Not A Blog™

Science fiction, I believe, has two primary purposes. First, it serves to give warnings. Often these are worst-case scenarios, but if nothing else, it gives us an extreme to steer away from. Second, it is a way to write about the truth of today’s world, unburdened by the instinctual emotions of the symbols and people which define contemporary culture. The reader, it is assumed, will make the connection in a more intellectual manner, and hopefully the reasoned conclusion has greater tenacity than the emotional.

The underlying factor between both of these uses of science fiction is something of which I’ve only recently become aware. It came about when I realized that the vast majority of science fiction stories are all the same plot. I hope to show that this does serve as a warning, though not necessarily a conscious one; and it is talking about the state of our world today, though perhaps not intentionally.

It seems almost ridiculous for me to say this now; certainly others have noticed it. At the risk of having everyone collectively say to me, “well, duh, we could have told you that“, I’ll put this down for completeness.

A disproportionately large number of science fiction stories are about the threatened extinction of humanity. Why I should not have realized this before just a few days ago, I can not say. But there it is: we’re fascinated with the large, external threat.

It’s also not news that large, external threats serve to unite people. If any good came from terrorists flying jetliners into the World Trade Center towers, it was the roughly 90 days worth of kindness we saw afterwards. By 2002, however, that had disappeared, to be replaced by Chinese-manufactured American flag waving and the appearance of laughable boundaries defining patriotism.

What we enjoy from this is not the prolonged slog through war, but the small bit of togetherness we feel immediately following the disaster. Humanity is addicted to war, not because war is great, but because the camaraderie of war is great. People take drugs for the initial high, not the following crash; cultures go to war for the initial solidarity, not the following death and destruction.

The greatest possible example of this that many people can imagine is the Biblical end times. I’ve heard it argued that Christianity will destroy the country because Christians—at least certain breeds of fundamentalist Christianity—are obsessed with the end times. They relish the idea of going to war with Satan and all his minions, and so they are driving America in such a way as to bring this about. Forget the number of people who believe we’re on the cusp of the end times; the number of people who hope we are is depressing—but it’s also dangerous because it may become, as they say, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What I don’t agree with is the reason. Christians don’t want the end times because they’re masochistic killers who want to see atheists or heavy metal bands suffer, nor is it because Christianity begets violence. The end times aren’t going to be filled with the James Bond-like antics of the Left Behind series, where crafty Christians get to stick it to the Antichrist in a way where their breaking the law is justified by God. And despite the popularity of books like Left Behind, I don’t think very many Christians are foolish enough to believe this either.

Instead, the end times promise the most solid togetherness and unity and group cohesion you can possibly imagine. It is the ultimate Us vs. Them. Working together for a goal that matters (eternal salvation and working with Jesus, in this case), that’s something worth fighting for.

Intellectuals have their own version of the end times, of course; there’s just not one definitive version of it as with the Bible. The nuclear holocaust is the same thing. In-group cohesion grows to new, practically savage heights!

Science fiction is the perfect stage for this. I started to list works which posit this scenario, but there are too many. They’re just everywhere. Initially, this might seem to go against science fiction being a warning. Something like On the Beach or The Matrix could serve as a warning for us to watch out for our nuclear weapons and/or artificial intelligences; but what about something like War of the Worlds, The Puppet Masters, or even Variable Star? In these cases, the threat to humanity is an intelligent extraterrestrial source. As prescient as that may turn out to be, it has exactly zero applicability to our current condition. What’s the point?

The second—and I believe more intellectual than emotional—appeal of the Armageddon-like scenario is that it provides a straightforward way in which to reboot civilization. Ayn Rand did this. She replaced the communist-leaning world of Atlas Shrugged with Objectivism. Star Trek on the other hand, replaced the rabid 20th century capitalism with some sort of communism, apparently, although no one really knows for sure because any time it comes up, it gets explained away with meaningless weasel-words and pithy phrases.

But most of the time, the books or movies don’t get that far. After civilization gets wiped out—the end. Nobody rebuilds. Sometimes there is no one left; fair enough—but often there are a few hangers-on. Whatever happens to these people, there is an air of living happily ever after, even if they have a lot of hard work head of them.

While some books imply the rebuilding under one scheme or another, they don’t get around to showing it. Atlas Shrugged ends with Objectivism. Communism didn’t work, do this instead. But the world of Objectivism never actually gets built. It’s just assumed that the rest of the book proves it’s the right answer. The world of Star Trek has a big hole between nuclear holocaust and space exploration, and even though they mention it sometimes, how the rebuilding was actually accomplished never quite gets explained, and it’s just assumed that the system works so everyone can focus on the space opera part.

The problem is this: everyone is telling the wrong story.

Authors write about the disaster—the resulting adventuresque group togetherness makes the story gripping, if not somewhat escapist—but few write about rebuilding a civilization from the scraps. Just like in real life, we enjoy the unity against adversity, but unlike real life, stories stop.

If there is any sort of warning growing out of science fiction, it should be two things. Firstly, humanity has a tendency towards war not because individuals are so aggressive and irreconcilable, but because individuals like to be united in a common goal. Or to put it bluntly: peace is boring. Peace will not be forthcoming so long as we get such a positive psychological hit from our altruism borne of the large threat. (Unless, perhaps, we can recognize and mediate this via fiction or other non-destructive recreation.)

Secondly, the proliferation of people telling the first part of the story (the rebooting) with an utter lack of focus on the second part of the story (the rebuilding) should be more worrisome. It tells us something very important about the human race. It tells us that, as a species, we haven’t figured out what to do next.

Many people have this noble ideal of resetting the world via a catastrophe and starting over, but we don’t know what to do after that. If civilization has some further stage to which we should be advancing, I think that should be it. We have to figure out how we would structure ourselves if a collapse did occur. After identifying this, we would have a goal to work towards now. I acknowledge that there may not be an answer to this. But if there is, and if we can make that transition without bloodshed, we’ll be making progress.

We shouldn’t hit the reset button, not yet. (We shouldn’t at all, if we can help it.) Because if we do, it won’t solve anything. We will end up with bigger problems: the problems of survival and infrastructure plus the higher order ideals of human rights and government and all that. We’ll be worse off, because humanity hasn’t given any thought to how it will rebuild. We know that everything can be reset, but nobody has any solid, long term ideas of how to proceed afterwards. We’re really good at telling the first part of the story. Now we have to start thinking about the second.

It’s really the only civilized thing to do.

-Ted