Reflections on Humanity in Light of Avatar

Avatar is an oversized movie in every respect, from the physiques of its Na'vi protagonists to its two-and-a-half hour length to the lush grandeur of its special effects. So it's probably not surprising that some of its opposition takes oversized exception to it. There seem to be two lines of argument. The first is that the movie is anti-human and, especially, un-American.The second is that it's anti-Christian, instead encouraging people to worship the creation rather than the Creator and adopt (quelle horreur!) pantheism and neopaganism.

Regarding the secular objection that Avatar is anti-human and anti-American, I believe that the movie is not so much intended to be a direct reflection of contemporary humanity - American or otherwise - as a cautionary tale of what we could become, if we make the wrong choices.

While there are clear echoes of "Apocalypse Now" in some of the scenes, the reality is that RDA's SecOps forces engaged in the kinds of actions - including direct and intentional attacks on known sacred sites, and the indiscriminate slaughter of noncombatants, including women and children - that our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are making tremendous efforts, and often taking heartbreaking losses, to avoid doing. And not to get too contemporarily political about it, if our only reason to be in Iraq was to get the oil, we could easily throw up Hell's Gate-like enclosures around the oil fields and leave the rest of the country to go to Hell in a handbasket. Instead, we're spending far more than we're getting from Iraq to try to restore peace, democracy, and the rule of law. The U.S. is far from perfect, in our motivations and actions, of course. But we're also far from Colonel Quaritch, thankfully.

Still, it could go either way, in the future. Avatar makes it clear that humans in that timeline have made the wrong choices. Earth - which, in the real/present, is damaged but still breathtakingly beautiful and awesomely productive - has been left basically a barren wasteland. Humans have raped her for her resources, and are now expanding out into the universe to do the same thing to other worlds: "if Grace is there with you - look in her memories. She can show you the world we come from. There's no green there. They killed their Mother, and they're gonna do the same thing here."

The ironic "Catch-22" - that unobtanium is required for regular, practical star travel, and regular, practical star travel is required to... well... obtain it - is an emblem for the way one of the most potentially positive aspects of the human psyche, the desire to explore, to travel, to discover new frontiers, can be perverted to the exploitative, destructive "frontier ethic" which views those new frontiers almost exclusively as a source of wealth, and any indigenous inhabitants as "violent savages."

We have been there before, and spent the last hundred years gradually clawing our way up from that mentality. What Avatar posits is that somewhere in the future, we lost our way; that we reverted, rather than progressed. And that is a danger that is all too real. If we're to save any Na'vi - or anyone else - that might actually be out there, not to mention ourselves, we need to learn to live on our own beautiful, generous, remarkable world in a way which is rooted in humility, sustainability, and love. In other words, we have to become more Na'vi-like.

We may not have neural interfaces concealed within our braids (more on that below...), but frankly, I don't need one to feel at one with this good Earth: sitting on the edge of the ocean, watching a particularly spectacular sunset, or just listening to, watching, smelling, and feeling the life of a forest. Or, for that matter, harvesting vegetables that I've grown in a natural, sustainable, organic fashion, or sinking my teeth into venison a responsible, ethical hunter friend has shared with me (or that I've harvested myself, if or when I ever get back into hunting).

Avatar is an indictment of humanity, yes... but of a particular kind of humanity, or a particular path for humanity. I cheered for the Na'vi, of course! In fact, I found myself silently but vehemently shouting "GAIA!!!" as Pandora/Eywa herself (more on this below, too...) rose to fight with the Na'vi against those seeking to destroy them. But I couldn't bring myself to hate the SecOps troops, not even Colonel Quaritch. Rather, I pitied them. They had made the wrong choices, and their forebears had, and they were reaping the bitter harvest those actions and attitudes had sown. Quaritch, and those who think like him, are caught in a "Hell's Gate," all right... a Hell of their own making.

And unfortunately, that kind of attitude toward life can only perpetuate itself by more of the same. That's why I'm glad to hear there's going to be a sequel or two, because at the end, as the Na'vi and the select few humans and their Avatars escorted the RDA off the planet, I could only think, "They'll be back. Unobtanium is too important to them. The Na'vi have won the battle, but the war's just begun..."

Somehow, the Colonel Quaritches and Parker Selfridges of both our world and the fictional one of Avatar have to have a change of heart, or enough other humans do in order to reign them in, because a military defeat is only temporary. Humanity, both there/then and here/now, has to have that kind of awakening which was expressed by the great 20th century conservationist Aldo Leopold as changing "the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it."

As Leopold put it, ""We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to [treat] it with love and respect." He proposed a "land ethic" which stated, basically, that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic enterprise" - what we would call the ecosystem, or even the biosphere as a whole. "It is wrong when it tends otherwise." This is a concept, an approach to living, which I am sure the Na'vi would immediately recognize and embrace.

Regarding the spirituality of Avatar, the Vatican objects that the movie "gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature... Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship," continuing that such notions "open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man's salvation in nature alone."

In this, the Vatican raises a good point. Pantheism, which teaches that nature is sacred - but can also be interpreted to mean that nature and the Sacred are entirely coterminous - can become a form of thinly-veiled atheism: the idea that all there is, is what we see and feel around us. Panentheism, which holds that not only is God in Nature, but Nature is also in God - in other words, that Divinity is BOTH immanent in and transcendent beyond the physical-sensory world - is another story entirely... but this is not a theological essay.

In fact, what the Na'vi are worshipping - or perhaps "revering" is a better and more accurate way of phrasing it, or perhaps better yet communing with - under the name of Eywa is the collective consciousness of Pandora and all its creatures (although we do get hints of transcendence in Grace's last words). There are those, notably adherents to the so-called "strong Gaia" hypothesis, who believe that Earth, and perhaps every planet that hosts life, has such a consciousness on some level; in which the complex interactions of atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere function as a sort of neural network and the planet as a whole functions as a remarkably complex and multifaceted organism.

And there is some evidence for Pandora-like interactions on our own homeworld: trees, for example, seem to be able to communicate chemically - either by plant pheromones or perhaps through their roots - with each other, passing messages of diseases or other threats. But on Pandora, where just about every living thing has some sort of active neural interface, potentially at least, with everything else, the effect is much stronger.

It is no wonder, then, that a primal - note that I did not say "primitive" - race like the Na'vi would revere this planetary group-mind as something akin to a Goddess: it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, exhibiting at least hints of self-awareness, but concerned overall with preserving dynamic equilibrium ("Our Great Mother, Eywa, does not take sides. She is only concerned with preserving the balance."). So might the collection of microbes and cells which make up a human person think of that person, considered as a whole, if they were capable of such self-reflection.

The interesting thing is that we here on Earth might be evolving toward a version of such planetary consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of a "noosphere" emerging from the interaction of human minds, a process sped up and multiplied almost immeasurably by the internet (see also David Brin's novel "Earth" for an interesting look at one way in which such a planetary consciousness might emerge). And Princeton University hosts the Global Consciousness Project, which asserts, among other things, that "large scale group consciousness has effects in the physical world."

Maybe we are more like the Na'vi than we know! And/or, maybe we can make the conscious choice to become even more like them, in the ways I suggested above, by making the conscious decision to move toward a more creative, sustainable, and balanced world: a world in which we do not confuse material standard of living for quality of life, in which we see ourselves as part of a larger planetary community to which we belong, but as plain citizens, not conquerors, in which creativity, artistry, and compassion is valued more than material wealth, in which learning to live in harmony with all of life is the highest good.

It is unlikely, of course, that we will ever be able to fully accomplish this, in fact. Human nature and its impulses are many and varied, and not all of them lead to higher goods. But thankfully, that does seem to be the historic trend. And as Leopold also said, "in these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive." Let us strive, then, for a future, and a world of the future, which has more in common with Pandora/Eywa of the Na'vi than the Hell's Gate of the RDA! The choice is ours to make.