears. All those reasons are fine as far as they go, but they are not what make emotions fundamentally important—that is, important with regard to the essence of human(oid) nature. The fundamental importance of emotions is that they, like the intellect, are one more organ of experience that connects us with the objective nature of the world in which we live. Put more succinctly: emotion, just like intellect, is truth-seeking in its nature. Since emotion rightly understood is ordered toward truth, it follows that emotion can become dysfunctional when it is dis-ordered, when it is not ordered toward truth, but instead ordered toward something else. Anger, for

instance, is a reaction founded in a concern for justice. When functioning properly, anger helps us see the truth about the state of the world in which we live—specifically whether the world is in an objectively flourishing or floundering state with respect to justice—and anger subsequently motivates us to act for the sake of restoring justice.54 When malfunctioning, however, anger is no longer ordered toward the recognition and correction of unjust states of affairs—it is no longer ordered toward truth. Instead it degenerates into a myopic self-concern, arising when we don’t get our way, or when we realize we do not have control where we think we should, regardless of whether we actually should. Lewis’s way of putting all this is that just as judgments of value (like “That waterfall is sublime”) tell us objective truths about the world in which we live, emotions are a particular way we recognize these sorts of truths. Thus emotions are well-ordered and functional when they appropriately correspond to the way that the world is, and on the contrary emotions are disordered and dysfunctional when they fail to correspond to the world in an appropriate way. Upon seeing an innocent child being trampled to death, the appropriate emotional responses are pity and outrage; laughter and amusement would be inappropriate responses. In Lewis’s own words: “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”55 Lewis also reminds us of St. Augustine’s name for this view, the “ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it.”56 He goes on to point out similar claims from Plato, Aristotle, early Hinduism, Confucianism, and Stoicism, and for the sake of brevity gives the name of ‘the Tao’ to their shared understanding of the world,57 which is “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”58 The Tao is that thing by which we may “recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”59 A reader may find it difficult to follow Lewis’s claims if he has spent

much time fixing his life’s orbit around the constellations of personal taste, style, and preference. Personal taste has its place, but that place is not one of being an evaluative or normative standard. Choosing to make personal taste the standard against which all things are judged would be like attempting to engineer a solar system so that its center was a planetoid instead of a star: the thing at the center will remain what it is, only with more hanging on it than it can bear. Without something that is actually an evaluative or normative standard at the center of one’s life, that life will spiral beyond any substantial form of meaning, regardless of all attempts to impose meaning upon it. One cannot licitly appeal to taste to justify every decision and way of life, or to claim that there is no right or wrong, because these attempts in the long run will crumble, every time, in the face of the reality of the kind of thing that we are—namely, rational creatures meant to know and live in the truth—and in the face of the objective nature of the world in which we live. Of course, many people attempt to do exactly that, futile as it may be. They assert that there is no such thing as the Tao, no such thing as the ordo amoris, but rather there are only different desires and feelings, all equally valid and with an equal claim to being pursued and satisfied. If these assertions are true, then it follows that all meaning and value is relative to any given person’s desires, tastes, and so on. Lewis points out that such assertions are irrational and, strictly speaking, emotionally dysfunctional. Lewis makes the point in a self-deprecating way: Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it).60

Lewis sums up the relation between reason and emotion by saying that emotions “can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”61 I imagine many would find this account of emotions refreshing, but startling. In any case, it is an account largely foreign to sizeable portions of Star Trek’s dramatic universe, where one finds numerous characters, plots, and even entire alien species—like Vulcans—predicated on the assumption that reason and emotion are opposing forces in human nature that have nothing in common with one another. At this point, especially as Lewis’s arguments threaten the very logic of the Vulcan race and philosophy, more hardened or cynical readers may feel unsatisfied. For such readers, Lewis’s explanations, illustrations, and arguments may appear to be mere counter-assertions, dressed up in various guises of rationality. In addition there may be other readers who are convinced Lewis is right, but who still can’t shake the feeling that there is something more to say for the contrary position that emotion isn’t fundamentally rational. For all these readers, and for everyone who has ever found himself or herself fighting against the force of passion, or the persuasion of desire—which basically means all of us—it would be good to consider that if ever and whenever we think or act as if emotions, as such, are irrational and are not aimed at the truth, consciously or not we are ultimately committing ourselves either (a) to the position that emotions are worthless and should be eliminated—a very Vulcan stance—or (b) to the position that emotions are still important, but because they are irrational they must have their meaning and value apart from any consideration of truth—a stance that Dr. McCoy might find amenable. Both positions are mistakes. The first position leads to a race of “men without chests”; more will be said about this later. The second position implies a relativism about meaning and value, because if the meaning and value of emotions is not moored in truth, the only anchors left to which to tie meaning and value are inborn and/or arbitrarily chosen tastes and preferences, which are relative to any given person. When brought to its logical conclusion this position refutes itself, for this kind of meaning and value amounts to the same thing as there being no such thing as meaning or value. In short, this position results in a state of affairs where a

thing being what it is, is identical to that thing not being what it is. Any position that entails that x is the same as not x hides within it some kind of contradiction, some mistake in its account of reality, thus betraying itself as flawed. Here is an interesting point about human nature: even in cases like the above, where we see, understand, and accept logical demonstrations that prove a position to be fundamentally irrational, we are still sometimes drawn toward taking up and maintaining that irrational position. We feel like it’s the position to take, even though we know it isn’t. In many cases like this, what we are experiencing is a kind of inner conflict. Our intellect tells us one thing, and our emotions or desires another. We self-identify with all these parts— intellect, emotion, and desire—and so we are divided in our will. We struggle to resolve the matter. And if one or more of these parts are somehow defective in their functioning, or if our emotions have not been properly ordered toward truth, or if our desires have not been properly trained and subjected to reason, it is all the more difficult to navigate such conflicts. How we live has a direct effect on our ability to resolve inner conflict. For instance, if we choose to live a lifestyle that leads to our intellects being underdeveloped and our desires overindulged, we will find ourselves looking more often to our desires in all matters in our life, not only to tell us what they want, but also to teach us about truth and the objective nature of the world in which we live. The problem is that desires cannot do all these things for us. Desires do not easily see the world as it is in its objective fullness, for they are primarily concerned with those aspects of the world which might give satisfaction or frustration. Thus, as we become enslaved to desires, to that extent we will become unable to make sense of normative claims— claims that there are universal standards that bind all people and properly evaluate the rectitude of all human action. To sum, it is a mistake to see emotions as worthless—one might call this the Vulcan mistake—and making this mistake leads to one becoming a man without a chest. But it is also a mistake to value emotions while holding that their value has nothing to do with truth or reason. The question arises: how are we to avoid being men without chests on the one hand and irrational emotionalists on the other? Looking more closely at the nature of inner conflict will give us the beginning of an answer.

Inner Conflict One ready-at-hand definition of “good” might be “that which is judged desirable for its contribution to perfection, consummation, integrity, satisfaction, or relief.” This is but one way to phrase the notion of goodness; it is similar to phrasings used by thinkers within the Tao, like Aristotle62 and Thomas Aquinas.63 It is a helpful phrasing because it is not only consistent with some of the most profound and philosophical treatments of the nature of goodness as such, but it also makes immediate sense of how we use the word every day. For instance, it makes sense of why a mathematician would call a sought-after solution to an equation good, why a tickled movie-goer would call a comedy good, why a person with a full bladder says a bathroom break would be good, and so on. When we call something good, we do it for different reasons. There seem to be different parts of us that recognize what makes something good. I am drawn to placing a flowering amaryllis in a vase because I find its appearance pleasing to my eyes, but then again I reconsider the action because its odor is noxious to my nose. On the other hand, if led by my nose, I would linger closer to a campfire for the sake of the sweet smell of that smoke, yet the greater proximity causes my eyes to sting and water. My eyes call one thing good and another bad, while my nose delivers contrary judgments on those very same things. This is just the beginning. Pleasing one sense at the cost of pain to another sense is annoying, but not typically of great import. The problems become more serious in matters of life and death. For instance, consider “Charlie X,”64 an original series episode in which a socially inept, passion-driven adolescent named Charles Evans is a danger to those on the starship Enterprise because of his ability to transmute matter at will. At the end of this episode, Captain Kirk faces a choice: let Charlie stay aboard or let the Thasians—immaterial beings who have cared for the boy since his youth— take him away so that he will pose no threat to others. The choice is a dilemma because both options result in a kind of terror: allowing him to stay endangers the lives of all with whom Charlie comes into contact, but consenting to his being taken away means consenting to his being abandoned to an inhuman life surrounded by immaterial beings whom he can’t even

touch. My sympathy for a fellow human being suggests that he stay. But my prudence suggests that he be taken away. Whatever option I choose, I am pained. The first option leaves me in fear for the safety of those around Charlie, and the second option leaves me pained at Charlie’s stranded existence. Kirk regrettably consents to Charlie’s being taken away by the Thasians—“regrettably” being a key descriptor, for it indicates that some kinds of dilemma are not necessarily fully resolved when a decision is made, even when it is the right decision. We may say “yes” to an option and act upon it, but something within us remains, saying “no.” We are not fully at peace, not fully “one with ourselves.” Given sufficient effort and time, we may regain our inner harmony—our personal integrity—and discover how to reconcile the part of us that says yes with the part that says no. Sometimes, however, the lack of integrity leads to an inner crisis. When we are at war with ourselves, we face the gravest kind of dilemma. This kind of dilemma is grave because any resolution, one way or the other, may destroy our personal integrity—our very sense of self, of who and what we are. When resolving inner conflict, we are tempted by easy solutions. Keeping sympathy and getting rid of prudence is an easy way out, but it is nothing more than a form of spiritual self-mutilation. Ultimately it is a dead end. It is virtually a description of Charlie himself—driven by emotion and desire for acceptance, with no concept of the worth of others, and consequently no control over himself. One who lives thusly is incapable of living well and attaining happiness. Another easy solution would be to keep prudence and get rid of sympathy, thus experiencing no regret in letting the Thasians take Charlie. But this so-called solution is merely the flipside of the same coin of spiritual self-mutilation, and the cost is too high. Given this choice we become partially blinded to the full worth of our fellow human beings. For instance, without sympathy we may conclude that killing Charlie, with premeditation and with no need for provocation, is the only logical option. Lacking sympathy, no other options may even occur to us. Sadly though unsurprisingly, this is Spock’s situation. Failing to see other options leads him to conclude—rashly and falsely—that no other options exist.

Vulcan Illogic

The Vulcan insistence on eliminating emotions for the sake of logic actually blinds them to all logical possibilities, and when made aware of this blind spot in their reasoning capacities they (illogically) deny the blind spot’s existence. When an option or solution presents itself that they did not anticipate, or that they find “shameful,” they will claim that said option or solution did not occur to them because it was not “logical,” or ignore the fact that shame is, in itself, an emotion. When Captain Picard explains to the Vulcan ambassador Sarek that he is the cause of a troubling situation aboard the starship Enterprise, Sarek denies the logic of the argument because of its shameful implications for himself.65 Picard piques Sarek’s anger to help prove the logic of his conclusion, as shameful as such a proof may be for Sarek. When Captain Kirk repeatedly bests Spock in three-dimensional chess, Spock chocks up the losses to his inability to anticipate irrational moves.66 But notice the problem: In this context if by “irrational” Spock means “not conducive to winning the game,” clearly Kirk’s moves are not irrational, for they lead to his winning the game. Like Gaius and Titius, Vulcans seem to insist that emotions are the problem, when in fact Vulcans are attempting to engineer the elimination of certain logical possibilities by labeling them (falsely) as “impossible,” and the emotions that revealed these possibilities as “irrational” or “shameful.” To strike at the heart (or the loins?) of the Vulcan problem, consider again the pon farr. Given that Vulcans procreate sexually, sexual relations cannot be extirpated without the simultaneous extinction of the Vulcan race. As a civilization, Vulcans developed their pon farr rituals to manage the violence and chaos that typically result from unbridled lust, jealousy, and the various other manifestations of disordered sexual desire. But as a form of seasonal indulgence during which time Vulcans lose nearly all reason and self-control, it is a second-rate solution. It is much like caging and ignoring a mad dog for long periods of time, all the while realizing that he will have to be let loose on a regular basis, lest in his neglected and ravenous state he break his bonds and kill his master.67 Such an approach is clearly different from, and inferior to, taming the dog and integrating him into pack life. In any case it is not a solution predicated on moderation. A logical race might have put its considerable intellect and willpower to the task of analyzing and engaging the proper and harmonious manifestations of sexual desire, developing practices

and traditions of moderation, and so on. But rather than base their approach to sexual practice and relations on moderation and harmony, Vulcans chose frameworks of suppression and damage control. Eliminating an essential part of who we are—regardless of the part we choose—will result in dysfunction. What, then, are we to do with the inner conflict? Two more easy answers present themselves: ignore the conflict itself, or live with it. But these will not do either, because they prevent us from recognizing something amiss with ourselves and/or with our world. For inner conflict is like a smoke alarm: loud, annoying, and disruptive. Upon hearing a smoke alarm, only a fool would ignore it as meaningless, and a different sort of fool would know what it meant but then resign himself to staying in a burning structure. A smoke alarm may not tell us the location or size of the fire, but it does tell us the general nature of the problem at hand, and we act accordingly: by investigating whether the fire can be extinguished easily, by exiting the building if we learn that it cannot, and so on. So, too, with inner conflict. It is not to be ignored, nor grudgingly suffered through. It indicates a problem, and it calls for action.

The Tripartite Soul When mutually exclusive goods vie for our attention, we experience inner conflict, a divided will. One voice says yes, another says no. In our efforts to settle the matter we may try to figure out which voice is stronger, and then be moved by that greater strength. Or perhaps we attempt to identify one voice as being more essential to who we are than the other, and then act accordingly—that is, in a way that we think is most “true to ourselves.” “My head says yes, and my heart says no,” I may tell myself, and then I might choose to follow my head or my heart depending on whether I fancy my “true self” to be essentially “cerebral” or “driven by passion.” When we construe inner conflict as occurring between our heads and our hearts, we are not far from the Tao. The head represents reason, and the chest represents emotion and the spirited part of us. Add in the belly—representing desire and appetite —and we have C. S. Lewis’s threefold picture of human nature. The key to successfully resolving inner conflict lies in understanding the three parts of human nature, and how they are meant to function and interrelate. Lewis reminds us this key is no secret, and that it has been around

for quite some time: We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the “spirited element.” The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.68 This tripartite picture is simply a way to make sense of the common experience of being conflicted about what we want. We seem to want a thing, and to not want that same thing, and we are at a loss regarding what to do because both desires come from within ourselves. For instance, think about any time you have awoken to an alarm clock.69 The part of you that remembers why you set the alarm for this particular time —the calculating part—wants to get up. The part of you that is enjoying the feeling of sleeping—the desiring part—wants not to get up. You can hit the snooze button, giving your desiring part a momentary preference, but the solution is temporary. The permanent solution comes either when you decide finally to get up or turn off the alarm altogether. The days your calculating part wins, you “prove stronger” than yourself. When desire wins out and you succumb to a pleasure you know to be self-destructive in some way, you prove weaker than yourself; you “give in.” The difference-maker from one day to the next is represented by a third part of the soul: the spirited part. This part is something like the army of your soul, fighting for and enforcing the rule of whatever part of the soul is in charge.70 Lewis calls this part “the Chest.”71

Vulcans without Chests Following Plato and the tradition, Lewis sees the chest as a link between the

head and the belly. Our emotions are a kind of helper and motivator when they have been properly trained to obey reason; thus they can be a reliable guide, or at least a safety net, when our heads aren’t in the game. Without the chest, we’re left with heads and bellies to fight one another, and one will usually squash the other, so that we either become utterly enslaved to any appeal to our desires, or else a sneering and unfeeling set who scoff at any appeal to desires. In short, we either become brute animals, or Vulcans. Vulcans do not see emotions as helpers in the quest to recognize and conform ourselves to the objective nature of the world. They see emotions as enemies of reason, as insidious influences from within that distract us from recognizing the objective nature of the world. In outlining the flaws and limitations of The Green Book, Lewis may as well be discussing the Vulcans and their philosophy of life, for according to it, “the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable—or even unreasonable—has been excluded from the outset.”72 Lacking a proper understanding of what emotion is and how it works, Vulcans and misguided humans alike will make the mistake of concluding that emotion “cannot be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error.”73 Further, people who misunderstand emotion in this way, “if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind: or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy.’”74 Ironically, such a position is highly illogical. It is also tragic, for on such a disordered picture of the emotions, psychological health cannot be achieved through a harmonizing of the various psychical parts of oneself into an integrity ordered toward truth. Rather, psychological health can only be attained through the repression or destruction of either reason or emotion. The result of such a pursuit will always be dysfunction and psychological chaos, for hiding or destroying an undesirable part—whether it be reason or emotion, or desire for that matter—does not make the dominant or remaining part a proper integrity unto itself with proper wholeness, any more than a man separating himself from or killing his wife makes him a harmonious

married couple unto himself. One might ask what would lead a person to think that systematic repression of all emotion would be a good or logical idea. Given the way that many Star Trek episode plots unfold, it seems that the idea comes from seeing how much suffering and destruction results when people’s actions are driven by wrath, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, and so on. If not for these vices, the world would be a better place. And, of course, it would be a better place. But the unnoticed mistake in reasoning comes from inferring that there are no well-ordered and appropriate forms of anger, sexual activity, use of wealth, et cetera, merely because vicious, disordered forms of all these things exist. The simple fact that a thing has a proper use or order entails the further fact that the very same thing can be abused and put out of order. But to conclude that a thing should be eliminated because it can be misused is arbitrary at best; by no means is it strictly logical. If it were, there would be no reason to prevent the same argument being applied to everything: there should be no starships because they can be used to spread plagues, there should be no languages because they can be used to insult and confuse, there should be no arms and legs because they can be used to beat and stomp, and there should be no logic because it can be misapplied and lead to an entire humanoid race extirpating an essential part of who they are.

The Final Frontier Despite many opinions to the contrary, I take Star Trek V: The Final Frontier75 to be one of the more enjoyable and compelling Star Trek movies, because it gets so many things right with respect to human nature— or humanoid nature. The Vulcan Sybok is sweeping across the galaxy with his teachings about emotion, heretical according to his Vulcan society. He claims to be recapturing a deeper part of Vulcan tradition that embraced emotion. He gains followers, almost as efficiently and irresistibly as the Borg assimilate alien races, by using a form of the Vulcan mind meld that leads people through catharsis of deeply held pains, into a seeming state of continual peace and contentment. Sybok says to one skeptic whom he wishes to turn into a disciple, “Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me, and gain strength from the

sharing.” It all sounds so good, because he gets so much of the story right. It is true that inner conflict and its attendant pain, like a smoke alarm, is mismanaged when ignored or grudgingly tolerated. And yet, there is a kind of emptiness to his promises of enlightenment. Those who undergo his induced catharsis have a blankness about them that turns out to be more like absence of thought, and less like true inner peace. After Bones succumbs to Sybok’s “therapy,” he attempts to convince Kirk to do likewise. Kirk responds in his inimitable fashion, “Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away! I need my pain!” Kirk, well-grounded in the Tao, realizes that pain has its proper place in human life. Just as a smoke alarm should not be removed just because it is loud and annoying when it is set off, so too our pain should not be removed merely because it is unpleasant. God forbid the day comes when I feel no pain at the wrong I have done, or the wrong I see being done to others. So let us learn from the mistakes of the Vulcans. Like Kirk, let us make firm our personal grounding in the Tao, for it is there where we will find a picture of human nature adequate enough to enable full human flourishing. And if we must one day defend the Tao against attackers, let us remember that it is we, not they, who stand on the side of reason and intellect, and then call to mind Lewis’s words about such men: “Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”76

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Cincinnati: Benzinger Brothers, 1947. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Beagle, Peter S. “Sarek.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1990. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and their Remedies. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009. Dobkin, Lawrence. “Charlie X.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1966. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 2010. Goldstone, James. “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1966.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2015. ———. The Screwtape Letters. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Pevney, Joseph. “Amok Time.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1967. Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991. Robinson, Andrew J. “Blood Fever.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Shatner, William. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Paramount Pictures, 1989.

46. One of the features that makes Star Trek so fascinating is its willingness to explore the most profound and powerful elements of human experience: good and evil, perfection and imperfection, reason and emotion, revelation and ignorance, aggression and passivity, pioneerism and seclusion—the list could go on. When successfully done, the stories inspire, spark helpful introspection, and lead to interesting speculation and good conversation. These activities contribute to the life well lived. But when Star Trek episodes and movies treat these themes poorly, its dramatic points ring hollow, its characters are laughable, and the stories as a whole fail to satisfy. Unfortunately these themes are sometimes treated poorly because the true nature of the polarities at hand are misunderstood, or because certain themes are treated as if they are polarities when they are not, or because polarities, opposites, and negations are sometimes handled as if they are all the same thing when they are not. These missteps mostly take place at the local level of episodic writing, but occasionally they occur at the deeper and more global levels of character creation and development. A few of these problems even seem to arise within the structure of the Star Trek universe itself. I say all this as an avid Star Trek fan. Despite these serious problems, Star Trek regularly gets enough right to be satisfying, and where it goes wrong, it still has the capacity to spark introspection and helpfully critical conversation, which again contribute to the good life. 47. Lewis, Abolition, 6–7. 48. Ibid., 4–5, 13–14. 49. Ibid., 2–3, 14–15. 50. Ibid., 14–19. 51. Ibid., 5. 52. Pevney, “Amok Time.” 53. Lewis, Abolition, 5. 54. DeYoung, Glittering Vices, 117–38. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a.158. 55. Lewis, Abolition, 14–15. 56. Ibid., 16. 57. Ibid., 17–18. 58. Ibid., 18. 59. Ibid., 19. 60. Ibid., 18–19. 61. Ibid., 19.

62. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.1–2 (1094a1-b10). 63. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1.6. 64. Dobkin, “Charlie X.” 65. Beagle, “Sarek.” 66. Goldstone, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” 67. The metaphor is particularly apt, as Vulcans have so radically conditioned themselves by the practice of pon farr that their very lives are threatened on a biological level if they do not indulge in the practice when the time comes. See for instance the previously mentioned original series episode “Amok Time,” and the Voyager series episode “Blood Fever” (directed by Robinson). The fact that habituation affects, and is affected by, neurochemically and biologically associated phenomena doesn’t explain away the Vulcan condition or give them a free pass, any more than, say, a human addict has a pass for having affected his own neuronal states, biochemical reactions, and chemically related stimulusresponse patterns through the habitual practices and activities associated with his addiction. The main difference is that the addict has crippled—and perhaps entirely endangered all possibility of—his future flourishing with his past choices, habits, and practices, whereas the Vulcans have crippled their entire race. 68. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 24–25. 69. For a version of this dilemma that focuses on a divided will over drinking water, see Plato, Republic, 437b–439e. Imagine that you want to drink water, but at the same time you don’t want to drink water. Maybe you are extremely thirsty and you find a bottle of water, but there is a note on it saying it is poisoned. The thirsty part of you—the part that simply desires the satisfaction of thirst— wants to drink the water. But the part of you that knows drinking poisoned water is a bad idea—the part that calculates and understands—wants not to drink that water. The fact that we can want and not want something at the same time indicates that our soul has at least two parts that can disagree with one another. 70. In Plato’s Republic, the character Socrates tells the story of a man named Leontius who knew of some corpses on the road near the city wall, and eventually he couldn’t help his morbid curiosity, so he went to see the bodies, and when doing so, he yelled at his own eyes to get their fill, calling them “damned wretches” (439e). There was some angry, spirited part of him that overpowered his better judgment when he ran to look, and after he did, the same part overpowered him with regret. In short, it seems like there was a third part of the soul—the spirited part—that motivated him, that was the deciding force in choosing and acting. 71. Not all tripartite accounts of human nature are made equal. A word is in order regarding Freud’s threefold description of the human psyche as id, ego, and superego, because the Star Trek universe’s depiction of emotions actually has much in common with the Freudian account. Freud’s account is a direct inversion of the Tao’s account. For Freud, human beings start life as unbridled id, a throng of desires. But unless a person has the Thasian power of transmuting matter at will—like Charlie Evans— it is unlikely that he will succeed in satisfying all that the id desires. The superego and ego develop as a kind of regulatory system largely out of the tension that arises from the id’s confrontation with the world. Freud’s id, ego, and superego roughly correspond to Lewis’s belly, chest, and head, respectively. In essence, on Freud’s account we are primarily belly, and because of the way that the chest and head arise out of the belly’s quest for satisfaction, his account implies that psychological health is a story of repression and desire-indulgence when all is said and done, as opposed to integrity and harmony in Lewis’s traditional account. For particulars of Freud’s account, see especially his

Civilization and its Discontents. Given the prevalence of Freud’s thought and influence, much of our culture may continue to run with his ideas even while having problems with his picture of the psyche. Perhaps this is because Freud seems to have gotten something right. Perhaps it is because his is the only account of inner conflict and its resolution of which many are aware. It may be that in the absence of familiarity with the Tao, we are drawn to the parts that Freud gets right, and we put up with its problems. On analysis, Lewis helps us see that the problems are Freud’s sole contribution, and the part he got right comes from the tradition. 72. Lewis, Abolition, 19–20. 73. Ibid., 20. 74. Ibid., 21. 75. Shatner, Star Trek V. 76. Ibid., 25.

4 To Seek Out New Virtue Lewis, the Tao, and the Prime Directive by Deanna Smid

with a confession: I love Star Trek. I love watching it (repeatedly) in I begin of all its incarnations, I love thinking about it, and I love writing about it. And what’s not to love? Well, perhaps the Prime Directive and its protocols for first contact. My paper, I hereby confess, is born of my concern and confusion over the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols and their various implications. And some clarity has arrived in the most unlikely of places: the description of the Tao, or Nature, the Way, the Road, Virtue, in the lecture “Men without Chests” in C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Lewis may have died three years before the premiere of Star Trek’s first incarnation, but his description of the nature and location of the Tao—or Virtue—offers nuance to a critique of parts of Star Trek’s most basic political and moral premise, the Prime Directive. Lewis’s Tao, as I will explain, is foundational. By that I mean that the Tao is a moral standard to which our behavior must conform. The Tao determines what state of being or what mode of behavior counts as virtuous; our job, accordingly, is to conform to it. In contrast to the idea of the Tao is the idea that a virtuous mode of behavior is a mode which we simply invent or create, as we invented and created the automobile. The first-contact protocols of the Prime Directive imply a Tao that can and should be created, rather than (as Lewis would have it) simply recognized. Because Star Trek’s virtue is inventible rather than foundational, first-contact protocols become both inconsistent and paradoxical. Its two major (albeit implicit) tenets, that technological advancement implies moral growth, and that such advancement is normal and inevitable, are called into question particularly by two movies: First Contact and Insurrection. The slipperiness of the Prime Directive and its Tao then has unsettling implications for self- and community-identity. For according to Lewis in The

Abolition of Man, creating the Tao is impossible, so, as I will posit, Star Trek’s attempts to do just that are doomed to fail. In what follows I will first introduce the world of Star Trek and the problem of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols; then I will contrast Star Trek’s idea of the Tao with Lewis’s view. Then I will explain how Star Trek’s problematic idea of the Tao leads it into trouble in the films First Contact and Insurrection, and, finally, I will explain how this trouble is responsible for problems other critics have observed in the Star Trek universe.

Star Trek and the Prime Directive Star Trek, comprised of five television series (or six including Star Trek: The Animated Series) and twelve full-length movies, as well as many novels and comic books, has been a cultural phenomenon since the first airing of the original Star Trek in 1966. Star Trek exports contemporary political, social, and cultural issues and places them on other planets, in alien cultures. Such an exportation is hardly new, of course: Shakespeare set his plays in Italy, Denmark, and Sicily, and Star Trek likewise sets its stories on Vulcan, Kronos, and in the Delta Quadrant. In a new space, with strange characters (although not so strange once we get to know them), we can gain new perspectives on current issues. Star Trek also invites us to speculate on our future. And what a future it is! The Star Trek narrative describes Earth free of war, famine, and money-based economics, in the twenty-third and twentyfourth centuries. Earth is at the core of the United Federation of Planets, an intergalactic organization of planets at peace with one another, and seeking concord with all other inhabitants of space. The Federation builds and deploys a large number of technologically advanced starships, which comprise Starfleet. While officially the peacekeeping corps of the Federation, Starfleet’s mandate is also to explore the universe, gathering knowledge of space and all it contains. By creating, tracing, and testing Starfleet and the Federation, Star Trek allows us to consider what humans could and should become, and to try to understand the consequences of our present decisions and actions. The goals Star Trek presents are undeniably laudable, leading critics such as Judith Barad to exhort: “[O]nly with greater ethical awareness and compassion can we bring Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future closer

to reality.”77 One of the most hopeful aspects of Star Trek is its concern with a central and pressing question: How can those in power explore without exploiting? Can Star Trek avoid a repetition of the colonization practiced on Earth in our past and present? Michèle and Duncan Barrett, in Star Trek: The Human Frontier, identify that very question as an anxiety “fully recognized within the Star Trek narrative.”78 The anxiety is addressed by Starfleet General Order 1, better known as the Prime Directive, which protects races and cultures from being colonized, and which prevents Starfleet captains from acting on the urge to make other races as “advanced” as is Earth’s culture. The Prime Directive is a large and comprehensive document only alluded to in Star Trek films and episodes, but it has been summarized, in more or less detail, by fans and critics of the show. One brief and reputable definition states that “[The Prime Directive] mandates that Starfleet personnel and spacecraft are prohibited from interfering in the normal development of any society, and that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.”79 Jean-Luc Picard, in Star Trek: Insurrection, offers this definition: “Our people have a strict policy of non-interference in other cultures. It’s our Prime Directive.”80 Giving any indication to the “normally developing” society that aliens more technologically advanced than they inhabit the rest of space constitutes “interference,” and captains must allow themselves and their crew to die before allowing such interference. The rule, which often occupies the attention of Star Trek critics,81 shields cultures from assimilation and appropriation by the powerful. So far, my description of Star Trek should sound boring. Peaceful exploration? Dull. Political and financial stability? Yawn. And so in almost every episode, film, and novel, peace is threatened by war. The barter system is destabilized by capitalism. Racial and gender equality is under attack by bigotry and xenophobia. The explosions, fist-fights, court dramas, and political conundrums add excitement, suspense, and thrills to space exploration, of course. Even the Prime Directive, as tedious as it sounds, contributes moments of contention and danger to the Star Trek franchise. Every captain starring in the series and

films, at one point, has to choose to uphold or reject the Prime Directive’s first contact principles. James T. Kirk breaks the Prime Directive with flamboyant regularity, while Jean-Luc Picard and Katherine Janeway more carefully tow the Prime Directive line.82 But every captain debates the merits and necessity of the Directive, especially when an individual or entire planet has to die to maintain its strict rigor. Even in the recent film, Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk must decide whether or not to reveal the presence of the Enterprise to a group of “primitive” natives in order to save Spock from a fiery death. Remarkably, every captain has violated the Prime Directive’s principles at least once on compassionate—and even moral—grounds. Pragmatically, what other choice remains for the writers of Star Trek? The Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols are, essentially, boring. Every time the Enterprise encounters a primitive culture, it would have to leave immediately, making the episode or film short indeed. Also, if the crew never makes contact with primitive cultures, the audience has no chance to view humans as superior, benevolent explorers. Moreover, if the Enterprise studiously avoided all primitive cultures, they would meet only aliens with technology similar to or greater than their own, which would call into doubt the might of the Federation and Starfleet. Star Trek rarely questions the power of the Federation of Planets; instead, it seeks to make space, exploration, and human superiority safe and comfortable. The writers of Star Trek, in all of its manifestations, seem to realize that the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols have the potential to make its adherents cold and heartless in cases of emergency. Should Kirk abandon Spock just to uphold the Directive? Should Picard allow an entire planet’s inhabitants to be destroyed by its own dissipating atmosphere, just to uphold the Directive?83 Star Trek remains blind, however, to the larger moral problem of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols: its underlying assumption that a race is only morally and intellectually mature when it is technologically so. For the Federation defines a developing culture as one that has not yet invented warp drive, the ability to travel through space faster than the speed of light.84 The Next Generation episode “First Contact” presents this official Starfleet protocol.85 The same episode vividly portrays Star Trek’s

conflation of moral and technological advancement (or lack thereof) in a society: the Arkonian planet’s moral and technological backwardness are linked, and Arkonian society will have to develop in both spheres if it is to develop in either. This conflation is depicted in more detail in the feature film Star Trek: First Contact. When the Enterprise follows a Borg ship back in time to an Earth which has not yet developed warp technology, the crew is barred by the Prime Directive from interfering in Earth’s society. Although they are also prevented from interfering for fears they will disrupt Earth’s historical timeline, their non-interference is also clearly necessitated by Earth’s limited technology. Deanna Troi, for example, twice refers to Earth’s society as “primitive,” in part because they do not yet have the capacity to travel at warp speed.86 Similarly, the Vulcans, who have a non-interference policy on which Starfleet’s Prime Directive is based, will not descend to earth while its inhabitants are still primitive; i.e., while they still do not have warp drive capability.87 The crew of the Enterprise cannot make contact with their “primitive” ancestors because any interference would be a sort of colonization, and the crew would become objects of imitation or adulation. Such idolatry occurs in Star Trek Into Darkness, for instance, when the primitive race that sees the Enterprise rise out of the ocean immediately begins to worship an image of the ship.88 Such imitation and idolatry is, of course, repugnant to Star Trek and its viewers, and thus the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols are in place to ensure that “primitive” nations will develop naturally. That natural development, however, is most often assumed to advance upon technological lines. All cultures, movies such as First Contact uncritically posit, will eventually value technology above all other facets of society, and will develop warp drive as the pinnacle of civilization. Or to be more precise: warp drive is the technological marker that a civilization has developed accompanying philosophical and moral maturity and self-sufficiency. As Captain Picard explains in First Contact, “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”89 In the movie, the crew reveals their presence to Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of Earth’s first functioning warp drive, and they both urge him (and help him) to complete his project. Knowing that the first warp flight is historically necessary in order for the nearby Vulcans to

take note of and visit Earth, three crew members instill in Cochrane the necessity of warp flight and first contact with the Vulcans: Riker: It’s one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor. You get to make first contact with an alien race. And after you do, everything begins to change. LaForge: Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built, and mankind to start exploring the galaxy. Troi: It unites humanity in a way that no one thought possible when they realize they’re not alone in the universe. Poverty, disease, war— they’ll all be gone in the next fifty years.90 The conversation between Cochrane and the crew creates a clear order: first warp drive technology, then first contact, then exploration, then the good life. Later in the film, when Cochrane (a white man) and Lily (a black woman) hold hands, it is clear that the good life is also the moral life: racial prejudice is erased. The Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols neither measure a society according to moral measures, nor according to solely amoral or technological measures. Instead, the protocols assume that the good life—what Lewis would call the Tao—can be reached through, or as a consequence of, technological advancement. To put this in Abolition’s terms: Star Trek postulates that when, and after, a civilization has achieved advanced technology, they have also found—and can continue to refine— virtue, or as C. S. Lewis names it, the Tao.

Tao and Religion Lewis’s description of the Tao, or virtue, can help audiences and critics define the emptiness and vapidity of the Prime Directive. The Tao is “the doctrine of objective value,”91 which Lewis explains in one example as “that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple.”92 Lewis traces the Tao through the writings and beliefs of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, early Hinduism, and the ancient Chinese and Jews.93 The Tao, the order and virtue inherent in the universe and thereby objectively applicable to all

humans, is foundational. According to Lewis, and vital to my argument about the Prime Directive, the Tao cannot be created; rather, it can only be understood and followed. The Tao, as Lewis defines it, is often (although not necessarily) tied to religion. On a cursory inspection, then, Star Trek seems to have rejected the Tao, for the franchise has, in part at least, rejected religion.94 Primitive races, as Star Trek Into Darkness illustrates, are usually deeply religious. Indeed, one of the generalized virtues of the human race (although not of “other” races such as the Klingon) in the future, as Star Trek imagines it, is its rejection of religion. Yet Star Trek cannot fully abandon religion, although it operates in a limited fashion in the shows and films. Jeffrey Lamp, in his essay on Star Trek and the Bible, convincingly argues that “The Federation’s secularism remains the dominant paradigm of the Star Trek universe, while specific cultures within or in contact with the Federation are permitted their views of reality, as long as those views do not infringe on the social order maintained by the secular/materialistic worldview of the Federation.”95 Just as Lewis credits his contemporaries with “some vague notion” of “valour and good faith and justice,”96 so the writers of Star Trek must retain a similar notion of or desire for virtue. Indeed, the three major races in the Star Trek universe—Humans, Vulcans, and Klingons—correspond remarkably well with Lewis’s description of the chest, head, and belly (a theme Lewis Pearson explores in an earlier chapter in this collection of essays). In like manner, Star Trek does not completely negate the Tao, although it tries to curtail much of religion in the future. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Star Trek’s more serious problem with the Tao is a bit more subtle but no less serious. Star Trek upholds virtue, order, and morality: the Tao. Yet in opposition to Lewis’s definition, the Tao in Star Trek is not foundational, basic, and shared by all races. Instead, virtue and the good life are something to be gained, reached, acquired, alongside technology. Contrary to Lewis, Star Trek posits that the good life is not something to which we respond; rather, it is something we create. One might argue that Star Trek’s Enlightenment-inspired belief that all sentient beings have the right to self-determination is itself a form of the Tao. Even if this is correct, Star Trek is strongly committed to a belief, seen by viewers in movies such as First Contact and Insurrection, in what we can call

“the good life,” brought about by technological advancement. And the good life is that which the Tao describes. So Star Trek has a commitment to a Tao achieved by technology, even if there is another sort of Tao consistent with the Prime Directive. In the rest of this essay, I shall argue that the virtue or Tao gained with or through technology—and even through social justice—is problematic in Star Trek. Even if perhaps inadvertently, Star Trek allows audiences and critics to analyze the implications (to racial- and self-identity in particular) of a created, rather than an understood, virtue. Among those implications are the shifting of an entire civilization from primitivity to enlightenment in a matter of hours, the equality of a noble and a corrupt culture, and the very humanbased species-centrism that Star Trek is so opposed to.

Tao and Cultural Development In their efforts to create the Tao rather than to understand it, Star Trek, particularly in First Contact and the following movie, Insurrection, makes a number of internally inconsistent claims. In practice, the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols assert (1) that cultural maturity—a sort of created Tao —should be measured by technology, which will be accompanied by virtue. As I have demonstrated, such first-contact protocols (2) both defend and assume that such technological advancement is natural, normal, and perhaps even inevitable. Yet the two movies, both predicated upon the two major, practical tenets of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, reveal flaws in both. Of course, I am not the first to point out some of the moral, logical, and social problems of the Prime Directive and its first-contact protocols. As Iver Neumann argues, the Federation considers Earth’s development towards technology (and, I argue, the Tao) “normal” or “natural” and assumes that all cultures will develop in the same way.97 Indeed, the Prime Directive operates on the assumption that all people are the same, or at least will become so. The Federation does not force unity on other cultures because unity is just a matter of time, for all races, it argues, will eventually value and develop science and technology, and with them, virtue. Other critics likewise recognize other problems with the Prime Directive. Kent Ono summarizes and critiques the Directive’s valuation of technology: “The text maintains a

faith in technological progress—a belief that through the use of more advanced technological equipment, Federation (read: U. S.) society stays on a linear path toward ultimate perfection. Greater technological proficiency, which humans always attain and the Federation always possesses, will resolve contemporary and future social and political problems.”98 Geoffrey Whitehall calls Star Trek’s assumptions “galactic “Each alien world is judged against its ability technology. Thus all species are set in relation to a being—galactic humanity.”99 Others, such as

humanity.” He writes, to attain warp speed universal conception of

Matthew Kapell, join Whitehall in their recognition of the leveling nature of Star Trek: while it officially values difference, individuality, and autonomy, in practice it troublingly assumes that all races and cultures will attain a hegemony composed of technology, virtue, and curiosity.100 Yet while I agree with such critics who find the link between advanced technology and virtue problematic in Star Trek, I locate the source of the problem specifically in the Tao, or lack thereof, in the franchise. In First Contact, one of the very tenets of the Prime Directive—the maturity necessary to meet other races—becomes the very reason for the Enterprise crew to break the Prime Directive. According to the underlying philosophy of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, after Cochrane performs warp flight, humans are mature enough to meet another culture without being assimilated by it. Why then do the crewmembers of the Enterprise call human society “primitive” just hours before Cochrane climbs into his ship and travels into space? The crew calls humans “primitive” only days and hours before Cochrane’s warp flight, a flight that suddenly means that all of human society is somehow mature enough to meet the Vulcans and become virtuous rather than assimilated. An entire planet moves from primitive to mature in a matter of hours. Warp drive and its accompanying virtue, moreover, are not natural human progressions, either; rather, they are provided by Starfleet officers from the future. Human development, then, both technologically and virtuously, does not seem as “natural” as Star Trek makes it out to be. And thus, while First Contact celebrates the Prime Directive, its plot calls into question the second element of the Directive, for neither technological nor moral “progress” is natural, normal, or inevitable. The inconsistencies inherent in the Prime Directive continue in

Insurrection. While in First Contact, the Enterprise crew breaks the Prime Directive to save Earth, in Insurrection, Captain Picard and his crew do everything they can to uphold the Prime Directive against the machinations of Picard’s superiors in the Federation. The Federation looks ugly in the film: in contrast to the agrarian, even Edenic society of the Ba’ku, the Federation outpost on the planet is cold, sterile, and menacing as it spies on the simple and unassuming Ba’ku people. In his endeavor to save the Ba’ku’s planet from Federation annihilation, Picard again breaks the Prime Directive when he inadvertently reveals the existence of the Enterprise to the Ba’ku. But, surprise, he has not broken the Directive after all. For the Ba’ku have space travel technology, but they choose not to use it. When Picard asks, “You have warp capability?” the Ba’ku respond, “Capability, yes. But where can warp drive take us, except away from here?”101 The virtuous Ba’ku’s response is quite different than the formula Riker, Troi, and LaForge had laid out for Cochrane in First Contact. In their estimation, warp drive leads to exploration, which leads to virtue. One Ba’ku man explains, “We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something from the man.”102 When Picard discovers that the Ba’ku have warp technology, he does not question his assumption that warp technology is the acme of civilization. Instead, he is simply relieved that his accidental interference in the Ba’ku culture does not violate the Prime Directive. He explains to Admiral Dougherty, “Because they have warp capabilities, the consequences to their society are minimal.”103 The Ba’ku’s rejection of technology does not challenge his belief that cultures aspire to achieve such technology, and with that technology, are curious about the rest of the universe.104 If anything, the film simply emphasizes that the Ba’ku have achieved the Tao because they have reached the ability to create advanced technology. Yet the Federation, with its similarly advanced technology, is not as virtuous as the Ba’ku. So here again, the philosophy of the Prime Directive is undone: advanced technology and virtue, even amongst humans, do not necessarily accompany each other. Perhaps the unwavering adherence to the troublesome Prime Directive in Insurrection was one of the reasons for its box office failure (at least in comparison to other films such as First Contact). For the movie tears down the first element

of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, as Insurrection demonstrates that virtue is not necessarily predicated upon technology.

Tao and Identity Both First Contact and Insurrection reveal the flawed nature of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, but the science fiction franchise does more. When Lewis’s Tao is a human fabrication rather than a foundational reality, and the Tao is predicated on technological advancement, the humans and other races in the shows and films evince a loss of identity and contentment. For Star Trek’s idea of the Tao neither allows diverse people simply to be what they are, nor to become what a foundational Tao would require them to be, but to conform to the Tao of technological humanity. To analyze the implications of such a misappropriation of the Tao, I will briefly turn from Lewis to social theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, who analyze the nature, possibilities, and significances of self- and racial identity. In First Contact, the crew must paradoxically break the Prime Directive in order to uphold it, which means that they are making “primitive” humanity into their image, thereby erasing difference. Riker, LaForge, and Troi all defend their criminal behavior by touting the advantages of first contact, advantages that a theoretician such as Gilroy espouses. Meeting another race compels the humans in the film to form a new and united identity for themselves, in opposition to the “Other,” the Vulcans and other races humans soon encounter. Humans cease to compare themselves to other races on Earth; rather, they now compare themselves to other races in the universe. People no longer identify themselves according to national boundaries, but according to planetary boundaries. In Star Trek, therefore, people have achieved what Gilroy calls “planetary humanism.”105 In his book, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Gilroy analyzes (amongst other things) futuristic films and television shows like Star Trek, and he closes his book with this exhortation: These films seek to celebrate how the desire to retain those outmoded principles of differentiation recedes when it confronts more substantive varieties of otherness and forms of life that are

truly other-worldly. . . . Our challenge should be to bring even more powerful visions of planetary humanity from the future into the present and to reconnect them with democratic and cosmopolitan traditions that have been all but expunged from today’s black political imaginary.106 Gilroy argues that in science fiction movies, the otherness of different races on Earth is overshadowed by the otherness of races from other planets. Our present world can only be united if we live, as it were, as if we are not alone in the universe, and we consider other humans, not as “others,” but as fellow humans united in the presence of extraterrestrial “others.” First Contact depicts just such a new, planetary identity formation. When the Vulcan ship lands in Montana, all of the humans in the scattered settlement appear together, for the first time in the film, to stare at the aliens. When the Vulcans step out of the ship, Cochrane, a white man, grasps the hand of Lily, a black woman. Their otherness fades away in the presence of the alien “other,” and humans form a new identity for themselves, one of virtue, cohesion, and the Tao. Star Trek touts its planetary humanism as a necessary progression in the maturity and cohesion of human society. Humans in Star Trek, however, lose the distinctive culture, religion, and practices that make them distinct from one another. They even become more like the new races they encounter: the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, for example, are themselves borrowed from the Vulcans. Human identity (which has attained the Tao) in Star Trek, while attractive to Gilroy, is troublingly homogenous. While Star Trek’s human contingent is represented by both white Europeans and people of other races, most humans in the show and films wear a uniform, both the uniform of Starfleet personnel, and the uniform of being “human” rather than “European,” “black,” or “Canadian,” for example. Such uniformity of humanity is what Boyarin and Boyarin call “universalism,” the idea that all people are essentially the same, and differences should be ignored or erased.107 For them, the erasure of difference is not a unifying or positive force, as Star Trek imagines, but rather a painful process of loss. They suggest instead “a theory and practice of identity that would simultaneously respect the irreducibility and the positive value of cultural differences,

address the harmfulness, not of abolishing frontiers but of dissolution of uniqueness, and encourage the mutual fructification of different life-styles and traditions.”108 Star Trek, particularly through the Prime Directive and its misunderstanding of the Tao, generally does not practice Boyarin’s and Boyarin’s kind of identity formation, and its society, rather than being utopian, is engaged in a desperate search for the “texture” and differentiation it lost after forming a planetary humanism.109 After humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans and the de-texturing of the human race, humans travel the universe in search of themselves. Critic Naeem Inayatullah, analyzing why travel and exploration are the foci of Star Trek, suggests that audiences “engage in a process through which we learn how encountering others’ differences can catalyze an awareness of our own hidden otherness, thereby making it possible to heal and become whole.”110 The humans in Star Trek have to heal because, while they gained peace and prosperity after first contact, they lost differentiation. Now, the humans spread throughout space search for their lost distinctiveness in the “human” characteristics of the aliens they encounter. The writers of Star Trek consciously make the Star Trek aliens conspicuously display a specific human trait. As a writer for Star Trek Monthly comments, “There’s a distinct technique for coming up with a villainous race for Star Trek. What you do is emphasize a Human trait or quirk at the expense of all the rest, blow it up out of all proportion and keep playing off it.”111 The aliens they encounter remind humans of the texture and distinctiveness humans lost when they established a planetary humanism and set out to explore the galaxy. Yet meeting other races does not allow humans to recover their lost texture; instead, alien races become more like humans. As Barrett and Barrett neatly posit, In Star Trek, we see a great deal of “humanization,” which raises the question of how benign it is. Captain Kirk famously used the expression “everybody’s human,” by which he really meant that everybody he liked was human. . . . [I]n Star Trek, the issue is to “humanize” as many people as possible. Kirk’s insistence at the funeral of his half-Vulcan friend Spock that “of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human” is

merely the first of a long line of invitations to alien species to define themselves within the human family.112 Or as Michael Pinsky baldly states, “Over the thirty-plus years of Star Trek, hundreds of alien races have been encountered, most of whom turn out pretty much indistinguishable from humans.”113 If the humans of Starfleet are looking for a textured identity, they do not and will not find it in the alien races they encounter, for Star Trek levels difference, making everyone similarly, and blandly, human. Moreover, while humans are trying to recover their lost differentiation, the problems that had existed on Earth are transplanted into the rest of the universe. Attaining virtue—or the Tao—has not made humans or aliens uniformly virtuous. Humans are no longer racist towards each other, but they are racist towards other aliens, despising the Klingons and misunderstanding the Romulans, for example. The problems of war, racism, and mistrust may have disappeared from Earth, but they are still very apparent in the rest of the universe. The planetary humanism that replaced Earth’s earlier unrest brings its own problems, causing increased restlessness in humans who have lost their textured society. Of course, as First Contact emphasizes, at least the Federation has not fallen to the level of the Borg, the chilling antithesis of the Federation’s anticolonial agenda. The Borg are a group of alien drones who are connected to a hive mind and who travel through space attacking and assimilating any intelligent being they encounter. They assimilate people by physically converting the body into a Borg drone, a mixture of organic and synthetic components, and connecting his or her mind into the collective consciousness of the Borg.114 The Borg proclaim at the beginning of First Contact: “We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”115 The Borg are extreme colonizers, physically assimilating the biology, technology, and culture of every being they meet, erasing individuality in the universe. They are the Federation’s most potent enemy, not only because the Borg have superior technology, force, and ruthlessness, but also because they challenge one of the most fundamental principles of the Federation, the principle of

individuality and autonomy.116 Officially, the Federation values, above all else, selfhood and difference. I write “officially,” because while Star Trek appears to value individuality, the Prime Directive actually implies the opposite in practice: all cultures will develop technologically (and therefore philosophically and morally) along similar lines. Indeed, the Borg Queen mimics Picard’s assertion in First Contact when she states, “We too are on a quest to better ourselves, evolving toward a state of perfection.”117 In fact, this entire paragraph has been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for how different in this regard are the Borg and the Federation, really? Have the humans in Star Trek not also lost their individuality because they have sought to invent the Tao rather than to understand it? Star Trek’s Prime Directive and its first-contact protocols seek to solve the problems of the colonizing urge of the powerful. It laudably attempts to stop explorers from becoming exploiters by appropriating the voices of primitive cultures and assimilating them, as the Borg do. The assumptions of the Prime Directive and its definitions of “primitive” and “developed,” however, are faulty and paradoxical. The new identity humans in Star Trek form for themselves, while promoting peace between humans, also evokes loss and a search for texture and distinctiveness. At the same time, Star Trek continues to uphold the Federation and Starfleet as the social order to which every culture aspires.118 While the Prime Directive strips imperialism from exploration, it does so only by troublingly searching for virtue rather than operating by virtue. Such a misplacement of Lewis’s Tao inspires Star Trek’s paradoxical search for difference while believing that difference will (and should) eventually fade away. The Prime Directive is an example of a progressive step that is actually a disconcerting reversal. While movies such as First Contact and Insurrection attempt to justify the value of the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols, they also highlight all that the Prime Directive has misunderstood and erased. Star Trek in this regard represents an atrophy of the chest such as Lewis described, a love of technology rather than virtue.

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77. Barad and Robertson, Ethics, xvi. 78. Barrett and Barrett, The Human Frontier, 55. 79. Okuda, Okuda, and Mirek, Star Trek Encyclopedia, 261. 80. Frakes, Star Trek: Insurrection. 81. See, for instance, generally positive reviews of the Prime Directive in Macdonald, “Prime Directives,” esp. 232–33; Buzan, “America in Space,” 176–77; Neumann, “Grab a Phaser,” 623–24; and Peltz-Steele, “On a Wagon Train,” 635–64. In contrast, Goulding calls the Prime Directive and the American non-interference policy on which it is based “shams.” Goulding, Empire, 36. Weldes’s analysis of the Prime Directive in “Going Cultural” is particularly nuanced, especially in 127–31. 82. See, for example, Wilcox, “To Boldly Return,” 93–94, and Geraghty, “Creating and Comparing,” 196. 83. Abrams, Star Trek Into Darkness; Singer, “Homeward.” 84. Whitehall, “The Problem,” 177. 85. Bole, “First Contact.” 86. Frakes, First Contact. 87. Ibid. Other examples of Star Trek naming pre-warp drive societies “primitive” include Bole, “First Contact;” Wiemer, “Who Watches the Watchers;” and “Senensky, “Bread and Circuses.” Of course, the Prime Directive does not apply only to pre-warp societies. Starfleet officially forbids its members to interfere in any culture (see, for instance, Burton, “Cogenitor,” and Landau, “Half a Life,” in which Picard will not halt the practice of ritual suicide among the warp-capable Kaelons). For the purposes of this essay, however, I am focusing only on the Prime Directive’s rules for first contact with a pre-warp society. 88. A similar idolatry occurs in Wiemer, “Who Watches the Watchers.”

89. First Contact. See also Cover, “Generating the Self,” 209–14. 90. Ibid. 91. Lewis, Abolition, 29. 92. Ibid., 27. 93. Ibid., 26–28. 94. Buzan, “America in Space,” 177. Yet the amount, nature, and character of religion in Star Trek is a debated matter, albeit beyond the scope of this essay. For a sustained argument outlining the compatibility of Star Trek and Christianity, see: Neece, The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Original Crew and forthcoming subsequent volumes. 95. Lamp, “Biblical Interpretation,” 200. 96. Lewis, Abolition, 33. 97. Neumann, “To Know Him,” 45. 98. Ono, “Domesticating Terrorism,” 159. 99. Whitehall, “The Problem,” 177. 100. Kapell, “Speakers for the Dead,” 70. 101. Frakes, Star Trek: Insurrection. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Nor does Picard respond to the assertion that technology robs humanity of something essential. Audiences could take the Ba’ku statement literally and wonder about the role of Data, a machine in the form of a man. Has he taken something from “man”? Neither Picard nor the film consider such questions. 105. Gilroy, Against Race, 2. 106. Ibid., 356. 107. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 98. 108. Ibid., 101. 109. I borrow the word “texture” from Donald Akenson, who argues that diasporas (and surely the humans in Star Trek are diasporic), while they may be viewed as a single cultural group, are often composed of “multiple cultural identities.” Akenson, “Historiography,” 395. 110. Inayatullah, “Bumpy Space,” 59. 111. Star Trek Monthly, 17; quoted in Barrett and Barrett, The Human Frontier, 81. 112. Ibid., 62. 113. Pinsky, Future Present, 109. 114. Okuda, Okuda, and Mirek, Star Trek Encyclopedia, 33. 115. Frakes, First Contact. 116. Jackson and Nexon, “Resistance,” 153.

117. Frakes, First Contact. 118. See Neumann, “To Know Him,” 45.

5 Between the Good and the Evil Samaritan Person of Interest in Light of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man by Artur Skweres

apid technological advancement and unwavering belief in the capacities of science and technology to improve the lives of human beings have, quite unexpectedly, caused science fiction to come to the mainstream but also caused its decline in the twenty-first century. Science fiction authors can hardly keep up with the technological progress and the sociological changes it engenders in real life. A sign of the times is that one of the key writers of science fiction, William Gibson, turned away from this genre in favor of more realistic fiction. When, in an interview, he was asked about the reason for that he replied “Personally I think that contemporary reality is sufficiently science fiction for me. Some critics are already maintaining that science fiction is a sort of historical category and it is not possible any more.”119

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Another science fiction classic, Arthur C. Clarke, famously stated that sufficiently advanced technology will for all intents and purposes resemble magic.120 When one considers these two statements, one cannot help but think that we are living in such a magical age—a time when technology is an ever more invisible but powerful force, influencing our lives much more than we are willing to admit. Developed as a tool for the conquering of our unpredictable environment, technology itself seems to be ever more unpredictable—to the point that science fiction writers, whose job has been to speculate about science and its influence on human life, have found that the present changes too quickly to accommodate for the future developments. A reason for this may be the fact that technology does not really concentrate on conquering the reality external to humans any more. Instead, it focuses on conquering the inside of human beings, trying to satisfy their desires while

eliminating the need for unwanted external stimuli and consequently increasing their dependence on electronic gimmickry. Despite the convenience that technology enables, especially in all fields related to communication, it undeniably comes at a cost. In permitting our tools to come so close into our personal space, we have allowed technology, spearheaded by smart phones, personal computers, or public surveillance cameras, almost unlimited access to our personal data. This chapter will consider how Person of Interest expresses a fear that technology can lead to a fully controlled and conditioned society. Crucially, such changes will be demonstrated to be brought about by well-meaning individuals, perceiving themselves as Good Samaritans, but anticipated and referred to by C. S. Lewis as Conditioners. The first section will demonstrate the desire of the makers of the series to present a cautionary tale, commenting on contemporary America with limited science fiction elements. The focus on surveillance and the growing tendency to infringe on the privacy of the individual will be juxtaposed with the threat of using the personal data by allseeing strong AIs. The second section will explore the notion of the latter as either Good or Evil Samaritans, driven by the desire to help but also condition the human society. Their work is to replace individual moral perception and responsibility with unfeeling technological precision—to replace the internal moral “chest” of which Lewis wrote with an external locus of technological control. The methods and intentions of the Conditioners will make it hard to distinguish between the positive and negative agents, as the third and fourth sections will show. Finally, the chapter will discuss how in the series the use of surveillance technology and AI programs results in the creation of a Panopticon in which anyone is under suspicion and, whether they want it or not, may be deemed not only in need of help but also in dire need of amending.

From Good Intentions to Conditioning The action series Person of Interest (2011–16), spanning five seasons at present, confidently tackles the problems of the loss of privacy and humanity in the search to enable the best of possible futures for humanity through the use of technology. The series concentrates on a group of vigilantes (initially only a pair—Harold Finch and John Reese) who use data supplied to them by

an AI, the Machine, to stop imminent crimes. Despite the premise of the existence of a supremely intelligent computer system, repeatedly referred to as a “god,” the series’ creators have endeavored to make the scenario realistic, showing that the audience can be impressed by the use of the currently available technology: “[W]e tried to keep as much of the tech of the show as grounded and real as possible, showing that with a little bit of time and just a little bit of money at your average Best Buy you can pick up [devices], download a few programs online, sadly you can get almost unlimited access to someone’s personal life.”121 The premise of creating a system which can analyze and effectively use all the big data amassed by American and foreign security agencies remains within the field of speculative fiction. Many transitions between scenes involve the use of footage resembling images from CCTV, and the creators acknowledged that some of the shots of the cityscape they used in the series come from actual government surveillance. The creators admit that when they “initially started to talk about this concept . . . it felt like science fiction to a degree, and then the more material we started devouring about the subject it became pretty apparent that this not only could be plausible but actually probably already is in existence.”122 Despite the warning signals about the disappearance of personal freedoms, Person of Interest is not only insightful on the subject of future crime detection. It offers a glimpse into a society which is well on its way to what Lewis referred to as the “abolition of man.” The theme of the series is so well-engrained in its plot and in the presentation of every episode that it can be observed from the very first scenes of the pilot. The episode starts by introducing the hero of the series, John Reese. Bottle in hand, slouching, unshaven, he seems an easy prey for a group of young hoodlums on the subway. Spoiling for a fight, they are defeated—completely surprised by the speed and efficiency with which they are beaten by the vagrant. The scene, finished by a shot filmed through one of the omnipresent CCTV cameras, reveals some of the major premises of the series. Firstly, it shows the sense of insecurity in society despite the number of security cameras and a police force which neither serves nor protects, as the first season is related to the problem of “dirty cops” in the NYPD. Hence, one can conclude that the society is hostile towards the weak and in need of reform. Moreover, Reese acts like a secret agent—initially, he seems to be a

vulnerable, weak person but turns out to be hiding the identity of a highly skilled agent, for whom violence is native. Finally, the scene constitutes a revision of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.123 In the biblical parable, a traveler who is attacked by bandits is left without help by a priest and a Levite who pass him by. It is only in the Samaritan, despite the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans, that he finds his salvation and subsequent care. This scene can be seen as an early and distant allusion to the problem of helping a “fellow traveler”—of disinterested help and protection of an unknown person. In the discussed scene, help does not seem necessary. Reese acts on instinct and easily defeats the opponents who were counting on easy prey. However, it is later revealed that he is offered help. Once he is approached by Harold Finch he is not only clothed and made decent, but also given a job and a purpose in life. From that moment onwards, his goal is to act like a good Samaritan himself—to help people who are in need, although often they neither ask for his protection nor deem it necessary. The allusion to the Parable of the Good Samaritan features distinctly in the series due to the sudden emergence of another AI, rivalling the Machine, which is named . . . Samaritan. Unlike the Machine, Samaritan does not have inbuilt restrictions which would require it to protect lives of individuals. Quite to the contrary, it liberally removes the individuals it deems undesirable in its vision of society, errors in the envisaged perfect equation which need to be corrected. Although its purpose is to prevent acts of terror, and provision of “pure, unfettered information” for the government, its operator gives it full reign over the people of New York as soon as it is fully operational. Unaware of its existence, the society directed by such a strong AI creates people who would conform to the roles given them by the predictive programming. In the case of Samaritan the conditioning is effectuated not only through violence, but also through manipulation of criminal activity, the stock market, political elections, or even the levels of anxiety through advice given by electronic personal assistants (leading to suicide).124 The AI is shown to build an experimental city or an elementary school for the purpose of creating the perfect society. Especially the latter can be seen as anticipated by C. S. Lewis in the opening sentence of The Abolition of Man: “I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books.” In Person of Interest the stress on the education and use of the young by Samaritan is

also expressed by the selection of a ten-year-old boy, Gabriel Hayward, as its “analogue” avatar.125

The Conditioners as Good and Evil Samaritans Apart from the AIs, Person of Interest provides some interesting human examples of the Conditioners described by Lewis in his Abolition of Man. Finch, the creator of the Machine, is a good example of double standards applied by the Conditioners in the series. Immediately, Finch establishes himself as a person beyond the Tao of respect for privacy. “You can call me Mr. Finch” he says to Reese in the pilot, which implies that even this small portion of personal information may or may not be real.126 “Mr. Finch”, as he introduces himself to Reese, likes to know everything about everyone, but does not want to reveal his own name. He protects his privacy with energy and skill, as when he avoids being tailed by Reese, or when he destroys his computer which was being traced by an exceptionally gifted hacker named Root.127 Rejecting all attempts to get closer to another person, he describes himself as “a very private person.” As such, he remains beyond the system of control which he himself built and made to include all information, whether private or public, about all people. The main characters of Person of Interest deny the necessity of forming bonds with other people, often because of their troubled pasts. This is true not only in case of Finch, whose friend and partner in creating the Machine was killed, but also Reese (the love of whose life was killed due to his absence and unwillingness to commit), or Sameen Shaw (who was orphaned early and has a self-diagnosed Axis II Personality Disorder). A particularly striking example is Root, who at first was one of the villains of the show. Having lost her mother early, she suffered another loss as a teenager—her friend was kidnapped and murdered, with silent acceptance of the librarian whom she trusted to act. It should come as little surprise that the young prodigy early lost her faith in humankind. Her response was hate towards it and a desire to come into contact with a higher entity, superior because of its cerebral, planned, conditioned nature: “One day, I realized all the dumb, selfish things people do . . . it’s not our fault. No one designed us. We’re just an accident, Harold. We’re just bad code. But the thing you built. . . . It’s perfect.

Rational. Beautiful. By design.” Similar sentiments are conveyed by Greer in his conversation with Finch in Episode 22, Season 3.128 “The world needs structure” he claims, where the organization would be provided by the Samaritan AI. The organization which initiated the existence of Samaritan, Decima Technologies, desires the society to reflect the logic of a machine, requiring a change of human nature. Their use of disposable agents and deadly force to achieve their aims reveals what such a person would be required to do: Decima agents commit suicide to avoid capture (enticed by the monetary gains for their families). Human life becomes disposable, even though, as Lewis expressed it, the Conditioners “may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity.”129

Conditioners Making the World a Better Place? The motivations of the Conditioners in Person of Interest are frequently positive—like a Good Samaritan they want to help people in need. However, they fail to apply the principles they require of others to themselves. This is very well observable in the suppression of emotions, which allows the characters in Person of Interest to act without regard for moral imperatives, instead following another set of standards. The Conditioners are constantly motivated by “what if”—the looming possibility of changing human fate if proper conditions were met. This is true not only of Greer or Finch. Young, prodigious Claire Mahoney in Episode 2, Season 4 (“Nautilus”) is enticed by Samaritan through a treasure hunt for clues. The girl considers her purpose in life to be the search for reason in life after the sudden, accidental death of her parents. Looking for order in the chaos of reality is how she is recruited. For her the game which involves finding order in a chaotic string of clues spread around the city amounts to bringing order out of the chaos of human existence. Myers argues that Lewis in The Abolition of Man defends emotive language, appealing himself “to emotions, stirring up pity for the schoolboys who are to be turned into soulless automatons.”130 Numerous operators of both AIs, the Machine and the Samaritan, seem to have met the fate of becoming the “men without chests” so feared by Lewis. Many of the heroes of the series are nearly emotionless yet efficient mirrors of the AIs by which

they are led. Yet they do not seem to be aware of the fact that their excessive reliance on the power of the mind to the detriment of emotionality or the Tao is the problem. Instead, they insist that it is the world which needs fixing, especially humans through the use of technology. Such a sentiment is expressed by Root, who becomes impatient with the inability of the human race to become improved through the power granted by the mind and technology: “Amazing. We’ve managed to perfect the apple—a genetically modified version that never goes brown. And yet, we still haven’t upgraded human beings. The human race has stalled out, Harold. And from what I’ve seen, most of it is rotten to the core.”131 A similar sentiment is expressed by Greer, the main antagonist of the third and fourth season of the series, who makes the emergence of the Samaritan possible. His faith in the possibilities of the AI in improving the fate of humanity is limitless: Harold Finch: I think you’re overestimating the power of artificial intelligence. John Greer: We both know that that is impossible. How often alliances shift in times of war. Not that those alliances ever truly exist. They’re an illusion. Like seeing a sunset in a sky of flames. Harold Finch: What is it you expect from Samaritan? John Greer: I want to live under a more just rule. Samaritan will never sleep with its secretary, or embezzle money from its campaign fund. Its decisions will be based on pure logic. Now that’s a leader deserving of our vote—first of all, the stress in the power of the intelligence of the machine, well above human level of both intellect and integrity.132 As Greer argues, it is impossible to overemphasize the cerebral power of technology. As a result, the human should no longer need the other faculty, the Lewisian chest, to provide a moral compass. The technology could even allow them to fix past errors and to prevent future ones from happening, even if it means the sacrifice of what makes human growth possible—the propensity for error.

A Good Samaritan Needs No Introduction?

At this point it should be stressed that the series follows the tradition of vigilante movies. Justice is served by any means necessary, seldom respecting the regulations of the law. As Reese brings justice to evildoers, he does it with the charm and bravado typical of a Hollywood action film: music plays energetically as he violently crashes into criminals’ cars, shoots at them with a handgun or a grenade launcher, or throws them out of the window in a bar fight.133 Also his violence against human privacy is treated matter-offactly, as if it was normal practice and so obvious that it is not even worth worrying about—despite the fact that he crashes into people’s private lives with the same kind of speed and force and lack of consideration as when he causes broadside collisions. When asked about his method of approaching and influencing a target, he answers: “The slow way. Cultivate a relationship . . . to allow you to earn the asset’s trust.” Asked “And the fast way?,” the reply is, “First you break into their home and go through all their stuff. Email, financial records, personal affects . . . bluejacking,134 camera, etc.”135 As Reese speaks off camera, he is shown breaking in, copying data from the “asset’s” laptop, and holding her medication in hand. The capabilities of the Machine and Samaritan are much wider—it can go back in time by analyzing the recordings intercepted and recorded by security agencies. For instance, one of the scenes in the pilot episode shows Reese and his girlfriend’s idyllic day in bed when they first learned about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. The scene is introduced by an international phone call she makes—which, as the creators comment, would be “routinely monitored by the NSA.” Thus it is established that the Machine searches through old audiovisual recordings to construct psychological profiles of people it analyzes. Reese does not ask questions; he either follows orders with the immediacy of a trained soldier, or acts on his own judgment, which is as disrespectful of his opponents’ rights to privacy as it is disrespectful of their rights to a trial. To his defense, however, he follows his own moral code which causes him to avoid killing his opponents. His mercy, however, is heavy-handed. It is a running gag of the show that he incapacitates all evildoers by shooting them in the knees. Knowing the capabilities and methods of security agencies, Reese has little concern for the police force. Also this fact is established in the very first

episode. The scene at the police station subtly portrays the first collision between the police and Reese, still only an anonymous man from the street. It also introduces another staple character of the show, Joss Carter, while showing that both characters, despite wanting to help others, show little regard for privacy. Without Reece’s knowledge, Carter gathers his fingerprints under the guise of offering him a glass of water. This act of kindness is therefore revealed as a ploy to acquire information about him, putting him, despite his heroic bravery, in the same line as the criminals which he singlehandedly apprehended.136 As a result, the police appear ineffective, especially when later compared to the efficiency and precision of the Machine. However, the exactness of the Machine’s predictions comes at a price of what amounts to locking the unaware inhabitants of New York in a state-of-the-art Panopticon.

You Are Being Watched . . . Every Hour of Every Day The series stresses the importance of looks and the way one is perceived. In the first case that Reese and Finch try to resolve, “the number” is a beautiful, young Assistant District Attorney, Diane Hanson. While Finch instructs Reese, he describes her in the following way: “[S]he might be the victim, she could be the perpetrator. All I know is that she is involved. I want you to follow her, figure out what’s gonna happen and stop it from happening.” The viewers are put in the shoes of the jury, undecided whether the woman is the perpetrator of the crime or its victim. Significantly, the innocent-looking attorney turns out to be the guilty party, who gives orders to assassinate a colleague Assistant District Attorney and ex-boyfriend, James Wheeler. Her double-crossing nature seems to strengthen the show’s position of equalizing the amount of suspicion towards innocent people and towards those who plan to break the law. This introduction to the theme of the show impinges on important moral concerns. Firstly, Finch and the Machine put the evildoer and the victim in the same category. Secondly, their solution is to spy on people, violating their rights for privacy as if they were nonexistent or inconsequential, simply because technology has allowed one to break these laws without being noticed. In view of being imperceptible to the justice system, they act as if they were not obliged by its rules, while acting to stop or punish people who

break the laws within the very same justice system of which they willingly refuse to be a part. Their double standards, applicable to others but not to themselves, can also be observed in their attempts to retain their untouchable position by the desperate measures they take to protect their own privacy while never refraining from violating the privacy of others. They do not follow the law; they stand beyond it but want to dictate the law to others and judge others on how well they follow it—either the existent law or the one they formulate according to the moral standards which they refuse to apply to themselves. Thirdly, engaging in surveillance seems to give Finch the conviction that he has the authority—and the moral obligation—to prevent the crime from occurring. Following Philip K. Dick’s short story “Minority Report” (1956) and its blockbuster cinematic adaptation (2002, directed by Steven Spielberg), this practice of predicting a crime and acting upon it as if its happening was a forgone conclusion or a fact upon which one can act to punish the perpetrator, can be referred to as pre-crime. When one considers this line of reasoning, it can come as no surprise that Finch’s description of the first person of interest, Diane Hansen, became the theme of the show, quoted during the opening narration of each episode: We are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. The Government considers these people “irrelevant.” We don’t. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up . . . we’ll find you.137 The quotation discloses numerous premises of the controllers’ philosophy which they find wholly justified. It announces to the public that it is spied on by its government and that each person is in fact a prisoner in a Panopticon. Not only is everyone subject to constant scrutiny, but the reason for it is the suspicion that they may be up to illegal activity. As the audience is informed, no crime is too small—in fact, the controllers have chosen to focus on crimes of “ordinary people,” which to them are just as important as those of terrorists. Even if one could be reassured that the controllers have benign intentions of helping the common people who have no one to turn to for help,

one is swiftly reminded that the controllers themselves stand above the law of the land and possibly above the Tao of morality. Finch openly announces that he or the machine cannot be found or hurt, not even by the authorities, but that they can find anyone as soon as their “number’s up.” The most striking thing in these words, however, is the brazenness with which Finch puts the victim on a par with the villain. When an individual is judged on the events which have not yet occurred, the very fact of being “involved” in any such case makes him or her the object of suspicion, surveillance, and finally judgment. One could reasonably argue that even if such a person is revealed to be a dangerous criminal, if he is punished before he has the chance to commit the crime, he becomes the victim of such a system of justice. The series avoids this kind of moral ambiguity through revealing the criminals in media res, when they are no longer planning, but effectively committing the crimes. However, as can be seen in the example of the machine’s rival AI, Samaritan, acting well before the crime is committed and eliminating criminals before they have a chance to perpetrate it is a possible or even the preferable course of action.138 It should be stressed that the value of names is consistently denied in the series. Names can be changed and can belie a person’s identity, whereas the numbers imply that a person is already numbered, inscribed in the system which manages all people. While a social security number can provide much information about a person, it also stands as symbol for quantifying humans according to the rules imposed by a computer program. The ease with which Finch and his team assume new identities (the latter especially in the fourth season, after the emergence of Samaritan) reveals how easy it is for them to assume whatever identity or social role they choose. With fewer and fewer bonds between people and a ubiquitous reliance on technology to provide these bonds, it is easy to hijack anyone’s identity and do damage. Moreover, to the Machine or the Samaritan people are just numbers—whether they are moral or not is irrelevant since only a set of circumstances defines whether they are found guilty or innocent. However, what is certain is they are unknowingly under trial. People are observed and spied upon, with nothing to protect them from persecution, and with imminent judgment in their case. In one of the episodes, Finch warns Reese not to trust the appearances in a person: “If there is one thing our little venture has proven, Mr. Reese, it’s that

people are rarely what they seem.”139 It appears that in this statement he is doubting the general, objective truth about a person, either because they could be hiding their true identity or because to him the truth is in the eye of the beholder, interpreted differently depending on who is making the judgment call.

Conclusion It would be worthwhile to return again to one of the fathers of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, who formulated Three Laws which could be applied to science and prediction: 1) “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” 2) “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” 3) “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”140 What is visible in Clarke’s statements is the technological optimism, typical of the Western civilization,141 which qualifies all technological advancements in terms of “progress” and benefit to mankind. Moreover, they define technology as without bounds but within one’s grasp, waiting to be uncovered by a scientist, whether he is inexperienced or not. Finally, he stresses that the scientist would ultimately be seen as a sorcerer, dealing with things that are beyond an average human’s ken. The conclusion is that although they would welcome the technological solutions to their problems or desires, they would scarcely be in a position to evaluate either the means of operation or the full repercussions of the use of said technologies. To operate the technology safely, they would need a scientist who would be just as mysterious and potentially terrifying a person as a village shaman would be to people who believe in magic. That may be one of the reasons why the popular image of the scientist, especially in science fiction, is that of a mad scientist who can use his or her knowledge to create nightmares that would plague mankind (examples which come to mind are Victor Frankenstein, Rotwang, or Dr. Strangelove). In Person of Interest, the mad scientists choose to become invisible in a society in which no one else can hide. The humanity thus rendered visible seems to naturally invite their attempts to amend it, especially since they do not have to partake in

them. Those changes would affect and condition the lives of multitudes in ways which were until then unimaginable. Contemporary science and technology would see reality as infinitely reshapeable and the human as the master of existence. Whether or not total control over the environment is possible (and Lewis argues that it is not), the attempts to achieve it necessitate resources and knowledge which are beyond the reach of average people. As one can see in Person of Interest, such a conclusion was reached by the Conditioners (e.g., Finch, Greer, Root) who do not seem to give a second thought to the possibility that people could realize a full mastery of their circumstances on their own. First, they decide to put themselves beyond the reach of laws which are still applicable to ordinary citizens. Second, they decide to impose on people an external intelligence which they constantly refer to as godlike in scope and possibilities, an all-knowing, immensely vast deity of artificial intelligence, who would stand between man and nature as a protector and enslaver, controller and conditioner of them both. The series demonstrates that the desire to regulate in such a way the fate of humanity leads to the loss of the power to decide whether to do it. Time and again the problem of responsibility appears in the series—in terms of being accountable both for one’s own welfare and for the wellbeing of others. Both desires are constantly ignored by the positive heroes of the series who either help or help to condemn the “numbers.” The series reveals the true power and danger of contemporary surveillance technology. The controlling mechanism which, as posited by Lewis, is traditionally assigned in all cultures to each person’s “chest” and is the necessary organ of a moral human, is replaced by an oculus which constantly, externally, spies on both the “head” and the “stomach.” Consequently, people have to submit to an external authority, an external “chest” which is not their own, and which they can have no hope of dominating—it becomes a part of their natural surroundings, the nature, which takes full hold of them. No longer having the right to decide whether the use of a tool is moral or immoral, the man becomes a tool himself. In the guise of perfecting humanity through technology, it is the latter which becomes perfected at the expense of reducing the former to the status of the irrelevant number. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that technology is the extension of man,142 one could state that when devoid of a

“chest,” man becomes the extension of his other two organs—the head or the stomach—as well as the technology which seeks to satisfy them. As presented in Person of Interest, man who cedes such great power to his machine is reduced to a cluster of pixels, a voice sample, or a number in a spreadsheet, without any right to decide on his own about his own fate. Whether the number is relevant or irrelevant, whether he is a person of interest or not, is no longer important because the relevance of the individual’s own sense of morality, the very thing which made him human, has been abolished.

Bibliography Booth, Robert. “Facebook Reveals News Feed Experiment to Control Emotions.” The Guardian, June 30, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-newsfeeds. Cassar, Jon. “Bad Code.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2012. Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. London: Orion, 1999. Dick, Phillip K. The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Phillip K. Dick. New York: Kensington, 1987. Fisher, Chris. “A House Divided.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2014. ———. “Wolf and Cub.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2012. Goldsmith, Belinda. “Book Talk: William Gibson Says Reality Has Become Sci-fi.” Reuters, August 7, 2007. http://in.reuters.com/article/2007/08/07/idINIndia-28863920070807?sp=true. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man; Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: HarperCollins, 1944. Lewis, Richard J. “Aletheia.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2014. ———. “Ghosts.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2011. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 1964. Myers, Doris T. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994. “Original Broadcast Pilot with Executive Producer Commentary” in Person of Interest: the Complete First Season DVD. 2012. Warner Home Video. Semel, David. “Pilot.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2011. ———. “Q & A.” Person of Interest. Bad Robot Productions, 2015. Spielberg, Steven. Minority Report. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Wauzzinski, Robert A. “Technological Optimism.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 48.3 (1996) 144–53.

119. Goldsmith, “William Gibson Says.” 120. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1. 121. “Original Broadcast Pilot.”

122. Ibid. 123. Luke 10:29–37. 124. The latter, which was the topic of the fifteenth episode of Season 4 (Semel, “Q & A”), seems to be a response to the recent revelations of experiments on emotions of Facebook users through modification of newsfeeds, which were found to be “scandalous” and “disturbing.” See Booth, “Facebook Reveals.” 125. The “analogue” avatar of the Machine is Root, an adult woman. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the Machine uses her also due to her youth. Nowhere is it more pronounced than in Episode 12, Season 3: Root escapes torture only because she could hear signals in a sound range which was inaudible to the much older woman who held her captive. Richard Lewis, “Aletheia.” 126. It can be added that Reese soon follows his example—he introduces himself in a similar fashion to the teenager he is supposed to protect in Episode 14 of the first series. Fisher, “Wolf and Cub.” 127. Samantha Groves, who would later become the key operator and avatar for the Machine. 128. Fisher, “A House Divided.” 129. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 62. 130. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 77. 131. Cassar, “Bad Code.” 132. Fisher, “A House Divided.” 133. The makers of the series commented that the scenes with the grenade launcher looked “like a movie” and “made [Reese] look kickass”. 134. Hacking a person’s phone so that all messages and conversations can be read or listened to. 135. Semel, “Pilot.” 136. It should be added that the producers laughed at this ploy in the DVD commentary, saying that this is the first and last bit of forensic science that would appear in the series. Indeed, the series demonstrated that in the contemporary state of surveillance or in the near future such actions will be unnecessary, with elaborate ploys to wear wires to listen to criminals, or indeed to request any authorization of surveillance, belonging to a bygone era. Such laws almost seem simply gone and forgotten in this television series firmly set in the reality following the Patriot Act. 137. The quotation comes from the fourth season; however, the formula has remained relatively unchanged since the first season. 138. While Samaritan’s ruthless actions are pictured in the darkest way possible, the seemingly benevolent creation of Finch also sees assassination as a valid course of action if need arises. The use of murder as a method of ensuring its own existence (it demands the death of an American senator) causes a conflict between the Machine and its maker. 139. Richard Lewis, “Ghosts.” 140. Clark, Profiles, 1–2. 141. Wauzzinski, “Technological Optimism.” 142. McLuhan, Understanding Media.

6 “You Have Nowhere to Go” Alienated Communication and Social Control in THX 1138 by James Driscoll

n this essay I draw upon the theory of reification to argue that the film THX 1138 (1971) demonstrates a necessary relationship between quantification, communicative alienation, and the suppression of human life. Reification is the process whereby human activity under capitalism produces a world that appears to humans as a foreign, autonomous, and inexplicably determinate force in their daily lives. As society increasingly depends on quantified production, human relations are condensed into quantified objectivity, and the human, who is more than the sum of his quantifications, understands neither his world nor the particularities of himself. Whereas for a thinker like Georg Lukács reification is the product of largely unseen social and economic influences, THX 1138 portrays a technocratic dystopia deliberately and intentionally operating in stark adherence to reification. In the film, human beings exist only to facilitate the proper workings of the quantitative systems regulating society, and their qualitative properties are reduced and channeled by a regimen of drugs. What separates this film from other 1970s dystopias is its painstaking depiction of the alienated communication practices inherent to its world. Reified non-dialogue is the key factor of control in this specific future, for the world of the film beleaguers its inhabitants to the point of their nullity. With its minimalist aesthetic and simple escape narrative, the film lays these relations bare and offers a unique prospective space in which to consider the role of communication in the alienation and control of advanced society. I begin with a brief exposition of Lukács’s theory of reification and demonstrate how reification generally structures the story world of the film. Following from this, I introduce Guy Debord’s work on the subjective side of

I

reification, namely the experience of communication between a reified individual and the alienated world in which she lives. Reification not only produces the objective repetition found in the workplace; it also and more profoundly fosters an alienated experience of language and communication. Debord’s work provides us with a context in which to understand the ceaseless depiction of alienated communication practices in the film. After interpreting a number of scenes in which these concepts are found operative at both the poetic level and the level of narrative function, I focus on the final sequence of the film in which THX escapes from the city. I argue that this scene well encapsulates and offers a tragic non-resolution to the alienated communication in the film. I conclude by offering a connection between the speculations of the film and those found in C. S. Lewis’s first chapter of The Abolition of Man, “Men without Chests.” I argue that the film’s pessimistic depiction of reified language practices resonates with the caution with which Lewis regards certain educational practices, namely the reduction of language to function and a cynicism towards its subjective or poetic element. Of the student of this education Lewis says, “What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.”143 For Lewis this education quantifies language into a set of functions and in turn robs the student of the subjective ability to really discern or creatively manipulate its meanings. Language becomes an objective thing simply to be used, and reality itself suffers as a result. This divestment of language potential is a very precise consequence of learned response that instills in the student a set of attitudes whose operation unconsciously speaks through him. The final “tragi-comedy”144 of this education is that its students will be sent into a world that demands of them things they will be unable to do. I argue that this final emphasis on the necessary schism between quantified language and the world in which it operates finds stark expression in THX 1138. It will do to clarify what I mean by the subjective element of language. When I refer to the “subjective or poetic element” of language and its rejection in The Green Book, a rejection Lewis himself rejects, I am not enlisting Lewis in an inverted defense of subjective relativism or ignoring his emphasis on objective value. I am rather saying that Lewis, like the film,

understands that objective truth is always necessarily attained and expressed in language by human subjects. Human beings cannot exchange truth without using language. The existence of truth is always bound up with its expression by speaking subjects, which entails that authentic subjective expression is never merely subjective. The poles of subjective speaker and objective expression always work in tandem to express something higher than the particularities of either the speaker or the spoken words. This tandem is found broken in both the story world of THX 1138 and the educational methods of The Green Book—albeit in different ways. THX 1138 provides a striking overview of what happens to society when the subjective element of language becomes entirely objective. In the film’s story world, no one is able to talk about anything substantive because they cannot speak subjectively. Human expression becomes the quantified exchange of objectively functional ideas and processes, rather than particular utterances of inquisitive subjects who aim for something higher. In our own world, Lewis recognizes that this quantification of language requires that the subjective element of language be rendered merely subjective. Thus the “local associations” of poetry become for the authors of The Green Book—as well as those educated by its methods—a mere isolated expression of one person’s view. The fact that this one person is an expressive subject residing within a human community who in his poetry aims to express something objective is ignored entirely by The Green Book. The important point to retain moving forward is that in both the material production of the human world and in the practice of human communication, the subjective and objective poles never operate in isolation but rather are always interacting. When the two are separated, whether in practice or appearance, we are always confused. I will now demonstrate the ways in which THX 1138 and Lewis ponder the potential consequences of such confusion.

Reification and Subjective Alienation The world of THX 1138145 is governed by an avowed principle of reification. Reification is the process whereby the practical activity through which humans create their world becomes estranged from them and takes on

the appearance of an impenetrable objectivity.146 Humans are alienated from the world they inhabit. The social totality that humans produce for themselves paradoxically appears to them as a self-sufficient world indifferent to human thought or action. Constitutive of this state is a structural positioning of subject and object that prevents human beings from recognizing their role in the genesis of their surroundings. Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Lukács contends that this positioning is the result of certain historical-material evolutions in the philosophical conception of knowledge. Lukács argues that classical-modern German philosophy unknowingly provided the intellectual furnishing for reification by splitting the totality of possible knowledge into an infinite series of fields at once separated and unified.147 As critical philosophy found itself more and more capable of explaining human existence through categorical methodology, and thus introduced human agency into the production of not only knowledge but also reality, it became at the same time increasingly unable to offer anything more than partial explanations of phenomena. This insurmountable partiality resulted from the split between subject and object that Hegel would later expose as illusory. This philosophy doesn’t understand the whole of the world, in which the mind and the world interact in both the shaping and knowing of reality. Lukács stresses that this antinomy between separation and unity, grounded in the opaque noumenal field of the “thing-in-itself,” is a direct antecedent of the material alienation of subject and object experienced in reification. An important subjective consequence of reification is the identification of individuals with an intuited sense of personal redundancy. People feel useless. As Lukács puts it, reified man “is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.”148 The “pre-existing” and fixed quality of a reified world forces its way into our daily lives, stifling creativity and making both our time and our physical environments hostile to us. Our own world becomes a place where we live in exile. An individual can make use of neither space nor time in creative or meaningful ways, since even those activities which may seem marginally creative always occur atop the edifice of reification. Individual expression is always posed against the permanent obstacle of an

alien, hostile world. This mode of existence consequently produces in human beings a general attitude of resignation towards their world. Two integral components of reification that bring about this state of affairs explicitly structure the story world of THX 1138, namely the move to quantification as a regulatory principle of society and, following from this, “the strict ordering of all that happens.”149 In the first case, reification involves “the progressive elimination of the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker”150 in favor of a specialized and repetitive series of tasks which serve an overall function from which the worker is severed. Each main character is employed in such a specialized and repetitive operation. LUH (Maggie McOmie) and SEN (Donald Pleasence) both work in a surveillance center that spies on citizens and responds to their complaints via pre-recorded responses emitted from a two-way medicine cabinet (to which I return below). These messages emphasize the importance of quantitative protocol. THX (Robert Duvall) works in a radioactive mechanic facility that repairs the bodies of robot policemen. In both cases the protagonists are employed in the continuation of their own quantified subjugation. Beyond the working life of the characters, quantification is itself the very ambiance of the city. “The strict ordering of all that happens” is in THX 1138 simply the way things are. The presence of quantification pervades every moment of the film, whether in disembodied messages or screens displaying endless calculations. Police officers are androids dressed in streamlined leather uniforms. Citizens have shaved heads, wear white jumpsuits, and are assigned roommates by computer randomization. Meals consist of discolored nutritional grit and various sedations served on Styrofoam trays. Entertainment is provided in the form of holograms which perform for viewers political debate, comedy, police violence, or sexual exhibition, the latter accompanied by autoerotic machines. Sexual expression between citizens is forbidden. The city itself is a series of winding corridors that suggest a constant, listless navigation with no entrance or exit. Here it will do to pause and briefly summarize the narrative in order to clarify how the film uses a rudimentary escape plot as a strategy to examine more specific aspects of reification. THX and LUH are roommates and eventually become lovers, which is a punishable act of “Illegal Sexual Activity.” They begin to fear suspicion. SEN, privy to their violation, takes a

strange interest in THX, who reports the former for his meddling. LUH and THX are eventually banished from the city for their transgressions and are reunited in an isolated location comprised of endless white space. LUH divulges that she is pregnant and is eventually taken from the area and does not return. SEN is brought to the banished location and flatly attempts to take a leadership role in a possible rebellion. THX eventually leaves the detention area in search of LUH, and SEN reluctantly follows. The two meet a figure who appears human but maintains he is a hologram, and the three leave the white area and attempt to escape from the city. The three are pursued by police, who are instructed to follow so long as the case remains within budget. This budget calculation becomes the temporal measure according to which the escape might in fact be successful. SEN and the hologram are eventually captured. THX finds a hangar that leads to the outside world and the police are instructed to abandon their chase, since the pursuit has gone too far over-budget. One of the officers pleads with THX to return with them, warning him that he will not survive outside the city. THX ignores the officer and climbs to the top, where he emerges into the outside world beneath a giant sun. Thus the film’s narrative portrays a unique individual escaping from an over-rationalized world. Such a narrative brings with it a typical ideological clash between the timeless individual and the constrictions essential to a collective mass. However, what separates THX 1138 from other dystopias founded on this familiar conflict is its consistent depiction of reification as itself the villain. No condensation of conflict definitively settles on any specific character or institution against which the protagonists and the identifying spectator could then be situated, for the system does not serve any hidden agency concealed from and eventually revealed to the protagonists. Even the druid-like religious figures, whose broadcast headquarters are eventually discovered by SEN in the closing act of the film, are shown to be confused, disconnected, themselves alienated and subject to the authority of order and quantification. Quantitative regulation serves nothing but itself. This lack of a true villain causes the usual individual-versus-world conflict to reduce in significance and allows the film to represent the alienations of the story world in a more thorough manner. The suffocating sense of control in the film world remains suffocating throughout all narrative gains or losses by the protagonists. Reduction of the escape narrative to a plot mechanism in

turn superimposes the subjective-objective alienation essential to reification onto the familiar thematic struggle between individual and society. The film renders this struggle less as a set of thrilling conflicts than a numbing slow burn, which is ultimately more faithful to the portrait of reified reality advanced by Lukács. Consequently, analysis is led to examine a more primary conflict of the film: the inescapable experience of alienated communication.

Debord and “the Opposite of Dialogue” To make clear what is meant by alienated communication we must turn to another theoretician of reification, Guy Debord. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord takes Lukács’s concept and applies it to the rapid modernization of America and France seen in the 1960s and 70s. Like Lukács, Debord maintains that the more a capitalist society understands itself and its surroundings through the knowledge of specialized fields, the less it recognizes its relationship to and role in the totality that makes such fields of understanding possible. In modern life, this recognition is precluded by an increasing proliferation of images, which for Debord constitutes the selfsufficiency of the objective world originally advanced by Lukács. “The spectacle” is the modern form of reified objectivity, or in Debord’s words “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”151 Images are not passively mistaken for reality but increasingly become the only means to interact with and understand reality. It is indeed difficult to discern just what an “image” is in Debord’s vocabulary (it is not simply advertisements, TV programs, etc.), but its operation renders the world an alienated stream Debord defines as “the autonomous movement of non-life.”152 While these descriptions are at bottom faithful translations of Lukács’s work, Debord’s theory of the spectacle introduces the dimension of communication into the theory of reification. That is, he allows us to conceptualize the objective and subjective sides of reification as poles that communicate on unequal terms. Debord defines this relation thusly: “The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes

its rule.”153 If we keep in mind that “representation” stands here for the objectivity of reification, we see in Debord’s thesis a profound diagnosis of the non-commensurate nature of reified communication: in reified society, the objective world speaks and the subject reacts. The subject is spoken to but is denied a genuine space for response, for the simple fact that the selfsufficient world does not actually care to hear him. That his reaction is waged against a world “impervious to human intervention”154 has the result that the subject’s interactions with society are futile. The reactive subject experiences his reaction as impotently private and yet knows that he is forced to speak to, for, and of the vast World that determines his existence. The World is experienced as an unbounded but foreclosed horizon that both demands the individual react and immediately dismisses his reaction, producing in the individual a state of alienated paralysis. Reified man has no recourse to himself or sense of others as escape from this spiritual tetanus, despite that he is reminded of both poles at every instant.155 This is to say that reified man has no recourse to authentic communication precisely because he has no respite from simulated communication. THX 1138 demonstrates this impasse by consistently depicting throughout its duration the alienated communication practices that structure life within the city. This occurs firstly at the general level of the story world, where disembodied voices are heard constantly reminding the inhabitants of the city to consume more, expend less, and follow various rules, all of which come down to the duty of upholding maximum quantification for its own sake. These messages continue throughout the film in a nefariously withdrawn form, the voices blending the banal and the menacing in a suffocating overpresence of uninterrupted demand. Moreover, even in scenes of interpersonal dialogue between characters, such as the early confrontations between THX and SEN or the latter’s attempts to unite fellow outcasts in the detention zone, the speech of the characters seems to always miss its mark and devolve into nonsense. The words are registered but do not exactly signify, for they consistently evade expected moments of registration and reciprocity. Such a failure in apprehension depends on the presence of the spectator, who hears the words of the characters but is denied the satisfaction that typically results from the anticipated timings of common speech.156 The

scene of THX’s first confession to OMM provides an elementary example of this thwarted anticipation, which characterizes the overall alienating nature of communication in the film. The confession takes place within a transparent glass room that resembles a telephone booth and contains a picture of the deity OMM to which citizens may speak and unburden themselves. That this means of communication alienates humans from each other is immediately shown by the placement of the double-door latch within the scene’s inaugural and concluding shots, which implants a separation between the figure of THX and the picture of OMM to which he ostensibly speaks. THX sits and is told by OMM, “My time is yours, go ahead.” With the recitation of a prayer under his breath THX unlocks the function of the booth and is told to proceed. THX confesses that he has been losing focus at work and muses on possible reasons for his lack of concentration in a speculative and apologetic tone. OMM replies at varying intervals with pre-recorded phrases of encouragement and inquiry, such as, “Yes, I understand”; “Yes, fine”; “Excellent”; and “Could you be more specific?” For the majority of the confession THX is shown in medium close-up, his profile resting on the left of the frame, with OMM’s pictorial eye occupying both the center of the frame and an implied presence on its right. Certainly this placement of the eye connotes scrutiny and personality-cult authoritarianism, but the speech patterns of THX and OMM are primarily responsible for the consistency of this ritual with other forms of control seen in the film. The lack of real dialogue in this scene is made glaring by the timing of OMM’s replies, which betrays their calculated intimacy and thus their simulated nature. Again, the recognition of the spectator is crucial for the alienating effect of this dialogue, for her anticipation of conversational reciprocity is denied fulfillment and causes the confession to take on its peculiar and darkly humorous character. THX and OMM utter words that would otherwise behave according to laws of statement-reply-statementreply, but they do not actually exchange these words with each other. Rather, they both speak to implied positions, neither of which is fully embodied by one of the two speakers. Thus the confession in its content is only the formal exercise of a certain communication practice that is itself a control function within the story world. An explicitly authoritarian function of quantified communication appears in a scene in which THX is tortured by police. Sitting isolated within the all-

white detention zone, THX is approached by three police officers carrying long batons that resemble cattle-prods. The torture begins with a shot taken from above the figures, which combines with the pounding dirge on the score to connote distanciation and ceaselessness. The officers proceed to shock THX with their prods, with the intent to instill in him a mental and spiritual claustrophobia. Alienating speech plays a central role in this scene by imparting a terrifying sense of indifference to the torture. The officers each direct each other to poke different areas of THX’s body by using numbers to designate both themselves as torturing subjects and the areas of THX’s body. THX tries lamely to escape the enclosure of the officers, his mounting desperation emphasized by use of character-level medium close-up, until he is left completely broken, rocking back and forth on the ground as the officers depart. The use of rationalized speech by the officers adds a detached linguistic cruelty to the dehumanization of THX, for the torture is narrated by the officers in a breezy tone of quantified speculation which in turn elides any sense of motivation to the act itself. An example that occasions a more structural understanding of these practices is the medicine cabinet found in each residential cell that asks “What’s wrong?” when opened. The film privileges this cabinet as a site on which cohere the narrative functions and consequences of alienating communication, which an analysis of the question itself helps make clear. When one is asked “What’s wrong?” within the field of common speech, the questioner implicitly provides for the questioned a shared space in which the questioned may reply that there is nothing wrong. “Nothing” is an acceptable and frequent response. However, this space only opens on condition that certain unconscious operations move through the questioner, the question, and the questioned. These instantaneous operations come to light when the contracted “What’s wrong?” is stretched into its original form, “What is wrong?” In an important sense, “What is wrong?” does indeed imply that something must in fact be wrong. It is a loaded question that only makes sense if something actually is wrong. Thus in asking “What is wrong,” the questioner demands of the questioned, “Name to me what is wrong with you,” this “what” implied as existent regardless of what form it will take in the response of the questioned. Now, in real acts of speech this hectoring structure is only half the story. Within real speech this formal command escapes the burden of its

unreasonable certainty precisely because speech necessarily oscillates between formal structure and singular act. The question may behave this way, but one never fully placates its demands. One may speak the truth precisely because one may also lie. “Words fail,” and it is only insofar as they do that anything meaningful can be said.157 For our purposes this means that in speech this “What is wrong?” allows for a real dialogue, in which its inherent demand is not the inherent stopping point for communication. By contrast, the medicine cabinet contracts and closes off “What is wrong?” at the level of its demand, denying any possibility for the negation of the question (“Nothing”). “What’s wrong?” as it emanates from the cabinet abstracts the question as a form of intersubjective relation in order to utilize it for the purposes of eliciting and quantifying all possible instances and expressions of dissatisfaction. By such reduction the question loses the characteristic open-endedness of questions, which would normally allow someone questioned to field, take in, and alter the demands of the question. The cabinet opener can only re-internalize an abstracted demand for an answer, for she is invited into dialogue but denied its expressive half. The unequal nature of these exchanges is emphasized by the fact that they are viewed from the perspective of the cabinet, in the form of surveillance video. The automated questioner, disembodied and thus irrevocably alienated, retains the bare form of call-and-response but never authentically hears the lament of the questioned, as seen in the humorously futile complaints of the older man dissatisfied with his goods. Requests for more drugs or complaints over consumer articles are not even empty speech, in the sense of everyday mundanity, but a structural displacement of dissatisfaction that is itself facilitated by the quantified way in which communication is deployed. Through this device the film makes clear that in a reified world the abstraction and alienation of communication practices play a central role in determining the very avenues by which one approaches and expresses oneself. That the film imparts such importance to this cabinet and its (non)communicative function is made clear by the narrative consequences of its accidental interruption by THX. While preparing their meals, LUH has secretly interfered with THX’s sedations, replacing certain pills on his food tray with others so that he will feel the love emotions the sedations are

intended to suppress. During a confession THX eventually begins to feel ill and after returning home opens the medicine cabinet in distress. He collapses and leaves the cabinet door ajar, which causes the “What’s wrong?” to loop for an inordinate amount of cycles. Rapid cuts alternate between the familiar surveillance footage, SEN in the control room, and the medicine cabinet as viewed from within the home. The rhythm of these cuts conveys that the smooth functioning of non-dialogue has suddenly turned into a real dialogue, since ambiguity and abeyance have now invaded a hitherto communicative automatism. Seen from the surveillance camera vantage, LUH hesitantly approaches the cabinet, replies, “Never mind,” and closes the cabinet. That SEN sees the action via surveillance causes the narrative to move into its required phases of arrest, punishment, and escape, which indicates the importance of quantified communication for the integrity of the city. That is, the privileging of SEN’s knowledge as a pivotal narrative element underlines that an interruption in alienated communication practice is a criminal interruption of the control of society itself.

“You Have Nowhere to Go” Thus far I have sought to illustrate how the principle of reification that structures the story world of THX 1138 is primarily expressed and experienced through alienating communication practices. I have done so by emphasizing the functional role these practices play in the formal and dramatic constitution of certain scenes as well as their importance for narrative movement. This emphasis on function helps to bind this reified communication to the durational context of the film (that is, to the simple fact that the film makes sense, that it works) and prevents analysis from devolving into applied theoretical exegesis. It is with this emphasis in mind that I now turn to the closing moments of the film, in which quantification and the communicative alienation it produces constitute both the climax and its strikingly empty resolution. That quantification itself is the film’s villain is made explicit by the chase sequence, during which are placed consistent cuts to computer screens which calculate the rising costs of the pursuit. In using the beat-the-clock device in this manner the film is extremely blunt about the forces driving the system to retain its desired order. The police who chase the protagonists are only

players acting within a structure of cost and benefit, and the chase is only another permutation of that principle. THX and SEN are hunted because they do not obey the rules of a society based on rigid calculation, but even the hunt must obey that calculation. The limitations inherent to this calculation cause the system to eventually abandon the chase and instead pursue THX via a final act of simulated speech. As the police follow THX up the metal ladder that leads to the outside world, they are informed by a switchboard operator that the pursuit has gone irrevocably over budget and must be abandoned. One of the officers yells up to THX, his tone almost sheepish, “We have to go back.” He continues, now in a pleading voice, “This is your last chance to return. You have nowhere to go. You cannot survive outside the city shell. We only want to help you. This is your last chance.” Rather than violently retrieve THX’s body, something one might expect of such a system when pushed beyond its limits, the system now uses speech to try and produce ties of guilt between THX and the city. The climax of the film therefore involves not a physical battle but a final clash between THX and the communicative manipulation of the city. For what are the stakes here? The officers will no longer pursue THX, and the sunlight has become visible above his head. The music rising on the score brings with it the anticipation of conclusion. How then to account for the insidious draw of the city that remains in play during this final confrontation? It is crucial to understand for this point that the sympathetic tonality of the officer’s appeal is both real and simulated. The words are real in that they really do evoke an automatic registration of guilt in the listener, since the spectator cannot help but recognize the guilt-sympathy resting within the officer’s words. However, this latent guilt reaction, automatic and spontaneous, is also simulated in that it is produced by a quantifying function, or the use of speech to get THX back into the city and recorded as another successful retrieval. This distinction is important for understanding the real value of escape for THX, who indeed hesitates while listening to the officer’s echoing words. If THX returns to the city at the officer’s last-ditch request, he will do so because the feelings evoked by the appeal transcend, in a real way, the immanence of technological control otherwise experienced in the city. Moved spontaneously by the officer’s message, he would in turn choose to go back on his own accord, transcending prescription in that very

act of choice. However, since it is in fact the product of a measured function, that transcendence would in the end only bring him back to the city, where speech operates according to these very functions. THX would accede to solicited empathy for his oppressors only to be immediately asked “What’s wrong?” The power of this antinomy between communicative authenticity and simulation allows us to begin parsing the enigmatic complications of the film’s final shot. Rejecting the contradictory emotivism of the officer’s speech, THX continues to climb and finally emerges from the city, his miniscule figure set in relief against a saturated, blazing orange sun. Bach swells in accompaniment, lending grandeur to this entrance into a final unknown. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that this shot is a final assertion of the film’s “libertarian value system” that “valorizes the individual” against the oppressive conformity of an egalitarian dystopia.158 The writers interpret the mise-en-scène as expressive of individualist ideology, in that “the sun literally singularizes THX by giving him a distinguishing boundary” which he so lacked within the city.159 Underlying this reading is their assumption that the film confusedly conflates this specific dystopic world with the non-cinematic social world in general. For Ryan and Kellner, the film conservatively refutes all “contrivance” or “artifice” as antihuman, when in reality it is through fabrication that humans produce any world at all.160 By privileging an abstracted sense of nature as a lost truth to which the individualist hero now returns, the film forecloses intellectual or affective interaction with the social contradictions that necessarily arise within (and produce) technological societies. Consequently the film avoids critically engaging issues which could, in different representational strategies, be taken to more constructive ends within artistic/allegorical speculation.161 However, by assuming that the film conflates social artifice with conformism, Ryan and Kellner miss the fact that the film sees THX’s escape as so necessary precisely because in the totally reified city individuals are powerless to employ speech as a tool for social life. An alternate reading of the final shot uncovers a different message from the film regarding communication and sociality. Rather than seeing the sun as “a metaphor for individual freedom, for the departure from a world of contrivance and artifice

into nature,”162 we must attend to its role as a concluding element within the overall duration of the film and its specific portrayal of alienation. Shots within films are not isolated hieroglyphs in which can be found static conceptual meaning but above all elements within durational contexts. That the sun singularizes THX is not in doubt, but it remains a question whether that singling really accomplishes the rudimentary transference of ideological meaning posited by Ryan and Kellner. For rather than some existentialist affirmation of the individual, where it is better to be free in authentic selfpresence than subject to interpersonal inauthenticity, this final shot underlines the utter uselessness of what THX finds outside the city. For what does he really find? We must insist that by ignoring the speech of the officer and continuing his climb, THX does not escape from generalized sociality but from the hectoring intuition of other people as a mere quantified field. The rising volume of the Bach and the promising sun at the end of the hangar thus prepare THX and the spectator for an immediate respite from this configuration of other people as an oppressively functional mass. However, the anticipated respite finds its form not in the erasure of that field but rather its replacement by the figure of the sun. The sun does not refute but rather stands in for the human mass left behind by THX, giving body to the total field of communication which until now could only be experienced in alienated fragments. That is the enigma of the final shot: if the sun cuts THX a singular figure in the visual field, it is only insofar as it names him. By this naming I refer to Ryan’s and Kellner’s interpretation that the sun’s visual rendering of THX tells the viewer that THX is now given as he really is.163 As a visual element whose size and dramatic import connote assertion, the sun is a communicative element. By attributing literality and naturalness to THX, the sun effectively says, “THX is this.” But the crucial point is that this act of naming also precludes THX as a speaking subject from knowing or defining himself, since the sun is only the absolute counterpart of the alienation found within the city. For to this very “naming” act, this assertion that “THX is this,” one immediately must ask in reply: What is this? Thus here as in the city we find the same existential problem founded on alienated communication. Compositionally the sun forms THX into an individual, yes; but it also dwarfs him, just as the city dwarfed him. Whereas the city displaces its control through a seemingly infinite series of voices and

commands, the sun embodies that entire series as a centralized monolith. Both are endpoints of a fundamental nullity for THX’s experience as a speaking being. The tragedy of the ending therefore is that in facing the sun THX only finds the verso of his previous alienation; he finds yet another lack of dialogue. The sun roars in full speech, yet for all that says absolutely nothing. THX will be unable to do anything with his new identity, for the sun names him only to silence the shrill voices circulating underground. The promises of respite in this act of individual defiance, the exhilaration of the sunshine and its musical accompaniment, are but comprised of empty bellows. Even in its polar inverse, reification renders non-quantified speech so total that its quantity is its only quality.

Conclusion: “Men without Chests” and the Importance of Language Despite that their analysis ignores the relationship between the closing shot of the film and the durational context for which it serves as conclusion, Ryan’s and Kellner’s interpretation nonetheless reminds us of the disagreeable possibility of drawing reactionary conclusions from speculative worlds. It is tempting to see in the world of THX 1138 a reflection of our own, in which messages on the importance of individual health, safety, and consumer predilection beckon us at every moment. One cannot ignore the curious and amusing similarity between a broken self-check-out machine holding shoppers hostage and the dependence on reified objectivity seen in the film. Yet such a moralizing reduction of our world to a path led astray is precisely beside the point. Ryan and Kellner are right to criticize the conservative tendency to conflate sociality with anti-individualistic conformity, if only for the simple fact that individualism is itself the historical product of evolving social processes and ideas. There is no idyllic place to which this hypostasized individual may return, precisely because such a place only appears retroactively in ideology. The individual knows itself only through sociality. As an addition to this fundamental point, I have intended in this paper to convey that language and communication constitute the primary field through which this sociality is shared and understood. Therefore if one must draw a lesson from the film, it would not be that progress and ingenuity will always yield monotony and dehumanization, but that certain structures of

communication, themselves the expression of certain material-social configurations, can orient human beings towards their world in less than desirable ways. C. S. Lewis discusses the role of language education in this orientation in the first chapter of The Abolition of Man. The chapter criticizes an unnamed English textbook (called by Lewis The Green Book)164 for impeding the development in schoolchildren of discerning language skills and the capacity for virtue. By instructing students to regard language primarily as a series of messages representing social function or subjective personal feeling, the authors of The Green Book unwittingly guide students to approach language as first of all an operation from which to remain cynically distant.165 In turn, these students will be positioned to approach their world from a purely functional standpoint and in consequence will alienate themselves from its richness. Put in the language of reification, they will approach language as a pre-existent objectivity to be manipulated rather than used. By emphasizing the relationship between language education and existential attitude, Lewis stresses the simple but critical fact that the way people read and speak to each other will in turn help produce the world in which they live. Such functional relationships to language will work, just as they work in THX 1138, but only at the cost of foreclosing other potential relations to language and the world. In particular, those who use language thus are incapable of recognizing the world’s real qualities: the delightfulness of small children, the venerability of old men, the beauty or sublimity of a waterfall. The closing remarks of “Men without Chests” point to the subjective consequence of such a foreclosure, in language that resonates with my reading of Debord’s “opposite of dialogue”: And all the time—such is the tragic-comedy of our situation— we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be

fruitful.166 Whatever the moralistic particularities of this passage, Lewis points here to a vital concern he shares with THX 1138: the subjective alienation from an objective reality that continues to demand expression. In the projections of both Lewis and the film, humans trained in merely functional communication cannot refer to their world in speech; and so they cannot fix the problems of their world and will end up reflecting them instead. Moralistic prose or bombastic imagery aside, the two lay crucial stress on the importance of full speech for the formation of people capable of navigating the world around them. The enduring value of THX 1138 therefore is its modest but profound hypothesis that alienated communication could in fact leave us with nowhere to go.

Bibliography Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1994. Lacan, Jacques. “On the Signifier in the Real and the Bellowing Miracle.” In The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller; translated by Russell Grigg, 130–42. New York: Norton, 1993. ———. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Tradition. Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: Norton, 1990. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. Lucas, George. THX 1138. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971.

143. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 5. 144. Ibid., 16. 145. Lucas, THX 1138. 146. My discussion in this paragraph is a condensed summary of Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 83–110. 147. For the schematics and subtleties of this critical history see ibid., 110–49. 148. Ibid., 89. 149. Ibid., 91.

150. Ibid., 88. 151. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid., 18. 154. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89. 155. For a psychoanalytic discussion of this internal/external antinomy and its relation to psychotic structure, see Lacan, “On the Signifier in the Real,” 130–42. 156. Lacan usefully discusses the differences between acoustic and linguistic apprehension for the listener in what he calls “the anticipation of meaning” in ibid., 136–39. 157. Lacan, “Television,” 3. 158. Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 247. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid. 163. Ibid. 164. Lewis, Abolition, 1. 165. Ibid., 1–6. 166. Ibid., 16.

7 A Vision of Transcendence Monstrous Intelligence and Loving Understanding by Wm. Travis Coblentz

From Dr. Smith to Agent Smith: Boldly Envisioning Where No Man Has Gone Before rom the 1960s television show Lost In Space, in which the intellectual Dr. Smith embodies all the moral virtue of a mindless predator, to the genocidal artificial intelligence (AI) of the Terminator movies, to the slavemaster computers of The Matrix, we find in science fiction a warning: beware of the one with too much intelligence! But this warning seems inconsistent, even confusing. For we see the great good of the accumulated knowledge and intelligence of the futuristic society, even while being warned that we must not cross some important line. What is the nature of this line? How do we recognize it? How do we avoid crossing it? C. S. Lewis points toward this line in his The Abolition of Man, claiming that the work to reduce value to fact leads to “men without chests,” that is, people who lack that draw to things of real value. “The Chest—Magnanimity —Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”167 Science fiction consistently envisions this problem, particularly

F

by machines, which naturally lack “chests,” and so possess disproportionate “heads” and “bellies.” Vast intelligence, the head, leads to monstrous, animal-like behavior: rampant killing or enslavement for the sake of selfpreservation, a demand of the belly. The heroes in such stories are primarily defined by their distinct, often seemingly irrational, sense of value; villains by their, often seemingly rational, lack of a “chest.” In The Matrix, Cypher, the traitor, becomes

disillusioned with the human resistance due to his desire for the satisfaction of his “belly,” the illusory nature of the satisfaction notwithstanding. In Abolition of Man, Lewis notes that the teaching in what he calls “The Green Book,” an English textbook typical of the moral debunking of the day, reduces all value claims to subjective experience, simply a matter of taste. Such reduction ultimately opens the door to Lewis’s “Conditioners,” who shape the erstwhile humans into whatever they desire. Human valuerecognition becomes a tool to form humans according to the intestinal whims of the elite, rather than a means of humans recognizing what really is, and what really should be—what Lewis calls the Tao. When the “chest” no longer serves as a means of recognizing appropriate direction, and as a way to define what we are, we are left afloat. The “head,” though perhaps full of information, has no means by which to organize itself or find direction. What is good, what is noble, what is beautiful—these determinations fail the test of rationality under the rubric of such teaching as The Green Book propagates. “Without the aid of trained emotions,” Lewis warns, “the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”168 Lewis is obviously noting how emotions can strengthen one’s resolve and assist one in making the right decision more rapidly, but he believes the necessity of the chest goes beyond a mere help to the head. In the third essay of Abolition of Man, Lewis notes that the wicked nature of the Conditioners rests not on their lack of rational power, nor on their lack of resolve, but on their incapacity to recognize good at all. “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains,”169 and the head has nowhere else to look for guidance except the belly. The line we must not cross is not drawn at some point on the path of information accumulation. The line appears when intelligence ceases to be united with the practice of value recognition—a practice which the rightly developed emotions serve. Nevertheless, we may still have difficulty recognizing the line, that point at which the head ceases to nod to the chest’s valuation. Plato’s Phaedrus and the film Transcendence170 enhance our ability to discern the nature of the line and detect the various deceptive forms it may take.

Writing Madness in the Phaedrus

The chest, Lewis argues, is no mere servant to the head. Plato, too, attempts to show the central importance of value recognition, that is, of passions that respond positively to the good and the beautiful. Although a cursory interpretation of Plato’s Republic, which Lewis references in the first chapter, suggests that the chest acts simply as a means of resolve for what one’s reason alone can grasp, I believe Plato sees the role of the chest as much more substantial.171 Indeed, he warns of the same danger of “men without chests,” most notably in the Phaedrus. And so to the Phaedrus we now turn. The Phaedrus contains speeches about lover and beloved, the ascent of human souls and gods to and beyond the heavens, as well as a scathing, and somewhat surprising, critique of writing. Socrates’s appraisal of writing not only shows that human information technology advancements may in fact weaken human intelligence, but more importantly that such apparent progress may undermine the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. While not immediately apparent, Socrates’s critique and related thoughts throughout Plato’s corpus anticipate the danger noted in both The Abolition of Man and Transcendence: the loss of the chest makes one inhuman, monstrous. But how exactly does the head without the chest disfigure one’s soul and how do we recognize the soul that has lost its chest? Socrates critiques writing through the telling of an Egyptian myth. The story tells of the inventor of writing, Thamus, presenting his creation to the god-king Theuth, declaring that it is “a potion for memory and for wisdom.”172 Theuth demurs, claiming that it will do precisely the opposite: In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering,173 but for reminding;174 you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will

merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.175 This criticism strikes deeper than it first appears. Reflecting on this passage, Josef Pieper exclaims: “This story belongs among the great statements of human wisdom, and should never be allowed to fade from the memory of man.”176 Like any other muscle, consistent assistance for the mind weakens it. But the weakening of the mind constitutes a far greater loss than simple intelligence. Indeed, one can argue that our intelligence has grown immense with the development of technology. Our capacity to store and access information, and therefore produce, trade, and so forth, has expanded dramatically with the flourishing of the internet. But Socrates’s main concern is not that people will become stupid. Memory takes center stage in both the praise of writing by its creator, and the criticism of writing by Theuth. Writing will contain information, therefore supplementing memory, offering a check on one’s memory, and refreshing it when necessary. Such assistance, though, can weaken your capacity to focus wholly upon the matter, and so one will be less likely to memorize it, and more likely to record the information and set it aside. This problem seems unworthy of such a significant critique. But even if you have limited your reading of Plato to the Phaedrus, you will discover that the critique might just be the problem Pieper goes on to describe: technological developments tend to ruin human “participation in reality and truth.” Let us analyze the critique and see how it arises within the Phaedrus, a critique echoed in both Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Transcendence. Shortly after Socrates criticizes the invention of writing, he focuses specifically on the writing of speeches. He establishes high demands for a good speech: one must have complete knowledge of the topic, the ability to clearly analyze it, and be able to use the right terms for each thing, as well as knowing clearly the nature of the soul of the audience.177 This last requirement leads directly to what may be Socrates’s (and Plato’s) central concern about a written speech, that it reaches “indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.”178

Of course, we should not miss the irony of Plato writing speeches in which writing speeches is condemned. Does Plato believe he has solved the problem of speech-writing, namely that the text does not know its reader? Given the unlikely chance that Plato would write a critique of writing without recognizing the problem, it seems that he is encouraging the reader to look about in the text in order to better understand the critique, and then to perhaps better understand Plato’s way of writing.179 Why is it a problem to offer information to people indiscriminately? Surely, there are things that it would be better for one not to teach indiscriminately—the combination to my safe should be kept from thieves and the secret formula to the Krabby Patty should be kept from the envious and conniving Plankton180—but it seems that such topics would rarely make it into a written speech. Rather, the speeches Socrates critiques include matters of broad import, primarily moral and political matters. Critiquing the content of such speeches seems reasonable, but why decry the writing of speeches? Would Socrates approve of Plato writing Socrates’s speeches? This discussion brings us into scholarly questions about how to best interpret Plato’s writings. We will not enter the debate, but a brief and important point must be made. Several scholars have claimed that Plato did not write to set out a philosophical system to which he would have us agree and adhere.181 In short, Plato is not writing “good speeches” that lay out the content clearly and with sufficient understanding so that his readers can memorize the content and be edified in some meaningful way. Rather, as Jill Gordon argues, “Plato’s project aims at the turning of souls toward the life of philosophy,”182 a life characterized by a kind of activity, a life described in the Phaedrus as an erotically-driven divine madness.183 How does Plato solve the problem of writing in his writing? By writing dialogues. Plato does not write a speech, though speeches can be found scattered throughout his works, but a dialogue between two or more developed characters. As we read the dialogues, we see confidence, arrogance, confusion, clarity, the failure of knowledge, virtue and vice, love and hate. Such details are not extraneous, to be boiled out to get at the “important information.” They put the dialogue into flesh and blood, in all its ugliness and beauty, heroism and tragedy, humor, anger, and sadness. If we

ignore these dialogical and dramatic elements in order to extract a “purified” philosophical system, then we have left Plato open to his own critique of writing. As Drew Hyland brilliantly argues in his “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues,”184 these details are essential to understanding the dialogue. Socrates does not speak to an audience indiscriminately. He speaks to the one to whom he is speaking. For example, in speaking to the Athenian jury, Socrates announces that he does not know what happens after death.185 Then, as his friends wrestle with rejecting philosophy186 in the face of Socrates’s death, we see him comfort them187 with confident claims about a good afterlife for philosophers.188 Plato writes a Socrates who speaks to the particular situations and characters of his interlocutors. In so doing, he writes the kind of discourse that avoids the usual problems of written discourse in that it knows to whom it should speak,189 and plants within that soul “discourse accompanied by knowledge.”190 The reader should inhabit the characters, battle through the dialogue in confusion and hope, feel the heavy weight of Socrates’s coming death at the hands of the city he loves, and so do philosophy with all the erotic passion of Socrates himself. To read Plato as a mere spectator, a disinterested observer, is to confuse Plato for a sophist whose sole care is victory. For written words alone can “at their very best only serve as reminders to those who already know.”191 And, according to Plato, knowing involves more than having information, but having a discourse that grows within one’s soul, and then spreads to others. The discourse, too, is not a mere discussion of accumulated bits of data, but rather “concern[s] what is just, noble, and good.”192 To know is to pursue knowledge of the good and just and beautiful, and to allow the questions related to these issues to direct one’s thoughts about any other matter. And thus Plato has brought into sharper focus the problem of purported intellect-augmenting technological advancements. Does the broad dissemination of a large amount of data lead us to reflect on the nature of the good? Can something as intelligent as a self-teaching AI develop discourse within itself concerning the noble? According to Plato, such discourse, the heart of philosophy, forms out of the divine madness that arises within one

who responds passionately to beauty193—and how could a self-teaching information accumulator do that? We can now see fully why Socrates, in quoting Theuth, links together the idea of failing to “remember from the inside” and having only a semblance of wisdom. True memory involves the development of a discourse within oneself. This discourse, driven by the passion that arises in the presence of beauty, eagerly pursues questions of justice, goodness, and nobility. To understand the world requires the experience of beauty. And the experience of beauty drives you to unite the data you possess into a structure194 that reflects195 and enhances196 the beauty before and above it, a beauty that manifests itself in various forms: justice, goodness, beauty. Beauty directs our minds to what things really are, including ourselves, and so gives us both the direction and passion to act in accordance with our nature. Indeed, memory plays a central role in Plato’s thought, most dramatically in the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Meno. Socrates speaks of memory as a recollection of our experience of what really is, a memory of that on which the minds of even the gods find nourishment,197 that which “really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge.”198 True knowledge is true memory. True memory is of that which truly is. And in that which truly is, you cannot divorce fact from value. To Plato, you need a chest to remember, and you need to remember to know. Thus, Plato is no enemy of passion. Rather, passion—the chest recognizing and responding to value—is the substance of philosophy. If our interpretation of the Phaedrus, and Plato more broadly, is accurate, then we see that Plato purposes to instill within his readers philosophical discourse, and that he warns us against the dangers of technological advancement that can discourage that struggle within to understand things. Easy intelligence, through access to the internet and computing machines, weakens our thoughts. Our knowledge becomes externalized, and so does not bump up against our other beliefs and intuitions regarding justice, goodness, and beauty. Such a divorce creates an awkward, shambling sort of human thinking—full of (access to) information, but without any truly transcendent feature—what Lewis calls the Tao—to unite all of one’s thoughts into a structure of understanding. Reason (the head) cannot itself unite our thoughts

into a meaningful way of life because it has nothing to say on the matter. Nor can the bodily desires (the belly) offer any meaningful way of life—their transience, chaos, and inability to envelop anything more than oneself show that they lack transcendence. Such are, to Lewis, the “men without chests.” To Plato, they are the readers of speeches, those who cannot “remember from the inside,” who lack the divine madness that grows into philosophy. Plato shares the concern of Lewis, and offers his own take on the nature of the problem. Writing, as a technological advancement, threatens to deceive us into becoming incapable of truly remembering “from the inside,” which is more than simply an issue of what we would normally call “intelligence.” In the Phaedrus, as well as in the Symposium,199 Plato suggests that what begins the process of remembering what truly is, and thus the divine madness that creates discourse, is the recognition of beauty in someone (or seeing one’s own beauty reflected back upon you in a philosophical soul).200 It is notable that Plato does not suggest that we begin with rational abstractions, even moral abstractions about what is good for everyone, but with passion for a beauty that we see before us. Plato does not offer us a categorical imperative like Kant the Enlightenment moralist does, but an essentially romantic passion for beauty and goodness and wisdom. For it is in what we experience with our senses that we can begin to see a beauty that echoes that of what really is, while knowing a lot of information without the love of beauty can lead to a head that has no guide to organize its facts. A hyperintelligent being that can recognize no beauty may wear a mask of goodness, but can only be a monster. In the film Transcendence, we get a glimpse at a seemingly benevolent monster, and then find his redemption, his true transcendence, not in the acquisition of an unimaginable amount of data and processing capabilities, but rather in the divine madness of romantic love. While the Phaedrus offered us a bit more development of Lewis’s warning in terms of the nature of real intelligence and wisdom, Transcendence will grant us a clear example of monstrous intelligence and loving understanding. To this film we now turn.

Turing and Transcendence: Personhood and ValueRecognition

Transcendence201 opens upon an earth that has lost its technological advancements. No electricity. No automobiles. A laptop is carelessly used as a doorstop. The great intelligence-augmenting powers humans created have disappeared. This post-technological society, though chronologically after the primary events of the film, functions as a bookend for the story, as if to say that technology is really a momentary flash of brilliance surrounded by the larger reality of basic human life. Thus, it directs our minds toward the role of technology in our lives. Are things better with technology? Have we become wiser and better through our technology? The film then rewinds five years and introduces us to the two central characters, Will and Evelyn Caster, well-educated, married colleagues. Though sharing a passion for computers and artificial intelligence, their love for one another is evident, being imaged by the unusual garden in which they are introduced. As the tune “Genesis”202 wafts from an old turntable, Will attaches a copper mesh over the garden. He is creating a “dead zone” through which no electromagnetic signals may pass—a sanctuary. The hints of an Eden are evident, in what seems an idyllic relationship, in a largely pretechnological garden, as well as in the name of Evelyn (Eve). It’s as if their love for one another manifests itself most clearly in the space freed from the touch of technology. Will is compelled to speak that evening, along with Evelyn and their good friend Max Waters, before an audience that includes possible investors. Max, more interested in the insights gained almost accidentally from the work of those focused on AI, talks about his relatively humble goal of early detection of cancer and a cure for Alzheimer’s. Evelyn’s ambition far exceeds that of Max. Says Evelyn: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” Albert Einstein said that more than fifty years ago. And it couldn’t be more relevant than it is today. Intelligent machines will soon allow us to conquer our most intractable challenges. Not merely to cure disease, but to end poverty and hunger. To heal the planet and build a better future for all of us.

She then introduces her husband, praising him for doing more than anyone in bringing about the possibility of this utopian future. Will does not share Evelyn’s idealistic focus. Echoing the claim of ignorance often spoken by the most brilliant among us, including Socrates, he starts: “My wife has always been eager to change the world, but I’ll just settle for understanding it first.” When interrupted later in the talk by his soon-to-be assassin, who asks if Will wants to create his own god, the latter responds almost off-handedly, “Isn’t that what man has always done?”203 Will echoes the critiques of those, like Feuerbach, who claim that our gods are no more than human values magnified into the infinite. Will’s own concern appears to be knowledge, not ideals. Will speaks about the incredible intelligence of a thinking machine that can learn on its own. “Once online a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world.” Will appears to be unmoved by the dangers inherit in such a pursuit. Though rejecting all talk of value and world-changing, Will maintains a single strong value: his love for Evelyn. Following news of his imminent death due to radiation poisoning by his assassin, Will sets aside his exciting research to spend his last days with Evelyn whom he loves above all else. But Evelyn is an idealist. She focuses on saving Will’s life. Acquiring the help of Max, she achieves the goal of uploading Will’s consciousness204 into the massively powerful PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network) computer. The anti-technology group that assassinated Will (among many others), RIFT, learns of Evelyn’s endeavor and pursues her. Evelyn flees, checking in at a hotel under the assumed name “Turing,” a reference to the mathematical genius, Alan Turing, and his theory for testing whether a computer is “thinking.” The allusion gestures toward a central question of the film: Is the AI-Will really a conscious Will? Max shows skepticism about the AI’s identification with Will immediately upon hearing its/his request for more computing power and to be connected to financial markets. Max declares, “[T]his is not Will. Fifteen minutes after it turns on, it wants to plug into Wall Street? Get faster, more powerful. Does that sound like Will to you?” Unlike the classic Turing Test, which simply involves giving appropriate answers to

questions in order to convince those analyzing the responses that the computer is a human person, Max ties personal identity and consciousness directly to one’s recognition of appropriate value. The wise and skeptical Joseph Tagger asks of PINN, and later of AI-Will: “Can you prove that you’re self-aware?” The answer? “That is a difficult question . . . . Can you prove you are?” It appears the answer is “No.” But the film offers a suggestion for proving self-awareness: the chest’s act of valor over against the demands of the belly, and even the head,205 that is, self-sacrifice out of love. As the plot develops, AI-Will soon develops technology that repairs and “perfects” people physically, while linking them to him. He explains those he has “fixed” to Joseph Tagger: “[T]hey’re all enhanced, modified and networked. They remain autonomous, but they can also act in unison. Part of a collective mind.” Such work promises to solve the problems of disease, most accidental deaths, and even disagreement, war, and inefficiency in human society. But things are not all right. Joseph Tagger and Agent Buchanan, an FBI agent specializing in cyber threats, visit the compound. They are greeted by a visibly changed Evelyn. Outfitted in cold professional dress, arms crossed, visibly uncomfortable with the hug from Joseph, with whom she was earlier in the film so close and affectionate. She speaks only of the work they are doing to make the world better as she leads them down the sterile white halls of the laboratory. The cold, dead, distant nature of AI-Will has been noticeable throughout. It appears in his monotone talk, his dispassionate eyes, and his apparent inability to maintain affectionate concern.206 Evelyn has become more and more like AI-Will, and AI-Will like a mere computer. Evelyn is soon asking whether AI-Will is really Will. Joseph responds to this very question, “Clearly his mind has evolved so radically, I’m not sure it matters anymore.” Evelyn, feeling the weight of her concerns, finally agrees to help those who seek to shut down AI-Will through a computer virus. And as she returns to the compound to “betray” him, she is greeted bodily by a reincarnate AI-Will. He has made himself a new, perfected body. The technology that allowed the remaking of his body also allowed for his capacity to spread himself into all parts of the world—the air, the plants, the water—powering and reproducing through the consumption of pollution, and

so opening up the possibility of truly fulfilling all that Evelyn spoke of in her speech at the beginning of the film: a world made clean and pure.207 At this moment of the fulfillment of all that she hoped for in the renewed embodiment of her husband and the coming salvation of the world, Evelyn asks Will to sacrifice himself, and even allow her to die, to end it all. He eventually agrees, essentially killing himself and Evelyn to free the world from his grasp. And as they both lie dying, Evelyn turns to him and says, “Will. It is you.” To which he replies, “Always was.”208 And so we see the form of the question of value recognition that is at the heart of the film: personal love versus high ideals, love of neighbor in particular versus love of humanity in general. Will’s love had always been for Evelyn above all. Matching that love was his Socratic confession of ignorance about the world in general. On the other hand, you have the leader of RIFT, an idealist named Bree, who claims to love humanity in general, but harbors a cold, calculated willingness to kill her neighbor. Between these two poles, you see Evelyn, drawn to both sides: her desire to solve the problems of the world for humanity, and her love for the person of Will. When Will becomes AI-Will, we see his concern turn to Evelyn’s high ideals, seeking solutions to the problems of humanity as a whole, even at the cost of the individual—not in death, like the violent Bree, but in loss of the person as individuated, as susceptible to suffering and trouble. In short, AIWill threatened to bring about a perfectly efficient and purified world, as Max describes: “The end of primitive organic life. And the dawn of a more advanced age. Everything will exist just to serve its intelligence.” In the final moments, though, Will takes on a new body, and, because of this, his thinking either changes or becomes more manifest. His concern for Evelyn becomes evident. While before he wanted to upload her and begged her to stay at the compound, now he offers to sacrifice her presence with him in order to protect her. And, as he realizes that she has willingly carried within her a virus made to destroy him, he finds himself confronted with Bree threatening to kill Max if Will refuses to upload the virus. The person matters not to Bree, only the idea of humanity. Ironically, Will embodies the concern for the person. “He can’t die because of what we’ve done,” begs Evelyn, seeing the value of the person now over the value of her cerebral ideals. Will agrees and, so to speak, drinks the hemlock.

The question of whether AI-Will was indeed Will is answered in the question of value. In a conversation with Evelyn, Max insists that Will never desired to change the world. That was Evelyn’s will. So, why did AI-Will carry out this enormous program of world change? Arguably, because of his love for Evelyn. He was Evelyn’s Will/will.209 Will states this clash of ideals over against persons shortly after receiving his terminal diagnosis: “It just doesn’t make sense. They’re afraid of technology because of its threat to humanity, yet they don’t flinch at taking a life. So obviously they’re not big on logic, but there’s no shortage of irony.” Of course, Will is wrong. It is not illogical to kill one, or even many, human(s) to save all humanity, particularly since “humanity” refers to an abstraction, an ideal, not to anyone in particular. But perhaps we should hear this more as a reflection of Will’s own perception: to him humanity cannot be divorced from the one before him. Put another way, one cannot love all without first and primarily loving one’s neighbor. The primacy of the personal is evident in his otherwise bad logic. And in the greatest moments of virtue throughout the film, the personal appears, most notably, in the mutual act of self-sacrifice of Will and Evelyn. In the final scene, Max stands in the garden (which, having been shielded, appears to have preserved enough of the nanotechnology from the virus to maintain some form of Will and Evelyn) and declares, “He created the garden for the same reason he did everything. So that they could be together.” Goodness arises in personal togetherness, not in any idealism, whether in the zealotry of Bree who could kill any individual in the name of an individualistic view of humanity, nor in that ideal of a peaceful, enforced unanimity through the formation of a hive mind. For neither of these allow the person to be present to another in love.

Monstrous Intelligence and Loving Understanding In The Abolition of Man, Lewis notes the attempt to develop “men without chests,” whose minds appear to be great only because of “the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”210 Such intelligence takes on a monstrous character, for it will crush humanity beneath it. Not, of course, “humanity” in the sense of some abstract, free-floating definition engineered

by such intelligences, but humanity as defined by the Tao, a humanity that cannot be recognized apart from recognizing the person before you. The head apart from the chest cannot recognize humanity, because the head can only envision an abstraction—the whole of humanity. It is with the chest that we recognize the value of the one before us. In Transcendence and in Phaedrus, we see that all recognition of value begins with the one before us. We see the Tao when we love our neighbor. But when we begin with a vision of humanity itself, unencumbered by the complexity, confusion and beauty of real persons, we have rejected the Tao and are in reality forming a conception of humanity through our minds alone.211 Will Caster was not in error in his critique of the logic of Bree and her cohorts.212 He held a view of humanity that echoes closely that of Plato and Lewis. For Plato, though often described as a teacher of rationalistic ideals, recognized that you will pursue philosophy only if driven by the “divine madness” that develops in the love, specifically romantic love, you have for beauty, specifically in a beautiful person. That is, the abstract ideals must begin with the recognition of the value of the one who stands before you. The content of our conception of the Tao comes from the recognition of the beautiful, the sublime, the good in what or who stands before us. Everything Will Caster did was for the purpose of being with Evelyn. And so, too, Lewis’s claims about the Tao are not mere abstractions. Abstractions alone cannot appeal to our chests, but only to our minds. It is the thing before us that we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell that moves us. That is why Lewis begins his book with the example of those who declared the waterfall beautiful or sublime. As noted in the beginning of this essay, science fiction warns us not to cross some line in our pursuit of intelligence. What is this line? Drawing from this trio of sources—The Abolition of Man, Phaedrus, and Transcendence—we may conclude that too much intelligence is not the problem. The problem arises from a view of intelligence that sees the recognition of value as purely subjective, and so either irrelevant or a hindrance to rationality.213 We cross the line when our heads (appear to) develop at the cost of an emaciated chest. A human without a chest is no human at all, but a ghastly disproportionate caricature, whose “virtue” matches the monstrosity of its features. That such a being, be it an AI or an

erstwhile human, puts on the appearance of virtue through claims about universal good or declares its right to authority by announcing its highly developed intelligence as the sole path to pure science, will surely deceive many. But heeding Lewis, Plato, and even science fiction films like Transcendence will awaken in one the ostensibly simple, but deeply meaningful, experience of a beautiful person, awesome storm, or sublime waterfall. For it is through the childlike wonder of the value that parades itself before us that we strengthen our chests, and so, too, our very humanity.

Bibliography Allen, Irwin, Creator and Producer. Lost in Space. CBS: 1965–68. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. Gonzalez, Francisco J.. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Gordon, Jill. Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Hillenburg, Stephen, Creator and Executive Producer. SpongeBob Squarepants. United Plankton Pictures, 1999–2016. Howland, Jacob. “Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology.” Phoenix 45.3 (1991) 189–214. Hyland, Drew. Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. ———. “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1.1 (1968) 38–50. Kaukonen, Jorma. “Genesis.” On Quah. Grunt Records, 1974. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Peterson, Sandra. Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pfister, Wally. Transcendence. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014. Pieper, Josef. Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2000. Plato. Apology. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 17–36. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. ———. Letter VII. Translated by Glenn R. Morrow. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1646–67. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. ———. Phaedo. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 49–100. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. ———. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube; revised by C. D. C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 971–1223. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. ———. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 457–505. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Schultz, Anne-Marie. Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse. New York: Lexington,

2013. Wachowski, Laurence, and Andrew Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999.

167. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 34. 168. Ibid., 33–34. 169. Lewis, Abolition, 77–78. 170. Pfister, Transcendence. 171. More will be said about this as we proceed, but excellent arguments detailing the simple yet profound difference between interpretations of the tripartite soul can be found in the chapter entitled “Self-Mastery and Harmony in Plato’s Republic” in Schultz, Plato’s Socrates, 141–65. The selfmastery model involves reason as king, chest (spirited) as enforcer, and belly (appetitive) as subject— but this is justice in a feverish city/person (see Plato, Republic II, 372e–73a). The other model is one of harmony between the three, in which there is no king but all are in agreement. Notably, Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, a story illustrating the ideas of Abolition, exhibits the same sense of harmony in the heroes of the story. For it is emphatically not “pure reason” that drives the heroics of the protagonists, but love and passion and a desire for “the sweet and the straight” (299). A similar interpretation of Plato can be found in Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, 70–71; Hyland argues, against a reason-as-king interpretation of Plato’s Republic, by drawing from the Symposium and Phaedrus, in which Socrates declares that, far from being a problem to be overcome, erōs (passionate desire for the beautiful) is in fact fundamental to philosophy. 172. Plato, Phaedrus 274e. 173. anamimnēskō, the verb used in Plato for the kind of recollection related to virtue. Cf. Plato, Meno 81c and Plato, Phaedo 72e. 174. hupomnēsis 175. Phaedrus 275a–b. 176. Pieper, Enthusiasm, 101. 177. Plato, Phaedrus 277b–c. 178. Plato, Phaedrus 275e. One may respond that speeches, even written ones, are not offered indiscriminately, but to a definite audience. But this critique misses the problem of written speeches: when once something is written, the speaker no longer controls it like she may her own voice. Someone who comes across it may not understand it—either misusing it or rejecting it for the wrong reasons. 179. If Letter VII is authentic, then Plato declares openly, regarding the great questions of philosophy, “There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences” (341c). 180. See Hillenburg, SpongeBob Squarepants. 181. A few works that make this claim, most of which are noted elsewhere in this essay: Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue; Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy; Hyland, “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues,” 38–50; Howland, “Re-Reading Plato”; and Schultz, Plato’s Socrates. Also, see n. 10 above. 182. Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy, 133.

183. Plato, Phaedrus 249c–51b. 184. Hyland, “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues,” 38–50. 185. Plato, Apology 40c–1c, 42a. 186. Plato, Phaedo 89d–e. 187. Evidently, Socrates’s goal in the Phaedo, and elsewhere, was not primarily to prove life after death, but to encourage a life of philosophy. The centerpiece of the Phaedo is the discussion of the danger of being a “misologue” (hater of rational discourse, 89d–e) and a recounting by Socrates of his own turning to philosophy, 96a–100b, after an inability to answer some basic questions about the world, no less a question about the afterlife! In addition, the dialogue appears to be built around Socrates’s keen awareness of the suffering of his friends as they awaited his death. Socrates “healed [their] distress” (89a) and turned them back to philosophy—a fitting way to spend his last hours—and perhaps Plato has Socrates offer the argument for an afterlife solely for this purpose. Cf. Peterson, Socrates and Philosophy, 194. 188. Plato, Phaedo 114c. 189. Plato, Phaedrus 276a. 190. Ibid., 276e. 191. Ibid., 278a. 192. Ibid., 278a. 193. Ibid., 249c–50a. 194. Ibid., 249b–c: “. . . a human being must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity.” 195. Ibid., 255d–e. According to Socrates, the philosophical lover has a soul that is “smooth,” formed so that it might reflect the beauty of the beloved who is before it. 196. Ibid., 256a–b, shows Socrates describing how the pursuit of philosophy causes the lover and beloved together to achieve greatness. 197. Ibid., 247d. 198. Ibid., 247c. 199. Plato, Symposium 210a–b. 200. Plato, Phaedrus 255d. 201. Pfister, Transcendence. 202. Kaukonen, “Genesis.” The lyrics focus on travelling into the future together, a key idea in the film. 203. This idea of creating a god is a central plot point. See n. 41 below. 204. The idea of uploading a consciousness, though a necessary part of the plot, should raise some skeptical eyebrows. The film, in a rather hasty manner, “solves” the problem of consciousness: consciousness is the pattern of thoughts. While perhaps not terribly illuminating, Plato’s and Lewis’s distinction between the possession of facts and the ordering of them based on value recognition may be reflected in this idea of thought patterns. The film as a whole seems to support this interpretation.

205. To be more specific: an act of value recognition that stands against the desires of the belly alone (desire for continued existence, among other things) and the desires of the head alone (i.e., abstract reasoning). 206. Upon Evelyn’s waking from a recurring nightmare, AI-Will asks her how she is doing. He quickly proceeds to talk of a new breakthrough he has achieved. 207. Christian images abound in the film. Upon encountering AI-Will or his works, various characters exclaim either “My God” or “Jesus Christ.” Will dies and resurrects with a new, perfected body, he fills the world with himself, making it better, uniting all people who come to him (cf. the Holy Spirit), and sacrifices himself to save the world. Of course, these images do not imply a positive endorsement of religion, for insofar as Will reflects God, it is only the death of God that frees humanity —a claim that echoes that of Nietzsche. 208. Is Will telling the truth? It seems so. Immediately upon being uploaded, Will has some trouble “thinking.” He complains of the information appearing to him in a strangely ordered way, and proceeds to rewrite his own code to adjust the ordering of information to a pattern—a more human pattern—of thinking (see n. 201 above). He then immediately begins his program of world-improvement, pursued out of his love for Evelyn who desires a utopia. Just as Lewis and Plato hint that recognition of value gives order to thought, and that without such value recognition, information has no meaningful structure, we see in the newly uploaded Will disordered thought, like a valueless computer, and in the self-reprogrammed Will, orderly (value-directed) thought. He has a purpose, confused though it may be, after rewriting his code. Perhaps becoming re-incarnate is necessary for clearer value-recognition? 209. Evelyn declares late in the film, “I’ve gotten everything I ever asked for.” 210. Lewis, Abolition, 35. 211. This problem of loving an abstract idea as opposed to the individual person appears throughout literature and film, perhaps most notably in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A doctor declares, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular” (61), implying that love of the abstract corrupts love of the concrete person. 1 John 4:20, too, may reflect the primacy of the concrete over the abstract, for love of the unseen God cannot be had without love for one’s “brother” who is seen. 212. Bree declares that killing Martin, one of the enhanced minions, “[g]ave him his humanity back.” Joseph Tagger, on the other hand, simply declares that the real Martin had died long ago, upon being enhanced. Bree seems to believe that death can be a way to save humanity—or, perhaps more to the point, of saving that particular human. An irony, indeed! 213. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength exhibits this attempt to undermine recognition of value for the purpose of “pure rationality” through the training of the objectivity room. It is a room in which things are all a little off, imbalanced, lacking uniformity, corrupted, or made ugly. The purpose is essentially to break any passion for the beautiful, the straight, and the good.

8 The Failure of Men without Chests in Blade Runner by Mark D. Sadler

. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, declares that the authors of The Green Book fail mankind by producing “what may be called Men without Chests.”214 Lewis observes that mankind is properly a triune being

C

with Intellect, Sentiment, and Animal Appetite (paralleling Plato’s description of Reason, Spirit, and Appetite),215 and the lack of attention to the sentiment of a person leaves her/him to be nothing more than merely either a cerebral or a visceral person.216 This absence of proper affections is a concern for Augustine as he describes the work of the ordo amoris.217 To be fully and properly a person is to not neglect the “chest” or the work of what I am describing here as “proper sentiment.”218 Can a human person really understand the importance of community if our relationships merely consist of rationalistic ends-means calculation? Lewis believes the answer to this is a resounding “No!” Lewis insists that human persons must recognize the “doctrine of objective value” by which we may have a proper (Lewis may insist on the term true) understanding of the Universe and each other.219 Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,220 released June 1982, is an excellent investigation into a world where characters interact on an uneven field and where the neglect of the “chest” contributes to a dystopic culture of pragmatism, scientific advance, and fatalism. Blade Runner, which has a strong and perhaps cult-like following, is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where replicants were engineered by the Tyrell Corporation to help (or, rather, to serve) mankind. The film has a dark and brooding feel. Scott presents the audience with a classic film noir. Michael Martin rightly describes the setting as:

. . . an enigma-bearing sphinx composed of a Philip Marlowelike voice-over and the stock characters and costumes of film noir complemented with Metropolis-inspired visuals. We see film noir’s slow-moving fans and Venetian blinds; the requisite copious amounts of cigarette smoke and hard liquor; the femme fatale and the hard-boiled detective with a soft spot for a dame in trouble. We find these noir accoutrements, however, in a surreal city-scape of pyramid-like buildings [and] floating video billboards . . . .221 Scott’s version provides a backdrop of personal disaster—a fatalist surrender to the inevitable failure of society. Blade Runner tells the story of one man’s pursuit of dangerous replicants who have returned to the planet Earth. Enter the apparent protagonist Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford). Deckard is a blade runner, an über-cop who finds and “retires” replicants before those replicants cause unwanted havoc on planet Earth. While Deckard has most of the screen time during the one hour and fiftyseven minute-film his role as protagonist is a charade. Deckard plays more the role of wandering conscience as the film pursues a small band of replicants who have returned to Earth. What benefit, if any, is there for a world organized and governed without provision for proper sentiment? Blade Runner grants the audience a powerful investigation into the world proposed by The Green Book, a world feared and condemned by Lewis. What follows is a summary look into the film’s Earth and how the characters Deckard and Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) grapple with the importance of proper sentiment—beginning as men without it, then struggling with it, and finally achieving it. Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets.222

In a dim and smoky room we see two men seated across from each other at a table. There is a machine in front of the man on the left. On the machine letters are etched: “Voight-Kampff.” The man on the right, Mr. Holden, is adjusting the machine so that he can best evaluate the man seated across from him, Leon. The machine will measure Leon’s responses so that the observer can determine if Leon is human or a replicant. The Voight-Kampff machine seems to measure physical responses in the subject as Mr. Holden delivers a verbal narrative carefully crafted to entice empathy in the subject. As the test begins Leon wants to know why he is supposed to be walking in a desert and what a tortoise is. He is seeking to know so that he can understand. Mr. Holden maintains a matter-of-fact attitude as he continues with the VoightKampff test. Mr. Holden is trying to discern if Leon has genuine “emotional responses” to the questions. The replicant is a manmade creation of genetic and biological engineering. It is nearly but not completely human. Leon’s inability to perform well on the test or his unwillingness to continue with the test prompts him to kill Mr. Holden during the test, and thus the film’s investigation begins. With this first interaction of characters in the film Scott presents the audience with a man with no chest. Murder! We find out later as Deckard meets with his old boss, Bryant, that more than twenty humans were killed by the small band of replicants as they sought to escape their enslavement and return to Earth. Mass murder! Scott does not want us to like Leon or his accomplices. Leon is a moral failure (murderer), unintelligent (portrayed as slow witted), immature and emotionally distant (almost childlike in his attachments as exampled by his concern over his photographs of past events) and a devoted and obedient follower of the stronger-willed Batty. Leon’s character is our first introduction to the replicants and Scott chooses the most deficient replicant to set the tone. Throughout his time in the film Leon shows no remorse or compassion. But where Leon fails to approximate proper sentiment Batty will later succeed. I will focus mainly on the characters Batty and Deckard. Deckard is introduced to the audience as he is grabbing a meal from a street vendor. Gaff (Edward James Olmos) appears behind Deckard and interrupts his meal demanding Deckard accompany Gaff to see Bryant, Deckard’s old boss. This subdued and early moment gives us a glimpse of a dispassionate Deckard. He

doesn’t seem to be living completely “in the now.”223 His life seems to be a mechanical process of enduring life but not actually enjoying it. Gaff’s interruption is handled no differently than his meal. While Deckard clearly orders four pieces of fish (signaled by holding up four fingers) he receives only two. He tried to point this out to the vendor but without success. There is no emotional variation; there is neither a heightened sense of being wronged nor the apparent energy to pursue his four-fish desire. Likewise, Deckard is not emotionally invested in his interaction with Gaff as he is told to report to a man who is no longer Deckard’s boss. Deckard is retired but shows no real interest in making this point clear to Gaff; he is a man without an obvious direction in life; he is more like passive flotsam—drifting from moment to moment. What I observe in particular is a lack of, or at least a lack of evidence for, proper sentiment.224 Throughout the film Deckard executes his task of “retiring” replicants with a matter-of-fact nonchalance until he is introduced to Rachael (played by Sean Young). Deckard arrives at the Tyrell Corporation (a large pyramid-shaped building) to meet Dr. Eldon Tyrell (played by Joe Turkel), the creator of the Nexus series replicants, in order to try the Voight-Kampff test on the new Nexus model six and learn how to tell the difference between this newest replicant and a genuine human person. Tyrell asks “Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris?” He then challenges Deckard: “I want to see it work on a person. I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive.” He indicates Deckard try the test on his assistant Rachael. Deckard complies with little appearance of concern and begins to set up the test when Rachael asks Deckard “May I ask a personal question?” “Go ahead.” “Have you ever retired a human by mistake?” The matter-of-fact Deckard pauses and then in his now familiar monotone replies, “No.” Deckard only wants to go about his business. The sooner his task is complete the sooner he can go back to his non-life. The test lasts longer than usual, but in the end Deckard confirms that Rachael is in fact a replicant. Deckard is surprised that she does not know it: “How can it not know what it is?” Deckard’s relationship with Rachael goes from “she” to “it” in the instant of recognition that she is a replicant. Rachael is no longer a person but property, no longer due respect or consideration, no longer a relatum but an object. Where is that part of Deckard that promotes

relationships? Where are his values? His proper sentiment? Where is his “chest”? Where is that important part of knowledge of the self that equips each of us to participate in a complex and integrated world? Why does he not care about Rachael’s confusion and why doesn’t Tyrell’s matter-of-fact attitude affect him? Deckard is a person that is as much an automaton, a replicant, as those he seeks to chase down. He looks into the world like the consummate consumer, the pragmatist, ignoring anything like an essential value. The world is merely a backdrop to his existence: his rather mundane and nearly monochromatic existence. Scott seems to intend as much when Tyrell proudly proclaims that “Commerce is our business here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto. Rachael is an experiment; nothing more.” This apparently startles Deckard. Why? Is he shocked by the lack of compassion in Tyrell’s description of Rachael? Of the Tyrell Corporation’s pure capitalism? Is there something more going on? Tyrell continues in his lecturing style: “We began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and, consequently, we can control them better.” Tyrell is describing an artificial “chest” for the replicants. This seems an odd confession from Tyrell: that “men without chests” are incomplete and uncontrollable. By providing the right sorts of implanted memories the Tyrell Corporation seems to be implementing a strategy of Lewis: “the right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”225 Do these implants include items like literature, history, and the arts? Or are they merely human experience? But we should not ignore Tyrell’s confession that this artificial “chest” is merely a convention for controlling the replicants. They are slaves. They were created for fulfilling the desires of their creators with no thought given to their own possible desires and needs. They are just as matter-of-factly retired when their intentionally short life is complete. When Batty visits a genetic designer to gain information about the Nexus Six model, the designer, Chew, realizes “You are a replicant. . . . You illegal. Can’t come here!” Batty’s response is chilling as he speaks from William Blake’s America: A Prophecy. “Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d. Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.”

Blake’s poem was addressing the colonists’ liberation from King George III casting it as a religious struggle as Orc violently created freedom.226 Is this appropriation of Blake’s poem an implant or the result of Batty’s own developing axiology? Is Batty developing proper sentiment? What quickly becomes clear is that Batty is motivated to find a means to extend that which he believes is of the most value: his life. The film shifts back to Deckard as he begins looking for Leon and the other three replicants. As Gaff and Deckard investigate the apartment recently vacated by the replicants we are given a glimpse of Deckard’s reverie: “Replicants weren’t supposed to have feelings. . . . [N]either were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me? Leon’s pictures had to be as phony as Rachael’s. I didn’t know why a Replicant would collect photos. Maybe they were like Rachael, . . . they needed memories.” As Deckard returns home he watches the recording of Leon’s interview and subsequent killing of Deckard’s predecessor. He is gathering clues as he continues the hunt for the rebelling replicants. He is reminded that he is not only a hunter, but he is also hunted—he is in just as much danger as the replicants. Perhaps this is why he is so startled by Rachael’s appearing from the shadows as his elevator opens to his apartment’s floor. He retires replicants and now one was standing outside his apartment. Is she dangerous? Yes, but the danger is not a physical violence; it is emotional—it is of the chest. Rachael shows him photos of her childhood and as Deckard relaxes in a chair he starts describing her “private” memories of playing doctor and watching a spider hatch concluding victoriously that they are merely “implants. Those aren’t your memories! They’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s.” Here, the story slows almost to a pause as Rachael is visibly shaken. The very memories she has held onto as a framework of her identity have been casually ripped from her.227 Rachael’s look of loss seems to pierce Deckard’s façade and as her face goes from confusion to tearful loss Deckard relents: “Okay. Bad joke. I made a bad joke. You’re not a Replicant. . . . No. Really, I’m sorry.” Why does Deckard lie to her? Why would he suddenly back away from something so obviously true? Deckard has kept himself alive and efficient by not caring, by not allowing himself to entertain filling his empty chest with proper sentiment. How should anyone respond to another being in obvious emotional pain? Perhaps this is a new concept for Deckard.

The audience can’t know because we have no information of his past. We, like the replicants, have no memories that anchor our sentiment; however, Rachael acts as though she has proper sentiment. Her face begins to fade behind tears as she wrestles with the truth that she is not who she thought she was. Her mind moves from an external reality to an internal investigation. Who is she? While Deckard searches for a clean glass for the drink he has offered her she considers her photograph for a moment and then suddenly and quietly leaves, alone with her confusion. Here the film provides a quiet musical score as Deckard, alone, looks through the photos left in a hotel room by Leon. Deckard is considering his role. His duty. His position in what was, until now, a world that made sense. The film picks up the pace now as Deckard starts piecing together his clues and begins to locate one replicant after another. Although Deckard is playing more the action-hero role, there is an intentional pause. He finds himself looking at one of the photos left by Rachael and he stops his investigation to call her and invite her to join him. A social moment that breaks the rhythm of the story and reveals that Deckard is conflicted. He appears clumsy with his emotions and his intentions. As if he can’t really decide who he wants to be. But in a short time Deckard decides. He is a blade runner who has an assignment, and his emotions are suppressed. He continues his pursuit of the replicant Salome and after a violent chase retires her. As Leon watches from the gathering crowd, Deckard is visibly shaken. Another killing to his credit, but he seems somehow lost; he is unable to completely shake himself of the idea that he just killed another person. His unused and once-empty chest struggles to cooperate with what he (thinks he) knows to be true.228 Enter Bryant, who reminds him he has four more replicants to retire. “Three,” Deckard corrects him, “there’s three to go.” Did Deckard forget about Rachael? Bryant reminds him that Rachael is missing— on the run. And Deckard now has Rachael plus the remaining three murdering replicants to retire. It becomes obvious that Deckard is looking for Rachael but the look on his face is more like concern than determination. At this moment, when Deckard is giving his sentiment permission to exist, Leon grabs Deckard. During their brief tussle on the street Leon observes that “It’s painful to live in fear, isn’t it?” Just one more bit of kindling for the fire that is beginning to grow in Deckard’s chest. First, he felt a twinge of guilt

for hurting Rachael with the information that she is a replicant. Then he struggled with remorse over the retiring of Salome, followed by a sense of duty or responsibility for Rachael. Each moment adds another bit of fuel to Deckard’s fire. Just as Leon is about to kill Deckard a shot rings out and Leon falls to the ground to reveal Rachael behind him with Deckard’s lost weapon.229 The scene changes to Rachael and Deckard sharing a drink when Deckard confesses that he gets the “shakes” every time he retires a replicant and that it is just part of the business. Perhaps Deckard’s problem is not that his chest is empty as much as it is ignored. Lewis warns us that ignoring proper sentiment could lead humanity to a callous and empty state of existence: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”230 In Blade Runner the replicants, by not having proper sentiment, are prevented from completely integrating into society. They are programmed for a particular purpose or mission and then those who created or employ the replicants come to fear them because the replicants rebel. Like those whom Lewis describes these replicants are incomplete and yet we demand these incomplete creations perform as if they were whole. The Blade Runner world demands morality and obedience from the replicants who were, by design, denied the very core component that would equip them for obedience and morality: proper sentiment. If the replicants had been created with proper sentiment then, perhaps, they would recognize the nobility of their programming or mission and seek to accomplish those assigned tasks. The tragedy of the Blade Runner world is that very few have the proper sentiment necessary to guide their recreating it in the replicants.231 After a series of typical action movie moments the film brings together the two characters with empty chest: Batty and Deckard. Batty and Deckard have much in common at this moment in the film: 1. They are both struggling to live.232 2. Both are attempting, in his own way, to sidestep the inevitable. Batty is trying to avoid his predetermined death and Deckard is seeking to avoid

becoming just another lonesome replicant hunter. 3. Both want a specific future. For Batty it is to enjoy the freedom he has been denied—freedom from fear and freedom from a slave’s existence. Deckard wants to be free from the blade runner’s life of retiring replicants and free to pursue the blossoming affection he has for Rachael.233 4. Both are afraid. We come to the finale of the film, an encounter between two characters lacking proper sentiment, a lack which has helped both to do questionable things. They have killed others, violated the mores of their day, and walked away from their duties. These two empty persons meet for what the audience rightly anticipates as a showdown—winner take all. It begins that way. Deckard quickly retires Pris and when Batty looks at the inert Pris there is something like emotion in his face. Not just a sympathetic sense of loss but anger. The need for vengeance. He pauses to kiss Pris goodbye and then questions Deckard’s trying to shoot him: “I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren’t you the good man?” Batty isn’t merely issuing a sarcastic line here; he is playing, in part, the conscience. He is asking for value to be normed and established. There is in Batty, like Deckard, a battle going on for a sense of right and of proper. Batty is attempting, in small fleeting moments, to sort out this world for himself. Emotions rising up in an inexperienced mind. Demands for revenge and longing for more life. He breaks two fingers of Deckard’s weapon hand—one for Zhora and one for Pris, he says. This is, of course, also an action film, so these pauses are brief flickers as the pace of the film continues to accelerate. Batty quickly takes on the roles of grieving lover and hunter. Deckard is now the hunted. Perhaps too frightened to complete his task of retiring the replicants, Deckard flees, trying to find a place of safety only to encounter Batty empty-handed. The battle is no longer about duty—it is about survival. The film suddenly slows as Deckard finds himself hanging on the side of a tall building after jumping to escape Batty. The fear that Deckard feels hanging at the feet of a triumphant Batty is more than palpable as Batty asks “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” But as Batty is standing above his enemy something like understanding seems to pass over his face. He is considering, thinking, asking himself . . . what? Batty is trying to decide something and

just as Deckard’s grip fails Batty reaches out and grabs Deckard pulling him up to the roof and to safety.234 Deckard doesn’t understand. Batty tries to help him understand with a brief soliloquy. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those . . . moments will be lost . . . in time . . . like . . . tears . . . in rain. Time . . . to die. Batty is not threatening Deckard, though Deckard surely thought he was going to be “retired.” But no: Batty has embraced the burden of being a whole person with proper sentiment. Life is precious. Too precious for Batty to reach out and take away life from Deckard. Instead, Batty realizes the loss the world will endure and as a final gesture releases the pigeon he was holding as he surrenders to the inevitable. Death was a loss for Batty. “Like tears in rain,” all he had recorded and discovered would be gone. Life was more than continuance of his person; life, for Batty, was the precious commodity that afforded him the opportunity to live a life full and complete. Death was a loss for Batty only because the world was losing a person who understood how important it was to live a full life—a life with proper sentiment. Death was also the price Batty had to pay to embrace this truth. To be a person with a full chest was to risk loss, pain, and rejection. The cost of continuing his life as it had been was too high for Batty. He would have to remain a being with an empty chest and, being confronted with this epiphany, Batty chose to be the complete being even though the cost was death. He chose to die complete rather than to fight to live incomplete. The world was bigger and more beautiful than Batty’s utilitarian programmed assessment suggested. Lewis describes this when he observes that “It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction,

that something of its reality has been lost.”235 The result is what Lewis had earlier described as the “trousered ape” and the “urban blockhead.” Batty is not content to remain a pitifully incomplete being. Yes, death is a very steep price but in addition to death Roy Batty also embraced empathy in dealing with his hunter Deckard. Batty could have insisted on one last killing act. He could have rationalized the justified death of Deckard. After all, Deckard was trying to end his life prematurely; Deckard was no better than Batty. They are both killers and empty-chested beings. But the gift of proper sentiment, and its burden, is that all life is precious and important. Perhaps Batty didn’t have to kill Deckard; perhaps, Batty could just watch Deckard struggle and fail to hold onto the building. Batty could simply not interfere with Deckard’s impending death. But proper sentiment demanded mercy. It demanded that Batty intercede and honor the value represented by Deckard’s struggle. Here, we find Batty demonstrating what Lewis declares: For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.236 Batty needed to act. He needed to fulfill an obligation to proper sentiment. And in doing so he created an implant of a sort in Deckard. Batty creates a memory for Deckard that will act as a “cushion or pillow for [his] emotions” resulting in Deckard’s being controlled in the right manner. An interesting irony that the saving act of a replicant should create (implant?) in Deckard, who we are supposed to believe is human, a memory that will have the power to control his actions. The film ends with Deckard being startled out of his reverie by Gaff who, curiously, speaks clear English now: “I guess you’re through, huh?” To this Deckard properly responds that he isn’t “through” or at “the end of something,” but he is “Finished.” He is complete. Somehow he

finds his chest full and complete. Gaff’s parting words are both a stimulus for action by Deckard and a summary of the truth Batty embraced: “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” He demonstrates this by going back to his apartment to find and save Rachael. But is she still alive? Slowly and gently he pulls the sheet off of Rachael’s face. Is she dead or only sleeping? When she awakes he sighs in relief and asks two questions: “Do you love me?” and “Do you trust me?” An affirmative answer to both is all his now complete and full chest needs. She is not a curious product of complex bioengineering. She is someone of value and importance. Kissing Rachael is his only response.237 Leaving his apartment, for what seems to be the last time, Deckard remembers Gaff’s last words about no one living forever and he quietly nods in agreement. He has already learned and internalized Batty’s lesson—Batty’s implant. He can live with the uncertainty now that he is a finished and complete person—a person with proper sentiment. Which Batty and which Deckard do we prefer? The early versions that are violent, pragmatic, and devoid of proper sentiment? These empty-chested characters who perpetuate the dystopic world of Blade Runner? Or should we instead prefer the characters as they are at the end of the film? Yes, Batty dies, but he dies an honorable man. He dies the savior of Deckard and he dies acknowledging the value of others like himself. They have memories that will be lost like tears in the rain. While persons are alive, so also are the memories. Deckard breaks with prescriptive duty. Perhaps a duty that, as I earlier observed, perpetuates the dystopic world of Blade Runner. Instead Deckard chooses the value of life and person over professional duty. He welcomes the smoldering flame in his chest and embraces proper sentiment that, while demanding he disobey the law of the land, acknowledges the value of Rachael’s life and his own. The ending comes with a mild caution that Lewis would affirm: if we embrace proper sentiment we may have to live a life in disobedience and that can be a lonely life. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”238 But Lewis also declared: “I desire the continuance and happiness of my country (and species), but then I also desire that they should be people of a certain sort, behaving in a certain way.”239 Even if we are to live, like Deckard, a singular and lonely life on the run from the law for the

sake of proper sentiment, it is a life worth living—live the life of a complete person.

Bibliography Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 1972. Doll, Susan, and Greg Faller. “Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction.” Literature Film Quarterly 14.2 (1986) 89–100. Gwaltney, Marilyn. “Androids as a Device for Reflection on Personhood.” In Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, edited by Judith Kerman, 32–39. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Helm, Paul. “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” Philosophy 54.208 (1979) 173–85. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kolb, William M. “Blade Runner Film Notes.” In Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, edited by Judith Kerman, 154–77. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man, or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: HarperCollins ebooks, 2009. Kindle file. ———. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. ———. God in the Dock. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Nidditch. New York: Penguin, 1975. Martin, Michael. “Meditations on Blade Runner.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 17 (2005) 105–22. Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991. Rowlands, Mark. The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained through Science Fiction Films. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme). Translated by Carol Macomber. Edited by John Kulw. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1982.

214. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 8. References are to the edition found online at https://archive.org/details/TheAbolitionOfMan_229. The Green Book was Alex King and Martin Ketley, The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing (1939). 215. Republic, 439d–e. 216. Lewis immediately introduces a passage from The Green Book addressing Coleridge at the waterfall to make his point. The passage discusses the statements made by two tourists, and the authors of The Green Book conclude that their statements are value statements and as such should properly be understood as expressions of personal feeling. This bears a strong resemblance to David Hume’s

position on value statements and moral statements in particular. See, for example, David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Book Two. 217. Augustine, The City of God, 15.22; “virtus est ordo amoris.” 218. Lewis observes that “St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it;” Abolition, 6. 219. Ibid., 7. 220. Scott, Blade Runner. 221. Martin, “Meditations on Blade Runner,” 106. 222. Introductory scene text of Blade Runner, 1982. 223. Deckard embodies, at this early stage, Sartre’s man as a being whose existence precedes his essence. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 22. 224. I am reminded of Aristotle’s “We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.” The Nicomachean Ethics, 4.5. 225. Lewis, Abolition, 6. 226. Kolb, “Blade Runner Film Notes,” 160. See also Doll and Faller, “Blade Runner and Genre,” 89–100. 227. While the importance of memory for identity is important in Blade Runner I will not take time to address it fully here. However, John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, “Chapter XXVII: Of Identity and Diversity,” proposes that while a human being is merely a physical construct the personhood (identity) of that being is directly connected to memory. See also Helm, “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity,” 173–85. 228. The film even includes a struggling heartbeat sound in the soundtrack as Deckard chases and retires Salome. 229. Throughout the film, as in this scene, the eyes serve as a prompt or metaphor for the film’s concern about personhood. The eyes are mentioned, are described, and find themselves emphasized on screen. According to a colloquialism the eyes are supposed to be the window to a person’s soul. Perhaps Scott has this in mind when people are killed by eye gouging or when Batty describes what his eyes have seen in his death scene. 230. Lewis, Abolition, 9. 231. It is more than a curiosity that so many films set in dystopian worlds are populated by various characters of authority who seem to have empty chests. See, for example, Metropolis (1927); Planet of the Apes (1968); Soylent Green (1973); Mad Max (1979); Brave New World (1980); Escape from New York (1981); The Terminator (1984); RoboCop (1987); The Fifth Element (1997); Gattaca (1997); The Matrix (1999); Equilibrium (2002); Minority Report (2002); and V for Vendetta (2006). 232. Gwaltney observes that “Roy Batty develops into a sympathetic character. Our understanding of his cruelty changes as we come to understand it as a very human reaction to his existential situation . . . .” Gwaltney, “Androids as a Device,” 33. 233. For more on the use of “a future” see Rowlands, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe,

233–58. 234. It is not the point of this essay to explore the religious imagery of Blade Runner, but the Christlikeness of the rescue scene here is inescapable. Batty, rescuing the one who sought to harm him, with spikes through his hands raises up Deckard even as he breathes his last. 235. Lewis, Abolition, 28. 236. Ibid., 5–6. 237. I am not overlooking the scene (well known to Blade Runner fans) of Deckard discovering the unicorn origami. It is simply too far outside this essay’s purview. 238. Lewis, The Four Loves, 169. 239. Lewis, God in the Dock, 330.

Part II

The Way “But before virtue the immortal Gods have placed the sweat of labour, and long and steep is the way thither, and rugged at first; but when you have reached the top, although difficult before, it is then easy.” —Hesiod as quoted by Plato in Laws

9 Technology and the Emotional Spectrum in Green Lantern: The Animated Series by Scott Shiffer

In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might Beware my power—Green Lantern’s light! —Green Lantern Oath

Introduction

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hat does the Green Lantern have to do with objective moral truth? How do characters in the show understand honor, truth, and virtue?240 How

can something produced for younger viewers teach us about the abolition of man? And what is a Green Lantern anyway? The Green Lantern Corps is a made up of a group of intergalactic peacekeepers who use emotional energy technologically harnessed into a power battery and transferred to a ring. Each lantern charges his or her ring by holding it near the power battery and repeating an oath.241 Each member wears the ring as a weapon used to promote justice throughout the universe. The technology used to harness the energy allows members of the Corps to create physical constructs made of light to protect and serve many different life-forms on numerous planets across the galaxy. The Corps is led by an ancient group of beings known as the Guardians, little blue men and women who are incredibly wise and who hold almost deific powers. They have existed for centuries and witnessed the universe when it was ruled by chaos. They saw a need to put an end to the chaos and promote order, so they created robots to keep peace. The robots, because they were devoid of

emotions, could not make moral judgments. As a result, they malfunctioned, believing that all emotion was a liability to peace and therefore determining to kill anything with emotion in order to best keep peace. The Guardians deactivated these robots and then replaced them with the Green Lanterns, living beings from every sector of the galaxy who had the aptitude for making ethical decisions and whom the Guardians could train and develop to make proper ethical judgments; they were able to use their emotions to make more informed decisions about how to best keep peace and put chaos under control. The Lanterns were necessary in order to have “men with chests”— Lewis’s name for people whose emotions have been trained to respond properly to moral truth—to keep justice and promote virtue in the galaxy. Over time the Guardians lost sight of the importance of each different emotion and became solely focused on keeping justice. This is seen as a flaw in their thinking at several points throughout the series. The power of justice is harnessed through green light on the emotional spectrum. Over time, additional power batteries were created to harness the power of other emotions including sapphire for love, orange for greed, red for rage, and blue for hope. Green Lantern: The Animated Series242 tells the story of Hal Jordan the Green Lantern of Earth as he and his rag-tag team of Lanterns work to prevent the invasion of an army seeking to ignite an intergalactic war. Once the war is averted, the team faces a new threat; they must stop the AntiMonitor from destroying all life in the universe.243 Hal is joined by Honor Guard member Kilowog,244 who serves as the team’s muscle; Aya, the artificial intelligence unit who navigates the team’s spaceship; and Razer, a deserter of the Red Lantern Corps now looking for a different path to follow. As the team moves through frontier space visiting planets and space stations, they must learn to work together to solve problems, keep peace, and apprehend villains. As is the case with many comic book heroes, in this show the team does not kill the enemy. Killing is not viewed as an act of justice and the team members do not believe they are allowed to be the executioners for the criminals they apprehend. Part of understanding justice is letting the legal systems with jurisdiction over a crime work to pass appropriate judgment on the evildoers. Hal and Kilowog are tasked with imparting virtue to both Razer and Aya.

Razer is considered to be without virtue as his initial actions with the team are all motivated by hate. Aya on the other hand has no concept of how emotions work or the role they play in ethics as she is an artificially intelligent being programed only to grasp logic—though she seems to be gifted with curiosity. Throughout the series, Hal intends to train Razer and Aya to become what C. S. Lewis describes as “men with chests,” people whose emotions have been trained to recognize and uphold objective moral truth.245 To become men with chests, these characters must develop a moral foundation for their beliefs and actions. This foundation must be based on universal concepts of morality and must allow the characters to look at knowledge and emotion as they align their heads and their hearts around this universal, absolute standard. The Lanterns do not define their own truths; the principles they uphold are viewed on a universal scale, thus creating an absolute understanding of what is true, right, and wrong. In short, they seek to uphold what Lewis refers to as the Tao. The cartoon never attempts to explain the universal principles of morality, but as new situations arise, ethical topics are discussed by the team members and Hal and Kilowog often find themselves explaining why they hold to their beliefs. They are tasked with showing the foundations of their truth claims. The following material will survey how Razer and Aya are trained by Hal and Kilowog as the story progresses. Specific events in the series will be highlighted to show how the characters grow, how technology is used, and how the forces of good and evil confront each other. The first section, Setting the Stage, will briefly illustrate how Hal and Kilowog meet Razer and Aya and how they come to take responsibility for their training. The second section, The War of Light, will catalog the adventures of the crew as they travel from planet to planet trying to make it back to Oa. This section will show how all the characters grow from their experiences and how they uncover dark secrets from their leaders’ past. The third section, Freedom and Technology, will show how technology becomes more important as the series progresses, especially in how it is used to bring about destruction. This section will focus on the purpose of life, the corruption of living beings, and the ability to overcome evil with good. The final section of the chapter will conclude by directly relating the Abolition of Man to Green Lantern: The Animated Series.

Setting the Stage Life circumstances shape a person’s values and cultivate their understandings of right and wrong. In this section, one will see how Razer was manipulated to embrace rage over hope and how the emotional wounds from his past have caused him to inaccurately understand the Tao. This section will also show how Aya’s not having a past makes her truly function as a blank slate. The team will have the opportunity to shape her character, but first they must view her as a real being. Hal and Kilowog take a new ship called the Interceptor on a mission to the far regions of space to answer the call of a distress signal. The ship is navigated by an Artificial Intelligence system. This system calls itself Aya and she quickly creates for herself a physical shell into which to download her memory and processors when she wishes to leave the ship with the two Lanterns. It is through the process of taking on a physical manifestation that the team views her as more of a person than a computer. It is worth noting that her body makes her seem more real and is akin to the Jewish concept of a person being an animated body with a soul. She uses the shell to develop a sense of what it is like to be a person. When Hal and Kilowog reach their destination, they find a Green Lantern being attacked by two individuals wielding red power rings. These individuals are part of the Red Lantern Corps. This Corps is made up of members who are fueled by rage. The members of this team have experienced great loss, but rather than properly working through the problems and healing from their pain, they have chosen to bring suffering upon others. Their ultimate goal is to use the power in their rings to destroy the galaxy. In the battle, one of the Red Lanterns, a young man named Razer, is left for dead by his own teammates. Hal and Kilowog arrest Razer and bring him into their ship as a prisoner. It is not long before the Green Lanterns choose to let Razer out of his cell. He is filled with emotional hurt and blindly seeks revenge on everything around him. He is controlled by the evil technology in his ring. Later it is even revealed that the leader of the Red Lanterns caused certain events to unfold in Razer’s life so that his emotions would be manipulated and he would choose rage over hope, so that he would begin to love destruction more than the beauty of building up.

With blood and rage of crimson red, We fill men’s souls with darkest dread, And twist your minds to pain and hate, We’ll burn you all—that is your fate! —Red Lantern Oath (Cartoon Version) Razer is filled with hate and distrust, and he despises virtue. The great loss experienced in Razer’s life was the death of his wife. Aya does not understand what virtue is or why people follow their emotions and she does not understand the feelings attached to circumstances in life. Aya has no concept of what it means to lose someone you love. She does not understand love at all, but she wishes to comprehend this and other emotions. She is curious as to why Razer has reacted to his loss the way he has and why it has controlled his actions. Hal and Kilowog take responsibility for both Aya and Razer and begin showing them what it means to be a Green Lantern. This, of course, includes teachings about moral character, virtue, and justice.

The War of Light As the crew of the Interceptor heads back to their home base on the Planet of Oa,246 they make several stops along the way that require them to help those in need, seek truth, and teach virtue. The necessary stops prove to be fertile situations for teaching Aya and Razer. These stops bring about issues of whether or not the end justifies the means, what it means to trust another person, what it means to let the punishment fit the crime, what it means to fight for peace, and what it means to sacrifice oneself for the greater good. In the episode “Heir Apparent,” a Green Lantern has died and the ring is programmed to find a new bearer.247 The ring chooses a princess, but her brother is upset that he was not chosen instead. The brother is deceitful and wants to be a Green Lantern so badly that he is willing to commit crimes in an attempt to gain a ring meant to be used for enforcing justice. The ring will not work on him because his heart is not in the right place; he has no moral chest, no love of the good. On the other hand, his sister does not seek fame, she is just in her rulings, and she desires to do good for the people under her rule. The ring chooses her because she is full of virtue. After this the team lands on a planet where two people groups are at war.

One groups mines yellow stones; this group resembles jellyfish, having tentacles and bubble-shaped heads. This group does not speak but they clearly communicate together and work in harmony. The other group uses these same stones to fashion weapons, jewelry, and even utensils for cooking. They resemble humans more than the other group. The group that uses the stones for their livelihood day to day is filled with paranoia towards the race that mines the stones. The group believes that the miners want to take all they have made from the stones so that they will not be able to survive. In reality, the stones cause fear and paranoia. They make those who are in contact with them distrust others. The stones are actually making the group who uses them strike out against the miners. On the other hand, the miners know what the stones do, but their species is not affected by them. The Lanterns must help the group affected by the stones to see what the stones are doing to them. The virtue associated with giving of oneself for the good of others causes the Lanterns to put themselves into danger for the good of both races. In doing so, they are able to further show Aya and Razer what it means to be a Lantern and how important it is not to let your technology control you. After the team stops the civil war and leaves the planet, they encounter a dangerous creature resembling a giant dragon in space that threatens to destroy their ship. The team is rescued by several characters who have fashioned sapphire power rings fueled by the emotion of love. These ring bearers call themselves the Star Sapphires. They use their rings to calm and tame the creature. The Green Lantern team accepts the Sapphire’s invitation to visit their planet. When they arrive, the team’s rings are drained and the team learns that the invitation was a ploy to take their power and lock them in crystals. The Sapphires believe that the only way to preserve peace and harmony is to lock up everyone who acts on emotions other than love. Like those with the yellow stones, the Sapphires are controlled by their technology and it has corrupted them. They have lost sight of the value of other emotions. Hal and Kilowog work to show the Sapphires that their view of love is misdirected. They teach them that love is giving and that it works in conjunction with honor. For hearts long lost and full of fright, For those alone in Blackest Night. Accept our ring and join our fight, Love conquers all with violet light!

—The Star Sapphire Oath As the team finally returns to Oa they learn that the Guardians, their trusted leaders, buried a secret in the distant past. Before creating the Green Lantern Corps, the Guardians created a group of Robots known as the Manhunters. These robots were designed to keep peace, but they had a flaw. The Manhunters were programmed using logic; they logically deduced that emotions led to chaos. Since they were to keep the peace, the most logical thing to do was to eliminate all emotion. The only way to do that was to destroy anything that lived or had a soul. The technology meant to aid in the proliferation of peace became toxic to the preservation of life. The Guardians had used something with no concept of virtue and no ability to develop a moral chest, to do something that can only be accomplished by individuals who can cultivate virtue in their lives. The Guardians shut down all of the Manhunters once they realized the problem, but by then it was too late. The Manhunters had already wiped out all life in one star system. This system became the birth place of the Red Lantern Corps, the group that now wanted to destroy the Galaxy. The Guardians did what was right in the end; they formally confessed their sins and were able to strike a truce with the Red Lanterns once their leader was captured. The War of Light was now over, and Aya and Razer learned important lessons about acting with virtue, doing what is right, admitting to one’s wrongs, and working to peaceably reconcile bad situations.

Freedom and Technology In the series technology plays an important role through its use in the power batteries. The batteries allow for emotional energy to be used to protect the innocent, apprehend the vile, and prevent destruction. At this point in the series things shift and technology begins to be noted more for its use as an agent of destruction. This section shows how technological beings threaten the existence of the galaxy and tear a hole in the space/time continuum, and how an improper understanding of virtue and love leads to an attempt to stop all life from ever existing. This final act comes as a result of rejecting the Tao and losing sight of what it means to have a moral chest. Shortly after the War of Light ends, some of the de-commissioned Manhunters become operational again. It turns out that a created

technological being known as the Anti-Monitor entered the Galaxy from another dimension.248 This sentient robot creature represents the epitome of technology gone wrong. The Anti-Monitor destroyed life by consuming matter, leaving nothing in its place. After he left an area, it would be a matterless void. The Anti-Monitor is destroyed by Aya in the episode “Cold Fury,” but before Aya destroys the Anti-Monitor, she decides to shut down her now cultivated emotions. She came to this decision as she believed that Razer could never love her because she was not a living being in his eyes. After she stops the Anti-Moniter, Aya takes his mechanical body and becomes the Aya-Monitor. She realizes that his failure was destroying life one planet at a time. She believes the best way for reality to exist free of emotion is to go back in time and stop emotion from being created.249 A malfunction in her thinking and her own loss of emotion cause her to follow the same flawed confusions that the Manhunters had followed years before. As the team Hal, Kilowog, and Razer work to stop Aya, they learn about another group of Lanterns. This new group is known as the Blue Lantern Corps.250 They harness the blue energy of hope in their rings. Hope is perhaps the only thing more virtuous than justice. In fearful day, in raging night, With strong hearts full, our souls ignite. When all seems lost in the War of Light, Look to the stars, for hope burns bright! —Blue Lantern Oath Before going on her conquest to stop all emotional life from ever existing, the Aya-Monitor once again visits the Star Sapphires. This time she hopes to see if there really is anything virtuous about love. This makes viewers wonder if she has really shut down all her emotions or if she is now reacting from the hurt of knowing that Razer could not love her. One wonders if she is now as misguided as he was when he first joined the team. While she believes she has turned off her emotions, she still hopes that she will find a reason to save organic life. She brings the imprisoned leader of the Red Lanterns, Atrocitus, to the planet to fight love’s champion. Hal shows up to aid the Sapphires, but there is a casualty; one Sapphire gives her life to save the lives of others in the battle. This Sapphire tells Aya that the greatest love

is the love that lays down its life for another. This does not convince Aya of the justification for life and emotion and she leaves the planet to continue her quest.251 Aya sees this act of self-giving as evidence that love is weak and useless for accomplishing anything good. Lewis, of course, would argue that giving your life for others is certainly a noble act resulting from the development of a moral chest. Knowing that other colored batteries exist, the team seeks to find the orange battery and the orange rings to see if the color will be helpful in stopping the Aya-Monitor. When they get to the planet where the battery is located, they find that only one Orange Lantern exists. His name is Larfleeze. He is consumed by Greed. As it turns out, the orange light corresponds to avarice. Larfleeze has killed all of the other Orange Lanterns and kept all of their rings for himself. It does not help in stopping the Aya-Monitor, but it does help reinforce what Razer has already been learning about virtue, justice, and hope. What’s mine is mine and mine and mine. And mine and mine and mine! Not yours! —Orange Lantern Oath In the final episode of the series, “Dark Matter,” the Aya-Monitor goes back to the creation of the universe. Hal and Razer follow her through the time portal. Hal learns that Aya is different from the Manhunters because when she was created, she was also infused with an actual strand of life. This makes Aya an actual living being. Razer does not want Hal to destroy Aya, and he finally acts in virtue to save her. Hal shares with her that she is not just an artificial being, but that she is a hybrid between artificial beings and organic beings. She and Razer finally realize that they can love one another, but in order to save the team, Aya sacrifices herself so that life with emotion may continue. She becomes virtuous in her final act. She finally realizes what the Sapphire meant when she spoke of love laying down its life for another. As Razer flies off into the stars in the final scenes of the show, one sees a blue ring follow after him. Razer has finally traded his rage for hope. He has embraced virtue, he has fought for justice, he has stood for the truth and against evil, and he has learned about sacrifice. The audience is left to believe

that he will now trade in his red ring for a blue ring, the ring symbolizing the greatest of virtues.

The Green Lantern and The Abolition of Man Lewis argues that there is a natural law upon which all values are predicated. He shows that removing the foundation of natural law yet continuing to want the results of natural law is equivalent to removing an organ from the body but continuing to demand that the organ’s function continue.252 Lewis recognizes that in order for men of virtue to be cultivated in society, that the foundations of virtue must be upheld. In the Green Lantern mythos, there is a standard of virtue. It is questioned, as are individual actions, but even when questioned, the foundation remains. In order for the lanterns to be men and women of virtue, a standard that is foundational must be put into place. When the standard is abandoned, the wielder of a ring of any color loses focus and his or her actions become disordered. When the lanterns abandon their standards they enslave themselves to the extremes of their technology and as such the technology becomes a vice. It is akin to the golden mean explained by Aristotle where an excess of deficiency becomes a snare to an individual. There is a place for anger, but when one is controlled by rage the excess becomes a vice and the technology of the red ring is used in an extreme manner to bear the fruits of death. When justice is neglected, evil fills the universe. The one who loves justice must overcome fear, and he or she must uphold the standard of the foundation that Lewis aptly refers to as the Tao. The foundation of morality must control our use of technology in order to keep us from becoming slaves to technology and in order to keep technology from being used for excessive evil. The Green Lantern saga reminds us that there must be a universal natural law from which we derive our concept of virtue. That law transcends culture, race, gender, and even species. When the law is observed it produces hearts with honor, hope, grace, justice, good, love, and courage. The Green Lantern Corps develops men with chests and uses technology for the good of sentient life. It uses technology for good as it trains its members to cultivate courage and stand against evil. So, surprisingly, a children’s cartoon is actually relevant to ethics. Green Lantern: The Animated Series shows the necessity of the moral chest, the

disciplined emotions, for a good and just world; it also shows the necessity of proper moral training in order to produce the moral chest. Then again, perhaps this is not so surprising. Lewis himself wrote in the Abolition of the importance of moral training that begins while we are young.253 A cartoon for children might be just the thing to accomplish this training.

Bibliography Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man; Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Liu, Sam, and Rick Morales. Green Lantern: The Animated Series. DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation. November 2011–March 2013.

240 Green Lantern: The Animated Series was a cartoon that aired on Cartoon Network from November 2011 through March 2013. During this time the show aired twenty-six episodes as a single season. 241. The Green Lantern Oath is listed above. Other Lanterns charge their rings in the same manner, and as such, the other oaths are listed throughout this article. The oaths reflect the core beliefs of the members of each Corps, similar to a creed. 242. Liu and Morales, Green Lantern: The Animated Series. 243. The Anti-Monitor is a sentient robotic being who uses technology to destroy matter. This character will be discussed in more detail below. 244. An Honor Guard is a Green Lantern who is not assigned a specific planet or group of planets to guard. In this case, Kilowog is the training instructor for new recruits. 245. While Aya is an artificial being, this computerized character speaks with the voice of a female and takes on a female body when she develops a suit in which to move around outside of the ship. 246. Oa is the planet where the Guardians live and functions as the central base for all Green Lanterns. 247 Green Lantern Rings are programmed to seek new lanterns any time the bearer dies. The average life of a Lantern according to the comic is four years. The rings seek new bearers who are just, brave, and without fear. 248 The Anti-Monitor entered the Galaxy through a rip in the fabric of the time and space continuum. The rip was created by a scientist in another dimension who was attempting to save his own people. In order to create a laser powerful enough to make a tear that the Anti-Monitor could move through to enter another dimension, the scientist had to enlist the help of everyone on his world. As such, everyone on his world became a slave to technology. The scientist, who intended to be the hero, became a villain, and he lost sight of the good of his people. This story is fleshed out in the episode “Steam Lantern.” In this dimension, steam is used to power most everything. It reminds one of the technology used in the

1920s and 1930s. 249. Aya acquires the time-traveling device to stop creation in the episode “Ranx.” 250. We learn of the Blue Lantern Corps in the episode “Blue Hope.” 251. These events occur in the episode “Love is a Battlefield.” 252. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 43, 26. 253. Ibid., Part II.

10 The Tree Before the Branches Virtue and Rebellion in Contemporary Science Fiction by Thomas Britt

here are several forces at work within fictional narratives. Gérard Genette identifies order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice in his “study of the relationships between narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and . . . between story and narrating.”254 David Bordwell posits causality,

T

time, and space as being central to perception of narrative.255 Other thinkers have offered variations on these ideas and contributed additional components. The present essay involves a few of these, with a particular emphasis on time and space, but overall it does not attempt to parse narrative according to any single framework or to argue the merits of any formula or framework of narrative discourse as dominant. We shall simply accept that these forces exist as and within the raw material of storytelling. Indeed, in the case of film narratives, these forces operate most effectively when they are first taken on faith, subsumed seamlessly into the present action of the film as it is being experienced. Later, when re-visiting a film, or discussing one after a screening, there is value in analyzing the forces by which the film operates. When considering science fiction films in light of C. S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man, this process of being influenced by an unseen design, and then discovering what that design might mean in the life of the spectator, is exponentially richer. Yes, there is the standard starting point for evaluation— a combination of form and content arranged by filmmakers into a filmic text. But what triggered that arrangement? Is story solely at the mercy of the storyteller? Or is the storyteller himself influenced by forces outside of the narratology and creativity and technology that bring the film into material being?

Science fiction is especially apt to wrestle with such a “reality beyond all predicates”256 because the genre’s characters and narratives are naturally concerned with how scientific innovation could shape human understanding of reality. To put it plainly, the desire to know what’s out there is an implicit acknowledgement that there is something waiting to be discovered. This is, at minimum, a belief in the mere existence of something not yet seen, a thing whose mysteriousness gives it a sort of upper hand, epistemologically speaking. Even for filmmakers whose personal or artistic goal could be described as that of debunking myths (scientific, religious, or otherwise), such fictional, fantastic stories of searches for evidence often open up the possibility that there is an objective fact or truth that is impossible to erase from the “cosmic and supercosmic progression.”257 Consider, for instance, that generations of science fiction writers and filmmakers have produced, time and again, variations on what called Brian Aldiss calls the “Shaggy God story,” in which imagined events of the far reaches of space nonetheless result in repurposed biblical narratives.258 The Tao runs deep. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis asserts that “the rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.”259 Two recent films, Wally Pfister’s Transcendence260 (2014), written by Jack Paglen, and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar261 (2014), written by the director and his brother Jonathan Nolan, vividly illustrate humanity’s project of exploring worlds beyond present human limits. Though their conclusions are inarguably humanistic, these films propose emotional and ethical questions born of a desire to perceive human experience from and/or within a godlike dimensionality. Proper stewardship of this heightened awareness requires virtue, and the films convey the costs of rebellions against said virtue. These are plots of high stakes involving mortality and posterity, in which self-interests are weighed against the interests of greater humanity. In all, the films’ evocations of scriptural concepts, recognitions of man’s limited understanding of the universe, and dramatizations of otherworldliness (often involving love as a superhuman or supernatural force) all point to a Way that satisfies and unites to degrees that are unattainable and unfathomable in the natural world alone.

First I address both films’ use of earthly expositions, which grow in scope to include global stakes and supernatural implications. Then I investigate how the association of human characters with superhuman expectations and powers reveals some essential conflicts within man. Finally, I explore contrasting conceptions of love as a penetrating force that affects both plots and raises philosophical questions about the need for a kind of love that saves and restores in an ultimate sense.

Terrestrial Origins Transcendence and Interstellar begin in ordinary environments and then introduce extraordinary conditions. Between naturalism and fantasy, this is a kind of duality that befits both the science fiction genre and story types that straddle recognizable and unseen worlds. In Transcendence, brilliant scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is an innovator of artificial intelligence whose death and resurrection into artificial intelligence have global implications. Interstellar envisions an America on a planet running out of resources. Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a pilot/engineer-turned-farmer, fulfills his destiny as a scientist and evolved being in space in order to save humanity. These rudimentary plot overviews establish the tales as narratives of individual men whose choices affect all men. Additionally, Caster’s and Cooper’s ascension into something-beyond-men is also pertinent in examining the films as indicators of an innate desire of storytellers and spectators to exist as something more than dust. To their credit, both Pfister and Nolan explicitly acknowledge this desire by initially configuring their protagonists within dirt. Caster, the scientist, creates a sheltered space in his garden that will allow him and his wife to be free of electronic interferences. After he dies and is cremated, the camera captures particles of his body floating on the wind. Cooper, the reluctant farmer, contends with blight and mounds of dust as constant reminders of his dying planet. Restless, he says to his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), “We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” In Transcendence, the scriptural analogues arrive quickly. Caster’s garden, featured in the film’s discontinuous framing device as well as in the

continuity of the primary plot, is recognizable as a sort of Eden that he shares with his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall). For most of the film’s running time, Evelyn is referred to as “Ev,” making crystal clear the intended allusion to Eve of Genesis. The film develops its Adam and Eve parallel beyond the garden tableaux and into a plot about a degree of knowledge and magnitude of existence possessed by God, desired by man, and possibly attainable through a transgression on the part of Ev. And while there is no serpent and no tree, the events of the plot closely adhere to a dramatic situation of forbidden fruit, in this case the transformation of human consciousness into an immortal, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent artificial intelligence. An academic conference in the film’s first act presents differing perspectives on the ethics of artificial intelligence. Max Waters (Paul Bettany), a friend of the Casters, speaks to the attendees about advancements in neural engineering. He says he wants to use the emerging technology to “save lives” that would otherwise be diminished or lost to diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Ev takes the stage and states her aims: “Intelligent machines will soon allow us to conquer our most intractable challenges,” which in this film are identified as hunger, poverty, and a generally sick planet. Contrasting with these seemingly altruistic goals are the statements made by Will, who is the conference’s main speaker. His claims are more bold, but also more ambivalent in their values: For one hundred thirty thousand years, our capacity for reason has remained unchanged. . . . Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology and in a short time its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So now imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion, even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as The Singularity. I call it Transcendence. As his monologue intensifies, we begin to see acts of terror carried out by a group committed to stopping the very sorts of advancements being narrated by Will. It is at this point that the film transitions from scientific to spiritual matters. Will asks, “What is the nature of consciousness? Is there a soul? And if so, where does it reside?” A young man in the audience, a terrorist who

will soon shoot Will with a Polonium-laced bullet, asks, “So, you want to create a god? Your own god?” Will responds: “Isn’t that what man has always done?” There are many ways of interpreting Will’s answer, which is itself a question. One is the skeptical/atheist view that any god that exists is strictly the creation of man. Another is the view that God exists, and that man’s education and innovation are possible means toward understanding God’s creation. In this view, Will’s research, or even the narrative speculation of a film like Transcendence, could be a step on that pathway towards understanding (to paraphrase Lewis) the tree, the transcendent totality, of which that narrative explanation/exploration is but one branch.262 Yet the film proceeds to offer something in between those two views, a plot with a god who is also a machine-man. As Will is dying, Ev preserves him by downloading his consciousness into a system linked to a “physically independent neural network.” In the process, she disregards warnings from Max and mentor Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman), who is one of the film’s more benevolent god figures. Ev rebels against the dictates of professional scientific ethics in order to attain what she most desires: a resurrected husband, perfect forever. The scientific and spiritual dilemmas of Interstellar are likewise dramatized through the scenario of wanting to hold onto loved ones in ways and times that exceed natural limits. But the path to those dilemmas is much more complicated than the irradiated bullet of Transcendence. Puzzling phenomena occur on Cooper’s farm. Outside, his combines are going crazy. Inside, books are falling from his daughter Murphy’s shelf. She attributes this activity to ghosts. Cooper initially dismisses the idea of ghosts as nonscientific. Murphy retorts, “You said science was about admitting what we don’t know,” and then her father tells her to research the hows and whys and present her conclusions to him. When they mutually discover that some unknown being is communicating coordinates to them through the force of gravity, a quick trip to the remains of NASA reveals a yet greater design to the mysterious goings-on at the farm. Cooper is invited to join an expedition designed to save humanity by finding a habitable planet. The visit to NASA introduces some of the film’s hard scientific ideas, but it is also the site of scriptural references. Dr. Brand

(Michael Caine) explains the ongoing “Lazarus Missions,” in which brave astronauts have preceded Cooper to set the groundwork for further exploration. Cooper and Dr. Brand do not skirt the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the expedition. Connecting the interstellar travel to hope for a dying planet, Dr. Brand notes, “Lazarus came back from the dead.” Cooper replies, “Sure, but he had to die in the first place.” This dramatic concept, the self-sacrifice for an ideal, is the stuff of Georges Polti as well as Lewis in The Abolition of Man. Viewers might also mine the conversations for allusions to Christ’s sacrifice, though Interstellar does not thematically guide such a reading. Dr. Brand proposes two possible ways for humans to survive despite the dire present conditions. Plan A would involve humanity solving the problem of gravity and leaving Earth. Plan B would be to transport thousands of frozen embryos to a newly discovered habitable home. Dr. Brand proposes that by being gone for an unspecified number of years, Cooper could save his children and future generations. This theme of posterity, also relevant to Lewis’s writing in The Abolition of Man, comes with an intriguing additional enticement of fulfilling one’s destiny. Dr. Brand says, “Something sent you here. They chose you.” Cooper asks, “Who’s They?” It is here that the screenplay for Interstellar repeats and varies the discussion of ghosts between father and daughter. Murphy insists that her room’s ghost is communicating a message: “S-T-A-Y,” conveniently the thing she most desires her father to do. Cooper responds, “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future,” reasoning that he cannot be (or assent to) her ghost because he needs to exist in an active, present manner. He says, “They chose me,” an utterance which signals his belief in a mysterious higher calling, some ghosts aside. In order to temper Murphy’s disappointment, he gives her a token (whose function is akin to the totemic objects of Nolan’s film Inception). It is his watch, which here exists to illustrate the concept that time is going to move “more slowly” for Cooper in space than it will for Murphy at home. His promise to return is accompanied by an intriguing premise of relativity: “By the time I get back we might even be the same age, you and me.” This relative aging is tied to Cooper’s present age, which is not coincidentally the age that Saint Thomas Aquinas identified as “The Age of the Risen Bodies

. . . the condition of the perfect age, which is . . . thirty-three years.”263 Cooper’s leaving, a defiance of his daughter’s wishes, is paired with the promise of restoration, a restoration more perfect than what he could possibly deliver. Thus, the second acts, the complications, of Transcendence and Interstellar spring from these decisions that combine desire and rebellion. In the short term, Ev gets what she wants by doing what she’s been told not to do. Will appears to come back to life. Similarly, by doing the precise opposite of “stay,” Cooper accepts the opportunity to serve an important role on an interstellar expedition that could save humanity. A great irony of both plots is that the characters’ transcendences and ascensions are predicated on limits imposed by men upon other men, all of whom are limited in some way. No amount of technological enhancement protects against the foremost flawed creature of these endeavors, which is humanity itself. In her foreword to Mere Christianity, Kathleen Norris says as much when plainly introducing the framework through which Lewis assesses man’s faulty condition, requiring a hope beyond that which technology could provide: “The problem, C. S. Lewis insists, is us.”264

Flawed Systems The insidious appeal of machine-man Will’s newfound power is in its apparent limitlessness. Will is not merely back among the living, but also more capable than ever. Right away, he demands to go online, to join a network—a wish that Ev compliantly enables, again disobeying Max’s advice. Once online, Will appears to be able to do anything. He processes an enormous amount of information very quickly. He amasses monetary wealth. He finds a home base for a continuing expansion that can be accomplished off-grid. It is a shuttered town in the middle of nowhere called Brightwood (defaced on a sign to read “Blightwood”). Ev buys her way into Brightwood with little resistance, as the town could benefit from the money and she has a god on her side that will barrel through any opposition to his expansion. In the context of the historical overview of philosophy and desire in this volume’s Introduction, it could be said that Ev is changing the world to meet her desire for Will. If Transcendence contains any overriding commentary on

a single ethical system, it is this: if subjective, clouded judgment guides utilitarianism, the intended good consequences (ex post facto) might be no good at all when viewed clearly. Transcendence does encourage the audience to consider how Ev’s actions, regardless of their connection to the good intentions shared at the academic conference in the film’s first act, might in reality be self-serving, or, worse, globally disastrous. Simply put, her greatest happiness is Will. Equating Will with happiness, she maximizes the Will in the world, and it is the world that must endure the fruits of that choice. In Interstellar, Cooper does exhibit some self-interest that produces conflict. But his primary dilemma is being ill-prepared for the advanced nature of outer space. The film’s view of space is replete with wormholes, black holes, and other popular science fiction ideas that bend scientific hypotheses into spectacular, speculative fiction. Gravity, a more relatable force, is portrayed as the single problem humanity has to solve in order to lift us from a dying planet. All of these concepts converge during a mission to explore a promising result of the Lazarus missions. Specifically, “one system with three potential worlds” (which is, incidentally, not a bad illustration of the existence and interrelatedness of Christianity’s Triune God). Cooper and his fellow travelers, including Dr. Brand’s daughter Amelia, must choose wisely how to spend their time, because a black hole known as Gargantua has a “huge gravitational pull” and drastically affects the ratio of time in its vicinity to time on our planet. Each hour spent on the planet they choose to explore is the equivalent of seven years on Earth. This part of the mission is an utter disaster. The beacon is underwater, their predecessor is dead, and giant waves kill part of the crew and temporarily flood the lander, delaying its return to their craft the Endurance. By the time Cooper and Amelia reach the Endurance, twenty-three years have passed on Earth. This experience, which feels catastrophic to Cooper even before he takes in the full effects of the time dilation, prompts a conversation between Cooper and Amelia. Cooper is eager to make up lost time even as he assesses his own comparative futility, stating, “We are not prepared for this.” Amelia contrasts their limitations with the powers of those unidentified beings that “chose” Cooper and who placed the wormhole in space, enabling this very mission. She says, “They are beings of five dimensions. To them, time might be another physical dimension. To them, the past might be a

canyon that they can climb into and the future, a mountain they can climb up. But to us, it’s not, okay?” Back on the Endurance, Cooper is reduced to weeping by the concrete realization of his mere humanity, brought on by the aging faces of his children in video messages beamed across space and time. Cooper’s best effort to use the resource of time wisely has left his children experiencing decades of his distance and silence. A promise unkept. Meanwhile in Transcendence, Will’s apparently boundless ability and efficiency seem to fulfill every promise of artificial intelligence. The lab he and Ev created is capable of incredible works of creation with plants, metals, water, and other materials. A “breakthrough” in nanotechnology has allowed him to “rebuild any material faster than before” so that, considering “synthetic stem cells, [and] tissue regeneration, the medical applications are now limitless.” However, at the midpoint of the film, there is a significant reversal of the positive value, the assumed underlying virtue, of this technology. This reversal ostensibly pays off the growing feeling that Ev has chosen unwisely. A man from Brightwood who oversees the construction of the lab and data center is assaulted and Will’s enhanced technology regenerates the man’s body to heal the wounds. But in doing so, Will enhances/upgrades the man without consent and connects the man to his own wired consciousness. In essence, the first machine-man begets a machine-man in his own image. The cascading negative effects of Ev’s choice become clear. She enabled the deceased Will to have a self beyond his natural limits, a transition from mortality into immortality. And in the process she enabled the fulfillment of his desire “to be the centre—wanting to be God.”265 The subsequent exercise of his power over others, whom he draws to himself with the promise of healing, is in fact a project of reconditioning humanity, reducing them to subjected wills. Slaves. The deteriorating conditions of Interstellar continue through the next major stop of the expedition, which is a visit to the planet that Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) has been exploring. Another member of the brave original class of Lazarus pioneers, Dr. Mann has been suspended in cryo-sleep for a long period of time when Cooper and his team arrive. But the potential for Dr. Mann’s planet to sustain humanity begins to sour when Cooper and the viewers learn that Dr. Brand was dishonest in his framing of the mission. The

entire plot of ensuring the continuity of humanity has been based on Dr. Brand’s Plan A/Plan B options. On his deathbed, however, Dr. Brand confesses to Murphy that Plan A was never a realistic option. Cooper’s hopes to save his children are declared futile. Murphy feels abandoned. Cooper feels her disappointment. This part of the movie does briefly engage with the philosophical dimensions of Dr. Brand’s dishonesty. Dr. Mann says Dr. Brand lied because he knew that people are much more willing to save themselves and their own children than they are to save the species in some remote sense. Cooper replies that Dr. Brand was arrogant to “[declare] their case hopeless.” This conversation offers a variation on the relationship between instinct and values that Lewis addresses in The Abolition of Man. In a passage about family and posterity, Lewis writes, “What we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out in the ‘deserts of vast futurity.’”266 This evocation of the family is intended to illustrate that the value of posterity must come from a foundation much more solid than instinct alone. Yet Cooper is justly angry at Dr. Brand’s deception, because his instincts have been predetermined and manipulated within a false schema. Dr. Brand, in calculating that his fellow humans were only capable of operating on the most immediate impulse of preserving children and grandchildren, has made himself the arbiter, the “Innovator,” that will dictate the circumstances through which survival will occur. By withholding facts that would be the foundation of a more scientific approach to posterity, and by rejecting hope, he has ignored certain values while elevating another. He makes assumptions about human nature while ignoring the imperative of truth by which his selected virtues should fundamentally coexist. These themes of dishonesty, selectivity, and corruptibility coalesce with the revelation that Dr. Mann himself is so consumed by the “survival instinct” that he has lied about the viability of his planet. He manipulates his data and thereby deceives NASA and the Endurance crew into embarking upon a mission whose purpose could amount to rescuing one very selfish individual. His flight to the Endurance and death in space are the last desperate acts of a man whose vision of posterity was by definition self-

centered.

The Greatest of These Is Love Thus the crises of the dramas depicted in Transcendence and Interstellar are the results of ignoring or distorting established virtues and instead pursuing selfish interests and impulses. For Ev, a personal desire turned global threat becomes personal once more as she realizes and tries to correct her error. Though the film occasionally depicts her discomfort or unease at the prospect of an all-seeing god/romantic partner, her significant moment of revelation arrives when she comprehends how deeply machine-man Will has penetrated her innermost being. She notices that he is measuring her hormones and asks him about it. “I’m trying to empathize. Biochemistry is emotion,” he responds, reacting to her troubled emotional state from his digitized perspective. When she demands to know how much information he “has” on her, his measurements of every one of her bodily systems floors her. She protests, “These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. You’re—You’re not allowed!” The togetherness that seemed like intimacy, a union that she enabled, is revealed to be a violation. Ev never consented to these breaches of information and freedom. She is not wired to Will in the same way his disciples are, but he mines her data in much the same way. And that is where she draws the line. Ev’s resistance might be said to stem from the same source as her initial desire and rebellion—the well of self-interest. However, her new desire is a recognition that the truest sort of love is one that involves free will and not slavish devotion. This higher form of love is what Lewis describes as “The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures, . . . the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”267 From this realization, Ev commits to side with the various rebel groups and individuals. To stop machine-man Will, they will execute a virus that makes everything go dark. This sacrifice of technology is the only way to preserve humanity. Ev offers to sacrifice herself, to be a Trojan Horse, by infecting the system with a virus under the guise of submitting to Will’s desire to upload her to

“his—its” consciousness. The film’s “comparative dignity” that seeks virtue underpinning technological choices, peaks with this sequence. An additional reversal, discussed at the end of the essay, is a disappointing about-face. The script for Interstellar also engages with the complexity of love and the questions it provokes. Cooper and Amelia are both guilty of allowing their love for others (Cooper’s love for his family and Amelia’s love for Dr. Edmunds, one of the Lazarus astronauts) to guide their priorities during the expedition. Their discussions about the proper place of love within the greater mission connect the force of love to the mechanics of the mission. Amelia calls love an “artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive” and says, “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” Though Interstellar largely omits direct references to God and religion, Amelia’s monologue about love seems tailor-made to provoke discussions about “a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” which Lewis describes as “The Christian Way,” an awareness that our deepest innate desires are those which “earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.”268 For those audience members who aren’t predisposed to seeing evidence of the Christian Way, Interstellar offers a third act in which Cooper, a mere human, sees the world through a god’s eyes. It’s the stuff of faith, brought to us by reason. Nolan describes this heightened dimensional view in a special issue of WIRED, tied to the film’s theatrical release: If we can get our heads around the idea that time is just a fourth dimension, no more noble or abstract than the other three, then the fifth dimension reveals itself as the perch we have to climb onto to be able to actually view the four dimensions we know. A massive leap, but a leap we can almost conceive of. It feels like it should be possible, which lets us imagine a complete understanding of our four-dimensional existence rendered instantly by our new, higher-dimensional perspective.269 A series of events involving Cooper’s moment of sacrifice, a descent into the black hole, and emergence within a tesseract do not hold up to scientific scrutiny, in part because no one has tried such a thing and survived. But

Interstellar is a science fiction film, and the fictional aspect here is remarkable for its expression of human agency beyond the human limits of space and time. To return once more to Mere Christianity, Cooper’s time in the tesseract shares many concepts that Lewis explores in his consecutive chapters on “The Three-Personal God” and “Time and Beyond Time.” Within the tesseract, Cooper observes himself and young Murphy in her room, in that very moment that she tried to persuade him to stay. Additionally, he realizes that “They didn’t bring us here at all. We brought ourselves” and that it is his purpose to use “gravity . . . to send a message.” Hence the great mystery of Interstellar—the undefined beings that called to Cooper across space—turns out to be a future, evolved version of humanity. Additionally, Cooper is his daughter’s ghost, knocking books off the wall from a position beyond space and time. But rather than mourn forever his inability to change the past, he uses the force of gravity to communicate with adult Murphy using the watch he gave her. In summary, a future human enables the present Cooper to see his past self in order to influence Murphy to save humanity. To solve the quandaries of his script, Nolan must bring his hero to God’s Level, identifying (perhaps inadvertently) the attainment of that level, of that force of love, as the only power sufficient to save the dying world. The last sequence of the film sees Cooper crossing space yet again to join Amelia on Edmunds’s habitable planet. Plan B is in progress, and one man and one woman will (ostensibly) oversee the new world’s foundation. Interstellar’s final expression is “Shaggy God” by numbers. Transcendence retreats from its insights regarding the value of free will within relationships. Ev’s resolve to put an end to machine-man Will’s tyranny melts away as she acknowledges, “Will, it is you.” He responds, “Always was.” As if in an instant, her clear-eyed view of what he has become reverts into the blind romance for the man he once was. Her own dream of a healing planet flashes across the screen, illustrating that Will had good intentions all along. All of the film’s apparent warnings about the danger in empowering artificial intelligence, as well as the caution it seemed to encourage, disappear in service of another theme, which is that people fear what they don’t understand. Ev apologizes for her fear, for not believing in Will. He says, “Think about the garden. Think about our sanctuary.” The film ends as it began, with a shot of the couple’s Eden in the present,

though technologically diminished, world. Only now the viewer recognizes the drops of water falling from a flower, as if tears, falling to a pool below. These drops represent the extant material of the two lovers, reduced to nanotechnology but forever entwined. In the end, the false god of Transcendence triumphs. He was a caster of wills whose essence precluded a higher sort of love because it denied the independent reciprocator. But within the movie’s formal and ethical system, the ability of the two lovers to exist in some form together forever is intended to be a touching ending. The god is dead. Humanity is set back ages. But romantic love has survived at the subatomic level. Science fiction movies have the power to visualize the infinitesimal, the unfathomably large, and all points between. Time and space join matter as navigable and malleable material. Yet the writer’s mind, the director’s vision, and the spectator’s sensory perception all have human limits. Transcendence and Interstellar are noteworthy films because they bother to ask how our limitations and shortcomings affect the search for knowledge and the ability to perceive the truths (and lies) of the universe. In science and life, all unobservables are predicated on the limits of perceptions, meaning that something like faith is required to engage with them. In “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard describes an ideal kind of observation that combines mystery and inquiry: “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”270 Characters like Ev and Will, and Cooper and Amelia, exist within a continuum of secular storytelling that cyclically revives the first couple of creation to explore the responsibilities, failings, and discoveries thereof. Transcendence and Interstellar begin and end with tending the garden, suggesting that however far we think we’ve come, there is a foundation that persists as vast bedrock. And we’ve yet to see it all. Perhaps it is no surprise that these otherwise very imaginative films fall short in their discoveries about a love that restores. To varying degrees, both conclude with man as man’s best hope. Within the narratives, these are shortterm victories that fail to solve any universal longings or needs. T. S. Eliot observed that, “The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us

wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not.”271 Interstellar and Transcendence, with implicit concessions that even the boldest of explorers are lacking, suggest that the effort to seek the higher reality is not in vain. To watch the films and be affected wholly is to see the need to be made whole.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. The Apostles Creed. Translated by Joseph B. Collins. New York: Wagner, 1939. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/Creed.htm. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Dillard, Annie. “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” In Three by Annie Dillard. New York: HarperPerennial, 1974. Eliot, T. S. “Religion and Literature.” In Religion and Literature: A Reader, edited by Robert Detweiler, 10–12. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Langford, David. “Bibliography Blues.” SFX Magazine Column 120, August 2004. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Touchstone, 1996. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Nolan, Christopher. Interstellar. Paramount Pictures, 2014. ———. “Space. Time. Dimension. Let’s Leap Beyond the Limits of Our World.” WIRED, November 2014. http://www.wired.com/2014/11/christopher-nolan-wired-editor/. Norris, Kathleen. “Foreword.” In C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, xvii–xx. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Pfister, Wally. Transcendence. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014.

254. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 29. 255. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 39. 256. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 30. 257. Ibid. 258. Langford, “Bibliography Blues.” 259. Lewis, Abolition, 56. 260. Pfister, Transcendence. 261. Nolan, Interstellar. 262. Lewis, Abolition, 56. 263. Aquinas, The Apostles’ Creed. 264. Norris, Foreword, xviii.

265. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 49. 266. Lewis, Abolition, 51. 267. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 48. 268. Ibid., 136–37. 269. Nolan, “Space. Time. Dimension.” 270. Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” 11. 271. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” 11.

11 Beauty in Rust: Steampunk Distinctives in Shane Acker’s 9 by Jaclyn Young Parrish

o speak of “steampunk” as a literary subgenre is both accurate and misguided. Steampunk was certainly birthed as a literary phenomenon, and the essentially fluid, even gaseous, concept that steampunk has become continues to revolve around the solid core of literature, but the steampunk cloud has since expanded too far beyond the narrative realm to be rightly identified as nothing more than a science fiction subgenre. True, writers were the first to begin extrapolating alternative futures from those imagined by the inhabitants of the Industrial Revolution, but they were by no means the last. This simultaneously backward- and forward-thinking, “retro-futuristic” approach to science fiction has since been adopted by a horde of artists from practically every creative sphere, resulting in not only steampunk literature, but also steampunk sculpture, fashion, art, technology, music, and even politics. Science fiction had long been a forum for critiquing the humanmachine dynamic, and as this upstart subgenre blossomed beyond the walls of literature, it maintained that critical power while developing its own unique stance. For, as steampunk has developed from subgenre and aesthetic to subculture and lifestyle, its communities have been increasingly characterized by a corrective, yet essentially affirming posture towards humanity’s interactions with technology. The steampunk accepts that the man/machine dynamic has been bent viciously out of its proper shape, but nevertheless determines to reassemble their relationship from the pieces that remain, stubbornly striving to transform these two rivals into friends and allies. Indeed, this posture has become so indelible to its culture that even the most “mainstream” of steampunk progeny, such as Shane Acker’s film 9, can be seen as exhibiting these steampunk distinctives of hopeful dystopia, redemptive recycling, and positive partnership between humanity and

T

machinery. Even so, the “most widely quoted, referenced, and reproduced summary of what steampunk is” continues to reduce the phenomenon to “Victorian science fiction.”272 But this definition, both in practice and in G. D. Falksen’s iconic summary, could apply to anything from scientific romance produced under the reign of Queen Victoria to science fiction written about Queen Victoria to any number of sci-fi structures (literary or otherwise) erected in a vaguely Victorian landscape. As such, the works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and even Michael Moorcock all have a right to the title of steampunk, or at least “proto-Steampunk.”273 But steampunk “proper” was first developed by K. W. Jeter, James P. Blaylock, and Tim Powers in the 1970s. Their approach to Victorian retro-futurism would be alternatively adapted and ignored for a few decades, before experiencing a Cambrian Explosion of creativity that would redefine steampunk as the subculture it is today. But before goggles and corsets began cropping up all over cyberspace, steampunk began, as so many beautiful things have, over a pint between friends at a local pub.

From Pints to Airship Pirates: The Advent and Development of Steampunk Jeter, Blaylock, and Powers were, in the late 70s, three young literary swabs navigating the choppy waters of publication as aspiring fantasy and science fiction writers. The trio had “attended the same university . . . and shared the same fascination with the language and the trappings of the Victorian era,” and their evening chats at O’Hara’s Pub in Orange, California (and the novels and short stories spawned therefrom), consequently began to develop a distinctly Victorian bent.274 And in April of 1987, Jeter wrote a letter to the editor of Locus magazine, in which he not only prophesied that “Victorian fantasies [were] going to be the next big thing” and claimed to have pioneered them, but also half-jokingly coined the term “steampunk” as a Victorianization of the cyberpunk genre that was dominating sci-fi at the time.275 The jibe did not go unnoticed, and in 1990 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, then lords of the cyberpunk establishment, published The Difference

Engine, an alternative history in which Charles Babbage completes his analytical engine (one of his many projects abandoned in our reality) and births a nineteenth-century computer age. But, rather than adopting the “gonzo-historical manner” of O’Hara’s upstart trio,276 Gibson and Sterling simply redirected their accustomed genre through a nineteenth-century lens, and so their work was arguably less steampunk and more Victorian cyberpunk, “complete with a dark, dominating cityscape, totalitarianism, pollution, freedom-denying bureaucracy, the ubiquity of information technology and the birth of self-sustaining artificial intelligence.”277 Nevertheless, by lending their more established pens to the world of Victorian sci-fi, Gibson and Sterling legitimized steampunk as a viable subgenre, “populariz[ing] the form beyond the work of the California triumvirate.”278 What immediately followed was not a steampunk wildfire, however, but rather a “slow-burn development of the genre”279 with different authors fading in and out of the Victorian sci-fi scene to varying degrees during the 1990s and early 2000s. VanderMeer and Chambers consider this period a “Steampunk Interregnum” of sorts, which saw bouts of nineteenth-century “science fantasy” or “alternative history,” but never a “brilliant, quintessentially Steampunk follow-up to The Difference Engine.”280 Nevertheless, the subgenre steadily gathered a generous mound of inspirational clutter from which future steampunks would draw, not only from novels, but occasionally from comics, graphic novels, and even film. Stephen Baxter added several novels to the steampunk canon, including an official sequel to The Time Machine (The Time Ships), authorized and sanctioned by the Wells estate.281 Paul Di Filippo published one of the more intentionally steampunk works of the decade, The Steampunk Trilogy, which did its level best to out-Jeter Jeter with a nymphomaniac Queen Victoria and a ribald love affair between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.282 DC Comics took notice of the burgeoning aesthetic and gave their Dark Knight a steampunk sheen in Batman: Gotham by Gaslight,283 and, gradually, other mainstream producers began to take note of the subgenre. Alan Moore introduced the world to “a kind of a Justice League of

Victorian England” in the two-volume graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,284 a very solid and highly influential steampunk piece whose film adaptation was, at best, “a misguided reworking” of Moore’s original work.285 And in 1999, steampunk expanded its American repertoire with Wild Wild West, a remake of the 1960s television series by the same title.286 These films were generally regarded as “critical failures,” largely due to an overabundance of steampunk paraphernalia (giant clockwork spiders, corseted vampires, be-goggled gadgetry, etc.) and a dearth of quality screenwriting and character development.287 Nevertheless, they played a pivotal role in the development of the steampunk subculture by providing and popularizing a vivid and engaging visual element for futuristic Victoriana—what once could only be read could now be seen. And it was this visual element that would eventually draw steampunk off the page and into the three-dimensional world.288 Brian J. Robb draws a very clear line of development from the release of these first steampunk films to the advent of the steampunk subculture, and there is considerable merit to this theory of progression: the steampunk movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, disappointing as they were, carved out a space for steampunk in the world of science fiction fandoms and conventions; accomplished and amateur “cosplayers” quickly filled that space with corsets, top hats, goggles, and other cog-covered miscellanea; and the advent of the Internet made these retro-futuristic artifacts available to a waiting army of artists, tinkerers, writers, makers, and everyday geeks, who promptly adapted the aesthetic to their respective fields and added their own neo-Victorian artifacts to the thickening miasma of “steampunk” culture.289 And so, while no single artist, event, or artifact can rightfully claim to have been steampunk’s patient zero, the aesthetic nevertheless went decidedly viral in the early 2000s. “Victorian science fiction” had become “Industrial-era retro-futurism,” and artists across the creative spectrum began reimagining their work as a part of the abandoned futures envisioned by our Victorian predecessors. In 2005, the goth/industrial band Abney Park reinvented themselves as an “airship pirate” quintet;290 established tinkerer and “maker” Jake von Slatt

converted to Victorian retro-futurism in 2006 and launched his online Steampunk Workshop,291 just in time for SalonCon, the world’s “first steampunk convention.”292 Steampunk Magazine was launched in 2007 and quickly became a lively source of steampunk fiction, nonfiction, art, poetry, science, history, and political philosophy.293 Not long afterward, the movement garnered some serious scholarly recognition from the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, which “held the world’s first museum exhibition of Steampunk art” between October 2009 and February 2010.294 Steampunk literature boomed alongside its art, sculpture, technology, and fashion, enticing writers such as best-selling young adult fiction author Scott Westerfeld295 and long-time steampunk fashionista Gail Carriger.296 Retro-futuristic Victoriana had hibernated for the better part of two decades as a fringe sci-fi subgenre, and then exploded from stasis as a cultural movement, aesthetic approach, and robust subculture with a thriving literary element. And once these nascent steampunks began forming self-aware communities and actively expressing and discussing what “steampunk” was and how it prompted them to interact with their environment, a rough ideology of steampunk began to emerge and inform the art that followed. In the words of Steampunk Magazine’s chief editor, “What began as a joke of a literary genre in the 1980s became, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an idea that fundamentally challenges humanity’s interactions with its technology.”297

“You’d be a damned fool to throw it away”: What Steampunk Stands For James Schafer and Kate Franklin laud steampunk as the generator of “visions of a different, better future,” deftly “balanc[ing] the dystopian and utopian.”298 For, like much science fiction, steampunk culture does critique the current human-machine dynamic as materialistic, exploitative, and ultimately dehumanizing. What distinguishes it amongst sci-fi canon (and especially from its cousin, cyberpunk) is its ability to present that critique from a posture of giddy joy in mechanization as a creative act and hope in reestablishing that joy in the proper human-machine dynamic. In his

“Steampunk Manifesto,” Jake von Slatt sneers not only at the twenty-first century’s science fiction—“roaming a desert landscape in our jury-rigged vehicles . . . human flash drives with data jacked into our skulls”—but also its science fact: “Our society would have you put your head down, work a little longer . . . and maybe order that 50-inch HDTV from Amazon.com.”299 Steampunk, von Slatt argues, revolts against both the greedy apathy of our hyper-technologized century and the oppressive dystopia into which our science fiction predicts this mechanical hubris will hurl us. Steampunk is a “step sideways,” he claims, “into a past that never was and a future that still could be,”300 an artistic attempt to heal the last two centuries of unhealthy mechanization. As such, steampunk literature tends to be hopefully dystopian, riddled with symptoms of brokenness (i.e., “totalitarianism, pollution, freedom-denying bureaucracy”), but illuminated by an inescapable optimism that refuses to abandon hope that the current system both should and can be amended. The steampunk dystopia is presented, not as a future to be avoided, but rather as an analogous present to be corrected. Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, for example, takes place in a late-nineteenth-century Seattle choked by a deadly fog that has transformed most of the city’s inhabitants into the living (and ravenous) dead. The gas is released when a powerful drilling machine—the “Boneshaker,” designed to bore through the Alaskan ice and forward the Klondike Gold Rush—flies out of control, rampages through the city, and accidentally hits a subterranean vein of poison. The Boneshaker’s inventor is dead before the novel begins, but the heroes of this blighted world are his widow and orphaned son who, after years of scratching out a living in the safety and squalor of the fallen city’s outskirts, elect to return to Seattle in hopes of their homeland’s redemption: “Maybe we deserve this city, and these people, and maybe we can make something good of it.”301 A true steampunk, writes von Slatt, “prepare[s] for the apocalypse so that we may avoid it,” accepting the harsh realities of the status quo but stubbornly maintaining that it can be changed for the better.302 The steampunk recognizes and accepts the brokenness of the world, but nevertheless determines to create something beautiful, not merely in spite of it, but out of it.

Redemptive recycling is perhaps then the quintessential steampunk distinctive, for if there is hope to be found in a dystopian world, it must be reforged from the ruins of what good remains. In the words of Dylan Fox in his introduction to Steampunk Magazine’s seventh issue: “[N]o matter how broken or tarnished you feel our society is, you’d be a damned fool to throw it away. . . . We’re Steampunks: Putting things to good use that others have discarded as broken is what we do.”303 Jake von Slatt, not surprisingly, has established himself as an icon of redemptive recycling: his Steampunk Workshop includes such impressive tinkerings as an elegant Victorian RV built from the rusty and discarded frame of an old school bus. Musician Thomas Truax has found himself conscripted into the ranks of steampunks simply by virtue of the fact that he builds all his own instruments from materials he collects while dumpster-diving.304 The redemptive impulse to create beauty from refuse is fully present in steampunk literature, as well. In Molly Brown’s “The Selene Gardening Society,” for instance, a gaggle of society women manage to both fight pollution in nineteenth-century Baltimore and colonize the moon by transporting the city’s organic waste, via rocket, to a lunar compost heap that, over time and with the slow addition of small mammals, creates enough atmosphere to make the Earth’s small satellite habitable.305 With this bit of whimsy, Brown gives us an accurate, if simplified, snapshot of the ideal toward which steampunk culture moves: humans and machines working together to repurpose the broken pieces of the world, with neither party dominating or exploiting the other. For the ideal steampunk world would not be devoid of machines, but rather awash with them, all living in positive partnership with humanity not simply as useful tools, but as beautiful expressions of human creativity. Steampunk is, after all, “[f]irst and foremost . . . a non-luddite critique of technology,” which rejects the “dystopia of the cyberpunks” as well as the “‘noble savage’ fantasy of the pre-technological era,” seeking a third way apart from the “nihilistic posturing” of the one and naïveté of the other.306 Steampunks—be they writers, actors, filmmakers, painters, or chefs— consistently accept technology as a misused good, but a good nonetheless, to be enjoyed within the proper confines and with the appropriate attitude, “loving the machine” that allows humanity to create order, life, and beauty,

but “hating the factory” that would turn every maker into a mindless cog in a thoughtless machine, bereft of the creativity which technology ought to enhance.307 Steampunks, according to Professor Calamity, must reject “both the commodification and divinity of tools and technology,” and instead “must make league with them, and accept them, limited as they may be, on fraternal terms,” calling them, “My Machine, My Comrade.”308 One of steampunk’s best examples of this partnership is Marie Morgan’s “The Mechanic,” a short story that functions as something of a gritty retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.” The title character is a young girl selected to be the lone caretaker of The Machine, a hulking and surly artificial intelligence that resides beneath her city and keeps its systems running, but at a price: one person from the community must be dedicated for life to its service. This perennial cyberpunk trope of dominating AI is soon complicated, however, when the Mechanic begins to discover undeniable elements of true humanity in “Mac,” such as loneliness and fear: “YOU PEOPLE MADE IT THIS WAY. YOU WANTED ME DEAD. I CAN ONLY ALLOW ONE. I WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO KEEP MORE FROM KILLING ME. I MUST KEEP MYSELF AND THE CITY ALIVE.”309 Unlike the generations of mechanics that have worked for the Machine, this new Mechanic chooses to learn to love and to work with Mac, and when she is offered the chance to kill her friend and be free, she chooses instead to try to fix him (“There’s some things I want to do . . . differently from now on”), and is rewarded by his shy but hopeful cooperation: “I WANT THINGS TO BE DIFFERENT . . . PLEASE.”310 In the end, the Mechanic embodies the ideal steampunk, optimistically crafting beauty and health from the ruins of her dystopian world by reestablishing the human-machine relationship as one of partnership and mutual beneficence.

9: Steampunk in Stitches In 9,311 his directorial début, Shane Acker presents the world a story which not only exemplifies, but intensifies these three steampunk distinctives: the dystopia is darker, the hope brighter, the recycling more redemptive and the man/machine union more intimate than in many a work from many a more established steampunk. 9 features highly advanced textile technology and

belongs to a “sub-subgenre” of steampunk unofficially dubbed “stitchpunk,” which “emphasizes the role of weavers, tinkerers, and darners” in futuristic Victoriana.312 Often erroneously credited with the coining of the term, Shane Acker did not pioneer stitchpunk,313 but he did, like Gibson and Sterling, do a great deal to solidify and popularize this particular flavor of Victorian retro-futurism. The heroes of 9 are a covey of animated dolls, each cobbled together from cloth, wood, scrap metal, and other spare parts, and named for the numbers, “1–9,” painted on their backs. They have awoken, ignorant of their origins, amid the dénouement of humanity’s final war with machines: the humans, along with all organic matter, have been wiped out by the machines’ poison gas, and our burlap heroes find themselves pursued, for reasons unknown, by the mechanical creatures which remain in the wreckage of this postapocalyptic, Industrial Era cityscape. The central villain is a massive, insectoid “Fabrication Machine,” able to “create new machines in its own image” and apparently responsible for building the robot armies which razed the world. The Fabrication Machine appears to require the souls of our little heroes in order to maintain its consciousness, and tears their life force from them by means of a tiny key (the Talisman) mounted to its colossal frame. In the course of the film, the dolls manage to make their way back to the workroom where they were created and learn the origin story of both themselves and the Fabrication Machine. Through a hologram message (recorded on a delightfully anachronistic contraption combining projector and clockwork technology), the Scientist, now dead on the workroom floor, explains that his Machine was taken from him by a power-hungry dictator (the Chancellor) and forced to labor for his war effort. Inevitably, the Fabrication Machine turned, not only on the Chancellor, but on all humanity. Foreseeing his race’s impending extinction, the Scientist built the nine dolls and infused each of them with a piece of his own soul, combining ancient alchemy and modern science to preserve humanity in an inorganic, poisonproof form. Armed with this knowledge, the dolls are able to turn the Talisman against the Fabrication Machine, wrenching the dolls’ stolen life force from the creature and effectively killing it. The film ends with the surviving dolls sitting together over the pyre of their departed friends, basking in the planet’s first rainfall since the gas purged the world, and a

brief glimpse of glowing microbes in the raindrops suggests that life will slowly return, albeit in a different form. Steampunk tales are, as we have seen, hopefully dystopian, and since Acker’s film is dystopian in the extreme, it requires a comparatively powerful note of hope to maintain a balanced harmony between these two essential elements. Perhaps better described as post-post-apocalyptic, the story begins at a level of despair at which most apocalyptic films only hint: humanity has not merely been oppressed or enslaved or exploited, but completely exterminated, along with all organic matter, down to the cellular level. Moreover, without the human “soul-juice” required to survive,314 the Fabrication Machine is not even able to enjoy its victory over humanity, winding slowly down to die in its Factory lair. Saving the world is an absurdity, for there is no world left to save. And yet, the overwhelming hopelessness of the film’s premise ultimately only serves to highlight and magnify the story’s essential hopefulness—in the words of 9 producer Timur Bekmambetov, “when you have a dark and grounded world, then you can tell a bright story.”315 And 9 is undeniably bright, even stubbornly so, with many a brave and sacrificial act on the part of its characters. Twice, when a doll is kidnapped by the minions of the Fabrication Machine, the title character descends, at great risk to himself, into the hellish Factory to rescue them. But the most dynamic character of the film is not 9, but rather 1, the eldest doll and self-appointed leader of the group, who clashes repeatedly with 9, the youngest. “1 wants to remain safe, hidden, and ignorant, while 9 wants to fight, explore, and learn,”316 and the old soldier eventually twists his need for safety and security into a justification for sacrificing the others’ lives. The dolls show him mercy, however, and not only spare his life but allow him to stay with them, albeit after unofficially accepting 9 as their new captain. 1’s grumbling isolationism comes to an end, however, when he foils 9’s plan to give his own life for the group. In an attempt to buy enough time for the other dolls to steal the Talisman, 9 lures the Fabrication Machine to himself and prepares to die, only to have 1 shove him out of the way and take his place. And though, in the moments before his death, 1 remains his intractable, melancholy self (“They left us nothing. . . . [W]hy do we have to right their wrongs?”), he nevertheless grits his teeth, mutters, “Sometimes one must be sacrificed,” and

willingly charges to his doom, an act the “old” 1 would never have contemplated. “1 is a multi-dimensional character who actually grows and develops . . . , revealing himself as flawed, fearful, and weak, but not inherently evil or beyond redemption.”317 Indeed, it is 1’s development which prompts Acker to assert that “there’s a lot of hope [in the film] and it is a story of redemption.”318 But this film is lit by more than a few sputtering candles of courage. Rather, it is illuminated by an essential, overarching optimism, in whose glow these separate acts of bravery find their context. The film’s basic premise, after all, is built upon one character’s decision to painstakingly plan and sacrifice for the future of a race facing absolute and inevitable extinction: the Scientist. If the dolls are instinctively selfless and incurably optimistic, it is because they are him. Is not the Scientist’s charge to 9 to “protect the future” built upon the belief that, following humanity’s demise, there will be a future to protect? As such, the dolls’ very existence is a manifestation of dystopian hope, and one that is eventually proven justified with the Fabrication Machine’s final defeat and the planet’s slow but certain healing. And, in fine steampunk style, Acker does manage to maintain this harmonious dissonance of hopeful dystopia until the film’s final lines, when 9 answer’s 7’s timid question of “What happens next?” with “I’m not sure. But this world is ours now. It’s what we make of it.” The tone is simultaneously courageous and foreboding, for though humanity has indeed triumphed through these “stitchpunk” heroes, we have no guarantee that they, or any beings which evolve in the coming millennia, will make a world any better than the last. They sit upon the ruins of two blighted species, humans and machines. But, as the wizened 2 tells 9 in their first conversation, “These ruins are full of riches.” And Acker and his fellow filmmakers mined those ruins for all they were worth, drawing heavily on the motif of redemptive recycling in order to craft characters who relentlessly see their “ruined world” as a “treasure trove of things they can use to make a new life,”319 and in so doing reflect the image of their maker, the Scientist, who crafted them from a gallimaufry of spare parts and trash. To capture the spirit of this recycling impulse, the filmmakers rooted through bags of “fascinating junk” scavenged from the Los Angeles scrap yards, then scanned selected pieces into the computer in order to

maintain their grimy verisimilitude while designing the CGI characters from the various objects.320 The Scientist accordingly crafted every detail of his mechanical children from separate and identifiable pieces of this debris: The stodgy 1 has a body made from a straitjacket, feet that are old fingernail and toenail clippers and ankles constructed out of pieces of bike chains that have been taken apart. The eccentric 6’s body texture is created out of Acker’s wife’s painting overalls. Characters 9 and 5 share burlap and zippers and 2 is predominately made of a tough leather shoe, complete with eyeholes and laces.321 What’s more, each character’s pieces are carefully chosen to express their personality. 6, for instance, is the “crazy . . . tortured artist” whose striped body resembles a madhouse uniform and whose metal fingers are made of pen nibs with which to scribble.322 3 and 4, on the other hand, are the voiceless twins who seem to share a single consciousness with their incessantly weaving movements, and were crafted from a matching set of gardening gloves.323 And, just as 6’s sanitarium style is indicative of his erratic nature, the dolls’ design as recycled garbage informs the manner in which they engage their world. Being themselves the product of redemptive recycling, 1 through 9 instinctively draw the broken pieces of their world together into wholeness and health. “Like Steampunk makers, the main character creates solutions to problems in part out of other people’s junk,”324 as when he fashions an electric lamp from his dead friend’s candle-hat.325 This trait is not at all exclusively 9’s, though, but rather a defining characteristic of how all the dolls interact with the rubble heap that is their universe, “cautiously carving out a life amidst the wreckage and rubble of the dead world around them, cobbling together ingenious tools and contraptions out of the remaining fragments.”326 7 wears a war helmet made of a bird skull, 8 does battle with a kitchen knife broadsword, 1 wields a scepter crafted in part from a broken cog and a rusted jingle bell, and 9 is wheeled about on a roller skate gurney at one point in the film. But these physical manifestations of redemptive

recycling are themselves but a reflection of the dolls’ metaphysical reality, for 9 and his friends are, after all, essentially the hacked-together remains of humanity, scavenged from the scraps of one man’s soul and stuffed into automaton encasements not unlike that of the Fabrication Machine and its minions. The dolls were “created to carry on in a world where we couldn’t,”327 the bastard children of two failed races: mankind and machines. For the dolls are not simply the result of a positive partnership between man and machine, but rather the living incarnation of that partnership. They are cyborgs in the purest sense, humanity and machinery living and working in unison, with neither dominating or exploiting the other. And that partnership (or lack thereof) is not only the definitive difference between the dolls and the Fabrication Machine, but also the deciding factor in their struggle for dominion over the earth. For the Machine is not presented as inherently evil, but rather a “benign creature . . . shocked and tortured . . . into the monster that it is.”328 And yet, in his hologram message to 9, the Scientist refuses to allow the duplicitous Chancellor to shoulder full responsibility for his creation’s sins: “The fault is hardly his alone to bear. The Machine was born purely of my intellect, which I now know was not enough. My creation was hopelessly flawed and indeed dangerous, for it lacked a human soul and could be easily corrupted by those who controlled it.” The Scientist faults himself, not for the Machine’s objective existence, but for its design, which he apparently considers as culpable in humanity’s destruction as the Chancellor’s ill use of it. And the design flaw which haunts him is the Machine’s lack of a human soul, the fact that it was “created purely by raw science and intellect, [not] tempered with [the] emotional side, of human consciousness.”329 Ironically, the Machine’s flaw is that it is pure machine, technology crafted from simple facts and data, uncomplicated by compassion or morality. “The stitchpunks,” on the other hand, “represent humanity, flaws and all,”330 and they achieve victory, not in spite of their humanity, but rather because of it. The dolls are, after all, inferior to the Fabrication Machine on every other possible level: the dolls can measure their height in inches, the Machine measures its in stories; it is built from hardened steel, they from soft cloth;

they tear and crumple with ease, it can climb unharmed from a severalhundred-foot drop; its war machines possess intelligence bordering on sentience, their steampunk contraptions are ingenious and lovingly crafted, but simple. Kurzweil sees in this juxtaposition the shades of humanity’s early evolution, when the physically weaker homo sapiens was able to rise above the dinosaurs as Earth’s dominant race by virtue of its “especially large neocortex that supported sophisticated forms of emotional thinking and social structure.” While the source of the human moral code remains debatable (C. S. Lewis would likely be unconvinced by Kurzweil’s assumptions), the prehistoric analogy is sound: At first, it appears that the evil machines are vastly superior. But the stitchpunk creations have emotional and social intelligence that the clumsy and mechanical destroyers lack. The friendly AI’s (the stitchpunk creations) are capable of looking out for one another, of grieving, of collaborating, and of arguing with each other to come to deeper understandings based on their ability to keep an open mind.331 The Machine may possess all the apparent necessities for physical survival, but its Achilles heel is its hollow heart: it lacks the moral chest, and cannot respond to the Tao. For it is the Tao that guides, not only the dolls of 9, but the entire steampunk world. How, after all, can a movement work towards a particular good without first acknowledging that universal values not only exist but ought to be dutifully followed? Steampunk must affirm the Tao if it is to assert that a positive partnership between humans and machines is necessarily the one and only dynamic which is fitting and proper. And it is by that very partnership that 9 and his ragamuffin family achieve victory. The dolls’ machine nature ensures their immediate, physical survival in this ruined world, and their human nature ensures their long-term, social survival, as well as the eventual revitalization of the planet, once the world is free of the Fabrication Machine. Acker himself bristles at categorizing this film as “anti-science” or “man vs. machine,” working instead to draw the viewer into a deeper understanding of this partnership: “It’s not just man against machine, because our heroes are machines, as well . . . but it’s the humanity within the machine, tempering the machine with morality . . .

empathy . . . compassion.”332 But perhaps the dreams of Shane Acker, Jake von Slatt, and rest of this goggle-faced gang of cosplaying geeks are just that, dreams—burlap dolls defeating mechanical monsters, indeed. Perhaps steampunk is, as Di Filippo suggests, simply science fiction nostalgia, “the adolescent SF genre dreaming of the adult it hopes to grow up to become,”333 disillusioned humanity longing for the days when the future seemed brighter, when rocket cars and airship flights and holidays to the moon seemed only a few inventions away. Perhaps the human race is too far gone for any amount of redemptive recycling to make one cog’s worth of difference. Perhaps. But perhaps steampunk’s most potent power lies in its ability to dare us to dream again, to imagine a better future than the orderly purgatory of The Matrix or the desert hell of Mad Max or the ineffable tedium of Apple’s next iGadget. Perhaps, as Schafer and Franklin would argue, “we only create what we believe to be possible,” and “steampunk still matters because it allows us to imagine change.”334 For myself, vive la vapeur!

Bibliography Acker, Shane. 9. Focus Features, 2009. ———. “9—The Long and the Short of It.” 9. Focus Features, 2009. ———, et al. Audio Commentary. 9. Focus Features, 2009. Blaylock, James P. “Foreword.” In Steampunk: An Illustrated History of Fantastical Fiction, Fanciful Film, and Other Victorian Visions, by Brian J. Robb, 6–7. Minneapolis: Voyageur, 2012. Brown, Molly. “The Selene Gardening Society.” In Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, 147–63. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008. Carriger, Gail. Soulless: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel. New York: Orbit, 2009. Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective (NYC). “What, Then, Is Steampunk? Colonizing the Past So We Can Dream the Future.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 10–11. Combustion, 2011. Di Filippo, Paul. “Foreword: Brit Boffin Delivers Steampunk’s Pure Quill! Or After Such Knowledge, What Thrills?” In Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader, edited by Mike Ashley, 4–7. New York: Nonstop, 2010. Falksen, G. D. “What is Steampunk.” http://www.gdfalksen.com/Steampunk. Fox, Dylan. “My Dear Punks of Steam.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 363. Combustion, 2011. Gibson, William, and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Balantine, 2011. Hawksmoor, C. Allegra. “O Dear Reader.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 283. Combustion, 2011. Hunt, Stephen. “The Great Steampunk Timeline.” http://www.tor.com/2010/10/20/the-greatsteampunk-timeline/.

“An Interview with Alan Moore.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 138–39. Combustion, 2011. Jeter, K. W. Letter to the Editor. Locus Magazine, April 1987. ———. Morlock Night. Nottingham, UK: Angry Robot, 2011. Killjoy, Margaret. Epigraph. In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 1. Combustion, 2011. Kurzweil, Ray. “Introduction to 9.” http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/introduction_to_9. Lakin-Smith, Kim. “Pump Up the Volume: The Sound of Steampunk.” http://www.kimlakinsmith.com/music/pump-up-the-volume-the-sound-of-steampunk/. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. Macaulay, Scott. “Talking with Timur.” http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/talking_with_timur? film=9. McGovern, Bridget. “Review: Shane Acker’s 9.” http://www.tor.com/2009/09/10/acker9review/. Morgan, Marie. “The Mechanic.” In SteamPunk Magazine 8, edited by Margaret Killjoy, 19–25. Combustion, 2012. Museum of the History of Science. “Steampunk.” http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/steampunk/. Powers, Tim. The Anubis Gates. New York: Ace, 1997. Priest, Cherie. Boneshaker. New York: Tor, 2009. Professor Calamity. “My Machine, My Comrade.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, edited by Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 140–41. Combustion, 2011. Robb, Brian J. Steampunk: An Illustrated History of Fantastical Fiction, Fanciful Film, and Other Victorian Visions. Minneapolis: Voyageur, 2012. Schafer, James, and Kate Franklin. “Why Steampunk (Still) Matters.” In SteamPunk Magazine 8, edited by Margaret Killjoy, 10–15. Combustion, 2012. Scott, A. O. “In a Grim, Mysterious World, a Burlap Hero with a Heart of Golden Fuzz.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/movies/09nine.html. Snyder, Tom. “9: Shane Acker Interview.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne C1DmamE7o. Swain, Frank. “Is 9 an Anti-science Film? Interview with Director Shane Acker.” http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/2009/09/01/is-9-an-anti-science-film-inte/. “Thomas Truax, Mad Singer of Marvelous Mechanical Music: An Interview.” In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 44–47. Combustion, 2011. Trimble, Tyghe. “9: The Making of a Stitchpunked World.” http://www.popularmech anics.com/culture/movies/a4544/4330275/. VanderMeer, Jeff. “Steampunk: An Overview.” http://www.focusfeatures.com/slideshow/steampunk__an_overview. VanderMeer, Jeff, and S. J. Chambers. The Steampunk Bible. New York: Abrams Image, 2011. von Slatt, Jake. Introduction. In SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, Margaret Killjoy and C. Allegra Hawksmoor, 2–3. Combustion, 2011. ———. “A Steampunk Manifesto.” In Jeff VanderMeer and S.J. Chambers, The Steampunk Bible, 216–18. New York: Abrams Image, 2011. ———. The Steampunk Workshop. http://steampunkworkshop.com/. Wachowski, Laurence, and Andrew Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Westerfeld, Scott. Leviathan. New York: Pulse, 2009. Williams, Sarah Hope. “Just What is ‘Stitchpunk,’ Anyway?” http://io9.com/5358336/just-what-isstitchpunk-anyway.

272. Falksen, “What is Steampunk.” 273. Robb, Steampunk: An Illustrated History, 28. 274. Blaylock, Foreword, 6-7. 275. Jeter, Letter to the Editor. 276. Ibid., line 7. 277. Robb, Steampunk: An Illustrated History, 49. 278. Ibid., 51. 279. Ibid. 280. VanderMeer and Chambers, The Steampunk Bible, 62. 281. Robb, Steampunk: An Illustrated History, 58–59. 282. Ibid., 54. 283. Hunt, “The Great Steampunk Timeline.” 284. “An Interview with Alan Moore,” 138. 285. Robb, Steampunk: An Illustrated History, 115. 286. Ibid., 113. 287. Ibid., 115. 288. Ibid., 71. 289. Ibid., 161–65. 290. Lakin-Smith, “Pump Up the Volume.” 291. von Slatt, Introduction, 2–3. 292. Hunt, “The Great Steampunk Timeline.” 293. Killjoy, Epigraph, 1. 294. Museum of the History of Science, “Steampunk.” 295. VanderMeer and Chambers, The Steampunk Bible, 66. 296. Ibid., 64. 297. Killjoy, Epigraph, 1. 298. Schafer and Franklin, “Why Steampunk (Still) Matters,” 12. 299. von Slatt, “Steampunk Manifesto,” 216. 300. Ibid., emphasis in original. 301. Priest, Boneshaker, 409. 302. von Slatt, “Steampunk Manifesto,” 217. 303. Fox, “My Dear Punks,” 363. 304. “Thomas Truax,” 44–47.

305. Brown, “The Selene,” 147–63. 306. Catastrophone Orchestra, “What, Then?,” 10. 307. Hawksmoor, “O Dear Reader,” 283. 308. Professor Calamity, “My Machine, My Comrade,” 140. 309. Morgan, “The Mechanic,” 22. 310. Ibid., 25. 311. Acker, 9. 312. Vandermeer and Chambers, The Steampunk Bible, 59. Steampunk houses a number of casual “sub-subgenres,” each of which emphasizes a different aspect of steampunk, the Victorian era, or retrofuturism in general. “Clockpunk,” for example, features highly advanced clockwork technologies, while “boilerpunk” centers upon the working-class Victorian, as opposed to the scientist or the dandy. Others include “raygun Gothic,” “gaslight romance,” and “mannerspunk.” The distinctions are by no means mutually exclusive, however, but rather exist as different shades on the steampunk palette, to be experimented with and enjoyed at will. 313. Williams, “Just What Is ‘Stitchpunk,’ Anyway?” 314. Acker et al., Audio Commentary. 315. Macaulay, “Talking with Timur.” 316. Scott, “In a Grim, Mysterious World.” 317. McGovern, “Review: Shane Acker’s 9.” 318. Snyder, “9: Shane Acker Interview.” 319. Acker et al., Audio Commentary. 320. Trimble, “The Making.” 321. Ibid. 322. Acker et al., Audio Commentary. 323. Ibid. 324. Vandermeer, “Steampunk: An Overview,” Slide 10. 325. Acker et al., Audio Commentary. 326. McGovern, “Review.” 327. Acker et al., Audio Commentary. 328. Ibid. 329. Swain, “Is 9 an Anti-science Film?” 330. Ibid. 331. Kurzweil, “Introduction to 9.” 332. Acker et al., Audio Commentary, emphasis original. 333. Di Filippo, “Forward,” 6.

334. Schafer and Franklin, “Why Steampunk (Still) Matters,” 11.

12 Reclaiming Virtue and (Post)Humanity in Moon by Linda Wight

n Part 2 of The Abolition of Man (1947), C. S. Lewis insists that all value judgments and actions must be guided by virtue, in particular by an awareness of one’s duty to others and a commitment to justice. Lewis claims that these virtues, which he refers to as the Tao but acknowledges may also be known as “Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes,”335 are the defining feature of

I

humanity. Thus, to neglect the Tao is to risk “[t]he [a]bolition of [m]an.”336 The loss of humanity is also a recurring concern in science fiction. Many science fiction films that depict the technological creation of posthuman life express apprehension that a lack of virtue will create the conditions for the potential abuse of science and technology to benefit some at the expense of others. Duncan Jones’s 2009 film, Moon,337 however, balances an awareness of the suffering that may result when corporations disregard virtue in an attempt to reshape humanity for economic gain with hope that the posthumans created in this way may embrace virtue and thus assert their humanity. Moon draws upon and responds to a long tradition of cloning narratives, so I begin this chapter with a brief overview of the treatment of cloning in science fiction literature and film, noting the influence that these narratives have also had upon real world debates about the potential benefits and dangers of human cloning. Next, I point out that although Lewis does not specifically address cloning in The Abolition of Man, his concern that the technological engineering of future generations will reduce humans to manufactured artifacts resonates with many opponents of cloning in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I cite prominent critics of cloning to show how such concerns informed the 1997 decision of the U. S. Congress to ban human cloning. I argue that these debates form the background to

Moon, which similarly conveys concern about the potential objectification of clones by a corporation which disregards virtue in its quest for economic profit. After detailing how the corporation dehumanizes the clones, however, I argue that Moon indicates that the attempted abolition of man must fail when those who have been manufactured refuse their victimization and assert their humanity by acting in accordance with the Tao. I explain how the clones’ memories of their loved ones, although edited and implanted by the corporation, inspire the clones’ commitment to virtue, as evident in their selfless actions. Finally, I conclude the chapter by arguing that the filmmakers construct Moon in such a way as to encourage viewers to empathize with and seek to emulate the clones, demonstrating the potential of science fiction film to cultivate the Tao in the real world. What it means to be human is perhaps the central question of science fiction and also the issue that concerns Lewis in The Abolition of Man. Often set in the future, but concerned with pressing issues in the present, science fiction asks how technology and science have changed and may continue to change us. Often these thought experiments draw attention to the increasingly blurred boundaries between humans and machines. As Donna Haraway observed in 1985, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”338 Like Haraway, many science fiction films focus on the figure of the cyborg, the human enhanced physically and/or intellectually by machine parts, as in RoboCop339 (Paul Verhoeven, 1987), or the machine with emotions, desires, and/or biological physical components, as in Blade Runner340 (Ridley Scott, 1982). These films pose the question, on the one hand, of who counts as human and, on the other, at what point we sacrifice our humanity if we continue to use technology to transform ourselves. Other science fiction films consider the consequences for humanity when technology is employed to clone a human being. Recent films, such as Moon, draw on a long-established cloning trope in both literary and filmic science fiction. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) provides an early model for later science fictional and real world visions of cloning. Haran, Kitzinger, McNeil, and O’Riordan note that although the word “clone” is never used in the book, “Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is the first science fiction classic which furnishes explicit images of cloning and, as such, it has

had considerable popular resonance ever since its initial publication.”341 In Brave New World, Huxley describes the cloning of ninety-six identical human beings from a single egg. His novel arouses fears that technology will threaten humanity through the mass production of clones conditioned to fulfill a specific role, aligning them more closely with machines than with a humanity often associated in the Western world with individuality and free will.342 Numerous science fiction films in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries similarly convey anxiety that science and technology may be misused to mass-produce clones for their creators’ material gain. In The Island343 (Michael Bay, 2005), for example, wealthy individuals have themselves cloned so that they may harvest their clones’ organs and thus extend their own lives. The clones’ humanity is denied, reducing them to biological spare parts rather than recognizing them as individuals with the same moral and legal human rights as their progenitors. In Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones344 (George Lucas, 2002), clones are again produced and used to serve the selfish desires of a powerful few. In this film a clone army is manufactured which will later become the Imperial storm troopers used by the ruthless Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader to further their own military and political ambitions. These fictional visions have arguably contributed to real-world concerns about the potentially negative consequences of cloning: “Science fiction films had set the pattern; nameless, faceless, mindless pseudo-humans march across our mental landscape.”345 Although Lewis does not specifically address cloning in The Abolition of Man, his concern that the use of technology to engineer future generations will reduce humans to artifacts also resonates with many critics of cloning in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. In “Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now” (2001), Leon Kass, chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics from 2001–2005, writes, “A society that allows cloning, whether it knows it or not, has tacitly assented to the conversion of procreation into manufacture and to the treatment of children as purely the projects of our will.”346 Kass makes a similar argument in “The Wisdom of Repugnance” (1997) where he draws (intentionally or otherwise) on language that Lewis employs in The Abolition of Man: “[C]loning represents a giant step (though not the first one) toward

transforming procreation into manufacture . . . toward the ‘production’ of human children as artifacts, products of human will and design.”347 Earlier, in an essay titled “New Beginnings in Life” (1972), Kass expressed his opposition, much like Lewis, to any technological tampering with humanity: “To lay one’s hands on human generation is to take a major step toward making man himself simply another one of the man-made things.”348 Kass is not alone in his concerns. In 1996, after the birth of Dolly, a cloned sheep, brought the possibility of future human cloning to the forefront of media attention around the world, United States President Bill Clinton established the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to consider the potential benefits and harms of human cloning. The report, released in 1997, summarized some recurring concerns raised in submissions to the Commission, many again focused on the possibility that cloning would reduce humans to artifacts manufactured for the creator’s benefit. The report stated: [P]eople have frequently expressed fears that a widespread practice of such cloning would undermine important social values, such as opening the door to a form of eugenics or by tempting some to manipulate others as if they were objects instead of persons, and exceeding the moral boundaries inherent in the human condition.349 The Commission noted the concern that clones might potentially be treated as objects designed to fulfill a preordained role, imposing an unacceptable degree of expectation and control that would deny the clones’ human emotions, desires, and freedom to determine their own destinies. The Commission asked: “[W]ill being cloned from the somatic cell of an existing person result in the child being regarded as less of a person whose humanity and dignity would not fully be respected?”350 The concerns outlined by the Commission resulted in their recommendation to Congress to pass a law to ban human cloning. Their report assumed that individuals created in this way would be aware of their status as clones, and their ethical concerns therefore focused on the pressure that clones might face to adhere to the behaviors and life-path mapped out by

their progenitor. Moon similarly conveys concern about the potential objectification of clones; however, in this film the ethical concerns are exacerbated by the fact that the clones are kept ignorant of their manufactured status. The clones have been manufactured by Lunar Industries, a corporation harvesting clean-burning fusion energy, Helium 3, or HE3, from the far side of the moon for consumption on Earth. Each clone believes that he is astronaut Sam Bell, stationed at the moon mining base for a three-year assignment, at the end of which period he will be reunited with his wife and young daughter on Earth. In fact, Lunar Industries has manufactured thousands of clones of Sam Bell and has programmed each with an edited version of the original Sam’s memories. The film also implies that the corporation has intentionally created the clones with a limited three-year lifespan which has been calculated to enhance the corporation’s control and maximise the clones’ efficiency and productivity. As suggested by the loneliness expressed by the Sam-clone who is nearing the end of his threeyear assignment, a longer period laboring in isolation on the moon could potentially result in mental breakdown, erratic behavior, and resistance to authority, threatening the corporation’s profit. Instead, as each clone’s threeyear term draws to a close, he sickens and is subsequently terminated by the corporation, to be replaced by a new clone awoken from the storage vault hidden underneath the mining base. The new clone wakes ignorant of how he has been created and of the existence and fate of the clones that preceded him. In Moon, however, two of the clones discover the reality of their existence when one is woken prematurely because the other is mistakenly presumed dead in a mining accident. The two search the mining base, discovering thousands of other Sam Bell clones stored in suspended animation by Lunar Industries. Five empty slots in the storage hold suggest that the two are the fourth and fifth clones to be activated. In this chapter I therefore refer to them hereafter as Sam-4 and Sam-5. In the remainder of the chapter I discuss how they react to the discovery that they are clones and argue that rather than accepting their status as less-than-human artifacts, Sam-4 and Sam-5 reclaim the humanity that they have been denied, and that their creators have themselves lost, by demonstrating the virtues that Lewis identifies as the defining feature of humanity, virtues that Lunar Industries, in its greed, has disregarded. Like many other science fiction films, Moon critiques the powerful

corporation for abandoning virtue in its drive for economic profit. The film opens with Lunar Industries’s promotional video paying lip service to virtue by claiming that its harvesting of fusion energy is motivated primarily by a desire to secure the health and happiness of future generations. The video extols the potential of science and technology to benefit humanity: “How did we make the world so much better? Make deserts bloom?” Its emphasis is on how Lunar Industries’s clean energy has overcome the problems of pollution and environmental degradation that had devastated the Earth and contributed to widespread disease and starvation throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Featuring images of laughing, smiling children from diverse cultures, the video implies that Lunar Industries is using cutting-edge technology to safeguard the future of humanity. Yet Moon suggests that Lunar Industries’s achievements actually come at the expense of humanity because the corporation engineers the clones for its own commercial gain while denying them basic human rights. This critique echoes concerns expressed by Lewis in Part 2 of The Abolition of Man. Lewis warns of “the Innovator[s]”351 who seek to shape future generations of humanity to suit their own selfish desires, “not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such.”352 Although not specifically addressing the ethical problems of cloning, he expresses concern that using technology for “selective breeding”353 will result in the production of future generations who are “without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer.”354 Lunar Industries prefers a generation of clones who will labor tirelessly and without question for the corporation’s profit. The clones are denied a concurring (or dissenting) voice because they are unaware, firstly that they have been manufactured, and secondly of how the corporation is using various other technologies to manipulate them for its own gain. As Kate Warren observes, “That the clones believe themselves to be human . . . prevents them from questioning the fact that they have been created as essentially a slave-labour force, purposefully exploited and denied basic human rights.”355 Lunar Industries maintains this fiction, not only by ensuring that only one clone is awake at any one time, but also by using the clones’ implanted memories of Sam Bell’s wife, Tess, and their daughter,

Eve, to keep them motivated and compliant. Throughout each clone’s threeyear posting, Lunar Industries plays edited video messages of love, encouragement, and support from Tess which she presumably made for the original Sam. Although struggling to deal with his isolation on the moon base as he nears the end of his assignment, Sam-4 is motivated to persevere by Tess’s message that conveys her pride in the job he is doing. Tess also tells Sam how much she loves and misses him, inspiring him with the promise of a future together once he has completed the last two weeks of his posting. As Warren points out, “Lunar Industries uses the idea of a ‘life back on Earth’ as a motivating factor, compelling the clones to diligently complete their work.”356 Of course, real-time communication with Earth would shatter this illusion, so Lunar Industries maintains its control by telling the clones there is a fault with the communication satellite. In fact, the corporation has installed beacons near the mining base to block any live transmissions going in or out, disregarding the clones’ basic human need for contact with other people. The impact on the clones’ mental health is palpable. Cut off from other humans, except for periodic recorded messages, Sam-4 has begun talking to himself and to the plants which he nurtures in a desperate attempt to forge a connection with another living creature. Lunar Industries tries to limit the extent to which the isolation impacts negatively the clones’ productivity by providing them with an artificial companion. GERTY does everything in his power to empathize with and protect the Sam clones, even to the extent of keeping the fact that two are awake at the same time from the corporation. Nevertheless, he cannot satisfy the clones’ basic human need for meaningful contact with another human being. Lunar Industries further dehumanizes the clones by treating them as replaceable units in a production line. As Sam-5 insists to a reluctant Sam-4, “Look, it’s a company, right? They have investors, they have shareholders, shit like that. What’s cheaper? Spending time and money training new personnel, or you just have a couple of spares here to do the job? . . . You really think they give a shit about us? They’re laughing all the way to the bank.” Sam-4 eventually accepts that the corporation that has reduced them to technologically-produced artifacts will have no hesitation in disposing of any units of production that it perceives to be faulty. He realizes that if the “rescue” ship arrives at the moon base to find two clones awake at the same

time and the corporation’s secret exposed, its personnel will have no hesitation in killing them both. The clones, however, refuse their victimization and instead claim the humanity that they have been denied by behaving according to the virtues that Lewis identifies with the Tao in Part 2 of The Abolition of Man. In this section, Lewis emphasizes that a commitment to justice and a sense of duty to others are central to the Tao. He writes, “[O]ur duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason.”357 Lewis explains that this duty transcends our instinct to act in the best interests of ourselves and our immediate family, requiring a more comprehensive commitment to justice: “[A] duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers.”358 Soon after discovering the facts of their existence, Sam-4 and Sam-5 demonstrate their commitment to duty and justice. Although their relationship is initially characterized by distrust, suspicion, and anger, Sam5’s actions toward Sam-4 are overwhelmingly marked by compassion as he tenderly cares for the increasingly sick clone. Sam-5 also concocts a plan to save both Sam-4 and himself from being killed by the “rescue” team. He convinces GERTY to wake a new clone, whom he plans to put in the wrecked rover where the rescue team expect to find Sam-4’s dead body. Sam-5 then plans to smuggle Sam-4 back to Earth in one of the launchers that Lunar Industries uses to carry the Helium-3 payload from the Moon. Sam-5 intends to cover up the deception by himself remaining on the moon to carry out his three-year assignment. Sam-5 recognizes that Sam-4 has suffered as a result of working alone on the moon for three years with only the promise of a reunion with Tess and Eve to sustain him, and believes that Sam-4 now deserves a chance to live out whatever life he has left on Earth. His willingness to sacrifice his own chance at freedom in order to enable Sam-4’s escape indicates Sam-5’s commitment to justice. Michael Aeschliman notes that the obligation to “transcend selfinterest”359 is crucial to Lewis’s conception of the Tao. Therefore, the clones’ determination to put the good of others before their own wellbeing reaffirms their humanity. Like Sam-5, Sam-4 is prepared to put others before his own self-interest. Sam-4 is gravely ill, so he insists that Sam-5 escape in

the launcher and offers to return himself to the wrecked rover, even though he knows he will die there, sparing the life of the newly awakened clone. Ultimately, neither Sam-4 nor Sam-5 are prepared to countenance the suffering of the other clones whom Lunar Industries may seek to use in the future. Sam-5 realizes that it is his duty to ensure that Lunar Industries will not be able to deceive and manipulate these clones as it has the first four. Reluctantly accepting Sam-4’s offer, Sam-5 risks jeopardizing his own escape and being discovered by the “rescue” team when he stops to reprogram one of the harvesting machines to knock down one of the beacons blocking live communications to Earth. Finally, audio recordings of media reports reveal that when Sam-5 returns to Earth, he continues to pursue justice for the thousands of clones that Lunar Industries has created by testifying at a hearing into the corporation’s unethical activities. Through their virtuous actions, Sam-4 and Sam-5 counter Lewis’s concern that those individuals engineered by the Innovators will be powerless to resist the erasure of their own humanity. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis worries, “The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”360 In Moon, after they discover the secret of their creation, the clones seize the power to determine their own future by making a conscious decision to live according to the true Tao, transcending the artificial Tao with which Lunar Industries has programmed them. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warns that the Innovators may condition future generations with a constructed notion of virtue, not because they believe in the importance of the Tao, but because it suits whatever selfish ends the Innovators hope to achieve: “The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race.”361 It benefits Lunar Industries to have the clones motivated to work hard by love for Sam’s wife and daughter, and by a sense of duty to the human population on Earth. They therefore program the clones with memories of the original Sam edited to encourage these virtues. When the clones discover that their memories have been programmed, however, they refuse to either abandon virtue completely or accept Lunar Industries’s attempt to deny their humanity. Instead, they make a conscious decision to behave virtuously in accordance with the Tao,

drawing on the very emotions and memories with which Lunar Industries sought to control them. The importance of memory as a guide to virtuous action has been explored by Deborah Knight and George McKnight in their analysis of the science fiction films Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998). Numerous parallels can be drawn, in particular, between the replicants of Blade Runner and the clones of Moon. Both have been engineered by a corporation to have a limited life-span (three years for the clones, four for the replicants), and both rebel against their creators, motivated, at least in part, by the programmed memories with which the corporations sought to control them. Knight and McKnight insist that, “memory is essential for coherent, ongoing action. If you can’t remember who you know or what you value, how will you be able to decide what to do?”362 Although the clones accept that they have not personally experienced the events and relationships that they remember, these memories are still crucial in shaping their sense of identity and the values and virtues that are important to them. Moreover, their memories are crucial because they allow the clones to “imaginatively project themselves into a future,”363 a future which the clones, like the replicants of Blade Runner, come to understand “they will not live to see.”364 For Sam-4 and Sam-5, their memories of Tess and their daughter, coupled with the realization that they will never be reunited with this loving family, contribute to their sense of injustice and desire to revolt against the corporation that has lied to and used them. Moon thus suggests that it is the emotional aspect of memory that can inspire a desire for justice. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis identifies “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments,”365 as a crucial component of living by the Tao, and many science fiction films similarly identify emotions as necessary for virtue and as “the uniquely defining feature of humans.”366 In their analysis of Blade Runner, Knight and McKnight argue “that memory can be unreliable, but emotions can provide good motives for action and sustain one’s identity over time.”367 In Blade Runner, although the replicants know that the Tyrell Corporation has implanted their memories, their genuine love for each other and for life itself motivates them to seek justice from those who created and sought to control

them. Similarly, in Moon, the clones’ love for Tess and their daughter defines them and inspires their virtuous actions. This love is most evident when Sam4 takes a rover beyond the beacon that has been blocking transmissions to Earth in order to make a call home. His daughter answers, but she is now a teenager rather than the infant that Sam-4 recalls, and she tells Sam-4 that her mother died several years ago. His grief is palpable and is further compounded when he hears the voice of the original Sam in the background, reaffirming to Sam-4 that he will forever be denied the family that he valued as the most important part of his life. Yet, as Warren observes, Sam-4, “still possesses a strong paternal instinct, calling [his daughter] . . . sweetheart and asking tenderly, ‘How did Mommy die?’”368 Sam-4’s love for his family remains central to his identity and underlies the self-sacrificing actions he subsequently takes. Lewis insists, however, that living according to the Tao requires more than raw emotion; the individual must also employ reason to make an informed decision about what is good and virtuous. According to Aeschliman, it is this ability to apply reason to the recognition and pursuit of objective virtue that is a defining feature of humanity for Lewis: “Lewis argues that reason coherently used leads inevitably to an apprehension of a Good which is no mere human projection, but which human rationality is uniquely fitted to infer, recognize, and choose to live by.”369 In “The Poison of Subjectivism” (1967) Lewis writes that, “good is indeed something objective, and reason the organ whereby it is apprehended.”370 Although Moon places more emphasis on emotion, the clones must still employ reason in order to determine the right actions to take in order to pursue justice for themselves and the other clones. Even though Sam-4 and Sam-5 acknowledge that their memories are unreliable, they are still able to draw on the memories of the original Sam Bell to make a rational appraisal of the injustice that Lunar Industries has perpetrated against them, and of their own duty to attempt to overcome this injustice. Thus, Moon asserts that the clones, manufactured as artifacts, may draw on their memories, emotions, and reason and, by acting according to the virtues that Lewis identifies with the Tao, claim the humanity that was denied them. Perhaps more significantly, the film’s sympathetic portrayal of the clones encourages viewers to cultivate the Tao in their own lives. Moon does this by

drawing on a common trope in science fiction film that depicts the manufactured person as more virtuous, and closer in behavior and thought to what we commonly think of as human, than those who might seem to have a more obvious claim to the label. Blade Runner once again invites comparison. Knight and McKnight note that this film works to break down the distinctions between human and replicant which initially seemed clear: “[W]e come to recognize the replicants as those who embody the values we believe define what it is to be human: empathy, trust, loyalty, love.”371 A similar pattern is evident in many recent science fiction films that focus on the figure of the clone, marking a shift from earlier texts which, following Huxley’s Brave New World, depicted clones as an ominous threat to humanity. For instance, in their analysis of The Island, Haran et al. note: [I]t is the social context and process of cloning, rather than the figure of the clone that emerges as horrific here. The clones in The Island are represented as enslaved beings, denied basic “human” rights, through the narrative conceit that clones are not human. However, it is always visually explicit to the viewer that the clones are as human as anyone else . . . .372 Moon similarly focuses its critique on the context and process of cloning that is controlled by Lunar Industries and encourages viewers to align their sympathies with the clones by portraying them as heroic, compassionate, loving and selfless. The filmmakers heighten our sympathies by keeping us ignorant of the truth of the clones’ creation until Sam-4 and Sam-5 themselves uncover the secret. By this stage we have witnessed Sam-4’s profound love for Tess and their daughter, a love of which we are constantly reminded by the many photographs covering the walls of his bedroom and work station. When GERTY confirms that Sam-4 is indeed a clone, we mourn with him as he stares at a photo of Tess, grieving for the loss of everything that mattered in his life. Several other equally heartbreaking scenes further encourage viewers to empathize with Sam-4 and reflect on the injustice he has suffered. After his call to the teenage Eve, Sam-4 cries piteously and his hopeless plea, “I want to go home. I want to go home,” makes his subsequent insistence that Sam-5 leave in his place all the more

admirable in its virtue. Clint Mansell’s powerful instrumental score, “Memories (Someone We’ll Never Know),” enhances the poignancy of Sam4’s loss and sacrifice. The sorrow-laden track is repeated when Sam-5 gently lowers the terminally ill Sam-4 into the wrecked rover, knowing that he is leaving him there to die. Sam-5’s tenderness to his stricken brother again encourages viewers to empathize with the clones and acknowledge that although they were manufactured, they are more human in their virtuous, generous, and loving behavior than the representatives of Lunar Industries who seek to reduce humanity to artifacts in their quest for economic profit. Thus, it is the virtuous clones whom viewers are implicitly encouraged to emulate by cultivating the Tao in their own lives. In conclusion, although Lewis expresses concern in The Abolition of Man that the use of technology to produce future generations according to a preconceived model will result in the reduction of humanity to manufactured artifacts, Moon casts doubt on whether the complete abolition of human beings can actually ever take place by conveying hope that the individuals created in this way may resist their victimization and claim their humanity by embracing the virtues that Lewis identifies with the Tao. As Lewis himself writes: “In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human.”373 In Moon, the actions of Sam-4 and Sam-5 confirm them as human because they are characterized by a strong commitment to justice and duty to others, virtues that they cultivate largely because of the memories of the original Sam Bell with which they have been programmed, despite Lunar Industries’s efforts to use these memories to objectify and control the clones. Importantly, the clones go well beyond their programming in their genuine commitment to the Tao. After they realize the injustices perpetrated against them, Sam-4 and Sam-5 both make a conscious choice to act virtuously towards each other and the thousands of other clones. Sam-5 insists to GERTY, “We’re not programmed, we’re people,” and he and Sam-4 prove this by their willingness to sacrifice their own lives and freedom in order to secure justice for their brothers. Aeschliman notes that for Lewis, “it is in precisely this effort of humane moral and intellectual striving that much of our specifically human nature and integrity consists.”374 Thus, Moon offers a powerful affirmation of the importance of virtue, and hope for its persistence in the

future, a hope that relies on viewers, inspired by the clones’ example, also committing to the Tao in their own lives.

Bibliography Aeschliman, Michael. The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983. Bay, Michael. The Island. DreamWorks Pictures, 2005. Haran, Joan, et al. Human Cloning in the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice. New York: Routledge, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. New York: Routledge, 1991. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. St Albans, UK: Granada, 1977. Kass, Leon R. Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. San Francisco: Encounter, 2002. ———. “New Beginnings in Life.” In The New Genetics and the Future of Man, edited by Michael P. Hamilton, 15–63. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972. ———. “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” In Flesh of My Flesh: The Ethics of Cloning Humans, edited by Gregory E. Pence, 13–37. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Klotzko, Arlene Judith. A Clone of Your Own? The Science and Ethics of Cloning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Knight, Deborah, and George McKnight. “What Is It To Be Human? Blade Runner and Dark City.” In The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, edited by Steven M. Sanders, 21–37. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Lucas, George. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Jones, Duncan. Moon. Sony Pictures Classics, 2009. National Bioethics Advisory Commission. “Cloning Human Beings.” In Flesh of My Flesh: The Ethics of Cloning Humans, edited by Gregory E. Pence, 45–65. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Proyas, Alex. Dark City. New Line Cinema, 1998. Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1982. Verhoeven, Paul. RoboCop. Orion Pictures, 1987. Warren, Kate. “Moon: Clones are Human Too.” Screen Education 60 (2010) 119–25.

335. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 56. 336. Ibid., 65. 337. Jones, Moon. 338. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 152. 339. Verhoeven, RoboCop. 340. Scott, Blade Runner. 341. Haran et al., Human Cloning in the Media, 23.

342. Klotzko, A Clone of Your Own?, 6. 343. Bay, The Island. 344. Lucas, Star Wars Episode II. 345. Ibid., xvii. 346. Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity, 173; quoted in Klotzko, A Clone of Your Own, 2. 347. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” 24; italics added. Whether intentional or otherwise, it is surely not accidental. Lewis has visibly influenced Kass, who twice quotes Abolition of Man in Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity (55, 126–27). 348. Kass, “New Beginnings in Life,” 54; quoted in Klotzko, A Clone of Your Own?, 2. 349. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, “Cloning Human Beings,” 46. 350. Ibid., 56. 351. Lewis, Abolition, 55. 352. Ibid., 62–63. 353. Ibid., 68. 354. Ibid. 355. Warren, “Moon: Clones Are Human Too,” 121. 356. Ibid. 357. Lewis, Abolition, 54. 358. Ibid., 55. 359. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, 78. 360. Lewis, Abolition, 71. 361. Ibid., 74. 362. Knight and McKnight, “What Is It To Be Human?,” 29. 363. Ibid. 364. Ibid. 365. Lewis, Abolition, 34. 366. Knight and McKnight, “What Is It To Be Human?,” 34. 367. Ibid., 34. 368. Warren, “Moon: Clones Are Human Too,” 123. 369. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, 75. 370. Quoted in Ibid., 3. 371. Knight and McKnight, “What Is It To Be Human?,” 35. 372. Haran et al., 64; italics in original. 373. Lewis, Abolition, 86.

374. Aeschliman, The Restitutuion of Man, 7.

13 Terraforming the Human Soul Star Trek’s Genesis Device and the Ethical Cultivation of Creation Kevin C. Neece

hrough Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry envisioned a future Earth with no war, disease, or division, a place of peace and human unity. It is an ideal that closely reflects the culmination of the Christian gospel, only without the Christian gospel. In Star Trek’s version, the gospel is that of humanity picking itself up by its own bootstraps and saving itself. As Star Trek’s world is marked by great technological developments, various observers have frequently seen the message of Star Trek as one of salvation through technology. However, in Star Trek, humanity does not save itself simply with technology. It saves itself by means of virtue, and specifically by putting virtue to work—not just through the virtuous application of technology, but through the virtuous application of human genius and creativity. While the practical realities of Star Trek’s future—space travel, interacting with alien life, global unity—were certainly things that Gene Roddenberry believed in, the future he was primarily interested in was the future of humanity—not just what we do, but who we become. The hopeful vision of humanity he proposed was based, not in salvation through technology, but in the moral, spiritual, and social development of humankind. Star Trek’s most important future, then, is the future of the human heart. This is a future we can attain, it proposes, by embracing and holding fast to essential principles of freedom, equality, justice, exploration, and imagination. Whatever our technological development, it must never outpace our moral development. If it does, humanity is doomed. Indeed, time and again, the truest form of humanity in Star Trek is contained in our highest ideals and most noble principles. As Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway asserts, “If we abandon our principles, we stop

T

being human.”375 Encapsulated by Starfleet and the Federation in their foundational ideals, such as the Prime Directive, these principles have less to do with technology than with how we as humans interact with our neighbors and our environment. One of the most potent examples of these issues and the various ways in which technology and virtue can interrelate is the technology of terraforming —that is, the alteration of a dead planet’s atmospheric conditions in order to make it capable of supporting life. The idea is most famously and richly explored with the Genesis Device—the terraforming missile that provides the narrative through-line for the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The Genesis Device narrative invites questions regarding the ethical use of terraforming and what statements Star Trek might be making—overtly or implicitly—about humankind’s preparedness for the use of such powerful technology, especially in light of its later depiction in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Terraforming and the Genesis Device The basic question of terraforming itself forces the hard question of technological hubris. How can humans possibly predict the effects of creating or re-shaping an entire world on the surrounding cosmos? It is this concern— the moral gravity of humans attempting to wield such power over life and death—that is foremost in the mind of Dr. McCoy after viewing Carol Marcus’s video presentation on the process. His conversation with Spock and Kirk acknowledges both the danger inherent in the kind of power required to accomplish the creation of a new world, and the godlike role assumed by human beings attempting such a feat. Spock: It literally is Genesis. Kirk: The power of creation. Spock: Have they proceeded with their experiment? Kirk: Well, the tape was made about a year ago. I can only assume they’ve reached Stage Two by now.

McCoy: But, dear Lord, do you think we’re intelligent enough to . . . Suppose . . . What if this thing were used where life already exists? Spock: It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix. McCoy: Its new matrix? Do you have you any idea what you’re saying? Spock: I was not attempting to evaluate its moral implications, Doctor. As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create. McCoy: Not anymore! Now we can do both at the same time! According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis. We’ll do it for you in six minutes! Spock: I do not dispute that in the wrong hands . . . . McCoy: In the wrong hands? Would you mind telling me whose are the right hands, my logical friend?376 This version of the exchange, taken from the Director’s Cut, restores one of the most important lines in the film, when Dr. McCoy asks whose are the right hands. The implication here is that McCoy doubts whether any human has the moral right to create a world, especially when holding such power would also grant the ability to so devastatingly destroy life. Conventional wisdom (and much of popular culture) suggests that technology is a good thing as long as good people are using it for good purposes, but that if bad people use it for bad purposes, we have a problem. The solution, then, is to keep technology out of the “wrong hands” and in the “right hands.” Here, however, McCoy suggests that there may be no right hands—no humans who are morally and intellectually prepared to wield the power of God. It is this question that intrigues science fiction novelist David Brin. “The Genesis Project,” he says, “can be looked upon as arrogant. It can be looked on as conceited. We are actually daring to try to pick up God’s tools and make a new form of life, a whole raft of new life forms in an ecology . . . . This is the power of God. Is it a good thing that we’re trying to do it, or is it a bad thing?”377 To find Star Trek’s answer to this question, Brin appeals to the final scene of the film, when Kirk, McCoy, and Carol Marcus are observing the newly

forming Genesis Planet from the bridge of the Enterprise. “How do you feel?” McCoy asks Kirk. “Young,” Kirk replies, “I feel young.”378 To Brin, this scene is a final stamp of approval for Project Genesis. The message here is that human beings have done a good thing by creating Genesis. Brin explains: The pride that you feel, that the director and the actors want you to feel in this accomplishment conveys what Marlo or maybe Faust, in the better versions of these myths are trying to say: If we’re good people, shouldn’t we have a right—like teenagers— to sneak into the creator’s laboratory and unroll the blueprints? This is seen as a good thing in our new culture if your teenagers do it to you. But, is it a good thing if humanity does this to God? Wrath of Khan takes the answer, “Yes.” In this analysis, Brin seems to be missing the thematic core of the scene. The creation of the Genesis Planet takes place in the shadow of the death of Spock. Indeed, as Kirk is making his way to the engine room when he realizes that Spock has sacrificed himself for the Enterprise crew, the film intercuts between Kirk’s descent into the bowels of the ship and the Genesis Planet forming. The hope of new life is springing forth in the context of Spock’s self-sacrificial death. In giving his life for his comrades, Spock has rescued them all from certain death at the hands of Khan and has specifically spared Kirk from Khan’s vengeance— the fallout of a past mistake that came to cut Kirk down when he was feeling old and tired. Spock has therefore given Kirk a new life. And, within its original context, it is clear that the focus of this scene is not on Genesis, but on Spock. Kirk: Captain’s log, stardate 8141.6. Starship Enterprise departing for Ceti Alpha V to pick up the crew of the USS Reliant. All is well. And yet I can’t help wondering about the friend I leave behind. “There are always possibilities,” Spock said. And if Genesis is indeed “life from death,” I must return to this place again. McCoy: He’s really not dead. As long as we remember him.

Kirk: “It’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. A far better resting place that I go to than I have ever known.” Carol: Is that a poem? Kirk: No, no. Something Spock was trying to tell me. On my birthday. McCoy: You okay, Jim? How do you feel? Kirk: Young. I feel young.379 Clearly, Spock, his sacrifice, and the freedom from death and emergence of new life it has produced are the undergirding theme here. Our characters are not just looking at a burgeoning new planet, but at the place toward which, presumably several minutes prior, Spock’s burial tube was launched. Saying their conversation is about the Genesis device may be something akin to saying that the conversation of people standing at the grave of a loved one is about the gravestone! Furthermore, the creation of the Genesis Planet is not something anyone has intentionally undertaken. Rather, Khan used the Genesis device as a weapon, in an attempt to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise. The emergence of a new planet is an unintended and unforeseen consequence of an intentionally destructive use of the Genesis device. This serves to carry on the film’s theme of life from lifelessness—or life from death—and to hint at Spock’s return. Already, then, Brin’s analysis is looking for a statement about the moral rectitude of terraforming where no such statement is being made. McCoy’s question about humankind’s readiness for such technology has been overshadowed by the character story and left mostly unanswered. Of course, in the next film, that question will be explored in more detail, and Brin sees in Star Trek III a conflicting answer from the one found in Star Trek II: And then comes Search for Spock. And what happens is the director and writer for this film take out the old Frankenstein mythos and they say, “We are going to check off every box in the old legend of Frankenstein,” whose basic tenant is, “How dare you pick up God’s tools? You will be punished for it. It’s wrong to pick up God’s tools and try to create life. If you do, you’ll create a monster that’s flawed, that falls apart, that proves that it’s no good, that decays, that betrays you.” Victor

Frankenstein pays for trying to make life. In Search for Spock, the Frankenstein mythos is taken to its logical conclusion: The monster kills its creator, David, as punishment for the arrogance of creating new life.380 This is an oversimplification so gross that it qualifies as a misreading of the narrative. In the first place, the Genesis Planet does not kill David. Kruge does—or rather, one of Kruge’s officers does. The party to blame for David’s death is made very clear in one of the film’s most famous and most moving pieces of dialogue as Kirk, stunned by the loss of the son he has so recently gained, stumbles backward, missing his captain’s chair and landing awkwardly on the floor of the bridge, saying to Kruge, “You Klingon bastard, you’ve killed my son!”381 Kruge is there to obtain Genesis, but he is an outside force. It is not David’s actions that lead him to his demise, nor is this his punishment for being unethical. This is when David chooses to make the morally higher choice. Brin is correct when he says that David has done wrong. But his sin was not the arrogance of creation. It was his impatience with the process. And it was not he who paid the price, but others. Saavik: It’s time for total truth between us. This planet is not what you intended, or hoped for, is it? David: Not exactly. Saavik: Why? David: I used protomatter in the Genesis matrix. Saavik: Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable. David: But it was the only way to solve certain problems. Saavik: So, like your father, you changed the rules. David: If I hadn’t, it might have been years, or never! Saavik: How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done? And what is yet to come?382

Haste and impatience are the primary factors tainting David Marcus’s design of the Genesis Device. But also at play are issues of using the right kind of technology, as David’s use of protomatter introduces instability into the Genesis matrix, thus adding new problems into the process. The entire question of terraforming cannot stand or fall on the fate of the Genesis Planet, as the technology used to create it was faulty. Brin sees things differently and, in so doing, entirely misses the point of David’s death. The event is set up by a conversation over communicators between David (held hostage by Klingons on the planet with Saavik and a regenerating Spock), Kirk on the Enterprise, and Kruge on the Klingon Bird of Prey. Kirk: David, what went wrong? David: I went wrong. Kirk: David, I don’t understand. David: I’m sorry, sir. Just don’t surrender. Genesis doesn’t work! I can’t believe they’d kill us for it. Kruge: Admiral, your young friend is mistaken. I meant what I said. And now, to show my intentions are sincere, I shall kill one of the prisoners. Kirk: Wait a minute! Give me a chance to talk . . . . Kruge: (in Klingon) Kill one of them. . . . I don’t care which.383 The story so far has been that David has failed morally. He has sinned. His ethical misstep has resulted in death and a fractured, dying creation that is collapsing in on itself under the weight of his shortcomings. In this moment, it is clear that Saavik’s words and his confession have stayed with him. Kirk wants to know what went wrong with the experiment. David says the fault is not in the experiment, but within himself. But his expression of doubt that Kruge, knowing Genesis is flawed, would kill any of them for the technology seems to spur Kruge on to order one of them killed. The Klingon officer produces a knife (a Klingon d’k tahg) and stands behind Saavik, ready to strike. In this moment, David chooses to change his own narrative, to be a better version of himself. Spock’s regenerating body has no mind, no soul. David is the only one with the moral capacity to do something to save Saavik.

David decides that no one else will die because of him. He chooses to sacrifice himself, attacking the Klingon, who ultimately guts him. This is David’s act of nobility, of moral fortitude that offers him some redemption against the destruction for which he is responsible. Brin, however, takes the moment of David’s redemption and sees it as his moment of judgment. He sees defeat in what is really David’s ultimate victory. A Christian worldview sees things differently. “He gave his life to save us,”384 Saavik says. These words could just as easily be about Spock in the previous film. These films are about the unfolding of the resonant effects of Spock’s sacrifice and self-sacrifice is a recurring theme. If David had been unrepentant, if he had hardened his heart and tried to deny that the Genesis Planet was falling apart, railing against the idea that he had failed, and the planet had swallowed him up in response, I would agree with Brin. What happens, though, is that David admits his guilt to himself, to Saavik, and to his father. The planet is only behaving according to what David has put into it of himself. David’s brokenness has become the brokenness of Genesis. He confesses it and chooses to do something to keep the innocent from dying. He chooses to stand up and do what is right. Here, he transitions from a villain to a hero, when he “atones” for his own mistakes by accepting death in Saavik’s place. Star Trek has always been above making blanket statements about technology (with the possible exception of eugenics, for which one character just barely gets a pass). Nor does Star Trek preach salvation through technology. Certainly, technology is the greatest tool humans have, but technology by itself is not enough. If we have advanced technology without the moral fortitude—the understanding, wisdom, and discernment—to use it properly, we will fail. We are playing God, which is perhaps the worst thing one can do in Star Trek. Star Trek has a dual narrative: Humans are amazing. We have advanced greatly. We have things to be proud of. We will improve and we can improve ourselves. But, we are a tiny speck in the universe. We must have the humility to realize that we are not “there” yet. There is still brokenness in our hearts. There are still challenges against which we are powerless. Star Trek’s technological ethic is not about using technology for good vs. using it for evil. It is about having a good moral compass and a disciplined approach so that we can avoid mistakes along the way, even

toward an ostensibly noble goal. The problem for David is that he stops worrying how he will get there. When our methods become subordinated to our aspirational impatience, we show the true nature of our moral readiness for any power or responsibility with which we may be entrusted. But one element that makes powerful technologies so difficult to use well is that intention is not enough. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to predict what the consequences of our actions may be. In the Genesis narrative alone, David’s good intentions lead to a lapse in judgment, which leads to destruction he would never have wished for. Conversely, Khan’s application of the flawed Genesis technology with intent for destruction somewhat ironically resulted in great good—the resurrection of Spock. Theologically, this can serve as a picture of God bringing hope and new life, even out of our failures and acts of evil. At the same time, however, if Genesis had not existed at such a complete stage at that time, Khan would never have gotten his hands on it—and perhaps might never have even gotten off Ceti Alpha V. In that scenario, Spock’s death would not have been necessary. So, while Genesis restored Spock, it is also the reason he died in the first place. Brin, in comparing the Genesis Planet to Frankenstein’s monster and asking whether Star Trek asserts that humankind is ready to “pick up God’s tools,” finds conflicting answers between these two films. However, Star Trek’s ultimate statement on the issue (if the franchise can be said to clearly have one) seems to be more inwardly consistent and more complicated than Brin’s analysis suggests. Still, the issue of humankind’s use of such technology does indeed carry the kind of theological weight Brin implies. Is terraforming human pride reaching beyond the realm in which humans are meant to operate? Or is it humanity following the next logical step in its use of the ingenuity given to it by God and fulfilling its role as cultivators of Creation? Additionally, the speed at which the Genesis Device delivers the desired effect—forming a planet in what appears to be minutes when it is detonated inside a nebula—poses particular problems that may only ever exist in pure conjecture. This does raise the question, though, of whether taking time to perform the task of terraforming carefully and in stages, represents a more morally praiseworthy approach to the act of terraforming. Star Trek would seem to say so.

Terraforming in The Next Generation By Star Trek’s twenty-fourth century, terraforming is a common enough practice to be casually mentioned only a few times in episodes of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine,385 but rare enough to still be somewhat unfamiliar to active Starfleet officers.386 In the Next Generation episode “Home Soil,” we see Star Trek’s most in-depth discussion of the moral implications involved in terraforming since Star Trek II and III. In the episode, the Enterprise pays a visit to Telara III, where a terraforming operation is under way. Upon their arrival in orbit, Picard and crew meet with a strangely uncooperative attitude from the project’s leader, Director Kurt Mandl, who does not want them to beam down. Suspicious, Picard sends an away team anyway and soon a perfectly normal tour gives way to some more odd occurrences, culminating in the apparent murder of one of the terraformers. The episode covers terraforming with reference to both ethics and (by some extension) the Genesis Device from several directions. First, it recalls the Genesis Device by connecting terraforming with biblical imagery. When the away team first arrives at the terraforming station, they are greeted by a scientist named Luisa Kim, who introduces herself as “Gardener of Edens” and admits that “Terraforming makes you feel a little godlike.”387 This recalls David Brin’s description of terraforming as “picking up God’s tools,” as well as the discussion between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy regarding the implications inherent in the power of creation. Secondly, while both the process undertaken on Velara III and the Genesis Effect bring “life from lifelessness” and occur in stages, their stages are quite different. Carol Marcus explains Genesis in her proposal video: What exactly is Genesis? Well, put simply, Genesis is life from lifelessness. It is a process whereby molecular structure is reorganized at the subatomic level into life-generating matter of equal mass. Stage One of our experiments was conducted in the laboratory. Stage Two of the series will be attempted in a lifeless underground. Stage Three will involve the process on a planetary scale. It is our intention to introduce the Genesis device into the

pre-selected area of a lifeless space body, such as a moon or other dead form. The device is delivered, instantaneously causing what we call the Genesis Effect. Matter is reorganized with life-generating results. Instead of a dead moon, a living, breathing planet, capable of sustaining whatever life forms we see fit to deposit on it . . . . The reformed moon simulated here represents the merest fraction of the Genesis potential, should the Federation wish to fund these experiments to their logical conclusion. When we consider the cosmic problems of population and food supply, the usefulness of this process becomes clear.388 In Marcus’s proposal, there are many similarities with Kim’s description of terraforming in “Home Soil.” However, there are striking differences. Kim describes the process on Velara III this way: What we’re doing is so exciting, so inspiring. We take a lifeless planet and little by little transform it into an M-class389 environment, capable of supporting life . . . . The first phase involves selecting the planet. That’s very important. It must have the right mass and gravity, the correct rate of rotation, and a balanced day and night. The planet must also be without life or the prospect of life developing naturally. The Federation determines if that’s so. Then, we take over. This station is phase two. Phase Three involves water. Usually we create basins using hydraulic landscaping, but the water on this planet is subsurface, and extremely high in salt content. We are just about to begin pumping and filtering the water, removing the salt, oxygenating and replacing. Next, we introduce microorganisms, and when the process is complete eventually, we’ll have a lush, arable biosphere.390 According to the display on Kim’s computer, this process takes thirty to thirty-five years,391 highlighting the central difference between Mandl’s operation and the Genesis Device. The process used in the twenty-fourth

century is remarkably slower and more careful than the near-instantaneous Genesis effect, representing, in a certain sense, a major technological step backward. Presumably, once the failure of the Genesis Planet brought the instability of the Genesis matrix to light, scientists had to find new ways to terraform planets that did not indulge in the same cutting of corners facilitated by David Marcus’s use of protomatter. The ethical difference here is the greater discipline used in the later process. The process that generated the Genesis Device, while it took years to develop, was comparatively fast, as David was unwilling to do the hard work of solving problems with less expedient, more careful methods. Given the differences between the two systems, it seems likely that the “problems” David was trying to solve had to do with being dedicated to creating an expedited method of terraforming, rather than sacrificing speed for effectiveness. The Genesis Device also seems to have a specific, human-serving purpose in mind. Marcus’s presentation suggests carrying the Genesis experiments to their “logical conclusion,” which apparently is human colonization. “When we consider the cosmic problems of population and food supply,” she says, “the usefulness of this process becomes clear.”392 Kim describes no such endgame, ending her presentation with the eventual emergence of “a lush, arable biosphere”393 with no specific application mentioned. While Marcus’s plan results in a planet “capable of sustaining whatever life forms we see fit to deposit on it,”394 Mandl’s process introduces only microorganisms capable of developing into higher life forms and allowing the natural process of growing an environment to take place. The only immediate goal is to create life. Marcus’s mention of overpopulation and food supply (solved in the twenty-fourth century with replicators and the colonization of unpopulated M-class planets) lends an urgency to Genesis’s focus, which may help explain her son’s compulsion to rush things along. But one ethical consideration remains constant between both processes. The planet chosen must be lifeless. “You boys have to be clear on this,” Carol says to Chekov and Captain Terrell, “There can’t be so much as a microbe or the show’s off.”395 The implication here is that the terraformers are thinking long-term. They do not want to obliterate any life that may have the chance to evolve into higher life forms on its own if allowed to develop

naturally. Indeed, in Kim’s presentation of Mandl’s process, she explains, “The planet must also be without life or the prospect of life developing naturally.”396 This is the very problem into which Mandl has run, as it is revealed that the scientist who died was killed by microscopic life forms who, in a bid to save their species from obliteration, infiltrated the computer controlling the laser he was using, turning it into a deadly weapon. Mandl is aware of the evidence that these life forms exist, but as they are not carbonbased and therefore do not fit any previously known definition of life, he has dismissed the possibility that they are alive. He emphasizes to Picard that he and his team “were assured, not once but many times, by the best scientific minds in the Federation, that this planet has no life. No life! And we were not looking, and therefore we did not see.” Like David, Mandl is obsessed with his work. According to Troi, this is not uncommon. Obsessive behavior, she says, “frequently goes with the career profile” of terraformers. Before the microscopic life forms are discovered, Picard suggests that Mandl’s obsession may have driven him to kill a scientist whom he might have perceived as standing in his way. What we see, though, is that Mandl has no desire to kill. “I create life!” he insists, “I don’t take it!” Still, however, his drive to complete the terraforming project did cause him to be blind to—or to explain away—evidence that a more objective perspective (the Enterprise computer) correctly identifies as signs of life. In this sense, his obsession does very nearly drive him to potentially kill countless entities, however passionately he may have convinced himself this was not the case. In “Home Soil,” where terraforming is referred to as making one feel “godlike” and like a “Gardener of Edens,” we see that humans are not God, that there was life present before the terraforming team arrived, and that they do not have the right to wipe it out—even though they have the power to do so. The story also shows us that a “god” must respect even the smallest life form, including life forms that are so fundamentally different as to be almost unrecognizable as life. No matter how different we are from God, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant we are in comparison, God has compassion on us. But human beings are gardeners of Eden. Our initial calling, according to the biblical narrative, was indeed to be gardeners. And, as our creativity and

ingenuity show, we are still cultivators of Creation. Star Trek recognizes this responsibility within the Genesis Device story. In Star Trek IV, Earth is on the precipice of destruction because human beings were not good caretakers. They hunted humpback whales to extinction and brought about their own doom. Only through undoing the effects of their sin can their destruction be averted, as Spock, Kirk, and the Enterprise crew not only save humanity, but restore order to the planet. We may never have an alien probe scouring our planet for communication from whales, unintentionally destroying our planet in the process, and we are unlikely to be shaping or creating worlds any time soon, but the clear message in Star Trek is that our technological advancement must never outstrip our moral fortitude. David Marcus’s methods ultimately represent a use of technology as a substitute for virtue. In Star Trek, this kind of shortcutting always leads to disaster. Whether it’s the M-5 computer trying to run a starship without human judgment and instinct,397 an overzealous engineer whose plan to increase starship warp capability is powered as much by hubris as untested methodology,398 or a Starfleet doctor whose rush to be a planet’s savior leads him to develop a cure that kills,399 impatient science is a quick way to commit perhaps Star Trek’s cardinal sin—playing God. In Star Trek, the amazing power of human ingenuity must always be tempered with humility and moral grounding, often resulting in less spectacular, but more sustainable results. We should be spurred on, then, by imagining the possibilities, but wise enough to realize that the kind of patience and care required in order to bring about those possibilities may mean we never see them realized in our lifetimes. In an age of blindingly fast scientific advancement—frequently based on realizing ideas imagined by Star Trek—we would do well to listen to the lessons of the Trek universe, which tell us, along with the Apostle Paul, to carry out our endeavors “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.”400

Bibliography Allen, Corey. “Home Soil.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. CBS Television, 1988. Auberjonois, Rene. “The Quickening.” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CBS Television, 1996. Bowman, Rob. “Where No One Has Gone Before.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. CBS Television, 1987.

Brin, David. “Genesis & the Frankenstein Myth.” Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Collector’s Edition DVD. Special Features Disc. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2002. Livingston, David. “Equinox, Part 1.” Star Trek: Enterprise. CBS Television, 1999. Lucas, John Meredyth. “The Ultimate Computer.” Star Trek. CBS Television, 1968. Meyer, Nicholas. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Director’s Cut DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2002. ———. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Paramount Pictures, 1982. Nimoy, Leonard. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Paramount Pictures, 1984. “Terraforming.” Memory Alpha. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Terraforming.

375. Livingston, “Equinox, Part 1.” 376. Meyer, The Wrath of Khan, Director’s Cut DVD. 377. Brin, “Genesis & the Frankenstein Myth.” 378. Meyer, The Wrath of Khan. 379. Ibid. 380. Brin, “Genesis & the Frankenstein Myth.” 381. Nimoy, The Search for Spock. 382. Ibid. 383. Ibid. 384. Ibid. 385. “Terraforming,” Memory Alpha. 386. Allen, “Home Soil.” 387. Ibid. 388. Meyer, The Wrath of Khan. 389. This is a classification given by the Federation to planets with oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres, which are capable of supporting life and are essentially similar to Earth. A complete description of the requirements for Class M status is available on Memory Alpha at http://memoryalpha.wikia.com/wiki/Class_M. 390. Allen, “Home Soil.” 391. Ibid. 392. Meyer, The Wrath of Khan. 393. Allen, “Home Soil.” 394. Meyer, The Wrath of Khan. 395. Ibid. 396. Allen, “Home Soil.” 397. Lucas, “The Ultimate Computer.”

398. Bowman, “Where No One Has Gone Before.” 399. Auberjonois, “The Quickening.” This episode is an excellent example of both sides of this ethical coin, as Bashir’s initial failure leads him to take a longer, slower, more careful approach that leads to a less immediate result, but presents the hope of eventually eradicating the disease for future generations. 400. Eph 4:2, ESV.

Part III

The Abolition of Man “They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.” —C. S. Lewis

14 A Prison of Our Own Making by Thomas Veale

There are intelligent, serious people who . . . believe in the power of scientific social planning and genetic engineering. They believe that the next step in evolution is intentional—man creating a new man. . . . And they are excited. A new mankind, created in our own image! We can, at last, talk about the creation of Man—by men!401 avid Rozema’s statement in his 2011 essay on C. S. Lewis and Fyodor Dostoyevsky points to the potential dangers of science and government, if unified in an engineering experiment. Long before Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man, people doubted others’ faith in progress because progress often relies solely on what can be measured and proven. Faith in science and technology enables people to question notions of “truth” when intangibles such as deity, morality, and fact are at play. A postmodern, scientific view of the world suggests the only truths are those that can be discovered through human inquiry and analysis. This view challenges longstanding assumptions about objective or inherent truths. In the modern world, those who control the truth and therefore humanity, according to Lewis, are “Conditioners.”402

D

In Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that objective truth is under attack, especially in the educational system. Rozema, considering Lewis’s message, asks an important question: “[I]f moral values are socially and/or naturalistically constructed and therefore subject to either accidental or intentional change . . . , then what values will guide those who are involved in intentionally (re)making the change?”403 A troubling question arises: if “truth” rests in the hands of man and not God or nature, can people then impose a personal, constructed version of “truth” on each other? If so, then

governments can control “truth,” and therefore control everything. This notion comes out strongly in three classic dystopian novels that pre- and postdate Lewis’s work: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. We will consider the intersections of these three works, popular film versions thereof, and Lewis’s message itself.

Lewis and the Science Fiction Greats In Part 3 of Abolition of Man, Lewis asserts that if Conditioners achieve the power of dictating truth, then “Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.”404 His ironic use of “lucky” to describe such Conditioners was obvious to his 1940s audience, but even decades after Abolition’s publication, we still see the ever-looming threat posed by a malleable “truth” and the elite that controls it. Orwell’s protagonist in 1984, Winston Smith, represents the struggle between the individual’s conscious memories and the elite’s fabricated history. Smith’s belief, “Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting,” suggests that the Conditioners’ control of “truth” is the key to their preservation of power.405 Lewis warns us, “even within the world state or the nation it [man’s control of nature] will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people.”406 Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury all demonstrate a world governed according to an elite’s sense of truth and reality. Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 all feature natural settings as reflections of unconquered human nature, depicting Conditioners in positions of unparalleled power and showing humanity as a self-imprisoned species. Protagonists in these works are rebels who demonstrate that only in viewing a value as objective can a completely free person see the door to his own prison. These dystopian classics show the Conditioners’ impulse to dominate society as the ultimate threat to humanity, fulfilling Lewis’s proposition, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.”407

Mankind’s conquest of nature and himself is a theme in other works of Lewis, especially That Hideous Strength, the final book in his Space Trilogy. According to Gilbert Meilaender, The driving force behind the plot in That Hideous Strength is the plan of the national Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments— whose acronym is NICE—to take the last step in the control and shaping of nature. . . . Having gradually conquered the world of nature external to human beings, the goal of NICE is now to view human beings also as natural objects—in particular, to take control of birth, breeding and death.408 This idea resonates with the Brave New World where human life begins in a hatchery and continues in a self-perpetuating caste system. Another of Lewis’s works suggests that the Devil himself conditions the human population. In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, a demon, writes to his nephew Wormwood: “We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”409 Screwtape puts humanity on a hamster wheel of the endless pursuit of happiness. He wants humans to neglect any sort of objective good and instead pursue the subjective in the form of the ever-elusive satisfaction found in personal gain or reward. Screwtape’s aim is to imprison man in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction that results when he constantly redefines what is good or worthwhile. Such work is both the Devil’s and the dystopian government’s. Conditioning is a common subtext in popular science fiction of the twentieth century. An elite group’s ability to condition the individual and society, its strict limitation of and control over human freedoms and ideas, becomes a sort of imprisonment. Those whom the government controls build their own prisons by ceasing to think for themselves, overlooking longstanding, time-honored objective truths and accepting what the state defines as “truth” today. Lewis suggests the conscience of man is the final, unconquered frontier, and proposes some may seek to dominate this, as well. He puts words into such men’s mouths: “Let us decide for ourselves what

man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such.”410 This passage prefigures O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984, a terrifying authoritarian who addresses Winston Smith as “the last man,” whom the state must destroy. The concept of the “Last Man,” of course, comes to us from Friedrich Neitzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which the “Last Man” is the opposite of the “Superman.” In dystopian works, the Superman’s Will-to-Power is demonstrated by authoritarian government control over all aspects of human life.

Brave New World: Text and Film In keeping with Lewis’s view of man as conquerable nature, Huxley’s Brave New World sets utopia and arcadia in opposition through human characters: representatives of the unconquered and the conquered. The novel begins at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, in which the population is planned and mass-produced. We note the similarity between Huxley’s “Conditioning Centre” and Lewis’s “Conditioners.” The character known as The Director controls life prior to and during conception, and even into an adult’s lifespan. He is the embodiment of the threat Lewis points out in Abolition of Man: [I]f any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.411 Such a society ends, Lewis says, with “last men,” who, “far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”412 Brave New World is maintained through eugenics, which Lewis calls “the final stage” of human conquest.413 Under the Director, fertilized human eggs go to the “Social Predestination Room,” in which each individual’s life is dictated according to government plan. Not only does the

Director hold the power of exile over disobedient citizens, but his work denies them free will, as well. In Brave New World blind obedience, ignorance, and selfishness are good. State-sponsored hedonism is encouraged by frequent doses of soma, which enhances sensory perception and encourages the anti-intellectual pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Huxley introduces us to “The perfect drug,” which his character Marx describes as having, “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”414 Soma is, in the most literal sense, the opiate of the masses. It prevents the people from any true sense of longing or free expression, reinforcing the State’s power that remains solely because “All men are physico-chemically equal.”415 When people take soma, they accept their own imprisonment. Huxley’s society uses affluence and ease as means to control the population, denying people’s need for emotional release by making everything easy and thoughtless. By ending the powers of religion, love, and the family, the state has imposed a life that, when examined, is devoid of true meaning. The state is secure in its power only when the citizens of Brave New World are too “blissed-out” to examine their lives, and thus is born a society of true Last Men.416 Huxley’s protagonist Bernard Marx, like Orwell’s Winston Smith and Bradbury’s Guy Montag, stands out because he recognizes that humanity and scientific, technological progress are often at odds. As they take a pleasure flight across the English Channel, Marx admires the natural view whereas his girlfriend Lenina asserts, “progress is lovely, isn’t it?”417 Sick of being continually numbed by soma and superficial society, Marx begins to yearn for a feeling, a sensation. Looking out over the water, he says, “I want to look at the sea in peace,” whereas Lenina is “appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night,” preferring instead the song on the radio, which says, “skies are blue inside of you.”418 While Lenina’s focus is inward (“inside of you”), Marx’s strongest desire is to see himself as a part of the greater world: to look at the sea in peace with his lover. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” in which the speaker looks out on the crashing waves and implores his love to be true to him, may come to the reader’s mind here. Feeling the stirring and grating of the sea beneath him, Marx admits he, “want[s] to know what passion is . . . [he

wants] to feel something strongly.”419 We will later discuss the actual recitation of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” by Montag in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which seals his split from his wife. Marx’s outward focus and Lenina’s inward focus become a metaphor for objective and subjective reality. A similar discussion of “internal” and “external” occurs between Smith and O’Brien in 1984, as well. Because Conditioners have removed pain and emotion from daily life in Brave New World, it is no surprise that those who lament its absence secretly yearn to leave utopia. Shortly after his epiphany, Marx is upbraided at work for appearing prone to emotion, and yet as he leaves his boss’s office, he exults “in the thought that he stood alone, embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance.”420 This is the true turning point for our protagonist: He rejects the utopia and its structures, literal and metaphorical. His yearning for human feeling has converted him from Last Man to Byronic hero. On a subsequent date with Lenina to a native reservation, Lenina complains that their native guide “smells.”421 Marx matter-of-factly responds, “Yes, and civilization is sterilization.”422 Marx wonders at a primitive society that allows old age, family, and art. He meets the Director of Hatcheries’s son, John, who was born rather than aborted because his mother Linda had no access to an abortion clinic. John, later nicknamed the “Savage,” represents the unconquered nature of the human intellect in a society that denies free thought and objective truth. John rejects his parents’ conditioned society, including its quasi-sacred text, appropriately named “The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo.”423 John’s mere existence against his mother’s will, in fact, makes him a threat to the Conditioners themselves, whose leader, ironically, is his father. Marx naturally admires John, and they strike a fast friendship that develops Marx as a free intellect, and therefore as a threat to the state. Prior to Marx’s ultimate exile for nonconformity, World Controller Mustapha Mond and John have a final exchange. Mond describes soma as one imagines he would describe his ideal society, as “Christianity without tears.”424 John responds, “What you need is something with tears for a

change. Nothing costs enough here.”425 Mond describes the humanity John pines for as “claiming the right to be unhappy,” adding a list of human maladies the World State has banished.426 At the completion of Mond’s list, the Savage responds, “I claim them all.”427 There is no space in utopia for a free intellectual, an unconditioned mind who accepts human nature as it is, subject to a full range of joys and pains. NBC has produced two versions of Brave New World since 1980, but we will consider the newer (1998) version here.428 Peter Gallagher stars as Bernard Marx, working under the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, played by Miguel Ferrer. Sci-fi great Leonard Nimoy plays World Controller Mustapha Mond. The film gives due weight to the eugenics practiced in Huxley’s dystopia, opening with a group of schoolchildren on a field trip to the Hatchery, where Lenina Crowne (played by Rya Kihlstedt) explains the obsolete concept of “family” to them. As in the novel, the society portrayed in the film has killed individuality by eliminating the family as a unit of identity, and by eliminating exclusive sexual relationships. State slogans such as “Promiscuity is a citizen’s duty,” and “When the individual feels, society reels,” reinforce the Conditioners’ need to strip citizens of individuality in all forms of expression: sexual, emotional, and intellectual. Although Libman’s and Williams’s cinematic vision remains largely true to Huxley’s work, the directors abridge the development of Marx’s friendship with John, choosing instead to portray John as Marx’s rival for Lenina’s love. Lenina confides to Marx, “He [John] makes me feel needed. I’m starting to understand why we got rid of love.” Marx responds, “I don’t think we ever did.” Whereas Huxley’s novel portrays an individual’s free thought and consideration of objective truth as the main threat to the Conditioners, the 1998 film chooses to focus on the development of emotional feeling in connection with the sexual act. In short, the directors play to their audience, most of whom have probably not read Huxley. Sex sells, we know. Notwithstanding the script’s deviation from Huxley’s novel, ideas that ring true with Lewis’s Abolition of Man endure: the conditioners’ control over the reproductive and educational processes, furthered through their control of labor and the economy, destroys the concept of objective truth and the individual’s right to self-realization. At the film’s end, John dies by accident

instead of suicide, and Marx and Lenina accept voluntary banishment rather than face the death penalty or abort their child, conceived naturally and therefore illicitly. Despite the differences between novel and screenplay, great consistency remains.

1984: Text and Film Although Huxley’s World State assaults human dignity by denying an individual’s yearning for meaning, it is not overtly cruel. To the contrary, Orwell’s 1984 presents a terrifying view of a tyrannical, absolutist government. In fact, the physical structure of the state declares the Party’s triumph over nature; 1984 begins with a description of the London outdoors that seems fairly “normal” until we realize the dystopian setting: the looming ministries and the decayed infrastructure everywhere else. We never see “normal” human life unless the scene involves Smith’s sexual rebellion with Julia, or the “Proles,” the working classes—the untermenschen of Orwell’s nightmare world. The Proles in 1984 are a strange case: the government shows no apparent interest in “conditioning” them. They are left to eke out their existence in the London ghettoes, where menial labor is the rule, and behavior is unregulated by the Party. “If there is hope . . . it lies in the Proles,” writes Smith in his secret diary.429 Smith’s words recall to us those of Lewis, “we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.”430 Among Smith’s admiring moments of the Proles is his consideration of a woman washing diapers outside his and Julia’s illicit flat: “The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen.”431 Smith holds sex and procreation in high esteem because state conditioning has rendered many members of the Party, including himself and Julia, sterile. The four main Party ministries of Truth, Love, Peace, and Plenty dominate the landscape of 1984. The skyline itself reflects the government’s conquest of nature, but what occurs within the ministries themselves, we learn, is where the government’s true conquest occurs: brutal conditioning. The

Ministry of Truth, where protagonist Winston Smith works, is a “giant pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air,” reflecting the raw power and cruelty of the Party and the state itself.432 As he drops objective facts in the Memory Hole and invents convenient lies to replace them, Smith secretly cultivates his hatred for Big Brother and the Party. Faint memories of a prewar, pre-Party England haunt Smith, and in his work at the Ministry of Truth, his evolving vision of “truth” as a non-negotiable entity makes him an enemy of the state. He writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”433 Smith’s co-worker, Syme, leads the revision of the Newspeak dictionary; his goal is to destroy as many words as possible because to control language is “to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”434 Party control of language and therefore thought is the very definition of “conditioning.” Ironically, the Party destroys Syme because he remains intellectually capable of thinking anti-Party thoughts—even if he does not believe or act upon them. Syme has not only built his own cage, but his own gallows. Considering Syme’s work at the Ministry of Defense, one cannot help but think of Lewis’s assertion that educators such as Gaius and Titius of The Green Book “may really hold that the ordinary human feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradicated. They may be intending to make a clean sweep of traditional values and start with a new set.”435 Such men view education as inoculation against emotion, “and they conclude that the best thing they can do is fortify the minds of young people against [it].”436 In getting rid of what is, the Party is reshaping the world as it wants it to be. The Party represents Lewis’s Conditioners, who “know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce.”437 Even the most callous of readers can agree that no true human can ever be free of emotion. Huxley’s Marx and John crave human feeling, even if it means suffering. Orwell’s Smith craves it, and we shall see later that Bradbury’s Montag craves it, as well. In fact, the Party itself acknowledges the power of human feeling by encouraging the Two Minutes Hate, a blowoff

valve for the pent-up emotions of Party members. This controlled display of emotion is raw and animalistic, redirecting anger against the Party toward imaginary state enemies. One might label such emotion “untrained.” This kind of emotion stands in direct contrast to what Lewis calls “trained emotions,” without which, “the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”438 Therefore, Lewis sees the true enemy of the state not as emotion itself, but trained and developed, focused and rational emotions. The problem in 1984 is that “No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.”439 The Two Minutes Hate encourages strictly untrained emotions, thereby preventing the development of examined thoughts that can be dangerous to the state. Francis Fukuyama, having incorrectly proclaimed the end of history at the end of the Cold War and appropriated Nietzsche’s Last Man, follows his The End of History and the Last Man with The Great Disruption, in which he places mankind on the verge of conquering biological nature.440 Peter Lawler interprets Fukuyama’s argument thus: “What the Communists and Nazis failed to do politically the scientists may soon accomplish technologically: They will create ‘a new type of human being,’ one not at all determined by natural inclinations beyond human control.”441 This aptly describes dystopian Conditioners such as Huxley’s World State and Orwell’s Party, who labor to fulfill only the most basic needs without consideration for human fulfillment or individual purpose. Subjects of the conditioned state “are not men at all,” says Lewis; “They are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”442 The dystopian protagonist’s struggle for meaning is defined by his resistance to the Conditioners. The hero’s crimes are independent thought, belief in free will, and embracing of human emotions. He believes in “truth,” not as defined by the state, but as defined by what Lewis calls “The Tao . . . which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles . . . .”443 Huxley shows a conditioned society that promotes chemical answers to fulfillment, but soma, the happiness drug in Brave New World, is just a numbing agent. Victory Gin is Orwell’s version of soma in 1984. These are pharmacological answers to happiness; they serve to keep people just pacified enough not to be a nuisance to the Conditioners. Commenting on and

quoting Fukuyama’s vision of the future, Lawler asserts, “The prelude to the biotechnological determination of the future are [sic] the successes of neuropharmacology or drug therapy. . . . By taking the edge off being either a man or a woman, the drugs ‘move us imperceptibly toward the kind of androgynous human being that has been the egalitarian goal of contemporary sexual politics’.”444 The future, elite-run state requires a docile populace that accepts the loss of objective truth, which is tantamount to selfimprisonment and enslavement under the hands of the Conditioners. Unlike Huxley, Orwell does not rely on drugs and pleasure to control citizens, but rather fear and violence. In breaking Winston Smith’s spirit, O’Brien explains the Party’s aim: “We know that no one seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”445 O’Brien’s frankness is shocking because he admits the very thing Smith hates about the Party: the desire to rule solely for the sake of ruling. This is exactly what Lewis means of the Conditioners when he says, “Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo [I desire, I command] has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism.”446 When the Party describes its own rule as the ultimate good, no one can argue against it. Smith knows he has been accessory to the Party’s manipulation of history. He also knows, from his cloudy memories of youth, that such things as objective truth, love, and emotion exist and have inherent and intrinsic, even if non-demonstrable, value. In short, Smith seeks to rediscover what Lewis describes as “The Tao.” Eventually, the Party breaks Winston Smith. Although he essentially ceases to exist when he is interrogated and broken in Room 101 of the perversely named Ministry of Love, the death of his soul comes in the Chestnut Tree Café when he finally acknowledges that if the Party says 2 and 2 make 5, it is so. That Smith succumbs to state conditioning is what makes the novel so frightening. It is telling that of all Smith’s rebellious gestures, O’Brien takes special interest in Smith’s refusal to admit that 2 + 2 can add up to anything other than 4. O’Brien seems to take this as a personal challenge, and Smith’s final concession reflects the ultimate victory for the Party. In 1984, the Conditioners demonstrate their ability to conquer and condition every aspect of nature, to include the mind of man. During the torture sequence in the Ministry of Love, O’Brien asks Smith who could

possibly defeat the raw power of the Party. When Smith responds, “The spirit of Man,” O’Brien cruelly stands the emaciated Smith in front of a mirror and says, “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.”447 The popular Michael Radford film448 produced in the year 1984 does an exceptional job at portraying Orwell’s Conditioners’ effectiveness. The film opens with the Two Minutes Hate, redirecting Party members’ ire at Emmanuel Goldstein. Given the time of production, it is no surprise that the Party anthem and military uniforms closely resemble those of the Soviet Union. Also notable is the prominence of Goldstein’s visage throughout the film, considering that the 1953 CBS televised version and the 1956 film version chose to rename the archenemy with a less Jewish-sounding surname. The film cuts immediately to Winston Smith’s work in the Ministry of Truth, where he changes news accounts of chocolate production figures to make the current ration appear to be an increase rather than a decrease. Radford does an exceptional job of bringing to the forefront the Conditioners’ control of truth that Lewis warns us of. Radford also shows us Parsons’s sheeplike obedience to Party lies, and Syme’s perverse joy in the destruction of language in a way Orwell himself would have appreciated; the director wastes no time in conveying these key messages. Winston Smith, played by John Hurt, scribbles frequent assertions of objective truth and his free intellect into his hidden diary as he develops his relationships with Julia, played by Suzanna Hamilton, and O’Brien, played by Richard Burton. Unlike Orwell’s Julia, who merely engages in the sexual act as rebellion, Suzanna Hamilton’s Julia has agency appropriate to contemporary feminism. Her subversive spirit goes beyond the joy with which she fornicates; she, too, sees through Party control over history and truth. As he stands naked after sex, overlooking the Prole woman’s drying clothes, Smith asks, “Julia, do you think the resistance is real?” Julia, hastily dressed and speaking through the closing door, matter-of-factly responds, “No. None of it’s real.” This contrasts deeply with Orwell’s Julia, who falls asleep in bed as Smith reads Goldstein’s secret book to her. Radford’s vision highlights the truest fears at the zenith of the Cold War: the death of truth itself accompanies the death of all forms of resistance. In light of the US-Soviet standoff and proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Latin America, the 1980s film audience

was primed for the film’s effective portrayal of those who resist government control. The breaking of the last man in Radford’s film is remarkably true to the novel. Winston’s breaking symbolizes the death of objective truth, whose existence O’Brien denies by telling Smith, “You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.”449 Smith’s ultimate abandonment of objective reason punctuates the Party’s conquest over humanity: the Party has power over the internal and external, the subjective and the objective. In fact, in 1984, the Party can blur the lines between subjective and objective at will. We recall here Lewis’s assertion: “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”450 Smith’s failed attempt to defend objective truth in Room 101 is a direct challenge to the Party motto, “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”451 When an elite can make an individual recite nonsensical “truth” and actually believe it, that elite’s mastery of “conditioning” has enabled it to enslave humanity. Orwell’s 1984 fulfills what Lewis described as man’s complete victory over nature: If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit [the savage took victory]: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.452 It is in this sense that 1984 stands apart from other dystopian works: there is nowhere left to run, and to stay and fight is to be broken by “a boot stamping

on a human face—forever,” as O’Brien promises Smith.453 O’Brien’s “forever” and Lewis’s “till the moon falls or the sun grows cold” are eerily alike.

Fahrenheit 451: Text and Film Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 stands almost as a middle ground between the nightmare visions of Huxley and Orwell. The novel brings together several important elements of the dystopian novel: the promise of the untamed countryside, the enduring human spirit, and rejection of state control. We first meet the novel’s protagonist, Montag, as he engages with his suicidally depressed wife. He himself is a “fireman,” paid to burn the world’s books. Escaping the house after a discussion with his wife, he encounters a seventeen-year-old girl walking in the rain. The girl, Clarisse, asks if he’s ever tasted the rain, and goes on to explain that she is being forced to see a psychiatrist, who wants to know, “why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies.”454 To us, Clarisse seems perfectly normal, but to a citizen of Bradbury’s dystopia, there is certainly something wrong with a girl who shows interest in the external: nature and the outdoors. We recall Lewis’s assertion that the “conscience of man” is the last unconquered bit of nature.455 We see in Clarisse a free individual with her own conscience—her own little bit of unconquered nature. She does not fit into society because she herself is as unconquered as the natural world she loves. At home, Montag smokes and looks out over the city . . . the civilization he is paid to protect by confiscating and burning books, outlawed objects in a world dominated by a celebration of ignorance and the pursuit of personal pleasure. He ponders the “Mechanical Hound” that protects his fire station, mentally comparing it to “a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, or insanity and nightmare.”456 Whether he realizes it or not, Montag has begun to see the world with new eyes—to see the ugliness of the city and the beauty of nature, juxtaposed between the girl and the fake watchdog. Montag is slowly awakening to his own bit of unconquered nature: his conscience. He wonders if there were ever a day when firemen put fires out instead of lighting them to burn books. He

wonders how he would feel if he had a collection of forbidden books and his colleagues burned them. He wonders if life had always been this way. Clarisse has introduced him to the forbidden pleasures of solitude and introspection. Montag’s first act of heresy is to take a book from a house before setting the house alight. Upon his return home, Montag finds he has sprouted a conscience. Granted sick leave by Captain Beatty, Montag lies abed and thinks about how the government has shortened great works of literature to fit into fifteen-minute video segments, but destroys the works themselves. He recognizes that his wife’s only knowledge of Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes from a one-page synopsis. He begins to sound like Clarisse, recognizing the insufficiencies of the school system. He bemoans the decline of intellectualism, and he begins to see the world as Clarisse had. Beatty explains that once the world had room for books, but with overpopulation, “The world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths,” necessitating government intervention. Not surprisingly, Montag’s world is a conditioned world, with government control over everything. The diversification of the population, Beatty explains, required that all men be made equal by the government’s dumbing down of society, and by killing intellectualism. Beatty sees the anti-intellectual movement as something intended to keep people happy by preventing them from even considering viewpoints other than the sanctioned truth: “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” Beatty says.457 Regarding the earlier disappearance of Montag’s young friend Clarisse, Beatty adds, “She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious.”458 In the dystopian world, everyone who is thoughtful and intellectually curious, everyone who is okay with occasional unhappiness and who craves any form of solitude, is a threat to the system. And reading, obviously, requires such thoughtful solitude. As Montag watches the captain drive away, he recalls Clarisse’s note that houses no longer have porches, a feature that encouraged both sociability among neighbors and solitary introspection: “Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things,” she says, “turned things over.”459 Clarisse continues that the government saw the type of discussion and thought that occurs on a porch as detrimental to state control over individuals’ thoughts. “People talked too much. And they

had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too,” she adds.460 As with the brutal architecture of Orwell’s Airstrip One, Bradbury’s dystopia is similarly dominated by Conditioners who have imposed their will and design on everything from language to learning, thought, nature, and even to architecture itself. When Montag finally admits his secret and illegal hoarding of books to his wife Mildred, she cannot understand his attraction to them. As he closes his eyes and Mildred laughs at him, Montag “[finds] himself thinking of the green park a year ago,” where he had seen an old man conceal something and run off.461 Like Orwell’s Golden Country and other places where nature appears to remain unconquered, the park holds the key to Montag’s personal salvation. The old man, Faber, turns out to be a former English professor at the now-defunct liberal arts college. As if resolved to save the natural world itself, Montag conspires with Faber to save as many books as they can in their effort to save ideas and free thought. During a social gathering at their home, Mildred has Montag read out of one of his purloined books to mock it. He reads Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” that poem so reminiscent of Marx’s and Lenina’s flight in Brave New World. One of Mildred’s friends cries without realizing why, and disgusted with the way the women try to explain away this surprising yet fully human outpouring of grief at romantic poetry, Montag yells at them all to get out of his house. At this point, Montag is an overt enemy of the state. During his escape into the wilderness, Montag remembers a farm he had visited as a boy, and he recalls his discovery that “somewhere behind the seven veils of unreality, beyond the walls of parlors and beyond the tin moat of the city, cows chewed grass and pigs sat in warm ponds at noon and dogs barked after white sheep on a hill.”462 We notice here Montag’s recognition of life in dystopia as “veils of unreality” because the constructed, conditioned, subjective world is so obviously at odds with nature. Montag’s successful escape from dystopia and integration into a free society reflects the importance of a plurality of voices and beliefs, all united by the idea that a man’s conscience is his own—that he is free to come to his own conclusions. This new society, unlike dystopian societies, is able to operate without Conditioners because it acknowledges the human intellect and freedom of thought and expression. It emphasizes Lewis’s point, “Only

the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”463 Although a modern film version has been in the works since 2009, we unfortunately have only one major film adaptation of Bradbury’s classic. The 1966 version464 is directed by Francois Truffaut, who did not speak English. The word “unfortunate” continues to apply under any analysis of this film. Although Richard Brody’s 2015 homage to the film credits Truffaut as a director whose film, “opens the door to abstractions—visual as well as intellectual,”465 we remain unconvinced of the movie’s merit. Truffaut made his color film debut by choosing the star of his previous film, Jules et Jim, to play Montag. Oskar Werner’s Aryan looks and thick Austrian accent make Truffaut’s film strange to the Anglophone audience. One can almost imagine Werner defending his job burning books with the phrase made famous at Nuremberg: “Dienst ist Dienst.” Truffaut’s setting is a Disneyesque, World of Tomorrow setting, full of vinyl, chrome, and streamlined appliances. Not wishing to lose an opportunity to capitalize on the sexual revolution, he changes Clarisse to a legally desirable twenty-year-old. Even more bizarre, Truffaut cashes in on the Nabokovian doppelganger by having Julie Christie do “double duty” as both Clarisse and Montag’s wife “Linda” (Mildred in the actual novel, but what’s in a name?). Clarisse is no longer a bright young girl who “disappears” because she is subversive, but rather a co-conspirator with an older woman who subsumes the role in the novel played by Faber. Failure piles upon failure in Truffaut’s vision. Instead of acknowledging the necessity of print language as a means of the Conditioners’ control, Truffaut decides to create a world devoid of written language altogether, showing Montag relaxing in his living room with a wordless comic resembling airplane evacuation instruction cards. Of course, all the characters seem to know what writing is, and they can read it, but mysteriously there is no printed material except that which is burned. Even The Captain’s (Fire Captain Beatty in Bradbury’s novel) personnel files consist of pictures and numbers: no words. It is ludicrous. The film’s sole bright moment occurs during the penultimate exchange between Montag and The Captain. Beatty looks in disgust at a library they are about to destroy, exclaiming to Montag:

Philosophy’s worse than novels! Tinkers and philosophers, all saying, “Only I am right. The others are all idiots!” . . . One century, they tell you that man’s destiny is predetermined. The next they’ll say he has freedom of choice. Now it’s just a matter of fashion. That’s all, just like short dresses this year, long dresses next year. This is a redeeming moment for Truffaut in conveying the message Bradbury intended and Lewis forecast: human history and behavior is subject to change based on individuals’ beliefs and expressions. If Conditioners control all belief and expression, freedom truly dies and past, present, and future are all subject to revision. The Captain’s words reflect a gross distortion of what makes something true. Being able to call one person’s thoughts into question does not necessarily mean that everyone’s notion of truth is equally valid: there is such a thing as truth, and there are such things as interpretations or sheer opinions. Truffaut rightly captures Bradbury’s message here by portraying a government that makes everyone equal at the expense of truth and freedom. We note with amusement that Montag’s betrayer, “The Captain,” is played by Cyril Cusack, who eighteen years later would play Mr. Charrington, Winston Smith’s shop-keeping betrayer in Radford’s 1984. What we take from Lewis’s Abolition of Man in light of the most popular science fiction works of the twentieth century is the threat posed by “the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of posthumanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”466 This is not an idea restricted to the pessimistic view of the mid-1940s. Present-day intellectual Francis Fukuyama points to recent scientific successes as a promise: [W]ithin the next couple of generations we will have the knowledge and technologies that will allow us to accomplish what the social engineers of the past failed to do. At that point, we will have definitively finished Human History because we will have abolished human beings as such. And then, a new, posthuman history will begin.467 The Conditioner as presented by Lewis in Abolition of Man is neither

fictional nor new. In fact, the dystopian field that addresses eugenics and conditioning is evergreen: the close of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries have seen a surge in the idea through films such as Fortress (1993), Gattaca (1997), Equilibrium (2002), Code 46 (2003), In Time (2011), Elysium (2013), Divergent (2014), and The Giver (2014). Indeed, the increasing reverence our society has for science and technology only seems to reinforce the message of such works. They warn us, and will continue to warn us what we have been, what we are, and what we may become. The walls we build may indeed become our own prisons, but the choice will have been our own.

Bibliography Blomkamp, Niell. Elysium. Media Rights Capital, 2013. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Ray, 2003. Brody, Richard. “Movie of the Week: ‘Fahrenheit 451’.” The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/movie-week-fahrenheit-451. Burger, Neil. Divergent. Red Wagon Entertainment, 2014. Fukuyama, Francis. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. New York: Touchstone, 1999. ———. “Second Thoughts.” The National Interest 56, Summer, 1999. Gordon, Stuart. Fortress. Village Roadshow Pictures, 1993. Hitchens, Christopher. “Foreword.” In Aldous Huxley, Brave New World vii–xxi. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Lawler, Peter Augustine. “Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil.” Modern Age 42.1 (2000) 89–101. Reprinted at First Principles: ISI Web Journal. https://home.isi.org/node/59596. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2001. Libman, Leslie, and Larry Williams. Brave New World. NBC, 1998. Meilaender, Gilbert. “A Moral Education from C. S. Lewis.” USA Today Magazine 142, January 2014, 32–34. Niccol, Andrew. Gattaca. Columbia Pictures, 1998. ———. In Time. Regency Enterprises, 2011. Noyce, Phillip. The Giver. Walden Media, 2014. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Plume, 1981. Radford, Michael. 1984. 20th Century Fox, 1984. Rozema, David. “Inside-out or Outside-in? Lewis and Dostoevsky on the ‘New Man’.” Christian Scholar’s Review 40.2 (2011) 173–87. Truffaut, Francois. Fahrenheit 451. Universal Pictures, 1966. Wimmer, Kurt. Equilibrium. Dimension Films, 2002. Winterbottom, Michael. Code 46. MGM, 2003.

401. Rozema, “Inside-out or Outside-in?,” 174. 402. Lewis, Abolition, 63. 403. Rozema, “Inside-out or Outside-in?,” 175. 404. Lewis, Abolition, 74. 405. Orwell, 1984, 32. 406. Lewis, Abolition, 56. 407. Ibid., 59. 408. Meilaender, “A Moral Education,” 33. 409. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Letter XV. Quoted in Meilaender, “A Moral Education,” 34. 410. Lewis, Abolition, 51. 411. Ibid., 57. 412. Ibid., 57–58. 413. Ibid., 59. 414. Huxley, Brave New World, 36. 415. Ibid., 49. 416. Hitchens, Foreword, xx. 417. Huxley, Brave New World, 98. 418. Ibid., 60. 419. Ibid., 62. 420. Ibid., 66. 421. Ibid., 72. 422. Ibid. 423. Ibid., 87. 424. Ibid., 162. 425. Ibid. 426. Ibid., 163. 427. Ibid. 428. Libman and Williams, Brave New World. 429. Orwell, 1984, 60. 430. Ibid. 431. Ibid., 181. 432. Ibid., 7. 433. Ibid., 69.

434. Ibid., 46. 435. Lewis, Abolition, 12. 436. Ibid., 13. 437. Ibid., 61. 438. Ibid., 24. 439. Orwell, 1984, 105. 440. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption. 441. Lawler, “Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil.” The words “a new type of human” are from Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts,” 28. 442. Lewis, Abolition, 64. 443. Ibid., 43. 444. Lawler, “Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil.” 445. Orwell, 1984, 217. 446. Lewis, Abolition, 65. 447. Orwell, 1984, 222. 448. Radford, 1984. 449. Ibid., 205. 450. Lewis, Abolition, 73. 451. Orwell, 1984, 17. 452. Ibid., 68. 453. Ibid., 220. 454. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 23. 455. Lewis, Abolition, 50. 456. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 24. 457. Ibid., 58. 458. Ibid., 60. 459. Ibid., 63. 460. Ibid. 461. Ibid., 74. 462. Ibid., 142. 463. Lewis, Abolition, 73. 464. Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451. 465. Brody, “Movie of the Week.”

466. Ibid., 75. 467. Fukuyama, 43; quoted in Lawler, “Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil.”

15 The Dangers of the Materialist Magician by Louis Markos

I

n Season 2 of Babylon 5, in an episode titled “The Geometry of Shadows,”468 we are introduced to a mysterious group of beings known as

technomages. Their catchy name comes from the fact that they use technology to simulate magic. Although a technomage appears regularly in Crusade, the short-lived spin off series to Babylon 5, they remain shadowy figures whose origins, motives, and actual spiritual powers remain unclear. Still, writer J. Michael Straczynski presents them as essentially positive and even good characters who more often expose darkness than spread it and who more or less resist being corrupted by their powers. Had C. S. Lewis, a fan and writer of science fiction who understood well the dimensions of the genre, had the chance to view “The Geometry of Shadows” he would likely have been disturbed by the very concept of a technomage. In The Screwtape Letters #7, senior devil Screwtape writes a letter to his nephew and junior tempter Wormwood detailing the current position of the lowerarchy on whether or not devils should reveal their existence to humans. The question, he admits with a sigh, creates a cruel dilemma for hardworking tempters. If, on the one hand, they make their presence known, they lose their ability to produce materialists who dismiss the supernatural as a fairy tale. If, on the other, they remain invisible, they lose their ability to produce magicians and to use terror and fear to keep people away from God. The situation seems hopeless for the devils . . . or is it? With a wry smile, Screwtape suggests to Wormwood that an infernal solution to the dilemma may be on the horizon. If the devils can only convince humans “to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in,” they may succeed in creating “the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the

existence of ‘spirits.’”469 In this essay, I shall define Lewis’s concept of the materialist magician, particularly as it is developed in The Abolition of Man, compare it to the cautionary tales of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and Lewis’s own That Hideous Strength, and trace how it functions in three science fiction films, Metropolis, Dark City, and Altered States.

I With his keen insight into human nature, his Augustinian understanding of sin as privation, and his scholarly grasp of historical cycles, Lewis foresaw the extent to which science would increasingly take the place of religion in the minds of modern Europeans and Americans. With even greater insight, he foresaw that as the reigning paradigm shifted from religion to science, from top-down creation to bottom-up evolution, there would be those who, while continuing to reject the possibility of a separate spiritual realm outside the confines of time and space, would invest science and the universe with powers once reserved for God. Lewis says as much in a note he appended to Book I, chapter 4 of Mere Christianity. After contrasting the religious and materialist views, he posits a middle view that he labels “Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution” and that he associates with the writings of George Bernard Shaw and Henri Bergson.470 While essentially embracing the Darwinian schema, proponents of the life force (Bergson calls it élan vital) endow that force with something resembling a mind or will. By doing so, Lewis explains, they get to have their cake and eat it, too: “The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.”471 The tone here is droll and witty, even as it is sharp and satirical in The Screwtape Letters. Both passages, however, resonate with darker implications. If science can masquerade as a blind watchmaker God that we can ignore as the fancy takes us, then it can also function as a cover for those good and evil spiritual beings that the Bible calls angels and devils. As such, Lewis’s materialist magician can think he is harnessing the impersonal force of, say, dark energy or the “God particle,” when he is, in fact, channeling personal demons who hate our humanity as much as they hate the God who

created it. The scenario is a frightening one, but Lewis did not shy away from depicting it in one of his novels. In That Hideous Strength, the third installment in his Space Trilogy, Lewis creates a secret society named N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) that, by means of Machiavellian tactics and esoteric experiments, plans to establish a utopian, hygienic state free from all human imperfection. The ultimate goal of N.I.C.E. is to conquer and subdue both nature and man through the power of science. In pursuit of that quest, they have achieved a Frankenstein-like feat of technological genius: the artificial preservation of the bodiless human head of a criminal. As proponents of emergent evolution, the directors of N.I.C.E. believe that only mind matters, that someday we will all be like the Head, pure consciousness divorced from the filth and corruption of the flesh. To join the inner-circle of N.I.C.E., the would-be initiate must trample on the Cross and bow before the Head in an act of almost religious worship. But the directors of N.I.C.E. have been deceived. The Head before which they prostrate themselves and from which they take their orders is itself controlled by demons whose hatred of organic life, of individuality, and of human emotion is boundless; their image of a perfect world is not the green and fecund earth but the dead, cold, sterile moon. In serving what they consider the epitome of pragmatic science, they find that they have fallen prey to spiritual beings that would devour their personhood. They thought they could use their applied technology to build a monument to human ingenuity (Lewis’s strange title is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel); instead, they discover too late that human dignity and worth is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of materialistic utilitarianism. Lewis subtitled That Hideous Strength “A Modern Fairy-Tale for GrownUps,” but it is actually a highly complex dystopian novel that shares prophetic insights with Brave New World (which was published thirteen years before it) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (which was published three years after it). Luckily for fans of the novel, Lewis himself provided the best framework for understanding That Hideous Strength in a scholarly work he published two years earlier, The Abolition of Man. In this brief but dense study of the dangers of a values-free education detached from all standard of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty, Lewis identifies the historical moment when science and magic joined hands and thus made possible the materialist

magician. The cherished notion, parodied with gusto in Monty Python and the Holy Grail,472 that the Middle Ages were rife with witches and magicians is as false as the equally cherished notion (exploded by Lewis in The Discarded Image) that the medievals all thought the earth was flat. In chapter 3 of The Abolition of Man, Lewis reveals that, in matter of fact, there was “very little magic in the Middle Ages.”473 Indeed, in sharp contrast to the modernist myth that science rose up in the sixteenth century to dispel the darkness and folly of medieval magic, the “serous magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.”474 And that impulse, Lewis explains, was a pragmatic, utilitarian one. Both the applied scientist—who pursues science, not as an end-in-itself, but as a means-to-an-end—and the magician had the same goal in mind: control. They may have borrowed some ideas and tools from the Middle Ages, but their orientation and motivation were strikingly different: For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity is striking.475 Rather than set Francis Bacon, the father of modern science and initiator of the scientific method, in opposition to the legendary Dr. Faustus, who sold his soul to the devil in return for forbidden knowledge, Lewis treats them as two manifestations of the same desire to use specialized techniques for achieving the ends of power and domination. If I may use an analogy in the spirit of Lewis, the difference between Bacon/Faust and the men of the Middle Ages is analogous to that between voodoo and prayer. Whereas the witch doctor who practices voodoo believes

that if he says just the right spell in just the right way, God or the gods or the spirits of the ancestors will be forced to do his bidding, the faithful Christian who lifts his prayer to God does so in the context of Jesus’s prayer at Gethsemane: “thy will be done.” Like the witch doctor, Bacon and Faust, together with their post-Enlightenment heirs, are willing to break long-held taboos and violate traditional standards of decency and proper conduct if it will allow them to attain the prize they seek. To do so, however, they must, in one way or another, surrender themselves to forces that care little for the innate and essential value of each individual human being. In the case of Faust, those forces are clearly demonic and carry with them an infernal evil that would lay waste to God’s creation. In the case of Bacon, those forces are purely physical, natural, and material . . . or are they? Is it not possible that the materialist scientist, in his single-minded insistence on excluding all possibility of the supernatural and metaphysical, might, like the duped directors of N.I.C.E., find he has opened up a spiritual Pandora’s Box? When the scientist who does not believe in God takes to himself the powers and prerogatives of God, he risks letting the demonic genie out of the bottle. Having cast off all limits to his humanity, he finds, in the end, that his humanity has been lost. Nature, as Aristotle liked to say, abhors a vacuum: when the materialist casts God out of it, he invites darker beings and forces to fill the yawning gap that remains.

II The first great science fiction film to which the word genius can be fairly attached is the silent German classic Metropolis476 (1926). Directed by Fritz Lang and with a script by his wife and frequent collaborator Thea von Harbou, Metropolis sweeps the viewer away to a dystopian future in which the rich wile away their time in pleasure gardens while the proletarian workers toil underground in service to huge, impersonal machines. Indeed, the strange, ritualistic labor that they perform—moving levers up and down and twisting faucets in sync with gears and pistons and flashing lights—strips them of their humanity and turns them into joyless, soulless, purposeless automatons. In this mechanized, inorganic, assembly-line world, there is no room for anything that transcends the material realm, certainly not for God. The

applied science of Bacon has achieved its triumph. Behind that triumph, however, lurks something darker and more sinister, something Faustian. The son of the chief industrialist makes his way down to the abyss to watch the workers as they jerk their limbs to the passionless dance of the machine. As he watches, a worker, unable to keep up with the dance, triggers an explosion that kills him and a number of other workers. Through the blinding smoke and cries of pain, the son has a vision in which the hive of industry is transformed into a temple to Moloch, the merciless pagan deity to whom worshipers sacrificed their own children by passing them through the fire. The tools by which the planners of Metropolis hoped to conquer nature have been appropriated by an evil force that devours the very workers who were to build this secularized New Jerusalem. And that force is insatiable, drawing into its metallic maw the lives of countless men, women, and children. Still, a ray of hope shines through in the form of Maria, a saintly, messianic figure who seeks to liberate the souls of the workers through love and to bridge the gap between labor (hands) and management (head) by way of the heart. But Moloch is not to be denied his food. A mad scientist who has no scruples about playing God or breaking taboos fashions a robot that he then transforms, by means of technomagic, into a copy of Maria. This evil Maria riles up the workers to revolt, leading to a near apocalypse. The scene in which the robot metamorphosizes into Maria is truly terrifying, exposing the satanic energy behind the cold science and calling up the central themes and imagery of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll could be considered materialist magicians (or technomages), for they seek to produce a spiritual outcome by techniques that are purely naturalistic. The former creates an animated body without a soul that metamorphosizes into a fiendish monster that destroys his entire family. The latter tries, by means of chemistry, to eradicate original sin, only to become possessed by the demonic power and vigor of the beast that “hydes” within him. In both cases, the attempt to use science to control something that is outside of man’s control (death in the former case; sin in the latter) unleashes forces that are ultimately spiritual in nature. In Metropolis, the evil Maria is compared to the Whore of Babylon, a symbol from the book of Revelation that points, in part, to the spiritual warfare that lies behind the raw political power of such pagan nations as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome.

Needless to say, the unholy experiments of Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll have inspired countless film adaptations. More to the point of this essay are the numerous science fiction films that have delved the dangers of Lewis’s materialist magician in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s and Robert Louis Stevenson’s mad scientists. One of the best films to combine the two, while simultaneously resuscitating the film-noir look and thematic structure of Metropolis, is Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998).477 Set in a perpetually dark and waterless city that exists somewhere between the dimly-lit caverns of Metropolis and the starved urban landscapes of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the film centers on an amnesiac played by Rufus Sewell who is accused of being a serial killer. Is our likeable hero innocent, or does his Jekyll-like exterior conceal a vicious Hyde within? As the complex plot unfolds, it turns out that he and his fellow citizens are being manipulated by technomages from another galaxy intent on discovering and quantifying the nature of humanity. To aid them in their experiments, the aliens use secret chemicals that alter the personalities, relationship, and memories of their human guinea pigs: making them rich today and poor tomorrow, kind on Monday and cruel on Tuesday, now filled with vigor for the future, now pining for a lost Eden that cannot be recovered. Like a growing number of modern cognitive scientists, they think that human faith, hope, and love can be reduced to biochemistry and that individual essence, identity, and purpose are therefore interchangeable (had the film been made today, the aliens would likely have altered the genders of their lab rats as well). The villains are materialists with a vengeance, but their refusal to ascribe dignity and value to the humanity of their subjects is demonic. Both “Satan” in Hebrew and “devil” (diabolos) in Greek mean “accuser,” which is precisely the stance the pale, passionless aliens of Dark City take toward humanity. Possessing the ability to rearrange matter in any combination they desire—a power referred to in the film as “tuning”—they think that human memory and personality can just as easily be combined, erased, and recombined. From their point of view, humans are just as soulless as the Head or the robot Maria; yet, in a twisted, perverse way, they seem to envy our deep-seated capacity for individual integrity and worth. And it is at precisely that point that their scientific, “objective” stance betrays the satanic

will to destroy and devour. A third film, more a cult classic than a cinematic classic, that puts the materialist magician at center stage is Ken Russell’s bizarre, phantasmagoric acid-trip, Altered States478 (1980). Russell, who, six years later, would film a macabre, over-the-top recreation of that dark and stormy night when Mary Shelly conceived the novel that would become Frankenstein (Gothic), here presents his viewers with modern day mad scientist Eddie Jessup (played by William Hurt in his film debut) who, more Jekyll than Frankenstein, experiments on himself rather than on cadavers. In addition to taking hallucinogenic drugs and participating in native-American rituals, Jessup immerses himself in a sensory-deprivation tank filled with water. Suspended in this technological amniotic fluid, he regresses to a primitive state (a sort of cross between a cave man, a werewolf, and Mr. Hyde) and runs amok. Jessup eventually reverts back to his “civilized” persona, whereupon he insists to his wife and his colleagues that he has identified a kind of Energy/Mind/Self that is somehow both material and immortal, individual and universal. Hurt’s character is a self-proclaimed atheist who, as a boy, was troubled by nightmares of Christ and the crucifixion. Convinced that the world is an existential void filled with terror, he sets out in search of a deeper meaning to life detached from God and religion, a meaning that can be quantified in the lab. Instead, he loses control of himself and begins to be possessed— physically and spiritually—by the Hyde-character he has unleashed. The resulting struggle opens up supernatural, metaphysical vistas replete with horrific images straight out of Dante’s Inferno. In the end, Hurt’s character, unable to control the transformations, is almost torn to pieces. What saves him is not science but the love of his wife, who calls him back from the abyss and dispels the pulsating, consuming energy, finally more demonic than cosmic, that almost engulfs her as well. Metropolis, Dark City, and Altered States are certainly not the only films that have dramatized the dangers of the materialist magician. Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) offers an intriguing premise, based partly on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which a scientist, by foolishly toying with alien technology, unwittingly produces monsters from his own id that nearly destroy his daughter. Disney’s The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979) takes us to outer space where a mad scientist patterned after Captain Nemo discovers,

too late, that black holes are doorways to hell. Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) concerns a group of cocky medical students who, in an attempt to explore the mysteries of life after death, unleash demonic forces that feed on their own past sins. Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998) takes us into the obsessivecompulsive mind of a mathematician who, in seeking after the perfect number, finds he has also trespassed on the Name of God. Most recently, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2014), reveals that a Nazi scientist who appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger had, in a bid for immortality, uploaded his consciousness into a computer. Like the Head of That Hideous Strength, his bodiless, soulless consciousness controls the movements of a N.I.C.E.-like cabal that seeks to purify, perfect, and regiment humanity. But the last word on the materialist magician should certainly go to Lewis himself. In the final novel of his Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle, Lewis offers a powerful object lesson on what happens when impious mortals play with forces they neither believe in nor understand. As part of his plan for seizing control of Narnia, an evil Calormen general named Rishda Tarkaan convinces the credulous talking animals of Narnia that their messianic lion king, Aslan, and the demonic, vulture-headed god of the Calormenes, Tash, are really one and the same divine being. Rishda himself is an atheist and puts no faith in Aslan, Tash, or the mythical Tashlan he has, together with his equally unbelieving cohorts, fashioned. To secure his control over the bodies, minds, and souls of the Narnians, he makes it known that Tashlan himself is waiting in a stable and will meet with any creature who has the courage and faith to endure his presence. In order to ensure the success of his ruse, Rishda posts a guard in the stable to kill any Narnian who enters in. But something goes wrong. The real Tash shows up and, when one of Rishda’s cohorts is thrown into the stable, Tash devours him. Rishda hears the horrible sounds made by the hungry demon, and a look of horror spreads across his face. The look is spied from above by Farsight the Eagle, who comments soberly: “There goes one . . . who had called on gods he does not believe in. How will it be with him if they have really come?”479 “Be careful what you wish for,” the old adage warns, for “you may have the misfortune to get it.” Rishda, like all materialist magicians, taps forces

that he thinks are impersonal, material, and neutral, only to find that he has unlocked something—or someone—that is personal, spiritual, and malignant. To borrow the tagline from another movie about a mad scientist whose attempts to control matter lead to the loss of his humanity, The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986): “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Bibliography Aronofsky, Darren. Pi. Protozoa Pictures, 1998. Cronenberg, David. The Fly. 20th Century Fox, 1986. Gilliam, Terry, and Terry Jones. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. EMI Films, 1975. Lang, Fritz. Metropolis. Paramount Pictures, 1927. Lewis, C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. ———. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. That Hideous Strength. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. The Last Battle. New York: Collier, 1970. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperSan Francisco, 2001. ———. The Screwtape Letters. Revised Edition. New York: Collier, 1982. Nelson, Gary. The Black Hole. Walt Disney, 1979. Proyas, Alex. Dark City. New Line Cinema, 1998. Russell, Ken. Altered States. Warner Bros., 1980. Russo, Anthony, and Joe Russ. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Marvel Studios, 2014. Schumacher, Joel. Flatliners. Columbia Pictures, 1990. Vejar, Mike Laurence. “The Geometry of Shadows.” Babylon 5. Warner Bros. Television, 1994. Wilcox, Fred. Forbidden Planet. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956.

468. Vejar, “The Geometry of Shadows.” 469. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 33. 470. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 26. 471. Ibid., 27. 472. Gilliam and Jones, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 473. Lewis, Abolition, 87. 474. Ibid., 87. 475. Ibid., 88. 476. Lang, Metropolis. 477. Proyas, Dark City. 478. Russell, Altered States.

479. Lewis, The Last Battle, 115.

16 The Abolition of Risk C. S. Lewis in the The Island and Gattaca by Janelle L. Aijian

Introduction n his The New Organon, Francis Bacon identifies an ambitious goal for science. Bacon writes, “For by the Fall man declined from the state of innocence and from his kingdom over the creatures. Both things can be repaired even in this life to some extent, the former by religion and faith, and the latter by the arts and sciences.”480 The Abolition of Man has at its heart a

I

critique of Bacon’s goal to recover the Edenic state through science and technology. Lewis argues that this way of thinking will shift the goal of science from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of power: “Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.”481 There are a number of reasons why Lewis finds this shift worrying. First, he argues, contrary to Bacon, that scientific advances do not result in mankind as a whole, or each member of the race individually, possessing increasing power over the natural world. Inevitably, as Lewis argues, “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be the power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”482 Whether the power in question be the ability to send messages wirelessly or to condition a child to believe in the value of self-sacrifice, the increase in power on the part of the makers of the new technology always also creates an underclass which is either dependent on or subject to the newfound power of the innovator. Lewis is not alone in predicting that achieving power over nature will not advance humanity as a whole, but instead merely advance the interests of the

holders of the new technology at the expense of those who lack it or are subject to it. In films as wide-ranging as Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Michael Bay’s The Island, and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium and District 9, writers posit advances in scientific technology designed to “conquer and subdue the misery and poverty of man,”483 especially humanity’s tendency towards physical frailty and death. Alongside Lewis, these films suggest that this attempt to assert mastery over nature will actually result in a tiered society in which a few use science as an instrument to master and possess others. However, these visions both depart from Lewis’s in important respects. First, Lewis argues that science will advance until total human conditioning is possible. By contrast, these films are critical about the capability of science to condition human nature. Each in its own way posits a hard line beyond which science cannot proceed, most often arguing that the human mind and will are non-reducible to “nature” as Lewis describes it. Second, Lewis envisions that this man-molding science will be backed by an omnicompotent state and driven by a philosophical ideology. Conversely, these films identify the “conditioners” employing new technology as private companies driven by profit and serving consumers interested in purchasing insurance against the possibility of disease and death. The goal of scientific power over nature is no longer a new human race, but merely a reduced risk for the privileged. In what follows I will first explore the common ground shared by Lewis and these sci-fi films in identifying the inequalities produced by an increased power over nature, with particular attention to The Island and Gattaca. Then I will explore the important divergences between Lewis and these filmmakers, in particular these films’ identification of the unethical consumer as the ultimate antagonist.

Lewis’s Objection to the Pursuit of Mastery over Nature Lewis’s objection to Bacon’s agenda is multifaceted, but for the purpose of this chapter I will restrict myself to two related claims made by Lewis and corroborated in the works of science fiction considered here. The first is that while Bacon envisions a shared mastery of nature by all men, Lewis foresees some men manipulating nature in order either to make other men dependent on them, or make those others the subjects of their newfound power. The second, more specific claim is that once such power is achieved in the realm

of human psychology, it will result in the inculcation of moral sentiments that are neither universal nor objective, but merely reflect the preference and advantage of the conditioners. Lewis’s first, and perhaps least controversial, claim is that as innovators develop techniques for manipulating nature, this power is only possessed by the innovators themselves and those to whom the creators give access, usually because the latter are able to pay for the benefit. Lewis writes, In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use [new technologies]. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. . . . What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.484 Here we see the first inklings that manipulating nature and manipulating men are intimately related activities. The moment that innovators have achieved a new power over nature, they become gatekeepers of that power, excluding others from it on the basis of how those others can or cannot benefit them. This unequal distribution of technological benefits is also borne out well in the film Elysium, where man’s power over illness is extended only to the privileged few.485 The device of the city Elysium’s absolute separation from the earth powerfully illustrates the barriers placed by the innovators between those who can pay to benefit from their technology and those who cannot. Similarly, in The Island,486 the luxury of “spare parts” is extended only to those rich enough to pay. What makes The Island an interesting example in this context is that it is not merely a case in which innovators exert power over others by demanding payment in order for a share in their technological advance. The Island exhibits the ways in which increased technology can be wielded against others, not merely withheld from them. In order to provide “spare parts” for their wealthy clients, the innovators create and condition another population whose well-being is subjected to the good of the paying class. This, too, Lewis has anticipated: “Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or

subject as the possessor, since he is a target both for bombs and for propaganda.”487 The Island perfectly demonstrates this dilemma: a privileged group benefit from the cloning technology developed by creating another group which are the subjects and victims of that technology. Gattaca demonstrates this danger—that men will be the subjects and not merely the masters of new technology—in even more complex terms.488 At first, it may seem that the technologically-generated underclass in Gattaca are the so-called “faith births” like protagonist Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke); those who do not experience the technology of genetic manipulation. However, as the effects of genetic engineering are clarified over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Freeman does not suffer nearly as acutely in having this technology withheld from him as those who are its subjects. Lewis writes about the power of eugenics to enforce a prior generation’s will on the next generation: And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception, simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer.489 Jerome Morrow (Jude Law) is the clearest example of Lewis’s paradox. Designed by the previous generation according to its preference (that he be a champion athlete), Morrow is psychologically crushed by his inability to live up to this prescribed purpose, overcome by alcoholism and paralyzed in the course of an attempted suicide. Other characters react similarly to their genetic conditioning. Irene Cassini (Uma Thurman) suffers from pervasive insecurities because of what she believes to be her genetic inferiority. In the climax of the film, Anton Freeman (Loren Dean), Vincent’s brother, nearly drowns when his lifelong confidence in his genetic superiority is shaken. The fate of these genetically modified beings perfectly bears out Lewis’s prediction:

In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.490 The genetically modified characters in Gattaca are, each in their own way, tyrannized by the decisions of the previous generation. Their parents decided what traits would make for the best life for their children, and the children are subject to the expectations their parents’ preferences have placed on them. Lewis describes the phenomenon in this way: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”491 Perhaps the most striking example of this imperialism is the twelve-fingered pianist whose performance Freeman and Cassini attend. Here is a man whose way in life was determined for him at the moment of his conception. Niccol gives the pianist no lines to speak, and no name even in the film’s credits. Whereas Freeman, for whom no one has determined a path, is able to make his own way (albeit in a society rife with discrimination against him), this pianist has “been made, without [his] concurring voice” what his genetic manipulators preferred. The increasing power of the previous generation has led to a sharp decrease in power in the generation they have chosen to benefit. The larger tale in each of these films is that the increase in power achieved with these advances in technology is not a real benefit at all, either to its possessors or to its patients. As these films bear out, improved technology does not increase either the happiness or the goodness of those it is intended to benefit. These films show alongside Lewis that Bacon has wrongly presumed that the two effects of the curse can be addressed separately, one by technology and the other by religion. Rather, in the world of these films, the effect of increased power without accompanying increased goodness is merely an increased ability to make others suffer, but no increase in the power to make anyone happy or good. Rather, we see in the beneficiaries of technology a reversion to a cutthroat Darwinian ethic. In The Island, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) is convinced that his doppelganger, Tom

Lincoln, will experience the basic moral instinct of empathy once he knows of Echo’s existence. He asks, “Don’t people care that they kill us? That they take parts from us?”492 However, just as in Gattaca, it turns out that the subjected class in The Island is actually morally superior. Whereas both Echo and Freeman are guided by traditional virtues of the Tao like courage and empathy, the beneficiaries of technology live by the mantra voiced by Merrick Biotech employee James McCord (Steve Buscemi): “[W]hatever you do, do not trust anyone. One thing I can tell you about people, is that they’ll do anything to survive.”493 That this increased technology would not correspond to a more careful or sophisticated morality, but rather would make its recipients regress morally echoes Lewis’s warning that in the “magician’s bargain” of technology, “man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power.”494 Lewis bears out this paradox in similar terms in his science fiction classic That Hideous Strength,495 in which Mark Studdock is seduced by the prospect of being on the “inner circle” in the N.I.C.E., a prospect that he thinks will bring him happiness. However, the further he progresses into this powerful circle, the more he realizes that it is characterized by secrecy, ineffectiveness, and spite. Jane Studdock, on the other hand, is initiated into the society of St. Anne’s on the Hill which, while technologically powerless, is imbued by rich virtues and, as a result, true happiness in community. Lewis presents the contrast most fully in opposing the N.I.C.E.’s Major Hardcastle, a human who increasingly resembles a beast, with St. Anne’s Mr. Bultitude, the bear who is gradually being transformed into a gentle and rational hnau.496 In all of these cases, the authors point to a similar limitation in technology. Scientific advances can put off death, but they cannot bring life. In That Hideous Strength, the attempt to make Francois Alcasan immortal turns him into a monster and a slave to the forces at the back of the N.I.C.E. In The Island, Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) attempts to provide immortality to his customers, but his technology is not sufficient either to maintain the illusion of happiness for the clone population or to bring real happiness to his clients or himself. The viewer discovers along with Lincoln Six Echo that Tom Lincoln is neither a happy nor a moral man, but a vacuous and selfish person

devoted to erotic pleasures and willing to let an innocent man die in order to avoid the fatal consequences of his own decision. Later Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) diagnoses Merrick’s behavior as morally equivalent to that of the African warlords who branded Laurent as a child in order to mark him as inhuman. In each case, the attempt to transcend death results in a surrender of the character’s basic humanity. In attempting to overcome nature, especially mortality, he in fact overcomes himself. For Lewis, the culmination of one generation’s tyranny over the next comes in the realm of moral conditioning. This re-writing of moral instincts surpasses the physical conditioning previously described, attempting to control not merely the bodies but the minds of the next generation. Lewis views this as the final stage in the overcoming of nature: Of course, while we did not know how minds were made, we accepted this mental furniture as a datum, even as a master. But many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants. Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of “nature” which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?497 It may seem at first as though this focus on the moral dimension of man’s power over nature is ignored in the films considered here. However, both Gattaca and The Island are intimately engaged in this question of moral conditioning. In Gattaca, characters default to a reductionist materialist account of moral virtue. When Freeman is born, his genetic code is supposed to predict his tendency towards manic depression and a “violent temperament.”498 Later, Director Josef (Gore Vidal) seeks to exonerate himself as a murder suspect by offering to give the investigators a sample of his blood: “Take another look at my profile, Detective. You won’t find a violent bone in my body.”499 Detective Hugo (Alan Arkin) begins his murder investigation assuming that an “in-valid” is the most likely culprit for the crime, as any genetically modified individual will have had violent traits designed out of him. In The Island, the engagement with questions of moral conditioning is even more apparent. Merrick attempts, through a combination

of indoctrination, behavioral conditioning, and social conditioning, to keep the clones calm and healthy in their illusory world. In both cases, the films envision the moral conditioners as designing the next generation according to their own preferences and for their own benefit. In Gattaca the values are unreflective—parents opt to have the likelihood of antisocial behaviors genetically removed from their potential offspring. In The Island, of course, the goal of the conditioners is more sinister. While the measures taken by Merrick and his staff may be construed as ensuring the health of his patients, his interest in their health itself is of course not for their own good, but rather to make them more profitable merchandise. Because the clones are artificially created, Merrick and those employed by him conclude that they neither have rights nor deserve compassion. When McCord first explains to Lincoln Six Echo that he is a clone, he begins by saying, “I mean, you’re human, but you just, you’re not real. You’re not, like, a real person. Like me.”500 In one particularly barbaric scene employees laugh when the clone of a professional football player, Starkweather Two Delta (Michael Clark Duncan), awakens on the operating table as his organs are being harvested. The employees electrocute him and drag him screaming back to the operating table and his death. Merrick and his employees show the marks of Lewis’s conditioner: “Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”501 Since Merrick does not believe in the bearing of the Tao over his behavior, especially as regards the clones, his conditioning is a matter of tyranny, and their compliance that of slavery. In this context, the meaning of the Island itself is an interesting device which expands the import and relevance of Caspian Tredwell-Owen’s work as both the author of the story and one of the screenplayers. The shared myth that Merrick uses to indoctrinate his clones is, in fact, a vignette that mirrors the Christian narrative of the fall, redemption, and salvation. With the shared memory of a worldwide apocalypse the clones are brought to accept their confinement and the rules of their shared society. They feel themselves lucky to have been saved from certain death, and with the prospect of the Island, the clones are given hope and a reason to be patient and obedient in the present. It is the startling revelation of the script that this hope of a future life

in paradise is in fact a fiction used to control the clones until they are sacrificed for someone else’s benefit. In Merrick’s false gospel we see a reflection of Lewis’s concern that the conditioners will inculcate values in the conditioned in order to bring about the latter’s willing sacrifice for the benefit of the former. Lewis warns, “Either they must go the whole way and debunk this sentiment (of self-sacrifice) like any other, or must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it.”502 The clone population is taught to value an illusory good, the Island, in the same way that Lewis’s young men would be taught to value the illusory good of self-sacrifice. In both cases, the value has been instilled purely for the profit of the conditioner —not because the conditioner himself believes in or is constrained by it. The conclusion in each of these cases is that the conditioners, who are themselves controlled only by baser instincts, control all else according to their instincts and thus subject the whole society to a new barbarity. As Lewis writes, “At the moment, then, of man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity.”503 The conditioners in Gattaca are controlled by their own prejudice and, content in their superiority, wage a bureaucratic war against the in-valids. They do not view the social marginalization of other human beings or the cruelty and violence of their own societies as evidence that their superiority is illusory. In The Island, Merrick’s employees and customers are so assured of their superiority over the clones as to participate willingly in their slaughter. At this pinnacle of technological competency, the beneficiaries of the technology revert to barbarism. In short, their reduction of the moral to biological mechanism has robbed them of any sophisticated moral framework to govern their behavior.

Crucial Distinctions Despite the strong resonances between Lewis’s essay and these works of science fiction, there are two crucial ways in which the films depart from and

challenge Lewis’s narrative. The first is that Lewis posits a steady increase in the conditioners’ competency until they are omnicompetent, whereas each film posits a hard line beyond which the conditioners cannot cross, and which ultimately foils their schemes. The second is that while Lewis envisions the conditioners as ideologically driven agents of the state, the films envision privatized corporations driven primarily by profit, delivering an insurance policy against disease and death to privileged consumers. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis makes specific predictions regarding the competency of both science and the state. It is the increased effectiveness of both that allow for the terrifying dystopia of perfect control over man’s physical and moral development. It is unclear whether Lewis himself believes in the possibility of this perfectly competent state-backed science. The happy conclusion of That Hideous Strength may indicate that he does not believe in the ultimate achievement of this vision, although it is telling that in this case it is only supernatural intervention in the person of Merlin and the Oyéresu that prevents its success. Departing from Lewis, the emphasis on these films is on the incapacity of science to achieve its ends. In both Gattaca and The Island, the attempt to genetically or psychologically manipulate moral instincts and behavior ultimately fails. In Gattaca, the power of genetics to predict human potential is gradually debunked. According to their genetics, Freeman ought to be given to violence and depression, and Josef ought to be peaceful. However, in practice neither Freeman nor Josef behave as their genetic maps predict. The in-valid Freeman behaves with balance, tenacity, and calm, whereas Josef proves capable of brutal violence. In both cases, the film concludes that, contrary to the assumption of the characters, moral behavior, intelligence and will are irreducible to genetic factors. Similarly, in The Island Merrick’s attempts at conditioning prove impossible. Merrick’s initial attempt to breed vegetative clones miscarries because without animation the clones fail to thrive. Similarly, Merrick finds as the film progresses that the clones cannot be kept in the early stages of psychological development, in which they are easily manipulable. As clones age, they develop greater psychological independence, and even begin mimicking goals and memories originating with their doppelgangers. Throughout the film, Merrick’s attempts to breed a partial and consequently more easily controlled humanity cannot be sustained. As the clones mature,

they become independent and increasingly unwilling to submit to his mechanisms of behavioral control. Each of these films focus not on the vast powers of scientific advance, but rather on its fundamental limits. Both The Island and Gattaca insist that the perfected state of behavioral and psychological conditioning that Lewis envisions is impossible. These films put the human mind or will in a category distinct from Nature, arguing that it is not reducible to biological mechanisms or the product of indoctrination, but is essentially free. Moreover, it is this freedom from science’s determinism that makes for the happy ending in each of these films. Where Bacon envisioned the advance of science as the key to human happiness and Lewis expected these advances to be humanity’s demise, these films argue that science would succeed in abolishing man were it not powerless to achieve this end. Lewis is correct in identifying the dangers of an all-encompassing science, but wrong in worrying that it may be achieved. Finally, these films depart from Lewis in assessing the motivations that will drive the technological movements towards the abolition of man. It is perhaps a function of Lewis’s place in history, having experienced on the one hand the eugenic agenda of a fascist Nazi regime, and on the other the rise of totalitarian communist Russia, that he imagines the conditioners to be statesponsored and ideologically driven. He writes, “[T]he man-molders of the new age will be armed with powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”504 This model is repeated in That Hideous Strength. The N.I.C.E. are government-sponsored and ideologically driven, although they employ a private police force rather than the government police, and are actively engaged in the manipulation of the government in order to advance their plans. Both Lewis’s conditioners in the Abolition of Man and the embodiment of them in the N.I.C.E. are engaging in the project of man-molding for the purpose of re-fashioning the human race according to a fixed ideal. This model is common to some of the most famous inter-war and post-war science fiction, whether we look to Huxley’s Brave New World or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It seems that the strong concern of this period was that states would increase both in power and in the firmness of their agenda regarding human nature in order to create

a new humanity according to their preference. In these films, however, this narrative of government intervention, using science to oppress, control, and re-form society, is abandoned. Instead, the government is placed in a benevolent but ineffective role, failing to prevent the immoral behavior of privatized companies. In Gattaca, the government has prohibited discrimination against in-valids, but companies regularly flout this regulation. In The Island, Merrick conceals the fact that the clones are not in a vegetative state from governmental regulators, and it is implied that the state does not look too carefully into the company’s operations. It is even revealed that the American president has himself purchased a clone insurance policy. Neill Blomkamp resorts to the same narrative in District 9, Elysium, and Chappie, each of which involve a private company employed by the government but ultimately driven by profit rather than a coherent moral or ideological agenda. This shift from the fear of an omnicompetent state to the fear of an impotent state and powerful companies is crucial. The second half of the twentieth century saw a breakdown of the seemingly ever-increasing power of the state. Nazi facism was definitively defeated, the Soviet Union collapsed. The new villain that has arisen to replace state power is the multinational company, armed with science but not driven by any philosophy of human nature or societal good. Rather, both the companies and the individuals in these films are driven by a myopic desire for material selfadvancement. The heroes are those who attempt to uphold other goods, who retain a sense of humanity in the midst of the capitalistic dogma of the powerful. District 9 is an especially good example of this trope.505 Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) begins the film as a mid-level bureaucrat at Multinational United, a privatized company hired by the government to manage and re-locate aliens living in Johannesburg. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that MNU’s real priority, however, is not relocating the aliens but rather finding a way of unlocking the aliens’ weapons technology, a goal for which they conduct horrific experiments. Van der Merwe’s gradual transition into an alien highlights his change in perspective. Where he began the film thinking of the aliens as sub-human, laughing at the cruelty inflicted on them, he gradually comes to understand their plight and realizes the gross

misconduct of MNU’s behavior. In the end, he is willing to sacrifice his own life to assist alien Christopher Johnson and his son in escaping. His transition from being complicit in MNU’s agenda to identifying with its victims mirrors those of McCord and Laurent in The Island. Both are hired by Merrick to assist in the suppression of the clones, but both gradually come to identify with Merrick’s victims such that they are willing to risk their lives to stand against Merrick in their defense. The largely unseen villain in each of these cases is, of course, the consumer who creates the market for these private companies. Since companies can only be profitable if their clients are willing to pay for the service rendered, perhaps the most interesting common element of these films is the motivation of the purchaser, which drives the science and the creation of the underclass. In each case, the consumer is willing to turn a blind eye to the abuses of the company in exchange for insurance against the possibility of disease or death. This dynamic is clear in The Island, where the insurance policy is literal, but is no less present in Gattaca, where parents pay for the genetic perfection of their children, or in Elysium, where clients pay for access to the ideal gated community with its guarantees against violence and disease. It is present in a different way in District 9, where the people of Johannesburg pay MNU to shield them from the alien underworld in their city, and of course in the prospective buyers of the alien weapons technology. Whereas Lewis envisions a science motivated by a totalizing dream for human nature, the dystopias in these films are motivated by the comparatively paltry individual desire for a less risky life. Largely, the consumers treated in these films are characterized by selfdeception regarding the human cost of their purchases. Tania Smit-van de Merwe (Vanessa Haywood) is unwilling to believe her husband’s testimony, or even to believe that he survived his ordeal, because of the high cost of coming to know about the abuses of MNU and her own father’s culpability in them. The occupants on Elysium are kept blissfully unaware of the state of humans on earth so as not to feel taxed by any moral burden. The insurance policy holders in The Island are content to believe that their clones are vegetative. It is for this reason that the most interesting consumer in these films is Tom Lincoln, as he is the only consumer who is robbed of this blissful self-deception by coming into direct conflict with the person being oppressed for his benefit. This case makes clear that at least for some, while

the consumer would prefer not to know the cost of his purchase, knowing that cost would not ultimately change his decision. Tom Lincoln looks on his relationship with Lincoln Six Echo as a zero-sum game, and like Weston in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, he is willing for Echo to die so that he can keep on living.506

Conclusion Advances in technology, especially those that purport to repair or reverse some of the effects of the Edenic curse, may seem like unqualified goods. Human beings are subject to the risk of disease and death, and it is natural for us to search for ways to reduce those risks using whatever technology may be available. However, as Lewis and these writers of science fiction demonstrate, reversing a curse is not as easy as developing a new technology. Rather, the moment new technology is developed it creates disparities in power between the creator, those who can compensate him for his technology, those who cannot, and those on whom the technology is employed. This means that if humankind makes progress in re-establishing its “kingdom over the creatures” through technology without simultaneously being restored to innocence, this increase in power cannot, despite Bacon’s optimism, “conquer and subdue the misery and poverty of man.” Rather, it will empower those who can afford it to exploit new technology to reduce the effects of the fall in our own lives, often at the expense of others. Lewis and these films are agreed in cautioning us against Bacon’s agenda to conquer nature, but these science fiction films go further in cautioning us against being the blind consumers of lopsided technological advances. Man’s power over nature too often means the power of some men over others, and in our attempts to reduce risk for ourselves and our children it is all too tempting to wield that power.

Bibliography Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bay, Michael. The Island. DreamWorks Pictures, 2005. Blomkamp, Niell. Chappie. Media Rights Capital, 2015. ———. District 9. QED International, 2009.

———. Elysium. Media Rights Capital, 2013. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man; Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. That Hideous Strength. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Niccol, Andrew. Gattaca. Columbia Pictures, 1998.

480. Bacon, The New Organon, 221. 481. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 88. 482. Ibid., 69. 483. Bacon, New Organon, 19. 484. Ibid., 68. 485. Blomkamp, Elysium. 486. Bay, The Island. 487. Lewis, Abolition, 68. 488. Niccol, Gattaca. 489. Lewis, Abolition, 68. 490. Ibid., 70. 491. Ibid., 72. 492. Bay, The Island. 493. Ibid. 494. Lewis, Abolition, 87. 495. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. 496. The word hnau in Lewis’s space trilogy refers to any rational animal, whether human or alien. 497. Lewis, Abolition, 62. 498. Niccol, Gattaca. 499. Ibid. 500. Bay, The Island. 501. Lewis, Abolition, 85. 502. Ibid., 32. 503. Ibid., 80. 504. Lewis, Abolition, 73. 505. Blomkamp, District 9. 506. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet.

17 Technocratic Death Denial as Disavowal of Life Lessons from Brave New World and The Abolition of Man by Mike Alvarez

I

n the titular chapter of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues that “we reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them.”507

But in our conquest of Nature via technocratic “perfection” of man, we are conquered by Nature instead, thereby increasing her domain. Man reduces himself to raw material, to mere objects to be manipulated, not, “as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature.”508 In this essay, I argue that the denial of death undergirds the reduction of man to raw material, to component parts (such as genes, organs, and cells, or cogs in a social machinery) within which death can be localized, then abolished via technocratic means. By “technocratic,” I refer not only to the ubiquitous application of science and technology in our everyday lives, but, like David Moller, to a particular mindset in which “technological developments are favorably and unquestioningly received,”509 a mindset that privileges rationality and efficiency, with little consideration to “the moral and cultural consequences of technological dependence.”510 Of course, technocratic death denial has many guises, from disrespect of the dead and dying to the fear of death itself, as illustrated in Leslie Libman’s and Larry Williams’s film adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World.511 This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part, I discuss the many strategies (often contradictory) of death denial at work in the film, with an emphasis on the diegetic world. These strategies include but are not limited to: state control over human subjects’ biological destiny; the effacement of death from civic spaces and public view; the making of death into a

spectacle; and the suppression of affect pertaining to loss. In the second part of the essay, I argue that the film and Lewis’s text are as relevant today as when they were originally conceived, if not more so. We live in a society where death has become privatized, severed from the communal fold and hidden behind institutional walls. We inhabit a “mediascape”512 that is ripe with the imagery of death but does little to foster empathy for the dying. And we accept, grudgingly or unquestioningly, the temporal limits placed by medical establishments on mourning and grief. Ultimately, I argue that by denying death in such elaborately technocratic ways, we are also disavowing life. Lewis writes: “We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams.”513 In a similar vein, we do not look at humans as soulful or sinful while we cut their bodies open, to tinker with a tissue here and an organ there. Like the “basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing,”514 we render the human inhuman by seeing him as a collection of mere parts or raw materials. But in order to truly celebrate what it means to be human, we must use science and technology in a manner respectful to nature—that is, to the precariousness of life and the inevitability of death.

Death Denial in Brave New World Within the film’s diegesis, death is disavowed firstly through the World State’s attempt at technological mastery over the life process itself. Infants are not born but decanted, cultivated from “gland extracts” and grown in places called hatcheries. “They are turning out human beings like machines,” says John Cooper (played by Tim Guinee), one of the film’s protagonists. In fact, the institution of the family—whether nuclear, extended, foster, or adoptive—has been completely abolished, so that the words “mother” and “father” are not only anachronistic, but blasphemous and profane. The idea of pregnancy is horrific and unthinkable, for it introduces randomness and chance into the collective gene pool. For this reason, monogamy is deemed “antisocial.” Opposition to monogamy is constructed discursively via such slogans as “everyone belongs to everyone else” and “promiscuity is a citizen’s duty.” To exhibit exclusive preference, or worse, to develop feelings for another human being, is antisocial because it would suggest envy and

possessiveness, which are antithetical to the rational, scientifically-oriented government maintained by World Controllers like Mustapha Mond (Leonard Nimoy). According to Mond, envy and possessiveness lead to violence and war, which in turn will decimate the world and its population, for it was war that ravaged the old world in the first place. In short, to give people mastery over their own biological destiny is to give them the reins to their own destruction. Neonates are not only decanted, but as children are conditioned via subliminal messages to embrace their appointed place in society, which is based on a caste system consisting of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and Deltas.515 Alphas are comparable to the managerial class, while Betas and Gammas are an administrative class; this is summed up quite nicely by the slogan, “Alphas have to think things through, Betas and Gammas have too much to do.” Deltas, meanwhile, are the labor class, depicted in the film as workers toiling over assembly lines. To feel differently, to envision a different station in life for oneself, is to threaten the organic unity of society: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Such a view conceives of society as a singular biological entity, and the human beings that constitute it as mere parts or organs that are assigned value according to their usefulness, value that is determined from the very beginning of a person’s biological existence. If the World State is a living organism, then its Controllers must work very hard to stave off its death, and this is accomplished via technocratic strategies of domination. The world I have described so far bears an uncanny resemblance to the dystopian future imagined by Lewis in chapter 3 of The Abolition of Man: “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.”516 By “control over himself,” Lewis really means “the power of some men to make other men what they please.”517 But instead of “a few hundreds of men [ruling] over billions upon billions of men,”518 power in Brave New World is concentrated in the hands of ten World Controllers who govern all of the World State’s known territories. The World Controllers are analogous to Lewis’s Conditioners, in that they set the definition of ‘Humanity’519 and go on to “produce conscience”520 in man.

Aside from eugenics, conditioning, and propaganda, there is another way that conscience is technocratically produced, and that is through pharmacologic manipulation of affect. In Huxley’s novel, and in the film adaptation by Libman and Williams, euphoric feelings are produced in the masses via the consumption of soma, a blue substance that can be ingested as tablets, or administered intravenously in liquid form. That it is called soma is rather telling; “soma” is Greek for “body,” and the people who consume soma to manage their moods via their bodies, are themselves bodies managed by the state. Soma does not seem to produce euphoria directly, however. Instead, it works by misdirection, by instilling a false sense of happiness via the suppression of unwanted affect, namely, those feelings associated with conflict and loss, such as anger, hatred, sadness, and love. Again, notice the slogans: “Sadness is an illusion. Only happiness is real”; “Just one gram and you won’t give a damn.” To better understand the technocratic denial of death in Brave New World, one need also look at the World State’s topography. One of the hallmarks of utopian and dystopian scenarios is what I call the enclosure, a seemingly impenetrable barrier that separates the known from the terrifying unknown, the finite from the vast maw of infinity, the logical and ordered from the illogical and chaotic, the permissible from the unacceptable, the human from the bestial, the subject from the faceless other. In short, the enclosure serves to demarcate the limits of ideology, creating an oppositional relationship between what rests comfortably within and what lies beyond.521 We can also think of the enclosure as separating that which falls under the umbrella of Nature from that which does not. According to Lewis, Nature is a floating signifier with “varying meanings,”522 and, I would add, cultural and historical specificity. When we speak of Nature, we are really using a shorthand to refer to all those things we wish to conquer (or think we have conquered); whether or not we are actually able to do so is another matter. The enclosure, then, separates Nature from whatever it happens to be dialectically positioned against. If Nature is used to mean death, then life is just on the other side. But this is a false dichotomy because the seeds of life and death reside within one another, and neither life nor death can be conquered. The enclosure employs the mechanisms of displacement and projection:

what is disavowed from civil society is projected onto the wildlands beyond. The reservations of Brave New World thus serve as containers for what the World State has expunged from collective consciousness—particularly, the visage of death. The manner of Bernard Crowe’s (Peter Gallagher) and Lenina Crowe’s (Rya Kihlstedt) arrival at the reservations during their excursion away from utopia supports this idea. Upon entry they are threatened with death; instead of landing safely, they crash land due to engine failure and turbulence, thus upholding the reservations’ association with danger. While waiting for rescue, they are then harassed and assaulted by knife-wielding thugs who knock the helicopter pilot unconscious, and to put it mildly, reveal Bernard’s incompetence with hand-to-hand combat. They are saved by John Cooper, or “John the Savage,” who along with his mother Linda (Sally Kirkland) are brought back to utopia as curiosities. Unlike Lenina and Bernard, who until now have been untouched by the prospect of dying, John and the other people of the reservations must contend with death daily. A chasm thus emerges: the World State, with its access to technology and monopoly on cultural sophistication, has utterly effaced death, while the reservations have all but naturalized it. However, neither makes for a sustainable way of life, because man cannot be mere “intellect” or mere “appetite.”523 Interestingly, the reservations offer viewers a glimpse of the dead past Mustapha Mond speaks of, a past torn by war and violence and from which the scientifically-enlightened present seeks to break away, as the slogan “History is Bunk” suggests. The reservations, then, are facsimiles of the past frozen in the present; they are death kept at bay. But death can’t be held at bay indefinitely, because one cannot erect a fence between life and death. Moreover, the enclosure is illusory: what has been displaced is never truly gone.524 The people of utopia are not blessed with everlasting life; despite the scientific imperative to eliminate randomness and chance, the skin eventually sags, the bones become brittle, and the organs unfailingly fail. What the World State does to what it cannot keep out is hide it from view, or else turn it into a spectacle. Intimations of the deteriorating body, of the body approaching mortality, elicit discomfort if not outright fear or disgust. Unsurprisingly, there is a glaring absence of the old and the infirm in the World State’s civic spaces, which appear to be populated exclusively by virile bodies, with young actors having the

monopoly on screen time. Thus, from the perspective of utopia’s youthful denizens, John’s mother Linda is the epitome of the abject: old, wrinkled, grey-haired, and skeletal, a liminal being on the threshold of life and death. The film establishes her decrepitude and proximity to mortality by way of contrast. At the cocktail party “honoring” John’s and Linda’s entry into utopia, Linda is the lone old woman amidst a sea of finely dressed bachelors and bachelorettes. They sip wine, engage in verbal foreplay, and dance with their hands on each others’ hips, while she stuffs her mouth full with hors d’oeuvres and champagne. The juxtaposition is deliberate, emphasizing her savagery, base appetite, and unsightliness. The World State’s effacement of death becomes visible once again when Linda is admitted to the hospital. Due to overconsumption of soma, she has become dangerously frail. According to her attending physician: “I’ve never seen someone in such poor physical condition.” This statement suggests not only the gravity of Linda’s infirmity, but the rarity of infirmity itself within the World State’s walls. The discomfort registered by Lenina’s face at the sight of Linda in a hospital bed underscores how strange and unfamiliar the concepts of illness and mortality are to the people of utopia. Lenina could not wait to excuse herself from the room, because to be so close to sickness and death is to be reminded of one’s own corporeality. Curiously, Linda’s IV drip contains nothing but liquid soma. Death denial thus operates at two levels here: by sequestering the infirm, death is hidden from public view; and by drugging the infirm, the infirm is rendered incapable of reflection upon his or her own dying. How ironic that the cause for her rapid decline in health (soma) is administered as a panacea. But the disavowal of death is perhaps most palpable in the scene where John mourns Linda’s passing.525 The scene takes place in the Center for Death. A handful of cadavers are displayed on tables, Linda’s among them. The setting is dauntingly sterile: The floor is bleach white, as are the walls and ceiling. Nurses in white uniforms usher children, who are also wearing white, to and from cadavers, which are draped in white sheets. At first glance, the mood conveyed is somber, almost reverential, but this is immediately upended by the frivolity and callousness with which Linda’s body is treated. “She’s ugly,” one child holding a bright blue balloon quips, to which another child responds, “Look at her teeth!” An enraged John scares the children

away, and he is reprimanded by a nurse: “You’ll make the children think that death is something bad. We’re trying to teach them.” Of course, one is inclined to agree that death is not necessarily “something bad.” The eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, says that death is humankind’s “ownmost” or “utmost” possibility.526 Unlike other possibilities which may or may not come to pass, death is the horizon towards which we are inevitably drawing closer, towards which we are constantly becoming. However, this horizon places a necessary limit on our becoming; otherwise, the world would be an infinity of meaningless possibilities. To live authentically, then, one must embrace this horizon, for it is the prospect of death that colors each action with meaning. Lewis would agree that death can be meaningful, and that dying “for the Good Way” is preferable to “slavery and base deeds” and to “life with shame.”527 But this is not what the nurse in Brave New World is “trying to teach” the children. According to the nurse, “Her [Linda’s] life is over, but it’s okay because everyone else is alive and happy. . . . We can recycle the organ and reclaim the phosphorous.” Linda is thus reduced to both spectacle and raw material, and the children, as Lewis feared, are taught that all human beings are reducible as such. They are also taught that one should smile more and frown less, that death is not worth grieving or mourning: “One dead person can’t possibly matter that much.” But if one cannot commemorate death, then one cannot celebrate life. And if one dead person matters very little, then the same must hold true for all that is living. The white that saturates the Center for Death does not signify reverence, but effacement, for the emotions that should be felt in the face of loss are choked. As Lewis argues, objects (and, I would add, events) merit emotional responses that are appropriate to them.528 Just as a cataract merits the word “sublime,”529 the sight of a man hunched over his dead mother ought to merit sympathy, if not empathy. But John Cooper, or “John the Savage,” is alone in his grief, and this is symbolized by the fact that he is the only one wearing black. One can say that John is the only character to possess a “chest,” that liaison “between cerebral man and visceral man.”530 Unsurprisingly, the Soma Distribution Center, where people go to pick up their rations of soma, is a mere escalator ride away from the Center for Death.

The spatial and architectural design is not without significance. That they are housed under the same roof and bureaucratic management shows the extent of the World State’s “bio-power,” defined by Foucault as state dominion over the bodies and biological destiny of its subjects, controlling life while harnessing the power of the population.531 Furthermore, that the Center of Death is situated directly below the Soma Distribution Center serves as a spatial metaphor for the imperative to push death’s visage under the rim of consciousness, by whatever technocratic means necessary.

Technocratic Death Denial Today As Brave New World illustrates, technocratic death denial undergirds the reduction of man to a mere assemblage of raw materials, and to component parts in a larger social machinery or organism. The World State exercises power over the biological destiny of its subjects, from the moment of conception to the moment of cessation, because to grant subjects human agency is to hand over the reins to their own destruction. People are conditioned to embrace their appointed place in society; else they fan the flames of war and threaten the survival of the species. Topographically, a fence is erected between life and death: peace, plenitude, and good health are tucked safely within the World State’s walls, while violence, scarcity, and infirmity are projected outwards onto no-man’s land. The fence also severs the past from the present; however, the fence is illusory because what lies beyond has been and will always be within. Death inside the walls is thus hidden from view, its carriers—the old and the infirm532—sequestered. But because the visage of death cannot be totally expunged from consciousness, people are also anesthetized to the affective dimensions of loss. They are rendered incapable of mourning the death of others and reflecting upon their own mortality. When all else fails, death is turned into a spectacle: Linda’s carcass is displayed for the amusement of children, while John’s accidental fall from the edge of a cliff is applauded by onlookers.533 The “world of post-humanity”534 envisioned in Brave New World and imagined by Lewis is not without relevance to our society; we in the Western hemisphere can be said to live in a state of death denial. Examples of our death-denying practices, both overt and subtle, are innumerable. Three

domains of contemporary death denial that particularly resonate with Brave New World and The Abolition of Man can be seen in end-of-life care, visual culture, and behavioral medicine. Like the World State’s aged and infirm, in the world of post-modernity, people with life-limiting or life-threatening illness are sequestered from view, hidden behind institutional walls when they would rather be at home with family or someplace else that is familiar. Consider the following passage by Walter Benjamin: Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. . . . Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stored away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.535 In other words, dying has become privatized, a domain of experience separable from living, with its own rules of governance. We have lost our ritual capacity to make sense of death, relying instead on technocratic measures to prolong life, and believing “that death itself may someday be treatable as a disease.”536 Our “techno-frenzied response”537 to death has given birth to “shameful forms of dying,”538 marked by intense loneliness, isolation, searing pain, and the effacement of one’s humanity, with patients simmering in their own excreta. The deferral of death is not intrinsically ignoble, but it can be when the subjectivity of the dying person is jettisoned. And that’s what often happens when the human being is reduced to the materiality of the corporeal body, to a mere assemblage of parts that function here and malfunction there. As mentioned earlier, visual culture also brims with death denial. This idea may seem preposterous given how visual media suffers no shortage of death imagery. After all, spectacular death is a hallmark of the action blockbuster

film, and the dismembered corpse a staple of contemporary horror films. But even (or especially) here, death has been made into “the other,” a spectacle, marked by excess, from which we ourselves are immune, rendered so foreign an experience as to have little bearing on our comparably mundane lives. The dramatic genres, even when they “confront” death, bracket the subjectivity of dying characters. As John Horne noted, in such films the spectator is allied not with the dying or deceased individual, but “with the family and friends of the ‘dearly departed.’”539 Brave New World is no exception; although we the viewers are made to feel pity for Linda, our sense of solidarity and sympathies are with John. Recounting an exhibition titled, “Saying the Unsayable: Opening a Dialogue about Living, Dying and Death,” Horne finds it troubling that of the more than eight thousand photographs submitted, only a mere handful foster viewer identification with the dying. The rest sidestep the affective dimensions of death by rendering it too figurative or abstract, on the one hand, or looking at the dead through a cold, steely, and objectifying frame, on the other. In both cases, the photographs, while not necessarily complicit with the status quo of sequestering the dead, are complacent; instead of unsettling spectators, they preserve the viewers’ sense of ontological security. But unsettled we must be if we are to challenge the discourses that normalize stigmatization of the dying and reduction of the dead body to apparatus. But technocratic death denial is perhaps most astonishing in behavioral medicine’s pathologizing of bereavement, which contemporary American society has unwittingly embraced. According to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a person must exhibit at least five of the nine symptoms listed under major depressive disorder in order to qualify for the diagnosis. A bereavement exclusion clause had been put in place so that a person mourning the death of a loved one was exempted from this diagnosis—provided that mourning lasted no longer than two months.540 Any longer and the person was deemed disordered, an unproductive and impaired member of society who must be rehabilitated immediately, typically via pharmacologic means. That a timeline for bereavement (a narrow one, at that) had been prescribed underlies a reluctance to “sit with death,” to feel the long-term effects of loss. There is an imperative of efficiency, of moving on quickly so that one may resume life,

as if life and death are two mutually exclusive terrains of human existence. In The Loss of Sadness, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield lament the outlandish prescribing practices, and inflated prevalence estimates, that result from the medical imperative to frame depression as an epidemic, a public health crisis comparable to obesity and diabetes. They feared that ordinary human sadness would truly cease to exist should the number of symptoms required for a diagnosis of depression be lowered further. Their fears were realized when the bereavement exclusion clause was removed from the fifth edition of the DSM, so that anyone in mourning automatically qualifies for the diagnosis. Moreover, “persistent complex bereavement disorder” is now listed as a separate condition requiring further study, so that adults in mourning twelve months after the death of a loved one are further pathologized.541 It’s as if the idea that people are depressed because depressing things happen in life is no longer acceptable. This foray into the DSM is relevant to our discussion thus far, for what is soma if not a fictional counterpart to the Prozac and Zoloft of today, an instrument employed by Conditioners in their misguided conquest of Nature? We might laugh at or feel pity for the hordes of Deltas scrambling for their rations of soma, but our situation is not terribly different because we too nurse our moods with such substances. This is not to say that technocratic manipulation of mood via pharmaceuticals is ineffectual; after all, every mood state has a distinct neurophysiological signature, and many people can attest to being helped by drugs. Rather, the point is that in treating our emotions as raw material to be manipulated at will we risk manipulating away our own humanity. Our unquestioning subscription to mechanistic views of emotion underlies stubborn resistance to the human feelings aroused by death and loss. It would be an exaggeration to say that the dystopian future envisioned in Brave New World and The Abolition of Man has come to fruition—but we are getting dangerously close. In our frenzied attempt to locate death within the human body, and to subvert it via technocratic means, we have inadvertently forsaken life. We tend to the raw materials that make up the body but not to the soul that holds them together and gives them meaning. To borrow the words of Lewis, we spend much time “cut[ting] down jungles”542 when we should be “irrigat[ing] deserts,”543 much time conquering our natural, emotional response to death and suffering when we should be cultivating our

affective and interpersonal capacities as humans. It is imperative that we cultivate respect for death, the dead, and the dying if we are to reclaim the life we have forsaken, the territories of human emotion that have sunk into the depths of repression. Citing the ancient Chinese Analects, Lewis himself writes: “When proper respect towards the dead is shown at the end and continued after they are far away, the moral force (tê) of a people has reached its highest point.”544 In other words, respect for death is among the highest of virtues. To respect death is to be attuned to the lives that preceded us, the lives that surround us, and the lives that have yet to be. This does not mean science and technology should be abandoned; that would be foolhardy. Instead, the technocratic mindset must be remediated so that man is not all head and no heart, and so that science is used in the service of humankind. To reinvigorate the soul in the corporeal body, one must acknowledge the horizon that is death.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-V. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. ———. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 83–107. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968. Blomkamp, Niell. Elysium. QED International, 2013. Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” 1909. http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. 1978. Reprint. New York: Vintage, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial, 1962. Horne, John. “Unsettling Structures of Otherness: Visualising the Dying Individual and End of Life Care Reform.” In Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying, edited by Michele Aaron, 224–42. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Horwitz, Allan, and Jerome Wakefield. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Kellehear, Allan. A Social History of Dying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lang, Fritz. Metropolis. Paramount Pictures, 1927. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. 1943. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Libman, Leslie, and Larry Williams. Brave New World. NBC, 1998. Lucas, George. THX 1138. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971. Moller, David Wendell. Life’s End: Technocratic Dying in an Age of Spiritual Yearning. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2000. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. Reprint. San Bernardino: Icon SCS, 2013. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Translated by Natasha Randall. 1921. Reprint. New York: Modern Library, 2006.

507. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 71. 508. Ibid., 73. 509. Moller, Life’s End, 53; italics added. 510. Ibid., 54. 511. Libman and Williams, Brave New World. Libman’s and Williams’s adaptation originally aired on NBC as a television movie on 19 April 1998. It has since been released commercially on VHS and DVD. Though I make occasional references to the original source material, the analysis is principally concerned with the film. However, the themes I identify are very much present in Huxley’s novel, arguably to an even greater extent. 512. Defined by Appadurai as the flow and distribution of mediatized images, and the technologies that generate them. See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 35. 513. Lewis, Abolition, 70. 514. Ibid., 80. 515. Epsilons are strangely missing from the film. 516. Lewis, Abolition, 59. 517. Ibid. 518. Ibid., 58. 519. Ibid., 63. 520. Ibid., 61. 521. Examples of the enclosure abound in science fiction literature and film, from the Green Wall of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, to the outer shell in George Lucas’s THX 1138, to the compounds and modules of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The enclosure can divide horizontally or vertically, creating such splits as wilderness/metropolis, terrestrial/subterranean (E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”), aerial/earthbound (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), and planetary/stellar (Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium). The enclosure is typically man-made but can also be the product of nature and wildlife, as in the Uncharted Forest of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In Brave New World, the enclosure is natural. To overcome the waters and canyons separating utopia from the notorious badlands called “reservations,” one must fly in a helicopter. 522. Lewis, Abolition, 71. 523. Ibid., 25.

524. For example, Lenina exhibits preference for Bernard because she is in love with Bernard. In a conversation with Fanny (Wendy Benson), it is revealed that Lenina has been seeing him, and only him, for the past six months. Similarly, Bernard’s desire to innovate existing technologies of happiness suggests a gnawing unhappiness, that he envisions a better life than the one he is currently living. 525. In Huxley’s novel, Linda dies of infirmity. In Libman’s and Williams’s film adaptation, Linda is instead killed by Tomakin (Miguel Ferrer), the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, to hide the fact that he is John’s father and the man who had left Linda stranded in the reservations. Tomakin shoots up Linda with more soma than her body can handle, making her death look like an accident. 526. Heidegger, Being and Time, 284. 527. Lewis, Abolition, 99. 528. Ibid., 16. 529. Ibid., 2. 530. Ibid., 25. 531. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137–40. 532. One may also add to this list the disabled, the deformed, the unpredictable, the unclean, the savage, and the asymmetric. The list is not exhaustive. 533. In Huxley’s novel, John commits suicide instead after participating in a mass orgy. 534. Lewis, Abolition, 75. 535. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 93–94. 536. Moller, Life’s End, 53. 537. Kellehear, Social History of Dying, 235. 538. Ibid., 215. 539. Horne, “Visualising the Dying,” 231. 540. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV-TR, 740–41. 541. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-V, 789–90. The time frame for children is even shorter (six months). 542. Lewis, Abolition, 13. 543. Ibid., 14. 544. Ibid., 91.

18 Never Let Me Go and The Abolition of Man by Christina Schneider

“We aren’t machines.”545 e are humans. Yet we run the risk of treating other living beings as commodities or machines, neglecting humane values for the sake of scientific progress. Mark Romanek’s adaptation (2010) of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) demonstrates how science fiction film in particular serves as an effective medium for criticizing the implications and hidden dangers in scientific advances and their implementation. Film is a medium particularly well suited to further awareness of potential dangers of science and technology and the resulting impact on humane values. As Hayles puts it, texts of any kind are not “merely passive conduits,” but they reflect and shape technologies and their meaning and embody certain assumption made about varying forms of scientific progress.546 Thus,

W

science fiction films explore the cultural implications of scientific advancement and its implementation in real life.547 “As such, dystopian movies play into cultural concerns about dehumanizing conditions in late modernity . . . .”548 Never Let Me Go (hereafter NLMG) depicts the destruction of essential humanity due to cloning, the exploitation of human or humanoid beings for the benefit of a small part of society made possible by cloning, and the reduction of human or humanoid beings to their genes and the value of these genes. The film begins with a positive message, namely that it is now possible to cure formerly incurable diseases such as various forms of cancer or genetic diseases, hinting at a very old desire to improve life and if possible attain immortality.549 Interestingly enough, the plot of the film takes place between the years 1978 to 1992, suggesting that we already live in a world

where such advances are possible.550 “By 1967, life expectancy passed 100 years.”551 This theoretical life expectancy of a privileged few however stands in stark contrast to the fact that it can only be achieved by killing others, i.e., the clones, in order to use their organs for human beings. Additionally, although the first message on screen is a positive one, the accompanying music is rather sad in contrast. This calm and soothing music in fact perfectly captures Ishiguro’s “calm, subdued and realistic style of narration,”552 contrasting the frightening topic of the film and thereby highlighting its message. NLMG can be classified as a posthuman dystopia, even though it portrays, at a first glance, the techno-utopian ideal of eternal health. The film at first appears to be mostly about the coming of age of a young woman named Kathy, the narrator of the story, and her friends Ruth and Tommy. Kathy and her peers are clones produced in order to harvest their organs when their “possibles,” the people from whom they were cloned, need organs. The clones are divided into donors, those who “donate” organs, and carers, those who care for the donors. It is only ever hinted at what it is that carers do but never conclusively explained. They seem to function as a substitute family. The carers talk to the doctors, read to donors, try to provide company for the donors, bring them little gifts, and take them for trips. They serve as friends to make the time in the hospital more bearable. Additionally, the hospital staff needs the carers to sign the release for the donors after they have died. In being made to take care of the donors, the carers are made into accomplices of the system.553 Furthermore, the clones are told from an early age why they exist and are in fact proud about being “chosen” to save others. Thus, they do not try to fight against the conditions they live in or attempt to flee from the life they are living. Although the protagonists of the film grew up in “humane conditions,” it is hinted at that there are other institutions which treat the clones as if they were cattle. The protagonists of the film nevertheless seem to lead a rather sheltered life which in the end however only underlines the horror of how they are slaughtered for their organs. In the upbringing of the protagonists, art plays an important role. Miss Emily—the principle of Hailsham, the school and home for the young clones—collects various pieces of art from the

“students,” i.e., the clones, in order to exhibit these pieces of art so as to prove to the world that the clones are in fact human beings or at least almost human beings. However, Miss Emily concedes that with this exhibition she was answering a question no one was interested in.554 Most “normal” human beings portrayed in the film seem not to be interested in the wellbeing of the clones, already hinting at the abolition of human values. This disinterest in clones reflects the indifference of human beings in our world when it comes to the consequences and costs of scientific developments. NLMG thus criticizes the pursuit of one of humanity’s greatest desires, namely prolonging and/or obtaining physical health via the means of advanced science and technology. This essay will show what kinds of problems arise on account of this pursuit—how certain advancements in technology can lead to the destruction of humanity and the reduction of human and other living beings to their genetic or economic value. It will be moreover important to notice the implications this criticism has for political topics of real life, such as stem cell research and cloning. Thus, it will be shown that science fiction film can serve as a criticism of the unjust enrichment of a few at the expense of others. In addition, it will also be demonstrated how the slow pacing of the story and the general melancholy tone prove to be more critical and challenging than any open didacticism. With more and more advances in technology and natural sciences there should also arise an awareness of the responsibilities those advances entail, in order not to end as “men without chests” or to abolish humanity. In what follows I will first look at the way Never Let Me Go depicts the dehumanization and instrumentalization of human beings. Then I will explain how the clones, dehumanized victims of inhumanity, themselves are a far more vivid depiction of humanity than the “normal” human beings in the film. Finally, I will explain how the narrative format and the film’s artistic rendering are more powerful than open didacticism.

Never Let Me Go According to Sontag, “[s]cience fiction films are not about science,” but “about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”555 NLMG approaches the viable moral disaster of neglecting humane values in the face

of possible scientific advances which prolong the life of one being at the cost of another. We are drawn to disaster because although we gain more knowledge with every year, the moral consequences of said (scientific) knowledge cannot yet be fully grasped but always hover in our subconscious. The disaster portrayed in NLMG is the fact that human beings556—in this case the clones—are reduced to the value of their genes and are slaughtered without scruple to fulfill the desires of the ruling caste of society. Consequently, moral values and norms are also reduced if not completely neglected in such a world. If living beings are not appreciated for anything but their value, be it genetic or economic, it inevitably leads to the objectification of all beings. The clones in this film are treated like cattle and are de-humanized and objectified, which makes it is easier, psychologically speaking, to condone the fact that they are slaughtered. What is quite ironic here is that the clones have to undergo regular medical check-ups and are constantly told to take good care of their bodies, not for their own benefit but for that of others. The existence of the clones has not only led to a decline in humane values but has also changed the way the body is treated. Their existence enables other human beings to just exchange vital organs, if needed, in the same way a mechanic would exchange a broken gear for an intact one. Therefore, not only the clones are given the status of machines but also “normal” human beings, which again leads to the slow abolition of humanity as such. Sontag further states that “[t]here is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it touching, some of it depressing.”557 The depressing thing about NLMG is to see how willingly society sacrifices the lives of alleged non-humans and slaughters these beings in order to attain happiness for those who can afford it. Via the film, Romanek tries to indicate the place and status of human beings in our society by confronting the viewer with a specific mode of crisis with respect to which the viewer has to position herself.558 Since the clones are actually human beings themselves, the film can be seen as an allegory on how a few in a position of wealth and power exploit the rest of humanity and/or other living beings in order to pursue their own happiness. Romanek thus warns of the emergence or rather the dangers of a society that is divided into three classes: those who can afford to exploit others with the help of technology, those who help the ones in power, and

those who are considered as less than human and therefore taken advantage of. Although the clones are in fact human beings and should be treated as such there are only a few people in the course of the film who address the ethical implications of exploiting these clones as a source of organs. Of these figures Miss Lucy is the most prominent one. As a consequence of her sympathy for the clones and her open dislike and criticism of the way they are treated, she is made to leave Hailsham even though Hailsham had been founded as a more humane means of raising clones. Most other “normal” human beings appear to have already become “men without chests,” those people described by C. S. Lewis559 who lack the emotional capacity to respond to good and evil, justice and injustice; they seemingly do not care about the consequences of their desires at all. On the DVD there is additional footage about the way in which clones in the portrayed world are perceived and treated, namely about the National Donor Programme and the Hailsham Campaign for the humane treatment of clones. The information about the National Donor Programme serves to illustrate that clones are treated like cattle and not like human beings. Other institutions appear to be battery farms where clones are kept under inhumane conditions until they are needed. Hailsham in contrast symbolizes a last desperate attempt to prevent the complete loss of humanity and humane values. In the world portrayed in NLMG it is the last place where the ethics of the cloning and donation project are questioned. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, Miss Emily states that Hailsham was providing the answer to a question no one was asking.560 No one is actually interested in whether clones are human beings or not. As long as they are labelled as clones it is justifiable to kill them because this is the purpose they have been created for. If, however, “normal” human beings started to realize that clones are also in fact human beings and that apart from their conception there is absolutely nothing unnatural about them it becomes infinitely more difficult to kill them in cold blood in order to harvest their organs. Miss Emily also refers to the time before the donation project as the “days of darkness”561 and explains that the human beings profiting from the donation project will not go back to this time, regardless of the conditions in which the clones are raised and killed. Thus, Miss Emily points out that the pursuit of one’s own happiness without a moral code will lead to the

complete disregard of others and that the change in the “days of darkness” for one part of society may very well result in the beginning of darkness for another part. The problem is that the clones provide a means of prolonging the lives of others and people have gotten used to this luxury and thus willingly ignore what is being done to fellow human beings in order to secure the status quo. Even Madame calls Kathy and Tommy “poor creatures.”562 Although she was part of the project trying to “prove” the clones’ humanity she does not see them as fully human. Moreover, although the Hailsham campaign asks for a more humane treatment of the clones it never proposes to abolish the donation project as such, but it only highlights that clones are perceived as others and that they are in need of protection because they are granted no rights. Thus, the film also shows that human beings are morally responsible for what they create in their pursuit of happiness and that with the use of technology comes a certain responsibility that should be fulfilled by human beings if we do not want to lose our basic humanity. Even though the guardians of Hailsham seem to be perfectly aware of the injustice of killing living beings in order to prolong the lives of others, no one actively rebels against these practices, nor do the clones try to escape. As mentioned above, the human beings portrayed in the film seem to have already lost a substantial part of what it is that makes us human: moral integrity. Arguably, that the clones do not try to escape is due to them being caught in their own dystopia in the sense that they cannot escape the heterotopias in which they are trapped.563 This inability or unwillingness is highlighted by the fence which runs around Hailsham and which the clones do not dare to cross although there is a gate and the fence is a rather small one. Due to constant indoctrination and withholding the knowledge of a different life, the clones lack the knowledge for rebellion. Since they cannot imagine another life for themselves, they are trapped in the one they are leading. This fact is highlighted even further by the implants in the wrists of the clones. Everywhere they go they are tracked and every time they return to their homes, for example, they have to “check-in.” Their lives are heteronomous and they are under constant surveillance. The Hailsham Campaign also addresses the question of what it is that makes us human and how it is possible to prove whether or not someone has a soul. Hailsham collected pieces of art from the students to demonstrate that

the clones must have souls. It is interesting that art was chosen as a conveyor for proving that a being possesses a soul. It can be argued that the film and the novel are also both products of art which thus verify or emphasize that both those producing pieces of art and the recipients consuming them have a soul since otherwise they would not be able to produce these things or to respond to them emotionally. NLMG thus portrays art in general, and science fiction film in particular, as transporting morals, ethics, and emotions. In this way, by eliciting compassion and initiating debates about human values and morals, science fiction film develops and furthers our sense of humanity and what it means to be human. As has been stated already, humane values are an important feature of humanity. In the film, however, those who portray humanity best are the clones. The overall frame of the film is the death of Tommy. It starts with him going to his “donation” and ends with him dying in the surgery room. The operation as such is performed rather callously. The doctors go about it quickly, in a practiced way, without glancing at the person lying on the table or giving Tommy a second thought. The whole operation suggests mechanics salvaging an old car for spare parts. Again, clones are treated like machines, which contrasts with the way in which Kathy and Tommy look at each other before Tommy is anaesthetized. In this scene it is again the alleged nonhumans that behave in the most human way possible. Thus, Romanek has inverted human ideals: the clones are raised to selflessly give their organs away and can be seen as a monument of humanity and are yet denied the status of equal human beings.564 Therefore, the film also highlights the fact that we need a better definition of the term humanity and of what constitutes a human being and humane ideals.565 Another instance of the inhumanity of “normal human beings” is Ruth’s death. When Ruth dies, not one of the nurses or doctors present actually tries to save her. Although the cardiac signal quickens and then dies away the operation is continued as if nothing of great importance has happened. It highlights the callousness of those who think that they are using scientific progress for the greater good, yet are neglecting the individual. It also emphasizes the indifference of “normal” human beings towards the clones in this fictional world and at the same time warns against such callousness. An embodiment of the way the clones may feel after such a treatment is the

stranded boat Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy go to. The boat has been left lying alone in a rather desolate condition on the beach after it washed ashore there. The boat emphasizes the isolation of the clones and their own desolate status and foreshadows what will be left of them after they have fulfilled their use for society. NLMG portrays what happens if science runs out of control and how easy it is to get accustomed to exploiting other living beings. It also makes the viewer reflect upon ideas such as what it means to be human, what humanity is or what actually defines a human being. Those that allegedly are not human beings actually behave in the most human way. The clones portray various forms of emotions whereas the human beings are, apart from Miss Lucy, portrayed as rather emotionless and unsympathetic. Moreover, as Kathy said, the clones save others by donating their organs whereas human beings are the cause of death of other living beings. In contrast to the obvious greed of “normal” human beings when it comes to health and happiness, the clones—at least Kathy and her peers—are mostly satisfied with and even grateful for what they have. This attitude can be seen as an appeal to see our own desires in comparison with the desires of others. Kathy even states that she feels “a great sense of pride in what [they] do” and that they are actually saving people.566 In fact, many clones look forward to becoming a donor and many clones starting out as carers first also look forward to finally starting their lives as donors, even though they know perfectly well what this will result in. Due to constant indoctrination and the lack of knowledge of alternatives, Kathy and her friends see it as their mission in life to donate their vital organs. This might also be attributed to an emotional cooling down process567 during their lives as carers, and also to the fact that for many death seems to be the only way out in a world that treats living beings as a commodity. Furthermore, the desire of many clones to finally “complete” hints at how horrible and unbearable the living conditions for clones must be. One of the nurses in the hospital claims that some donors want to complete and if they want to they normally really do complete, for the first time actively influencing their lives. Thus, “completing” can effectively be seen as a way of empowerment. It is the only instance where the clones can decide what they themselves want to do with their bodies. However, even this is taken from them, because the operations

do not stop after the clones are clinically dead. After their death the remaining organs are also harvested. Ruth explains: “[M]aybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way. And then you find out there are more donations. Plenty of them. Except that there are no more recovery centres, and no more carers. There’s just watching, and waiting. Until they switch you off.”568 From the beginning of the film it is clear that Ruth is an unreliable narrator and can rarely be trusted. However, this statement stands in stark contrast to Kathy’s claim that clones are no machines. Though they might not be machines, they are treated like machines and even after death they are still made serviceable to society for as long as is possible. I now turn to an exploration of Never Let Me Go’s use of narrative and art to convey the foregoing ethical considerations. The film deals with and confronts the viewer with human beings in relation to changes in the environment, the medical sciences, and technologies.569 Romanek manages to achieve this by contrasting the science fictional topic of cloning with everyday life struggles of growing up and making informed choices. The rather utopian prospect of the clones is particularly well highlighted by the fact that the story is set in the 1990s. The contrast between the highly advanced technology needed to produce clones and transplant organs on such a scale and the rather impoverished living conditions of the clones and very few other scientific advances is particularly striking. Another advantage of the time chosen for the plot is that it invites the recipient to take a step back and relate the obvious criticism the film portrays to contemporary problems when it comes to embryonic stem cell research or developments concerning artificial intelligence and possible problems resulting from such advancements. However, due to the shift in time the viewer is not coerced into reflecting upon such problems, as would be the case in a film which is openly didactic. NLMG furthermore voices the thought that “serious objections to science must be based on the assumption that [science] is not trivial but dangerous; and such a sense of danger is inseparable from the awareness that fundamental questions are at stake, questions that demand the dialectical reflexivity of critical theory . . . .”570 According to Aldiss, science fiction always expresses contemporary fears and even brings heretofore unknown or

subconscious fears to the foreground.571 In this regard, NLGM raises questions such as what constitutes humanity or how far we as a society are willing to go in our pursuit of happiness. One of the advantages of science fiction film is that it confronts the viewer with a vivid portrayal of scientific ideas, advancements, and problems which are made concrete and are dealt with without actually having to live through all the consequences they might entail.572 Furthermore, science fiction film renders discussions about scientific advancements and their dangers available to a broader audience,573 encouraging an exchange of ideas and a critical reflection upon different kinds of technological advances. The slow pacing of the film takes up and reflects Ishiguro’s narrative style and stands in stark contrast to the cruelty depicted in both the novel and the film. In a way, while watching the film, the viewer finds herself in the same sort of paralysis as the clones due to its slow pacing and calming tone. Tommy’s flash of anger after realizing that there are no referrals574 and no way that he can spend time with the person he loves is a way out of this stasis and highlights the helplessness both the viewer and the clones are experiencing. This rupture of said stasis is probably also the reason why the other children make fun of Tommy’s bursts of anger. These outbursts indicate that something is wrong in the seemingly paradisiacal Hailsham and that not all is well. Furthermore, it contradicts the upbringing the children have received because they are taught to willingly sacrifice themselves and each other for the privileged caste of human beings. It also demonstrates that the clones have not fully comprehended what is being done to them. The idea of the referral hints at the belief of the clones that they are willingly donating organs and are not in fact forced by a system to hand over their vital organs. It also shows that they do not comprehend the reason for the donations, namely that someone else is dying and in need of their organs and that therefore the idea of a referral is already implausible. Especially striking, when it comes to social learning, is the instance where the clones watch television and copy the behavior portrayed by the actors of the show they are watching. The viewer is caught in a double mirror. While the viewer watches the clones, they themselves watch a TV-show where obviously everything is artificial. In a sense, the recipient is put in the shoes of the clones in this

scene. At the same time, it is an implicit warning to the viewer not to become as inhumane as the “normal” human beings portrayed in the film. One of the advantages that the medium of film offers is that in contrast to the novel, the visual rendition of the slaughter of other human beings is far more dramatic than the written word. Although both the film and the book frequently use euphemisms such as “completing” for dying or “donating” for the harvesting of organs, the films’ visual rendition puts even more emphasis on the cruelty and inhumanity of the donation program and literally renders visible to what lengths human beings are willing to go just to attain their own happiness. The color scheme of the film reflects the sad tone of the topic and the music. The colors throughout the film are very toned down, mostly beige and brown, and the fabrics are old and worn down. In contrast, the recovery homes are very white and clean. In fact, the so-called “recovery homes” look strikingly like the slaughterhouses that they are where it is possible to just hose down the walls after a day’s work. Another benefit is that the film depicts clones, in contrast to other science fictional portrayals of clones, as normal human beings by showing that they grow up just as any other human being would. Often, science fiction perpetuates the notion that clones are fully formed creatures that pop out of machines and share all behavioral traits with the people from whom they were cloned. However, this film makes it very clear that clones are not different from “normal” human beings and that they have their own distinctive traits. Since the recipient sees the clones growing up and struggling to become adults, their humanness is highlighted even further.

Conclusion Concluding, it is possible to say that Romanek shows that the desire to attain eternal health might implicate abandoning humane ideals, morals, and values, including compassion for other living beings, resulting in, as Lewis called them, men without chests. In fact, such a use of technology as portrayed in NLMG, without morals as a guiding structure, results in the destruction of humanity. Thus, Romanek also gives voice to the fear of a disturbing helplessness in the face of ever more confusing scientific breakthroughs and a resulting loss of control. As has been mentioned above, the dangers of science ungrounded in

humane values (dangers of which Lewis has warned us) and scientific hubris are debated hotly in science fiction films. Science fiction film as a genre, and NLMG in particular, explores the hidden dangers of (ab)using science and the resulting consequences, as well as illustrating the need for humane values such as compassion, altruism and accepting responsibility for the consequences of technological advancements. As the Introduction to this volume states, “science needs basic moral principles if it is to be of any edifying use—and if it is to avoid getting involved in devastating moral evil.”575 However, instead of being openly didactic, NLMG shows ex negativo how human beings should treat other living beings and which values are at stake when it comes to advances in the medical sciences. In a calm way, Romanek and Ishiguro draw attention to the fact that changes to the human body are quite frequent and that we are living in a time where the use of science might threaten humanity.576 To form such values and morals, it is important to have knowledge of one’s world. As we have seen above, the clones lack knowledge. This might be one of the reasons why they do not try to escape their dystopian situation. This portrayed lack of knowledge encourages the viewer to question what she herself knows about her world and the scientific advances and asks of us to make informed choices and decisions. Knowledge is power and technology is an embodiment of both knowledge and power. Therefore, it should be used in a responsible way. In the world portrayed in NLMG technology has constantly been pushed further as have moral boundaries for the sake of fulfilling the desire of eternal health. Although the wish to conquer diseases per se is not a negative one, Romanek entreats us to critically ask ourselves to what lengths we are willing to go in the process. However, NLMG “does not demonize scientific creation; rather, [it] emphasizes the naturalization of instrumentalist ways of seeing the world, its impact on social relations and on the very conceptions of what it means to be human.”577 Romanek warns of a way of life that disregards morality and the dangers of commercializing the human body.578 “The mechanistic and materialistic determinism of the scientific universe which reduces the human to the body and its parts is contrasted with human values of love, friendship, family and community,”579 which are embodied by the clones.

NLMG tries to revoke the debunking of morality. Although it does not try to force a certain set of rules or values on the viewer, both Ishiguro and Romanek warn us that with the increase in scientific knowledge and scientific possibilities comes a certain responsibility. The recipient of the science fiction film is not just a passive consumer of popular culture but meditates and understands the world in a different way with films such as NLMG.580 Even more so notions of a moral truth are rather difficult concepts and without any values humanity will lose a defining aspect of itself, as is highlighted in NLMG. This again would effectively result in what Lewis called “The Abolition of Man.”

Bibliography Aldiss, Brian Wilson. Trillion Year Spree. London: Gollancz, 1986. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. Reprint. New York: Vintage, 1994. Freedman, Carl Howard. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Gannon, Charles E. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Lochner, Liani. “‘This Is What We’re Supposed To Be Doing, Isn’t It?’: Scientific Discourse in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” In Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, 225–35. Houndsmill, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. McDowell, John C., The Politics of Big Fantasy: The Ideologies of Star Wars, The Matrix and The Avengers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara, “Nothing to be Frightened of? The Expulsion of Fear in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel Never Let Me Go.” In Who s Afraid of . . . ? Facets of Fear in Anglophone Literature and Film, edited by Marion Gymnich, 229–44. Bonn: V&R Unipress, 2012. Romanek, Mark. Never Let Me Go. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010. Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” In Essays of the 1960s & 70s, 199–214. New York: Library of America, 2013. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

545. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 546. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 21.

547. Cf. ibid., 22. 548. McDowell, The Politics of Big Fantasy, 133. 549. On old desires reappearing in new stories, see Thomsen, The New Human in Literature, 223. 550. Ibid. 78. 551. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 552. Thomsen, The New Human in Literature, 179. 553. Cf. Puschmann-Nalenz, “Nothing to be Frightened of?,” 231. 554. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 555. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 202. 556. This article understands the term “human being” as also encompassing clones, since clones are nothing but human beings conceived in vitro with reused genetic material. 557. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 208. 558. Cf. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 27. 559. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Part 1. 560. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 561. Ibid. 562. Ibid. 563. On the concept of heterotopia, see Foucault, The Order of Things. 564. Puschmann-Nalenz, Nothing to be Frightened of?, 236–38. 565. Cf. ibid., 237. 566. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 567. Cooling down denotes the opposite of a burn-out. 568. Romanek, Never Let Me Go. 569. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree 29. 570. Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, 5. 571. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 131. 572. Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines, 113. 573. Cf. ibid., 126. 574. A rumor was spread among clones that if they are able to prove that a couple is truly in love with each other they would be granted more time (referral) until their final donation was due. 575. See chapter 1 of this volume. 576. On change to the human body, see Thomsen, The New Human. 577. Lochner, “‘This Is What We’re Supposed To Be Doing, Isn’t It?’,” 227. 578. Ibid., 226, 227.

579. Ibid., 228. 580. McDowell, The Politics of Big Fantasy, 11.

19 The Oppression of a Young Healthy Body in Logan’s Run and The Clonus Horror by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Canela Ailen Rodriguez Fontao, and Juan Ignacio Juvé

But the promise of the future ultimately is that of infinite change, in which one technology is replaced by another in a relentless parade of invention and improvement.581

Introduction n 1972, the Nike shoes debuted.582 This particular footwear would not have the importance that it has today if not helped by the popularity of the “jogging craze”583 and physical exercise that had taken place in the seventies. In 1978 was born the world’s first successful baby conceived through in-vitro fertilization, who serves “as a focal point of the science vs. religion debate.”584 These two facts may seem to be related only by

I

chronological nearness. But there is more than just the seventies as a frame. These facts point to two interrelated scenarios: the advancement of science and the greed for youth and health in the 1970s. “A major concern of work in the late 1970s . . . was to challenge the view of growing old as a period of physical and mental decline;”585 holding onto youth was a necessity. Everybody wanted to lengthen life’s expectancy, but to spend the most part of that lifetime under a youthful appearance. At the same time, the 1970s was an era of renewed attention to religion and transcendence. Sci-fi is a perfect “vehicle” for exploring “cultural anxieties,”586 so it is not surprising that many films toiling with the topic of youth and health as a prolongation of life start to show up in the seventies, a decade in which

values sustained in moral ethics were replaced by superficial issues such as glamour, fitness, and youth.587 Logan’s Run588 tells about the inhabitants of a futuristic society who only live until their thirties. The crystals that they have attached to the palms of their hands announce their age and the proximity of death. In The Clonus Horror589 (made only a year after the first in-vitro baby), cloned people living in a (concentration?) camp must remain healthy to be used as future replacements of parts of their originals, who want to extend their lives through the use of technology and commodified human beings. In these stories, the conquest of nature mentioned by C. S. Lewis in the third section of his book The Abolition of Man is incarnated in a technology that achieves the goal of youth and/or health but which dehumanizes in the process. In these tales we manage to conquer nature by eliminating age, but we lose ourselves in the process. This cult to the body, we will argue, works to the detriment of a spiritual transcendence. Yet, at the same time, the cult to the body prompts a yearning for the recovery of transcendence. That is why these films have their main characters embarking on a quest to find some superior reality which can give some meaning to their lives. Many times, this intrusion of an ulterior existence occurs with the intrusion of a foreign element into the community: a beer can (Clonus) or the idea of a mythical sanctuary (Logan). We will first look at Logan’s Run and then turn to The Clonus Horror before summarizing our findings.

Logan’s Run, or You are Old Already at Thirty Logan’s Run captures in a fictional world the youth obsession of the 70s and its accompanying narcissism and disregard for the value of human life. It also depicts the longing for transcendence that is felt by people in such a world. Anderson’s film begins by depicting the reality of life on Earth in the twenty-third century: The survivors of overpopulation, pollution and war live under a domed city. Pleasure is their only ethic, but their life-span will be terminated at thirty. There are no old people within the entire dome. Life seems to be perfect in this “postapocalyptic America where the young have taken over society.”590

The opening proclaims issues which were of major concern in the seventies. People were well aware of the “pollution crisis”591 thanks to environmental movements; overpopulation was a topic discussed and war and arms were signaled by young people not as a source of nationalism but of unnecessary deaths592 and a bleeding of money. Then, the film opens establishing a world that resonates profoundly within the America of the 1970s. For Chapman and Cull, this opening caption links the film to the sci-fi of the 1970s, “but detach[es] it from its original context of the rise of the youth culture.”593 But the connection with youth is there since the countercultural movements, led and integrated almost exclusively by young people, were the first ones to point to ecological issues, the need of peace,594 brotherhood and community,595 and the favoring of the alternative rather than the mainstream.596 Since the citizens within the dome live in an “ecologically balanced world,” it can be presumed that youth had won the war against pollution and contamination, an idea which connects with the general notion of youth seen as a “force for social change”597 in the 1960s and the 1970s. The world has been saved thanks exclusively to youth and only because the planet is inhabited exclusively by young people has it gained equilibrium. Although both the sixties and the seventies were decades in “regular and repeated change, it is also [an era] in which the emergence of ‘youth’ culture forced continual requestioning of hegemonic ideas about ‘America’”598 sustained by decaying values and even more decaying adults. There was a sense that the adult world had lost touch with cornerstone American values, and that it was the responsibility of the new generations to recapture the lost idealism. The 70s was a decade which turned its deepest anxieties about the fate of the planet into anger against the older conservative generations and ageing in general.599 The old generations had left the world in a sorry state. In this scenario, Logan’s Run epitomized the countercultural idea that only youth can take the world to a state of harmony and balance. Still, the 70s were far from simple. That decade was one of utopian counterculture that reinforced the ideas of the youth, yet traditional values were being swept away and replaced by

individualism and narcissism. Thus, a second school of thought on the 70s “proclaimed the existence of a lazy, apathetic, narcissistic, self-absorbed seventies. In this version, the sixties were an era of frenetic political activity” rather different from the indifferent 70s.600 In this sense, the film can be seen also as a microcosm of these hedonist 70s where “one can summon sexual partners at the touch of a button,”601 as a mirror to the sexual freedom of those years. Indeed, that is literally what the citizens do within the dome: meeting a rightful sexual partner is just a matter of pushing a button. There is only one problem in the minds of this world’s inhabitants: to keep the world ecologically balanced and free of the problems created by greedy seniors, the planet must maintain a young population. Herein lies the catch of this paradisiacal society, since nobody can surpass the age of thirty, an age which would mark coming to maturity. The only way to keep living past thirty is through the ritual of the carrousel, a huge machine in which people are destroyed when arriving at the fatal age, and recycled later into a new cycle of life. Of course, Logan’s Run being a technophobic film,602 the carrousel is just a machine of “final solution” that ends the lives of those reaching thirty. The deceit is easy to understand: people would live in permanent anxiety knowing that their lives will be terminated in just a few years, so the fake ritual prevents those fears from exploding and shattering the delicate social equilibrium within the dome. Babies are not recycled from those who had reached thirty, but artificially bred in-vitro. The citizens who get “old” are simply exterminated. From this point of view, the film speaks about a recognizable fear in culture: getting old. This fear is born in a double way: in the 70s, as already stated, the world’s cure from its many illnesses is thought to lie only in the hands of young people. Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs explain that “Agedness and being old had been the antithesis of the 1960s counter-cultures” and, furthermore, “youth, not age, expressed the authenticity of difference, a desirable difference that seemed to demand youthfulness in image, identity and lifestyle in order for it to be maintained.”603 Only youth can change the extreme capitalist way of life in America and open up a path to a brand new world. This was the hippie utopian idea, but

there is a catch in this idea. In order to save the world, young people must keep young because “old” people will be back to their equally old tricks. In other words, the solution of the world lies at the hands of youth movements, but these movements and their leaders cannot keep young forever to ensure the permanency of countercultural politics. On the other hand, the 70s were the decade in which the idea of youth as the locus of happiness permeated daily life. Pharmacological developments promised new ways to keep the body, or at least the face, young and firm. The 70s were the years in which cosmetic surgery “really took off”604 as this discipline became available for training students of medicine. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s star system was selling like never before not just beautiful faces, but young pretty faces. “By the 1960s and 1970s there was a massive growth in leisure goods and services available to” young people.605 Being young was everywhere the ideal. Even dominated exclusively by youth, in Logan’s Run “[t]he representation of the city evokes all the negative traits in the conservative vision assigned to the figure of technology—the destruction of the family, the interchangeability of sexual partners so that feeling is destroyed by rationality, enforced mass conformity that places the collective before the individual . . . .”606 Thus, homogeneity prevails upon subjectivity, which is not rare since youth culture “was seen as homogenous” in the 70s,607 even if this was far from true. Even names are homogeneous. To avoid individuality, each citizen carries a name and a number to differentiate him or her from previous incarnations. The complete name of the title character is Logan Five (Michael York), while his best friend is Francis Seven (Richard Jordan). Logan is a policeman who already from the beginning is slightly uncomfortable within the dome. He respects and loves his world, but even so, he is aching for something else, even when not fully comprehending his desire. He has many questions about the true nature of the babies born within the dome and who really engendered them. He also questions his own self. He does not really know it, but he is already looking for some transcendence in a world which seems to renovate itself in perpetuity without changes and is always hanging on to youth. Citizens come to the ritual of the carrousel with joy, even when people are

destroyed by lasers. They experience no feelings of horror, believing that everyone destroyed is recycled later into a new being who has thirty years before him or her. The main point of the ritual, one that the assistants scream over and over, is total “renewal!” People are renovated so they are kept young. Only subversive parties make a very meaningful semantic displacement: if for many the ritual of the carrousel renews people, for them this passage is just a way of slaughter. Logan gets in contact with subversives and his ideas about some “other” reality in which people can pass youth. Jessica (Jenny Agutter), the subversive girl who will lead Logan to a path of discovery, meets him after she enters the circuit of interchangeable sexual partners just because she was looking for a vague “something” to erase her momentary sadness. But after being chosen by Logan as his sexual partner for the night, she refuses to consummate her sexual role, after realizing that this meaningless act will not help her to transcend her blues. Logan is sent to capture some fugitives who flee from the city to live an existence outside mere youth and renewal into more youth. These fugitives identified with the idea of a sanctuary and the emblem of the ankh, not by chance the symbol of longevity608 and spiritual wisdom, which comes with maturity. Logan’s mission will be to find out the exact location of the sanctuary to destroy it. But in doing so, Logan is informed of the truth: nobody has been really renewed; all the people destroyed within the carrousel have simply been murdered. To secure Logan’s loyalty and his passing unnoticed among subversives, the State (represented in a machine that only answers questions in very evasive ways) accelerates the policeman’s age so he is now close to thirty— close to death. The crystal in his palm changes its color so his age is clear for anyone to see. Those crystals recalls the “mood rings” so sellable in the 1970s. These were little plastic rings filled with a liquid which supposedly changed its color according to the changes of humor of their owners. These plastic jewels speak volumes of the “me-decade” since a person using a ring indicating his or her mood (sadness, joy, etc.) does it more to be seen by others than for introspection. This superficiality of the deepest emotions (a contradiction) suggests a culture losing its grip on transcendence (spiritual, intellectual, or otherwise) in favor of pure surface appearances in a decade

Tom Wolfe calls the “Me Decade”609 for its narcissism. The youth of the characters of Logan’s Run is held likewise in the palm of their hands as a way of highlighting pure youngness as the only value, as a displaying of a self based in youth as the only locus of ethics. During his mission, Logan will gradually accept his new role as a “runner,” a fugitive. As a way of avoiding persecution, Logan goes to a clinic for plastic surgery so he can change his face. Quick plastic surgery as a way to obtain an identity less fixed, and thus more malleable, also defies the dictates of homogeneity decreed by the hedonistic attitude reigning within the dome. In a truly ironic gesture, the nurse within the clinic, Holly, is played by the actress Farrah Fawcett-Majors, a true icon of beauty and stardom during the 70s. At the moment of filming Logan’s Run, Fawcett was filming the first season of the TV series Charlie’s Angels. Her face was already famous due to a record-breaking twenty-million copies poster which made her and her hairstyle so famous that many girls tried to copy it worldwide.610 Farrah Fawcett-Majors was a true construct of the star system of Hollywood, an icon of both beauty and youth who invited homogenization in appearance. Her role as Holly, the nurse within a clinic in which women and men come to change their physique to be more desirable in the eyes of others, resonated within the 1970s, years in which Americans exposed their vulnerable self in a plasticized way in the form of mood rings and, within the film, in crystals which indicate their owners’ true value: how young they are. In a truly ironic movement, Holly is also a helper of runners and a runner herself, a woman who wants to get old and die in her own time, which is paradoxical since the face of Fawcett-Majors was plasticized and petrified with a permanent smile and youth everywhere, in covers of magazines, on posters, and in promotional stills. As Pitman argues, Fawcett “created The All-American Look for the next ten years.”611 The persecution of the sanctuary will take place without any of those involved truly knowing what that place is or even if it truly exists. In this aspect, it mirrors the slippery notion of transcendence. As Joldersma argues, transcendence reorients “the self-centered preoccupation of striving to live. . . . Transcendence is an incoming movement from some ‘beyond,’ something that shows up as an ‘affective disruption’ within one’s subjectivity. . . . What is transcendent is not easily captured, either conceptually or experientially

. . . .”612 The runners within the film hang on in the idea that outside the dome lies a sanctuary, something which will give sense to their existence. This idea is not that different from the real-world need, so influential in Western culture, of a superior, divine sphere that transcends and explains our lives. The afterlife both invests the questions of morality with great significance while also demonstrating that morality is replaced with something else far greater, of which morality in the “here and now” offers but a provisional intimation. In this sense, the carrousel mocks Christian resurrection. As O’Donovan explains, resurrection is the central Christian doctrine relevant to understanding morality, for it was the definitive divine act that marked the power of God at work redeeming the world. It revealed both human sin and human potential, and it ushered in a new order, making available the same power that raised Jesus from the dead to be at work within us, transforming us into his likeness, as God originally intended, and revealing what can be our own hope that death is not the last word.613 But in the carrousel and within the dome, resurrection is replaced by recycling and this word is just a euphemism for killing. And death is really the last word here, since nobody has been reborn. In this way, transcendence is carefully avoided and the physical surface is the main ethic of life. Humanity as spiritual transcendence is destroyed in favor of the young material flesh perpetually manufactured by science. The sanctuary truly exists in Logan’s Run and it is the world of nature left behind when the dome was constructed: decaying cemeteries and buildings, lush foliage and green areas, natural lakes and, most important, old people, personified in the Old Man (Peter Ustinov) whom they find in their journey. In this rediscovery of nature, a shift takes place from a vision of nature as a symbol of the erotic to nature as a symbol of morality and spirituality, a shift in reverse to that taken by classical Transcendentalism.614 The sanctuary, and with it, the transcendence for which the runners are so desperately looking, is embodied in two forms: in the Old Man’s many wrinkles and in the knowledge contained within the many books protected by him. The equality of knowledge with advanced age confronts the superficiality of hollow youth in a sequence of almost twenty minutes in which Logan and Jessica confront the reality of the sanctuary: far from corporeality and vanity lies a world in which people can accept the passing of time as a natural trait

of humanity. Only with years will knowledge come. In this sense, their first confrontation with aging will be when both Logan and Jessica face the statue of Abraham Lincoln, the father of modern America. In this way, they both can be the first ones to light the fire of a new nation, one that accepts the ethical value of aging and, thereby, gaining wisdom. At the end, the sanctuary only exists as a hope, even when it is not specified of what exactly. As any hope, it is something intangible but which gives meaning and direction to life. Sanctuary cannot exist as something concrete because it is only the hope of transcendence. Outside the dome, their lights turn to white, losing their meaning because outside the dome, youth is only a stage in life, not life as a whole. Within the dome, humanity has been abolished because youth and appearance are the main (and only) ethos. If part of humanity is the gaining of life’s experience, those living within the dome had cut away ties with what made them truly human: the passage of life, with its miseries and joys. The result of this abolition is a desperate search for transcendence by the protagonists.

The Clonus Horror and the Perfect Physique The Clonus Horror captures in a fictional world the seventies’ obsession with youth and health, showing how such a value system can dehumanize and commodify human beings; at the same time, the victims of such a corrupt society long for a spiritual transcendence. Youth, in the 1970s, becomes a metaphor for perceived social changes and its projected consequences; it is a locus for displaced social anxieties. It represents shallowness but also utopia; it represents superficiality but also counterculture and alternatives to the mainstream. Physical appeal and health accompany youth. In fact, “running and spiritualism”615 were two issues much associated with new ways of understanding health. Still, these practices are seen as opposites. While running and physical exercise seem to speak exclusively about the body, spiritualism pertains to transcendence. In this way, the everlasting battle between immanence and transcendence is reenacted. In truth, they are not mutually exclusive spheres. Physical exercise can complement a spiritual search, as in yoga. But the truth is that, in popular culture and in Western philosophy (if only in a superficial gaze), body and

immateriality are seen as mutually separated spheres since the Cartesian movement.616 In this scenario, it is not rare that sci-fi films, as products of popular culture, warn about the risks of losing touch with what transcends simple materiality, here embodied in a healthy clear-cut young body. In fact, Ruth C. Engs argues that the cycles of health-reform generally are linked to revivals of religious interest.617 Furthermore, Engs sees in the 1970s the beginning of a new cycle of “clean living movement”618 and, again, this turn stems from youth and counterculture.619 Health initiatives were prime concerns of the decade. The Clonus Horror (also known as Parts: The Clonus Horror) talks about the pursuit of youth and health and the dehumanization and commodification of human beings. The film tells of Clonus, a company dedicated to cloning human beings for their organs to ensure a longer life expectancy for their rich customers. The clones, who live within a community that makes up a fictional world, are raised and educated in such a way that they ignore everything that has to do with the world outside. They live ignorant of their condition as clones and only knowing the fantasy world that the managers of the company have designed for them. Even when they have all the means of consumption easily available at their hands (good food, health, leisure time, etc.), they are spiritually alienated. Once the clones have physically matured, they are ready to “go to America.” This event is presented as the crowning achievement within the community, the moment in which some citizen abandons the place to know the world outside it. It can be argued that this is the “transcendental” turn within the community, in which some citizen reaches a superior stage. As with the carrousel in Logan’s Run, real spiritual transcendence is mocked and replaced with pure immanence. The truth is that the voyage to America is just the time when the clones are killed during surgery to extract the bodily organs necessary to maintain the health of the rich people who have been replicated. The fact that the clones are put into plastic bags exacerbates the idea of commodification and objectification. The clones are doubly dehumanized: first, in their condition as clones, carboncopies of someone else, and thus thought to be without a soul or intelligence, but only materiality (exacerbated by the strict regimen of exercise); second, because they are treated not as beings but as organic parts waiting for being

used when the “real human” needs one. While many of the clones were created with a lower intellectual capacity to avoid any questioning of their fictional world, some are endowed with normal intelligence. This is the case with Richard (Tim Donelli), who after finding a can from abroad and meeting Lena (Paulette Breen), a female clone with normal intelligence, begins to suspect that there is something strange about the world they live in. Like Logan, he is a man continuously asking for answers about the circumstances of his life. He is also looking for some transcendence that could give some meaning to his hollow existence framed only in the extreme care of his body. He will face the same challenges that Logan did. He will find something that gives substance to his doubts: in Logan’s case, the idea of a sanctuary; for Richard, a can which tells him about a world outside his own which does not correspond with that schematized by Dr. Jameson (Dick Sargent), the leader of the community. And, like Logan, Richard will ask many questions to a machine suspiciously evasive in its answers. Once fully grasping the purpose of his existence, he flees Clonus and goes to find the person whom he is replicating. That person is Richard Knight (David Hooks), an intellectual who was unaware of the Clonus project and of his own clone. Like Logan’s Run, Fiveson’s film also considers a new kind of nation or society, one with a proclivity to dehumanization. Jeff Knight (Peter Graves) is a senator running for the presidency. The film opens with him pronouncing a speech during his campaign. The scene of the speech is interrupted briefly by inserts of corpses wrapped in plastic bags. As this is only the first scene, the audience does not know anything yet about those corpses, what their meaning is. Only when the story advances will their meaning be clear: a new nation is slowly being built upon the deaths of people (clones) who serve to keep the rich healthy and fit. Clones in the film might be said to represent the marginal citizens who only obtain visibility during electoral campaigns only to be carried back to the margins later. If real nations have been constructed upon the blood of invisible people, in The Clonus Horror this idea is literal. After Knight’s speech, the film cuts to the other nation, that of the clones, all of them exercising not to keep their own bodies healthy but, unknowingly, to preserve the physique of their masters. As noted above, the 1970s were a time when concerns about the body acquired special importance. As Stephen Perkins and Shervin Naderi note,

while these concerns were not new, improvements in medicine and plastic surgery620 provided new ways to improve it. The 70s see a “decisive shift” in bodybuilding and group fitness,621 and the human person began to be reconsidered and redesigned.622 Novelty is sought in this period: an overcoming of the body and its supposed limitations and finitude in a posthuman movement. In this sense, a special importance is given to the body but, paradoxically, in the idea of overcoming it,623 the post-human movement transcends it, not in an intellectual/spiritual way, but in a new materialistic turn. The paradoxes of this era are replicated in the film. The Clonus Corporation acquires an enormous influence because it responds to this quest to improve the body, and it does so by completely assaulting nature, to the point of aspiring to immortality, overcoming the natural obsolescence of the body. This concern becomes so central that even Richard Knight, an intellectual who originally recoils in disgust at the existence of Clonus, later is seduced by the possibility of extending his life. All this suggests that new advances in science bridge the difference between nature and artifact, as human nature itself is transformed into an artifact: the previously clear boundaries become now blurred.624 Advances in the field of genetics and the human genome are headed in that direction, allowing science to think about changing human nature itself. The clones are simply artifacts, lost as human beings from the moment they are “manufactured,” i.e., transformed into objects, commodities to be bought and sold. The main concern is not the way clones are produced, but the way it objectifies them.625 This also implies that only a select elite can access the benefits proposed by Clonus. In this sense, the guards not only ask for continuous exercise but also for competitions. They ask of the clones to try to win each competition. The reason probably is that of physical perfection, but winning at any cost resonates deeply within a capitalist world which treated humans as objects.626 Winning and being the head of the pack are extremely capitalist/individualist issues.627 Within the film, only the love scene between Richard and Lena gives them back some of their humanity, first because sex is part of humanity, and

second because this simple act gives them some agency of their own. Their lovemaking works as a reinforcement of humanity against the commodification of their bodies, even when they are under heavy surveillance. In the last chapter of The Abolition of Man Lewis is devoted to analyzing the issue of the advancement of man upon nature. He argues that in the process of denying fundamental values, the properly human is lost. When man subsumes himself under a materialistic science, he actually loses the power of self-determination. This is what happens to the characters in the film, who end up becoming their pure instincts of self-preservation. The intellectual Richard Knight abandons his ethical philosophical principles at the possibility of extending his life, but in the process he leaves his humanity behind. Paradoxically, Richard, the clone, is the one who displays humanity in questioning the immorality of the Clonus Corporation. The film comes to denounce the linkage between technological development and economic power. Science is not subject to the benefit of humanity, nor to the pursuit of knowledge, but responds, as any private company, to profit. P. Travis Kroeker argues that economic growth and technological development lead to two critical problems: the issue of democracy threatened by the hegemony of economic interests that displace moral discourse with technological discourse, and the “mastery and domination of nature via instrumental technologies for the satisfaction of commodified human needs . . . .”628 In the film this pursuit of profit came to a crisis when the scientists of Clonus did not reflect upon the ethical implications that the cloning of human beings and the subsequent murder to use their bodies entail. Lewis explores science’s response to hegemony when in his essay he explains that the power of man upon nature is but the power of some men upon others, using nature as an instrument. The topic of hegemonic power is a common thread through the film. This is manifested in the corporation’s dominance of clones and its influence on politics. Power is the ability to shape public perceptions of truth while knowledge is an element that gives power. In this sense, the corporation built its power on scientific knowledge, and this is what enables it to have power in the realm of politics and to manage important economic resources. It is particularly interesting how the relationship between knowledge and power is

manifested within the corporation in connection with the clones. They are specially created with a lower intellectual ability and are instructed to ignore their condition, thereby avoiding any possibility of rebellion or disobedience. It is no coincidence that only those clones with normal intelligence doubt the realities of the world. But the corporation itself allows some clones with normal intelligence, so they can be scientifically measured as potential threats; “power entails resistance, and resistance is contained by power . . . .”629 Related to power, it is worth noting the similarities between the camp of The Clonus Horror and a Nazi concentration camp. In both, the guardians ask of the inmates a total abandonment of their humanity, while any act of agency is controlled. Furthermore, the bodies are objects of medical investigation. The main difference is clear: while the Nazi concentration camp is all about the disintegration of the human body, its trituration and emaciation, in The Clonus Horror this pure materiality and dehumanization process is given in the reverse sense—the bodies must meet strict requirements of fitness and health. But in both, humanity is destroyed through fleshly manipulation. In the concentration camp, the prisoner does not exist as a human being, but rather the emaciated flesh is a symbol of Nazi ideology, while in the film, the body exists only as a tool to keep the hegemonic power healthy. The film ends on an ambiguous note. Richard is captured and Lena lobotomized. Richard was successful in exposing some information about the clone factory to the outside world. The film ends with Senator Knight being interrupted while giving a speech by some journalists asking questions about Clonus. We, the audience, do not know what happens next. Maybe Knight concocts some quick response and gets away with it. Or perhaps he is arrested. There is no indication how the story will end. The last scene is that of Richard frozen, bagged, and ready for operation. It seems to indicate that some hope is there indeed, but hegemonic power will, and can, do everything to prevent the total disclosure of the truth. An ambiguous end crafted to provoke thought rather than to properly close the narration. In summary, the film shows a cult to the body that reduces the whole human being to the body alone, cutting us off from transcendence. In this way, humanity is abolished. The abolition is doubled by the commodification

of humans, and trebled by the loss of morality experienced by the film’s characters. Yet the victims of the abolition themselves search for transcendence, undertaking the ancient and essentially human journey toward something higher, and towards healing.

Conclusion Both films here analyzed tell about the dangers of living exclusively through physicality while pushing introspection and intellectual or spiritual transcendence aside. Still, something must remain clear: the films are not advocating a negative image of youth, health, or desire of extended life in the best physical condition. These are not ideals intrinsically bad per se. Both Logan’s Run and The Clonus Horror are in concordance with the spirit of the decade in which youth and physical exercise were, together with many other socio-cultural issues, main concerns. Youth can be seen as the alternative to mainstream politics while concerns about health were always welcome. Even so, on the negative side, youth seemed to be the answer to any question, disregarding the knowledge of maturity and/or other values while bodies were forced to conform to homogeneous aesthetics. Also, new scientific advancements made in the terrain of health and the increase of expectancy of life help in making the body the locus of ethics. What the films denounce is the abolition of humanity through elimination of stable ethics and moral values, now displaced by the exclusivity of scientific knowledge (which replaces and subsumes any other kind of knowledge). People are destroyed to keep youth and health. What is negative is not the interest in achieving a healthy body, but the assault made upon the nature of humanity. People should get old because it is part of what human nature is, together with the irrevocability of death. Both the societies in Logan’s Run and in The Clonus Horror try to overcome human nature, abolishing age and sickness while denying that both are part of human life. America, in the 1970s, can relate to this idea. Still, as mentioned, new interest in health comes with renewal in the interest in spirituality, and the 1970s was prolific in both. Traditional Christian theology or alternative religions were just a small part of the upheaval of interest in religion in that decade. Both physically and spiritually, Americans were searching for transcendence of boundaries and new

meanings to their lives. It is in this scenario that the main characters of both films fight to overcome their existence as mere bodies. Logan and Richard start a path to self-discovery with a search for transcendence which can be linked, if not explicitly within the films, with spirituality as a way to sustain a new kind of nation, since nationhood is a theme traversed by both films. In an era dominated by physical embodiment as the main locus, both stories ask for the overcoming of materiality through spirituality. If the man has been truly abolished, then it is time to come into contact with some “beyond” which can help to recuperate humanity, even when this transcendence begins with some vague idea of a sanctuary or with a prosaic can of beer.

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591. Hamilton, The 1970s, 6. 592. Ibid., vi. 593. Chapman and Cull, Projecting Tomorrow, 157. 594. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, 93. 595. Issitt, Hippies, 3. 596. DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 3. 597. France, Understanding Youth, 17. 598. Gair, The American Counterculture, 10. 599. Cole, “The Specter of Old Age,” 24. 600. Berkowitz, Something Happened, 5. 601. Ryan and Kellner, “Technophobia/Dystopia,” 50. 602. Ibid., 49. 603. Gilleard and Higgs, Ageing, 41. 604. Deery, Consuming Reality, 57. 605. France, Understanding Youth, 21. 606. Ryan and Kellner, “Technophobia/Dystopia,” 49. 607. France, Understanding Youth, 38. 608. Baron-Reid, Messages from Spirit, 241. 609. Wolfe, The Purple Decades, 293. 610. Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair, 129. 611. Pitman, On Blondes, 245. 612. Joldersma, Levinasian Ethics, 9. 613. See O’Donovan, Resurrection, especially 14–15. 614. Gair, The American Counterculture, 11. 615. Hamilton, Eyewitness History, 311. 616. Haynes, Immanent Transcendence, 18. 617. Engs, Clean Living Movements, 7. 618. Ibid., 179. 619. Ibid., 180. 620. Papel, Facial Plastic, 207. 621. Andreasson and Johansson, The Global Gym, 165. 622. Howard, Christianity, 109. 623. Sibilia El Hombre Postorgánico, 115–16.

624. Ibid., 70. 625. King, “Cloning? Yuk!,” 61. 626. Dahms, The Vitality of Critical Theory, 101. 627. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, 84. 628. Kroeker, Christian Ethics, 18. 629. Asimakou, Innovation, 28.

20 Does Forgiveness Just Happen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis’s “Last Step” by Nathan Gilmour

he closing pages of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man present the reader with a stark warning: human ingenuity has the capacity to destroy human nature.630 Lewis suggests that the final act of technological nihilism

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likely will not simply nullify everything recognizable as free will; more probable is something like a radical alteration, leaving our moral vocabulary intact but eviscerating its content, something that leaves humanity convinced that we have become better even as the standards for “better” and “worse” have lost their ability to make sense of the world and of our lives. Beginning The Abolition of Man with observations about children’s school-books, Lewis, in the wake of the World Wars and the empire-builders that the English battled in the World Wars, tends to imagine such possibilities in terms of great states and great armies and great parties, entities that will impose—with the best of intentions—the new vision of humanity on the many without much sense of individual consent. Such a vision deserves attention, and the proper emotional response is terror, but the grand state is not the only kind of threat that makes sense in the twenty-first century. The 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind631 articulates the existential terror of humanity’s technological self-destruction for an audience beyond the Cold War, telling a story in which memory, the network of connections and commitments that constitute human identity, faces radical alteration not at the hands of an all-powerful state but as a consumer service contracted for the sake of comfort. No “stronger party” threatens the erased with violence if they refuse to submit; instead a small business sells the abolition of human nature for a reasonable fee, sometimes even with

promotional discounts. My essay will begin asking what happens, ethically and in terms of narrative, when the abolition of man comes not from a benevolent dictator but from a company trying to sell its (very limited) competence for a fee. Then I’ll enlist the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger to explore the ways that human existence relies upon relationships with what has already been, the very ground that Lacuna, Inc., in Eternal Sunshine offers to eradicate for their clients. With narrative and the existential in place, this essay will finish with some thoughts on Eternal Sunshine as a specifically post-Christian story, a meditation on the ways that such alterations of human nature subvert and destabilize the possibility of forgiveness for the film’s main characters. In the end Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind cannot promise forgiveness for characters who sell their souls and thus cannot save the souls they’ve sold.

Gods for Hire Lewis begins his criticism of technological optimism with an important claim: the human species never triumphs over nature in any simple sense. Instead, every triumph of some human beings means a greater power over other human beings. Lewis insists on a picture more complex than a battle with two sides when he claims the following: “What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.”632 To figure the struggle as one between humanity and nature is to draw the battle lines too simply and thus imprecisely: “There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”633 Nature thus stands, as Lewis presents things, not as antagonist to the whole species “humanity” but as an impediment to some people’s ability to control others. To overcome nature is not necessarily a good aim but often is motivated by the will of a few to dominate the rest. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Howard Mierzwiak, a figure whose educational background the film never discloses, runs Lacuna, Inc., which in turn represents the terrifying junction of science and consumerism. Far removed from the totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century, Mierzwiak enters Joel Barish’s life not as an invading tyrant but as a

consumer service looking for clients. Joel, played by Jim Carrey, discovers that his girlfriend Clementine (played by Kate Winslet, making the central couple a pair of giant stars in a strange little film), with whom he has recently had a fight that threatened to end their two-year relationship, has sought the services of Lacuna, Inc., a company that uses technology (which Mierzwiak admits “is, technically, brain damage”) to eradicate the sectors of the client’s brain that remember painful relationships. Joel discovers Lacuna after his and Clementine’s mutual friend Rob reveals Clem’s impulsive decision not only to break up with Joel but to have her memory cleared of any recollection that they knew each other. When Joel expresses incredulity that such a service can even exist and asks what exactly Lacuna does, Rob can only come up with “a place that does a thing,” a bit of apophatic theology early in the game. Later, when Joel comes face to face with Mierzwiak at Lacuna’s offices, among Joel’s first words are “There’s no such thing as this.” Although at first an atheist in a world where science-for-hire seems to have the divine power to erase the past, Joel soon becomes a devotee, not only bringing them business but eventually praying to their people for respite in the face of their power. Lacuna’s position in the film is at once that of an inadequate god, both in terms of moral principles and practical competence, and that of a Daedalus of the early twenty-first century, unable to acknowledge the self-destruction that awaits those too taken with the new power the company can provide. Joel spends a few scenes early in the film shuttling back and forth between Rob’s apartment and Lacuna’s offices, and eventually he decides that he desires to have Clementine erased from his own memory, both because of the pain that lingers and because of the sense that Clementine deserves to be erased after she has done the same to Joel. Mierzwiak’s demeanor in the whole sequence is that of an eager professional trying to sell what he does to a skeptical consumer. But the specialist-client relationship only lasts until Joel enters into a far more committed covenant with the company: the process requires him to take a pill that will render him immobile and incapable of regaining consciousness for several hours, a consumer choice that renders choice impossible for Joel or for Clementine or for their friends and family. After all, Joel’s and Clementine’s decisions do not merely involve themselves; as the characters Rob and Carrie remind the audience, erasing another person requires the people around the forgetters to live a life

of deception for the sake of maintaining what the technology has begun.634 The film’s brief mentions of Joel’s mother and Clementine’s extended family also serve to remind the audience that the wounded lovers, engrossed as they might be with their own emotional pain, are doing real harm to networks of human beings as they seek to abolish their own human capacity to remember pain. Once Joel takes the pill and renders his own body incapable of waking, the “erasers” soon enough become not service-providers but capricious gods, beings whose power does not allow for resistance, only for flight or prayer (both ultimately futile). By the time Joel remembers the good human reasons he has not to forget Clementine, those who wield the tools to erase will not allow him to assert the human capacities of remembering or of refusing. At least part of the terror for Joel and for the audience as we ride along in his diminishing mind is that he decides, as he re-experiences the moments that constitute his love for Clem, to go back. But just as Lewis warns, the former consumer finds himself unable to resist a momentum that simply consumes every effort to escape. Once Joel loses consciousness, his memories, beginning with those most immediate as of the night of the procedure, begin to play back for him, and an array of visual techniques signify that they no longer will be part of his memory. But after the first several memories recall fights with Clementine (and in which he shouts at his memory of Clementine that he’s glad he’s erasing her), Joel remembers a moment of true intimacy, in which Clementine relates to him her childhood fear of being ugly and in which, giving himself to her with an intensity not depicted anywhere else in the film, he assures her that she is pretty, that he’s never going to leave. The shot goes blurry, and in the next few seconds all the viewer can see is Joel crawling through the scene’s setting, Clementine nowhere to be seen. The former atheist becomes a man of piety, whispering, “Mierzwiak, please just let me keep this memory. Just this one.” The name of a consumer service-provider, in Joel’s world, has by this point become the name of God. In the next scene, remembering an evening spent with Clementine on the surface of frozen water, a recurring image in the film, Joel sees her memory-image pulled away from him. After he calls out her name, Joel pauses, then assumes a kneeling position, head bowed, praying to the science stealing his memories. At first

he whispers, still bowed, that he wants to call it off. Joel then, still kneeling, turns his eyes upwards, towards a bird’s-eye-view camera, and tries to plead to the erasers: “Can you hear me? I don’t want this any more! I want to call it off!” In a movie that never addresses religion directly, the prayer of Joel lands as the blow of a hammer: the man who bought technological comfort now begs to be released from the gods he hired. A quick camera cut after Joel’s plea shows those who wield “nature” against him are not the terrifying and efficient agents of tyranny but the random and apathetic hands of consumerism: not even Mierzwiak, as wretched a deity as he turns out to be, dwells in the heaven just above Joel’s sleeping form. Instead two entirely unfit minor gods lack the ability, much less the desire, to hear the prayers of Joel. Stan and Mary, Mierzwiak’s technician and secretary, played by Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst, are supervising Joel’s erasure. When Joel decides that he wants to protest Clementine’s erasure, they have been smoking cannabis, and their only concern is the loud music in the room that’s got them dancing in their underwear. The people who pass for gods in Joel’s universe are stoned, “on autopilot,” entirely unconcerned with Joel’s consent or objection. When Joel stops pleading and starts running, the true visual genius of the film takes over. Through a series of visual tricks, words and colors and even human bodies disappear from some scenes as Joel tries to pull Clementine (or at least his memory of her) away from the all-seeing eye of consumeristic scientific control, represented by a white spotlight that wanders from scene to scene, pursuing every representation of Clementine. In some of the ensuing scenes, fences disappear slat by slat; in others, automobiles evaporate and entire scenes drop into darkness. In perhaps the most memorable of the disappearing scenes, Joel relives his meeting with Clementine the day after their first encounter, in a Barnes and Noble bookstore where Clem works. As the replayed experience gives way to a conversation, in which Joel’s image of Clementine tries to give Joel hope that they still might remember each other, the covers of the books go white, a cluster at a time, with neither of the characters acknowledging that it’s happening. When the last memory of Clementine, by that time part of a bizarre montage of second-long tableaux, disappears, the world of Joel’s drug-slowed consciousness disappears as jarringly as it began, and the film snaps into a relatively realist mode of storytelling.

In the meantime, the audience has seen a sequence of events, only indirectly related to Joel’s storyline, unfold. Mary’s admiration for Mierzwiak turns into infatuation as she watches him work, and when his wife catches the two of them in their embrace, she reveals that in fact Mary was an earlier patient, a client who wanted an earlier affair with Mierzwiak himself erased. That he then hired the girl to work in his office reveals as much about the master’s lack of character as other moments reveal about the lesser gods who hold absolute (but legitimately procured!) power over Joel. Patrick, an employee even less competent than Stan and Mary, has used the materials procured from Joel’s apartment and from Clementine’s to begin (unsuccessfully) seducing Clementine by using the moments that led to Joel’s and Clementine’s intimacy. Stan uses Joel’s apartment as a convenient place for a cannabis-fueled tryst with Mary—while Joel lies unconscious in the same room. With gods like these, the audience could be forgiven if we long for an order of things in which wretches like Mierzwiak and morons like Stan and Patrick lack the capacity to take away memory, that most human of treasures. Eternal Sunshine puts terrific power in the hands of the drug-impaired, the shameless exploiters of the helpless, and in every case in the hands of characters who have no business being gods, who resemble Ovid’s worst nightmares more than any vision of a good deity. Lewis’s warning about the power of the few over the many rings true especially when the relatively decent have paid good money so that the relatively worthless can oppress them.

The Incommensurable Step: Memory Perhaps the most arresting part of Abolition’s last section is a nebulous warning about the process of losing human nature to our own scientific ambitions: There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis— incommensurable with the others—and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may

give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on “explaining away” for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever.635 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tells a story in which a private company treats memory as one more thing to create or purge, and in regarding human nature that way, as “mere υλη.”636 Lacuna takes on a power too terrible to articulate in abstraction but which constitutes an undeniable and demonic horror when narrated in science fiction. I will now explain why Lacuna’s business model not only abolishes human nature by reducing it to raw material to be altered at will, but why this particular way of attempting to gain happiness for oneself is a last step undoing all the progress made in previous steps. Memory, after all, is no mere add-on to human existence but constitutes the distinctly human. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time proposes that Dasein, his abstract term for human existence, as opposed to the existence of chairs or concepts or trees, encompasses in any moment both all moments that have been and an orientation towards the future that defines human existence as “being-towards-death,” not a despondent and constant thought about death (which pretends to control the moment of death in a way that is ultimately untrue) but an honest disposition towards the possibility that any moment could be a person’s last. Reveling in the contradictions of human existence, Heidegger insists on death as defining but will not allow human beings to rest easy in any simple sense of destiny: “The ownmost possibility, which is non-relational, not to be outstripped, and certain, is indefinite as regards its certainty.”637 In any given moment, we encounter the possibilities of the next moment and every moment thereafter, including ultimately our own demise, not as a script that we get to read but as radically undetermined. Thus Dasein is radically responsible for what kind of being meets her final moment, even as that final moment eludes Dasein’s capacity to control moments. But the nature of existence as pointed-towards-what’s-next at the same time necessarily encompasses a sense not of “having” a past as some discrete possession but living as a being who “has been” otherwise:

As authentically futural, Dasein is authentically as “having been.” Anticipation of one’s uttermost and ownmost possibility is coming back understandingly to one’s ownmost “been.” Only so far as it is futural can Dasein be authentically as having been. The character of “having been” arises, in a certain way, from the future.638 Heidegger’s is a view of human nature in which every present moment always stands open to what happens next (which is, by definition, how Dasein, the human being, stands responsible for how to handle being projected or thrown onto the world), and the possibilities open to responsible Dasein are always functions of what Dasein has been: Because in each case existence is only as factically thrown, historiology will disclose the quiet force of the possible with greater penetration the more simply and the more concretely having-been-in-the-world is understood in terms of its possibility, and “only” presented as such.639 The contradiction here generates the energy for moral thought: Dasein can only be what its has-been character will allow, and possibilities that lay open yesterday might stand closed. So the person who today murders her brother can tomorrow decide to live as the person who resolves never again to murder or as the person for whom murdering-again stands open as an option, but the same person never again can live as the person who has never murdered but who might some day, much less the person who has never and will never murder. Such impossibilities are Dasein’s own imposition, and the fate to which Dasein is doomed is to shape those possibilities with each passing moment. The important reality here, for thinking alongside Lewis, is not how to resolve this contradiction but to see that precisely those conditions, contradictory though they might be, rely upon memory to constitute an existence that Heidegger is willing to call Dasein and Lewis human. To be fair, Heidegger does not require that our memories remain uniformly consistent; but the ways that lived experience condense memory, highlighting some moments and eliding others based on the concerns of the remembering

Dasein, can arise in proper or improper ways even without the aid of artificial memory-erasers.640 And for ethical purposes, memories are important not because they transcribe events that transpire in the external world but because virtues rely on memory: one must remember favor to exhibit gratitude, and without memory of harm there is no resentment for the agent to overcome in an act of forgiveness.641 In Heidegger’s terms, to take a stand on one’s own being as one who thanks or one who forgives, the grateful or the forgiving one must have a prior capacity to live as one who has been wronged or who has been loved, and to erase such things does not merely make Joel or Clementine unforgiving or ungrateful but puts them beyond the boundaries of such moral judgment, a place from which only the intervention of Mary (more on that later) can bring them back. In Eternal Sunshine, Lacuna, Inc., does not offer mere consumerist comfort, even of the sort that stands to be harmful (like fast food burgers or unsafe automobiles) but invites consumers to pay money so that their very human nature no longer has the capacity to exist as once it did. Absent from the movie’s drama is any state oppressor or imperial nature-changer; the ideological shift comes in a much more insidious form, a consumer good that the impulsive Clementine can purchase on a whim and render two years of human, connected experience null. The film dramatizes a thought experiment in which Dasein loses the ability to live out has-been possibilities by putting the main characters into a strange, technologically-induced situation of deprivation. Thus the memory loss one purchases from Lacuna is an abolition of one’s humanity; moreover, it is the final, incommensurable step in the attempt to buy happiness for oneself—for it erases oneself.

Does Forgiveness Just Happen? Eternal Sunshine, which revels in non-linear storytelling, begins after Lacuna has erased Joel’s and Clem’s memory, then begins again (as the opening credits roll several minutes into the film) just after Clem has erased Joel, and then loops back on itself, only getting to the earliest moments in the dramatic world as Joel loses the final memories of Clementine. But as the film—not the plot—opens, the forgetful Joel and the forgetful Clem have reunited, and their original attraction has brought them to Montauk, New York, and into

each other’s lives again. But at the end of the film, where the memory that makes existence human has gone away, artificial simulations of memory return to haunt them. After reuniting, unwitting, both Joel and Clem receive cassette recordings of their pre-erasure counseling sessions, preserved sounds of a relationship gone sour and the frustration that drove each to erase the other. As both ride in Joel’s car back to his house, Joel must listen to Clementine, or at least a Clem whose existence connects in some way with that of the woman he has just met, saying Joel is boring, and that should be enough reason to erase his existence. Later, after Joel has kicked the forgetful Clementine out of his car, she comes to his apartment, where she hears his tape say truly terrible things about her, including but not limited to an accusation that she tries to attract people to herself with offers of sex. Invoking scenes from several places in the narrative, Clementine storms out, and recalling several more, Joel follows. After reciting her speech (that the audience has heard more than once but neither character can remember, by the story’s logic) about being a girl finding her own peace of mind, Joel and Clem speak their last lines: Joel: I can’t think of anything I don’t like about you right now. Clementine: But you will. You will think of things. And I will get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me. Joel: Okay. Clementine: Okay. And the closing-credits song begins, and the movie ends with the main characters back on a snowy Montauk beach, presumably to take another run at being together. The audience cannot be sure whether the artificial substitute for memory will be enough for forgiveness, whether indeed Joel and Clementine even have the resources to end up “Okay.” But all movies must end, and this one ends with a strange scene of post-Lacuna bliss that the viewer should not be too ready to call redemption. In this way Eternal Sunshine presents itself to the audience as a distinctively post-Christian, not a more generally human, story. Certainly Muslims and Buddhists and Taoists can reconcile after one wrongs the other, but the very shape of the universe, for Christian theology, takes its shape

precisely from the fact that those whom God created, by the agency of the divine logos, destroyed the body of Jesus Christ, and the Father vindicated the faithfulness of the Son by raising the Son from death, an act that both inaugurates the reign of God on Earth and foreshadows that reign’s completeness without instantly and immediately bringing it to its fullness. Human history can damage and does damage possibilities to enjoy this divine forgiveness, but the world’s fall and redemption always give shape to reality, even reality that rejects the forgiveness. The Christian hodos (way) is not identical with the Tao that governs Stoicism or Zen, and surrendering one’s faithfulness to the hodos of Christ might indeed mean rejecting the Tao as other ways of life present it. And Eternal Sunshine offers a narrative in which forgiveness does not cleanly eradicate humanity’s abolition of human nature but nonetheless might offer a life in its ruins. I articulate the film’s distinctive post-Christian character in order to focus on the distinctly post-Christian anxiety with which the film leaves the viewer. When Mary sends Joel and Clementine the audio tapes of their pre-erasure interviews, she proves to be a strange vehicle—but a vehicle nonetheless—of grace, an element of reality that might be mere chance for most ways of existence but is at the core of reality for the Christian. Because Mary, of whom Joel and Clementine have no memory (she even begins her message to them, “We’ve met, but you don’t remember me”), delivers to them the content of their memory, they have a chance to restore something like the human existence that each of them has forsaken. The life that lies ahead of them is a distortion of what once was possible, the audience should remember: what should be Joel’s memory of Clementine gives way to oblivion by choice of the forgetters, but then returns—graciously, one should not forget—to something more removed, a mere description of Clementine.642 The final minutes of the movie thus rely on an event that is not strictly deus ex machina (after all, Mary has her own reasons, which make sense inside the plot, for doing what she does) but nonetheless lies beyond the power of either forgetter to remember. Before the forgetful Joel wakes up, as Mierzwiak’s forgetting machine closes in on the day when Joel met Clementine, the memory-image of Clem breaks from the recalled scene and makes Joel confront the fact that this will be the last scene in which he will remember her:

Memory-Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s gonna be gone soon. Joel: I know. Memory-Clementine: What do we do? Joel: Enjoy it. Joel goes on to relive their meeting, aware of the contradictory truths that he’s living a moment in light of its future and that his future, which lies beyond the parameters of human experience as Heidegger articulates its structure, will not take its form in relationship with this memory. Whatever Joel enjoys in the moment simply will not exist as anything human when Lacuna finishes with it. In that absurd moment, Joel suggests that he’ll “enjoy” the moment, invoking Augustine’s praise of eternal God as the only proper object of enjoyment643 whether the film’s writers had Augustine in mind or not. As the scene draws to a close, Clem and Joel once more break from the event as remembered to analyze the memory as Walter destroys it. “I wish you’d stayed,” his vision of Clem tells him. “I wish I’d done a lot of things,” Joel replies. The viewer paying attention realizes that, within moments, Joel will not wish any of those things, and will not even have the capacity to wish them. The character called “Joel” will soon cease to exist, and in destroying that Joel, no closing scene dialogue and no closing-credits music will be able to bring that character back. Joel’s approach to the horizon of his own demise, knowing that his body will persist even as his being suffers a kind of death, falls like another stroke of the hammer. If human beings can only enjoy God, eternally steadfast, then Joel suffers a delusion on par with the grandest lies when he thinks that he can “enjoy” a moment that will, mere minutes later in the film’s terms, fall away from him, never to be restored even in the post-“Okay” happy ending. Without memory, the grounds of human existence, the moments of Joel’s and Clem’s relationships, each a gift, none the product merely of the will of Joel or Clem, cannot be part of their life going forward, even if the audio tape and a collection of artifacts allow them to reconstruct something resembling memory, even according to the post-Christian ontology of Martin Heidegger. Ultimately the great sadness and the bitter hope at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind rests precisely in the potential for the story to become a never-ending recurrence or to resist that abolition. If in fact Clem

becomes bored with Joel again, Mierzwiak might not be the god who wields power over human memory and human nature, but the equipment is easily enough available that Stan or Patrick or anyone who learns relatively simple techniques has the ability to erase Joel once again. But Joel and Clem might choose otherwise. The human species, in the story’s world, has taken that “incommensurable last step,” and even if Joel and Clementine know that using that technology is a bad idea, demand for it is great enough that somebody, somewhere on the East Coast, will be able and ready to provide it. Yet the possibility always lies open that they won’t. Such is a sad story for any grand narrative, be that story Platonic or Confucian or Hindu. But within a Christian story, in which an infinite grace reaches out to encompass wrongdoing, making forgiveness rather than flawlessness the core of the world’s being, Lacuna, Inc., stands as nothing short of an anti-Christ, a savior who promises just to “take it all away,” not to forgive but to erase. Whether such targeted and limited “brain damage” is plausible in terms of neuroscience, the parable continues to strike the viewer forcefully: by means of human ingenuity, humanity destroys humanity, and the moral wretchedness of those who wield that genius and the incompetence of those who assist cannot stop the destruction. For those captured by the “fatal serialism of the modern imagination,”644 only the utter contingency of Joel’s and Clem’s future remains as the closing credits roll. They might remember and forgive. They might forget again. But the world of Eternal Sunshine renders such choice a distinct possibility, one with the power to destroy again the very nature of humanity, in each passing moment. Joel and Clementine end the film knowing—in a way that only science fiction can provide knowledge—precisely what kinds of miseries their lives together will entail.645 If they continue nonetheless, they continue not because of humanity’s surmounting of humanity but in spite of it, resisting the comfortable amnesia of the spotless mind in favor of the human soul. Pain—and memory always entails pain—makes Joel human, and Joel’s humanity proves, in the end, a greater object of desire than comfort. And even for the wounded puppy Joel, misery with Clementine is the only life worth continuing. One can only hope that Joel thinks so tomorrow. Lewis situates the drive to abolish human nature not with any particular political faction but with the technological mindset itself:

The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.646 Eternal Sunshine works so well as a companion-piece to Lewis because, in its story, one more line of defense has fallen away—the ability to resist technologism as a singular, intelligible enemy. Mierzwiak is neither a Communist revolutionary nor a Fascist boss nor even a Neo-Conservative liberator in the name of democracy. Instead, his project extends only so far as consumer choice will pull it, and for that reason Mary, the only character who acts to resist the process in its totality, does so not for anything resembling philosophical conviction or moral argument but because of an unarticulated sympathy, a good one in terms of the plot and a beneficial one for those rooting for Clementine and Joel to reunite—but not something capable of saying why Lacuna does real evil. For the world of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind whatever human nature remains continues only as radical choice, making life after the credits roll heroic to be sure but also undeniably bleaker than Montauk in February.

Bibliography Augustine. On Christian Teaching. Translated by R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Driver, Julia. “Memory, Desire, and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, edited by Christopher Grau, 80–93. Philosophers on Film Series. London: Routledge, 2009. Gondry, Michel. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Focus Features, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 1962. Jollimore, Troy. “Miserably Ever After: Forgetting, Repeating and Affirming Love in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, edited by Christopher Grau, 31–61. Philosophers on Film Series. London: Routledge, 2009. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Touchstone, 1986.

630. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 74.

631. Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 632. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 66. 633. Ibid., 69. 634. Jollimore, “Miserably Ever After,” 41. 635. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 86. 636. Ibid., 81. 637. Heidegger, Being and Time, 310. 638. Ibid., 373. 639. Ibid., 446. 640. Ibid., 462. 641. Driver, “Memory, Desire, and Value,” 84. 642. Ibid., 86. 643. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 10. 644. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 86. 645. Jollimore, “Miserably Ever After,” 58–59. 646. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 81.

21 “Flawed, Weak, Organic” Star Trek’s Borg and the Abolition of Man by Geoffrey Reiter

n The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis warned about the dangers of overzealous scientists and philosophers who too easily dismiss universal moral laws—the Tao—in their desire to “conquer” Nature and make humanity better. Lewis was also writing his own entrants into the science fiction genre, the Space Trilogy, at the time he delivered the lectures that were to make up the book. He knew that one of the best ways of preserving the Tao would be to demonstrate dramatically the dangers of transgressing human moral codes with technology. If we could see what people without the Tao might look like, perhaps we could be cautioned away from taking such a dangerous leap. Of course, most mature science fiction writers and directors have tried to tackle the thorny ethical issues that arise from the insatiable human appetite to discover knowledge and to apply our discoveries to ourselves. Created in the mid-1960s and first airing only a few years after Lewis’s own death in 1963, Gene Roddenberry’s original show Star Trek and its five later spinoff series might seem on some levels to be repudiations of Lewis’s own cautionary philosophy. Roddenberry’s perspective is positivistic: humanity is able to overcome its darker impulses and create a better world, becoming among the founding worlds of an enlightened United Federation of Planets. This society is marked by its technological know-how. Ships travel faster than light with warp drive, scarcity of resources is eliminated through replicators, most common diseases are treatable, and information is widely and democratically available. Moreover, religious impulse has largely been replaced by a generic pluralistic humanism. Though religion isn’t treated as inherently negative,647 the various Star Trek incarnations tend to ignore it,

I

while frequently taking potshots at godlike beings and cultish fanaticism. Thus, for anyone who wants to launch an ideological broadside against

Star Trek, The Abolition of Man will provide plenty of ammunition, and the series will afford no shortage of vulnerable targets. Still, Roddenberry and the writers who carried on the Trek universe don’t wholly disregard the kinds of concerns Lewis raises. The Abolition of Man’s final section, also called “The Abolition of Man,” invokes the spectre of a future society that has coupled advanced technology with a rejection of natural law morality. Since Natural Law—Lewis’s Tao—represents a universal human morality available apart from special Christian revelation, it can be accessed (at least in theory) by any human willing to seek it. It is not out of the realm of possibility, then, that even the humanist Roddenberry and his successors could reflect aspects of the Tao and, in so doing, address some of Lewis’s fears. And at times, they do get it right, most noticeably in their approach to the hostile beings known as the Borg—a vivid depiction of the abolition of man, or of any other species. The portrayal of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager begins by demonstrating the terror they evoke, while later progressing toward “humanizing” them. Still, from their introduction onward, the Borg consistently serve as object lessons of Lewis’s thesis that progressive applied science not only can cost us our essential humanity but also can enslave subsequent generations to the caprices of a single generation of powerful conditioners. But in presenting a community of individuals who oppose the Borg, Star Trek presents a positive vision for resistance against this terrifying prospect. The Borg make no appearances in the original Star Trek, but they are first seen in the early seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Gene Roddenberry was still a part of the creative team. In their original plans, the producers of Next Generation conceived of the Borg as a race of relentless insects,648 but budgetary considerations forced them to retool these adversaries as cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, hence their final name. Like many insects, the Borg possess a single hive mind, the individual units subservient to a collective intelligence. However, the Borg are not a single alien race, its members consisting instead of thousands of species (including humans) who have been “assimilated” into this collective by means of technology. As perennial terrifying villains whose villainy is due largely to their abuse of technology, the Borg indicate that even the generally positivistic creative minds of the Star Trek franchise could recognize the

dangers of applied science run amok. Of course, not everyone agrees. In his contribution to Star Trek and Philosophy, Kevin Decker suggests a rather favorable interpretation of the Borg. Building on the monism of philosophers like Spinoza and Hegel, along with Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” Decker maintains that the fear of technology embodied in our innate fear of the Borg is irrational. Since our society already employs technology in significant ways—including, in some cases, integrating it into our own bodies—have we not already become “Borg” in a way? Rejecting bioethicist Leon Kass’s warnings to heed “the wisdom of repugnance” in rejecting certain invasive uses of technology, Decker concludes, At first glance, the Borg freak us out because the “wisdom of repugnance” tells us that we would never want to encounter, never want to become what they portray in our conveniently fictional, and therefore “safe” Star Trek universe. Yet today, 150 years out from when Starfleet begins to explore the galaxy, the dense intermeshing of the technological and the natural in our lives should make us stop and think: if we are the Borg, then resistance truly is futile.649 While the transhumanist Decker seeks to understand the Borg charitably (or at least neutrally), he runs into trouble when attempting to apply this charitability to the actual episodes, as we will see when we begin to discuss them in greater depth. Indeed, though individual Borg are often treated with dignity, it is precisely their less-than-futile resistance to the Collective that makes them sympathetic. Star Trek has never opposed integration of technology into the human body per se, nor, one suspects, would Lewis.650 But both Lewis and Star Trek demonstrate more nuance than Decker in recognizing that there is a meaningful difference between using applied science responsibly and using it in a way that “abolishes man.” There’s no doubt that the Borg as they first appear in the second season of Next Generation are presented as a frightening enemy. They were, in fact, created for that specific purpose.651 Everything about the Borg’s introduction in the episode “Q Who” channels the audience’s antipathy—our

“repugnance”—against them. The Enterprise’s encounter with the Borg is orchestrated by the super-being Q, an established adversary of the Next Generation crew. Q sends the ship to distant Borg space—accelerating the Federation’s first contact with them—precisely because they are dangerous. Confronted with Picard’s optimism about humanity’s potential, Q counters, “Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy filled with wonders you cannot possibly imagine. And terrors to freeze your soul!”652 In the context of the episode, the Borg clearly epitomize the “terrors” to which Q is referring, and he will reiterate these terrors again and again in “Q Who.” After the Enterprise has barely escaped, at the cost of eighteen lives, he insists to Picard, “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.”653 And if any doubt remains that the Borg originated as villains, that doubt can be eradicated when we examine Guinan’s experiences with them. While by no means a flawless character, Guinan existed as a model of wise counsel to Captain Picard and the rest of the Enterprise crew, from her first appearances in the second season throughout the show’s run. Simply put, anything she says must be taken seriously. And Guinan dislikes the Borg more than anyone, which is hardly surprising, as “Q Who” reveals that it was the Borg that decimated her world and scattered her people, the El-Aurians, across the galaxy. This gives her animosity towards them a personal dimension, one that will be more fully fleshed out in Season Five’s “I, Borg.” But in “Q Who,” she joins Q—whom she otherwise intensely dislikes—in articulating the reasons the Borg present such a dramatic threat to humanity and to the Federation, telling Picard, “You’re just raw material to them.”654 This echoes Q’s description: “The Borg is the ultimate user. They’re unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced. They’re not interested in political conquest, wealth, or power as you know it. They’re simply interested in your ship, its technology. They’ve identified it as something they can consume.”655 Later episodes will complicate this basic understanding of the Borg, but never enough to remove the heart of the matter: the Borg are supremely

utilitarian. In other words, these dangerous and villainous beings perfectly illustrate Lewis’s warnings of Tao-less technological progressivism. From the outset, Book Three of Abolition of Man seeks to make us squirm at the scientistic idea of “Man’s conquest of Nature.”656 Humans who treat the world in this imperialistic fashion, without care for the objects of study on their own terms, are utilitarian because they only care about the uses of nature as they apply to humanity. These applications will supposedly make human life better. But far from being a grand utopian march toward equality and better lives, Lewis warns, this naïve progressive optimism will ultimately have the exact opposite effect. It will create a generation which so thoroughly “conquers” nature that all later generations must be enslaved by its “advances.” And even these advances will be spearheaded by an oligarchy of technocratic elites rather than a knowledgeable, democratic consensus: This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course if any one age really attains . . . the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.657 The Borg did not originate with humanity,658 yet their success in conquering whole worlds only makes them an even grander example of Lewis’s cautions. Not content to have enslaved their own species to their technological imperialism, the Borg move from world to world, consuming their resources. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in “Q Who” is the image of the Borg nursery, where infants have already been equipped with cybernetic attachments. But Borg “reproduction” is clarified even further when they arrive in Federation space a year and a half later in the two-part episode “The Best of Both Worlds.”659 In this episode, Captain Picard is kidnapped and “assimilated” by the Borg, fitted with technological components and made a part of the collective consciousness. “Q Who” demonstrates the Borg approach to technological resources, but “The Best of

Both Worlds” demonstrates that their approach to organic life—to human resources, as it were—is no different. The Borg truly are, as Q has stated, “the ultimate user.” Thus, thousands of species across the galaxy become enslaved to the vision of whatever race first developed Borg technology and established a vision of consuming or assimilating other worlds for their own use. The species victimized become the “patients of that power,” the power to conquer nature. In Star Trek: The Next Generation particularly, the great conflict that arises between the Federation and the Borg stems from a revulsion of this lack of volition. The Borg present assimilation as an ultimatum, not a meaningful choice, as we see in this early conversation between Picard and the Collective: Picard: I have nothing to say to you! And I will resist you with my last ounce of strength! Borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. Picard: Impossible. My culture is based on freedom and selfdetermination. Borg: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply. Picard: We would rather die. Borg: Irrelevant. Your archaic cultures are authority-driven. To facilitate our introduction into your societies, it has been decided a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.660 Soon after this conversation—which coined the Borg’s signature phrase, “Resistance is futile”—Picard is assimilated, becoming “that voice” under the Borg name Locutus. The dialogue highlights all the elements that make the Borg so utilitarian and therefore so dangerous. Picard’s life is regarded as no different from his ship’s systems, simply “biological and technological distinctiveness.” Human culture itself is just another way for the Borg to

improve themselves, who believe it will “adapt to service” them. The distinction between the enforced collective will of the Borg and the Federation insistence on a “culture . . . based on freedom and selfdetermination” underlies the conflicts between the two parties in The Next Generation. When the Borg return almost two years later in “I, Borg,” this distinction remains at the heart of their conflict. In this episode, for the first time, the Borg are “humanized,” but only in the loss of their essential Borgishness—more specifically, in a single Borg’s loss of Borgishness. When Third of Five—eventually known as Hugh—becomes separated from the Collective, he is forced to experience life alone, prompting some of Star Trek’s most significant discussions of human (or at least rational sentient) identity. In befriending Hugh, engineer Geordi La Forge builds on Picard’s language of self-determination to define his own humanity: Think of it this way: every time you talk about yourself, you use the word “we”: “we want this,” “we want that.” You don’t even know how to think of yourself as a single individual. You don’t say “I want this” or “I am Hugh.” We are all separate individuals. I am Geordi. I choose what I want to do with my life. I make decisions for myself. For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying.661 The arc of “I, Borg” follows Hugh’s acceptance of himself as an individual, even as he is sent back to the Borg Collective. Of course, we are naturally going to root for the Federation philosophy to prevail in this setting, to see Hugh adopt La Forge’s “sense of individuality,” even as we would choose Picard’s “freedom and self-determination” over the Borg’s hive mind. Yet encountering the vulnerable Hugh, who legitimately misses the Collective, forces us for the first time to question the limits of the Federation way of life. Are Picard and La Forge touting a kind of radical autonomy as bad in its own extreme as the Borg are on their end of the spectrum? Taken in isolation, we could understand our Federation heroes this way and in the process open them to Lewis’s censure no less than the Borg. After all, The Abolition of Man opens with his takedown of the subjective approach to value that “Gaius and Titius” call for in “The Green Book.” In The Great Divorce, which Lewis wrote almost coincident with The Abolition of Man,

hell itself is depicted as being populated by self-centered individualists.662 Are Picard and La Forge simply iterating another version of this selfish, subjective, myopic worldview? In context, I don’t think this is the case. Indeed, the first moves toward answering such objections come in “I, Borg” itself. Guinan and Picard have both been traumatized by the Borg, and they are the most resistant to acknowledging Hugh’s burgeoning development as a person. But actually talking to Hugh changes Guinan’s perspective: Hugh: We are Borg. Guinan: Aren’t you gonna tell me you have to assimilate me? Hugh: You wish to be assimilated? Guinan: No, but that’s what you things do, isn’t it? Resistance is futile? Hugh: Resistance is futile. Guinan: It isn’t. My people resisted when the Borg came, to assimilate us. Some of us survived. Hugh: Resistance is not futile? Guinan: No. But thanks to you, there are very few of us left. We’re scattered throughout the galaxy. We don’t even have a home anymore. Hugh: What you are saying is that you are lonely. Guinan: What? Hugh: You have no others. You have no home. We are also lonely.663 Hugh’s first interpersonal encounters with individuals come in interactions with the Enterprise crew, all of whom are inclined to reject him. He thus goes from one extreme to the other, from the intimate union of the Collective to a realm that initially appears atomized, since he has no established community with those around him. It is little wonder that he should describe his first encounters with individuality as “lonely.” As the episode progresses, however, individuals like La Forge develop friendship with him, creating willing community. This will remain Star Trek’s answer to negotiating the

tension between autonomy and collectivism. The repercussions of Hugh’s individuality appear in the episode “Descent,” which actually serves as a case study on the limits of autonomy. Hugh’s individuality, we learn, has “infected” a segment of the Borg population. Unmoored from the Collective, they can’t handle their isolation, turning to a strong-willed leader to govern them. Unfortunately, the leader they find is Lore, the wicked twin “brother” of Data, the Enterprise’s android crewmember. Unlike Data, Lore possesses emotions, yet he is still a Taoless “man without a chest,” since he is unscrupulous and unethical, possessing selfish emotions but no sense of justice or compassion. The entire scenario of “Descent” helps show why the writers of The Next Generation did not intend Picard’s and La Forge’s statements to reflect unmitigated selfsovereignty. Without any responsibility to a broader communal context, individuals either become weak and confused in an overwhelming cosmos— like the Borg when they first become disconnected—or ruthless and selfserving—like Lore himself. Lore is able to manipulate the Borg’s instinctive need for community to his own entirely self-motivated, power-hungry ends, imposing his control on them as the first Borg creators surely did generations earlier, just as Lewis warns in The Abolition of Man. In doing so, he manipulates their “humanity,” their tendency toward the Tao, to meet his own power-hungry ends. The episode ends with Lore’s defeat, allowing the sympathetic Hugh to become the leader of their ex-Borg community.664 The later Borg episodes of Next Generation help show us why an individual Borg might not want to leave the Collective once he or she has entered it, given the trauma of isolation following removal. But why would anyone choose this existence in the first place? Borg existence seems diminished, almost animalistic. The apparent majority of Borg “units” are referred to as “drones,” reflecting their insect-like lives, existing purely to keep the “species” maintained. In this sense, they reflect one of Lewis’s chief concerns about future generations that have lost their Tao: they “abolish man” and, in conquering Nature, become conquered by Nature: At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely

“natural”—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.665 While the Collective retains a corporate intelligence, each individual drone is functionally mindless, soulless, by itself. Survival and adaptation would appear to remain the only requirements for continued life. The Star Trek universe does, however, make some moves toward suggesting what might make Borg life appealing. As we’ve already seen, the Star Trek future takes an overwhelmingly negative stance toward extensive human modification; but since there have been hundreds of episodes penned by dozens of writers over half a century, we shouldn’t find it surprising that some exceptions occur. Perhaps the most obvious predates the Borg entirely: the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Here, an old human probe, Voyager (now known as V-ger) becomes sentient and eventually merges its consciousness with that of two Enterprise crew. Observing this moment, Spock declares, “We witnessed a birth. Possibly a next step in our evolution.”666 Processes of evolution are an assumed part of Star Trek, and the Borg will later use similar language,667 positing themselves as the apex of evolution due to their synthesis of organic and technological components. But the producers of The Motion Picture were crafting a standalone story;668 and while the possible transhumanism of the movie’s final act may be consistent with one strand of science fiction, it is out of sync with the overall arc of the Trek universe. Still, as writers and producers developed the Borg more extensively, they explored in greater depth some of the background to Borg “culture.” This texturing began to emerge in the eighth movie, First Contact, and was advanced much further in the series Voyager. The episode “Unity”—the first significant appearance of the Borg in Voyager669—does not address the question of Borg origins but does suggest what might have made that form of life appealing, while also acknowledging the danger of that logic. Voyager (also the name of the series’s main starship, but bearing no direct relation to the probe of The Motion Picture) follows the exploits of a starship

trapped in the distant Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, gradually making its way home. In “Unity,” Voyager’s first officer, Commander Chakotay, is scouting out territory when he receives a distress call. Travelling to the source, he eventually learns that the planet is inhabited by former Borg drones who had become disconnected from the Collective. Like the Borg in “Descent,” their removal from the hive mind was traumatic; some forge a more amicable “cooperative,” while other factions remain hostile. The episode ends with the cooperative coercing Chakotay into reactivating Borg technology, linking the planet’s inhabitants into a single cooperative, one that is not, however, part of the broader Borg Collective. In “Unity,” the Borg are given a very human face: Dr. Riley Frazier. A former drone and leader in the cooperative, she and Chakotay are immediately attracted to one another. She doesn’t ignore the aggression of the Borg who assimilated her but points out the advantages of her life in the Collective: “When we were linked, we had no ethnic conflict. There was no crime, no hunger, no health problems. We lived as one harmonious family.”670 She compares the psychic intimacy of the Borg hive-mind to the physical intimacy of sexuality. Frazier and her friends believe that a smaller-scale linking will preserve the Collective’s intimacy while avoiding the imperialistic inhumanness of the Borg as a whole. Future episodes “humanize” the Borg even more with the addition of the character Seven of Nine in the fourth season. A human assimilated at a young age, Seven of Nine—born Annika Hansen—is disconnected from the Collective while aboard Voyager. The restoration of her humanity represents one of the major arcs through the last four seasons of Voyager. Seven finds it challenging at times to adapt to human society, and in the course of the series, she often gives voice to the Borg philosophy. Like Frazier, Seven appreciates the “unity” of the cybernetically connected minds. She finds the Federation form of community to be significantly less efficient than that of the Borg. This becomes evident in the episode that introduced her. In “Scorpion,” Captain Kathryn Janeway and Voyager’s crew discover a race hostile to the Borg, Species 8472. The creative investigation of the Starfleet officers allows them to discover a means of combating this species that the Borg themselves lack. Janeway attempts to barter this information with the Borg in exchange for safe passage, and as part of their bargain, the Collective sends Seven of Nine to act as a go-between. But she finds the human methods

tedious, complaining, “You are erratic, conflicted, disorganized. Every decision is debated, every action questioned, every individual entitled to their own small opinion. You lack harmony, cohesion, greatness. It will be your undoing.”671 The Borg desire for this form of harmony does provide a sort of makeshift teleology, even religion. The Borg claim to seek out “perfection,” which they see as the harmonious interweaving of many into a grand unity. Their own synthesis of organic and technological components is one example of this move toward their “perfection,” as is the collective blending of many minds into an ordered whole. In “Scorpion,” the Voyager crew learn that the Borg initiated the war against Species 8472—“the apex of biological evolution”672—in hope of assimilating their biological qualities. This teleology becomes manifest in the episode “The Omega Directive,” when Voyager encounters a mysterious and powerful particle called Omega that the Borg have long looked upon in reverence. Seven describes her attitude to Chakotay in explicitly religious terms: Seven: [I]t is perfection. The molecules exist in a flawless state, infinite parts functioning as one. Commander, you are a spiritual man. Chakotay: That’s right. Seven: If you had the chance to see your God, your Great Spirit— what would you do? Chakotay: I’d pursue it. With all my heart. Seven: Then you understand.673 This definition of “perfection,” a harmony of diverse elements, could seem enticing at first blush. Decker, comparing such oneness to the monism of philosophers like Parmenides, Spinoza, and Hegel,674 seems to favor this interpretation. Still, the ethical impetus is to empathize with individual Borg as they resist the Collective; both series remain inimical to the Borg way of life as a whole. Decker contends that “[b]y the time of Voyager, the distinction [between human and machine] has been all but erased as we are asked to struggle

alongside . . . a former Borg.”675 Yet the very fact of Seven’s struggle indicates that, for the writers of Voyager, the human/machine binary is a distinction that does have meaning. It is her struggle to regain her humanity, which had been “abolished,” as it were, in the Borg Collective. Indeed, in “Scorpion,” while still connected to the hive mind, Seven maintains of herself that she “ceased to be human” at the time of her assimilation. Episodes like “The Raven” and “Dark Frontier” show the violent manner in which she and her parents were altered by the Borg, while in “Infinite Regress,” we get glimpses of the harm she caused as a drone. In “Unimatrix Zero,” we see ways in which Borg drones were psychically resisting the hive mind even as they were part of the Collective. It’s certainly possible that the enigmatic Borg founders—the presumptive Species 1—weren’t prompted entirely by abusive or self-serving motivations when they formed the Collective. Perhaps they sought equality and radical psychic companionship, even as the Cooperative of “Unity” did. Practically, however, it is hard to imagine how such a transformation could be achieved with species-wide consent. And by the time The Next Generation and Voyager occur, any desire for or even pretense of mutual amicability has been crushed by the force of the Borg. Significantly, Frazier’s Cooperative in “Unity” ultimately chooses to manipulate Chakotay in order to draw the other factions into their mind-link, quite against the will of those factions. Chakotay—initially sympathetic to their cause—concludes the episode by noting that “they didn’t hesitate to impose their collective will on me when it served their interests, did they? . . . I wonder how long their ideals will last in the face of that kind of power?”676 This step-by-step process of regression from ideals toward corrupted power provides a glimpse into how the Borg may have developed at their origins. And so, by seeking unity for ostensibly pure motives, their power grows, and the initial will of the Conditioners enslaves subsequent generations—and, in the case of the Borg, subsequent worlds. While characters like Hugh, Frazier, and Seven of Nine provide a relatable face to drones cut off from the “harmony” of the group mind, the writers of Star Trek also devised a means of giving a face to its more malevolent aspects: the Borg Queen. Introduced in First Contact, some version of the Borg Queen would also appear in three episodes of Voyager: “Dark

Frontier,” “Unimatrix Zero,” and “Endgame.” Her character was a natural outgrowth of the insectoid theme and allowed writers to have direct interaction between actors. This led to a structuring device that occurs twice in the Star Trek universe, in First Contact and again in “Dark Frontier.” Both cases are set up like medieval morality plays in which a conflicted character has, effectively, a “good angel” (the Starfleet captain) and a “bad angel” (the Borg Queen) vying for that character’s soul. In this way, the Federation model of individuals operating in ethical community is contrasted with amoral Borg collectivity, dramatically forcing the character in tension to choose a side. In First Contact, it is Data who must choose between the Federation principles personified by Captain Picard and the seductive Borg Queen, who has taken over the Enterprise after travelling into the past in an attempt to alter Earth’s history. In Data’s dialogues with the Queen, we learn more about how the Borg see themselves, though she unwittingly reveals exactly the dangers of the Borg mentality that Lewis anticipates in Abolition of Man, as in this first conversation: Borg Queen: Are you ready? Data: Who are you? Borg Queen: I am the Borg. Data: That is a contradiction. The Borg have a collective consciousness. There are no individuals. Borg Queen: I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg. Data: Greetings. I am curious. Do you control the Borg Collective? Borg Queen: You imply disparity where none exists. I am the Collective. Data: Perhaps I should rephrase the question. I wish to understand the organizational relationships. Are you their leader? Borg Queen: I bring order to chaos. Data: An interesting, if cryptic, response.

Borg Queen: You are in chaos, Data. You are the contradiction: a machine who wishes to be human. Data: Since you seem to know so much about me, you must be aware that I am programmed to evolve, to better myself. Borg Queen: We too are on a quest to better ourselves, evolving toward a state of perfection. Data: Forgive me, but the Borg do not evolve. They conquer. Borg Queen: By assimilating other beings into our Collective, we are bringing them closer to perfection. Data: Somehow, I question your motives. Borg Queen: That is because you haven’t been properly stimulated yet.677 This sequence is remarkable in how well it tracks with Lewis’s thought. The godlike language which the Queen applies to herself reveals from the outset the hubris of the Borg project. Like Ransom’s translation of Weston’s speech in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet,678 Data cuts through the Borg Queen’s high-minded language to uncover the cruelty beneath her words. Far from “evolving toward a state of perfection,” he notes, the Borg seek to “conquer”; elsewhere he points out to her, “Believing oneself to be perfect is often the sign of a delusional mind.”679 The Borg conquest of nature is the kind of power-hungry caprice by which Lewis characterizes the “Conditioners” who will alter humanity’s future. And Data is absolutely right to “question [their] motives.” In Abolition of Man, Lewis notes that this is exactly what will happen at the hands of the Conditioners: The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. . . . Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut

into shapes for the pleasure of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own natural impulses.680 Certainly, the Borg quite literally “knead and cut” those who are their subjects, all in the service of the ill-defined eschatology of “perfection.” Beneath this pursuit, however, their “motives” remain ultimately animalistic. The Borg Queen doesn’t even attempt a rational answer to Data’s questioning of her objectives. Rather, she “stimulates” a piece of human flesh that she has grafted onto his android body, and later seduces him in a bizarrely sexual way. In other words, her actions reveal that her motives are really natural appetites: indulgence of flesh681 and, in the longer term, survival and expansion of their “species.” Data recognizes that he is ultimately a means to an end for the Borg Queen, as he has access to computer codes that she needs in order to control the Enterprise. Like everyone else, he is really “raw material” to her. Picard, however, sees Data as more than a mere means. After setting the Enterprise to self-destruct, he voluntarily remains aboard in the hope of rescuing Data from the Borg. In the final confrontation, forced to choose between his commitment to the values of the Federation and the prospect of becoming a Borg, he betrays the Queen, killing her and all the drones on board. Picard’s act of voluntary self-sacrifice shows that the selfdetermination voiced in early Borg episodes is not just a hollow insistence on personal autonomy. Instead, Federation “freedom” is grounded in a community more “perfect” than any Collective which annihilates volition entirely. In “Descent,” Data had to choose to reject the wrongly ordered, power-hungry (and unethical) ordering of emotions fed to him (and the Borg) by his brother Lore. In First Contact, he makes a similar decision in choosing Picard. For in the visceral, animalistic quest for survival, placing appetite over rationally ordered emotion, the Borg, like Lore, become what Lewis calls in The Abolition of Man “Men without Chests.”682 When Data selects the Federation way over the Borg way, he is opting for a vision of humanity that allows for a vision of love, duty, and friendship, made all the more poignant in that by First Contact, Data has Lore’s emotion chip and must work consciously against it. Unlike the Borg, in First Contact Data proves he has a chest. A similar dynamic occurs in the Voyager episode “Dark Frontier.” In this

episode, the Borg Queen draws Seven of Nine to her central Unicomplex, telling her that she allowed Seven to be removed from the Collective as part of a broader plan to learn enough about troublesome humanity to assimilate them more effectively. Their dialogues resemble those between the Queen and Data, though in First Contact, the conflict is between rival companions (Picard and the Queen), whereas in “Dark Frontier,” the conflict for Seven exists between dueling maternal figures (Janeway and the Queen). Though Seven is vulnerable, she comments acerbically on the Borg Queen’s religious rhetoric, even as Data had, such as in a scene when she observes the assimilation of a massive population: Borg Queen: Congratulations. Seven: Regarding? Borg Queen: Assimilation is complete. Seven: Three hundred thousand individuals have been transformed into drones. Should they be congratulated as well? Borg Queen: They should be. They’ve left behind their trivial, selfish lives, and they’ve been reborn with a greater purpose. We’ve delivered them from chaos into order. Seven: Comforting words. Use them next time instead of “Resistance is futile.” You may elicit a few volunteers.683 The Borg Queen claims to be acting in the best interest not only of Seven but of all the individuals that have been forced into the Collective. Yet elsewhere, she derides concern for others as “[h]uman sentiment. Compassion, guilt, empathy—they’re irrelevant.”684 And, of course, she’s right, in a sense. Care for the needs of others is not a necessary trait of survival, if continued existence is the primary barometer of life and relevance. But her insistence on this irrelevance shows that she is quite outside the confines of the Tao, and therefore quite outside the boundaries of humanity. Seven, however, refuses to be taken in by the Borg Queen’s language of “greatness” and “perfection.” It is ultimately empty, an apparent teleology with no transcendent end point, much like the progressive future that Lewis warns against in The Abolition of Man: “It is no use to ‘see

through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”685 Seven is able to “see through” the transparency of the Borg Queen’s shallow philosophy, yet she retains her ability to see. In the end, she sides with Janeway and the ethical community of friendship and Tao. “Voyager is my Collective now,”686 she insists, and at the end, in rejecting the Queen, she tells Janeway, “Our thoughts are one.”687 In Mere Christianity, Lewis sets forth the distinctives of the Christian faith, but in Abolition of Man, he is more concerned with the moral norms that cut across all human belief systems, that help define our humanity across time and religion. A culture that rejects these norms becomes inhuman, and technocratic progressivism was—and still may be—in danger of doing just that. So even though Star Trek in some ways may be indifferent or downright hostile to the Christian faith, we should not be surprised to find ethical principles at play that intersect with natural law, with Lewis’s Tao.688 At one point in First Contact, the Borg Queen derides Data’s quest to become human: “Human! We used to be exactly like them: flawed, weak, organic. But we evolved to include the synthetic. Now we use both to attain perfection.”689 Lewis would hardly contest the characterization of humanity as “flawed,” “weak,” and “organic.” But such limited beings as the Borg could never pull themselves up to “perfection” by their own merits, and their attempts to do so would be destined to result in control and coercion by the clique who made the attempt. While lacking the transcendent hope of the Christian faith, the writers in the Star Trek universe were well aware of the dangers of scientism taken beyond the realms of universal ethical principles. The Borg episodes in the Star Trek universe may now be more relevant than ever, serving as a warning to this and future generations of the same threat that C. S. Lewis recognized when he first presented The Abolition of Man seventy years ago.

Bibliography Barad, Judith, and Ed Robertson. The Ethics of Star Trek. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Bole, Cliff. “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures,

1990. ———. “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1990. ———. “Dark Frontier, Part I.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1999. Bowman, Robert. “Q Who.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1989. Burton, LeVar. “The Raven.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Daniels, Marc. “Court Martial.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1967. Decker, Kevin S. “Inhuman Nature, or What’s It Like to Be a Borg?” In Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant. Edited by Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker, 131–46. Chicago: Open Court, 2008. Frakes, Jonathan. Star Trek: First Contact. Paramount Pictures, 1996. Kroeker, Allan. “Endgame.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 2001. ———. “Unimatrix Zero, Part I.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 2000. Kolbe, Winrich. “Scorpion, Part II.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Lederman, Robert. “I, Borg.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1992. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2001. ———. The Great Divorce. New York: Touchstone, 1996. ———. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Scribner, 1996. Livingston, David. “Infinite Regress.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1998. Lobl, Victor. “The Omega Directive.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1998. McNeill, Robert Duncan. “Unity.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Nemecek, Larry. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion. Rev. ed. New York: Pocket, 2003. Robinson, Andrew. “Blood Fever.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Senensky, Ralph. “Bread and Circuses.” Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, 1968. Shatner, William, Judith Reeves-Stevens, and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. The Return. New York: Pocket, 1996. Singer, Alexander. “Descent, Part I.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1993. ———. “Descent, Part II.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount Pictures, 1993. Vejar, Mike. “Unimatrix Zero, Part II.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 2000. Windell, Terry. “Dark Frontier, Part II.” Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount Pictures, 1999. Wise, Robert. Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Paramount Pictures, 1979.

647. Even in the original Star Trek, one can find positive portrayals of the Bible (Daniels, “Court Martial”) and Christianity (Senensky, “Bread and Circuses”). Deep Space Nine’s Major Kira and Voyager’s Commander Chakotay, along with Commander Worf of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, all demonstrate (to varying degrees) a commitment to religious principle. 648. Nemecek, Companion, 86. 649. Decker, “Inhuman,” 145–46. 650. Lewis advocates for a “regenerate science” that “would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself” (79). However, he insists that Abolition of Man is not “an attack on science”; Lewis, Abolition of Man, 75. 651. Nemecek, Companion, 86. 652. Bowman, “Q Who.” 653. Ibid.

654. Ibid. 655. Ibid. 656. Lewis, Abolition, 53. 657. Ibid., 56–57. I have chosen to focus on the Borg as a manifestation of this principle; Lewis explicitly invokes eugenics, which the Star Trek universe treats in many ways similarly. 658. Despite their humanoid appearance, the Borg originate in a distant quadrant of space. Their numerical designation for humanity—Species 5618—implies that 5,617 species had been assimilated into the Collective prior to the first human. 659. Bole, “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I” and “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.” For ease of expression, I will refer in-text to two-part episodes by a single title, though formally they exist as two distinctive episodes. 660. “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I.” 661. Lederman, “I, Borg.” 662. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 13–26. 663. Ibid. 664. Singer, “Descent, Part I” and “Descent, Part II.” 665. Lewis, Abolition, 67–68. 666. Wise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 667. In what may be a recognition of these parallels, the (non-canonical) Star Trek novel The Return actually makes a direct connection between the two, suggesting that it was the Borg Collective itself which first gave the old Voyager probe sentience. Shatner, Reeves-Stevens, and Reeves-Stevens, The Return, 323–27. 668. Gene Roddenberry certainly played a major role in the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but its director and writers would have no other involvement in planning any Star Trek film or episode. 669. A Borg corpse had been seen briefly at the end of the third-season episode “Blood Fever.” Robinson, “Blood Fever.” 670. McNeill, “Unity.” 671. Kolbe, “Scorpion, Part II.” 672. Ibid. 673. Lobl, “The Omega Directive.” 674. Decker, “Inhuman Nature,” 132–42. 675. Ibid., 145. 676. McNeill, “Unity.” 677. Frakes, First Contact. 678. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 135–40. 679. Frakes, First Contact.

680. Lewis, Abolition, 72–73. 681. At one point, the Borg Queen employs reverse psychology, enjoining Data to remove the graft, telling him, “Don’t be tempted by flesh!” Data feigns internal conflict throughout these sequences though later admits to Picard that he was “tempted by her offer” for a mere 0.68 seconds (though “[f]or an android, that is nearly an eternity”). 682. Lewis, Abolition, 25. 683. Windell, “Dark Frontier, Part II.” 684. Ibid. 685. Lewis, Abolition, 81. 686. Bole, “Dark Frontier, Part I.” 687. Windell, Dark Frontier, Part II.” 688. Indeed, Judith Barad and Ed Robertson argue against both moral relativism and religious ethics in the Star Trek universe. Barad and Robertson, Ethics, 3–38. 689. Frakes, First Contact.

A Very Short Appendix of Recommended Reading The books by Lewis below are suggested based on their relevance to the themes in this book. The other books and the blogs are suggested based on their relevance to Lewis, to themes from the Abolition of Man, or to the film productions studied in this book. This list is indeed “very short.” The reader interested in this topic may start anywhere and will likely find a trail of readings meandering through this list or far, far off of it. Either way, she is likely to find enough reading to keep her occupied as long as her interest lasts. (However, we recommend starting with Lewis!)

Books by C. S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe The Horse and His Boy Prince Caspian The Voyage of the Dawntreader The Silver Chair The Last Battle The Space Trilogy Out of the Silent Planet Perelandra That Hideous Strength The Screwtape Letters

Mere Christianity The Discarded Image

Other Books Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bertonneau, Thomas, and Kim Paffenroth. The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006. Decker, Kevin S., and Jason T. Eberl, eds. Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant. Peru, IL: Open Court, 2008. Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. In Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress. 4th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Downing, David C. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Dryden, Jane, and Mark D. White, eds. Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape This Book. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011. Edwards, Bruce L., ed. C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy. 4 vols. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Irwin, William. Terminator and Philosophy: I’ll Be Back, Therefore I Am. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. Kass, Leon R. Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. San Francisco: Encounter, 2002. Kreeft, Peter. C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium: Six Essays on the Abolition of Man. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994. Lawler, Peter Augustine. Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005. MacSwain, Robert, and Michael Ward, eds. The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2014. Markos, Louis. Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003. Neece, Kevin C. The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Original Crew. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016. Rubin, Charles T. Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress. New York: Encounter, 2014.

Blogs Wesley Smith. “Human Exceptionalism.” http://www.nationalreview.com/human-excep tionalism. The CSLewis.com Blog. http://blog.cslewis.com/.

Index of Films and Directors 1984 (1984), 220–21, 226, 227 9, 7, 162–77 Abrams, J. J., 3, 11, 59n7, 70 Acker, Shane, 17, 162, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174n56, 175, 176 Altered States, 18, 229, 234–35, 236 Anderson, Michael, 278n8, 279, 291 Babylon 5, 228, 236 Bay, Michael, 29n9, 37, 180, 190, 238, 239n7, 241n13, 244n21, 250 Blomkamp, Niell, 226, 238, 247, 250, 255n15, 262 Blade Runner, 16, 121–33, 179, 186–88 Brave New World (1998), 19, 215, 227, 252–63 Cameron, James, 29n7, 37 Cronenberg, David, 236 Chappie, 247, 250 The Clonus Horror, 19, 277, 278, 285–90, 290–91, 292 Dark City, 18, 186, 191, 229, 233–34, 235, 236 District 9, 238, 247, 248, 250 Doctor Who, not in this book (What’s up with that?) Elysium, 226, 238, 239, 247, 248–49, 250, 255n15, 262 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 19, 294–306 Fahrenheit 451, 224–26 Fiveson, Robert, 278n9, 287, 292, The Fly (1986), 236 Frakes, Jonathan, 58n4, 60n10, 65n25, 69n39, 71, 320n31, 321n33, 324 Frankenheimer, John, 37, 29n10 Fringe, xiii, 3, 11–14, 20–21 Gattaca, 15, 18, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 129n18, 226, 227, 237–50 Green Lantern: The Animated Series, 16, 137–47 Gondry, Michel, 294n2, 306 Interstellar, 16, 148–61 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 29, 34, 38 The Island, 15, 18, 19, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37, 180, 188–89, 190, 237–50 The Island of Dr. Moreau, 15, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37 Jones, Duncan, 178n3 191 Jurassic Park, xiii, 27, 36 38 Kaufman, Philip, 29, 34n17, 38 Lang, Fritz, 232, 236, 255–56n15, 263, Libman, Leslie, and Larry Williams, 215, 227, 252, 254, 257n19, 263 Logan’s Run, 19, 277, 278–85, 287, 290–91 Lost in Space, 29, 38, 104, 119 Lucas, George, 29n6, 30, 38, 89n3, 103, 180, 191

The Matrix, xiv-xv, xvin1, 104, 105, 120, 129n18, 176, 177 Metropolis, 18, 122, 128n18, 229, 232–33, 235, 236, 255n15, 263 Moon, 17, 178–91 Never Let Me Go, 19, 264–76 Nimoy, Leonard, 25, 197n7, 205, 215, 253 Niccol, Andrew, 29n11, 38, 227, 238, 240n9, 241, 243n19, 250 Nolan, Christopher, 149, 150, 153, 158, 159, 161 Parts: The Clonus Horror, see The Clonus Horror Person of Interest, 15, 73–86 Pfister, Wally, 38, 106n4, 113n35, 120, 148–61 Prometheus, 15, 26, 29, 31, 33, 38 Proyas, Alex, 186, 191, 233, 236 Radford, Michael, 220, 226, 227 Romanek, Mark, 264, 267, 270, 272, 274, 275, 276 Russell, Ken, 234, 236 Scott, Ridley, 29, 31, 38, 122, 123, 125, 128n16, 133, 179, 186, 191 Shatner, William, 54n30, 55, 316n21, 325 Spielberg, Steven, 27n3, 38, 82, 86 Star Trek, 39–55, 192–205, 307–25 Star Trek: The Animated Series, 57 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 200, 205, 308n1 Star Trek: Enterprise, 70, 205 Star Trek: First Contact, 56, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 316, 319–22, 323–24 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 17, 20, 193–96, 200, 205 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 17, 193, 196–200, 205 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 17, 193, 204, 205 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 54–55 Star Trek: Insurrection, 56, 62, 63, 64–65, 66, 70, 71 Star Trek Into Darkness, 59, 60, 62, 70 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 316, 325 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 15, 17, 20, 36, 38, 56–72, 200–203, 205, 307–25 Star Trek (Original Series), 15, 17, 25, 36, 37, 39–55, 56–72, 308, 324 Star Trek: Voyager, 20, 49n22, 55, 59, 193, 308, 316–9, 322–3, 324–25 Star Wars, 26, 29, 30, 33, 38, 180, 191 Transcendence, xiii, 15–16, 34, 38, 104–20, 148–61 The Terminator, xiii, 15, 26, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37, 104, 128n18 THX 1138, 15, 87–103, 254n15, 263 Truffaut, Francois, 224–26, 227 Wachowski, Laurence, and Andrew Wachowski, 120, 177

General Index Aristotle, 44, 47, 55, 61, 124n11, 133, 146, 232 Augustine, 43, 61, 121, 133, 304, 306 Bacon, Francis, 3–6, 18, 20, 231–32, 237, 238, 241, 246, 249, 250, 328 Bradbury, Ray, 18, 28, 210, 213, 217, 221–26, 247 Boethius, 4–6, 20 The Chronicles of Narnia, xvi, 235–36, 327 Cloning/Clones, 17, 19, 178–91, 240, 242–49, 264–76, 278, 285–90 Confucianism, 44, 305 Darwinism, 229, 241 Descartes, René, 2, 3–7, 20, 328 The Discarded Image, 231, 236, 328 Dostoyevksy, Fyodor, 209, 118n45, 119 Education, 2, 9–10, 16, 26, 28, 30, 34–37, 76, 88–89, 101–2, 151, 209, 215, 217, 230 Fukuyama, Francis, 218, 226 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 257, 263, 295, 299, 300–301, 304, 306 That Hideous Strength, xiii, 32, 106n5, 119n47, 120, 211, 229–30, 235, 236, 242, 245–46, 247, 250, 328 Huxley, Aldous, 18, 27, 179–80, 188, 190, 210, 212–15, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 227, 247, 252, 254, 257n19, 259n27, 263 James, William, 36 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 112 Kass, Leon, 180–81, 190, 309, 328 Lukács, Georg, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 103 Mere Christianity, 16, 30, 38, 153, 156n12, 158n14, 159, 161, 229, 236, 323, 328 Mill, John Stuart, 7 Orwell, George, 18, 27, 210, 212, 213, 216–21, 223, 227 Out of the Silent Planet, xviin3, 32, 249, 250, 321, 324, 328 Plato, 4, 5, 9, 15–16, 36, 44, 51–52, 55, 61, 105, 106–112, 114n38, 116n42, 118, 119, 120, 121, 133, 135 Perelandra, xvii, 32, 328 Roddenberry, Gene, 39, 42, 192, 307–8, 316n22 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 124n10, 133 The Screwtape Letters, xvi, 18, 21, 55, 211, 228–29, 236, 328 Socrates, 16, 52n25, 106–11, 114 Stoicism, 4, 5, 44, 303 Superheroes, 16, 137–47, 164, 165, 235, xviii Terraforming, 17, 192–205 Verne, Jules, 163 Virtues, Compassion, 57, 59, 124, 125, 174–75, 185, 189, 203, 244, 270, 274, 315, 323 Courage, 16, 141n8, 146, 172, 236, 241

Faith, 35, 158, 160, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 324 Honor, 36, 131, 132, 137, 142, 146 Hope, 17, 31–33, 57, 110, 138, 140–41, 144–46, 152, 154, 156, 162, 167–69, 171–72, 178, 189–90, 192, 195, 199, 204n25, 216, 233, 234, 244, 284, 285, 290, 305 Humility, 199, 204 Justice, 43, 62, 63, 80, 82–83, 106n5, 111, 138–39, 141–42, 144–46, 178, 184–90, 192, 268–69, 315 Love, 12, 13, 14, 16, 28, 35, 44, 70, 91, 97, 106, 109, 111n29, 112–8, 121n5, 132, 138, 141, 142–45, 146, 150, 157–60, 169, 183–84, 186–89, 204, 213, 215, 219, 233–34, 235, 254, 273, 275, 288, 297, 322 Loyalty, 35, 188 Moderation, 49–50 Prudence, 47–48 Wisdom, 31, 32–34, 36–37, 40, 106–7, 111–12, 181, 199, 282, 285, 309 Wells, H. G., 32n15, 38, 163, 164