Battlestar Galactica: Immersion Therapy for Post 9/11 World

By Michael Dudley, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2009.

In last week's finale, however, it was revealed that this irradiated "Earth" was not the one we live on, but rather a completely different world known to the Colonials by that name. Our planet shows up in the final hour -- inhabited by spear-carrying hominids -- and is dubbed "Earth" in memory of the lost, destroyed colony.

But by this time the humans and Cylons alike have apparently lost any faith in the project of civilization. Convinced that rebuilding their cities and returning to their former social structures will lead once again to self-destruction, both peoples scatter in small groups across Earth. Sadly, the show's main characters even decline to remain part of any community at all but go off on alone or in pairs to live as hunter-gatherers or farmers.

Flash forward 150,000 years later and the series closes with images of our own gigantic cities and the latest advances in robotics. Despite the Colonists' chosen isolation many millennia ago, civilization has returned, with all its glories and injustices. True to the series' spirit producer Ron Moore and his writers leave open to interpretation whether or not we will avert the fate of the 13 Colonies. What is less clear is if they share their characters' cynical fatalism about civilization -- that all attempts at forming human societies are necessarily doomed, and should therefore be avoided.

For four seasons we have heard the Colonists' religious precept that "all this has happened before and will happen again." In this portrait of cyclical histories, appeals to the supernatural to explain events and leaving open the hope that something will emerge to prevent history from repeating itself, BSG (perhaps unwittingly) adopted a highly Toynbeean view of its universe. As such, it's worth reminding ourselves what the great Arnold J. Toynbee wrote on this theme in his classic A Study of History, which was written at the close of World War II but seems equally applicable now:

A civilization is not like an animal organism, condemned by an inexorable destiny to die after traversing a pre-determined life course. [A] succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient inevitably inspires a dark doubt about our future, and this doubt threatens to undermine our faith and hope at a critical 11th hour which calls for the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challenge that we cannot evade, and our destiny depends on our response.

In this light, the entire four-year run of "Battlestar Galactica" may be read as a meditation on Toynbee's assertion that "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." Following years of technological hubris, near-genocide, tyranny, competing attempts at theocracies and civil war, Colonial and Cylon civilizations were quietly allowed to expire, in the belief that civilization itself was at the root of their suffering. As we face our own calamities of crashing economies, deepening wars, decaying democracies and a planet becoming ever-less forgiving of our excesses, we would be well advised to heed Toynbee, who, to the contrary, would argue that it is when a society faces its most severe crises that our "faith and hope" in the project of civilization are needed most.

This piece was originally published on CityStates.

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