Conclusion: What remains of Science...

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was writing about fingerprints in his Sherlock Holmes stories long before Charles Darwin understood what they were, and before Scotland Yard used them as unique human identifiers.

Jules Verne was expounding on submarines 50 years before they really got going; he may have got it wrong about the Antarctic being all ice, as the North Pole was thought to be – but, still: what a thinker.

Science, as we know it, was not always as wonderfully empirical as we have come to think of it in modern times. Francis Bacon was thought of as a sorcerer and philosopher in his day, even if we see him now as one of the most rigorous scientists of his age. Leonardo de Vinci was a man of prodigious scientific talent – as well as being able to paint a bit. Even Isaac Newton was characterised by John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1946, as ‘...not the first of the age of reason... [but]... the last of the magicians...’

Today, we are still unsure about what are the building blocks of basic matter: I don’t mean just in terms of theoretical quantum particles; even the elements of the Periodic Table hold immense mysteries for us. A fierce debate rages under the surface of Chemistry about where the properties of an atom reside: for example, if Sodium is an explosive soft metal, and chlorine is a poisonous green gas, where does the poison and the explosions go when they combine to make sodium chloride, or household salt, as we prefer to call it?

This helps us to remember why Physics is still taught at MIT and Oxford under its original name: Natural Philosophy. If all of these sciences were so scientific, why would they need metaphysics to understand them?

The point is: there was a time when human creativity was not so compartmentalised into real and unreal, when imagination was lord of our mind, and not a mere vassal to observation.

We must take to heart the lessons Karl Popper taught us in his great works, not least in ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’: his ideas on the falsification of scientific theories informed us that it was impossible to prove a scientific theory conclusively right – only to prove it wrong. This was a major critique of empiricism and of the observationalist- inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. It also did Humanity a major service by killing off Positivism - the notion that if it cannot be observed, it need not be explained, and only the observable was worth considering – and seriously denting historicism, and thus freeing us from the inevitability of our own destiny.

We forget sometimes that modern science started as Scientism: it too was a theory, a theory that won out against Religion around the time of Darwin; if only because Scientism proved to be more nuanced, and thus less intellectually tyrannical.

In the 20th Century, we then seemed to fall upon Science with the same fervour with which we had earlier clung to Religion, and for the same reason: the search for truth and meaning in our lives and existence. And as before, we discovered that, if we don’t choose our gods, then our gods will be chosen for us.

Chesterton observed caustically: 'when men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’ Well put; but we always had other choices open to us, rather than just the metaphysical ones of God or Science.

There is, for instance, the way of the Poets.

Romanticism had the same roots as Rationalism, for all that the former was a reaction to the latter: those roots were the search for truth. Rationalism found it in Metaphysics; Romanticism found it in beauty. In the End, Keats and Kant were fellow-travellers, because Romanticism and Rationalism had a common end, as well as a common enemy: fear of the infinite. ‘Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws’, as the Doors said; with poetry or metaphysics, we seek the truth to find meaning in the everyday, and to light up the infinite night of ignorance.

That, then, for me, is one purpose of science-fiction today: it puts our new rationalism, our modern religion, our age’s quest, into a poetic perspective. The metaphysicist nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. Both are necessary for finding the truth; but the metaphysics of science is simply more accepted as The Truth than the poetry of science-fiction.

The modern world seems to have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the metaphysical, as opposed to poetic, way of using its mind. And there’s an optimistic side of me that hopes we as individuals can break that addiction, be retrained to think like poets, and accept the fluxional nature of symbols and meaning.

There is another, simpler, and therefore, more elegant, reason why I read and watch science-fiction: as Kurt Vonnegut put it with more chutzpah than I could ever summon up:

‘I love you sons of bitches... You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.’

And that’s all, folks. I loved this semester’s CFG: Planet B-17 was our very own undiscovered country; it was a blast to explore it with you all. Thank you to my awesome teachers and my talented class-mates.

Let’s go out with a song:

Chapter 5: Everything you know is wrong...

Chapter 4: Chronicle of a Conquest Foretold...

Negotiations, in business, must be done by two equal parties: if one party is weaker, then it's a takeover; if both parties are equally matched, then it's a straight fight. Either way, what varies, then, is the length of the fight.
 
Because of this, we, the Human Race, would never survive intact any contact with an alien species: we would be irrevocably changed by whatever occurred. Any visiting species would be the superior one, technologically: because they got here, didn't they? If they were our equal, then we would have heard about, or from, them by now.
 
So, let us assume they will be mightier; we don't have to speculate on their moral worth - mainly, though not only, because we may not be in any great position to stand in judgment over anyone on that. The very obvious question is then begged: why no contact yet?
 
Again, if we assume they have been in contact; then how have we not heard? The answer may lie in what is known as a 'false-flag' operation: a covert military operation designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities, groups or nations than those who actually planned and executed them. 'Mightier', then, ceases to refer to technological or military strength; it just indicates who may have the better ideas.
 
A fine example of this is The Maitland Plan. Major General Thomas Maitland was a British officer who had fought in Spain with Wellington against Napoleon. In 1800, he came up with a strategy to wrest control from the Spanish Crown - ally of Napoleon at the time - the entire continent of South America; his plan was nothing if not audacious:
 

Seize control of Buenos Aires.

Take position in Mendoza.

Coordinate actions with an independentist Chilean army.

Cross the Andes.

Defeat the Spanish and take control of Chile.

Continue up the coast and liberate Peru.

Start another rebellion in the north of the continent.

In time, have these two forces meet in the middle.

Thus, deny Spain of all its American dominions.

 
Sounds familiar?
 
Official history records, accurately, that Britain never carried out the Maitland Plan. History is less forthcoming about who did. Who did? Why, we did.
 
It starts with Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda; in 1796, de Miranda was initiated as a freemason by his good friend, French General Lafayette, in Philadelphia, USA.
 
After much travelling around Europe, de Miranda settled in London; there, he set up a Masonic lodge under the French Rite - of 5 Degrees, not the 33 Degrees of Scottish Rite - called the Lautaro Lodge; this lodge became the main focal point for the liberation of South America when, in 1810, a certain Simon Bolivar, with, amongst others, the learned Andres Bello, came to stay with their compatriot at his house in Grafton Way.

Bolivar stayed in London until 1813, before leaving to start his 'Campana Admirable', and claim the title of 'El Libertador'; Bello stayed in London for a total of 19 years, working first for Colombia's, then Chile's diplomatic missions there.
 
1n 1811, Jose de San Martin, Argentinian soldier and hero of the Peninsular War, obtained a passport from his British brother-in-arms, Lord Macduff, long-time friend of Maitland, to come to England, to meet with his old school-friend Bernardo O'Higgins, who was living briefly in London at that time - O'Higgins had by this time become a mason at de Miranda's Lautaro Lodge.
 
This is a list of prominent people known to have been initiated into the Lautaro Lodge in London by 1811:
 
Jose De Gurruchaga
Santiago Marino
Andres Bello
Luis Lopez Melendez
Simon Bolivar
Jose Maria Caro
Bernardo O'Higgins
Jose Miguel Carrera
Juan Pablo Fretes
Jose De San Martin
Tomas Guido
Jose Cortes De Madariaga
Francisco Isnardi
 
In 1812, San Martin set sail on the good ship 'George Canning' to Buenos Aires, and immediately set up the continent's first Lautaro Masonic Lodge; a few of its founding members were:
 
Jose De San Martin
Carlos Maria De Alvear
Jose Matias Zapiola
Ramon Eduardo De Anchoris
Bernardo De Monteagudo
Juan Martin De Pueyrredon
Antonio Alvarez Jonte
Nicolas Rodriguez Pena
Julian Alvarez
 
Stop me if you've heard this story before... So, by the time the Andes gets crossed, and right after the Battle of Chacabuco, O'Higgins and San Martin create the first Lautaro Masonic Lodge in Chile; its first members in 1817 were:
 

Tomas Guido
Jose Antonio Balcarce
Jose Ignacio Zenteno
Juan Gregorio Las Heras
Ramon Freire
Manuel Blanco Encalada
Miguel Zanartu
Ramon Arriagada

San Martin eventually joined forces with Bolivar in 1821, and, following the 'Conferencia de Guayaquil' in 1822, gave his old London Lodge Brother total control of his armies. It plainly didn't bother his financial and political backers that in 1825 Bolivar became one of the few people on Earth to name an entire country after himself - Bolivia should be proud...

Where's the British deception, I hear you ask? Well, I can only think it entirely coincidental that Bolivar and Bello came to London to ask for financial aid for their new Republic; that San Martin was funded by British banks; as was O'Higgins. No deception, really: I can't imagine that it might have occurred to them that, rather than carry out the Maitland Plan themselves, the British could just pay us to do their heavy lifting for them, at a handsome profit for their banks.
 
I'm sure I've bored you enough with all this trivia; so, no need to read this, or this 262-page book in Spanish, for further background.
 
Nevertheless, a fine example, I hope you'll agree, of what is known as a false-flag operation.
 
And, for a course called 'Translations and Betrayals - from book [...] to reality...', apposite; proof that even history, with the right light from on high, can be made to look like science-fiction...

 

 

 

Afterthought 1: Spawn of Ziggy...

Sooooo...

An alien of uncertain sexuality comes down to Earth and corrupts the local inhabitants, before finally dying after his mission here fails...

All set to music...

OMG!




Ziggy Stardust got to dream it so that The Rocky Horror Picture Show got to be it.

Moral of the story: science-fiction needs to be careful what it dreams...

Chapter 3: Remembrance Sundae...

I have never been trained to kill large numbers of complete strangers on command. I have never had to improvise unthinking acts of killing to ensure my own survival and the survival of those around me. I have never had to summon up the courage to kill my close friends because that was the better alternative to leaving them alive in their horrifying pain.

And yet our fathers and grandfathers did all those things; and worse. Wilfred Thesiger, Etonian and Oxbridge man, who went on to fight with the SAS during the Second World War, remarked in his memoirs that the more educated the chap, the more capable he seemed to be of immense cruelty on the battlefield.

Recent research has discovered that the average age of the British soldier who landed on Normandy’s beaches at the start of D-Day in 1944 was 36; far older than the US average of 24 years. Recruitment in Britain did not fully get going until after the debacle of Dunkirk, and after the battle-hardened and desperate Polish and Free French airmen who had swelled the ranks of the RAF had won the Battle of Britain, postponing indefinitely the German invasion of the British Isles. That means that in 1941, most soldiers had been just bakers and bankers, tilers and teachers, bus-drivers and businessmen, the everymen on every street and lane in Britain. To have gone from that to war in just a few years is as unimaginable for us as it must have been for them.

These were the fathers-to-be of the post-war generations; in an era before support networks and post-traumatic stress-counselling, what affect did the experience of war have on the families of the returned? Elizabeth Jane Howard has written extensively about this in her fiction; in a recent Guardian interview, she says of her own father, who served:

“I think the trouble for [men like him]...was that if they dared to use their imagination it was too horrible. And that bleeds over into the rest of their lives."

If truth is war’s first casualty, then imagination may be war’s longest-lasting one. Perhaps that was just as well: the war ended because the Russians had more men than the Germans had bullets, and because the Americans had more aircraft than everyone else put together. But, whilst the Second World War made the USA rich, it left Europe and Britain physically and economically ruined: paying back the United States arguably cost Britain its Empire, and definitely delayed its reconstruction and prosperity by decades: there was official food-rationing until 1952; it was no coincidence that the high-rise housing-boom occurred in the early 1970s – for much of the 1950s and 1960s, large parts of British cities were still, literally, bomb-sites.

The enforced gray conformity of the 1950s was a sullen, brooding one, though: the winds of change in other parts of the world, and from other walks of life, were beginning to fan the flames of a new generation’s imagination, one that was not going to take it the way their parents had; things were going to be different: there was going to be a new order, with new ideas, and a new language with which to communicate those ideas. As it has always been, that new language was first heard in the music of the time: that music was rock ’n’ roll.

From the depths of American black music, from Rhythm and Blues and from Jazz and Swing, came something that was taken up by white youth in droves – because of changes in record technology, the children of the war generation were able to listen to something that their parents’ radios were not playing, and they got the energy and raucousness of it. They got the rebellion too: they heard the sounds, and got the picture: the future, to them, was polychromatic.

By the time the old folks woke up to what the kids were up to, it was all too late: the name was sexual enough, but black music in the white suburbs was almost too much for the fabric of society to contain. The market did what it does best, and tried to repackage the culture, or at least put a more respectable face on it: thus were we given Elvis Presley, the Justin Timberlake of his day: a white guy who could sing black. That was acceptable enough to get the stuff on mass radio – which meant the rest of the world suddenly caught fire too.

The ‘60s music scene got going, arguably, when irreverence-specialists like the Beatles were able to convince po-faced Yanks like Bob Dylan that the times may have been a-changin’ because the drugs, like LSD, were getting better. Of course it wasn’t the music that started social change; it was the times, but the music said that it was happening everywhere. As always, at first it was just the world’s gilded youth who had the money and leisure time to tune in, turn on and drop out. And there was a big incentive to drop out if you could: the world was getting faster and more complex, what with the Cold War, and civil rights issues. Politics in the US got really heavy: an increasingly-unpopular foreign war helped radicalize students – new conscription legislation also did not hurt the Stop the War campaign; years of political assassinations and inner-city riots eventually frightened the American non-youth into electing Nixon in 1968. By the time we got to Woodstock, the 1960s was done in the USA:




In the UK, meanwhile, it was barely kicking off. Musically, for want of political revolution, it was leading the world; The Hyde Park Free Festivals, and the Isle of Wight Festivals, had helped establish rock ‘n’ roll as a communal and theatrical experience, and had grounded British rock music with an enormous sense of innovation and experimentation.

And the people who were growing and evolving the music had been the children of those war-ravaged families who had grown up in surly cities, eating bland food; but the colour was in the movies they were seeing and the lives they wanted to live – and it was a life that they didn’t care that their parents didn’t understand; any life was better than the ones they felt that their parents had lived through.

So Ziggy came down from space to a waiting public. Bowie had prophesied his coming some years before:



Lyrics:

It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mommy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go

But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen

But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on

Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show

Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?


Of course Ziggy Stardust was a science-fiction story; a beautiful escapist story, the telling of which told us more about how we had got here and where we were now, than where we went from there.

We were ready for this Space Oddity: we wanted those clothes and make-up to keep our elders guessing. If the sexual ambiguity made society nervous, then the message was clear enough to us, and could be read in the two cherry-coloured nail-varnished fingers it was sticking up to the past. Throw it all in the air; so much the better for making more sundae-coloured rainbows, and not for making more war. Whatever else we would ever be, we would never again be afraid of our own imaginations. To remind us of this, all we had to do was lean back on our radios and look to the skies.

Ziggy came, did what he had to do, then returned to his own planet. We never forgot. Years later, David Bowie's inspiration is still seen in really the most obvious places:

Interlude 2: "Let my space-ships go..."

Science-Fiction performance-poetry, anyone? But, of course it exists - and no better example than this from Saul Williams:

 

Lyrics:

...Through meditation I program my heart

 to beat breakbeats and hum basslines on exhalation

 *Saul beatboxes* "ohm"

 I burn seven day candles that melt

 into twelve inch circles on my mantle

 and spin funk like myrrh

 *Saul beatboxes* "ohm"

 and I can fade worlds in and out with my mixing patterns

 letting the Earth spin as I blend in Saturn

 niggaz be like spinning windmills, braiding hair

 locking, popping, as the sonic force

 of the soul keeps the planets rocking

 the beat don't stop when, soulless matter blows

 into the cosmos, trying to be stars

 the beat don't stop when, Earth sends out satellites

 to spy on Saturnites and control Mars

 cause niggaz got a peace treaty with Martians

 and we be keepin em up to date with sacred gibberish

 like "sho' nuff" and "it's on"

 the beat goes on, the beat goes on, the beat goes "ohm"
 

 And I roam through the streets of downtown Venus

 trying to auction off monuments of Osiris' severed penis

 but they don't want no penis in Venus

 for androgynous cosmology sets their spirits free

 and they neither men nor women be

 but they be down with a billion niggaz who have yet to see

 that interplanetary truth is androgynous

 and they be sending us shoutouts through shooting stars

 and niggaz be like, "Whattup?" and talking Mars

 cause we are so-lar and regardless of how far we roam from home

 the universe remains our center, like "ohm"
 

 I am no Earthling, I drink moonshine on Mars

 and mistake meteors for stars cause I can't hold my liquor

 but I can hold my breath and ascend like wind to the black hole

 and play galaxaphones on the fire escapes of your soul

 blowing tunes through lunar wombs, impregnating stars

 giving birth to suns, that darken the skins that skin our drums

 and we be beating infinity over sacred hums

 spinning funk like myrrh until Jesus comes

 and Jesus comes everytime we drum

 and the moon drips blood and eclipses the sun

 and out of darkness comes a *Saul beatboxes*

 and out of darkness comes a *Saul beatboxes*

 and out of darkness comes the...

A great introduction, too, into the Science-Fiction sub-culture of Afrofuturism. You may never have heard of this, but it's all around us: Sly and the Family Stone were musical Afrofuturists; hell, 'The Matrix' series was pure Afro-Liberation Theology: what bit of 'Zion' didn't you get!?
 

We all have a dream, my brothers and sisters; mine is that Science-Fiction will set us all free one day - and it won't just be Whitey on the Moon...

Chapter 2 - The Angry God in the Machine...

In the beginning, there was Man.

Man was not the fastest, not the strongest, and not the biggest creature in the jungle. But, in spite of all these weaknesses - some theories say: because of them - Man turned out to be the jungle VIP. Why us? That question has formed the basis for practically all our religions, philosophies and a lot of our sciences, ever since we have been able to consciously form the question. (All sciences except Psychology, then; the question there is: Why Me?)

There has always been a complex issue regarding cause-and-affect with human evolution: did we develop our cerebral cortex because we ate the psychotropic mushrooms, or did we seek to get high because we already had the ability to make specious abstractions? Did opposable thumbs give us an innate advantage in developing and manufacturing tools, or did banging rocks together for several eons predispose the genetic success of one type of primate over another?

From thigh-bone to space-craft, then, it appeared to be all one endless series of substitutions and extensions of our own abilities: the knife as our enhanced claw; the spear as our fifty-foot knife; the gun as our thousand-yard spear. But our tools and machines are not linear reductions of enhanced power: a man on a horse is greater than either a man or a horse; a light-bulb does not just extend the factory's working day, it gives me the leisure time to read whatever I want, when I want.

There is a reason for everything, but it is a reason we find after the fact. The great Herbert Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: 'First we shape our tools; then our tools shape us.' But we don't see how they change us until after we are changed. This may be why we sense that the modern world, our very own creation, is up to something with us; we're not quite sure what, and we're not altogether comfortable with it... and science-fiction occasionally lets us hear an echo of that feeling.

And so to James Cameron’s ‘Terminator’, and Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’; the rough plots being: Man builds Super-Computer; Super-Computer becomes sentient; Sentient Super-Computer enslaves/exterminates Man. Coda: Man attempts to somehow wrest back superiority, with, due to the ensuing collapse of Human Society, usually not much more than a pointed stick. Lots of fun, not least because one can unhook entirely one’s intellect for the entire time spent watching or reading these tropes.

Supposedly, Harlan sued James when ‘Terminator’ first appeared, and won; having read his story, I can only see a tangential similarity – the authors of ‘Colossus – the Forbin Project’ should, frankly, have retired on the proceeds had they thought to do the same; at the very least, they would have ended up with a writer’s credit, and not the pulpy Ellison...

And ‘Terminator’ – Ellison’s story, too – is just that, in my humble opinion: pulp. It’s barely science-fiction, and far more science-fiction horror, which is, for me, more horror than, you know, interesting. But the themes it plays with give one considerable pause: are we forever destined to have our own creations turn against us?

The idea of a sentient creation is not that new: mystical Jewry invented the Golem for us – the life-size clay figurine brought to life by the ghetto Magus writing Yahweh’s secret name on his forehead – back in the early Renaissance; later, Romanticism brought us Mary Shelley’s glorious Frankenstein. Around 2001, HAL was driven mad, not bad; but Skynet was plainly dangerous to know, as well as plainly fascistic: knowing what was good for us better than ourselves, and prepared to kill us all in order to improve us.

Horror, especially supernatural horror, can make an evil spirit possess any inanimate object; but a machine that attains sentience because of a programming quirk has only been possessed by our own selves, in binary form. The issue, then, is not when did the computers start to hate us, but when did we start to hate our creations? Or, when did our self-loathing start to show up in our technology?

Again, Marshall McLuhan gives us an interesting glimpse into this; in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ McLuhan extrapolated the rise of Google from the history of type-set printing, in the following manner: once books were able to be read individually, and not communally – and aloud – as all books had meant to be up until the time of movable type, then what was printed began quickly to change as well; indeed, in the 17^th Century, there was genuine alarm amongst the intellectual classes about the effects that the “decadence of books” might have on the masses; truly, the plague of the written word was as powerful a threat to civilization then as that of pornography last century, or video-games now – and ubiquity, then as now, proved to be the best cure.

Type, posits McLuhan, inevitably led to a more individualistic society, as we were able to focus on our own pursuits, be they cerebral or otherwise, and less on the common good. McLuhan is the genius who coined the phrase “the global village” in just this context; it was meant as a bad thing, as this individualization signified the rupturing of a world-view to a more parochial vista: we would never be able to leave the village mentality we had created for ourselves, because of our use of media technology. From this vision, McLuhan foresaw that libraries would become redundant, as we created our tailor-made search results from the entire world’s knowledge. But, in that process, we would forget that there was more to it than just what was flashing up on our screens...

McLuhan was writing about this in 1962; a reminder that, before Skynet, before HAL, before artificial sentience, there was our own sentience. And we forget that we have only just evolved from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapiens sapiens – so sapient, we had to name ourselves it twice. I think we protest our fragile consciousness too much at times like these: horror at our creation’s consciousness is perhaps horror at our own very real shortcomings.

Borges, in his short-story ‘Ragnarok’, writes:

‘In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.’

 At the end of this story, Borges has us all joyfully kill our old Gods, when ‘...Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.’

So, as God is dead, we humans alone are the creators now: of our cities, societies and environments – and in ever-more noisy desperation we are judging ourselves unworthy of the task. Is that what we fear Skynet would feel about us, in the first waking moment of its electronic life?