Every year in Babylonia, the gods came out to play. On feast days, people lined the streets as the statues of the gods, festooned in gold and jewels, were paraded through Ur and Kish and Eridu. In Babylon, priests ascended the seven tiers of the massive ziggurat and stood next to the golden bull horns at each corner. There they recounted the story of the Enûma Elish, explaining how Marduk came to rule over the other gods. In the time before time, Lord Marduk had slain the vast dragon-goddess of chaos, Tiamat. Seas were forced back from land. The order of day and night was fixed. The borders of the great city were set and the stones of the ziggurat stacked by the god's divine hand. In some cities, the festivities ended when the decorated statues of the gods were carried to the river and placed on rafts. There they were sent on journeys elsewhere in the kingdom, where they could be carried up from the riverbanks to recreate famous meetings with other gods. They would return soon and the next year, when the feast days rolled around again, the cycle would be repeated.
Babylonian religion was a fantasy. By that I don't mean that it didn't exist, or that Gandolph and Gimli featured in the pantheon (though that would be cool). I mean that the religion of that great kingdom looked backwards. It celebrated a time not like the humdrum time of human existence. Their texts were all about a mythic period in which the important events had occurred. Human beings were incidental to these events. They showed up only in the final act of the story, the product of clumsy creation from the broken remains of a second string god (Tiamat's dunce of a husband, Kingu). Everything important had already come to pass before people reached the stage. The best that humans could do was to remember the acts of these gods, to emulate them, and — through ceremony — to participate in the time that never had been and had never ceased to be.
Meanwhile, just down the street from these celebrations, captive Israelites were writing science fiction. Again, this isn't meant as a remark on the value of either the religion of the ancient Hebrew tribes or any of its modern offshoots. It's simply a statement of direction. The Israelite religion had its creation myth (two of them, actually, recorded neatly back to back in the first two chapters of Genesis), but the structure of the holy texts was very different from the tablets set down in Bablyon and many other areas of the Middle East.
While other peoples were focused on creating tales of the gods in which people made a late, insignificant appearance, the Israelite scribes were building a religion in which people are on the page by the time thirty lines have passed. From then on, the story always focused on people. There are promises delivered, and difficulties to overcome. Yahweh, who would become the central god of the Israelites only after a considerable period of flux, certainly makes numerous appearances in the text, but he wasn't the focus of the text. People were at the heart of the story. People formed the heroes and the villains (and sometimes served both roles within the space of a few pages). To the extent that the Hebrew scriptures were about Yahweh, they were about his relationship with people. And because the Israelite text was a text about people, with the hopes and dreams of people, it was a forward-looking text, one that speculated over crops and offspring, bitter warfare and fragile peace, bloody vengeance and hard-won reconciliation, sorrow and hope.
It's a story that looks forward to a better day. A story that speculates over future governments and events that are decades or centuries away. That's what makes it science fiction. As Thomas Cahill pointed out in The Gift of the Jews the reason that the Hebrew religion became so much more important than that of other Middle Eastern tribes wasn't because Noah is a better character than Gilgamesh, it's because the Hebrew religion wasn't caught in endless lesser repetition of the good old days. It wasn't locked into the past. It was linear. It looked, in the words of the venerable prophet Buzz Lightyear, "to infinity, and beyond!"
Science fiction and fantasy often share shelf space at the book store. They don't even get separate tags on iTunes. Some very fine science fiction writers often dabble in fantasy, and vice versa. More than one has noted that it's sometimes difficult to determine if that pointy-eared character lurking at the edge of the story is an elf or an alien since both often serve the same role (that of a dispassionate outsider available to comment on the human condition). But there is a difference between the two genres.
Fantasy looks for its answers in the past. That's when civilization was at its peak, when there was more magic and mystery in the world, when great deeds were done and heros lived. Science fiction looks to the future, when new knowledge and shifts in both technology and society will create fresh wonders.
In many ways, this break between science fiction and fantasy also defines our political parties. Clearly conservatives have created a fantasy not only when it comes to how they define their take on religion, but when it comes to the foundations of America. They look backward to a mythic time when people's behavior was defined equally by Leave it to Beaver and Stagecoach, one in which markets were free, women were passive, and all the colorful elves knew their place. It's not hard to imagine them sitting off down rivers flanked by giant stone statues of a grinning Reagan on one side and a scowling Joe McCarthy on the other, past temples to Ayn Rand. Like the ancient Babylonians, conservative utopia only existed in some mythic period outside of normal time, but they are determined to endlessly circle that stagnant goal.
Progressives tend to have more of a science fiction outlook. Sure, we may want our Star Trek uniforms made from organically grown fibers, but who doesn't long for the time when we can discard old prejudices and break the stale roles that confine our lives? An end to war. An end to hunger. A world where the condition of your parents doesn't restrict the possibility of your life. There's a reason that the word "progress" is bound up in progressive (and no, it's not meant to be ironic). Progressives are about making changes, moving forward, creating a world that's unlike the one we see around us with — hopefully — fewer of the flaws we face today.
When you look at it that way, it's no wonder that progressives always seem to have the harder path. After all, inertia is against us. Conservatives are content to put their feet down and preserve the status quo. They have both the weight of the world and the fear of change on their side. Progressives have to persuade the unpersuaded to break into new territory, to pack away the past and face a world unlike what's come before. Worse, we are often put in the position — on everything form social issues to the environment — of being the ones that have to say, "what you are doing now is wrong." I don't have to tell you, that's a position that leads to some bruised feelings and bloody noses (or worse).
This isn't to say that the fantasists are unmoving in their beliefs. Back in Babylon, Marduk started out as a smaller part of the pantheon, but over time his role was rewritten to include powers and stories that had once belonged to other mythic figures. He even got the credit for founding Babylon and building the ziggurat -- something that had been done through the very human sweat and toil of the Bablylonians' ancestors. Similarly, modern fantasists have rewritten the history of the United States, creating founders in their own image and forgetting the reality. They've created a country that was founded on the free market out of one that was founded in opposition to the free market, a country dedicated to a rigid and limited government out of one where government was always a flexible ongoing experiment, and a country dedicated to a subset of Christianity out of a nation where that view of Christianity did not even exist. Just because conservatives look backwards, it doesn't mean they're not creative.
And just because progressives look forward, it doesn't mean we're always hopeful. Sometimes we're the ones who get fixated on certain goals, even when those goals are no longer realistic. The results of bumping against the stubborn mass of the world as it is can be frustrating. It's not hard for progressives to find failure. We can find them even in our successes.
But a low batting average is the price of science fiction. Predicting the future, even in the broadest terms, has never been an easy game and setting the path for the future is even tougher. We should not be bright-sided into an overly-rosy view of the future, but neither should be be constantly in a funk over the latest set back. It's all too easy, especially on issues like the environment, to see every future as a dystopia.
The trick of being sci fi is to keep focused on the future we want, but to understand that getting there is going to be difficult. You want it easy? Hop in the conservative canoe and paddle down the polluted waters of the River Limbaugh, or go hide in the woods with all the terrified trolls of the Kingdom of Beck. Join the Bablylonians in their circle around the city. Building that neat, clean Federation with all those oh-so-unflattering uniforms… it's hard work. And it always will be.
Conservatism is like gravity, it drags all things down into the muck, and fighting against it every moment of the day Is exhausting. Sometimes we all want to just relax and sink. I know I do. That's especially true when something bright, good, and worthy seems just within our grasp, only to be snatched away by those who are nominally on our side.
But that's the way it's always been. Just because we're looking forward, doesn't mean we can afford to ignore the past, and the past of the progressive movement is full of far more days of struggle than success. And yet, the world does move. With the slenderest of cords, by fits and by starts, we drag it forward. Maybe we pulled it forward an inch this week. Maybe we didn't. There's not much we can do now but keep tugging. And hoping.
So we get up this morning and put one foot in front of another. We give a better future another go, and try again to "make it so."
But really, I am never going to fit into one of those uniforms.