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Ah, the alien question. Although I only have 15 minutes before I'm supposed to leave for class, and I haven't even finished getting ready yet, I feel like this is a good moment to give an answer to this because being the person I am, it's something I've thought about. [This will be a very impressionistic answer here. Maybe I'll clean it up later.]
I'm not sure what's more significant to our existence -- the possibility that we would someday encounter lifeforms from another world, or the way that that idea works within our minds to create whole genres' worth of metaphor and simile for dealing with the unknown. Aliens let us see ourselves as alien. All the little things that we do and take for granted aren't so normal when viewed by someone else. But the same thing works in reverse. The fiction of aliens -- even if it is only a fiction -- is one that provides our collective consciousness with a metaphor for the Other, and sets it far enough away from us that we can comfortably pretend we aren't affected by it while learning great truths from it. I can't even begin to count the number of things I've learned about life and my existence from science fiction (most recently from rereading The Left Hand of Darkness which is now one of my favorite books ever).
This is incoherent, which is sad, because it's part of an argument I've been thinking my way through for forever. At first the idea of aliens seems like a bad one to keep around, even metaphorically. Once you separate someone out as different or separate and do it on a large scale, you create an Other that can be discriminated against, oppressed, subjugated, slaughtered. Old tracts about race made non-white peoples into aliens, argued that racial interbreeding was not only immoral but physically impossible, and this attempt to equate skin color with species was responsible for so much violence, so much pain, so much human suffering. It always happens like that. Hitler did it, too, but people followed him not just because he was powerful but because there is a fear or misunderstanding of the Other at the heart of most people, even if it's small.
And yet it doesn't make sense to do away with the aliens altogether, because sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, an author lets the metaphoric edge slip, and suddenly it is the so-called "alien" whose "humanity" we see, and the Terran human who is judged by the eyes of an outsider. That judgement, the turning of the metaphor upon itself, is key. Without it, the metaphor would be destructive; with it, the metaphor becomes essential. It seems like a stretch to assert boldly that the thing that makes human beings human, the thing that gives us a soul (though not in a necessarily religious sense), is our ability for fellow-feeling, for understanding and responding sympathetically to the pain of another -- and so I won't make that assertion -- but think about this: even if it's not true, what if we all decided to believe that empathy and compassion were the traits that distinguished humanity, and what if we all decided to strive for them? This might not be scientifically true. But if we all believed in feeling with and for others, wouldn't that make the world a better place? It might not be the most rational of responses, but rationality doesn't always lead down the best road.
My favorite part is how I haven't actually answered the question. Statistically speaking, yes, I suppose that life other than ours does exist, or has existed, or will exist, in some other quadrant of this universe, but considering the vast space and time dimensions we're dealing with, I doubt any of them will make their way to Earth any time soon, and so at present the best use for aliens is metaphor that makes us think things through in a new way and see ourselves through strange eyes.
Ah, the alien question. Although I only have 15 minutes before I'm supposed to leave for class, and I haven't even finished getting ready yet, I feel like this is a good moment to give an answer to this because being the person I am, it's something I've thought about. [This will be a very impressionistic answer here. Maybe I'll clean it up later.]
I'm not sure what's more significant to our existence -- the possibility that we would someday encounter lifeforms from another world, or the way that that idea works within our minds to create whole genres' worth of metaphor and simile for dealing with the unknown. Aliens let us see ourselves as alien. All the little things that we do and take for granted aren't so normal when viewed by someone else. But the same thing works in reverse. The fiction of aliens -- even if it is only a fiction -- is one that provides our collective consciousness with a metaphor for the Other, and sets it far enough away from us that we can comfortably pretend we aren't affected by it while learning great truths from it. I can't even begin to count the number of things I've learned about life and my existence from science fiction (most recently from rereading The Left Hand of Darkness which is now one of my favorite books ever).
This is incoherent, which is sad, because it's part of an argument I've been thinking my way through for forever. At first the idea of aliens seems like a bad one to keep around, even metaphorically. Once you separate someone out as different or separate and do it on a large scale, you create an Other that can be discriminated against, oppressed, subjugated, slaughtered. Old tracts about race made non-white peoples into aliens, argued that racial interbreeding was not only immoral but physically impossible, and this attempt to equate skin color with species was responsible for so much violence, so much pain, so much human suffering. It always happens like that. Hitler did it, too, but people followed him not just because he was powerful but because there is a fear or misunderstanding of the Other at the heart of most people, even if it's small.
And yet it doesn't make sense to do away with the aliens altogether, because sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, an author lets the metaphoric edge slip, and suddenly it is the so-called "alien" whose "humanity" we see, and the Terran human who is judged by the eyes of an outsider. That judgement, the turning of the metaphor upon itself, is key. Without it, the metaphor would be destructive; with it, the metaphor becomes essential. It seems like a stretch to assert boldly that the thing that makes human beings human, the thing that gives us a soul (though not in a necessarily religious sense), is our ability for fellow-feeling, for understanding and responding sympathetically to the pain of another -- and so I won't make that assertion -- but think about this: even if it's not true, what if we all decided to believe that empathy and compassion were the traits that distinguished humanity, and what if we all decided to strive for them? This might not be scientifically true. But if we all believed in feeling with and for others, wouldn't that make the world a better place? It might not be the most rational of responses, but rationality doesn't always lead down the best road.
My favorite part is how I haven't actually answered the question. Statistically speaking, yes, I suppose that life other than ours does exist, or has existed, or will exist, in some other quadrant of this universe, but considering the vast space and time dimensions we're dealing with, I doubt any of them will make their way to Earth any time soon, and so at present the best use for aliens is metaphor that makes us think things through in a new way and see ourselves through strange eyes.