Eternal Verities in Science Fiction
Posted on 13 January 2012
A reader asks:
Why do you like science fiction, despite your strong moral positions?
Note: this is not a misprint. The reader wrote “despite” in that sentence rather than “due to.” Let us read on.
I am an avid reader of your blog; I’ve derived great joy from reading your perspective on things. Even though you’re a Christian, what makes you so interested in science fiction? Science fiction is the literature of change; it supposes that there are no eternal human verities, and examines what impact various technologies can have on human social organization. It is inherently opposed to any sort of moralism, religious or not, since an unforeseen technology can render a given situation obsolete. I’m not saying that being religious is bad, I’m just wondering what draws you to science fiction.
My Answer:
You say science fiction is a literature of change, and that is well said, and I agree with the concept. But then I must ask: what is change?
Myself, I would have thought that change can only be measured against a standard, which, by definition, cannot change, for then it is not a standard.
Even in physics, the changes in the measurements of timespace as one approaches the speed of light could not be measured unless the speed of light were a constant to all observers.
You say science fiction presupposes that there are no eternal verities. This would, unfortunately, expel nearly all science fiction writers from the canon.
Most science fiction stories, for example, take place in a universe where the rules say things like “reality is objective” and things like “valid conclusions following from true axioms are true” and things like “A is A.” All such statements are eternal verities.
But even if this were so, your statement would be what philosophers call a self impeaching statement: this is, the statement that there are no eternal verities, if it were always true, would itself be an eternal verity; and if it were not always true and ergo did not cover all cases, then there would be some cases were eternal verities did exist.
You say science fiction is inherently opposed to ‘moralism.’ As before, you would exclude from science fiction every story which has a moral or makes a moral point, and that is nearly all the stories which exist. Even the most cynical, dark and gritty detective story has no drama unless the story portrays implicitly that betrayal and murder is bad.
Just to take two examples with opposing moral points, imagine writing STARSHIP TROOPERS from the point of view the patriotism is bad and war is madness, or, again, imagine writing FOREVER WAR from the point of view that jingoism is good and all war is noble.
Even a yarn as allegedly pragmatic Asimov’s FOUNDATION makes no sense as a story without the underlying moralistic assumption that civilization the Seldon Plan intends to restore is better than the Dark Ages which otherwise would be permanent.
As above, to denounce moralism is once again a self impeaching statement, because it is the statement that moralism is morally wrong.
You say that an unforeseen technology can render a given situation – by which I assume you mean a given moral maxim – obsolete. This is what philosophers call a category error: you are conflating means and ends.
Technology is tool use. The tools selected do not change the ends for which they are used. Burning that same man to death with an atomic raygun is a technology unknown to Code of Hammurabi. The invention of the raygun might change the mechanism of the homicide, but not the elements of homicide. In each case, it is the intent, the cause-and-effect, the harm, and the lack of lawful justification which makes homicide a crime, not the tool used. The end sought, murder, is the same. The means used or the tools used differ.
I do agree that new tools and new technologies open up to human temptations a potential for evil and good unknown to our ancestors, merely because they lacked the ability. Our ancestors did not have to deal with the morality of cloning humans, because they lacked the ability; in the same way we do not need to deal with the moral conundrums of time travel or mind-control rays.
But from this we cannot conclude that the moral standards by which to judge these things, and to know which is a use and which an abuse, do not exist. Moral truths are the one thing no man, and no rational being in the universe, can expel from his knowledge. We lack the power to doubt these things.
If you doubt me, put it to the experiment. Can you, by an act of will, make something that seems morally wrong to you, such as race-hatred or child-rape, seem morally right? Can you do this merely by imagining the crime performed by means of different tools than what is now used?
Can we indeed concoct a new moral code once a new technology exists? If someone invented the mind-control-ray tomorrow morning, would there be any doubt in your mind that it would be wrong of me to use it on some toothsome schoolgirl and make her my love-slave? If I raised the objection that there are no eternal verities, would you actually be persuaded that such an act of teen rape and brain-rape was licit?
So I can only answer with the caveat that the premise on which the assumption is based is not only wrong, it is illogical. That is, your premise is not only happens to be not the case in this particular time and place and under the conditions in which we find ourselves, it also must be wrong in all times and places and conditions.
My answer is that I like science fiction because of its moralistic character, combined with its imaginative character and its logical character.
I need not overexplain what I mean by imagination and logic, I hope. The nature of speculation, of any story that asks “what if?” is to carry out the logical consequences of an unreal assumption: if pigs had wings, pigsties would have roofs. If Martians landed on Earth, and drank our blood, the bacteria to which our ancestors by natural selection developed an immunity would kill them.
Now, the science fiction I read when I was growing up in the 1970′s and 1980′s was almost all the output of the John W Campbell Jr stable of writers from the 1930′s and 1940′s, so whether or not modern science fiction retains the energy and strength of its moralistic Golden Age roots I leave to you to decide.
But every story upheld a strong moralistic message vaunting the power of man’s reason to understand and ultimately to command nature. These were not crime-drama stories or “true confession” stories showing us in the imagination the negative consequences or fraud and murder or betrayal and adultery. These were science fiction stories showing the benefits of technological progress and emphasizing the utility, beauty and necessity of the power of thought and reason.The moralizing comes in where all the stories demand of their heroes and demand of the reader that we think. Thou Shalt Reason.
Even in the more purple-prosed pulp of Campbell’s predecessors, the moral was clear. In the LENSMAN series by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, alien beings who otherwise would be utterly reprehensible from the human moral point of view, such as the bloodthirsty callousness of the Valentians, the cowardice of the Palainians, the bovine communism of the Rigelians, are shown to be not only worthy allies but heroes of sterling worth because and only because of their reasoning powers. I cannot think of a more blatant moralizing statement vaunting the human power of thought and the duty to be openminded, rational, and indeed ruthless in the pursuit of reason, than when Mentor of Arisia telepathically contacts the Gray Lensman from across the universe and demands of him: “Think, youth! Think!”
Again, not every story is a yarn glorifying science. Many a tale is a cautionary tale against the misuse of science, or an eerie little horror story emphasizing man’s littleness in the grand scheme of things. I do not see how anyone can interpret these as not having a moral point: NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR has a moral and a warning about the misuse of language as clear as Aesop’s fable about the boy who cries wolf; BRAVE NEW WORLD has a moral and a warning about the seductive allure of dehumanizing luxury as clear as Aesop’s fable about the eagle who grants the tortoise his wish to fly (by dashing him from the clouds down against a rock).
Robert Heinlein’s ‘Lifeline’ just as much as A.E. van Vogt’s ‘The Black Destroyer’ (merely to take the first tales published of two of the authors who defined the Golden Age of SF) both have the same point: a warning against hubris, overweening pride, a caution that the universe is a stranger place than one might think.
Nearly every science fiction story disagrees with nearly every other as to what the eternal verities are. Science fiction readers, after all, like foxhunters, are more interested in the process of the hunt for truth, the excitement of finding out, to your awe, that the Earth is not the center of the universe as the pagan Ptolemy thought, but is whirling about the sun at unthinkable speeds as the monk Copernicus taught. But nearly all science fiction stories agree, in theme and mood if not explicitly as a moral, that the hunt for truth is an imperative, and that reason is the means.
“Check your Premises” and “Question Assumptions” are moral imperatives. The reason why science fiction has a greater appeal for me than for mainstream stories, is that science fiction is the only literature explicitly vaunting the moral imperative of the philosopher and scientist and scholar, where my personal primary interest lies.
Let me in closing mention the one assumption behind the question I did not address.
I am so baffled that anyone would write the sentence “even though you’re a Christian” and then ask about a type of literature, the scientific romance or science fiction adventure novel, which historically sprang out of nowhere but Christian culture and civilization, and which logically can exist nowhere but where the assumptions and axioms of Christendom, particularly those axioms dealing with Western natural philosophy, hold sway, that I confess I cannot answer that part of the question because it makes no sense.
It is like asking why a Christian can like science fiction when all Christians hate science.
Only those very easily duped by Politically Correct bumper stickers, and very ignorant of science and its history and its metaphysics and its meaning, can think of scientific progress as taking place outside Christendom: scientific institutions are of the West, as are the metaphysical assumptions about the fixed qualities of nature, or are of Eastern lands that have adopted or had forced upon them Western institutions, the Western world view.
Science is much a part of Christian civilization as the notation of diatonic music, as the institutions of the University or the Parliament or chivalric Knighthood, as Christian as perspective drawing, as the architecture of the Gothic Cathedral. And the Romance or novel is a unique product of the Christian worldview as Science is. So a scientific romance is the quintessential Christian cultural product.
Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Figaro!
I’ve typically found science fiction is actually a medium to make a less than subtle moral or political point, without seeming to be moralistic. Science fiction allows you to create a universe where you can make this or that moral point.
Star Trek, I think, is the case in point. While the original series seems quaint and old fashioned to us now, episodes in each series regularly make contemporary moral points. I can remember one particular anti-racism original series episode where an alien race was trying to kill each other, because some were black on the left and white on the right, and the others vice versa; and the Enterprise crew just couldn’t make heads or tails of what the difference was nor how it mattered. We were meant to think through them and realise black and white doesn’t matter, either. Star Trek is, I think, quite blatant and intentional about doing it.
Or a few years ago, my sister was trying to encourage me to read the works of a particular author who she really enjoyed (I forget his name). Some of his works were set in a future(?) society where when you died, you could “download” yourself into a brand new, custom built body with whatever structure you wanted. Now aside from the sheer improability of being able to separate the mind and the body in any meaningful way—the modern conception that “me” and “my body” are merely coincidentally united is bizarre, scientifically fraudulent and reminds me of the mediaeval gnostic heresies—I found the work irritating because of the way it presented people with my ideas. Some people, for moral reasons, refused to “upload” themselves onto computers, and once they were dead, they were dead. But they were quaint people, more to be pitied in the work I read. And then there was the whole sex thing. So much of the work was about pushing a libertine sexual world down my throat, where random hookups were the thing to be done, you could pick the sex of your next body, and the notion of anything remotely resembling a traditional marriage was not the done thing.
Frankly, I thought the work was repulsive and offensive, and I don’t think I even finished it, much less started the second and third book my sister offered. She has more liberal views of sexuality, and I think this is part of the reason she enjoyed it so much.
(Mind you, I’ve often found it a little offensive that the only people in Star Trek with religious traditions are relatively primitive aliens. I think that tells you much about the writers of the stuff.)
But, to be frank, my science fiction days are mostly in the past. This reality takes enough of my time to learn about, to waste valuable reading time on fiction.—Well, that’s me; I find things fun other people would die of boredom from.
“Star Trek, I think, is the case in point. While the original series seems quaint and old fashioned to us now, episodes in each series regularly make contemporary moral points. I can remember one particular anti-racism original series episode where an alien race was trying to kill each other, because some were black on the left and white on the right, and the others vice versa; and the Enterprise crew just couldn’t make heads or tails of what the difference was nor how it mattered. We were meant to think through them and realise black and white doesn’t matter, either. Star Trek is, I think, quite blatant and intentional about doing it.”
Hmmm. To your credit, you are a much harsher judge of Star Trek than I am. Of course I remember the episode you mean (after all, Frank Gorshin the Riddler, played one of the Charonians) and I don’t regard the message as being too blatant or heavyhanded: as I recall it, the message was actually a bit subtle, because one of the tensions in the plot was that the Enterprise crew was being asked to pity and support Loki, the epitome of the oppressed race, and they were unmoved and unwilling. They did not automatically side with the villain here. The other subtlety was that the Charonians were a more advanced species than man or Vulcan, and could control energy with their minds (contemptuously ignoring phaser fire) but that their advancement did not make them immune to hate.
“Or a few years ago, my sister was trying to encourage me to read the works of a particular author who she really enjoyed (I forget his name). Some of his works were set in a future(?) society where when you died, you could “download” yourself into a brand new, custom built body with whatever structure you wanted. ”
Sounds a bit like my THE GOLDEN AGE. But I might guess you are referring to TITAN by John Varley, or another tale of his set in the same background.
I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that particular episode (or anything much of Star Trek), and with time details are lost and plots shrink into stereotypes of the moral—especially the way I watch TV. I’m very often over-attuned to the “moral”, and I think this can sometimes interfere with my enjoyment.
As for your two suggestions—it certainly wasn’t a work of your own (I’d've remembered, y’see!); and the other name doesn’t ring any bells. Not that that’s proof of anything: I’m extraordinarily bad with names.
Was one of the books your sister recommended “Biting the Sun” by Tanith Lee? It seems so similar to your description, but it deals with how the beyond-decadent society is unfulfilling and dehumanizing…the protagonist just really takes her time getting to that realization.
The book Alexander describes sound more like Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan or Hopscotch by Kevin Anderson. Titan by John Varley was the first in the trilogy about the living space station Gaia discovered out by the moons of Saturn by Scirocco Jones.
My guess that it was TITAN was based on the body-switching technology in the background, and the overabundance of gratuitous sex scenes, and the mention that there were other books in the series. As you might guess, I am more familiar with the books from my ‘omnivorous reading period’ back in the 70′s and 80′s than I am with more modern works.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Interesting, your idea that science fiction could have arisen on our planet only from the Christian tradition. I think it makes sense that SF has two basic roots: Christianity and the scientific method and modern industry/technology springing from that.
To me, some of the most interesting SF I’ve ever read used both advanced scientific concepts or inventions and took religion seriously. Walter Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, and James Blish’ A CASE OF CONSCIENCE comes to mind among novels. Short stories would be Anthony Boucher’s “The Quest for Saint Aquin,” and Poul Anderson’s “The Season of Forgiveness,” etc.
So, no, I reject as blatantly false that good SF HAS to be hostile or indifferent to religion.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Science fiction has two roots: HG Wells, a socialist who was hostile to religion, who wrote social commentary under the forms of science fiction, and Jules Verne, a Roman Catholic who wrote hard SF, what we would now call technothrillers, about technology foreseeable and realistic for his day.
I don’t know if there is a general rule that Hard SF is more realistic, hence more sympathetic to religion, than Soft SF, but the idea of the war between science and religion is science fiction, or, at least, a fiction about science. (And one that only crops up in Protestant circles, by the way.)
Dear Mr. Wright:
Interesting thought, that hard SF writers tend to be more friendly or at least less hostile to religion than “soft” SF. Not always true, I agree, but fairly often. That certainly seems to be reasonably true of Robert Heinlein’s earlier works, before he became such a bore about sex and incest in his later works. And my most favorite SF writer, Poul Anderson, was definitely respectful of honest believers in God. And that also seems to be the case with S.M. Stirling (see both his Draka and “Change” series).
Yes, I see what you mean about both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Verne’s FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON is definitely hard SF, and based quite soundly on the science available to him in the 1860s. But he was aware of serious difficulties which would have prevented men from reaching the moon at that time.
H.G. Wells? Yes, he was the author of such classics as WAR OF THE WORLDS and THE TIME MACHIME. But, alas, his later work was marred by his tiresomely preachy socialism.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Not by a simple act of will to be executed in a few seconds, the way I might lift my finger, no. But I note that, had I been born into a historical situation where race hatred was the Done Thing, I would, very probably, be a race-hater. So it seems that there is some series of experiences which could make me, or at least the child I was, into a racist. Presumably I could, with sufficient cleverness, find out what that series of experiences is; and then will things so that I inescapably experience it.
Your test is not stringent enough. “An act of will” need not be limited to a few moments of thought.
“Presumably I could, with sufficient cleverness, find out what that series of experiences is; and then will things so that I inescapably experience it.”
Though when you suspend the freighted notion that Will includes a warrant called “feeling something really strongly”, then this sentence seems tautological. I’m reminded of one of the few things I learned in theatre: wanting to will something is not a playable action. The thing anterior to doing something is wanting to do it, not “sufficient cleverness”, and certainly not stagecraft.
I’m not sure if I’m following your argument, but let me prehrase and see if I got it right. Are you saying that it might be physically possible for me to thus change my opinion, but that I would never do it because I don’t want to be a race-hater? It may be so, although I notice that perhaps I would find it worthwhile to become a race-hater just to prove the point that I can indeed change my opinions by an act of will; for plain spite, in other words. But even if not, we needn’t limit ourselves to opinions that are universally reviled and hated. Could I, by an act of will, become a libertarian? I don’t see why not; and here I do not think your argument (if I understood it right) that I would never will such a thing can hold. Libertarians are neither obviously wrong nor universally hated; I have some disagreements with them, but they are points on which rational men can differ.
You read it here first, folks! Science Fiction is the pinnacle of Christendom!
And if you think it’s OK, then someone probably already has invented a mind-control-ray.
Margery Allingham’s last Campion mystery novel, and a very subtle one, was a science fiction mystery called The Mind Readers. It dealt very realistically with the criminological consequences of a practical telepathy machine. (And mysteries being also a genre about morality and the verities, there was a lot of soulsearching about morality as well.)
Of course, this was married-with-children Campion, which some people don’t like as well. But it bears reading.
And here I thought the invention of the hospital was the pinnacle of Christendom, or maybe the symphony. I am glad to know my chosen profession is more august that I thought. Take THAT, doctors and musicians! Sciffy ROCKS!
“And if you think it’s OK, then someone probably already has invented a mind-control-ray.”
LOL and Amen.
I have heard it said many times that science requires a new moral code, but I have never, not once, heard even the flimsiest argument attempted to uphold the notion. Science giving us new ways to invade the rights of our fellow beings, nastier weapons or subtler techniques, does not change the Golden Rule. And the idea of a new moral code makes about a much sense as the idea of a new primary color.
I do agree that Time Travelers should think carefully about the moral implications of stepping on butterflies in the Triassic, or suffering a sex change operation to go back, seduce yourself, and be both your own parents. As we lawyers say, these would be cases of first impression, lacking precedent.
Race-hatred as good? Suppose some scientists were really stupid enough to create vampires as per Peter Watts’ Blind Sight. When the war between humans and vampires came, I thought race-hatred would be a good. In fact in the novel it seems unavoidable for humans to fear and dislike vampires. But the race-hatred would just be a side-effect of the genocidal war, and would in fact blind me and others to a possible chance for peace (provided some suitable mechanism was enacted to prevent the vampires from continuing to prey on humans and to prevent the humans from re-enslaving the vampires). So, race-hatred still bad.
See what I mean? Even in thinking about how to deal with a new situation, we have no choice but to look to the same rules, the same timeless and eternal rules, fixed in the conscience of all intelligent life in the cosmos. Good and evil are not different between men and elves, elves and Martians, Martians and Daleks, Daleks and Organians, Organians and Angels. You (and I, and everything else that reasons) still analyzes moral questions in terms of (1) universal rules (2) practical applications of those rules (3) whether any exceptions apply (4) whether any exception would set a bad precedent (5) and, in general, whether the ‘Golden Rule’ of impartial symmetry is upheld, i.e. would it still seem just if the roles were reversed?
The only man who can imagine a situation where race hatred is good is one who already thinks it good: and even he, albeit wrongly, uses the same tools and reasons in his moral calculation.
There ain’t no such thing as an absolute.
“There ain’t no such thing as an absolute.”
Absolutely!
(Note to the logic impaired. This is a joke. I don’t believe the people who make the absolute and universal statement that there are no absolutes and no universals actually believe it. It is something they say to win arguments or to quell their uneasy consciences. It is make-believe. something said in the hopes that the people around you will nod and sooth your uneasiness by agreeing with the nonsense. Like sharing a joke or a slogan in a clique, or singing an anthem. Word-noises meant to produce team spirit.)