The Politics of Eternal Progression
The Politics of Eternal Progression: On Certain Narrative Structures in Mormonism and Battlestar Galactica (both original and reimagined)
I wrote this last year, under another lj avatar (poncif), for a BSG forum. I reproduce it here for a friend who wanted to hear about my crackpot theories and in anticipation of Jan 16 (when the series will air its final episodes).
There’s a lot out there on the interwebs on the original BSG and Mormonism, most of it pretty intelligent (though there are a few alarmist and amusing “don’t let your children watch this pernicious cult twaddle!” articles by believers of other Christian faiths). I’m not going to dwell on rehearsing their material, but rather on my own impressions as a kid, my analysis of the show as a grownup, and pose some questions about how one might critically read Ron Moore’s reimagining of certain features.
Capitalism for the soul
Growing up a nerdy little Mormon kid, I was always fascinated with the question of eternal progression (the idea that you could get your own planet one day if you were righteous enough): "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become" (fifth church President Lorenzo Snow). Capitalism for the soul, as I think of it now. It was always something of a disappointment that I, being female, wouldn’t get MY VERY OWN planet. I would have to be one of some righteous man’s harem (plural marriage was and is still very much a go in the afterlife, if it isn’t here on the terrestrial plane, even for Warren Jeffs), and even then, I wouldn’t be worshiped like my husband would be (the female deity in the Mormon religion is still a taboo subject* and I assumed the same conditions would apply in the celestial kingdom and thereafter). I’d have to settle for being a hanger-on. Meh. Add to that the annoyance, when I must have been about nine or ten, of watching Apollo marrying that damsel-in-distress/twit Selina on the original show - I knew at the time I was supposed to want to be in her place, to be her, to emulate her. I was thus somewhat disgruntled.
Implicit in the doctrine of eternal progression is the notion of free agency (about which many of the commentators on the original BSG and Mormonism make quite a point): that if you aren’t offered the chance to be an evildoer, then your righteousness means nothing**. In order to progress one had to be righteous in the face of an opportunity to NOT be righteous! An Invisible Hand of the Soul, if you will, which will provide a general progression of the market I mean souls. (maybe that’s a tortured metaphor, sorry.) So I wore my CTR ring and went about my righteous little-kid business, always aware that the devil was lurking around ready to tempt me. But I had that ring to remind me that I could CHOOSE THE RIGHT when confronted with evil (which was everywhere - the Mormon persecution complex is bred in early).
Rag-Tag Fleet
CTR ring notwithstanding, I suspected that there was no way out of the eternal cycle of righteousness - self-satisfaction - decadence and unrighteousness - getting smote by God (except for a few survivors) - contrition and repentance I saw over and over again in the Book of Mormon. It happened at the tower of Babel (when the Jaredites fled in their submarines), 1500 years later in Jerusalem (when Lehi hied himself westward to the Americas), then throughout the Nephite civilizations in their continual wars with the Lamanites, finally culminating in the Nephites’s destruction as Moroni stuck the plates in the hill that would later be “found” by that huckster Joseph Smith (the Lamanites, according to the Mormons, survive on the rez, about whom the Mormon Church has displayed disgusting amounts of paternalism). The Mormons themselves seemed to go through cycles like these, being chased across the country to the Utah Territories, the body count rising with each forced expulsion.
Anyway, that cycle seemed hardwired into the religion, creating this bizarre paradox in which you could only hope to escape that destruction by being especially righteous, undergoing these trials of choice again and again that you’d hopefully emerge from unscathed: it was a kind of individual or personal exceptionalism that I think unconsciously motivates members to this day. They hope to be among that rag-tag fleet - they long for that kind of expulsion.
In the original BSG, then, all of these concepts pervade the mythos and plots of the show. This essay is particularly clear on these two points (eternal progression and free agency), and does a fair job of tracing the role church doctrine plays in the plot of “The War of the Gods” (first appearance of that frakking SHIP OF LIGHT, chock-full of what we can only assume are gods-in-training, which reappears in an ep I recently rewatched [“Experiment on Terra”]). What’s missing, and in a politically important way, in the original show (and Mormonism itself) is an understanding of the cycle as vicious and infinite, an acknowledgement of that motivating paradox.
Eternal Return versus Homogeneous Empty Time I mean Eternal Progression
A quick and dirty reading of the politics of the narrative structure of capitalism: it expands forever, progresses forever, and will collapse without new markets, new consumers, new caches of resources and labor (some might say this of modernity itself). This is the logic of infinite novelty and a presumed hunger for “difference,” but also a temporality that German philosopher Walter Benjamin called homogeneous empty time, where nothing new actually does happen, only the same over and over: what he would call a “bad infinity” that produces a constant “state of emergency” that is the rule, and not the exception. Capitalism’s others (pre-capitalist/pre-modern, communist/socialist, etc.) overtly assume a closed loop, an eternally returning cycle in which everything but the process itself is finite:
“[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again...” Heinrich Heine
In the original series, the eternally recurring cycle I see in the Book of Mormon (and in capitalism) is completely replicated, paradox and all. It misrecognizes that infinite repetition in homogeneous empty time as a horrifying sameness in matters of individual choice, and displaces it, attributes it to the Cylons (who were, it should be remembered, aliens with robot slaves [centurions]: the Communist Party and its proletariat): implacable enemies of freedom and intelligence. We get another, more baldly referential version of this in the Eastern Alliance. (I always found that plot-line tedious.)
I don’t know if you, reader, are old enough to remember any of this rhetoric booming out of televisions and radios. I came of age in the era of Iran/Contra, when arms sales to Iran funded the right-wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua in their war against the Sandinistas, who were aligned with the Soviet Union through Cuban support. I don’t know enough to comment on the Sandinistas, but I do remember the vitriol against them during the hearings, which sounded unnervingly familiar to me. (The hearings were on CNN every day during part of my junior year of high school, which I would watch over at my best friend’s house [her parents were liberal Methodists], because I wasn’t allowed to watch them at home.) Anyway. It probably goes without saying at this point that I viewed the politics of the original series as part and parcel with the xenophobic, corporate, imperialist, patriarchal religion in which I was raised.
Popular cultural objects (the original BSG) reflect the anxieties and hopes of both an ideological situation (the cold war, which was, imo, essentially about markets) and the people consciously or unconsciously subject to that situation (both the intended and actual target market for the show [Mormons and middle-class-white-US consumers, respectively]). The way the Mormon religion gets its members to buy into being partisans for capitalist expansion is via this story of eternal progression within the context of the devil and evildoers always out to get you, promising you your own planet if you continually choose the right, but always under the threat of annihilation.
Such progression isn't really progression, but repetition. That repetition goes unacknowledged, disavowed, even. And without avowing that it's just this always-the-same cycle of righteousness-decadence-getting smote-repentence, you're just as mindless and slave-like as the original-series Cylons themselves. Ex-Mormons call current members the Morg (borg-morg, get it??), and it's creepy how long those structures of belief linger. I re-watched the old BSG episodes "The War of the Gods" recently (Count Iblis [the DEVIL!] versus the beings on the Ship of Lights [gods-in-training]) and I was a little sickened at my reaction to it: I still had this sense of wonder, this wow-gee-I-want-powers-like-that, etc.
The Arrival of the New?
Ron Moore et al have done some amazing work scrambling the narrative structures and themes of the original series, as many have noted. The theme of eternal recurrence in particular has been a fascinating motor for the plot throughout the series. One of the articles I’ve already linked to (above) has some interesting things to say about this switch-up and invigoration.
Myself, I think it’s genius, because the desert monotheists behind the original series (the Mormon church) get transformed into the baddies of the reimagined series (the Cylon), but with a difference. I’m not saying I’m arguing staunchly for this reading, but certain aspects of Cylon religious belief and behavior seem uncannily like the faith in which I grew up, but rendered awry: monotheist, evangelical, violent, intolerant of other faiths, obsessed with the soul, and, this is the genius bit, also aware, as perhaps the Mormon Church is not, of the repeating nature of that cycle (or at least Leoben, the William-Burroughs-Hybrid, and possibly Athena are [dunno if Head!Leoben and Head!Six count as Cylon]): all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. As Athena and Six have both said, the Cylons know the Colonials’ religion better than they do. This overlapping of the two cultures’ beliefs in eternal recurrence is the most interesting philosophical and political aspect of the show for me right now.
How this will play out in the coming season, I dunno, but here are some questions:***
-Choice and the Cylon: Athena makes a big deal out of choosing that uniform, and that choice, in certain ways, makes her “human.” So does this make the identifying mark of the human “choice” and not biology?
-Apokalipsis or apokolipsis eschaton? Since we’ve been talking about these cycles with no end, will Kara be the herald of a revelation of hidden things, or the herald of the destruction of human-kind? A related question: will the cycle repeat (as in polytheism), or will it really be the end-times?
-Worthy of Saving: is this the question the original series never bothered to ask? Rhetorical question, maybe.
------------------------------------------------------------
*One of my housemates in college, a wily and capable historian, writer, and editor, got excommunicated for editing a book on the female deity.
**Incidentally, this produces the kind of attitude you’ll find among Mormons about being IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT [they kind of get off on being among the heathen], which in turn produces a very persistent persecution complex.
***I wrote this before the beginning of Season 4.0, so some of these questions have been complicated by the most recently aired episodes.
I wrote this last year, under another lj avatar (poncif), for a BSG forum. I reproduce it here for a friend who wanted to hear about my crackpot theories and in anticipation of Jan 16 (when the series will air its final episodes).
There’s a lot out there on the interwebs on the original BSG and Mormonism, most of it pretty intelligent (though there are a few alarmist and amusing “don’t let your children watch this pernicious cult twaddle!” articles by believers of other Christian faiths). I’m not going to dwell on rehearsing their material, but rather on my own impressions as a kid, my analysis of the show as a grownup, and pose some questions about how one might critically read Ron Moore’s reimagining of certain features.
Capitalism for the soul
Growing up a nerdy little Mormon kid, I was always fascinated with the question of eternal progression (the idea that you could get your own planet one day if you were righteous enough): "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become" (fifth church President Lorenzo Snow). Capitalism for the soul, as I think of it now. It was always something of a disappointment that I, being female, wouldn’t get MY VERY OWN planet. I would have to be one of some righteous man’s harem (plural marriage was and is still very much a go in the afterlife, if it isn’t here on the terrestrial plane, even for Warren Jeffs), and even then, I wouldn’t be worshiped like my husband would be (the female deity in the Mormon religion is still a taboo subject* and I assumed the same conditions would apply in the celestial kingdom and thereafter). I’d have to settle for being a hanger-on. Meh. Add to that the annoyance, when I must have been about nine or ten, of watching Apollo marrying that damsel-in-distress/twit Selina on the original show - I knew at the time I was supposed to want to be in her place, to be her, to emulate her. I was thus somewhat disgruntled.
Implicit in the doctrine of eternal progression is the notion of free agency (about which many of the commentators on the original BSG and Mormonism make quite a point): that if you aren’t offered the chance to be an evildoer, then your righteousness means nothing**. In order to progress one had to be righteous in the face of an opportunity to NOT be righteous! An Invisible Hand of the Soul, if you will, which will provide a general progression of the market I mean souls. (maybe that’s a tortured metaphor, sorry.) So I wore my CTR ring and went about my righteous little-kid business, always aware that the devil was lurking around ready to tempt me. But I had that ring to remind me that I could CHOOSE THE RIGHT when confronted with evil (which was everywhere - the Mormon persecution complex is bred in early).
Rag-Tag Fleet
CTR ring notwithstanding, I suspected that there was no way out of the eternal cycle of righteousness - self-satisfaction - decadence and unrighteousness - getting smote by God (except for a few survivors) - contrition and repentance I saw over and over again in the Book of Mormon. It happened at the tower of Babel (when the Jaredites fled in their submarines), 1500 years later in Jerusalem (when Lehi hied himself westward to the Americas), then throughout the Nephite civilizations in their continual wars with the Lamanites, finally culminating in the Nephites’s destruction as Moroni stuck the plates in the hill that would later be “found” by that huckster Joseph Smith (the Lamanites, according to the Mormons, survive on the rez, about whom the Mormon Church has displayed disgusting amounts of paternalism). The Mormons themselves seemed to go through cycles like these, being chased across the country to the Utah Territories, the body count rising with each forced expulsion.
Anyway, that cycle seemed hardwired into the religion, creating this bizarre paradox in which you could only hope to escape that destruction by being especially righteous, undergoing these trials of choice again and again that you’d hopefully emerge from unscathed: it was a kind of individual or personal exceptionalism that I think unconsciously motivates members to this day. They hope to be among that rag-tag fleet - they long for that kind of expulsion.
In the original BSG, then, all of these concepts pervade the mythos and plots of the show. This essay is particularly clear on these two points (eternal progression and free agency), and does a fair job of tracing the role church doctrine plays in the plot of “The War of the Gods” (first appearance of that frakking SHIP OF LIGHT, chock-full of what we can only assume are gods-in-training, which reappears in an ep I recently rewatched [“Experiment on Terra”]). What’s missing, and in a politically important way, in the original show (and Mormonism itself) is an understanding of the cycle as vicious and infinite, an acknowledgement of that motivating paradox.
Eternal Return versus Homogeneous Empty Time I mean Eternal Progression
A quick and dirty reading of the politics of the narrative structure of capitalism: it expands forever, progresses forever, and will collapse without new markets, new consumers, new caches of resources and labor (some might say this of modernity itself). This is the logic of infinite novelty and a presumed hunger for “difference,” but also a temporality that German philosopher Walter Benjamin called homogeneous empty time, where nothing new actually does happen, only the same over and over: what he would call a “bad infinity” that produces a constant “state of emergency” that is the rule, and not the exception. Capitalism’s others (pre-capitalist/pre-modern, communist/socialist, etc.) overtly assume a closed loop, an eternally returning cycle in which everything but the process itself is finite:
“[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again...” Heinrich Heine
In the original series, the eternally recurring cycle I see in the Book of Mormon (and in capitalism) is completely replicated, paradox and all. It misrecognizes that infinite repetition in homogeneous empty time as a horrifying sameness in matters of individual choice, and displaces it, attributes it to the Cylons (who were, it should be remembered, aliens with robot slaves [centurions]: the Communist Party and its proletariat): implacable enemies of freedom and intelligence. We get another, more baldly referential version of this in the Eastern Alliance. (I always found that plot-line tedious.)
I don’t know if you, reader, are old enough to remember any of this rhetoric booming out of televisions and radios. I came of age in the era of Iran/Contra, when arms sales to Iran funded the right-wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua in their war against the Sandinistas, who were aligned with the Soviet Union through Cuban support. I don’t know enough to comment on the Sandinistas, but I do remember the vitriol against them during the hearings, which sounded unnervingly familiar to me. (The hearings were on CNN every day during part of my junior year of high school, which I would watch over at my best friend’s house [her parents were liberal Methodists], because I wasn’t allowed to watch them at home.) Anyway. It probably goes without saying at this point that I viewed the politics of the original series as part and parcel with the xenophobic, corporate, imperialist, patriarchal religion in which I was raised.
Popular cultural objects (the original BSG) reflect the anxieties and hopes of both an ideological situation (the cold war, which was, imo, essentially about markets) and the people consciously or unconsciously subject to that situation (both the intended and actual target market for the show [Mormons and middle-class-white-US consumers, respectively]). The way the Mormon religion gets its members to buy into being partisans for capitalist expansion is via this story of eternal progression within the context of the devil and evildoers always out to get you, promising you your own planet if you continually choose the right, but always under the threat of annihilation.
Such progression isn't really progression, but repetition. That repetition goes unacknowledged, disavowed, even. And without avowing that it's just this always-the-same cycle of righteousness-decadence-getting smote-repentence, you're just as mindless and slave-like as the original-series Cylons themselves. Ex-Mormons call current members the Morg (borg-morg, get it??), and it's creepy how long those structures of belief linger. I re-watched the old BSG episodes "The War of the Gods" recently (Count Iblis [the DEVIL!] versus the beings on the Ship of Lights [gods-in-training]) and I was a little sickened at my reaction to it: I still had this sense of wonder, this wow-gee-I-want-powers-like-that, etc.
The Arrival of the New?
Ron Moore et al have done some amazing work scrambling the narrative structures and themes of the original series, as many have noted. The theme of eternal recurrence in particular has been a fascinating motor for the plot throughout the series. One of the articles I’ve already linked to (above) has some interesting things to say about this switch-up and invigoration.
Myself, I think it’s genius, because the desert monotheists behind the original series (the Mormon church) get transformed into the baddies of the reimagined series (the Cylon), but with a difference. I’m not saying I’m arguing staunchly for this reading, but certain aspects of Cylon religious belief and behavior seem uncannily like the faith in which I grew up, but rendered awry: monotheist, evangelical, violent, intolerant of other faiths, obsessed with the soul, and, this is the genius bit, also aware, as perhaps the Mormon Church is not, of the repeating nature of that cycle (or at least Leoben, the William-Burroughs-Hybrid, and possibly Athena are [dunno if Head!Leoben and Head!Six count as Cylon]): all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. As Athena and Six have both said, the Cylons know the Colonials’ religion better than they do. This overlapping of the two cultures’ beliefs in eternal recurrence is the most interesting philosophical and political aspect of the show for me right now.
How this will play out in the coming season, I dunno, but here are some questions:***
-Choice and the Cylon: Athena makes a big deal out of choosing that uniform, and that choice, in certain ways, makes her “human.” So does this make the identifying mark of the human “choice” and not biology?
-Apokalipsis or apokolipsis eschaton? Since we’ve been talking about these cycles with no end, will Kara be the herald of a revelation of hidden things, or the herald of the destruction of human-kind? A related question: will the cycle repeat (as in polytheism), or will it really be the end-times?
-Worthy of Saving: is this the question the original series never bothered to ask? Rhetorical question, maybe.
------------------------------------------------------------
*One of my housemates in college, a wily and capable historian, writer, and editor, got excommunicated for editing a book on the female deity.
**Incidentally, this produces the kind of attitude you’ll find among Mormons about being IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT [they kind of get off on being among the heathen], which in turn produces a very persistent persecution complex.
***I wrote this before the beginning of Season 4.0, so some of these questions have been complicated by the most recently aired episodes.