Return to Utopia

Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) is in The Faces of Science Fiction (1984). His statement covers almost an entire page. I'll quote some of it:

I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. [. . .] I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. [. . .] My hope for humanity--and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in that direction--is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship [. . . .] I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an acceptable citizen in Utopia. (Emphasis in the original.)

There is a lot to say about the things in that quote and in Ackerman's larger statement. First, there is his seeming sense of superiority, a sense that exists not only in science fiction but also in the world at large, especially among intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. The Superior Man seems to have been a recurring character in science fiction during the 1930s and '40s, especially in Astounding Science-Fiction. Karl Marx, another atheist and materialist, believed himself above ordinary men. Curiously, both he and Ackerman died.

Ackerman was a materialist in more ways than one. In his lifetime, he collected a lot of things. The final count may have been a third of a million. Yes, he may have saved those things, but I believe them today to be scattered: Nothing made by man endures. I am reminded of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," a poem to which I will soon return:

["]My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!["]
Nothing beside remains.  [. . .]

Nothing that we make, mighty or low, shall remain. That includes big bunches of sci-fi memorabilia.

Ackerman had his hopes for humanity. They are admirable. But why are those hopes only for the future, or more precisely, in the future? Why aren't they now? Why haven't they been in the past? What keeps them from happening? A progressive-minded person--a Marxist for instance--would say that society or the system hasn't and won't allow them. Thus the system must be overthrown and society remade. History--that Irresistible Force--will guarantee a better future.  There is a fierce urgency now, but it will still take some time before we have perfection. And in that time, by the Marxist and socialist formulation and ambition, countless millions will die by deprivation, war, and murder. These things are of course historical necessities.

In his statement, Ackerman claimed wisdom, or at least a hope that he had gained some wisdom in his then sixty-eight years on this earth. But he placed his hopes in a process that is almost certainly illusory. There is no wisdom in believing in it. That process? History, of course, a Force or Forces that are, incidentally, always imprecisely described, always undetectable, always unmeasurable. Progress is another name for it. I'm reminded here of Sidney Harris' cartoon in which a miracle inserted in the right place guarantees that your equation comes out right:

That's the hope and plan of the hard-nosed materialist: that a miracle will occur, human nature will be altered, and we will have a better world as a result. What he, the materialist--Ackerman included--fails to understand is that we will never be whole, we will never be free of pain, we will not always be fulfilled, we will not always have love and friendship, for the world can never be made perfect. Our only chance for having any of these things is to reject atheism and materialism and to seek something greater to fill the hole in our hearts, a hole that always and everywhere has the same shape.

So Ackerman was a utopian. Ironically, he posed for photographer Patti Perret in front of some of his memorabilia for the utopian/dystopian picture Metropolis (1927). I doubt that he was aware of the irony. After all, the Progressive lacks a sense of irony and self-awareness. But as we know, every Utopia is a Dystopia, the reason being that in order for a society to be made perfect, people themselves must be harried into perfection. Only an overarching State can accomplish that--or believes that it can accomplish that--and so the State must be made supreme over the lives of men. So, Metropolis may depict Dystopia, but in its way, it also depicts Utopia: Utopia for the powerful is Dystopia for the rest of us.

Socialists of one stripe might quibble with those of another over the meaning of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Workers in revolt? They are the Proletariat. They are oppressed. Their situation is intolerable and they will have an end to it. This is History in action. . . . Or maybe not. Here is Joseph Goebbels, propagandist for the Nazi party, writing in 1928:

The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labor (Arbeitertum), to begin their historical mission. This is not a matter of wages and hours--though we must not fail to realize that these demands are essential, perhaps the most important single manifestation of the socialist will. More important is the incorporation of a potent, responsible estate (Stand) in the affairs of state, perhaps indeed in the dominant role in the future politics of our fatherland. (Quoted in Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, 2012.)

Note the sophomoric patois of the socialist revolutionary: bourgeoisie, history, oppressed, Labor, historical mission, the socialist will, the future. Always: the Glorious Future. Here is more of Goebbels:

We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists. (Emphasis added. Also quoted in Mr. Shoenbaum's book, from 1929.)

Before I go on, I must emphasize: Nazis were socialists. They said it themselves. They inserted that word into their own name for themselves. As people would say nowadays, they self-identified as socialists. They were anti-liberal, anti-democracy, anti-capitalist. They wished to create a perfect State and a perfect society, set, of course, in the future. This would be their Thousand-Year Reich. In other words, National Socialists, like their International cousins, were and are essentially utopian in their aims. So enough with the slander that American conservatives have anything to do with Nazis. If anything, it is the American Socialist or Progressive--the anti-liberal, anti-capitalist Progressive--who finds in the Nazi past his or her ideological bedfellow, or at the very least shares in the techniques of Nazism.

A last quote, from Siegfried Kracauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947, 1971):

In the case of Metropolis, Goebbels's own words bear out the conclusions drawn from this film. Lang relates that immediately after Hitler's rise to power Goebbels sent for him: ". . . he told me that, many years before, he and the Führer had seen my picture Metropolis in a small town, and Hitler had said at that time that he wanted me to make the Nazi pictures." (p. 164; Lang quoted from the New York World Telegram, June 11, 1941.)

Fritz Lang decided instead to flee Utopia, first for France, then for the United States. My hope is that our country will forever be an enemy of socialism in all its forms and consequently of Utopia.

I'm not sure that there is a strong or unequivocal connection to be made between utopianism and Esperanto, but Forrest J Ackerman was both a utopian and an Esperantist. He was fluent in that made-up language and knew its theme song by heart. Here is a pertinent passage:

On a neutral language basis,
understanding one another,
the people will make in agreement
one great family circle.

Wow, what a catchy lyric that is. I sometimes find myself singing it when I'm in the shower or walking down the street or when I'm hanging out with the Lion King on the endless plains of Africa. Anyway, one of the aims of the socialist/statist/progressive/utopian program is the creation of the One State. (That's what Yevgeny Zamyatin called it in We.) All the better if the One State is really just a big, happy family, living together in a great circle of happy happiness. On top of course is a Benefactor or Father Figure (or in our current case, a creepy, befuddled, hair-sniffing Uncle Figure), one who bestows upon us, his children, every material--and therapeutic--blessing and frees us all from our own freedoms.

Like so many pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-historical, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-religious, and otherwise just plain crackpot ideas, Esperanto was invented in the nineteenth century. (The whole idea of it reminds me of Richard Shaver's Mantong.) It caught on during the 1920s and '30s, I think, around the same time as communism, fascism, Taylorism, technocracy, and other cult-like and/or totalitarian belief systems. It seems to have been custom-made for the person who had ceased believing in God but, being human, needed to believe in something larger than himself anyway, in this case a happy circle of humanity. It was perfect, too, for science fiction fans, for here was a language for the future. Perfect for the atheist, perfect for the materialist, perfect for the science fiction fan: perfect for Forrest J Ackerman. Beyond that, made-up stuff, as opposed to things that grow organically and through tradition, is one of the hallmarks of progressivism, for the Progressive despises the past and lives for a better future. That means everything for the future has to be made up because we will destroy everything from the past. Ackerman said it himself in so many words: he was a progressive and believed in a better future.

Guess who else is or was an Esperantist? George Soros. Funny.

I was at a secondhand store on Wednesday this week, July 21. (The birthday of both Ernest Hemingway and a girl I knew in high school.) Strangely enough, I found an Apollo 11 drinking glass, fifty-two years and a day after men first set foot on the moon. The day before, the Bezillionaire blasted off into space in a Tower of Babel built on the flames of a rocketship.* I'm not sure whether that was an homage, a tribute, or something else. Anyway, he's not the worst of the Big Tech moguls, at least I don't think so. In going into space, he seems to be living a lifelong dream. I think we should all be happy with people who do these things. Dreams are made to be lived. Too few are. And after all, it's his money. He gets to do what he wants with it. And before you object to that idea, recall that about forty-five seconds ago you bought something from his company, thereby putting some of your money into his pocket in a voluntary exchange. What was yours is now his, and vice versa. Anyway, if you think that his money isn't his, and that it's rightfully yours, or "the people's," you might join with Joseph Goebbels, who wrote that his party:

was not against capital but against its misuse . . . , against capitalism in every form, that is, misuse of the people's property (Volksgut). Whoever is responsible for such misuse is a capitalist. . . . For us, too, property is holy. (Quoted, again, in Mr. Shoenbaum's book.)

Property is, after all, material, and the socialist is also, by necessity, a materialist. Property is holy to him. It's just that he wants to make yours, his. The transfer ain't voluntary and there ain't no exchange.

Like I said, I think there are worse people in Big Tech than the Bezillionaire, the reason being that they have utopian aims. They are thoroughgoing progressives. They believe, I think, that they can create and are creating a better world. They have even admitted these things, boasted of them. I used to think, naïvely, that they want our money. But I don't think they want our money so much as they want our data. Their hope, I think, is to gather enough data by which they might write an equation (or nine billion lines of code) describing human behavior, no miracle needed. And with that equation and the knowledge they believe will come from it, they hope to understand and predict everything. The future, the universe, all of human existence will be to them an open book. What they don't realize is that such a thing cannot be done, for we have infinite and irreducible variety within us. No man was the author of that variety and no man can duplicate it. In their ambitions towards godhood, these men (and a few women) are making a go at the infinite. What they don't realize is that only one Being is capable of anything infinite, absolute, or eternal. He has already written the equation and his terms are beyond our understanding. They can't do it. They aren't capable of anything that is rightly his. But then, like Forrest J Ackerman, they don't believe in such things. They are materialists. To them, human beings are merely material. For them, property is holy. The equation can and will be written. But first they need the data.

Supposedly Tamerlane spoke the word impossible only once in his life, and that was as death came for him. Like him, these people believe they cannot die, and they are working towards immortality for themselves by attempting to place their own ghosts--ours, too, I guess--into their own machines. They believe themselves to be gods or soon to be gods and cannot countenance that they and all of their fine ideas and wondrous works will in the end surely die. But they will. These men and women will find that the impossible--death--is indeed possible, and not just possible but inevitable. And not just inevitable but necessary. (They may never learn that part.) Like Tamerlane they seek to conquer the world and thereby make themselves immortal. Instead, they will become like yet another prideful figure from history, the aforementioned Ozymandias, who was himself silenced and conquered by time and death, by the lone and level sands of the bare and boundless desert that lies over his ruined works and will surely lie over all of our own.

* * *

That's an awful lot to read, I know, but I'll be gone for a while. I'll pick up again on this topic when I get back. So:

To be continued . . .

-----

*An addition, August 7, 2021: It occurs to me now that Esperanto is a human attempt, necessarily frail, ultimately doomed, to undo the outcomes at the Tower of Babel, to make once again a world and a people "of one language, and of one speech." (Genesis 11:1) It is in itself a kind of arrogance, a belief that we can be godlike in our wisdom and in our powers, that we are in fact wiser and more powerful than God. We should consider another verse from the Bible, Mark 10:9, here inverted: What God has put asunder, let no man join together. Esperanto is merely a hobby. It is not a serious endeavor.

Now an aside: The Bible says that the builders of the Tower used slime for their mortar. Some interpret "slime" to mean asphalt. Jack Parsons (1914-1952) was inspired to use asphalt as a solid-rocket fuel. Although the Bezillionaire rode to space on top of a rocketship, his was liquid-fueled rather than solid-fueled. Nonetheless, it's hard to pass up commenting on these nexuses within the worlds of culture and ideas.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

To Entropy and Beyond!

Winston Smith has his tormenter in O'Brien. D-503, the protagonist in We, has his in I-330. She is a different kind of tormenter, though, for D-503 is in crazy love with her. We all know about the torments of love and what we will do for it.

I-330 says some interesting things. First:

"The 'last one' is a child's story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night."

Then, in response to D-503:

"Ah, 'evenly'! 'Everywhere'! That is the point, entropy! Psychological entropy."

D-503, still bound up in the United State (the One State in some translations), believes in the last revolution and the end of history. I-330, a true revolutionary, calls him out on the absurdity of such things. She chooses infinity. He would rather have entropy. Consideration of this dichotomy opens doors . . .

* * *

I-330 is a woman, passionate and full of emotion. She pushes. She coaxes and cajoles and harangues. As a woman she moves in cycles, and cycles roll infinitely through infinite Time. What is the last revolution--literally the last revolving, the last turning of the cycle? What is the last wave? The last reaction? The last transmission? The last star? The last universe? The last woman, turning and cycling through Time?

Her symbol is a circle. Or a cup, its mouth a circle. There is no beginning or end to it.

His is an arrow, with a head and a tail, flying in a line, straight through Time, with an origin and a destination. Or, pointed, a triangle, a blade--hard and angular rather than soft and rounded.

The flight of the arrow has its beginning--its initial burst of energy--and it has its flight and its bright flash in the sunlight as it flies; then, it has its end, at which point all of its energy has been expended. Meanwhile, the circle keeps turning.

She is a planet, Earth. His arrow follows a flightpath, bends in an arc under the influence of her gravity. Her gamete is a globe. Like an arrow, his has a head and a tail. It wriggles towards hers in its sinusoidal wave. Together they renew Life in its endless cycles . . .

* * *

History has two ways, the cyclic and the linear, the circle and the arrow. There will be either infinity--no end of history, no last revolution--or entropy, an end after which there can be no further revolution, no further turning. In entropy, in fact, there is no after. Time reaches its end. There are no further events.

We move through history, turning and turning. To disrupt that turning, D-503 and people like him under the United or One State--people among us, too, people in the real world--leftists, socialists, and statists of every stripe--seek an end to history, a final expenditure of energy, an even and entropic Utopia in which there is no further change, no further events, as D-503 sees it: "In the whole world, evenly, everywhere, there is distributed . . ." These are his words and theirs: evenly, everyone, everywhere, unity, equality, equity, distribution, redistribution. To the rest of us, all of that means an even, gray sludge of humanity, a mass of undifferentiated zombies trudging over the earth and through their featureless lives, like in the Kate Bush video. To this we say no, as does I-330:

"Don't you as a mathematician know that only differences--only differences--in temperature, only thermic contrasts make for life? And if all over the world there are evenly warm or evenly cold bodies, they must be pushed off! . . . In order to get flame, explosions! And we shall push! . . ." [Ellipses in the original.]

As I-330, a woman of great passion and feeling, understands, Life is the anti-entropic Force. We live, and so we resist entropy. Dull, blind, mindless, plodding, entropy seeks the opposite, to end us, maybe not specifically but as a general process. But history will not end, for as long as there is Life, there will be cycles of Life and a forever turning . . .

* * *

Because there are two ways of history, there are also two ways of literature, or at least of fantasy and science fiction. One is entropic: Utopia, and its Mr. Hyde identity, Dystopia. (As I have written before, Utopia and Dystopia are the same thing, or, put another way, every Utopia is also a Dystopia.) Tales of Utopia were common and popular in the early days of fantasy and science fiction. I'm not sure that anyone would be so naïve as to attempt one now. (That should tell real-world utopian theorists--the socialists and statists among us--a thing or two about their prospects for bringing their fantasies to life.) Dystopian stories are still popular, though, even if they function as vehicles of satire or commentary, or as cautionary tales, or simply as escapist fantasies, rather than as serious possibilities. I see We as a satire and a fantasy, pointed to be sure but not necessarily an attempt at extrapolation or prognostication. In contrast, it's hard to think of 1984 as anything less than a nightmarish vision of our future. George Orwell may have written his novel late in life when his own prospects appeared so bleak, but he and his cohorts were still living in the shadow of totalitarianism, and the totalitarian mind and its ideas were still among them--and on the move. Stalin may have died just a few years later, but there were new totalitarian fantasies then slouching towards Babylon. We live with them today, and they stalk us everywhere we go.

* * *

The other way of literature is towards the infinite. Nearly fifty years ago, Donald A. Wollheim wrote: "The essence of science fiction is that this is a changing world." He assumed an "Infinite Future" and urged "a belief in human infinity." The essence of science fiction would seem to be towards infinity: there is reason for hope, still possibilities for progress and change, for there is still life, humanity, and the human mind still at work in the universe. But that was fifty years ago. Where do we stand now? Does science fiction still "maintain a belief in human infinity"? Or have science fiction writers and readers come to prefer entropy?

* * *

Because it is about the future, science fiction easily becomes politicized. Science fiction may in fact be inherently political (and from there, perhaps inevitably utopian). There have certainly been political controversies among writers of science fiction and fantasy. Some if not all of these have to do with racial and gender politics, in other words, the fruits of critical theory. Totalitarianism is a many-headed hydra. This is just another of its heads. Believe it or not, there are still old-fashioned Marxists or socialists among the ranks of science fiction and fantasy writers, too. Evidently they haven't gotten the memo that they and their ideas have become outdated. They still seek Utopia and entropy. But isn't every socialist or totalitarian scheme, whether Marxist or post-Marxist, utopian and entropic in its ends? And if science fiction is about the infinite future, then how can these things be reconciled? Can there be a positive entropic science fiction?

* * *

In history, in literature, in politics, there comes an inevitable confrontation with the problem of good versus evil. A neverending problem, a neverending battle. Neverending. You already know this, but neverending means forever. For as long as there is Life, there will be inputs. There will never be a winding down. When we face evil, we must also be facing infinity. Maybe that's one of the reasons that tales of infinity must not be told, because they frighten children and the childlike mind.

At every page, in front of every image, I stop to catch my breath. And I tell myself: This is the end, they have reached the last limit; what follows can only be less horrible; surely it is impossible to invent suffering more naked; cruelty more refined. Moments later I admit my error: I underestimated the assassin's ingenuity. The progression into the inhuman transcends the exploration of the human. Evil, more than good, suggests infinity.

Those are the words of Elie Wiesel, who chose to tell stories of what he had witnessed and experienced. He has been looking at albums of photographs, a graphic record of the evil that man does to man. In these images, he encounters the possibility that evil may be infinite, a frightening one for all of us. (From "Snapshots" in One Generation After [Pocket Books, 1978], p. 62.)

* * *

The utopian theorist necessarily believes that good, his idea of good, can and will--of course!--triumph over evil. That is the purpose and endpoint of History after all. It cannot be otherwise, for History is an irresistible Force. Its ways and results are known. It has an arc (like an arrow flying through Time) that always bends the right way. It has a right side and a wrong side, and the wrong side must always lose. Once evil is overcome, we on the right side of History shall have Utopia. And entropy. They leave off that part. Either that or they yearn for it--the uniform coldness of evenly distributed bodies, filled with reason and drained of Life. In this vision, the infinite, the neverending and ever-changing, the endless cycling and turning, perhaps what O'Brien calls "the process of life"--Life itself--all of this must cease.

* * *

But even O'Brien is not so naïve. He understands that there will always be an enemy to overcome, that punishment must always be meted out, for human beings will not go easily into sameness and submission. He has nothing but contempt for "the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined." (Signet, p. 220) (Could George Orwell have foreseen the coming of Herbert Marcuse?) At first glance, we might think that O'Brien seeks an endpoint to history, that he, too, seeks entropy. (I assumed that the other day when I wrote.) After all, 1984 is a dystopian work, and Dystopia is seemingly entropic by definition. But O'Brien doesn't plan for stasis. He in fact believes in action, progress, change, refinement:

"Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."

And:

"But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler." [Emphasis added.]

Remember, O'Brien's vision of the future is "a boot stamping on a human face--forever": the tense is the present progressive. You know this already, but forever means neverending. Not entropy but infinity. An asymptote, always approaching perfection but never reaching it. Always with inputs, never with any final expenditure. "Evil, more than good, suggests infinity." Human depravity knows no limit and no end.

* * *

Like history and literature, the cosmos has two ways: it will end either in entropy--an evenly distributed, red-black sludge of matter and energy--or with the beginning of a new cycle. Put another way, the question might be: Is the nature of the cosmos feminine or masculine? It all depends on whether or not there is enough matter hiding inside it to make it all fall back on itself. Or whether or not there is enough outward-flowing energy to make it expand forever. (Maybe these are both the same question.) If I understand things correctly, there is a tussle going on among cosmologists and astrophysicists who believe that there is versus those who believe that there isn't. There are more questions and hypotheses, too; there is not necessarily a dichotomy but maybe a polychotomy (my new word). I won't pretend to know the ins and outs of all of it, but to paraphrase an old saying, a psychologist is a man who watches everyone else when the question of dark matter and energy enters the room.

* * *

There is the question of how the universe will end, either with a whimper or a bang (or, as Robert Frost--perfect surname--pondered, whether with fire or ice), but there is also the question of why people believe--or more precisely, why they want to believe--in one thing or another. Could there be among cosmologists the same divide as among the rest of humanity, including lowly writers of fantasy and science fiction? Could there be among them a dichotomy between infinity and entropy? Between the circle and the arrow? Between Utopia and the neverending push? Between an end of history and no end at all? In every belief, there is the question, What does holding this belief offer to the holder of it? Can this or that philosophical position or scientific postulate really be just a bit of wishful thinking? A desire to force the vast universe into accord with our own minute beliefs? Do you prefer entropy because it confirms some other belief that you hold, one too dear to give up? Do you run away from infinity because it scares you? Does the possibility of the infinite suggest a Creator of the infinite? Or maybe it can be used as a substitute for that Creator. Yeah, that's the ticket. For if the universe is infinite in Time, and if it simply creates itself, again and again, then we can dispense with any Creator seated above the universe. We can apply Occam's Razor--a blade--to the problem and keep our assumptions simple: the Universe itself is the Creator, and our beliefs and non-beliefs become thereby satisfied. We can thereby believe in and yearn for infinity in the Cosmos, as it suits us, just as we might believe in and yearn for entropy on Earth. And if there is no supernatural creator of the infinite, then we as human beings--as the incarnate minds of the Creator-Universe--may create our own infinitude. We may stop at nothing--there can be no limits to anything we might imagine or do, including any evil or depravity we might commit.

* * *

But where does that leave entropy? If we are to climb the Tower of Babel, seize godlike power, and become the creators of infinitude, then what are we to do with the possibility that the universe might go on expanding forever? Entropy might be perfectly fine for the pedestrian, earthbound imagination of the utopian theorist, but what about those whose imaginations wish to wander among--ultimately to create--the planets and stars? There may be infinity in entropy, for the final, entropic universe is also infinite, in Space rather than in Time. But how satisfying is that to the believer in--to the person who desperately yearns for--an endlessly cycling universe? Not very, I suppose. And maybe it's a little frightening, too, for what is the way out? What can there possibly be outside the universe that could somehow change things inside? What can we get to help us reverse this ultimate, crushing, depressing entropy? Nothing. There can be nothing. We must be believe in nothing.

* * *

Or maybe we can believe in ourselves and our ability to create our own Mini-Me universe in which we can escape from entropy or some other universe-ending disaster, like baby Moses in his basket or R2-D2 and C-3PO shot out of the Rebel blockade runner. Yes, that's an idea in physics. Credit goes to Dr. Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It might easily be an idea for a science fiction story: "Go ahead--go eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Meanwhile, we're going to work on our escape pod." It sounds like the origin story of Superman. It would also allow for new Life and the beginning of new cycles . . .

* * *

Draw any line long enough in a universe warped by gravity and it becomes a circle. And so here we have a circle: to the socialist or statist imagining an earthbound Utopia, entropy is suitable and desirable. It is, after all, the goal and endpoint of History and all of his own efforts. There will be a last revolution, History will end, and there will be no after. Consequently, tales of the infinite must not be told because they will frighten the children. On the other hand, entropy frightens the materialist taking the long view, for what is he to do with his belief in and yearning for the infinite-in-Time, endlessly cycling Creator-Universe if everything is to end in a completely uniform, dull sludge of matter-energy? There must be new beginnings, new waves, new cycles, the arms of new galaxies turning in the sky like the wings of a windmill . . . 

* * *

Maybe I have been setting up a row of straw men so that I might easily knock them down. Maybe I'm imagining beliefs and non-beliefs that don't really exist. Maybe things aren't so simple. But if they do and if they are, then I might point out that there are solutions to these problems for the seeker after earthly entropy or cosmological infinity, if he or she will only have them (more for him than for her, who may believe in and seek after the Infinite by working in the merely infinite): If the utopian will give up on his idea of creating heaven on earth and allow the true Creator his greater prerogative. If the materialist will simply transfer her belief in and yearning for the unseen or unknown from dark matter or dark energy or whatever other dark force to something more. If both will believe in Life and Love, recognize and embrace the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, have faith in the Creator of it all, who exists outside it and above it forever, keeps it all going and turning forever . . .

There could be a solution if only they would have it.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Quotes for Today from 1984 (and Before)-No. 6

From 1984:

"You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?"

[. . .]

He [Winston] knew what O'Brien would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth [. . . .] That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others." (Signet, p. 216)

Except that that's not what O'Brien says in answer to his own question. We'll get to that in a minute. In the meantime, let's hear what's on the mind of the Grand Inquisitor:

"They [humanity] will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever-sinful and ignoble race of man?" (Bobbs-Merrill, p. 30)

And:

"No, we care for the weak, too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them--so awful it will seem to them to be free." (p. 30)

[. . .]

"And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures, except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy." (p. 40)

So maybe George Orwell had read The Brothers Karamazov and kept it in mind as he was writing 1984. More than just decades had passed since the publication of Dostoyevski's novel, however. A clear-eyed witness to history, Orwell understood as much. Weary, benighted, naïve, trapped inside his story, Winston Smith does not. The Grand Inquisitor's motive, cynical as it is, wasn't quite cynical enough for 1948-1949, let alone for our own times, for here is O'Brien's answer to his own question:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; only power, pure power. [. . .] We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" [Emphasis added.] (p. 217)

* * *

There are still those among us who seek power for its own sake, for the opportunity to exercise their will over all. Like the poor, they will always be with us. But maybe the age of the Grand Inquisitor, the Benefactor, Lenin, and O'Brien has passed. Then again, maybe not. It's worth noting here that seventy years separated the initial publication of The Brothers Karamazov from that of 1984--and that seventy-plus-one separate us from the publication of Orwell's novel. In that first seventy-year period, the Grand Inquisitor's motives appear to have been rendered obsolete by O'Brien's naked, cruel, and cynical will to power. At least the Grand Inquisitor imagined that what he was doing was for the good of humanity. O'Brien says: "The object of power is power." Now another seventy-year period has passed. What of O'Brien's ideas now? Have they been rendered obsolete, too?

I'll answer that question in a hurry: I think that the aspiring tyrants in our midst have come to understand that murder, torture, imprisonment, starvation, and all of the other overt and vulgar methods of early- and mid-century socialism aren't nearly as effective as one might have hoped. After all, the Nazis were defeated in 1945, 988 years short of their goal, and Bolshevism failed at the end of its allotted threescore and ten. The lessons of the totalitarian epoch seem obvious: If there is going to be power concentrated in the hands of a few revolutionaries, it will have to be gathered and held in a different way. Tyranny by force is inefficient. More efficient by far is for people to tyrannize themselves and each other, for them to participate willingly, even joyfully, in their own oppression. The locus of power can then be moved away from the State, and oppression by the State becomes unnecessary. The governmental clown show can continue, but the real action will be somewhere else.

Enter cultural Marxism, critical theory, political correctness, identity politics, and the New Left, which, at age sixty or so, is actually pretty long in the tooth by now. Despite the fact that their repast has gone bad and now stinks to high heaven, a lot of Marx, Freud, and Gramsci inspired revolutionaries have gone to the buffet table of leftism/socialism/statism and come away with a big heapin' helpin' of that kind of thing. But how well is that going to work? These revolutionaries might tear each other apart over real or perceived transgressions, but that's their own fight. They're really just sitting at the kid's table--at a highchair actually, because, boy, are they infantile. The real work is being done by a new kind of revolutionary. Like Lenin and O'Brien, these new revolutionaries are serious, driven, ambitious, arrogant. They are confident and ruthless in the extreme. They are also in control of a new technology that puts O'Brien, Ingsoc, Oceania, and all of their trappings to shame. Orwell had inklings of them and it when he wrote:

"Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. [. . .] With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen [. . .] could be kept under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time." (p. 170)

Substitute the phrases "digital technology" or "social media" or "the Internet" or "smartphones" or "search engines" or "Internet commerce" or maybe all of them together plus some more--substitute all of these phrases for "television" and you approach our current situation.

* * *

O'Brien says: "But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." Winston Smith resists that idea, but his resistance is weak, for he is a non-believer, or, more accurately, he doesn't see the truth, which is that human nature is in no way malleable because it has not been made by human beings. Put another way, nothing that is made by God is alterable by human beings, and nothing made by human beings out of relationship with God and our true nature can be made permanent. In his naïveté, O'Brien believes something different. But that was seventy years ago. The new kind of revolutionary of which I speak may have recognized the same kind of shortcomings that the old kind has, namely, that mid-century methods don't work very well--and that they were probably never going to work very well. Like I've said, if you're going to gather power to yourself, you can't do it very easily or efficiently by force, a thing the old revolutionaries have come to understand. You also can't do it by trying to change human nature, just as the new revolutionaries, looking at the past failures of O'Brien and his kind, now seem to understand . . .

And that's why you must change what it is to be human.

Human beings are a pesky problem if you're an aspiring tyrant. How are you supposed to handle them with all of their desires to be free and unruly? To think and speak and act as they please? To be unpredictable, un-programable, un-machinelike? To think about and act on something other than your project? To love and be loyal to somebody--anybody--rather than you? You can't change their nature. You have already figured out that part of the problem. What to do? What to do?

"I've got!" cries your minion, an underpaid guest worker who is living on a shoestring in the interstices of your digital-elitist enclave. "We will make them into something other than human!"

And so you get to work. The great thing is that you have so many options--or so you think. You can genetically reengineer them. You can turn them into cyborgs or zombies drugged up on some kind of digital smack. You can upload their consciences into computer servers or android bodies. You can feed them digital pablum and harvest their data, thereby reducing them to inert generators of information, kind of like in The Matrix. (In We, everyone volunteers or is forced to undergo an operation to get rid of his or her sense of "fancy.") Most promising of all, you can build the greatest AI the universe will ever know and do something with it. You don't know what it will be just yet, but one way or another, you're going to use it to outsmart God, Man, and all of Creation. You will make all of them superfluous, obsolete. Human beings will be gone forever from the universe. At last your problem is solved. At last you can rest, like Thanos on his idyllic planet, happy in the knowledge that the universe is exactly as you wish it to be.

* * *

The overarching goal, I think, is to establish a transhumanist society, a posthuman universe, an attempted eradication of the pesky problem of an unchanging and uncooperative humanity. If only we can succeed in this, we will have, as O'Brien and our new tech masters promise, immortality. Not individual immortality, mind you, but digital-collective immortality. (O'Brien's promise is political-collective or Party-collective immortality.) That's still immortality, right? This is all still doable, right? And not just doable but desirable, right?

Well, wrong, I think. We have tried all of this before. It seems to be a part of human nature--to feel that we are or ought to be gods, that we can make of ourselves something other than what we are, that we can escape from time and achieve immortality, all on our own and under our own power. Transhumanism and posthumanism seem to be just the latest iterations of these age-old desires. If I'm right, they, too, are doomed to failure. In biblical times, reaching for heaven and godhood, we set about building the Tower of Babel. We all know how that turned out. Anyway, if you doubt that the masters of digital information and communications are working on this problem, watch a video called "The Selfish Ledger" on the website The Verge, dated May 17, 2018, and accessible by clicking here (for now). Assuming it's real and not just a spoof or a sophisticated bit of trolling, it is the most perfect horror movie ever made.

As I have said before, we as human beings have never stayed our hands: everything that we have imagined--and many things we have not yet imagined--we will do. And so we will have a new Grand Inquisitor, a new Benefactor, a new Lenin, a new O'Brien for our new age, and once unleashed, perfect horrors will tear across the world like a storm.

A French-language edition issued by Le Livre de Poche in 1969 with cover art by Michel Siméon (1920-1998).

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Flying Saucers from Before the Great War

Six months ago, before the world fell apart, I wrote about the evolution of the flying saucer from nineteenth-century airship to twentieth-century flying disk. Now I write again.

It seems to me that the conceit of the nineteenth century was both progressive and romantic. The conceit was that Science, this new and exciting force, could be and would be used to solve previously intractable human problems. Airships were a symbol of this kind of thinking, the belief being that airships, because of their great power, would render war impossible to wage. There would be other benefits, too, but an end to war would have to come first if the world was to be made a better place. Salvation was literally in the air; it would be dispensed from the heavens. Here at last was progress, wrought not only by science but also by a faith in science and its power to remake (or at least tame) human nature. (1) This was the dream and the vision. And I suppose it's one of the reasons that early science fiction stories could be called scientific romances with some degree of accuracy and without fear of self-contradiction.

The events of the twentieth century taught us a different lesson, at least for those willing to listen. There are many who haven't listened. Sometimes it seems that most haven't listened, for there are still too many among us who believe in progress, the malleability of human nature, and the perfectibility of human society, thereby of individual human beings. They continue to have an overweening faith, pride, and confidence in Science and Reason. Their faith, as opposed to a faith in anything outside of science, helps to explain why the airship became the flying saucer. With all non-material and supernatural things swept aside during the nineteenth century, we as human beings were free to seize power from above and apply it to our own earthly problems. If the world was going to be made a better place, we would be the ones to do it.

Except that we didn't. Instead we used airships, and after them airplanes, rockets, missiles, and guided bombs, as weapons of war. From the heavens we rained down upon each other horrifying death, making of this Earth a perfect hell. The German State of the twentieth century is an object lesson in the progressive/romantic conceits of the one that preceded it. As Germany proved, the airship would not be used to end war. Instead airships were used to wage it. During the Great War, Germany became the first country to use a rigid airship--the infamous Zeppelin--to bombard another. It was also the first to use in war guided missiles in the form of the V-1 Buzzbomb, guided ballistic missiles in the V-2 rocket, jet-powered aircraft in the Me-262, and guided bombs in the Fritz X. Given a few more months, Nazi Germany might also have been the first to use a flying wing-type aircraft against its enemies. (2) And never mind the atomic bomb.

All of these were hard, scientific/technological developments. You could argue that, as such, they were based in a progressive faith in Science and Reason. But Germany, especially Nazi Germany, was also given to romantic, irrational, and pseudoscientific thinking. That simultaneous embrace of science and pseudoscience, of reason and irrationality, of hard materialism and soft romanticism, is itself irrational and one of the reasons that Nazi Germany remains, to me at least, an almost inexplicable phenomenon. But where had we seen this mix of science and romance before? Where had there previously been a representation of pseudoscience as science? Where else but in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientific story or scientific romance, a genre that evolved during the interwar period into what we now call science fiction. In realizing that, we might imagine Nazi Germany as the ultimate, real-world scientific romance, perhaps starring Adolf Hitler as an extreme perversion of the Captain Nemo-type Byronic and Romantic hero. (3, 4) And if all of that is true, then the scientific romance and the reign of the airships can be seen to have finally failed with the end of World War II. (5, 6) It's probably no coincidence that flying saucers came along just two years later to take their place.

* * *

Problems remained, though. Now, instead of originating on Earth and among human beings, airborne power came from places unknown and was held by equally unknown and unknowable beings. They are by definition alien and inexplicable. With flying saucers, questions follow upon unanswerable questions. Perhaps none is more important than this:

What do they want?

Or, put another way:

What is their function?

When I wrote in February, I speculated on the physical appearance of the twentieth-century flying saucer as a kind of natural evolution from the nineteenth-century airship. But I also touched on the function of the airship. Here is a quote, the same quote that I used before, from The Century Magazine, 1878:

As entirely new profession--that of airmanship--will be thoroughly organized, employing a countless army of airmen. . . . Boundaries will be obliterated. . . . Troops, aerial squadrons, death-dealing armaments will be maintained only for police surveillance over barbarous races, and for instantly enforcing the judicial decrees of the world's international court of appeal. (Quoted in Predictions by John Durant [1956], p. 28)

That function was affirmed in one of the great flying saucer movies of the twentieth century, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is also in Things to Come (1936). Now I have found another such quote from before the Great War, but only just before:

The world is tending toward universal peace--the abolition of war. And one of the greatest heralds of peace is the airship. It will make war too horrible to exist further.

The quote is from a book called Wonder Stories (p. 61), written by Francis Trevelyan Miller (1877–1959) and published in 1913. My copy is inscribed:

Charles Gray

Dec. 28th 1914

seven months to the day before the Great War began! It's astonishing to think that even at that late date, progressive-minded people had such great faith in human nature and human perfectibility. And such naïveté, too, for as we have seen since Wonder Stories was published, we haven't yet found "anything too horrible to exist." We haven't yet stayed our hands from doing the most depraved and horrifying of things. In actuality, war is proving to be one of the lesser of the horrifying things that we do. At least war is direct. More killing is done behind closed doors these days than on the battlefield. More depravity exists among the élite than among the common man, including the common foot soldier. Airships didn't do anything to change any of that. In fact that old romantic faith in science, reason, technology, and progress that drove the development of airships has only helped speed things along towards evermore horror and ever greater--or at least evermore practicable and efficient--depravity. Airships into airplanes, the promise of Things to Come, didn't halt their march. Nor did airships into flying saucers, which was the message of The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as the contactee narratives of the 1950s and the abductee narratives after that. (7, 8) Flying saucers continue to keep their distance and we continue to kill each other. Under the sway of Scientism and materialism, we threaten to do far worse things. Imagine a coming age in which human beings are genetically engineered to be no longer human . . .

* * *

Another function of the flying saucer is to observe, to watch, to study, to see. One of the now iconic (or clichéd) images of the flying saucer is of the cone-shaped beam of light--or death ray--cast upon the Earth and its inhabitants. Here it is on a poster for another of the great flying saucer movies, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956):

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers was based on Flying Saucers from Outer Space by Maj. Donald Keyhoe (1953). Keyhoe, as it so happens, was a teller of weird tales. Click here to read his story.

Here is a similar image from Weird Tales, November 1944, without the flying saucer, although a flying saucer might be implied as the source of the descending green aliens. (9) The cover artist was Matt Fox:

Fox's cover makes me think of the little green aliens in Toy Story. I have been chosen . . . (10) Here is still another, depicting a supposedly real-life event, the abduction of Travis Walton:

This imagery has obvious religious overtones and obvious origins in religious belief and religious art. That's really a topic for another day, or maybe a week, or a month. For now, I'll show just one image and that should be enough to close this case:

The Baptism of Christ by the Dutch artist Aert de Gelder (1645-1727), executed ca. 1710. The image is the same, its elements are the same, the phenomenon is the same, the feeling and the yearning are the same. These are essentially the same picture. There is even a flying saucer in each. (Actually there is a messenger from on high in each, it's just that one is supernatural and the other is material. Both, however, are spiritual.) The difference between these two images is that they are separated by nearly three centuries, moreover by a vast and unbridgeable gap between belief in God and the completely disastrous loss of that belief, not within Travis Walton himself but within our whole culture, which believes in nothing in the form of Scientism and materialism.

Anyway, my point here is to show that the flying saucer, which is an invention of science fiction, is descended from the romantic/progressive airship of the nineteenth century (which has, as the image above shows, its own line of descent from prescientific, pre-materialistic times). So are there similar images of airships? Well . . . 

. . . how about this one from the San Francisco Call, November 23, 1896, during the first UFO flap in America? The Mystery Airships of 1896-1897 are supposed to have been real, even if there weren't any such aircraft known to exist at the time . . .

Just seventeen years later, though, when Wonder Stories was published, there were in fact rigid airships, exemplified by the German Zeppelin, which first took to the air in 1900. The author of Wonder Stories, Francis Trevelyan Miller, even mentions the Zeppelin in his book. Above is its frontispiece. The function of the airship in this picture isn't obvious at first glance. But from reading Miller's chapter on airships, I gather that the men in the airship above are observing enemy troop movements. The idea, then, is that airships will make traditional warfare obsolete because nothing can escape observation from above. It is this image that grabbed my attention when I first saw Wonder Stories because it recalls the iconography of the flying saucer and its casting of a cone of light upon earthbound people below. It also goes along with the idea that airpower--specifically the airship and later the flying saucer--will render warfare obsolete and impossible to wage. That is the message of Things to Come, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and no doubt other science fiction of the twentieth century.

I have said before that flying saucers come not from outer space but from science fiction. But then science fiction has its own origins in nineteenth-century romanticism, progressivism, and, I think, materialism and Scientism. Put another way, flying saucers flew out of the 1800s on the wings of imagination. Whether it was a naïve or even childish imagination is another one of those topics for another day of writing and reading.

Notes
Each has its own little story to tell.

(1) It's no coincidence that four of the great scientific, pseudoscientific, or pseudo-historical developments of the nineteenth century--Darwinism, Marxism, Mendelian genetics, and Freudianism--were attempts (or used as attempts) to drill down into the heart of human nature. Only one of these--genetics--is actually a science and only one of the originators--Gregor Mendel--was actually a scientist. Consequently, he was the most hardheaded among them. It so happens that he was also a man of faith.

So: a man of faith (Mendel)-->an actual science-->rejected by a twentieth-century regime--the U.S.S.R.--in which reason was supposed to have been supreme, to be replaced by a pseudoscience, in this case Lysenkoism; or, conversely, pursued and used as a kind of pseudoscience by progressives and Nazis (they're hard to tell apart sometimes) in the form of eugenics, abortion, forced sterilization, and bizarre experimentation on human beings and human society, either real and murderous or aspirational and murderous.

Meanwhile: skeptics, doubters, and outright atheists (Darwin, Marx, Freud, and their acolytes)-->pseudoscience, pseudo-history, or weak or soft science-->embraced by the murderous regimes of the twentieth century, or at the very least embraced by aspiring tyrants and murderers, for example, the New Left, the critical theorist, and the politically correct offspring of the teratogenic mating of Marxism and Freudianism. For another, the Fascist/Antifa people currently overrunning some of our cities and threatening and hoping to overrun our whole civilization.

What a strange and curious world we live in.

(2) Like the airship of the previous century, the flying wing-type aircraft of the twentieth is a symbol of scientific and technological progress. You know that if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which has as one of its set pieces a fistfight around a Nazi flying wing. In our popular culture, Nazi technology = advanced technology. In recent years, there have even been conspiracy theorists who believe that Nazi scientists were the first to develop flying saucers. For some reason, these flying saucers look like the fakes that George Adamski built out of a chicken brooder or a desk lamp. Some technology. We shouldn't forget, either, that one of at least two early descriptions of the first flying saucers (June 24, 1947), was of a scimitar-shaped, flying wing-type aircraft. If Kenneth Arnold hadn't described them as skipping like saucers, the whole history and iconography of the phenomenon would have been far different, and maybe there wouldn't have been a flying saucer era at all.
(3) Captain Nemo was reincarnated in Maximilian Schell's character, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, in The Black Hole (1981). There is of course a lot of German and maybe a little bit of German romantic in his character. His ship, the USS Cygnus, looks like it came straight out of the nineteenth century, not as an airship so much as a great, flying Crystal Palace, a nineteenth-century progressive/romantic wonder that burned to the ground in the same year that Things to Come was released. "This is the end of an age," remarked Winston Churchill. And how.
(4) The phrase "Nazi science fiction" would, like "scientific romance," seem self-contradictory and any discussion of it might risk foundering on the rock of German-romantic or Nazi irrationality. Here's the best quote I can find on short notice:

The science fiction novel, with its technical emphasis, at first seems to be the most difficult genre to integrate into the National Socialist literary canon. Science fiction, however, fit perfectly into the Nazi project of returning to a preindustrial world where science is really a craftsmanlike technology that has its source in the ancient currents of magic and racial myth but not in rationality. In real life this was the final goal toward which the Führer led the German people in a total war. In literature the irrational that is capable of subsuming technology in a rudimentary sense had been prepared as early as Heimatkunst [the "Homeland Art" movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s]. It would be more precise to refer to Nazi science-fiction novels as magical-technological novels. These novels--because the real-life dismissal of science was at the core of National Socialist ideology and its self-destructiveness--constitute the one literary genre in which Nazi ideology showed its true face most clearly. [Emphasis added.]

See what I mean by near-foundering? But at least we have a workable term, "magical-technological novel," which approximates, I think, "scientific romance." From German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism by Ingo Roland Stoehr (2001), p. 192.
(5) Perhaps the crash of the progressive/romantic airship was prefigured in the flaming disaster of the Hindenburg, which came to grief on May 6, 1937, at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Speaking of flames, the UFOs of World War II were called "foo fighters," from the Smokey Stover comic strip and its popular saying, "Where there's foo there's fire." For those who don't know it, Smokey Stover is a fireman. Supposedly a nonsense word, foo is almost certainly from the French, feu, meaning fire. (I think that's called a tautology: "Where there's fire, there's fire.")
(6) Ten days before the Hindenburg went up in flames, Nazi and Fascist air forces bombed the Basque town of Guernica, a terrifying event memorialized by Pablo Picasso in his epic painting Guernica. Though not the first aerial bombardment of a town or city, it was one of the first to gain international attention and international opprobrium. Again, the lesson of the twentieth century is that airpower will not end war but only extend it into another element.

(7) The Day the Earth Stood Still can be seen as an abductee/contactee story, screened at about the same time that supposedly real-life narratives of the same kind began making the rounds of flying saucer fan gatherings. The message was the same, too: our space brothers--which tended to be of the Aryan or Nordic type--wanted to bring us peace and brotherly love. First, an end to war, then, brotherly love, hopefully a little sisterly love, too, with those tall, blonde Nordic aliens.

(8) It occurs to me that The Day the Earth Stood Still and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) have similarities except that in the first, the single mother is the abductee, while in the second it is her son who is taken aboard the alien spacecraft. In both, the military is a sort of enemy or at least an obstacle to the fulfillment or salvation-through-knowledge sought by the main characters. The opposite is true in The Thing from Another World, also from 1951 and also a great flying saucer movie. In that movie, the scientist is the sort-of villain, and the military men the obvious heroes. He wants to understand. They mean to defend. The journalist, who might be the intermediate figure between men of action and men of ideas, reconciles the two at the end, a nice touch made by the screenwriters.
(9) At first glance, Matt Fox's cover seems simple enough. But isn't it actually an inversion of traditional Christian imagery? There is the cone of light or beams of light issuing from Heaven. Smaller, lesser angels descend in the background, while two heralds flank the larger and obviously superior angel or archangel in the center. He has come to Earth on a mission, but what is it? What does he want? Here is a similar image, again from an age of faith:

The Annunciation to the Shepherds by Abraham Hondius (ca. 1631-1691), a painting from 1663. It looks like the heralds are missing from this painting, but we have all seen them in other paintings of the same type.

The spiraling cherubs above lead back to another Weird Tales cover:

Weird Tales, September 1941, cover art by Margaret Brundage. In this case, the spiraling figures are being taken up instead of being sent down. And instead of joy, they express fear and apprehension, at least until the taking up and spiraling begins.

The spiral motif makes me think of the Tower of Babel and its spiraling, ascending walkway. In biblical times we built for ourselves a Tower of Babel so that we might ascend to the heavens and thereby gain godlike power. (The title of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength [1945] refers to the Tower of Babel.) Instead we were scattered. But with the airship first and later with airplanes, we could make our ascent without a tower--we were cut loose from foundations of slime. Again, it seems to me that the purpose of the airship is to exercise godlike power--to make the world a better place without God's help, this in an age that discarded belief in God and substituted for it a progressive/romantic belief in human beings and the power of the human mind. Now, using Gregor Mendel's insights, we are attempting to drill down into the heart of the cell and to manipulate another spiral, the double helix that resides within each. Again, we seek godlike power, in this case to remake the Creation because we believe it to be flawed. In our own very fine thoughts and minds, we believe we can make the world a better place, alone, without God's help. We're trying once again to build a Tower of Babel. That didn't work before. It's unlikely to work again.

The cover story, by the way, was "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth, a notably Catholic author.

(10) That statement--I have been chosen--essentially summarizes the abductee/contactee narrative: I have been chosen--I, who am so small and insignificant in my own life [goes the subtext]--I have been chosen. I stand out. I am special. I alone have been selected to receive the only truth from the heavens and to disseminate it among a benighted and earthbound humanity. I have hereby gained importance and significance. I can hereby feel and am right to feel self-esteem. I.

If there had been social media in the 1950s, we would have had selfies taken with aliens, and the abductees/contactees would have posted them on the Internet in their desperate search for the esteem of their peers. Millions of likes and thumbs-up would have awaited. The significance of the aliens themselves would have been pretty negligible, as the flying saucer phenomenon is ultimately not about flying saucers or aliens from space but about human beings and the spiritual emptiness we feel in this overly scientific and materialistic age. We seek transcendence and will find it or make it any way we can.

Well, that's a long article, with lots of ideas and notes. I wanted to give you plenty to read, though, as I'm going to be gone again for a while. I'll let you know when I come back.

Original text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley