A person who hates or distrusts humankind is called a misanthrope. Maybe I’m not yet at the hating level yet but certainly I am well into the ‘distrusting’ zone. I’m starting to believe human beings are simply ‘no damn good.’ The remake of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still played with this misanthropic perspective. But unfortunately it was a crummy movie. Expensively made with high production values, it was the usual blockbuster dreck. It features terrible acting by Keanu Reeves in a role that actually requires him to be stiff and boring, much lame dialogue, some extremely annoying characters (Jennifer Connelly’s character’s kid is an unpleasant whinny little dreadnaught-haired jerk) and the usual over-reliance on big buck computer generated graphics to blow lots of big things up in a big way. Yet, the basic concept had promise, an updated more broadly misanthropic version of the 1952 version’s more simplistic anti-militarism message.
In the original version the aliens arrive in a modest little 1950s scale “flying saucer” and try unsuccessfully to bring about world peace but wind up mounting a massive defensive retaliation against our puny array of laughably ineffective weaponry. This time, besides the usual defensive retaliation against our primitive peashooters, the aliens have decided they must destroy us to protect the planet from us. An intergalactic confederation somewhere has decided we are destroying a very unique life supporting celestial vessel, our Planet Earth, and we must be stopped since we are incapable of change. The concept had great promise. Too bad the movie turned out to be an unwatchable mess that required recourse to the Eject Button before anything was actually resolved. But judging from how things were going, it would no doubt have been resolved in the finest Hollywood tradition. One of the lead characters would heroically, individually, ruggedly save the entire human race, the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe. Ho hum.
When one starts seeing the human race as unredeemable, the idea that this movie was working with, one is inadvertently backing into the concept of ‘original sin.’ If you accept the idea of original sin, or more secularly, the inherent limitations of the human animal, it stands to reason our morally challenged nature will be reflected in all of our institutions.
One prime example of this is that we have inserted (and even promoted to almost a virtue status) the once widely reviled sin of greed to be the actual mainspring of our economic order, known as Capitalism. So is it any wonder that we are constantly ill served and often in crisis if we have a system of resource allocation that encourages a known form of misbehavior? Yet even if "greed" is formally if not effectively removed from the equation in a collectivist alternative, such as Socialism, other “sins” or in secular terms “human defects” reassert themselves and undermine the operational integrity of said revised arrangement. Such ignoble human characteristics as pride (careerism, egotism and the will to power) and sloth (manifested as alienation, insubordination, alcoholism and lack of pride in workmanship) reemerge. At least they did in the prime model of ‘real existing socialism’, the erstwhile Soviet Union. But they had other serious disadvantages working against them, too, such as no tradition of democracy. But that’s another story.
And then there is that other major human institution, ‘our font of moral redemption’, our commonly accepted means to ‘explain the inexplicable’, the very underpinning of all of our cultures: Religion. Second only to the timeless struggle over issues of simple tribal dominance, nothing has caused more wars than disagreements over religious doctrine especially when linked with religio-political ideologies like Theocracy or monarchical Divine Right. Furthermore, religion as an institution is failing dismally to address our lemming-like march toward global ecological suicide. Stewardship of the planet seems to be never even on the radar of the most activist and troublesome fundamentalist sects such as Muslim jihadists, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Judaic sects and American evangelical Christians and their rabid ‘right-to-life’ movement. In fact religiously inspired horrific Jihadist terrorist spectacles such as 9-11 and the fascist reaction of the Bushian-led US government have served as a major distraction from serious recognition of the gravity of our present ever-worsening environmental crisis.
So as we end the first decade on this new millennium, humankind remains bitterly divided. Scores of nation states continue in confrontation, individually or as members of alliances with a small group of larger, more powerful nation states retaining their economically exploitive and politically dominate status. This while doomsday nuclear weaponry threatens to continue to spread to ever less coherent political entities. Add to this the diverse religious, ethnic and racial tensions that often mutate into hatred and distrust. Sitting astride this whole mess is a self-interest driven global ruling class, unacknowledged by a corrupt corporate controlled Fourth Estate, and operating primarily behind the scenes. These puppet masters pull the strings of the world’s elected and un-elected “leaders.” Despite idealistically conceived global institutions such as the United Nations that are intended to harmonize and unify, these nation states remain a quarrelling dysfunctional family. This ongoing Spectacle serves as constant distraction from the ongoing massive transfer of global wealth into ever fewer hands. This redistribution upward occurs whether the world economy sputters in recession (as now is) or hyperventilates itself another financial bubble.
This perpetual global discord and continuing spirit of nationalistic Darwinian survival- of-the-fittest distracts us from our ‘forced march to oblivion’ as the entire planet overheats. Scientists keep reminding us that this planetary overheating is fostering cascading changes through little understood feedback loops resulting in ever more grave and unpredictable secondary effects. And yet we dither while our resource devouring war machines, our atavistic internecine religious squabbles and our ever recurring geo-political maneuvering continues to distract and immobilize. All the while an ever-growing portion of the world’s myriad life forms, human and non-human, struggle for the means for survival.
Against this is a feeble and cacophonous resistance by a hodgepodge of liberals, leftists, religious do-gooders, journalists, intellectuals and artists of all stripes, each who contain within themselves a personal mixture of vanity, lust, ambition, self-absorption and other human frailties and shortcomings. So the “resistance” has no lock on being defect-free. Yet where would we be without these people throughout history - resisting slavery, monarchy, child labor, apartheid, torture, nuclear weapons, war and so on. Some small improvements have been made over the years (few would try to defend slavery these days.) But progress is always subject to reactionary reversal as has occurred in the ‘dark sided’ days of Bush/Cheney. Will any further progress be made? Barack Obama claims to be on the side of human progress. We shall see…
In the original version the aliens arrive in a modest little 1950s scale “flying saucer” and try unsuccessfully to bring about world peace but wind up mounting a massive defensive retaliation against our puny array of laughably ineffective weaponry. This time, besides the usual defensive retaliation against our primitive peashooters, the aliens have decided they must destroy us to protect the planet from us. An intergalactic confederation somewhere has decided we are destroying a very unique life supporting celestial vessel, our Planet Earth, and we must be stopped since we are incapable of change. The concept had great promise. Too bad the movie turned out to be an unwatchable mess that required recourse to the Eject Button before anything was actually resolved. But judging from how things were going, it would no doubt have been resolved in the finest Hollywood tradition. One of the lead characters would heroically, individually, ruggedly save the entire human race, the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe. Ho hum.
When one starts seeing the human race as unredeemable, the idea that this movie was working with, one is inadvertently backing into the concept of ‘original sin.’ If you accept the idea of original sin, or more secularly, the inherent limitations of the human animal, it stands to reason our morally challenged nature will be reflected in all of our institutions.
One prime example of this is that we have inserted (and even promoted to almost a virtue status) the once widely reviled sin of greed to be the actual mainspring of our economic order, known as Capitalism. So is it any wonder that we are constantly ill served and often in crisis if we have a system of resource allocation that encourages a known form of misbehavior? Yet even if "greed" is formally if not effectively removed from the equation in a collectivist alternative, such as Socialism, other “sins” or in secular terms “human defects” reassert themselves and undermine the operational integrity of said revised arrangement. Such ignoble human characteristics as pride (careerism, egotism and the will to power) and sloth (manifested as alienation, insubordination, alcoholism and lack of pride in workmanship) reemerge. At least they did in the prime model of ‘real existing socialism’, the erstwhile Soviet Union. But they had other serious disadvantages working against them, too, such as no tradition of democracy. But that’s another story.
And then there is that other major human institution, ‘our font of moral redemption’, our commonly accepted means to ‘explain the inexplicable’, the very underpinning of all of our cultures: Religion. Second only to the timeless struggle over issues of simple tribal dominance, nothing has caused more wars than disagreements over religious doctrine especially when linked with religio-political ideologies like Theocracy or monarchical Divine Right. Furthermore, religion as an institution is failing dismally to address our lemming-like march toward global ecological suicide. Stewardship of the planet seems to be never even on the radar of the most activist and troublesome fundamentalist sects such as Muslim jihadists, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Judaic sects and American evangelical Christians and their rabid ‘right-to-life’ movement. In fact religiously inspired horrific Jihadist terrorist spectacles such as 9-11 and the fascist reaction of the Bushian-led US government have served as a major distraction from serious recognition of the gravity of our present ever-worsening environmental crisis.
So as we end the first decade on this new millennium, humankind remains bitterly divided. Scores of nation states continue in confrontation, individually or as members of alliances with a small group of larger, more powerful nation states retaining their economically exploitive and politically dominate status. This while doomsday nuclear weaponry threatens to continue to spread to ever less coherent political entities. Add to this the diverse religious, ethnic and racial tensions that often mutate into hatred and distrust. Sitting astride this whole mess is a self-interest driven global ruling class, unacknowledged by a corrupt corporate controlled Fourth Estate, and operating primarily behind the scenes. These puppet masters pull the strings of the world’s elected and un-elected “leaders.” Despite idealistically conceived global institutions such as the United Nations that are intended to harmonize and unify, these nation states remain a quarrelling dysfunctional family. This ongoing Spectacle serves as constant distraction from the ongoing massive transfer of global wealth into ever fewer hands. This redistribution upward occurs whether the world economy sputters in recession (as now is) or hyperventilates itself another financial bubble.
This perpetual global discord and continuing spirit of nationalistic Darwinian survival- of-the-fittest distracts us from our ‘forced march to oblivion’ as the entire planet overheats. Scientists keep reminding us that this planetary overheating is fostering cascading changes through little understood feedback loops resulting in ever more grave and unpredictable secondary effects. And yet we dither while our resource devouring war machines, our atavistic internecine religious squabbles and our ever recurring geo-political maneuvering continues to distract and immobilize. All the while an ever-growing portion of the world’s myriad life forms, human and non-human, struggle for the means for survival.
Against this is a feeble and cacophonous resistance by a hodgepodge of liberals, leftists, religious do-gooders, journalists, intellectuals and artists of all stripes, each who contain within themselves a personal mixture of vanity, lust, ambition, self-absorption and other human frailties and shortcomings. So the “resistance” has no lock on being defect-free. Yet where would we be without these people throughout history - resisting slavery, monarchy, child labor, apartheid, torture, nuclear weapons, war and so on. Some small improvements have been made over the years (few would try to defend slavery these days.) But progress is always subject to reactionary reversal as has occurred in the ‘dark sided’ days of Bush/Cheney. Will any further progress be made? Barack Obama claims to be on the side of human progress. We shall see…
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