Cylons, Humans, and Philip K. Dick
Feb. 26th, 2005 04:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
labingi.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
13thcolonyThis is my first post on this community (which I've been enjoying lurking in). (Cross-posted in my LJ.)
I’ve been pondering the discourse of “humanity” and the “soul” developed in BSG episode 1.8 (“Flesh and Bone”) and why it makes me just a bit nervous. Spoilers up to that ep.
In this ep. more than any previous one, the series is posing the question: “How human are the Cylons?” It seems clear that they’re not identical to humans.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
docmichelle, in a comment on morwen_peredhil’s episode review on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
13th_colony makes an excellent point that Boomer and Six mimic human emotions pretty well but don’t seem to get the overarching essence of human feeling. (Six confuses sex and love; Boomer doesn’t understand why Tyrol had to break up with her, etc.) This, however, leaves open the question of why (and to what extent) they are mentally and emotionally different from humans.
I see two possible types of explanation, which are respectively embodied in Blade Runner and the novel the film was based on, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In Blade Runner, the Replicants are in essence emotionally human. The only difference is one of life experience: Replicants (presumably born with downloaded “adult” information) only exist for four years, so they never attain normal human maturity. But when they are given false memories, as Rachael is, they behave and feel exactly as a human with those memories would.
Now, we know that Galactica!Boomer, at least, has false memories (I don’t see evidence that most of the other Cylons we’ve met do). Yet Boomer still doesn’t behave quite like a “real” human, though she’s very close to it, close enough for Tyrol to fall in love with her. But even with Boomer, I wonder if her life experience has been anything like “normal.” If her false memories tell her that she came from a mining colony where all her family was killed, she might have “grown up” very isolated and somewhat dysfunctional as a human anyway. If I didn’t know she was a Cylon, I would see her behavior as well within the bounds of human possibility. In the mini, I never guessed that she was a Cylon until the big reveal. Her behavior seems to have become “less human” since then, but part of the that might be the strain of wondering if she is a Cylon. So I think the Blade Runner model might, indeed, be one possibility for Cylon consciousness.
But, on balance, the series seems to be favoring the position that the Cylons really are structurally different on an emotional level. We certainly haven’t been encouraged to view any of them as really normally “human.” This type of difference is more reminiscent of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In this version of Dick’s story, the androids are genuinely incapable of becoming “human” because they almost wholly lack the basic quality that binds human society together: empathy, the ability to feel another’s feelings vicariously. Boomer’s inability to understand Tyrol’s guilt at one of his “kids” taking the fall to cover for his and Boomer’s relationship is perhaps the strongest indication we’ve seen that the Cylons may fit into a category analogous to Dick’s androids. On a basic level, they just don’t get it.
But whatever type of consciousness the Cylons have, the humans are faced with a morally difficult situation in dealing with them. And I don’t think the humans in 1.8 engaged with that moral complexity very well (though, from a narrative standpoint, I think it’s believable that they didn’t).
If Cylons are like Replicants, then they are basically humans with dysfunctional life and cultural experiences. If this is the case, torturing them and spacing them without any sort of due process is clearly as wrong as it would be if practiced against any human.
If the Cylons are like androids, the situation as murkier. These Cylons could not be “reformed.” They could not be integrated into human society. They very likely could not be negotiated with in a constructive way. They are more like dangerous things that need to be destroyed. Yet they can clearly feel pain and fear and can think on a complex level. And they have a system of morality among themselves, even though it’s one that’s highly suspect. They, therefore, can’t just be disposed of as one would disarm and dispose of a bomb.
In Do Androids Dream, Deckard kills androids for a living. This is arguably a morally defensible and even necessary occupation: since androids are basically psychopaths, they are a menace to human society. But here’s the kicker: androids are a menace because they don’t feel empathy. But for Deckard to chase down and shoot in cold blood a living, thinking, talking, feeling being, he must reject his own feelings of empathy. Normal human empathy says that you just don’t do that to your fellow beings. So by protecting humanity from the androids, Deckard is in constant danger of becoming no better than they are, of becoming an android himself.
Back to BSG: On one level, it doesn’t matter whether the Cylons deserve to die. It doesn’t matter whether they have souls or “real” feelings, or even if they must be eliminated for the future of human civilization. They act (more or less) human. To torture, deceive, and slaughter them, then, is fundamentally dehumanizing to the people doing those things. If you can do it to a Cylon who acts 85 percent human, what’s to stop you doing it to a human?
But it’s even trickier than this. We (and the BSG humans) don’t know if the Cylons are like androids or Replicants or something else again. Maybe they are categorically different from humans but not so different that they couldn’t theoretically be another “species” humans could make peace with. In my view, when you don’t know the status of a being you’re dealing with, it is very nearly always best to err on the side of the benefit of the doubt. If it acts human, assume it feels human. The BSG humans--for very understandable reasons--seem inclined to do the opposite. They want to believe that the race that destroyed their civilization is made up of “toasters,” of mere machines who can just mimic “souled” human beings. This, however, is exactly the type of thinking that for centuries led Europeans to conclude that black people were inferior, led men to conclude that women were inferior. And I can’t help but be reminded of Descartes who gave a justification to centuries of scientific torture of animals on the grounds that they were--sound familiar?--mere “machines.”
So, all in all, I’m concerned about the implications of the humans’ attitude toward the Cylons. I understand it. If they destroyed almost everything I knew and loved, I’d hate and want to destroy them too. It’s great storytelling to show this kind of credible response to a very complex situation. But it is a response that I find troubling.
I’ve been pondering the discourse of “humanity” and the “soul” developed in BSG episode 1.8 (“Flesh and Bone”) and why it makes me just a bit nervous. Spoilers up to that ep.
In this ep. more than any previous one, the series is posing the question: “How human are the Cylons?” It seems clear that they’re not identical to humans.
docmichelle, in a comment on morwen_peredhil’s episode review on 13th_colony makes an excellent point that Boomer and Six mimic human emotions pretty well but don’t seem to get the overarching essence of human feeling. (Six confuses sex and love; Boomer doesn’t understand why Tyrol had to break up with her, etc.) This, however, leaves open the question of why (and to what extent) they are mentally and emotionally different from humans. I see two possible types of explanation, which are respectively embodied in Blade Runner and the novel the film was based on, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In Blade Runner, the Replicants are in essence emotionally human. The only difference is one of life experience: Replicants (presumably born with downloaded “adult” information) only exist for four years, so they never attain normal human maturity. But when they are given false memories, as Rachael is, they behave and feel exactly as a human with those memories would.
Now, we know that Galactica!Boomer, at least, has false memories (I don’t see evidence that most of the other Cylons we’ve met do). Yet Boomer still doesn’t behave quite like a “real” human, though she’s very close to it, close enough for Tyrol to fall in love with her. But even with Boomer, I wonder if her life experience has been anything like “normal.” If her false memories tell her that she came from a mining colony where all her family was killed, she might have “grown up” very isolated and somewhat dysfunctional as a human anyway. If I didn’t know she was a Cylon, I would see her behavior as well within the bounds of human possibility. In the mini, I never guessed that she was a Cylon until the big reveal. Her behavior seems to have become “less human” since then, but part of the that might be the strain of wondering if she is a Cylon. So I think the Blade Runner model might, indeed, be one possibility for Cylon consciousness.
But, on balance, the series seems to be favoring the position that the Cylons really are structurally different on an emotional level. We certainly haven’t been encouraged to view any of them as really normally “human.” This type of difference is more reminiscent of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In this version of Dick’s story, the androids are genuinely incapable of becoming “human” because they almost wholly lack the basic quality that binds human society together: empathy, the ability to feel another’s feelings vicariously. Boomer’s inability to understand Tyrol’s guilt at one of his “kids” taking the fall to cover for his and Boomer’s relationship is perhaps the strongest indication we’ve seen that the Cylons may fit into a category analogous to Dick’s androids. On a basic level, they just don’t get it.
But whatever type of consciousness the Cylons have, the humans are faced with a morally difficult situation in dealing with them. And I don’t think the humans in 1.8 engaged with that moral complexity very well (though, from a narrative standpoint, I think it’s believable that they didn’t).
If Cylons are like Replicants, then they are basically humans with dysfunctional life and cultural experiences. If this is the case, torturing them and spacing them without any sort of due process is clearly as wrong as it would be if practiced against any human.
If the Cylons are like androids, the situation as murkier. These Cylons could not be “reformed.” They could not be integrated into human society. They very likely could not be negotiated with in a constructive way. They are more like dangerous things that need to be destroyed. Yet they can clearly feel pain and fear and can think on a complex level. And they have a system of morality among themselves, even though it’s one that’s highly suspect. They, therefore, can’t just be disposed of as one would disarm and dispose of a bomb.
In Do Androids Dream, Deckard kills androids for a living. This is arguably a morally defensible and even necessary occupation: since androids are basically psychopaths, they are a menace to human society. But here’s the kicker: androids are a menace because they don’t feel empathy. But for Deckard to chase down and shoot in cold blood a living, thinking, talking, feeling being, he must reject his own feelings of empathy. Normal human empathy says that you just don’t do that to your fellow beings. So by protecting humanity from the androids, Deckard is in constant danger of becoming no better than they are, of becoming an android himself.
Back to BSG: On one level, it doesn’t matter whether the Cylons deserve to die. It doesn’t matter whether they have souls or “real” feelings, or even if they must be eliminated for the future of human civilization. They act (more or less) human. To torture, deceive, and slaughter them, then, is fundamentally dehumanizing to the people doing those things. If you can do it to a Cylon who acts 85 percent human, what’s to stop you doing it to a human?
But it’s even trickier than this. We (and the BSG humans) don’t know if the Cylons are like androids or Replicants or something else again. Maybe they are categorically different from humans but not so different that they couldn’t theoretically be another “species” humans could make peace with. In my view, when you don’t know the status of a being you’re dealing with, it is very nearly always best to err on the side of the benefit of the doubt. If it acts human, assume it feels human. The BSG humans--for very understandable reasons--seem inclined to do the opposite. They want to believe that the race that destroyed their civilization is made up of “toasters,” of mere machines who can just mimic “souled” human beings. This, however, is exactly the type of thinking that for centuries led Europeans to conclude that black people were inferior, led men to conclude that women were inferior. And I can’t help but be reminded of Descartes who gave a justification to centuries of scientific torture of animals on the grounds that they were--sound familiar?--mere “machines.”
So, all in all, I’m concerned about the implications of the humans’ attitude toward the Cylons. I understand it. If they destroyed almost everything I knew and loved, I’d hate and want to destroy them too. It’s great storytelling to show this kind of credible response to a very complex situation. But it is a response that I find troubling.
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Re: Where are we headed...
Date: 2005-02-27 07:20 pm (UTC)And is being an alcoholic (Tigh) really deserving of death? What about characters like Cally, Billy, Dualla, or my dear Captain Apollo? What have they done that's so bad we'd be rooting for their enemies to kill them?
So, interesting thought, but I just don't think we're being led that way.
Re: Where are we headed...
Date: 2005-02-28 03:28 am (UTC)Very eerie point about Starbuck seeming like an expert interrogator. She certainly does. And we know that the colonies were not a utopian society, as Zarek’s (sp?) disaffection illustrates. All the same, I wonder if Starbuck’s expertise was a bit of an oversight in the writing. What I mean is, apart from this episode, I don’t see any signs that she’s being pointed out as that kind of hardened person. Then again, it’s early in the series, so we might just not have seen it till this episode.
I did feel that Starbuck was somewhat “redeemed” by her final sympathy for Leoben. Actually, the character whose actions bothered me most was Roslin, not least because she is so often set up as the “nice” lady, the one who doesn’t want the prisoners to be treated like slaves, etc. I can understand Roslin’s decision to kill Leoben. His attempt to discredit Adama certainly evidences his danger as a source of misinformation. What I have trouble with is her decision to kill him by spacing him. This seems like an unnecessarily cruel way to kill someone. Though it may be over relatively quickly, it still seems like a nasty way to die. If Leoben had to die, why not just put a bullet through his head? It seems almost as if Roslin was taking the position that he was just a thing to be put out with the trash. Maybe she was trying to convince herself of that, since her dream certainly gives her reason to have more personal feelings for him. All I can say is, her decision creeped me out (as it was probably meant to).
Re: Where are we headed...
Date: 2005-02-28 04:53 pm (UTC)I think that this experience (combined with her experiences with the ship) is not so much intended to paint Starbuck in a negative light but is moreso intended to bring about, at the very least, a slight change in attitude. I don't think that she'll be looking at the Cylons in quite the same way after this, and that should prove very interesting.
As for Adama, I don't think that his initial decision to lie to the fleet about the new breed of Cylon was necessarily unscrupulous (but then, I don't think that lying is necessarily bad. There's a lot of gray area). Perhaps short-sighted, but his intentions were admirable and made sense. The panic that the truth could have caused might well have done a lot more damage to the surviving humans than the Cylons themselves could ever have done. Wouldn't allowing that to happen when he knew he could prevent it also be unscrupulous? It's rather tough to call. Perhaps the events of "Litmus" would not have happened if he had opted to let the entire fleet know the truth outright, but no one can predict the future. He did what he thought was most likely to benefit his people, and I think that such intentions are far more important than the fact that it wound up being a mistake.
As far as rooting for the Cylons goes, as others have said, I don't think that we're going to wind up completely rooting for them. I think it's going to be a far more situational thing; at times we'll be disliking the humans and at others we'll be disliking the Cylons. I don't think that the show is trying to set us up to root for one side or the other. Rather, it's setting us up to root for individual characters in individual situations, and, more importantly, it's trying to make us think about what really makes someone human.