Science Fiction, Social Fact, Human Hope and Divine Inspiration

July 21, 2002

by Bruce Walker

Science fiction and fantasy seem increasingly prominent in popular culture. There is a recurring theme in all popular fiction that describes our future: bleakness. Unlike the films and television shows of fifty years ago which showed a life of warmth and sweetness, what permeates contemporary descriptions of modern life and our future society is an unrelenting dystopia.

The very term "dystopia" is relatively new. Writers like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury created future worlds in which our powers of invention and creation were used as instruments of self-flagellation and we became our own worst enemies. Some novels, like 1984 and Brave New World left no room for hope of any sort, while other novels like Fahrenheit 451 presented faint glimmers in a distant future of returning to normal life.

Contemporary fiction lacks the subtlety of Orwell or Huxley. People are described in modern entertainment and commentaries as savage, selfish and soulless. Fictional works do not paint pictures of noble creatures made in the image of God, but rather thinking - and scheming - apes. Virtue is defined as victory, and martyrs are nonexistent.

Why? God, the Light of Lights, is conspicuous by His absence in futurist fiction. Men are compelled to create love, goodness and hope without the Creator of love, goodness and hope.

Science and technology, which is capable of doing so much good in our lives, becomes the whip of the brutal overlords of man-made realms. So the dystopias of modern imagination have no light at the end of the tunnel, no promise of ultimate redemption, no reason for seeking truth. The madness of Kafka or the cruelty of Darth Vader are the only sure facts about a godless universe.

God, of course, is not dead - whatever the New York Times may have said several decades ago - but faith in God has been murdered by modern liberalism. He is an inconvenient being for social planners, ideological theorists and institutional functionaries. No swarms of mob opinion can sweep Him away and no credentialed experts can make Him vanish.

So He who is greater than all reality without Him has become an "unperson." Liberals have excised all vestigial records of God and thrown them into the memory hole of the Ministry of Truth. The trite power to transform matter into energy or make virtual reality machines - these most trivial attributes of the Almighty - have become all that liberals can worship.

This offers much less comfort than even the capricious gods and goddess of mythology, because the new temples of liberal man are the grimy factories, dull software iterations or "miracle drug" salvations of materialism. We each know intuitively how little we are without our Maker, and so this age of "stuff" and "gadgets" has descended into a vast septic tank.

What is astounding is how little real dreaming we can do without God. If there is a secondary theme to modern science fiction, modern social theories and modern liberal behavior, it is a ghastly sameness and an almost unspeakable boredom. What can we create without help from the Creator? Not much more than dogs and cats, it seems.

This monotony is not only reflected in the fantasies of modern liberals, but in the practical advice of glamour and celebrity magazines, which seem incapable of moving a single step beyond the banality of adultery, promiscuity and seduction. Peruse these sheaves of wasted paper and ink, and what is new or interesting? Nothing. The same simple plot, the same crude punch line, the same perverse mocking is retold a million times with nothing changed except a few proper nouns.

How did President Caligula act under his eight years of debauchery? Bored. Clinton and Rodham act so, so bored! Recall when President Bush made his great speech after September 11th, and Hillary could scarcely hide how tiresome it all was to her, and this was not feigned or insincere: we saw, for once, the real Hillary.

The sordid, seedy conduct of liberals displays an indifference to everything except who will hold the greatest principalities in Hell. This is because liberals have cast themselves beyond the reach of God - which is the only power we have which God cannot overcome - and so assume that their infinite emptiness is the nature of all things.

This is also why liberals worship trees, rivers, lice and dirt. When the endless beauty and joy of the divine spark is shoved aside reflexively, then nature - that small reflection of the beauty of God - becomes the only reference to anything worth treasuring. Not coincidentally, dystopian fiction of modern liberals is all filled with machines and computers and robots and other creatures of our own frail minds.

Nature is, however, simply the trappings of the divine spirit. God dwells in us, not in trees and in rivers. Liberals sense (i.e. fear) this, and as a consequence their only possible diversion from the two-dimensional sameness of their minds and the certain knowledge of the end of their lives and of all this "reality" of photons, probability curves and perceived events which is the thread of modern science is to probe and poke and push that part of the untouchable divine that they can touch.

Cruelty and hate are the end game of liberalism’s pathways. There are a million dead ends, but all these dead ends lead to spiteful resentment of Creation and special loathing for that greatest creature in Creation - man. Is it then any surprise that entertainment has so much violence? So much loveless sexual wantonness? So much interest in spinning bigger lies?

Liberals would recoil at the notion that murdering faith in God also shuts the door on a cold, gloomy dungeon. But liberals have long trekked beyond simple dishonesty. They wander instead in the unchanging, hopeless desert of chic atheism. They wander and they beckon us with their shrill voices to join them at the oasis. Pity them who cannot conceive of anything greater than themselves or imagine any goodness more sublime than their petty personalities. Pity them, but do not follow them.

They have seen the future, and to liberals the past is the future is the now - and all of it is an airless coffin of despair. When has Hollywood spun a vision of Heaven that seemed real? When have the "creative types" who produce so much odd "art" had any story to tell beyond the griminess of humanity? Any message beyond rage and anger?

There is a light. There is a peace. There is a hope. There is something so much bigger and better than all of us together that wise men simply surrender to it, and never worry about the certainty of death and sorrow in this life again. This light is He who lives forever and changes never. He beckons all of us to joy, and asks us to leave the final answer to all things in His Hands alone.

None of us - not H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas together - could paint even the first brush strokes of Heaven. Hell is something they understand. It is a place they describe and which all of us could write in our mortal fears. Hope, however, is beyond their powers. It lies alone with God.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Bruce's articles, visit his archives.