I don't think dramas initiate social change, but they certainly reinforce it.
The only work of fiction that I can think of in American history that visibly changed society was Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it was a literary adaptation of an idea that was spreading rapidly: abolitionism. It reinforced an existing trend.
Because fictional presentations of an idea can grab people's attention, occasionally we can learn some principle more readily. We have a hook on which to hang the idea.
I got to thinking of this with respect to my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I did not watch the series initially. My teenage son persuaded me to watch it after it had already become popular. He would record the show during the week, and we would watch it on Sundays. That was my day off.
I was never a Trekkie, but I enjoyed the show. My favorite character was introduced later, Lieut. Worf. Sometimes the writers gave him the funniest one-liners in the history of the series. They were funny because they came out of his mouth. Also, I was impressed with Michael Dorn's tremendous achievement: nobody recognizes him when he goes out in public. The only other celebrity like him was Gene Simmons of KISS. I spotted Simmons' advantage in 1975. I never saw or heard KISS, but I immediately saw what Simmons had done -- and with a name stolen from an actress.
IT'S ABOUT TIME
I got to thinking about the series. The three shows that I remember best all had to do with time. One was the show where there was a time loop, which is a kind of Star Trek version of Groundhog Day. It preceded Groundhog Day by one year. I am not the first person to note the similarity. The Web has lots of links to this connection. It was titled "Cause and Effect." Of course, the time loops really weren't, in either show. They were semi-loops. Picard learned in each successive loop, finally finding a way out. Bill Murray's character did, too. He become a decent man: progressive sanctification. That finally let him out of the loop. All's well that ends well.
Problem: there are no time loops. Sad, but true.
The second episode that I most recall is among the most beloved of the entire series, "The Inner Light." A space probe gets close to the Enterprise, and it renders Picard unconscious. He then relives a lifetime of a simple man on a distant planet. It turns out that the planet had been destroyed 1,000 years earlier. The justification for sending out a probe with the built-in memories of one representative of the entire civilization was this: the planet's people wanted to be remembered. They wanted to have a sense of significance, and they hoped to maintain this significance by means of another person's memories. His story could give them all significance, but only retroactively. Another man might learn their story from the probe, and then impute value to it.
Imputation is a crucial concept in the history of Western civilization. It remains one of the most fundamental concepts of modern man. We don't talk about it much, but it really is crucial. The question is this: "Will you have significance if nobody remembers you?" For most people in history, nobody remembers them after three generations. Only a few famous people are ever remembered. Someone may read an old diary, and in that way the dead person will be remembered.
Now, for the first time in history, it really is possible for billions of people to be remembered. This is because of YouTube. Presumably, YouTube videos will stay online forever. Bandwidth keeps getting cheaper (Moore's law). For the first time, we can leave a record online of our thoughts and dreams, and it does not cost us anything but recording time. Descendants will be able to go back to a YouTube video and find out what an ancestor thought. I'm not sure anybody will care, but at least it will be possible. This is a fundamental change in the nature of human civilization. Most people are not taking advantage of it, but it can be done technically. It can be done economically.
Imputation is the central doctrine of historiography. Somebody has to impute meaning to the past. But who has authority to do this? Whose opinion counts? If the world ends in the heat death of the universe, with everything frozen when all kinetic energy is dispersed, then what did it all mean? If there is no one at the end of time to impute meaning back in time, and do so on a comprehensive, flawless, authoritative basis, then what meaning does anything have today? This is a major philosophical issue, but we don't like to discuss it, so we avoid thinking about it. That show forced millions of people to think about at least the fundamental question. What did it matter that a burned-out civilization left a record for one man to experience? They wanted to leave a record, but why? I think it was a popular show, precisely because it raised the question.
Do you have an answer? Mine is here: http://bit.ly/gnworld.
The show won a Hugo award, which was a major distinction. People on the literary side of the science-fiction movement agreed with millions of viewers. It was a significant episode.
Now we come to my favorite: "Tapestry." Picard is shot in the chest by radicals. He wakes up in the presence of Q, who tells him he is dead. He would have survived, Q says, except that he had been given replacement heart decades earlier. He had a replacement heart because he had been stabbed in the heart in a fight with a group of Naussicans. Q gives him the option of going back to that fight, but he warns Picard that this will change his life subsequently. Picard takes the deal, and he avoids the fight by acting prudently. This changes his subsequent career. He winds up a competent junior officer on the Enterprise, where Will Riker is Captain. He is not given a promotion, precisely because he is perceived as too cautious. Q then gives him another choice: to go back to his potential deathbed, but with the defective mechanical heart. Picard takes the offer. He he is now willing to risk dying on the table rather than living in a world in which he is plagued by his own cautiousness.
That episode conveyed a fundamental message, and it is one which I have returned to over the years. It is this: our lives are package deals. We think that if we could go back to a particular decision we made, if we just would not make that decision, we would be better off today. We forget about how many decisions we made that we have forgotten about, any one of which could have changed our lives. This is the true butterfly effect. A butterfly in our lives flaps its wings, and this results in major changes: the law of unintended consequences. Our lives are a tapestry.
Time travel stories very often hinge on just this kind of an event. Science-fiction authors like to play with the butterfly effect.
This is connected to the theme that was explored in the episode on "The Inner Light." A philosophical theme today is this: time as an aspect of entropy. Time is called time's arrow. It is irreversible, because entropy is irreversible. We can't go back again. We can only go forward, but we go forward towards a world which eventually dies, according to evolution's cosmology. Entropy overwhelms the world.
The second law of thermodynamics is the great enemy of meaning. If there will be no one to look back and impute meaning to the past, and then make judgments in terms of this, then time really is meaningless. We are meaningless. When we equate time with entropy, which modern philosophers of science do, then the butterfly effect is irreversible. We don't impute correctly to the past, because we really don't know how or why we wound up where we are today. We guess. We make poorly informed judgments retroactively. Ultimately, we cannot be sure. All we know is what was, meaning that all we know is what little we remember of what happened to us in the past. We don't know much.
The reason why I liked the "Tapestry" episode is this: it reminded me that I probably could not fix my present situation by going back in time and jiggering with a particular event. Life is too complex. There are too many butterflies. It is this rule: we can't change just one thing. We can't change just one aspect of our timelines. Cause and effect are just too complex.
Picard decided that it was better to risk dying than to experience a life that was the result of what had looked like a good idea in retrospect -- prudence -- but which turned out to have negative consequences so great that it was better to risk death than to persevere with those consequences.
This is a variation of the theme in the Jimmy Stewart movie, It's a Wonderful Life (1946). That is one of the most beloved movies in American history. It did not win the Academy Award as best picture the next year, although it was nominated. The award was won by a movie that is highly dated in retrospect: The Best Years of Our Lives. It had a similar theme: the re-evaluation of our lives, and a new beginning. They were both immediate postwar movies. Americans had just gone through World War II, and millions of young adults were re-evaluating their lives and their futures. These movies reinforced social trends that were already in operation. Both of them offered hope. But the Stewart movie was not only timely in 1946, it was timeless. It is extremely difficult to achieve this in literature or anything else. That which is timely is usually not timeless. That which is timeless is usually not timely.
Both of them rested on this idea: you can't go home again. You can't go back again. You can't change what is past. Or, as Omar Khayyám famously put it back in 1100,
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
In short, get over it. Ask forgiveness. Make restitution, if possible. But move on.
Also, don't needlessly upset Naussicans.
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