Cyberpunk, Battlestar Galactica, & what is a Human Being?

Life's big questions and the anthropology that follows...

The Tightrope Walker, img by author (midjourney)

Anthropology in pop culture is in a dangerous place. The example of this below is of course on the surface, anecdotal, just a flicker of the thinking that passed by on Reddit.

Even so, I think an honest appraisal of broader culture, especially in how the culture is talking to itself about itself via science fiction —shows it to be more than that.

It is an example of a view that is held at the articulative level by the mis-educated* (and by larger and larger swathes of those spared the mis-education our societies offer too, at the pre-articulative level), that people are ultimately in the grand scheme, pointless and without meaning. This conclusion seems to be unavoidable in view of the answers our culture parrots when it dares to even acknowledge the big questions, like why is something there rather than nothing? Why a universe, and why a universe with myself or all these other persons in it? What am I and what are we?

Here below is Frankl on this question— a man who lived through a world the last time it made these same mistakes.

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.* - Viktor Frankl

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Party one:

There's a quote from the recent Battlestar Galactica remake that I love which feels like it's the same thing but coming from the other direction. Slight spoilers I guess:

Brother Cavil: "In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"

Party two:

I found BSG when I was in my early teens and it informed much of my taste in science fiction but this monologue unironically formed my outlook on technological progress and what we should strive to be. It expressed exactly how I felt back then and I still agree with every word to this day.

I am reminded of it every time some fool fearmongers about "technology makes us less human" and I think "good"

GutenbergMuses:

‘I don’t want to be human’ says the machine man and then rattles off a list of ‘abilities’, and completely disregarding human qualities as if they aren’t also included in his rejection of all that it is to be a human being.

Love, Joy, Community, Hope, Free will, and on and on.

And on this note… no one will care if you approve or not of what the ubermensch will turn out to be. Every last time the ideas been tried, such as in Hitlers Reich or the USSR, it gave us an inferior ‘product’. Maybe because it conceived of us as being manufactured goods in the first place. And those who did the conceptualizing were already well on their way to not being human, because to commit atrocities like they did, you have to fragment your own psyche. Machine man needs to realize that life is about more than power. Whether power over the self, power over nature, or power over others… either we seek good purposes or we mutilate ourselves.

Fear-mongering, nah, asking myself why no ones figured out that we’re going to be the collective Humpty Dumpty because of misaligned priorities and bad anthropology? Yes.

There is a war going on for human beings. Largely for the moment the side that says human beings are nothing but meat, has been pushing their front forward by means of sexual decadence, by enticement — by entrapment.

And they show no signs of slowing down. The end result of their project is not restricted to the sexual sphere alone, in part because sex touches us in all places. You cannot sterilize sexuality and make it malleable to desire by artificial means without unknowingly (and later knowingly), communicating to yourself and the world, that you are nothing but what arbitrary force makes you.

But that is not true, even if all the world is taught to believe it.