Technology as We'd Like It to Be

Desk Set 

Desk Set (1957, Dir. Walter Lang) is a delightful romantic comedy starring Tracy and Hepburn (but it gives a strong supporting role to the IBM computer above). Tracy plays an efficiency expert who is tight-lipped about the work he is doing at the research department headed by Hepburn. The film leads us to expect that the ladies in the reference section will be made obsolete by the EMMARAC computer and its matronesque technician played by Neva Patterson but that does not happen. 

Neva Patterson sporting an outfit that is the envy of concentration camp matrons world-wide

Despite the lively libations and hi-jinks at the office (above), the reference section is efficient and in the end the computer does not displace the team but exists to allow them more time to do research.

A bit utopian perhaps but still a delightful little film.

STNG "The High Ground" or Trolling for Relativism?

I have such a love/hate relationship with Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry was clearly both a visionary and a secular humanist on the scale and order of say, John Dewey, which makes him (Roddenberry) an interesting "educator" who suffers not from Dewey's turgid prose.

Here's an episode that can't just decide between good and evil. Are we heading ever upwards to the sunny peaks of progress or will we be bedeviled by our propensity toward violence and self-destruction?

The terrorist leader pictured above -- in desperate need of the ministrations of the Flowbee -- gets his comeuppance from the agile Kerrie Keane who just says No his shenanigans. Meanwhile, Picard and Riker dither and kindly suggest less lethal means for dealing with this shaggy sociopath. Well done, Ms. Keane. You've done the galaxy a favor by going where the men would go neither boldly nor at all. Sometimes it takes a woman to do men's work.

Pope Francis had this to say about the Paris mayhem: "These things are hard to understand. There is no justification for such things. This is not human." Recognizing the inhumanity in a situation is a clarity of judgment that is need now as it will be in the 24th century.

Star Trek, Immortality and Evasive Action

The name of the German philosopher who claimed that all philosophy begins in the face of death escapes my mind. However, this particular episode (even while being the most anti-theistic I can recall) does show the limits of human development, technology and evolution. The final frontier is not space, but death:

"Who Watches the Watchers"

In one of his books Peter Kreeft notes that it is popular to equate religion, magic and superstition as opposed to reason and science. (He then argues that both science and religion are rational, while science and it's manipulative overuse [that which Neil Postman characterized as "Technopoly"]: technology, which he says is a modern version of magic, are fundamentally irrational).

In any case, the above STNG episode reveals more about the Enlightenment Soul of Gene Rodenberry than it does about the future of religion. "Who Watches the Watchers" looks at religion and preaches that men (well, sentient life) simply "evolve" out of religion into rationality and technique. Religion in this view would seem to be - at best - a kind of substitute for science which fades away once a people invents the lightbulb or, say, television.

To go where every man goes...

Despite the episode's superficial and dismissive view of religion, there is a moment rather poignant. After the proto-Vulcans have mistaken Captain Picard for "The Picard, a god," a Federation anthropolgist dies. Confronted with the stark nakedness of death, we hear this bit of dialogue:

NURIA [the Mitakan leader]: Picard, you could not save her?
PICARD: No.
NURIA: You do have limits. You are not masters of life and death.
PICARD: No, we are not. We can cure many diseases and we can repair injuries, we can even extend life. But for all our knowledge, all our advances, we are just as mortal as you are. We're just as powerless to prevent the inevitable.

It is that mortality which calls into question the "Rodenberry Hypothesis" that humanity is always heading onward and upward toward sunlit peaks. We "do have limits" but we desire the limitless. Not merely the "Bad Infinity" of the galaxy or even the universe, but that total satisfaction without end.

I could be reading something into Patrick Stewart, but I had the distinct feeling that even he might have thought that last sentence above was incomplete. I would end it thusly: Perhaps, though, what is inevitable is not annihilation but eternity. There remains so much we don't know.... 

That would seem to me to be a more scientific view: let the question remain open.

Infinite Jello?

One doesn't generally think of ineffable sadness and longing with punk rock, but Dead Kennedys manage to pull it off with "Moon Over Marin." Told in the first person, the song is a lamentation over a toxified California coast and the protagonist's desire to find meaning through routine and the hope of a stable cosmic order.

In this dystopian future, our narrator is privileged enough to own some beach front property amid a "crowded future" and "still find[s] time to exercise" "on my beach at night." The beach itself seems to be the coast of the Valdez oil spill gone mad and global:

Another tanker's hit the rocks
Abandoned to spill out its guts
The sand is laced with sticky glops

Despite the horror, he concludes, "There will always be a moon over Marin."

Jello Biafra -- longing for the Infinite. Who woulda thunk?