Column

James Cameron's new film Avatar deals, among other subjects, with marauding humans looking for minerals invading a moon inhabited by a non-human species. The species fights back. As it happens, the humans are the bad guys and this has led to some discussion of the subject of aliens and us.

Of course, in our current situation of real life, we have no clue whether we will ever meet any extra-terrestrials and further, will have no clue if they are good, bad, ugly or indifferent. This excludes people who live in mid-west America who meet invading aliens quite frequently. If Hollywood veers between good aliens-bad humans and good humans-bad aliens, at best it reflects on the political and philosophical sensibilities of the film-maker.

But studying that reflection leads one to some essentials of human nature. Most significantly, our fear of the "Other". Of course, this fear is perfectly understandable. As nomadic tribes moving through hostile terrain or as pastoral groups anticipating unfriendly invaders, as humans we have had to deal with Others all the while. Trust and suspicion are both vital components of our social interactions and we cannot survive without them.
The alien from another planet is then the ultimate Other. Films like Mars Attacks spoofed both our official knee-jerk reactions to crises and our intrinsic silliness as a species.

District 9 was a damning indictment on human prejudice when faced with the unfamiliar. Both ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind talked about more benign aliens who could easily be friends. Avatar has been called a "cautionary tale" about war and human greed.

All these stories are about ourselves. If we assume that aliens will be angry invaders when they land on earth, how do we imagine that we will be sweet and gentle when we go "out there"? Are we sweet and gentle when we move from country to country, civilisation to civilisation? At every point in the human discourse, we veer from being conservative and liberal, hard and soft, friendly and hostile and so on. The bleeding hearts liberals versus the hard nut cons. The brave versus the cowards. We know all these people very well because they are us.

Perhaps we do have to be prepared for the invasions of the body snatchers, who may want our land, our ability to procreate (this is a very popular perception — zillions of aliens who want to come here for sex, the mind boggles at the tremendous ego of the human race), our air, our minerals or just us. Very rarely do these fictional aliens want our ideas because our logical assumption is that any invading species that reaches us is obviously more advanced.

All science fiction then is a morality tale and in some sense, no one does morality better than television. Two popular television shows to do with outer space and outer space beings have come from America and England. Both finally applaud the ingenuity and humanity of the human race. In Star Trek, as the Enterprise boldly goes where no man has gone before, what saves the crew every time is when they think like humans — that is humans of the good, kind, noble variety.

In Dr Who, the handsome Time Lord comes back again and again to save planet Earth because he is veryfond of humans and their qualities. (And it must be admitted, he is fond of some human females too. Conversely, in the first series of Star Trek, the charming captain was quite taken with ladies of all species and persuasions: a true renaissance man.)

Simply put, there are no aliens. It is just us. Right now, it is one half of the world aligned against some believers in the Islamic faith or the pro climate changers versus the anti climate changers. It is, still, rich versus poor, middle class versus lower middle class, cities versus villages. As with our fictional aliens — blue or green or zombie-like or insect-like — they represent what we fear most about ourselves.