the matrix | J. Zornado

September 5, 2012

If Only the Earth Would Stand Still

Possible solutions to current global environmental problems remain, at least in first-world economies, mostly all talk. At least we’re talking, but it’s high time we moved well beyond talk and addressed the serious crisis that’s unfolding all around us. One web-site that denies global warming declares that people just don’t care about it, not really. Perhaps it’s not as bad as all that—and conferences and papers like mine are merely hysterical rituals of chicken-little –like minds. I hope so, for all of our sakes. But what I believe is that the situation is bad, very bad, and we’re so inclined to self-delusion, cognitive denial and ego-rationalizations that we cannot handle the evidence that scientific researchers of all disciplines continue to gather about the state of the human habitat.

As a way into the current ideological discourse about the myriad problems that plague us, I want to tell you about a recent film, at once a speculative warning, a mechanism of ideological consensulization and a pretty bad piece of movie making. But even bad films, like bad dreams, have something to tell us about what’s on our minds.

As a film the remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a failure. The narrative is saddled with an earlier sensibility—when the world was larger and there were no cell-phones or internet, or spy-satellites, or Google earth, and we were all just waiting for the Cold War to become a nuclear holocaust.

In the original film from 1951 Klaatu and Gort visit earth on a mission to warn Earth: either live peacefully without nuclear weapons or be destroyed! In the 2008 remake, nuclear holocaust has taken a back seat to environmental holocaust. And in this version our not so friendly space alien is humanoid in the shape of Keanu Reeves. The remake retains the limited scope of the first version—the attempt to communicate with all nations turns into a very local affair and our space visitor ends up hanging out with two other rather ordinary human characters. The end result keeps special effects shots to a minimum. This may have worked in 1951 but in our brave new world of digital movie making this cautionary tale leaves one feeling a little gypped in terms of the sci-fi we’ve come to expect on screen these days.

Still, the film for all its limitations can be understood as a kind of dream our culture—or someone in Hollywood–is having, and it’s a dream about human extinction.

In this latest version of the story Klaatu is an alien intelligence in human form born of human DNA. He is, the film establishes, fully human yet alien at the same time. The point here is to establish that the alien is new to the human body and doesn’t “get” being in it, and this he states from the outset that it will take some time adjusting to his new material condition. He is, though, fully human, and when he finally “gets” what it means to be human—to love, to feel connection to others, to fear their loss—we’re supposed to “get” it too, and his change of heart should be ours. This, Klaatu realizes, is what it means to be human, but just what “this” refers to is where the film’s ideological agenda unspools. “I feel it now,” Klaatu declares near the end of the film just as the human race is being swallowed by a swarming storm of mighty metallic grasshoppers unleashed only moments before by Klaatu himself. This plague of locust he unleashes feeds on the material world eating all the steel and concrete in their way.

Klaatu initially has determined that the human race is guilty of crimes against the planet. In the film we learn that life-supporting planets are rare and that Earth is in serious trouble. Keannu plays Klaatu like a latter-day Neo from the Matrix, and the parallels don’t end there. In the Matrix Agent Smith informs us that the human race is “a cancer on this planet” and in The Day the Earth Stood Still, we’re still the cancer but now Keaanu as Klaatu—rather than Agent Smith—is the cure.

“You’re killing the earth,” declares Klaatu, and the film explains that it is the Earth—and, gasp, not humans!—that is special, and in order to save the planet and its biosphere humanity must be removed, for it is a cancer, and Klatuu and his robot Gort have come to do some radical surgery in a last-ditch attempt to save the diseased and dying blue gem.

But then, suddenly, as the film winds down and the plague of locusts swarm, and feed, and grow, Klaatu finally “feels” what it means to be human—his body and his mind catch up to one another and he understands that humans—not just the earth—are special. He’s heard from humans that we can change, but now he understands why they believe it, and what drives them. And so fulfilling his role as a kind of figuration of the Christ, Klaatu decides to sacrifice himself, or at least his human body, to turn off the savage swarm of judgment day and save humanity. Now, as in the original, and as in the Matrix, humanity gets a second chance and the message of the film is a familiar one: the rest is up to us.

But will we change? Can we change?

In the film Klaatu is won-over by an argument made by a scientist played by John Cleese. This scientist defends humanity and its future by arguing that it is precisely these “precipices” of survival that drive the evolutionary process, and our current crisis will finally register on our collective consciousness and so motivate us to change, to evolve. But what the cause of our problems is the film remains silent, and so the solutions are reduced to an emotional platitude: “we can change!”

But how?

Evolutionary crisis, the film blithely implies, will force change upon us and then the indomitable human spirit will step up and respond. We’ll be okay! It will all work out. Have another soda, have some more popcorn. Drive safely on your way home!

But this is nothing short of lulling us to sleep in the name of waking us up. The film’s ideological narrative casts the viewer back onto familiar and reassuring assumptions: first, that humans are, in short, special. The film challenges but then ultimately endorses our unshakable belief in biological exceptionalism.

I’ll admit that in a way we are special—if only because we’ve come to dominate the planet as no other species has—7 billion, going on 9 billion by 2050 and still on track to make 12 billion by the turn of the twenty-first century. Why there are so many people on the planet today is debatable. That population growth continues to expand exponentially is an obviousness that has become almost invisible. Yet it remains the greatest, most pressing symptom of our dysfunctional relationship to the ourselves and our environment.

And The Day the Earth Stood Still tries to address this in its own way by quietly suggesting that pollution is such a problem because there are so many people polluting the planet. Yet in the end the film draws away from this conclusion and represses the uncomfortable reality of over population in the name of “hope” and “change.” As if talking about things is the same as changing them. It’s a start, but it’s not an end.

I am no believer in a determined fate that leads us to Armageddon or judgment day. There may be a Malthusian catastrophe this century, or a truly devastating pandemic, or a catastrophic war over water, but any and all of these fates will be of our own making, yet I believe that they are not inevitable. The best we’re being offered right now is the chance to make a few adjustments to our way of life so that things can go on as they are but this is a dubious proposition.

My argument is that our problem is not just our “carbon footprint.” It’s the human foot print—nearly seven billion and still trending upwards at an alarming, exponential rate. Even if we do manage to cut green house gas missions substantially—say, by 80% by 2050–the population by then will have grown by nearly 25%, from today’s numbers. In other words, even the most draconian cuts will not, in the end, be enough to account for the billions more consumers who will join the planet between now and 2050.

What will these people eat? Drink? Let alone drive? Consider that, according to the UN’s 2007 report, Global Environment Outlook known as GEO-4, on average human demand for natural resources currently equals 21.9 hectares per person while the report states that the carrying capacity of the planet is only 15.7 hectares per person. This is one way of saying what Klaatu says in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Our footprint is too big, and there’s just too many feet.

Even now we can pull back from the precipice the film assures us, if we want to. Klaatu realizes that humans are special—they love, they suffer, they sacrifice—and so he shuts down the genocide machinery he brought with him. He shuts it down because he has realized the great obfuscating, ideologically conservative truth that reassures and benumbs: in spite of everything he has come to know about human civilization, he chooses to forget the facts and instead the film retreats to the greatest of romantic myths in order to offer humanity a stay of execution. Humans are special. Especially American ones.

And this is where the film can’t help but reveal its conservative agenda.Apparently through terrible, unimaginable crisis we’ll grow, we’ll change and we’ll survive. I hope so, but what that crisis might look like, and how we move from this world to a smaller, more sustainable one remains a riddle shrouded in a mystery.

The biggest challenge to wholesale political, cultural and societal change in the near term are deeply ingrained notions of “private property” and unconscious practices that are rationalized by a latent, though potent, Social Darwinism. A just and sustainable world will only come when our cultural discourse moves beyond “a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness.” We must reject, he says, those social and economic practices that appeal “solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature” (Edward Bellamy).

In short, Greed does not work. Greed is not good. Sorry, Gordon.

We need a new vision–we need a new story. And I suspect this story will include the need for great sacrifice for all, everywhere. The symptoms of our greed and our arrogance—pollution, population, climate change and human misery–are already too great to ignore. We may already be in the midst of an evolutionary crisis that will make clear that it is in our self-interest as human beings to end plutocracy and re-direct our concerted efforts towards global environmental justice. A new vision must include the radical transformation of civilization’s “market ideologies” of unending “growth” and “profit” into a sustainable way of life based upon universal rights of birth and the inherent right to dignity of all sentient life.

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September 4, 2012

2050: A Future History

2050 a.s.

PROLOGUE

Volume One: Gods of Little Earth

The Book of M

There is SIMON who in Little Earth is called Blessed, and the One, and World-Killer, and the Great God, and He came into the world as the Ancients fell and He fashioned a Little Earth from the frozen wastes of Antarctica at the bottom of the Ancient’s world. He raised the Arclight and He raised His Great City and He called it the Seventh Realm.

After the Blessed Simon came upon the land and took it as His own, the lesser gods banded together to contend against Him and out of jealousy and spite they plotted together to cast Him down and steal His Power of M, and they did. And it is a great mystery for on that day they scattered Simon to the seven corners of the Seven Realms, and Simon’s face disappeared from the surface of the world.

And on that day the Four took the Little Earth into their own hands and used what Power of M they could master to re-make the Seventh Realm, and they tore down what Simon had built up and put their own works upon the land, all but Simon’s Great City and His Arclight—these things of Simon the gods took as their own.

For in their hubris the gods decreed that the Seventh Realm would become a Little Earth where immortals reigned over the children of the gods. The children of the gods would work to tame the land and draw a new world from the ashes of the old, and the gods would look on the work of their children and take credit for their accomplishments.

But always the Four sought to claim the greater power of Simon as their own, but Simon had hid it from them when the Four overmastered Him. And so the Four were forced to contend among themselves for that portion of the Power of M each desired, but none of the Four were contented. They chafed and bit at one another in vengeful greed until finally they turned their minds to making war against each other. Because of war all they turned their hand to took seed only to fail, and finally, the Arclight of Simon failed and the long day grew cold and the long night grew dark and Little Earth stood upon the edge of ruin.

Even as the gods despaired of ever finding where Simon had hidden the Power of M, Vilb Solenthay set out on his Pilgrimage to the Great City in search of the truth about why his world was dying. Of his companions, and how he met them, and who they were, and how he found his answers and embraced his fate, more follows in this record. Little did Vilb know that he would become an ember to ignite a great conflagration across the Seven Realms.

To know the gods of Little Earth

Pilgrim needs a second birth.

Go seek the Martha about her Son.

(for His is the name for our Destruction)

Next Lord Qir, who blinds the just,

Then Quadros Prang who feeds his lust,

Last is Azo who serves the Martha’s trust.

What deed provoked the Four against the One?

Simon, Simon, where have you gone?

2050: A Future History

Volume One: Gods of Little Earth

Volume Two: The Power at the Bottom of the World

Volume Three: When Immortals Reign

August 18, 2012

What is Speculative Fiction?

I’ve been listening to Sting’s third solo-album from 1991, The Soul Cages. There’s a tune, one of many great songs on the album, called “Jeremiah Blues, part 1.” I think it speaks to the “speculative tradition” as well as any other text. That’s what I’m working on—the notion that there is, what I’m calling, a “speculative tradition” in western culture. I think the title of Sting’s song is a good place to start—it sounds one of the dominant, re-occurring themes of the “speculative tradition,” that of the “Jeremiad,” the sermon style named for the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, who was—he claims–appointed by God to reveal the sins of the Jews and the coming consequences if they continued to worship false idols. He is considered one of the Old Testament’s “Major Prophets.” He would say things like, “Woe unto you, O Israel, for turning to false gods. If you don’t change your ways God is going to f–k you up!” It was, for him, an obvious case of theological “cause and effect.” Break God’s commandments and you would feel His wrath. Break God’s law and He reserved the right to punish the unrighteous impunity. Sodom and Gomorrah anyone?

Most people don’t want to hear anyone saying this sort of thing—it sounds crazy, self-righteous, and off-putting. So, as you might imagine, Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest as a false prophet, imprisoned by King Judah, thrown into a well by King Judah’s officials and generally ignored as a madman when he wasn’t being threatened with death.

Jeremiah rather reminds me of Cassandra, another prophet, but from the Greek side of ancient history. She also predicted the future, having been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but in a jealous fit he cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions. Cassandra is a tragic representation of one of the fundamental qualities of the speculative tradition–vision combined with a powerlessness to change anything, but filled with a compulsion to prophetic utterance nevertheless.

From Plato to Pixar (think of Wall-E) the theme of apocalypse (now!) runs like a genetic code through western culture’s most basic beliefs about itself. It’s a thematic pattern that appears in our religion, our ideology, even how we wage war. Consider that it’s been said that war is simply politics by another means—if this is true, and I suspect that it is, then what does it say about our politics (and our civilization) that since 1945 thermonuclear annihilation has been taken seriously as a viable political and military solution to certain global problems? Lest you think I exaggerate, consider Jonathan Schell’s classic work, The Time of Illusion as a case in point. His description of a weapon of mass destruction is worth the read, by the way. The phrase has been misused and abused since 9/11. A weapon of mass destruction kills hundreds of thousands if not millions. Conventional weapons do not compare, nor do airplanes used as bombs. That’s why weapons of mass destruction are so unconscionable—because they cause mass destruction in the blink of an eye. Like Manhattan, or Chicago, or London, or Moscow destroyed, and an area within a hundred mile radius made uninhabitable. This is mass destruction. And consider the fact that a single Trident nuclear submarine could wipe out a continent. Now that’s a spicy meatball!

And so I think it’s worth worrying about the fact that Islam and Christianity are both bent on Armageddon—it’s built in to their beliefs—it’s a fundamental premise of their religious world views. It’s as if God Himself wants to destroy the planet—after all, He did it once before with the Great Flood, or so the story goes. Perhaps extinction is a part of His Master Plan?

Plato was no Christian, though he might have been had he been born five hundred years later. He thought something was wrong, even in jolly old Ancient Greece, and so he imagined a more perfect union in his great treatise, The Republic. Why engage in such speculative thinking? Well, it seems that he suspected that something wasn’t quite right in the way Greeks were living together. Plato wasn’t a big fan of democracy after all. And so he imagines a world in which order would be maintained by a strict caste system in which everyone would be taught their place and would be strongly encouraged to stay in it.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. It should be remembered that almost always the ancient speculative traditions were, in the end, optimistic–from death life would come, from the ashes, a phoenix, from the tomb, a savior, from the destruction of the world, a New Jerusalem. The Great City would rise and it would be ruled by a great philosopher king, or a god. Or perhaps the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner?

Let me end here with a short list: themes of the “speculative tradition” include: prophecy and warning, destruction and re-birth, an implicit critique of the status quo, a warning and a promise of the consequences if things don’t change. A vision of how best to live, how to “regain Eden” or how to find Utopia. More often than not private property was forbidden in this new world order and a kind of radical socialism championed. Thomas More’s Utopia, for instance. The City becomes a central trope as well. And all of this would be taking place either in the future, or just off the edge of the map—either way new world was just over the horizon line. If we could only find our way, reach out, we could—in the end—reach it and perfect the human community.

Much of the Enlightenment grew out of this noble ideal—the project of Modernity—to finish the work God had left unfinished, but human reason would light the way, and science, and soon we could know all we needed to know, solve our problems, and end human suffering.

It never happened. Meanwhile Darwin came and Nietzsche declared God dead. Modernity failed. The Industrial Revolution blackened our eyes (and our lungs). War went on unabated. Science offered us more and more efficient ways to destroy ourselves. Our grand fate to recover Eden slipped away. And on this note entered the 20^th century—and as we did the last, great dominant theme of the “speculative tradition” emerged. By the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20th century the “speculative tradition’s” theme of rebirth into Eden/Utopia gave way to dark visions of Dystopia–destruction without rebirth or hope for recover–a boot stomping on the face of humanity, forever. And as civilization was about to cast itself into its bloodiest century on historical record, it should come as no surprise that the hope in the future gave way to the existential despair of the present. And the “speculative tradition” in fiction—and film— like Metropolis and Modern Times and later, Soylent Green, I Am Legend, The Matrix, Children of Men, V for Vendetta, and Wall-E—to name only a few—represent 20th-century “speculative tradition” based upon the cautionary tale of the Jeremiad tradition, but this time it is a secular rather than a spiritual Jeremiad, but even so the stakes remain the same: we must change our ways or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately the curse of Cassandra is alive and well.