Interstellar

Remember, I have power... I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master... Obey!

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein


There's a point in Nolan's movie near the beginning where a schoolteacher, in an attempt to convince a schoolchild's father of the importance of trying to save the planet Earth in favour of colonizing another, and of his son's predeliction for farming (as opposed to say astrophysics), speciously attempts to support her argument by mentioning 'how the Apollo missions were faked in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union'. She urges the father that 'if we don't want a repeat of the excess and the wastefulness of the 20th century, we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it....'

It's a poignant moment which only fails due to Nolan's belief that such a concern for our home planet is naive compared to the possibilities on offer by what I can only term as 'super-science'. At best, this 'super-science' is the mere positing of several perverted quantum theories which when lumped together attain the status of mawkish fantasy; at worst, it is implying that the earth and all who inhabit (and are sustained by) her, is expendable, and another dispensable commodity. In other words, interstellar travel (though they, the scientists, may try and convince you otherwise) is based on the simplistic and rather fatuous equation: (over) consume, (over) waste, (over) pollute, gtfo...

This attitude is exactly the attitude that has gotten us into this mess in the first place: the deluded hope that science is salvation, that humans are masters over nature instead of its stewards and custodians, and that somehow, something better will eventually come along to save us. 

It's a shame that Nolan thought that adding the bit about faked moon landings would somehow demonise and discredit the teacher's views about 'rockets and useless machines', make her out to be some kind of nut whose complaints about the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century would be construed as similarly madcap. But they're not, that's the point. What she says is perfectly true (apart from the faking of the Apollo missions in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union - Americans are just not that clever), but that Nolan has to somehow offset this with a statement of such ridiculousness, is a pity. For it reveals Nolan to be none other than another small-minded logical positivist trapped within the shimmering boundaries of super-science. A super-science that has, along with the reason and logic it so upholds, come to dominate the worldview of so many and infect the world with 'godlessness' (read 'desecration of land and animal' - 'existential and ecological apartheid'); science that has, with its emphasis on Cartesian dualism, Newtonian mechanics and the like, sought to reduce the living to un-living components, and see the routes to knowledge itself as restricted to the ruling modes of thought and conventional beliefs.

Science itself has propagated the wastefulness of the 20th century like no other force. Indeed, one might argue that wastefulness is the primary remit of science (beyond the quest for knowledge and proofs) for without it, it would not generate as much GDP, and thus provide the backbone for a flailing economic model like capitalism.

Super-science has created a throwaway society in which people are constantly being seduced by its startling advances. But behind every startling advance there are numerous atrocities which rarely see the light of day, yet which prevail and resonate across the planet eventually.

Science has created a fundamental distraction from the grounding that we so badly need, our attachment not necessarily to farming, but to the soil itself, and to the care and love of the land. Science has enabled the wholesale degradation of the topsoils of the Earth to the point where growing food has become severely if not entirely affected. Science may well have created machines that appear to 'benefit' mankind, but even these machines are inherently destructive due to their habit of outsourcing ingenuity and energy from the human. Thus, machines grow smarter as humans grow dumber. That may well be a scenario that appeals to the already zombified masses, but it is not the intelligent and sensitive response to a planet in peril. It is simply the response of a logical positivist with too much faith in science to solve all our problems.

Just as Islamism is taking the world to task for its lack of faith in the sacred, so too is Scientism taking the world to task for its thinking there is a God in the first place. The problem is that God, in a scientistically saturated world, has become an irrelevance. It's not so much that God is dead, but that people are (and thus the godhead within them). People, and animals, and the world and everything in it, have been reduced by science's efforts to mere components and mere variables. Gone are the relationships between them. Everything becomes either supercilious subject or supercilious object, one or the other, but not both, and definitely not between. Such a view of the world demands a certain unfeelingness towards said world, a certain unthinkingness (a denial of instinct and intuition), which we can see manifest in tourism, in modernity itself, in conspicuous (and inconspicuous) consumption, in need, in fear, and in our readiness to outsource our energies to machines and tech. It also demands perhaps more than anything else a level of self-interested myopia, that fails to see even after people like Rachel Carson and Masanobu Fukuoka write about it, that treating our soils with pesticides and disdain, will bode no good for future generations. Such myopia would appear to be part and parcel of science's remit to sell the world and humans into slavery, for when the world and its humans are enslaved to science, science will have nothing more to stand in its way. In this respect, science is like a great big ogre gorging on everything that stands in its way. 

Those who are against science, or at least do not see it as the be all and end all that most view its as, are in their looking towards 'God' in favour of more encompassing approach to life and death, a more conscientious approach to the world and one's place within it. It is this conscience (con-science as opposed to a singularly sterile science) that establishes our relationships and views the world and our place in it accordingly. This 'withness' of being (a being-with-the-world as simply and self-shrinkingly being-in-the-world presumably apart from everything else) is our original immanent condition. We had it once, but we have lost (sight of) it beneath the nonsense. However, that does not mean it cannot be regained. 

It is this, Nolan's naivety, and his reluctance to accept this truth, and instead to rush off in the name of science to promote, effectively, thoughtlessness, that leaves me cringing when I watch Interstellar. That he imposes this view on millions of others through the medium of film leaves me less cringing and more disappointed that people cannot, for the fantasy and science they coat their selves with, see the reality of their situation... that nothing is going to help them get out of this mess that they have made for themselves, not least spending $250m on what is effectively a propaganda exercise. But still the world continues to live in ignorance: inequality, war, economic and ecologic crises abounding; fear, need, greed. Has science not already told us that these things are ultimately self-destructive? Have we not learned anything from all this knowledge and information that we have managed to accumulate?

Apparently not.

So much, then, for science.

The sooner people stop off-loading and out-sourcing their own vital energies (that enable movement of mind and of body), the sooner they will realize that the self is everything, that interstellar space is not out there but in here, that god is not some crazy bearded staff-bearing monolith, but a sensitive and intuitive human being whose connections to the natural environment that nourishes him express themselves through his daily interactive being.