The Dream of MacIan/The Dream of Turnbull

[These are two chapters taken from G.K. Chesterton's 1909 novel "The Ball and the Cross." The novel is not Chesterton's best, but I have always regarded these two chapters, taken by themselves, as among the most incisive of his political writings, and an excellent surrealist short story. It is difficult not to see in the two "visions" experienced by his characters a prophetic glimpse into the events and conflicts of the latter part of the 20th century, as well as of our own time.

Very little context is necessary except to say that the two heroes of the novel are two Scotchmen, Evan MacIan and James Turnbull, one of whom is a Roman Catholic and a Jacobite, and the other of whom is an atheist and a revolutionary republican in the 19th century style. At this stage in the story, our heroes have been captured and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum.]

XV: THE DREAM OF MACIAN

The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense of almost complete solitude. They could stray up so near to the wall in an apparently unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump over it. They would only have found the error of their calculations if they had tried to jump.

Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan MacIan was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark--especially upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the word. It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night, when the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the garden until almost the strongest tints to be seen were the strong soft blue of the sky and the large lemon moon. He was walking with his face turned up to it in that rather half-witted fashion which might have excused the error of his keepers; and as he gazed he became aware of something little and lustrous flying close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked off the moon. At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction in his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes. Then he thought it was a falling star; only it did not fall. It jerked awkwardly up and down in a way unknown among meteors and strangely reminiscent of the works of man. The next moment the thing drove right across the moon, and from being silver upon blue, suddenly became black upon silver; then although it passed the field of light in a flash its outline was unmistakable though eccentric. It was a flying ship.

The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend. It was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of Sir Galahad. The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction. The figure stood so still that he could easily have supposed it to be a statue. Indeed, he thought it was until it spoke.

"Evan," said the voice, and it spoke with the simple authority of some forgotten father revisiting his children, "you have remained here long enough, and your sword is wanted elsewhere."

"Wanted for what?" asked the young man, accepting the monstrous event with a queer and clumsy naturalness; "what is my sword wanted for?"

"For all that you hold dear," said the man standing in the moonlight; "for the thrones of authority and for all ancient loyalty to law."

Evan looked up at the lunar orb again as if in irrational appeal--a moon calf bleating to his mother the moon. But the face of Luna seemed as witless as his own; there is no help in nature against the supernatural; and he looked again at the tall marble figure that might have been made out of solid moonlight.

Then he said in a loud voice: "Who are you?" and the next moment was seized by a sort of choking terror lest his question should be answered. But the unknown preserved an impenetrable silence for a long space and then only answered: "I must not say who I am until the end of the world; but I may say what I am. I am the law."

And he lifted his head so that the moon smote full upon his beautiful and ancient face.

The face was the face of a Greek god grown old, but not grown either weak or ugly; there was nothing to break its regularity except a rather long chin with a cleft in it, and this rather added distinction than lessened beauty. His strong, well-opened eyes were very brilliant but quite colourless like steel.

MacIan was one of those to whom a reverence and self-submission in ritual come quite easy, and are ordinary things. It was not artificial in him to bend slightly to this solemn apparition or to lower his voice when he said: "Do you bring me some message?"

"I do bring you a message," answered the man of moon and marble. "The king has returned."

Evan did not ask for or require any explanation. "I suppose you can take me to the war," he said, and the silent silver figure only bowed its head again. MacIan clambered into the silver boat, and it rose upward to the stars.

To say that it rose to the stars is no mere metaphor, for the sky had cleared to that occasional and astonishing transparency in which one can see plainly both stars and moon.

As the white-robed figure went upward in his white chariot, he said quite quietly to Evan: "There is an answer to all the folly talked about equality. Some stars are big and some small; some stand still and some circle around them as they stand. They can be orderly, but they cannot be equal."

"They are all very beautiful," said Evan, as if in doubt.

"They are all beautiful," answered the other, "because each is in his place and owns his superior. And now England will be beautiful after the same fashion. The earth will be as beautiful as the heavens, because our kings have come back to us."

"The Stuart--" began Evan, earnestly.

"Yes," answered the old man, "that which has returned is Stuart and yet older than Stuart. It is Capet and Plantagenet and Pendragon. It is all that good old time of which proverbs tell, that golden reign of Saturn against which gods and men were rebels. It is all that was ever lost by insolence and overwhelmed in rebellion. It is your own forefather, MacIan with the broken sword, bleeding without hope at Culloden. It is Charles refusing to answer the questions of the rebel court. It is Mary of the magic face confronting the gloomy and grasping peers and the boorish moralities of Knox. It is Richard, the last Plantagenet, giving his crown to Bolingbroke as to a common brigand. It is Arthur, overwhelmed in Lyonesse by heathen armies and dying in the mist, doubtful if ever he shall return."

"But now--" said Evan, in a low voice.

"But now!" said the old man; "he has returned."

"Is the war still raging?" asked MacIan.

"It rages like the pit itself beyond the sea whither I am taking you," answered the other. "But in England the king enjoys his own again. The people are once more taught and ruled as is best; they are happy knights, happy squires, happy servants, happy serfs, if you will; but free at last of that load of vexation and lonely vanity which was called being a citizen."

"Is England, indeed, so secure?" asked Evan.

"Look out and see," said the guide. "I fancy you have seen this place before."

They were driving through the air towards one region of the sky where the hollow of night seemed darkest and which was quite without stars. But against this black background there sprang up, picked out in glittering silver, a dome and a cross. It seemed that it was really newly covered with silver, which in the strong moonlight was like white flame. But, however, covered or painted, Evan had no difficult in knowing the place again. He saw the great thoroughfare that sloped upward to the base of its huge pedestal of steps. And he wondered whether the little shop was still by the side of it and whether its window had been mended.

As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other alterations. The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a more solemn and somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was draped or destroyed, and round the gallery, under the cross, ran what looked like a ring of silver statues, like the little leaden images that stood round the hat of Louis XI. Round the second gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a second rank of such images, and Evan thought there was another round the steps below. When they came closer he saw that they were figures in complete armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point upward; and then he saw one of the swords move. These were not statues but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the cross. MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly beautiful. For he could imagine nothing that so echoed his own visions of pontifical or chivalric art as this white dome sitting like a vast silver tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords.

As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs and plume whose smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather than steel. Only in one place--at the corner of Bouverie Street--did there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to hurry rather than resistance. But one old grumbling man did not get out of the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck him, not severely, across the shoulders with the flat of his sword.

"The soldier had no business to do that," said MacIan, sharply. "The old man was moving as quickly as he could."

"We attach great importance to discipline in the streets," said the man in white, with a slight smile.

"Discipline is not so important as justice," said MacIan.

The other did not answer.

Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's Park, he said: "The people must be taught to obey; they must learn their own ignorance. And I am not sure," he continued, turning his back on Evan and looking out of the prow of the ship into the darkness, "I am not sure that I agree with your little maxim about justice. Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual."

Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with startling suddenness and stared at the other's back.

"Discipline for society--" he repeated, very staccato, "more important--justice to individual?"

Then after a long silence he called out: "Who and what are you?"

"I am an angel," said the white-robed figure, without turning round.

"You are not a Catholic," said MacIan.

The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main topic.

"In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into subordinates."

MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and unaccountable eagerness.

"Go on!" he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony fingers, "go on!"

"Besides," continued he, in the prow, "you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type."

"Go on!" said Evan, with burning eyes.

"Just as the sight of sin offends God," said the unknown, "so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and----"

"Why, you great fool!" cried MacIan, rising to the top of his tremendous stature, "did you think I would have doubted only for that rap with a sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights, that good knights have bad tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals; I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say, 'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong; everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is not the rightful king who has come home."

"That is unfortunate," said the other, in a quiet but hard voice, "because you are going to see his Majesty."

"No," said MacIan, "I am going to jump over the side."

"Do you desire death?"

"No," said Evan, quite composedly, "I desire a miracle."

"From whom do you ask it? To whom do you appeal?" said his companion, sternly. "You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross on the cathedral, and insulted an archangel."

"I appeal to God," said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the edge of the swaying ship.

The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with eyes which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just too late to hide an awful smile.

"And how do you know," he said, "how do you know that I am not God?"

MacIan screamed. "Ah!" he cried. "Now I know who you really are. You are not God. You are not one of God's angels. But you were once."

The being's hand dropped from his mouth and Evan dropped out of the car.

XVI: THE DREAM OF TURNBULL 

Turnbull was walking rather rampantly up and down the garden on a gusty evening chewing his cigar and in that mood when every man suppresses an instinct to spit. He was not, as a rule, a man much acquainted with moods; and the storms and sunbursts of MacIan's soul passed before him as an impressive but unmeaning panorama, like the anarchy of Highland scenery. Turnbull was one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and industry of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady. His heart was in the right place; but he was quite content to leave it there. It was his head that was his hobby. His mornings and evenings were marked not by impulses or thirsty desires, not by hope or by heart-break; they were filled with the fallacies he had detected, the problems he had made plain, the adverse theories he had wrestled with and thrown, the grand generalizations he had justified. But even the cheerful inner life of a logician may be upset by a lunatic asylum, to say nothing of whiffs of memory from a lady in Jersey, and the little red-bearded man on this windy evening was in a dangerous frame of mind.

Plain and positive as he was, the influence of earth and sky may have been greater on him than he imagined; and the weather that walked the world at that moment was as red and angry as Turnbull. Long strips and swirls of tattered and tawny cloud were dragged downward to the west exactly as torn red raiment would be dragged. And so strong and pitiless was the wind that it whipped away fragments of red-flowering bushes or of copper beech, and drove them also across the garden, a drift of red leaves, like the leaves of autumn, as in parody of the red and driven rags of cloud.

There was a sense in earth and heaven as of everything breaking up, and all the revolutionist in Turnbull rejoiced that it was breaking up. The trees were breaking up under the wind, even in the tall strength of their bloom: the clouds were breaking up and losing even their large heraldic shapes. Shards and shreds of copper cloud split off continually and floated by themselves, and for some reason the truculent eye of Turnbull was attracted to one of these careering cloudlets, which seemed to him to career in an exaggerated manner. Also it kept its shape, which is unusual with clouds shaken off; also its shape was of an odd sort.

Turnbull continued to stare at it, and in a little time occurred that crucial instant when a thing, however incredible, is accepted as a fact. The copper cloud was tumbling down towards the earth, like some gigantic leaf from the copper beeches. And as it came nearer it was evident, first, that it was not a cloud, and, second, that it was not itself of the colour of copper; only, being burnished like a mirror, it had reflected the red-brown colours of the burning clouds. As the thing whirled like a windswept leaf down towards the wall of the garden it was clear that it was some sort of air-ship made of metal, and slapping the air with big broad fins of steel. When it came about a hundred feet above the garden, a shaggy, lean figure leapt up in it, almost black against the bronze and scarlet of the west, and, flinging out a kind of hook or anchor, caught on to the green apple-tree just under the wall; and from that fixed holding ground the ship swung in the red tempest like a captive balloon.

While our friend stood frozen for an instant by his astonishment, the queer figure in the airy car tipped the vehicle almost upside down by leaping over the side of it, seemed to slide or drop down the rope like a monkey, and alighted (with impossible precision and placidity) seated on the edge of the wall, over which he kicked and dangled his legs as he grinned at Turnbull. The wind roared in the trees yet more ruinous and desolate, the red tails of the sunset were dragged downward like red dragons sucked down to death, and still on the top of the asylum wall sat the sinister figure with the grimace, swinging his feet in tune with the tempest; while above him, at the end of its tossing or tightened cord, the enormous iron air-ship floated as light and as little noticed as a baby's balloon upon its string.

Turnbull's first movement after sixty motionless seconds was to turn round and look at the large, luxuriant parallelogram of the garden and the long, low rectangular building beyond. There was not a soul or a stir of life within sight. And he had a quite meaningless sensation, as if there never really had been any one else there except he since the foundation of the world.

Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the man at a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see his face and figure quite plain. Two facts about him stood out in the picked colours of some piratical schoolboy's story. The first was that his lean brown body was bare to the belt of his loose white trousers; the other that through hygiene, affectation, or whatever other cause, he had a scarlet handkerchief tied tightly but somewhat aslant across his brow. After these two facts had become emphatic, others appeared sufficiently important. One was that under the scarlet rag the hair was plentiful, but white as with the last snows of mortality. Another was that under the mop of white and senile hair the face was strong, handsome, and smiling, with a well-cut profile and a long cloven chin. The length of this lower part of the face and the strange cleft in it (which gave the man, in quite another sense from the common one, a double chin) faintly spoilt the claim of the face to absolute regularity, but it greatly assisted it in wearing the expression of half-smiling and half-sneering arrogance with which it was staring at all the stones, all the flowers, but especially at the solitary man.

"What do you want?" shouted Turnbull.

"I want you, Jimmy," said the eccentric man on the wall, and with the very word he had let himself down with a leap on to the centre of the lawn, where he bounded once literally like an India-rubber ball and then stood grinning with his legs astride. The only three facts that Turnbull could now add to his inventory were that the man had an ugly-looking knife swinging at his trousers belt, that his brown feet were as bare as his bronzed trunk and arms, and that his eyes had a singular bleak brilliancy which was of no particular colour.

"Excuse my not being in evening dress," said the newcomer with an urbane smile. "We scientific men, you know--I have to work my own engines--electrical engineer--very hot work."

"Look here," said Turnbull, sturdily clenching his fists in his trousers pockets, "I am bound to expect lunatics inside these four walls; but I do bar their coming from outside, bang out of the sunset clouds."

"And yet you came from the outside, too, Jim," said the stranger in a voice almost affectionate.

"What do you want?" asked Turnbull, with an explosion of temper as sudden as a pistol shot.

"I have already told you," said the man, lowering his voice and speaking with evident sincerity; "I want you."

"What do you want with me?"

"I want exactly what you want," said the new-comer with a new gravity. "I want the Revolution."

Turnbull looked at the fire-swept sky and the wind-stricken woodlands, and kept on repeating the word voicelessly to himself--the word that did indeed so thoroughly express his mood of rage as it had been among those red clouds and rocking tree-tops. "Revolution!" he said to himself. "The Revolution--yes, that is what I want right enough--anything, so long as it is a Revolution."

To some cause he could never explain he found himself completing the sentence on the top of the wall, having automatically followed the stranger so far. But when the stranger silently indicated the rope that led to the machine, he found himself pausing and saying: "I can't leave MacIan behind in this den."

"We are going to destroy the Pope and all the kings," said the new-comer. "Would it be wiser to take him with us?"

Somehow the muttering Turnbull found himself in the flying ship also, and it swung up into the sunset.

"All the great rebels have been very little rebels," said the man with the red scarf. "They have been like fourth-form boys who sometimes venture to hit a fifth-form boy. That was all the worth of their French Revolution and regicide. The boys never really dared to defy the schoolmaster."

"Whom do you mean by the schoolmaster?" asked Turnbull.

"You know whom I mean," answered the strange man, as he lay back on cushions and looked up into the angry sky.

They seemed rising into stronger and stronger sunlight, as if it were sunrise rather than sunset. But when they looked down at the earth they saw it growing darker and darker. The lunatic asylum in its large rectangular grounds spread below them in a foreshortened and infantile plan, and looked for the first time the grotesque thing that it was. But the clear colours of the plan were growing darker every moment. The masses of rose or rhododendron deepened from crimson to violet. The maze of gravel pathways faded from gold to brown. By the time they had risen a few hundred feet higher nothing could be seen of that darkening landscape except the lines of lighted windows, each one of which, at least, was the light of one lost intelligence. But on them as they swept upward better and braver winds seemed to blow, and on them the ruby light of evening seemed struck, and splashed like red spurts from the grapes of Dionysus. Below them the fallen lights were literally the fallen stars of servitude. And above them all the red and raging clouds were like the leaping flags of liberty.

The man with the cloven chin seemed to have a singular power of understanding thoughts; for, as Turnbull felt the whole universe tilt and turn over his head, the stranger said exactly the right thing.

"Doesn't it seem as if everything were being upset?" said he; "and if once everything is upset, He will be upset on top of it."

Then, as Turnbull made no answer, his host continued:

"That is the really fine thing about space. It is topsy-turvy. You have only to climb far enough towards the morning star to feel that you are coming down to it. You have only to dive deep enough into the abyss to feel that you are rising. That is the only glory of this universe--it is a giddy universe."

Then, as Turnbull was still silent, he added:

"The heavens are full of revolution--of the real sort of revolution. All the high things are sinking low and all the big things looking small. All the people who think they are aspiring find they are falling head foremost. And all the people who think they are condescending find they are climbing up a precipice. That is the intoxication of space. That is the only joy of eternity--doubt. There is only one pleasure the angels can possibly have in flying, and that is, that they do not know whether they are on their head or their heels."

Then, finding his companion still mute, he fell himself into a smiling and motionless meditation, at the end of which he said suddenly:

"So MacIan converted you?"

Turnbull sprang up as if spurning the steel car from under his feet. "Converted me!" he cried. "What the devil do you mean? I have known him for a month, and I have not retracted a single----"

"This Catholicism is a curious thing," said the man of the cloven chin in uninterrupted reflectiveness, leaning his elegant elbows over the edge of the vessel; "it soaks and weakens men without their knowing it, just as I fear it has soaked and weakened you."

Turnbull stood in an attitude which might well have meant pitching the other man out of the flying ship.

"I am an atheist," he said, in a stifled voice. "I have always been an atheist. I am still an atheist." Then, addressing the other's indolent and indifferent back, he cried: "In God's name what do you mean?"

And the other answered without turning round:

"I mean nothing in God's name."

Turnbull spat over the edge of the car and fell back furiously into his seat.

The other continued still unruffled, and staring over the edge idly as an angler stares down at a stream.

"The truth is that we never thought that you could have been caught," he said; "we counted on you as the one red-hot revolutionary left in the world. But, of course, these men like MacIan are awfully clever, especially when they pretend to be stupid."

Turnbull leapt up again in a living fury and cried: "What have I got to do with MacIan? I believe all I ever believed, and disbelieve all I ever disbelieved. What does all this mean, and what do you want with me here?"

Then for the first time the other lifted himself from the edge of the car and faced him.

"I have brought you here," he answered, "to take part in the last war of the world."

"The last war!" repeated Turnbull, even in his dazed state a little touchy about such a dogma; "how do you know it will be the last?"

The man laid himself back in his reposeful attitude, and said:

"It is the last war, because if it does not cure the world for ever, it will destroy it."

"What do you mean?"

"I only mean what you mean," answered the unknown in a temperate voice. "What was it that you always meant on those million and one nights when you walked outside your Ludgate Hill shop and shook your hand in the air?"

"Still I do not see," said Turnbull, stubbornly.

"You will soon," said the other, and abruptly bent downward one iron handle of his huge machine. The engine stopped, stooped, and dived almost as deliberately as a man bathing; in their downward rush they swept within fifty yards of a big bulk of stone that Turnbull knew only too well. The last red anger of the sunset was ended; the dome of heaven was dark; the lanes of flaring light in the streets below hardly lit up the base of the building. But he saw that it was St. Paul's Cathedral, and he saw that on the top of it the ball was still standing erect, but the cross was stricken and had fallen sideways. Then only he cared to look down into the streets, and saw that they were inflamed with uproar and tossing passions.

"We arrive at a happy moment," said the man steering the ship. "The insurgents are bombarding the city, and a cannon-ball has just hit the cross. Many of the insurgents are simple people, and they naturally regard it as a happy omen."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, in a rather colourless voice.

"Yes," replied the other. "I thought you would be glad to see your prayer answered. Of course I apologize for the word prayer."

"Don't mention it," said Turnbull.

The flying ship had come down upon a sort of curve, and was now rising again. The higher and higher it rose the broader and broader became the scenes of flame and desolation underneath.

Ludgate Hill indeed had been an uncaptured and comparatively quiet height, altered only by the startling coincidence of the cross fallen awry. All the other thoroughfares on all sides of that hill were full of the pulsation and the pain of battle, full of shaking torches and shouting faces. When at length they had risen high enough to have a bird's-eye view of the whole campaign, Turnbull was already intoxicated. He had smelt gunpowder, which was the incense of his own revolutionary religion.

"Have the people really risen?" he asked, breathlessly. "What are they fighting about?"

"The programme is rather elaborate," said his entertainer with some indifference. "I think Dr. Hertz drew it up."

Turnbull wrinkled his forehead. "Are all the poor people with the Revolution?" he asked.

The other shrugged his shoulders. "All the instructed and class-conscious part of them without exception," he replied. "There were certainly a few districts; in fact, we are passing over them just now--"

Turnbull looked down and saw that the polished car was literally lit up from underneath by the far-flung fires from below. Underneath whole squares and solid districts were in flames, like prairies or forests on fire.

"Dr. Hertz has convinced everybody," said Turnbull's cicerone in a smooth voice, "that nothing can really be done with the real slums. His celebrated maxim has been quite adopted. I mean the three celebrated sentences: 'No man should be unemployed. Employ the employables. Destroy the unemployables.'"

There was a silence, and then Turnbull said in a rather strained voice: "And do I understand that this good work is going on under here?"

"Going on splendidly," replied his companion in the heartiest voice. "You see, these people were much too tired and weak even to join the social war. They were a definite hindrance to it."

"And so you are simply burning them out?"

"It does seem absurdly simple," said the man, with a beaming smile, "when one thinks of all the worry and talk about helping a hopeless slave population, when the future obviously was only crying to be rid of them. There are happy babes unborn ready to burst the doors when these drivellers are swept away."

"Will you permit me to say," said Turnbull, after reflection, "that I don't like all this?"

"And will you permit me to say," said the other, with a snap, "that I don't like Mr. Evan MacIan?"

Somewhat to the speaker's surprise this did not inflame the sensitive sceptic; he had the air of thinking thoroughly, and then he said: "No, I don't think it's my friend MacIan that taught me that. I think I should always have said that I don't like this. These people have rights."

"Rights!" repeated the unknown in a tone quite indescribable. Then he added with a more open sneer: "Perhaps they also have souls."

"They have lives!" said Turnbull, sternly; "that is quite enough for me. I understood you to say that you thought life sacred."

"Yes, indeed!" cried his mentor with a sort of idealistic animation. "Yes, indeed! Life is sacred--but lives are not sacred. We are improving Life by removing lives. Can you, as a free-thinker, find any fault in that?"

"Yes," said Turnbull with brevity.

"Yet you applaud tyrannicide," said the stranger with rationalistic gaiety. "How inconsistent! It really comes to this: You approve of taking away life from those to whom it is a triumph and a pleasure. But you will not take away life from those to whom it is a burden and a toil."

Turnbull rose to his feet in the car with considerable deliberation, but his face seemed oddly pale. The other went on with enthusiasm.

"Life, yes, Life is indeed sacred!" he cried; "but new lives for old! Good lives for bad! On that very place where now there sprawls one drunken wastrel of a pavement artist more or less wishing he were dead--on that very spot there shall in the future be living pictures; there shall be golden girls and boys leaping in the sun."

Turnbull, still standing up, opened his lips. "Will you put me down, please?" he said, quite calmly, like on stopping an omnibus.

"Put you down--what do you mean?" cried his leader. "I am taking you to the front of the revolutionary war, where you will be one of the first of the revolutionary leaders."

"Thank you," replied Turnbull with the same painful constraint. "I have heard about your revolutionary war, and I think on the whole that I would rather be anywhere else."

"Do you want to be taken to a monastery," snarled the other, "with MacIan and his winking Madonnas."

"I want to be taken to a madhouse," said Turnbull distinctly, giving the direction with a sort of precision. "I want to go back to exactly the same lunatic asylum from which I came."

"Why?" asked the unknown.

"Because I want a little sane and wholesome society," answered Turnbull.

There was a long and peculiar silence, and then the man driving the flying machine said quite coolly: "I won't take you back."

And then Turnbull said equally coolly: "Then I'll jump out of the car."

The unknown rose to his full height, and the expression in his eyes seemed to be made of ironies behind ironies, as two mirrors infinitely reflect each other. At last he said, very gravely: "Do you think I am the devil?"

"Yes," said Turnbull, violently. "For I think the devil is a dream, and so are you. I don't believe in you or your flying ship or your last fight of the world. It is all a nightmare. I say as a fact of dogma and faith that it is all a nightmare. And I will be a martyr for my faith as much as St. Catherine, for I will jump out of this ship and risk waking up safe in bed."

After swaying twice with the swaying vessel he dived over the side as one dives into the sea. For some incredible moments stars and space and planets seemed to shoot up past him as the sparks fly upward; and yet in that sickening descent he was full of some unnatural happiness. He could connect it with no idea except one that half escaped him--what Evan had said of the difference between Christ and Satan; that it was by Christ's own choice that He descended into hell.

When he again realized anything, he was lying on his elbow on the lawn of the lunatic asylum, and the last red of the sunset had not yet disappeared.

Orthodox Schism: The Meeting of Primates at Amman Did Not Take Place

For those keeping track of the Orthodox Schism at home, the last few days saw the gathering (by Moscow, acting through Jerusalem) of a purported "Meeting of the Primates of the Local Churches" in Amman, Jordan. Of all the nonsensical-surrealist events in this schism so far, this may be the most nonsensical and the most surreal.

To recap, late last year, after visiting Moscow, the Patriarch of Jerusalem issued a call to all the heads of the autocephalous churches to meet and fraternally dialogue in order to end the schism in Orthodoxy. This initiative was immediately backed up and trumpeted abroad by the Patriarchate of Moscow, leading to the overwhelming conclusion among almost all bystanders that the initiative in fact originated with Moscow and was going to be used by them as a means to gather support and take further steps against Constantinople. Almost immediately, Constantinople and the autocephalous churches closest to it refused to attend, citing both this perception and the quasi-doctrinal claim that only Constantinople has the authority to summon Pan-Orthodox meetings like this. More recently, the Patriarch of Jerusalem met with the Patriarch of Constantinople and by all reports was soundly berated, then dismissed with a letter that strongly denounced the initiative as a threat to Orthodox unity and accused Jerusalem of openly courting the favor of the Russian state. In the aftermath of this, the Patriarch of Jerusalem issued a statement "clarifying" that the proposed meeting was to be only a very informal initial conference, not an official Synaxis or Meeting of Primates. Several more autocephalous churches issued statements indicating they would not attend, while the majority steadfastly maintained silence on the whole issue, leading to a great deal of understandable confusion, literally until the minute when delegations were supposed to arrive in Jordan, over who would attend and who wouldn't. Less than a week before the meeting, the Patriarch of Antioch finally issued a statement (predictably) saying he would not be there due to his continuing (unrelated) schism with the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

What finally met in Amman over the last few days, therefore, was a highly winnowed group, consisting of delegations from only six of the universally-acknowledged autocephalous churches of Orthodoxy, including most notably His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow himself. Besides the Church of Jerusalem, all the churches represented were in Eastern Europe with close ties to Moscow. Even then, two of these churches refused to actually send their Primates and instead sent delegations of subordinate bishops. After a single day of meetings around a small conference table presided over by a fuschia powerpoint bearing the legend "Maintaining the Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace," a joint press release was issued that is so generic in its content that it asserts practically nothing other than the fact that the meeting took place.

From accounts of the meeting itself, it seems to have been dominated, predictably, by Moscow, with the Patriarch of Moscow himself delivering a lengthy speech that is effectively a manifesto on Moscow's position in the Schism, once again comparing the present conflict to that between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, asserting that the fundamental issue is the quasi-Papal abuse of primacy by Constantinople, and laying out a set of detailed policy proposals that should be taken up and implemented by a Pan-Orthodox Council. The leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) also delivered a speech denouncing Constantinople's interference in his canonical territory and calling for "a conciliar church administration that will be in demand and effective for salutary ministry of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Orthodox Church in a new world space." Every other remark I've seen from every other bishop present seems to amount to little more than vague platitudes about the need for peace and fraternal dialogue. At the end of the meeting, the bishops apparently agreed to meet again at some point this year to hopefully begin discussions on a possible agenda for a possible Pan-Orthodox Synod or a possible Meeting of Primates.

It's honestly hard to know how to read this event. On the one hand, Moscow's inability to wrangle up more than a handful of primates, and their inability to get even this handful of primates to actually clearly side with them and denounce Constantinople, is a clear sign that, for all Moscow's success in dividing local churches and preventing them from openly siding with the UOC, they have no ability at present to actually take Constantinople's place as leader of global orthodoxy. The other autocephalous churches, whatever their problems with Constantinople, evidently have little interest in breaking communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and even less in in any way submitting to any purported authority of the Moscow Patriarchate within global Orthodoxy. Even divided, Orthodoxy will remain a set of balkanized national churches, with little ability, even among those cut off from Constantinople and following Moscow's lead, to act in concert.

That being said, Moscow has predictably made much of even this, openly arguing (through Metropolitan Hilarion, their head of external relations) that the number of primates present doesn't affect the meeting's importance, and that even a Pan-Orthodox Synod would not, in fact, have to include all the Orthodox churches to be both valid and authoritative. They will likely continue to press ahead on further meetings, giving themselves more time and applying more of their substantial resources towards getting more primates and churches to show up to the next meeting, seeking to lay the groundwork for a possible anti-Constantinopolitan "Pan-Orthodox" Synod.

Whether any of this will ever actually happen in any meaningful sense, however, is very doubtful. Certainly this meeting did not take place. Barring some kind of miracle, global Orthodoxy will only continue to divide.

Orthodox Schism: Moscow's Ecclesiastical Total War

For those keeping track of the Orthodox Schism at home, the Patriarch of Moscow has recently taken a number of steps that I find, frankly, both surprising and extremely disturbing.

In the first place, in response to the recognition of Ukrainian autocephaly by the Church of Greece and the Greek Church of Alexandria, they have predictably broken communion with these churches. This was expected. However, in doing so, they have gone out of their way to make clear that they are not breaking communion with the whole of these churches, but only with those individual bishops and dioceses within them that have publicly agreed to the recognition, and that they are happy to maintain or increase relations with any bishops or faithful within these churches who will side with them. In other words, Moscow is not just breaking communion with these churches as united autocephalous jurisdictions, but is attempting to break them down internally, dividing them diocese-by-diocese into rival bodies at war with one another and siding either with Moscow or Constantinople. This is, to say the least, an extreme move--a total division of Orthodox believers without any tangible attempts at justification in ecclesiology or doctrine--and it only remains to be seen how effective it will prove as a strategy. Most likely it will be very effective indeed, thanks to Moscow's money and influence: internal dissension is spreading everywhere, and by one count twelve Greek bishops have already spoken out against their own head and aligned themselves with Moscow.

Secondly, Moscow, via the bare proxy of the Church of Jerusalem (whose alleged primacy has never in all of church history been anything but a joke), has called for a "pan-Orthodox synod" made up of all the heads of the autocephalous churches to meet in February to discuss and settle the issue of Ukraine. Given the fact that Constantinople claims the sole right to summon such pan-Orthodox assemblies, this has functioned from the beginning as an obvious and naked attempt to get the remaining autocephalous Churches to openly "pick sides" in the conflict, as well as to provide further cover for Moscow's own global ecclesiastical consolidation of power. Constantinople and its closest allies almost immediately refused to attend, and the Patriarch of Antioch will almost certainly not be present at any meeting called by Jerusalem (with which he is currently in schism for unrelated reasons). What will eventually meet in Jordan in February will not be all the heads of Orthodoxy, but a partial, factional grouping of Moscow's allies and anyone else they can bully into showing up, which will predictably do whatever it is Moscow wants: denounce Ukrainian autocephaly and Constantinople, certainly, and perhaps go even farther. The mere holding of an allegedly "pan-Orthodox" meeting without and in opposition to Constantinople will act as a public showcase of the formation of two rival global Orthodox Churches.

Both of these moves, in response to the fairly modest gains by Constantinople of two recognitions by autocephalous Churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, represent extreme escalations toward a sort of ecclesiastical total war. Both have the clear goal of dividing global Orthodoxy permanently into two rival camps, one led by Constantinople, one by Moscow, with battle-lines drawn not between, but within, existing Orthodox jurisdictions.

I have never exactly been a fan of the Moscow Patriarchate, but in my judgment these latest moves are nothing short of revolting, and I sincerely hope they can be undone before they do further damage.

The farther Moscow continues on this path, however, the more suffering and division it will bring for our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters everywhere in the world, cutting across nations and Churches and parishes and even families. Prayers are in order for the praying types. God have mercy on us all.

Private Goods and Love, Human and Divine

I was thinking today about the fact that it's precisely the lesser nature of private goods as opposed to common goods that makes them uniquely precious and meaningful expressions of love.

For the unaware, the distinction between common and private goods has nothing to do with private property or communism or anything like that, but is a central categorization in ancient and Medieval philosophy of the good things that can be given and received and enjoyed. A private good is any good that is diminished in being shared with another. The classic examples are material goods like food, resources, etc. If I bake a pie, my giving you pie means there is less pie for me to enjoy. If my people gives food or water or money or oil or gold to yours, there is less for us to use. Common goods, in contrast, are goods that are not diminished in being shared. This category is typically understood with reference to intellectual goods, political and social goods, and spiritual goods. If I know something, the fact that you also know it in no possible sense diminishes my knowledge. In a truer sense, there are common goods that can *only* be enjoyed in common with another person or persons. I cannot enjoy the good of marriage alone, nor the good of political community. St. Augustine argues that God is a good that can only be had in common with others, that must be shared with others if we are to possess it--and, going even farther, that our possession and enjoyment of God, the Trinitarian God who is love, is not only not diminished, but actually increased the more we give him away, and the more we share him in common with others.

In a straightforward sense, then, common goods are simply superior to private goods, and superior precisely in their connection to relation and therefore to love, human and divine. Love is a common good, and in a sense the exemplar for all other common goods.

Still, it occurred to me today that it is also precisely the lesser nature of private goods that allows them, in actual human life, to often express and create love in a uniquely powerful way. The very fact that there is a limited amount of them, that they are diminished when they are shared, makes it all the more precious when they *are* shared, when they are given. Giving knowledge, etc, doesn't diminish my enjoyment of it, but increases it--but then, so often "giving knowledge" can be just a way to make myself feel important for having knowledge, or for giving it, knowing full well that I lose nothing in so doing.

Giving food, or money, when there is only so much of it, when the fact that I give it to you means there is less of it for me--it is this which, in human life, both expresses and ensures the reality of love, its truthfulness, even its proper commonality. Merely giving common goods does not necessarily mean that I am not treating love itself as a private good, enjoyed alone and diminished by giving. To give another something of which there is a limited amount is to express, more than anything else, the reality, essential to love, that my good, the good of love, is found precisely in our relation, that their good is in fact, to this extent, simply my good. It expresses something of love, human and divine, that would remain unexpressed if we only had common goods to share with one another. As the Gospel would have it, to give only out of and in abundance does not express love so much, or in the same way, as to give out of poverty.

And then I was thinking about the various private goods we can give or receive, and it occurred to me that in this life, perhaps the most limited good of all is time itself. In a limited life, bounded by birth and death, devoting a moment of time to a particular person, as opposed to any other purpose at all, is probably the most meaningful thing that can be given, precisely because it is so limited, because we are so limited within it. Life is very short, and human capacities are very small. I can only do so much in a moment, or an hour, or a lifetime--in a larger sense, not very much at all. To give *that* to another is to express, more than almost anything else, the reality of love as a good of relation, as a good found simply in willing the good of the other.

And then I began to think about how when God wanted to express the infinity of his love, the perfect love of the Holy Trinity, he did it by becoming man, by becoming a limited creature, with a limited human reason and will, and a lifetime of moments. Catholic tradition is replete with reflections on the life and the Cross of Christ, on each day and hour and moment spent with Mary and Joseph and his disciples and others, on each wound and each drop of blood, given by him to each and every one of us, individually and together. When he gave these things to us, limited goods exhausted in the giving, it cost him everything, including his life. When he gives himself to us in the Eucharist, it is precisely as food, broken and shared and diminished and consumed. This is how God chooses to express his own infinite and eternal love.

Anyway, it's worth a thought.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Or, There Are Weasels Under the Coffee Table: Or, Is 19th Century Liberal Imperialistic Utopianism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Before I get finally and totally buried in the depths of the Dissertating Lifestyle, I present to you, my dear, long-suffering readers, the long-promised, oft-longed-for Deep Space Nine Mega-Post. This is my favorite of the Star Trek series, and so I have, as you might imagine, a fair bit to say.

American National Politics and the Justice Casino

American national politics makes more sense when you realize that, while shouting about urgent justice issues is an important element in how American national politicians get people to vote for them, American politics are in no way actually about justice.

As matters stand now, giving out "Justice party-favors" is an essential element in the tit-for-tat of economic-managerial, interest-based coalition politics, but these party-favors bear little or no relationship with any consistent theory of justice, or even the most gradualist, incrementalist idea of how to achieve it. They correspond, rather, to a predominant theory and practice of politics as a system of managing clashing group self-interests through an a-moral exchange of favors and patronage mediated by electoral machinery. Some of these favors are purely self-interested, i.e. they represent direct benefits for the group itself; some represent concessions to that group's purported theory of justice or at least their commitment to a particular justice-issue. From the standpoint of the larger political system, though, there is little fundamental difference between the two.

When you vote for a political party based on a justice-issue, you're essentially gambling that your interest-group will receive, in exchange for its support, political favors that will in some indirect way translate into a tangible but incremental movement towards justice as you see it. This isn't necessarily irrational, since there's always the chance in our political system that your interest-group really will win big (the Supreme Court being the big unpredictable slot machine that occasionally gives crazy Jackpots in the larger Casino of American political life)--but what you're doing when you direct your pursuit of justice towards national politics is still essentially gambling, not working toward justice in any clear, rational manner.

The real issue with this system, though, is not that such gambling occurs, but rather how much sheer energy is directed towards converting every single justice-issue, however urgent or life-and-death, into a ready-made political interest group ready to play long games of cards with the big boys, and what effects this has in the long run on those causes and the societal conceptualization of justice in general. A people trained to see justice, in the end, as a set of interchangeable tokens in a game of Blackjack is going to find itself relating to justice in a manner fundamentally incompatible with any philosophical or moral theory of justice since Plato, and therefore with a fundamentally incompatible idea of politics as well.

Whether this justice and this politics is remotely coherent in itself, or remotely able to *actually* manage the clashing interests of different interest groups and thereby prevent political division and violence, is another question entirely, though one our political system seems to be working very hard to put to the test at the moment. We shall see.

In Defense of the Awful, Terrible, No-Good Terrifying Alienated Surrealism of the First Two Seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation

Alright, stop the presses: I want to write something in defense of the first two seasons of TNG.

Now, before everyone stones me through the Internet (hundreds upon hundreds of virtual packets of communal sacred violence winging their way through the ether(net) to end the Contagion and reestablish order in society), allow me to explain exactly what I mean, and also what I don't mean.

Most notably, I do not mean that the first two season's of TNG (with the exception of a few episodes) are actually good seasons of television, let alone (Waru avertat) well-written seasons of television. For the most part, the dialogue is stilted, the characters unlikeable, the plots bizarre and frequently incoherent, and the overall setting stultifying to most ordinary forms of drama. On all these fronts, the later seasons of TNG are undoubtedly better.

Nevertheless, I have come to think that, when all is said and done, there is something to be said for the prevailing vibe, the portrait of a people and a universe, the cinematic and fictional and science-fictional qualities of Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and 2. Some of this even emerges out of the otherwise negative qualities of the show--and if I had to use a single word to name the elusive yet omnipresent value offered by these seasons, it would undoubtedly be "surrealism."

Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and (especially) 2 is, frequently, a glorious tour de force of surrealist entertainment, bordering frequently on horror.

Almost everything about the show, the characters, the plots, serves to reinforce this overriding sense of alienated surrealism 

Imagine: the human race, centuries in the future. A vast, powerful starship travelling through the blackness of space, crewed entirely by men and women in spandex jumpsuits and skirts who talk slowly and blankly and seem to be constantly concealing high levels of tension and mutual hostility. The society they live in, everything we see of it, is stamped with the same strange, sterile vacuousness that they themselves display, buttressed by a fanatical, ideological belief in its own absolute moral perfection.

Nevertheless, all is not well in paradise. All the sexuality displayed by the characters is marked by a bizarre combination of the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s liberationism combined with the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s sexism. Most of the character's backstories seem to feature some kind of tragic violence, especially death or estrangement from parents, as well as romantic relationship dysfunction. A number of the crew members seem to obviously dislike one another, but it can be difficult to pin down, because these dislikes are never expressed aloud, since all the characters interact, even when off-duty, with an odd sort of tense formality, like actors in a highschool production of Shakespeare. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact all of their emotions are being constantly monitored by the alien female psychiatrist in the skin-tight jumpsuit seated next to the Captain on the bridge. Her job, besides monitoring the psychological health of the crew, is to emote in an exaggeration fashion on behalf of the unfathomable the alien entities they encounter, breaking out into uncontrollable expressions of others' terror or horror, sadness or joy, as everyone else stands around and impassively watches her. For leisure, our heroes can make use of the perfect AI-created virtual-reality machine helpfully provided for their amusement, a machine that can display a perfect facsimile of any person or scenario and also has the power to create sentient life. They can also sit around their quarters alone and listen to classical music.

These bizarre people, in this bizarre society, are travelling through space into the unknown. This unknown, it seems, largely consists of unfathomably-powerful superbeings bent on judging or controlling or testing the human race, or at least our heroes. Each one of these superbeings, who have no obvious relationship with one another or any larger cosmic order, has the power to bend the very fabric of reality and accomplish incredible feats--and their own nature, purposes, etc, are rarely if ever clear. One of these intelligences puts the human species on trial to prove its worth, one just experiments on them like rats in a maze, one underwrites the arbitrary laws of a hedonistic society, one constructs a perfect artificial environment based on terrible 20th century pulp novel. Their power and purposes are, for the most part, equally unfathomable.

What the hell even is this? Well, for the most part, it's the result of the combination of a number of behind-the-scenes things that didn't work out very well. For Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was an aspirational fable about a perfect evolved human race proving itself worthy at last, reaching ever-higher levels of existence through technology and scientific exploration, while giving a middle-finger to God and all other judgmental superbeings along the way. This didn't work out very well, though, and no one in particular could make sense of it or turn it into drama, so over time a succession of writers did their best to work with this idea, coming up with any number of one-shot high-concept science fiction storylines. The most competent of these by far was Maurice Hurley, whose fingerprints are all over the second season in particular. What he realized more than just about anyone else was that the Enterprise characters, as mostly blank ciphers of power and knowledge and perfection, really worked best (or at least most dramatically) when their power was challenged by superior power, their knowledge was stretched past its limits, their perfection revealed as a sham. So he wrote a number of stories where just this happens; a superior power acts, and our heroes do not understand how or why, nor can they do anything to overcome it: all they can do is escape or submit, and so survive, for a while. 

"Time Squared," perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is essentially a horror story. There is a power, an intelligence, that appears out of nowhere to threaten the Enterprise with destruction: but our heroes never make any sense out of it, what it is, why it's doing what it's doing, or how they can relate to it. Captain Picard, our arbiter of normal reality, is confronted with another version of himself, seemingly thrown six hours back in time, where he lies on his back, unable to focus on the world around him, but screaming in helpless terror, sure only of the need to repeat the cyclical events that brought him here. Picard, our Picard, is terrified: and in a key scene, he admits that despite all evidence, he recognizes nothing of himself in the person he sees. As if to underscore this, in the plot's pivotal moment, he shoots and kills his future self, then pushes the Enterprise to take a seemingly senseless action--and it works. They are all alive, free: for now, until the another inscrutable higher power makes them the object of its attention. 

"Where Silence Has Lease" is perhaps the most outwardly nasty of the episodes in the first two seasons: a horror story where our heroes are trapped in a starless void by a sinister intelligence who experiments on them like lab rats. In one such "experiment," an illusionary version of the Enterprise appears, that when beamed over to is all fun-house mirrors and illusions: our heroes exit one bridge directly onto another, looking through a door and seeing themselves from behind. Then an Enterprise crewmember dies in screaming agony, curled in a fetal position with his eyes wide and staring. Finally, the intelligence listens to Picard explain the mystery of death to two blank, illusionary versions of Data and Troi (the two strange, alien characters of the crew), and releases them again. Victory--of a sort.

 It is not just our heroes who are vulnerable to the terrifying powers of the universe, however, but their whole (supposedly superior) society. In "Conspiracy," the whole structure of the utopian Federation is infiltrated and taken over, without a shot being fired, by fathomless alien parasites who cannot be understood, cannot be negotiated with, but can only be defeated with brutal violence. The Federation is saved, for the moment. Still, they (and things much worse) are out there, waiting. 

The best of these episodes, and in a sense the climax of the whole theme,  is "Q Who?," Maurice Hurley's tour de force, which introduces the Borg, and makes the point emphatically that the Enterprise crew's ideological insistence on their own evolved perfection is a hollow sham in the face of a universe full of deadly powers they can neither control nor understand. It is, again, essentially a horror story. Q, the infinitely-powerful, mocking, judgmental superbeing, says the Enterprise crew are weak and arrogant, and cannot understand or control the universe as it is; and then he proves the point. Picard must beg, literally on bended knee for the help of this, mocking and judgmental but at least interested and sympathetic, superbeing against the fathomless, mindless power of the Borg. Their friendly superbeing has saved the day for them--this time. But the Borg are coming. 

These are (most of) the good versions of this story. There are bad versions as well, mostly (but not always) where Gene Roddenberry himself is calling the shots. "Royale," which has an interesting premise (fathomless superbeings kidnap a crew of astronauts, accidentally kill most of them, and then create an entire illusionary world based on a shitty novel for the one survivor to live out his life in misery), but which is otherwise a badly-paced mess; "Justice," where a race of child-like hedonistic sex-fiends turns out to be protected by an unfathomably powerful machine-god that nonetheless responds submissively to a moralistic lecture by Jean-Luc Picard;"Hide and Q," where Q is defeated and humiliated by yet another moralistic lecture on the perfection of humanity by the aforementioned Jean-Luc Picard; "The Last Outpost," where an ancient superbeing judges Riker worthy after he recites a line from Sun Tzu; et cetera. 

The benefit of this when it works, though, and even often when it doesn't, is that the strangeness, the surreality, never quite leaves you--and many aspects that might otherwise be considered straight-up "bad" can and do aid in that effect. The characters are written badly, taking on contradictory traits, likes, and dislikes, episode to episode and scene to scene, speaking and reacting in ways that no recognizable human person would do: but then, that helps with the sense of unreality, the sense that these are not human beings, not as we know them. Obvious conflicts among characters exist, but seem to have been deliberately edited out (as they often literally were by Gene Roddenberry's rewriting), or else resolved in the strangest possible ways: but we can treat this, too, as a sign of the dysfunction and alienation of a future society. Episodes are often heavily padded and paced glacially--there are shots featuring Captain Picard sitting on the bridge staring off into space and doing nothing; when an action is suggested, it is discussed in much more detail than is necessary; we watch in real time as mundane technological tasks are carried out; et cetera. But this, in a sense, is helpful; we can watch the unreality and strangeness of these characters and their world play out, and have time to focus on it, not merely on the shiny colorful plots and their supposed sense of excitement.

Whatever sense of the world, of Star Trek, we get from these seasons is quite far away from the bright, colorful character action-adventure of the contemporaneous original-cast Star Trek film series; and even from the pulpier, weirder world of TOS (which had its own share of superbeings). This is, genetically and dramatically, an idea of Star Trek that sits the closest, perhaps, to that of Star Trek the Motion Picture: an evolved humanity, composed of blank, unpleasant careerists, makes surreal, trippy contact with beings yet farther along the terrifying path of evolution, with vast intelligence and unfathomable power. A step beyond, and this is an idea of science fiction drawn in large part from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's distancing parable about contemptibly small and petty evolved apes forcibly transformed by an unfathomable alien intelligence toward an isolated, distanced transcendence. Beyond that, in turn, this vision of Star Trek stands a lot more closely to the world of '60s and '70s sci-fi, The Twilight Zone, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke: stories about ideas, about the alienation of man in technological society, very often edging into outright horror.

And isn't there something about all this quite a bit more relevant, in our particular alienated, technological society, than the warm family and political drama of later TNG? The late-TNG and beyond Federation may be less of a utopia, but it is undoubtedly a much nicer place. In DS9, we eventually find, genetic engineering and experimentation is strictly banned--but in TNG Season 2, the Federation itself is carrying on such experiments, and accidentally creating deadly plagues in the bargain; and there is talk of conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet...

Later TNG largely replaced all this with stories about recognizably human characters existing in community, and then about politics and drama on a more human scale: cold wars and civil wars and family feuds and coups. This was executed a lot better than anything in the first two seasons of TNG, was a lot more interesting and thought-provoking and even meaningful, most of the time. Because of this it's easy to see the first two seasons as little more than an embryonic version of what was to come, picking out the elements that are the same rather than focusing on the differences--or just dismissing these two seasons altogether. The point of this blog post, though, is that it's worthwhile, also, to acknowledge that if a lot was gained, still something was lost in that transition as well. The first and even more so the second season of TNG were in many ways a recipe for a totally different show, a totally different vision of science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular. A better one? No. But one with an attraction all its own.

So: even if we (reasonably) decide to skip right over the first two seasons of TNG, let's acknowledge, for just a moment, the true surreality, the alienation, the horror, presented all too often in these episodes. Sometimes it is merely laughable, shoddy, obviously fake--but every once in a while, it becomes something more: genuinely disturbing. 

Anxious men in purple spandex sit alone in their padded rooms listening to Mozart, while outside in the darkness and silence limitless intelligences do unimaginable things for reasons no one can fathom--and watch, and judge.

Who can say why anything happens in such a world? Who can say what it means to be a human being in such a society? Causation has broken down, as have ordinary ideas of character and personhood. All there is to do is keep watching the alienated technological patients continuing to travel space, continuing to (hopefully) survive each encounter with their terrifying alienated universe.

Caveat spectator.

Note: if this interests you, I wrote a much longer & more comprehensive piece on TNG a few years ago which can be found here, as well as a shorter piece reviewing a few random episodes here.