Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (34 page)

How is this for a thought experiment: you show a group of True Believers the events surrounding the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 on your alien Wayback Machine. Explain that the gizmo has odd gaps in its record, either due to Overlord censorship or a natural limitation of the unknown science. The True Believers see no evidence of George Bush dynamiting the towers, and the Wayback Machine shows them that steel does indeed melt when doused with aviation fuel and placed in the middle of a firestorm. How many True Believers would you convince?

Or you show a group of True Believers a perfectly human man trampling crops in a large circle using technology no more complex than a rope and a plywood board. How many True Believers stop believing crop circles are messages from UFO people? (Let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that the Devil-shaped Overlords keep a straight face and do not snicker through their nostrils when they testify that none of their beer-soused UFO joyriders did it.) This thought experiment is one which actually has been performed in real life, for a True Believer in Crop Circles did indeed start making Crop Circles of his own in secret, convinced his fellow believers would detect the counterfeit. He became a skeptic when they did not.

You show the True Believers the Venona Cables, proving beyond doubt that Senator McCarthy was right, and that the people he accused of being Soviet spies, were, in fact, spies in the pay of the Soviets. How many True Believers start believing that McCarthy was an honorable man and stop believing that he was a Witchhunter?

You show the True Believers Sandy Berger stuffing down his trousers documents from the National Archives, (documents proving Vince Foster was “femecuted” by the Clinton Political Machine’s Honey-Ninjas, known only as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad), as he smuggles them out, waddling like a penguin and giggling. How many Democrats instantly and without argument overthrow their entire superstructure of rationalizations and emotional fixations, sober up, and vote for Sarah Palin next election? All of them, without a single exception? Riiiight.

You show a True Believer whose dearly beloved son died as a martyr for his beliefs, who refused to recant when so commanded by Communists or Islamists: and her mother’s tears and never-ending heart-wound can only find balm with the thought that her loved child, her perfect little baby, died for a reason, and now carries the palm leaf in heaven.

Or suppose it is a Mohammedan mother, whose beloved child committed filthy suicide spraying a busload of innocent schoolgirls with a nail bomb, killing others for their beliefs, which she, with blankminded Orwellian disregard for truth and logic, also calls martyrdom. With vile contempt for the teachings of the Koran and natural reason, (The Prophet damns suicide in no uncertain terms, and murder), she tells herself her son is in the paradise of Mahound, coupling with seventy-two ever-virgin houri, treating these virgins with a love more earthy and, (ahem), priapic than the love offered by Catholics to the ever-virgin Mary, Queen of Angels and Star of the Sea.

Will either of these True Believers simply glance at the Wayback Machine, watching the 90 minute film showing Jesus or Isa at Cana making water into wine by means of stage-magician slight-of-hand, (he had a bucket of fine wine tucked in his sleeve), and shrug and say, “Gee, my dumbass kid died for nothing. That’s a bummer. Well, he is carrion meat now! No use crying over spilled milk! Time to move on! Maybe I will take up aerobics to get my mind off it!”—does that sound like any sane person? Does anyone outside of a book written by a partisan act that way?

You show the Pope, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta the “magic” television produced by aliens who look like cartoon devils, not to mention The Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraaff. You also show the flick to Sadhu Sundar Singh, who converted from Sikhism after he saw a vision of the risen Christ.

For the purpose of this thought experiment, we are assuming here that the Overlords came when these men were still alive, or we can assume the Ethicals of the Riverworld have resurrected them.

Just for fun, you also show the images of the bones of Jesus to Elmer Gantry from Sinclair Lewis, the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky, Tartuffe from Molière, and the one-eyed Bible salesman from the movie
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Do the crooks stop practicing their hypocrisy on the gullible?

And, why not, to Tiny Tim from Dickens’
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
? Does the crippled boy give up his hope?

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs Cratchit. “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Bob’s voice was shaking when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

Ah, but then Tiny Tim watches a ninety-minute television presentation provided by horned devils whose mission is to destroy mankind and rob humanity of its children.

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs Cratchit. “As a rational creature,” said Bob. “He recognizes that his bent legs and failing health are merely a malfunction of the machine of his body. He told me, coming home, that science proves that, when he dies, his body will contain as many atoms before as well as after, and ergo there is no need to suffer an emotional reaction—since emotions are produced by the brain as a gall produces bile, by a mechanical process—merely because he is condemned to die in slow and lingering pain, or, as he put it, to suffer bio-procedure cessation.” Bob’s voice was cool and unsympathetic, and he glanced at the malfunctioning biological unit known as Tim almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

“Also, my master Scrooge came by, dancing and singing, and with an enormous Turkey. But I told him that the space devils who are here to destroy us have proved scientifically that his visitation by Christmas Ghosts was a dream caused by an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. He accepted my explanation, as the only rational theory, and joined the Overlord work gang who are dismantling St. Paul’s Cathedral with tractor beams. Do you think we should sell Tiny Tim’s organs to transplant clinics once he had ceased function? Is it not rational to put recyclable biological tissue into the ground?”

You also show the film clip to Prince Hamlet, who swears by the Holy Rood that he beheld the unquiet ghost of his father, foully murdered and crying for vengeance, his eyes weeping tears and wounds weeping blood. Do people who say they saw a ghost with their own eyes suddenly stop believing? All of them, as suddenly as dew evaporating?

For the purpose of this thought experiment, we are assuming we can find real people with the personality characteristics described by these fictional people. You show the Wayback Machine to Christians both honest and dishonest, to saints and Pharisees, to high and low, snake-handlers and theologians, literate and illiterate, Cardinals in Rome and persecuted peasants in Korea, lukewarm churchgoers, missionaries of lifelong dedication, Doubting Thomases, and red-hot revivalists who claim they see the Holy Spirit every day.

Now, ignore whether you are a theist or atheist. Let us not argue about whether the subject matter of religion is innately believable or not. Pay attention to your view of human beings. How do they act?

How many of these people, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Nehemiah Scudder, do you think would be convinced in a matter of one or two days to hang up their miters, give up their ministries, foreswear their hope of an afterworld, ignore their inner spiritual life, forget the miracles they have seen and prayers they have had answered, and go out and get an honest job, or become Environmentalists or GLBT Activists or hard-drinking socialist commentators for Vanity Fair, instead—merely on the strength of one machine showing one image one afternoon of the bones of Jesus being dragged away by dogs or medical students one Saturday midnight in Palestine in AD 33 ½ ?

To a man they would change their minds like dewdrops vanishing at dawn. Are you kidding me? I know of people who think the moon landings were faked.

(Heck, I know of people who think the atomic destruction of New York was not caused by an outraged Doctor Manhattan or a teleporting giant space-squid, but by some sinister scheme concocted by Ozymandias! We all know and love Ozymandias! I’ve studied body-building using the Veidt Method! I don’t care what the alien vision machine shows!)

Clarke’s conceit that religion would simply vanish is a ridiculous idea, handled with ham-handed clumsiness that breaks suspension of disbelief. I am reminded of similar scenes in books by Olaf Stapledon, where he casually asserts that, in the future, everyone will fall out of bed one day, be jarred awake, and become Socialist Fabians without any more debate, quarrel, suspicions, war or rude questions. Their truth is so obvious to True Believers. Their truth says that if only you had a Subtle Knife you could kill Almighty God by scratching open his oxygen tent, and watching the healthy spring wind simply blow Him into powder.

No, this scene is just a masturbatory fantasy by an atheist, wishing he had the power to eliminate God, and chuckling to himself about how easy it would be. Back when I was an atheist, I was not so naïve. Religion answers basic and deeply-rooted human emotional and psychological and intellectual needs. At that time, I thought the answer was false, but I did not think it was trivial, a matter of mere lightly held opinion. I thought it was a lie, but I thought it was a cunning lie, a bear trap impossible to disarm, and only to be approached with courage and caution. I thought religion would always be among us, and never pass away, any more than racism or warfare would ever pass away. I now believe religion will always be among us and never pass away, any more than true love or times of peace will ever pass away.

Finally, the condescension is odious and contemptible.

Every rational man knows and has always known that not all religious writings can be true, does he? Well, what do you make of those who hold that one of them is a true report of a messiah who claimed to be God, and the others are inventions of men, who claimed only that they were inspired or wise or insightful? What do you make of the Deist or Universalist who holds the one is true, but all contain some reflection or adumbration of the Light? What do you make of Henotheism and Polytheism, whose followers hold only that their gods are true, not that their neighbor’s gods are false? Indeed, what do you make of those mystics who say that all sacred writings of any source are all metaphorical and poetical, not meant to be taken literally, but an attempt to find human words for something no human words can embrace?

Any man who so says any of these self-consistent things is not just wrong but irrational? What, merely because you disagree with him?

So the men on the world ruled by Overlords have no need of Gods because they are too old? But what is the evidence that religion is not a development of intellectual effort away from a more primitive state, rather than the opposite? The Christians claim to be a development and fulfillment of Judaism, and the Mohammedans claim a similar thing. Buddhism is built upon and developed from Hinduism in the same way Aristotelianism is developed from Platonism, or Taoism developed as a reaction to Confucianism. In real life, every regime that has attempted to eliminate religion for something more modern, (The Revolutionaries of France, the bloody gangsters of Russia, China, and Indochina), always ushered in a rapid decivilization, a new barbarism. It is almost as if—heretical thought alert—atheism is a regression to a more primitive state, not an improvement. Hmmm.

I would have had more respect for the story if the Overlords had turned on the Wayback Machine, and discovered that the events described in the folk tales of the Ainu of Japan, or, better yet, the Aztecs were literally true, and every other religion merely self-deception. The Overlords then reveal that they are Hierodules of the Aztec Gods Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl, who have announced the End of the Fifth Age and the opening of Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, and commanded all mankind to rebuild the great pyramids and march the countless thousands of slaves captured in flower wars into the steaming obsidian knives! The great Galactic Overmind, instead of being a cheap knock-off of Christian notions of the Communion of Saints, would be the dread and dreaded OMETEOTL “God of the Near and Close,” “He Who Is at the Center,” the hermaphroditic demon-god of Omeyocan, the highest of the Aztecs’ thirteen heavens! That would have been worthy of H.P. Lovecraft. That would have taken some balls for a writer to pull that off!

Instead we get the same old boring Gnostic crap. It is always the Judeo-Christian tradition they plagiarize for ideas. No one bothers to blaspheme the Aztec Gods.

I mean, if you are going to pretend the UFO people are going to land and conquer us, why assume that our racial childhood ends with us being made the Princes of the Kingdom, as Christianity has it, rather than assume that, our racial childhood ends with us as the fattened-up turkey invited to dinner on whatever Thanksgiving Day the Martians or Morlocks celebrate? (So the Overlords came To Serve Man? You fools! It’s a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!!)

Let us be fair and look on the other hand. I admit that having the Space Aztecs land is a lot more like an H.P. Lovecraft story than an Arthur C. Clarke story; it is not the tale Clarke wants to tell, and maybe it’s a dumb idea. Fine. The story “To Serve Man” has been done. Fine.

More importantly, if Clarke had written any other book aside from
Childhood’s End
it would not have been an answer to the question posed by the Space Trilogy of C.S. Lewis.

Let me emphasize that there is a dialog going on among the great books of speculative fiction. H.G. Wells posed the speculative question in
The War Of The Worlds
, “What if Darwin is right, and evolution brought forth on an older planet a race as superior to us as we are to Tasmanians? What if that race treated England as the English have treated the Tasmanians, with genocide? Is there anything in Darwinism to save us? Are we not fit for this planet—have not our ancestors died for it?”