You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, More Progressive Science Fiction

I wasn't raised in a house with liberal social values. My parents didn't even think I should plan on going to college. I was expected to get married early (I did) and settle down (I couldn't.) Many people have asked me over the years how I got to be so liberal and the easy answer could include rebellion, but the real reason is science fiction.

Of my two other sisters, I was always the scifi fan. I loved Star Trek at first sight, read scores of science fiction series and would sometimes forget that I shouldn't bore my hard right, fundamentalist co-religionists by talking about the books I was reading. Looking back, the stories I loved the most were often the ones that had a strong ethic of fairness, justice, mercy and equality.

We've never seen a world permeated by fairness, justice, mercy and equality. It has never existed. It's truly a land to which no one has gone before.

It isn't a message I got from my family or church, whose vision of paradise included no LGBT people, no unbelievers, and though they claimed to prize creativity, not a single person who's ever lived that was an actual free-spirited Bohemian. It's a message I got from the science fiction show that featured the first broadcast interracial kiss on television (yes, Star Trek), and when you think about it, the idea that we should be living in a state of peaceful egalitarianism with alien species makes living in peaceful egalitarianism with other humans seem like a trivial leap.

So of course I enjoyed Devilstower's recent essay about how progressive politics is science fiction [1], as opposed to the fantasy fiction of conservative politics:

... 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!"

... 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.

... 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. ...

What makes it harder is that so much of what was unique to the human-centered science fiction stories wasn't the technological breakthroughs they envisioned, though they were nifty and often pivotal. Technology can prompt dramatic changes in human society, as we can all personally attest to. But no, I think the more radical ideas about what change is possible have been the ones about how we treat each other.

That's another reason why the Bible, if not all the ideas people have gotten from it, was science fiction. It's talking about a way to be towards each other that's more alien to the world we've experienced ("It's not fair!" "No, it's not." - courtesy, every human household since the dawn of time) than transporter beam technology. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is extreme science fiction.

Then, so is the goal of trade union organizing, or grassroots community development, or civil rights education, and most of the rest of the goals of civil society.

This is progressive politics: What if, instead of having a civil society, we were a civil society?

Frak.

No one has ever seen such a thing. There has never been a fully civil society.

So yes, it's hard to convince people against the weight of their own experiences, that the world could be different like that. It would be ... weird, as in, unusual, improbable, verging on miraculous. Because even if it's regrettable to some degree, it's normal that the distribution of wealth and power in society is extremely inequitable, it's normal that women are valued less than men, it's normal for different ethnicities to hate each other, it's normal for the young to be marginalized, it's normal for people to be intolerant of other faiths or a lack thereof, it's normal to see fear and hate of people who break down the gender binary, it's normal for the rich to steal from the poor, it's normal to see greed, strife, hatred and abuse.

And what's normal, however regrettable, humans can deal with that. We have coping mechanisms. We know how the system works and are practiced in carving out tolerable niches for ourselves. We are not surprised. We are not unsettled. We are not disturbed.

Dog bites man is not a story.

What we're asking people to do as progressives is to be surprised, unsettled and disturbed by the usual and customary. To be alarmed that neighbors do not love each other and that strangers are not shown hospitality. We're asking them to see this world we see where you wouldn't need a union or a feminist movement (not there by a long shot in either case) because workers actually had equal footing with management and gender wasn't a factor in how well people were treated, and asking them to be bothered that it isn't here yet.

It's a hard job. But we have a better world today because of all the sciencefictionaries of the past who lived in times of less change and greater inequity and tried to articulate a vision more like the world we live in now than the one they saw all around them. They must have suffered greatly, but we owe whatever gains we have now to their insistence and faith that their vision could be real. The only way to pay them back is to suffer the knowledge of the injustice of normalcy and insist that humans can change for the better, one towards another.