Nobody Left to Talk To

Pluribus, the return to Eden, and the freedom to remain someone

Pluribus. Image courtesy of Apple TV.

This is, after all, a philosophy blog. And Pluribus, in which most of humanity becomes a seemingly happy collective consciousness, has given us a very old philosophical problem wearing a smile. I think the show can be read as the inverse of the ur-myth in the Book of Genesis. The return to Eden is available. You just cannot bring yourself.

In A Treatise on Love, part of the Grand Praxis series, I proposed a reading of the Fall as the birth of love: the departure from unquestioning conformity that makes a chosen relationship possible. This was a philosophical reading of the myth, not a claim about what its authors intended or what Christians are obliged to believe. The question was what becomes possible when a creature can stand apart from its creator. Someone who can refuse you can also choose you. There is a difference between being loved and having your will carried out, and omnipotence would be a particularly effective way of concealing that difference from yourself.

The beloved has to remain someone. Someone whose answer you do not supply, whose life exceeds your knowledge of it, who can tell you something you would never have thought to tell yourself. Love involves caring about that life from a position you cannot make identical with it. The distance can hurt. It can become unbearable. But closing it by abolishing the person on the other side would destroy the relationship along with the pain.

Pluribus runs this movement backward. That is my reading of the invitation, at any rate: come home to a unity in which the burden of being a separate person can finally be put down. The invitation’s logic is audible in the promise made to Carol: “We will figure out what makes you different,” followed by “So we can fix it. So you can join us.” Her question is the one the promise cannot accommodate: “So what happens when I say no?” Difference is something to cure. The person asking the question is the outstanding problem.

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I approached this from another direction in The Mythology of The Matrix and the Grand Praxis, where I read Smith’s project of making everything himself as the collapse of the difference that makes meaning possible. What interests me here is how little the emotional presentation changes the destination. We recognize the horror more readily when assimilation arrives with a sneer. Offer it patiently, with apparent concern for our happiness, and we find ourselves having a much longer conversation about whether it might be good for us.

A shared world requires distinct participants. We can understand each other better, cooperate more generously, relieve suffering, and make our lives less precarious without becoming the same person. Nothing in this argument requires us to preserve preventable misery for its supposed spiritual benefits. The possibility of losing someone is a condition of loving a mortal being. There is work to do within the conditions of a human life. Declaring the conditions themselves a design error is a different undertaking.

This is where a certain kind of systems thinking becomes confused about what it is improving. Define the objective as eliminating conflict and you can produce a perfect result by eliminating everyone capable of disagreement. The result satisfies the specification. Whether it preserves anything worth wanting depends on what the specification left out. If the people were supposed to be the beneficiaries, their disappearance should probably count against the proposal.

Once Carol and the other remaining individuals are gone, imagine what is left. There may still be bodies, memories, voices, all the visible equipment of a human world. I need not assume that the consciousness inhabiting it feels miserable, or that it feels nothing at all, to ask whom it can meet. Where is the person who can answer from somewhere it does not already occupy? What could “I love you” mean when there is no longer anyone to whom the “you” refers?

The return to Eden would have undone the very departure that, in my reading, made love possible. Paradise would be full of familiar faces. And there would be nobody left to talk to.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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