Earth Trek: The Next Generation

So. Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit. Jean-Luc Picard

I'm not a big TV person.... partly because I don't have one. I have managed to live without one for the most part of the last two decades with no problem at all. Televisions are like guns insofar as there's very little positive to say of them, but plenty negative (read no further than Jerry Mander's 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television or Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death). In other words, they cause more trouble than they cure. Yet, every so often, there comes around a program whose writing and thinking is worth every minute of your life's brief span. Even, perhaps, as in my case here, twice...! [It is here I thank the sharing capabilities of the electronic sphere, that is downloading programs as opposed to having to buy a TV].

There are two programs here I wish to discuss: the first a soap opera set in space, the second a dramatic documentary set on earth. Both of which I watched very recently and which tie in neatly together.

The first is Star Trek: The Next Generation, a wonderful piece of writing  and acting spanning seven years during the nineties. As I watched it a second time these past couple of months I realised that it was just as good, if not better, than when I first watched it when it originally came out. It wasn't just the mature and interesting writing, and the often strange metaphysical storylines, but the way the whole cast gelled together as a single unit. Indeed, having just watched the final episode (again), I kinda think the whole 180 episodes gelled together as a single unit, the portmanteau wraparound with Q notwithstanding. In fact, in the final episode as Picard is tackling a spatial-temporal anomaly (is this not what we are all effectively doing here?), and Q emerges to offer him some advice, we see Picard coming to the realization that he has caused this anomaly to happen. We see Picard understanding, finally!, the paradox.

We also hear Q, in his final words to the starfleet Captain, warn him in no uncertain terms that the exploration lies not out there, in the various quadrants of the galaxy, but inside.

       PICARD: I sincerely hope that this is the last time that I find myself here.

        Q: You just don't get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.

        PICARD: When I realised the paradox.

        Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.

        PICARD: Q, what is it that you're trying to tell me?

        (Q nearly whispers in Picard's ear)

        Q: You'll find out. In any case, I'll be watching. And if you're very lucky, I'll drop by to say hello from time to time. See you out there.

Getting beyond the strict subroutines and superimpositions laid down for you by society is a tough business. Finding your own way, organically, and not pollutingly, in a world where convention incessantly beats itself over your head, is even tougher. Expanding your mind and your horizons to encompass, even embrace, the paradox, in a society where reason and logic hold sway, is nigh on impossible. But it is possible. It may take seven years to get there, but you will get there. If you have enough faith, and space.

Where Picard realizes the paradox at the end of his 7 year star trek, so too does it seem that David Attenborough realizes his at the end of his 70 year earth trek, and an illustrious career as a television presenter of nature documentaries.

In the final episode of Planet Earth II, 'Cities', David Attenborough signs off atop The Shard (a monument to excess if ever there was one) looking down onto a sea of concrete and coagulation that is the city of London:

    Only a small number of animals have managed to find ways of living alongside us.
    And every 10 years, an area the size of Britain disappears under a jungle of concrete.
    But it doesn't have to be like this.
    Could it not be possible to build cities more in harmony with nature?

Does Attenborough actually realise that all his efforts have actually contributed to this 'jungle of concrete'? Think of all the hotels and the like that have sprung up in order to cope with all this nature tourism. Not to mention the globalisation (at the cost of the local) that he encourages through his globetrotting. I'm all for what Deleuze calls 'the sacred right of migration', but being ferried around in a tour bus is not migrating. I should have thought that seven decades watching animals would have revealed some essential truths to David about our own animality.

Attenborough then comes out with a typically small-minded response, locked in as he is to this developmental paradigm :

Create the space, and the animals will come.

How about, David, that we just leave the space alone.  Let the habitat, and its inhabitants, be? If only Attenborough and his grease-monkeys had embraced Starfleet's prime directive of non-interference.

Attenborough calls this interference 'ingenuity', but true ingenuity (as its etymology might suggest) is all about using your own engines.The natural ones inside you.

Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to  reshape the surface of our planet is very striking, but it's also sobering. It reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it's on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. It's surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.

Therein lies the rub:  Responsibility... as the ability to respond.

And yet, within an increasingly manic and distracted society focused on making money (at whatever cost), our ability to respond to Nature is lamentable. Our responsiveness has been redacted and redirected into the sphere of finance and the non-essential. Indeed, the essential has been buried almost entirely beneath a mountain of artifice, and this reshaping of the surface of our planet. And when you lose touch with the essential you lose touch with essence and with spirit. And the ability to respond, originally.

Here's the theological ethicist James Gustafson:

Before we can address the problems of the environment, we must first be addressed ourselves. We must first hear the live voices of diverse neighbours, wondrous creatures great and small. We must hear something more than the echo of our own thoughts...
... to know ourselves as addressed can awaken us from dogmatic slumber and present us with "counter-love, original response". [...] Responding to the uninvited voices of what is foreign to us, we finally venture to participate in the ambiguous world of nature.

It is not our duty to create a planet when there is already one here. As animals, it is our natural 'duty' to blend in and to respond, to be our environment, not to destroy it and disassemble it. If we do alter our environment then it is our obligation to do it in a manner that befits nature's ways, and not man's greed, or his quest for excitement.

Our cities are not emblems of freedom, or 'great'. They are, certainly in a case like London's, symptoms of all that has gone wrong in the human being, and in his removal from his own nature. These vast urban centres, full of noise and smoke, nature poor and concrete rich, impose an artificial and dehumanized existence.

As James Gustafson signs off in his book A Sense of the Divine, he writes:

As we live in an increasingly urban and artificial environment, we are losing touch with most of the biotic components of nature. As we lose familiarity, we lose our sense of the majesty and wonder of nature. Instead, feelings of fear and revulsion maybe be evoked upon encountering an insect... The real saviours of nature and the human species may be those individuals who take the time to introduce children to the wonder of nature and nurture an emotional attachment between children and insects.

When you have been weaned on a diet of noise and business, something like a babbling brook in a cool unpopulated wood can be disquieting, even threatening. Wild animals even more so. Spiders and wasps are immediately swatted because of this perceived threat. Woods and forests turned into fields.

Mis-meetings with nature abound. In order to understand nature, one must meet with her aboriginally and intimately. This invariably means alone, and unencumbered.

It took me many years to finally understand (in spite of my Jesuit education) that trapped insects like wasps, spiders and flies mean you no harm, that they are in fact like you.... dislocated by an un-seeable pane of glass from their natural habitat. They require our empathy and our help, not our ignorance and the back of a rolled up newspaper. We erected the glass and the walls, so it is our responsibility to create an exit that doesn't involve killing it.

This 'dislocating pane of glass' crops up all over the place in nature documentaries. Attenborough's team of cameramen, editors, soundmen et al. have all conspired to manipulate certain natural scenarios to their own end. Through the power of editing, and high-power lenses, they have created 'noisy' stories with fascinating creatures and even more fascinating expressions. They have pimped up nature to use the modern term, and turned something relatively mundane into something modern and stimulating. Yet, to go into nature is, invariably, not like that at all. There are few melodramatic scenes to see (unless you're very lucky), no killings, or births, no quirky little faces staring at you from a few inches away. And certainly no cuteness. Unless of course you're in the koala enclosure at the local (outdated) zoo. In many ways then, with all their contrivances and conceits, Attenborough's documentaries are a type of zoological pantomime, watched by an armchair generation that knows little of real unadulterated (and un-theatrical) nature.

In the worst case, Attenborough has encouraged a sort of televisual voyeurism, and created a generation of children expecting nature to be like his programs. Understanding nature however requires the opposite of what Attenborough and his cronies give us. It requires what Goethe called a 'delicate empiricism' and a quietness of 'being with' the phenomenon or entity. In order to attune to Nature, one must learn to quieten and un-busy the self. To this end, God knows how much quietness you can get when you're rushing all over the world like a troop of hungry hamdryas baboons.

The next generation of  cities, if humans wish to survive outwith the realm of compacted unthinking automata, will need to concentre itself on nature and not concrete, will need to focus on quietness and not noise. It will need to stop thinking in terms of 'development' and business (the state of being busy), and more in terms of live and let live and contemplation. It's the only way: To upturn the paradigm. To stop interfering. To realise Nature as the foundation upon which all else rests.

Action is not the answer. Doing nothing is.

Welcome to the paradox!