Science fiction has been seen as a response to pressures in the real world, or as a means of creative learning that can lead from fantasy to adaptive change in society. Carl Jung argued that the belief in flying saucers was a means of adaption to the threats of a world many saw as out of control. The internet has been seen by some as having a similar role, especially in the creation of virtual communities.
A number of internet commentators have argued that sites like Second Life are surrogates for real life, others have argued that these virual worlds are utopias in the making or provide people with outlets for practicing skills for real life. Numerous companies are using these sites to test market products. A few have centered there comments on the idea of “otherliness” as a metaphor for events that various authors wish to address in their works. Here we might contrast the work of the Soviet filmmaker, Andre Tarskovsky, and his 1972 film, “Solaris.” In this production, the enemy is within, not the other, but a terror that poignantly underscores the crimes of humanity against itself.
His thesis, however, neglects another line of explanation, one begun by Alexander Pope in his “An Essay On Man” (1733-4). In a satiric fashion he theorizes the existence of invisible being who prosper from man’s suffering, or find enjoyment from his struggle for achievement. Soame Jenyns in a critical review of the essay (“A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil”) interprets Pope’s invisible beings in yet a quite frightening way, that their intent, being simply their own enjoyment, as superior beings are not much wiser than ourselves. Of course, this is not much different from some of the musings of Plutarch in his attempts to explain why the gods seemed to give the oracles the effective gift of prediction in an earlier time, and failed to do so in his own.
Carl Jung in his 1958 book, Flying Saucers: Myths of Things Seen in the Skys, argued that sightings of flying saucers filled a need that many people had in the hope of some greater force than man that could put an end to war and especially the threat of nuclear war. While Carl Sagan, in a book co-authored with Soviet scientist I.S. Shklovskii, suggests, like Pope, that aliens, if they arrived on Earth, would probably not be visible to us. They might not even recognize us as intelligent life, but like our perception of bees or clouds, simply notice patterns of chemical or electro-magnetic processes. This idea was translated onto film in 1988 by John Carpenter in a movie titled, “They Live!” This was not as inventive as Pope’s idea where invisible beings might feast on human souls tasting different by reason of their passions, evil nature or virtue. Of course, Sagan’s other, less colorful speculation was that visitors from outer space would be no more interesting than American tourists, and no more enlightened.
In another sense the internet can be seen as the “hum” of the bees wings in a hive as part of an adaptive pattern developing in our complex society as Herbert Spencer predicted and Daniel F. Galouye spoofed in his science fiction book, Simulacron-3 in 1964.
Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
Dept. of Anthropology
San Francisco State University