Infamous Doctor Who novelist turned blogger and self-styled “uneasy conscience of fandom” Lawrence Miles has a fascinating blog post on the future, both the future as depicted by Doctor Who and “The actual future – the one where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives, unless Bill Gates’ new masterplan to save the world involves messing about with tachyons”, as he puts it.
Like most of Miles’ blog posts, it uses Doctor Who as a launching point for discussing far bigger issues. It’s also very long, almost 10,000 words, but he’s got plenty of interesting and thought-provoking stuff to say, whether or not you agree with his politics (or indeed, with anything else he says). Here are some selections that took my interest:
On thinking of the past through pop culture:
These days, we’re primed to think of specific decades as being made of pop culture, since we’re usually only shown the archive footage when we’re being sold a nostalgia-piece. The very mention of “the ’60s” immediately makes us think of the Beatles, which is rather unsettling, when you consider everything else that was going on. Ergo, talk of “rioting” makes us think of fun-loving long-haired students protesting against the Vietnam War. But we shouldn’t forget that this was the era which made the term “race-riot” so popular…
On 1960s Doctor Who’s view of social control…
…look at the Doctor Who stories made between 1967 and 1968, the clump of episodes now known as Season Five. In the space of a single year, five out of seven stories are set in the future – I’m counting “Fury from the Deep” (deliberately pitched as a near-future scenario), but not “The Web of Fear” (since the idea of the UNIT stories taking place in the ’70s didn’t emerge until “The Invasion”) – and every single one of those five involves a “Controller”. In all but one case, “Controller” is given as the individual’s official rank. We’ll ignore the suspicion that the writers expected all futuristic institutions to be run like the BBC, and concentrate on the broader issue: it was taken as read that if our species isn’t going to get into a terrible muddle, then somebody has to make cold, rational decisions about the distribution of resources, whether those decisions affect a single space-station or an entire continent.
On the social control we actually got…
Neo-liberalism is the ultimate creation of right-wing economic thinking, which assumes that there’s no such thing as society; that as a result, nobody has a responsibility to society, or to any other human being beyond his or her own household; that any plans for the future of a society are therefore pointless; that all political philosophies should be discouraged, other than the promotion of self-interest; that a population will remain placid if you give it enough affordable consumer goods, without any need for the kind of state intervention that might get in the way of big business (essentially a more carefully-calculated version of the Roman “bread and circuses” concept); and that as a side-issue, it’s reasonable to keep producing those goods even if it does destroy the planet’s biosphere and lead to the mass exploitation of dusky-skinned natives outside the Western World, because anything else would be an affront to “freedom”.
Well, to be fair, it did work. Which is to say… without any need for a big central cyber-brain, without inventing the Gravitron or T-Mat, and without the intervention of Ramon Salamander, we’re now a lot less intent on rioting than our forefathers were.
On freedom as defined by neo-liberalism:
The “freedom” in question is the freedom to build yourself a bigger DVD collection than your neighbours and choose whether or not you want fries with that haemorrhage, but then, that’s the only kind of freedom we now understand. Planning for tomorrow is forbidden, since it might involve telling people what to do, and that would destroy the illusion of consumer choice.
On Torchwood:
…children won’t grow up with a stunted social conscience because of Torchwood. But they will grow up with a stunted social conscience because of a culture composed entirely of programmes just like it. Only not quite as awful, and usually not in such sickeningly bad taste. To me, this is the Mini-Pops of the twenty-first century.
Miles also has a habit of taking down his blog posts after a week (for some unknown reason), so catch it while you can! And don’t forget to read his sidebar – the Moffat Times Table is hilarious.