Communion or Collapse?

Ben: Why are you so angry, John?

Locke: Because you're cheating! You communicate with the outside world whenever you want to, you come and go as you please, you use electricity and running water and guns...you're a hypocrite, a Pharisee. You don't deserve to be on this island. If you had any idea what this place really was, you wouldn't be putting chicken in your refrigerator!



One of the running subtexts of L O S T is the relatively recent (since the Industrial Revolution) struggle between modernity and what could be called primitivism - a belief in the value of what is simple, or 'natural.'

Season 3 came to a close with the revelation of perhaps the epitome of neo-Luddism (or, given the apparent manipulation of time on the island, maybe the original Luddite), Jacob.



The Luddites (named after Ned Ludd) were a group of English textile artisans in the 19th Century who opposed, sometimes violently, the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Neo-Luddism, usually employed now as a pejorative, refers to the resurgence of this type of resistance to the exponentially rapid technological changes of today. While they don't view technology itself as intrinsically evil, they do feel that technology somehow degrades the quality or dignity of our humanity. The poster child for the extreme element of this type of movement would be Ted Kaczynski (who bears a striking resemblance to Jacob; though no doubt this was intended by the writers of L O S T - Kaczynski even lived in a secluded cabin in Montana).



Another modern, but more moderate, example of this type of thinking is evinced by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy:

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario...In the book, you don't discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others.

Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.

Each of these technologies also offers untold promise: The vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger.

While the neo-Luddites can be considered to be at one end of the spectrum, the Transhumanists can be seen as the other end. Just as the neo-Luddites have their extreme element, so do the Transhumanists; though the critical difference is that it's much easier to employ violence to destroy existing technology than it is to force as yet non-existent technology onto the populace. Transhumanists generally support the use of new technologies to enhance human mental and physical capabilities, and to ameliorate or eradicate undesirable aspects of humanity - disease and death being the big ones.

The Others could be considered to be the neo-Luddites, while the D.H.A.R.M.A Initiative could be considered to be the Transhumanists. Generally speaking, the Others want to 'get back to nature', so to speak; and the D.H.A.R.M.A. folks ostensibly want to enhance humanity, or at least prevent humanity from destroying itself. But apparently the mixture of the extreme elements of both sides resulted in a cataclysmic clash:

Ben: This is where I came from, John. These are my people - the DHARMA Initiative. They came here seeking harmony, but they couldn't even coexist with the island's original inhabitants. And when it became clear that one side had to go, that one side had to be purged - I did what I had to do.

It's been argued that the human race's evolution from quasi-nomadic hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists living in villages and towns, while presaging the onset of modern civilization, has been detrimental to both human society and the planetary environment at large. University of Reading professor Steven Mithen's latest book, After the Ice, treats this subject at length. UCLA professor Jared Diamond explores similar themes in his two bestselling books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How human societies choose to fail or succeed.

The general theme is that technological advances have not only enabled humanity to flourish as never before, but that this flourishing has led to depletion of natural resources, social hierarchies that lead to marginalization and strife, and economic disparities. While this trend may be lamented by some, it would seem that it is an inexorable consequence of planetary evolution.

But since each of us is concerned primarily with the small picture, with the effects these trends have on us individual humans, the question seems to be: Is it possible to revert back to a more simpler time, to 'get back to nature', to live as if the deluge of progress had never swept us away?

Some would say no. But Ben seems to have done it; the Others he has recruited, those who have made 'the commitment', seem to have as well. But for some there may be psychological hindrances to this type of reversion. For instance, Mephisto mockingly offers Faust the following advice:

Right. There is one way that needs
no money, no physician, and no witch.
Pack up your things and get back to the land
and there begin to dig and ditch;
keep to the narrow round, confine your mind,
and live on fodder of the simplest kind,
a beast among the beasts; and don't forget
to use your own dung on the crops you set!

C.G. Jung believed that this 'simple life' cannot be faked, that an escape into this simple life is closed forever to someone who has not been driven to it by necessity. Someone who is firmly ensconced in modernity cannot slip into unsophisticated existence without serious psychological dissonance. Such a one cannot comply with poet Wallace Stevens' directive - "you must become an ignorant man again/and see the sun again with an ignorant eye" - meaning, one cannot really divest oneself of all the symbolic or abstract concepts attributed to all the variegated phenomena of life.

But the appeal is there, nevertheless. In fact, the inspiration for this post came from reading a passage from pseudonymous Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, describing an enticingly pastoral, idyllic and somewhat psychedelic scene:

A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight subwinds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues...What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by the cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze!

So this societal struggle is paralleled on the personal level as well. We'll see how it plays out on L O S T over the next 3 seasons; but more importantly we'll see how it plays out in our own global society, and in the hearts and minds of each individual.








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