NEW!: A Comment on Caprica

I'm not going to follow our standard format for this post, as I frankly don't have the energy or interest necessary to spend four-plus hours constructing a synopsis for what turns out to be a pretty boring and philosophically suspect few hours of television. Instead, I am just going to complain for a bit in the hopes that said complaints will provide sufficient entertainment for all you lurking Right Fangirls in the audience.

When SABR Matt and I originally started this blog, I was planning to include Caprica among our new show offerings, but that now looks highly unlikely for two reasons. Number one, its technological premise is ridiculously materialistic. Number two,  I found it difficult to put aside the feeling that I was being attacked as a Christian viewer.

The pilot of Caprica proposes that by merely downloading the public records of our lives onto a computer, we can somehow copy our entire personality. What nonsense! We are not the sum of our external behaviors. The things we do and say out loud comprise merely the tip of an enormous iceberg that includes every stray thought, feeling, or daydream - things that are damnably difficult to observe and capture in their pure forms. A psychologist could ask me why I sometimes physically fought with SABR Matt when we were both kids, and I could probably articulate a few honest reasons - but as soon as they leave my mouth in the form of language, they are no longer wholly me. They are changed somehow - changed so as to be made understandable to the person across the room who is making his or her notes and uttering thoughtful replies. What is accessible to the senses - or seen in our records - is different from the reality. This does not mean that we can't use our senses to make halfway reasonable predictions about people - I'm not arguing for total skepticism here. Rather, it means that the information gathered with the senses is a small box sitting within the bigger box that is the personality. (And now I wish I could draw a diagram.)

Even more troubling than the incredible notion that we can download our very essences onto computer chips is Caprica's treatment of religious sentiment. This, of course, is carried over from the show's predecessor, Battlestar Galactica, but here, the writer's attack on ethical monotheism seems even more overt. When a young monotheistic suicide bomber blows up the Lev, the strongest criticism a fellow monotheist is heard to utter is that it was "premature." What the hell? I don't know what world you're living in, Ron, but it's apparently a world in which the only monotheists are Islamofascist-style terrorists. Word to the wise: the Catholic Christian religion believes cultural decadence of the sort we see in Caprica's VR clubs is a genuine moral evil, but it does not teach that we should fight it by attacking innocent civilians on public subways.

And what is the response of the Caprican polytheists to the militant group of monotheists discussed above? Well, in one scene, a government investigator remarks fearfully that if monotheism really starts to catch on, it might engender - gasp! - moral absolutism. Well, we certainly can't have that, can we? Although -- if you review the history of the human race, you will quickly find that the relativists have certainly not acquitted themselves well. As it turns out, when we are left to write the rules for ourselves, a few of us inevitably develop an ethusiasm for controlling others. On the other hand, moral absolutism - a set of predictable and universal rules - leads to freedom. Under the rule of Law, we are not subject to the capricious impulses of our fellow human beings.

I chugged through the entire run of Battlestar Galactica despite its philosophical flaws because there was one character I was really rooting for (Tigh - yes, I said Tigh). No character in Caprica's pilot manages to inspire a similar affection - so why bother sticking around to be insulted?