I’m currently watching the Netflix adaptation of The Three Body Problem (or 3 Body Problem, as they have styled the title). The dialogue and exposition writing is so much better than the recent Avatar: The Last Airbender that I could cry. I finished episode six last night, and it’s taking a lot of my willpower bandwidth to continue working on schoolwork instead of finishing the final two episodes. It’s been a while since I read Liu Cixin’s book, and I have not read the other two books in the series, though with the amount of enjoyment I am getting from the show, they may move to the top of my summer reading list.
With all those caveats on my own ignorance in place, I’ve noticed an interesting religious theme in the show. In the first episode, Vera, a scientist who’s shortly going to commit suicide, asks another, “Do you believe in God?” This question is seemingly related to the fact that the particle accelerator they both work at is spitting out “Alice in Wonderland”-type results, like all the other colliders in the world. This implies that the only reason to consider religion is because you encounter things that don’t make sense.
Revelations in the show make it seem likely that Vera, like another protagonist, has also encountered a mysterious human who tells her that “the Lord” will take care of her if she stops her research and perhaps force her to commit suicide if she doesn’t. Later, it becomes clear what this group of fanatics refer to as “the Lord” is actually a group of technologically advanced aliens. This is a common enough science fiction explanation for God, but what makes this framing interesting to me is that these humans know that their Lord is a group of aliens. They are under no illusions that anything supernatural is going on. All of the aliens’ marvelous capabilities are scientific in their minds, and yet they still frame the aliens as a god, one who cares deeply about humanity’s best interests, and worship them accordingly.
This behavior, of worshiping a god who is simultaneously non-supernatural, reminded me of the Earthseed religion that Lauren invents in Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. In this postapocalyptic version of America, Lauren survives her gauntlet of dangers by purposefully inventing a religion that worships change, complete with mystical sounding scriptures that she composes herself along with a set of recommended community practices and norms. She doesn’t believe in a supernatural god of change; she believes in change as a natural force and that personifying it as a god is helpful. As she explains when a skeptical fellow traveler questions her:
“Why personify change by calling it God? Since change is just an idea, why not call it that? Just say change is important.”
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
“Because after a while, it won’t be important!” I told him. “People forget ideas. They’re more likely to remember God—especially when they’re scared or desperate.”
The common thread here is the portrayal of religion not as a source of supernatural truth, but as a powerful social organization technology. The fanatics of 3 Body who worship the aliens could have done their work by viewing the aliens as partners or refugees, but the framing of them as “the Lord” has a certain useful power in compelling unquestioning obedience. Obviously given the background of the fictional founder of the group, this decision is partly the show making a commentary on the secular religion of Maoist China, which despite being secular clearly shared many traits with a cult. This idea also reminds me of Jonathan Haidt’s attitude towards organized religion in The Righteous Mind. He leaves questions about religious truth claims to the side, instead focusing on religion as a technology to shut down the self and enable altruism and unity, a solution to the free-rider problem.
It’s absolutely true that religions can be, and often are, used in these ways. Again, see 3 Body Problem‘s portrayal of communist China with all its catechisms and sacrifices of self. However, it would be a mistake to reduce religion to only a social or evolutionary technology. I think C. S. Lewis has it right when he points out in his chapter on friendship that the artificial construction of religiously-unified groups for social purposes rarely succeeds:
Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell’ Christianity as a means of ‘saving civilization,’ do not come to much.
CS Lewis, The Four Loves
Witness the almost immediate collapse of the communist true believer character in the show, who’s trying to convince herself that her ideology was worth the sacrifice of her leg and her happiness and not really succeeding. Instead, Lewis praises groups that come together organically, not through social or political engineering, out of meaningful connection that is real between people or even between humans and the divine. These groups, he believes, are those who change history, for better or worse.
I can’t be sure that’s not what’s happening in 3 Body Problem. Does Ye Wenjie actually believe that the world would be better off without humanity? Do her followers actually believe that? Thus far, it seems like there are at least a few true believers among the bunch, including Marlo Kelly’s character, but as their organization is scattered, will their religion continue? I can’t wait to watch the remaining episodes (and read the other books) to find out.
