Take a look at the YouTube clip regarding the new movie by Christopher Nolen. Forget about the movie itself for a minute. Pay attention instead to the exalted rhetoric of sublime human exploration and achievement as the ultimate identity marker of what it means to be a fully realized human being.
“We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments, these moments when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known, to count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we’ve lost all that, and perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we’re still pioneers, that we’ve barely begun, and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, that our destiny lies above us.”
This is nonsense, but it is surprising nonsense.
It is nonsense because the “we have defined ourselves” sounds like human beings have defined themselves as technological overachievers from the beginning. But overcoming the impossible in the sense given in this clip is an ideology born in the Enlightenment, or thereabouts. People like Francis Bacon* and his heirs thought that with the right materialist manipulation of nature (and of human beings, eventually), we overcomers would overcome nature and rule like gods. (The answer to this blasphemic hubris is Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein.)
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| Swiftian scientist extracting sunlight from cucumbers |
It is surprising nonsense, because we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, and we are nowhere near the Gernsbackian utopia envisaged by atheists who idolize scientism and its promise of endless progress. The world might have some pretty sophisticated technology, but human beings are as a whole still in pretty bad shape. Our greatest accomplishments don’t seem to fix the problems with crime, with civil wars, with collapsing infrastructures, with poor education, with shattered families and the attendant pathologies of crime and drug addiction. It is surprising that anyone could still say with a straight face that our destiny, our ultimate satisfying identity, is in space exploration.
When it comes to technology, we are in a sense superior to previous generations, and our best inventions (maybe) are still ahead of us, though superior ways of delivering pornography doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. Breaking barriers in terms of curing cancer is impressive and humane. Breaking barriers in terms of bigger and bigger houses (on the moon, maybe) with bigger and bigger closets is less so.
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| "I say, old chum! Does this thingy show the topless girls from Mardi Gras?" |
Here is an odd fact--odd from the perspective of a secularist ideologue who believes in inevitable progress: human nature doesn’t change. What Plato, what Shakespeare, what Edwin Arlington Robinson has to say about being human is still as relevant as it has ever been.
According to the New Testament, the proudest human achievement is to repent. In an unintended way, the Interstellar voice-over gets it right--our destiny lies above us, just as Aeschylus, Milton, Faulkner, and , oh, I don’t know--Isaiah?--have been telling us.
Maybe this movie will be good. Nolen has made some entertaining movies. But it will only be a pleasantly diverting fiction, if the movie is nothing other than a celebration of Promethean Man, who is in fact the little child who says, “I can do it by myself!”
* I am probably being a bit unfair to Francis Bacon, but history is uncanny in its twists and reversals. Bacon wanted empiricism to serve humans, helping them to become noble and religious. Instead, it brought about the horror of things like hyper-efficient Nazi death camps and transhumanism