“So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people’s lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.”
– Alice Roberts.
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.” – EM Forster.
“Humanism is a way of thinking and living that emphasizes the agency of human beings. Humanism stresses the fact that we, human beings, are capable of changing the world.”
– Leo Igwe.
In my younger days, I was proud of my human rights activism and my achievements in that forum. One of my guiding principles came from what was attributed as being an old Chinese proverb: “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”. Today, as we live through an era of increasing darkness and uncertainty, I believe that it is important to be fully mindful of the candle adage. In my experience, an optimal way of expressing that principle in practical terms cannot be found within an organised religion – which is usually exclusive and elitist – but through a recognition of our common humanity. This, to me, comprises humanism.
A fair definition of humanism – across time and culture – is that it is a philosophy which acknowledges the capacity and responsibility of human beings to think and act in ways that are reasoned, compassionate, humanitarian and responsible – especially in solving the world’s problems that we have caused. Placing humans at the centre of this focus does not, in any way, diminish the inherent value of other life on this planet, but commits us (as individuals and as a species) to respect and protect these other forms of life, and the biosphere upon which we co-exist.
As a collective, humanists have a lot of which they can be proud. From the abolition of slavery to the establishment of human rights; from gender and sexual and racial equality to international conventions on rights for children and refugees and people with disability; from anti-discrimination laws all the way to animal and environmental rights; humanism has changed the world. As a philosophy that has influenced religions across space and time, it has engendered “The Golden Rule” into cultures everywhere with such confidence that religious adherents often believe their dogmas are responsible for inculcating this principle of universal human fraternity.
It might also be noted that secular humanism is currently under attack. With the decline of mainstream religions and cultural adherence to conformity, we have seen the widespread rise and acceptance of a multitude of alternatives to address the adage that nature abhors a vacuum. We now see an epidemic of fringe individualism, religious fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, science denialism, sovereign citizenship, political populism and dog whistling, social media celebrity, and a return to ideas that were long discarded: flat earthism, racism, Nazism, warmongering, rejection of refugees, the ‘othering’ of foreigners and immigrants and those from other races and cultures. Anyone who subscribes to universal human rights and the philosophy that all people are equal in worth and dignity, must take battle against such attacks upon human egalitarianism, knowledge and dignity.
In order to most strongly advocate for a universal philosophy of equitability and social justice, we must have the courage and honesty to explore humanism’s current weaknesses in practice, as well as its strengths in principle. Please come with me as we go on a journey to explore this nuanced and multifaceted human adventure.
The History of Humanism
“Humanism is about the world, not about humanism.” – Harold Blackham
Humanism is often presented as a historical, academic and philosophical phenomenon that was inspired by writings from ancient Greece and Rome, reborn in Renaissance Europe, achieving its modern context late in the nineteenth century. Despite the reality that modern humanism is a more grassroots and less academic phenomenon, its practice is rooted in this Eurocentric perspective, which highlights western culture (from academia to entertainment) instead of nurturing and sponsoring local African or Asian or Latin American expressions of culture and perspective.
Humanist ideas were discussed in Ancient Greece, from Thales to Anaxagoras and Protagoras. The teachings of Zarathushtra and Lao Tzu had strong elements of humanism, and there are many other examples.
The writings of the ancient Greeks were studied in the 1400s during the Renaissance. However, in this period the term “humanism” came to mean educated in the humanities, a rather different kind of idea. Petrarch is often cited as the first modern humanist, but he pointed backwards to classical authors. The modern meaning of humanism is more to do with using science to make the world a better place. – Kiddle Encyclopedia
(Remembering LGBT+ refugees in Africa, whose voices are often silenced)
However, the history of humanism extends further back than that, and its reach is broader. Humanity emerged from Africa, so although much evidence of those past times has long been lost, our humanism clearly also emerged from that same source. Like humanity itself, humanism has spread across the globe, and its rudimentary philosophy can be found in cultures from long ago.
Chirag Patel and Rishabh Prasad clarify the protracted history regarding the origins of humanism:
The principle origins of humanist thinking are in India, Iran and China. In India around the 8th Century BCE, there was the emergence of Lokayata philosophy, which was itself a development of ideas in the Vedas, the core Hindu holy texts, written in around 1000 BCE. Lokayata philosophy is a system that is explicitly materialist, rejecting the concept of the soul and taking on philosophical scepticism…
Earlier still are the Gathas of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, between 1000 and 600 BCE. The Gathas focus on the notion of individual choice and agency (Schmid, 1979). In China, there is the Tao Te Ching in the 6th century BCE, which combines elements of spiritualist abstraction with a clear focus on the mutable world and away from metaphysical rules and authoritarian approaches. This is contemporaneous with Buddhism, which begins with a rejection of the Gods while retaining the valuable aspects of religious behaviour within a human-centred frame.
In each of these cases, models of thought and behaviour are developed that focus around the human self and supreme wisdom as an ideal, rather than authoritarian theologies. In each case, there is also a vision of the ideal person, such as the enlightened Buddha (‘awakened one’), and the defining characteristic of this person is their focus upon the human and personal rather than metaphysical and hierarchical. (Patel and Prasad, n.d., 7)
Humanism is documented as contributing to a medieval renaissance within Islam as well as Christianity:
“It was during the Renaissance of Islam that humanism unfolded in its luxuriant expression. This branch of humanism was essentially the offspring of the humanitas ideal which germinated in the period of Hellenism and Graeco-Roman antiquity. The primary features of this humanism are: a conception of the common kinship and unity of mankind; the adoption of the ancient classics as an educational and cultural ideal in the formation of mind and character (paideia); and humaneness, or love of mankind (philanthrōpia).” – Kraemer, pp. 135 & 136.
The Confucians tried to replace traditional religious beliefs with an ethical system focused on responsibility to family and society. Confucianism emphasizes benevolence, respect for others, and reciprocity as the foundations of social order. An early expression of the Golden Rule of ethics is found in The Analects (the collected sayings) of Confucius: “Do not do to others what you would not like for yourself.”
Morimichi Kato notes that Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) established a Japanese version of Confucian humanism.
Meanwhile, the African philosophy of Ubuntu epitomises the universal nature of humanist tenets: “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”— or “a person is a person through other people.” (see Felix).
Modern Humanism Around the World
Humanism has been used as the basis for exploring socialism and post-colonial politics across Africa, as demonstrated by the experiences of President Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia:
“He developed a left nationalist-socialist ideology, called Zambian Humanism. This was based on a combination of mid-20th-century ideas of central planning/state control and what he considered basic African values: mutual aid, trust, and loyalty to the community. Similar forms of African socialism were introduced inter alia in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah (“Consciencism”) and Tanzania by Julius Nyerere (“Ujamaa” – Wikipedia).
One modern Humanist in Ghana, writes about human priorities, particularly the universal human need for family:
“Family to me is anyone who loves me almost unconditionally and wants the best for me. I grew up thinking that family is blood and I’m sure a lot of us have as well…
“I broadened my definition of family when life snatched my wig and came for my edges. I was a hot mess. Life said “you’re too cute or whatever, lemme throw in some trauma and spices”.
His biological family being unavailable to offer meaningful support, he found love and help from a friend:
“One day, we were sitting and chatting in a library and I jokingly told him that he’s been adopted as my brother and he smiled and said “you’ve been my brother from the time you opened your heart to me”.
“Since then my adopted family has increased. The most recent adopted members were the humanist family and I’m glad I have. Sometimes I wish we’d stop fighting on how bad religion is and just love humanity as is.” – The Boy Behind the Flowers, Ghana Humanists.
“Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society.” – Alexandra Hartmann (summary)
Humanism in Latin America has not only influenced Brazilian and Mexican cultures (Mexican humanism, for example, employs the motto: “por el bien de todos, primero los pobres.” “For the good of all; first, the poor”) but also contributed to women’s rights being included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Australia’s most significant humanist cultural contribution may be within its long tradition of storytelling from authors including Marcus Clarke, Steele Rudd, Henry Lawson, Katharine Prichard and Patrick White. Given that this literary tradition is based upon the white colonialist perspective, the Australian convict and digger and ANZAC perspectives of egalitarianism and mateship have their challenges in being inclusive of First Australian and more recent immigrant perspectives, but our nation has a strong cultural claim to humanist equality upon which we should build.
Humanism for the Future
Humanism underlies our lives, existence, and commonalities. It therefore has the potential to grow and evolve along with the human species.
However, in a world facing global crisis, I do feel it is time for western humanists to reconsider their opportunities. For example, if humanists were to lead a challenge to the current withdrawal of US overseas aid and lifesaving medicine as an immediate, short-term goal; and if they were to adopt and promote the eradication of global poverty as some of their long-term goals; they could literally help to save millions of lives and lead the world by ethical example. This would also do more than their current local patchwork efforts to confront theism and religiosity, and ultimately achieve the same ends on a more geographically and historically global scale.
Western humanists are among the world’s most affluent people, and are able to spend more personal time in hobbies and study, versus others who spend more time just doing what they need to do in order to survive and who have relatively little time available for self-reflective introspection. Hence the history and practice of modern humanism appears to be encased in a Eurocentric shell of predominantly affluent western philosophical culture that largely excludes other voices and perspectives, attracts adherents predominantly from similar backgrounds, and leans heavily towards introspection rather than encouraging pragmatic activism.
Modern humanism in the western sphere needs to use its influence to literally change the world instead of comprising the ‘Ladies Who Lunch‘ syndrome. By definition, humanists are people who are good at heart, so I challenge them to make the change.
Let’s see the next generation of humanists adopt the life experiences and wisdom of Opeyemi and Zola and Moussa and Feng alongside our current/past mentors Carl and Richard and Christopher and Madalyn.
Secular humanism has the potential – and the opportunity – to adopt a more inclusive, celebratory and pragmatic approach to its own underpinnings. Many younger non-believers are not currently attracted to secular humanism, but to sentientism, which they perceive as being a more broadly inclusive philosophy and the next evolutionary step of humanism as a philosophy. Do we ignore them – or join them?
Where to From Here? As humanist Gene Roddenberry asserted: The Human Adventure is Just Beginning. The journey promises to be exciting, but like Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo Moon walkers who made history, we must have the courage to step out of our safety zone and into the unknown.
Robert Grudin, 2023. “humanism“. Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 December.
Alexandra Hartmann, 2023. “The Black humanist tradition in anti-racist literature: a fragile hope”, summary from University of Southern Indiana, USA.
Harry Heseltine (ed.), Introduction in “The Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories”, Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1976 (reprinted 1981), pp. 9 – 31.
Joel L. Kramer, 1984. “Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A Preliminary Study”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 104, No. 1, Studies in Islam and the Ancient Near East, Dedicated to Franz Rosenthal (January – March), pp. 135-164.
Chirag Patel & Rishabh B Prasad, n.d. “The Hidden History of Humanism Part 1: The Real History of Humanism”. [Academia.edu].
Originally published: 2 March 2025.
Edited and republished: 3 and 31 March 2025 in order to streamline and rework some material. Final editing on 1 April 2025.
With thanks to a humanist friend for his advice.
“Stand By For Action… Anything can happen in the next half hour!” – so begins the opening narration of a British children’s TV series from 1964. Sixty years later, such a call for action and anticipation remains pertinent when considering our relationship with both ourselves and the world’s oceans.
4th October 1964 marked the seventh anniversary of the start of the Space Race, when the USSR launched Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit. It is noted that “Sputnik 1 demonstrated the feasibility of sending artificial objects into orbit. It inspired rapid technological evolution… Sputnik 1’s success accelerated research into new materials, propulsion systems, and miniaturization techniques.” Whether by coincidence or otherwise, the seventh anniversary of its launch also served as the launch date for “Stingray”, a ‘Supermarionation‘ children’s television series that explored another unknown frontier – Earth’s oceans; and although this TV series did not have the same immediate impact as Sputnik, it nevertheless pointed the way towards both technological and societal/attitudinal changes that would become as profound as the space program.
A Drop in the Ocean
“Most people think the bottom of the ocean is like a giant bathtub filled with mud — boring, flat and dark. But it contains the largest mountain range on earth, canyons far grander than the Grand Canyon and towering vertical cliffs rising up three miles—more than twice the height of Yosemite’s celebrated El Capitan” – Robert Ballard (2014).
Humans have had a relationship with the oceans since before we were human. Our earliest known ancestor may have been a microscopic aquatic creature over half a billion years ago. Subsequent aeons of evolution have left signs to show that we evolved from marine life and retain tantalising clues within our anatomy. Even as a modern land-based species, it appears that sea caves may have saved African homo sapiens from extinction less than 150,000 years ago. It is known that Australia’s own indigenous peoples have interacted with marine environments for probably over 50,000 years.
It might be said that looking up into the night sky – as Sputnik challenged us to do in 1957 – can fill us with awe as we contemplate that everything we know is merely a drop in an infinitely larger cosmic ocean. So too should we consider with awe that the Earth’s actual marine oceans comprise the planetary amniotic sac that birthed us, and were the home within which our distant ancestors grew and evolved. Such notions should be as natural to us as a human baby’s bradycardic response and “diving reflex”, or a child’s natural propensity to play at the beach.
And yet, despite the Australian tradition of visiting the beach and getting sunburnt, it appears that most people around the world cannot swim. In our quest for modernity, we have lost touch with our roots. Our imagination is one way we can cast a glance backwards (and forwards) to the oceans around us.
Photo of a turtle swimming underwater by Belle Co (Pexels)
Marine Science Fiction
Mike Nelson: “Underwater: That’s where I do my work.” – “Sea Hunt”.
There have been many imaginative attempts to explore underwater, oceanic or submariner worlds in literature, film and television. The earliest popular work is, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1870) by Jules Verne, and the most overlooked might be Fantastic Voyage, a 1966 film about a submarine shrunk to microscopic size and injected within a human bloodstream. Both of these explore the marine world that is within or around us, and our relationship to that environment. Both posit that we are a part of that environment and should treat it with respect and care.
Aside from “Stingray”, two other popular TV shows in subsequent decades have featured a submarine crew. The first was “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea“, a US series based on a 1961 movie of the same name; commencing its television run on 14 September 1964 – almost the same date as “Stingray” – and concluding effectively four years later, on 31 March 1968. Featuring Admiral Harriman Nelson and Captain Lee Crane, the submarine Seaview and its crew encountered adventures ranging from spies and nuclear alerts, to aliens and monsters of the week.
The other show was “SeaQuest DSV” (12 September 1993 to 6 June 1996), a series following the adventures of the Deep Sea Vessel (submarine) SeaQuest, operated by the United Earth Oceans organization (UEO). With a 1990s flavour, the show featured action adventure mixed with politics, environmental issues, intrigue, military adventures, and a teenage prodigy.
Both “Voyage” and “SeaQuest” followed the same formula of “Stingray” in that they feature military structures under the command of a male who is entrusted with a ship and a crew in pursuit of a mission. Other TV series with marine themes, such as “Sea Hunt”, “Flipper”, and Australia’s own “Adventures of the Seaspray” and “The Rovers”, were all programs that featured seaboard or shipboard life rather than submariner adventures, and moved outside the collegiate (teamwork) principles of “SeaQuest”, “Voyage” and “Stingray”, focussing on more individualistic stories (the “Stingray” production team would venture into this individualistic perspective in their later – and most successful – series: Thunderbirds”).
The Future Was Fantastic
“Marina, aqua Marina,
What are these strange enchantments that start
Whenever you’re near?”
– Barry Gray (musician), ‘Aqua Marina’, in “Stingray”.
“Stingray” was produced by the creative team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the same people who went on to create a variety of increasingly technologically and conceptually complex series, including “Thunderbirds” and “Captain Scarlet”, and some live action series such as “UFO” and “Space: 1999“. Consequently, “Stingray” seems to have been largely overlooked, overshadowed by its successors – although it was groundbreaking in its own way.
“Stingray” was primarily a children’s action-adventure series, prominently featuring model work and vehicles from the same team that would later wow the world with explosions and space age vehicles in “Thunderbirds” and other productions. The Stingray submarine and its drydock were reminiscent of the Skydiver and its dock that would later appear in “UFO”, and the launch of this submarine would later evoke images of the launch of the “Thunderbirds” in that subsequent Anderson series; a myriad of such futuristic vehicles would inhabit the other worlds of the Andersons and their production team. One critic acknowledged that a strength of “Stingray” was its powerful Anderson trademark special effects work:
“Anderson and his colleagues were always far better as technical wizards rather than tellers of compelling tales. And when the eponymous sub unleashed hell via its torpedo tubes, the result is explosive in more ways than one.”
For a puppet show, it may be surprising that some of the groundbreaking material in “Stingray” was in its implicit portrayal of humans. The series had a surprising amount of subtle humour, but also some serious underlying messages. Commander Shore was a disabled man in a hoverchair, unrestricted by his disability to exercise leadership of his military unit. Marina was a mute young mermaid woman who manages to live, love, communicate and engage in cross-cultural interactions despite her disability and her culturally alien background. Such portrayals are rare even today. Furthermore, Marina and Atlanta Shore are shown as capable, proficient and accomplished women in their own right, despite the restrictions of their world – this form of female empowerment also appearing in other Anderson TV shows, including “Thunderbirds”, “Captain Scarlet”, “UFO”, and “Space:1999” – during the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism.
And despite the limitations of the stories and the exotic, other-worldly setting of the series – simplistic, deep sea “shoot-’em-up” adventures at the bottom of an alien ocean environment – the budding romance between Troy Tempest and the Marina might be seen as a symbolic love for exploration, new knowledge and reconciliation. This quest is set up in the opening scenes of the first episode:
Co-pilot Phones: “There are people living under the sea, and I’ve got fairies at the bottom of my garden.”
Troy Tempest: “Okay you can laugh, but someday I’m going to prove it, and maybe sooner than you think.”
Other meta-analysis in the series revolves around Titania’s deference to their god, Teufel – a fish whose divine fishbowl-lens wisdom leads his adherents to constant defeat. Perhaps humanist Gerry Anderson is challenging viewers to ponder whether their seeking of knowledge through religious perspectives assists or hinders their lives; and is encouraging them instead to use the lens of scientific, evidence-based reasoning that was supposedly the basis for the philosophies of the victorious aquanauts.
Cold Waters, Cold War
“War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.”
– Carl Von Clausewitz.
Artist: Louis Chow.
Reflecting the era of Cold War and Space Race, “Stingray” depicted a Cold War between the land dwellers of Earth versus the underwater denizens of Titanica. Led by aquanaut Troy Tempest (captain of the underwater craft “Stingray”) and his crew, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (WASP) fought to repel the aggressive hostilities of King Titan and his spies and marine creature henchmen. On its most basic level, the series could be seen as a simple reworking of the traditional “good guys versus bad guys” theme, of heroes versus villains, as was later revisited in other Anderson shows particularly “Captain Scarlet” (humans versus Martians) and “UFO” (humans versus aliens). However, set in the domain of Earth’s largely unexplored oceans, “Stingray” metaphorically asked questions about who might win this underwater version of the Space Race; implicitly suggesting that the people of Marineville (land dwellers who were transitioning into people who explored the oceans) might be the best compromise for taming, colonising and exploiting this final frontier, and thereby win the quest for possible dominance of the world.
This was an era which we might now view in hindsight as being somewhat culturally problematic – women were portrayed in sexist, demeaning ways; James Bond movies were using “yellowface” to represent Asians – and while “Star Trek” was being created as an “Wagon Train in Space”, “Stingray” might be seen as an underwater version of the “western” template. The conflict with underwater denizens can now be seen as equivalent to an imperialist or colonial quest for dominance over indigenous people, complete with an Orientalist flavour and the placement of WASPS (or “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” – a term that was becoming increasingly widespread in the 1960s) as the heroes by default. If “Stingray” was being produced today, it would undoubtedly be more nuanced in its portrayal of characters from both sides of the conflict. Children’s programs today are much more willing to explore discrimination, bullying, empathy and equality.
Photo by Pew Nguyen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-can-on-the-shore-11607726/
Treasure Down Below
“The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.” – Jacques Costeau.
There are many reasons why we should explore and protect the oceans. For one thing, it remains home to vast numbers of species and potentialities that we have yet to discover, leading Sir David Attenborough to compelled to declare in Blue Planet II that, “Hidden beneath the waves, there are creatures beyond our imagination.” The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concurs:
“Scientists estimate that 91 percent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and that more than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. While these statistics may sound daunting, they have not stopped the global scientific community from striving to amass as much knowledge as possible about ocean life.”
They also note that the oceans provide us with food and medicine, economic resources, and climate regulation.
But the oceans are the birthplace and cradle of life on this planet; the location of the natural terrestrial chemical laboratory within which natural tidal forces likely churned up abiogenesis, and the source of photosynthesis that created the oxygen in our atmosphere. These waters remain our largest unvanquished planetary frontier. We need to stop using them as a garbage can for our pollution, chemicals, wastes and plastics. Instead of worrying about treasures, pirates and monsters at the bottom of our seas, we need to tackle the problem of trillions of microplastic shards that humans have discarded, the species of marine life that we are making extinct due to overfishing; and the destructive impact of human-caused climate change upon the 70% of the Earth’s surface that makes ours the Blue Planet. Even NASA has joined the call, using space technology to further extend its mission to planet Earth.
To explore, respect and protect the world’s oceans is a worthy cause today, and groups such as Oceana and Ocean’s Harmony lead the way, with their appeals for support and volunteers and youth activism.
And let’s pay tribute to a humble children’s puppet series, launched sixty years ago today, that also contained a call for action regarding our oceans and marine life.
In 1949, author Joseph Campbell wrote “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, which explored in part: “specific details about the continuing importance of mythic stories in current times, the energies that support such, and how the body of myths and stories can become corrupted, undernourished, assaulted, even destroyed — and yet return again and again in fresh and unusual ways.” (Estes, 2004, p. xxvi). This generational cycle of life, death and new birth is not just biological – it is cultural. Our heroes and villains are reborn or rebooted every generation. This constitutes a large part of our folklore.
“Narrowly, the term “folklore” has been traditionally considered the oral tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all aspects of a culture – beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviors, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools, objects, etc.”
Every culture and every community has its own folklore – from religious ideologies to national cultures; from populist Hollywood storytelling to minority cohorts (for whom folklore is particularly important to provide collective identity and community cohesion). Folklore can not only mirror a culture, but it relies upon its cultural background to fully explain its own context: “the folklore of a people can be fully understood only through a thorough knowledge of their culture” (Bascom, 1954, p. 338). Folklore bridges generations, fuels ritual, inspires literature and art, and – in recent decades – has flavoured and influenced television, film, urban mythology, and social media memes.
In The Beginning
In 1918 in Oakland, warnings to wear a mask. Photo: public domain, Source: FoundSF.org
Folklore has provided a basis for many origins – whether the origin and life cycle of the world, or the ironic origin and death cycle of plague; from the Plague of Justinian (which may have caused the fall of the Roman Empire) to our most recent epidemic to impact the whole world (COVID), stories and cultural traditions thrive. Diane Goldstein explores one example of such origin stories:
“A significant part of AIDS legendary tradition betrays our obsession with origins. Whether the narratives focus on government conspiracies, African or Haitian AIDS, “patient zero” type characters, superbugs transmitting the virus through bites, or hundred-year-old AIDS cases, the concern is the same: establishing a first — a source for this thing that made our world change so irreversibly” (Goldstein, 2004, p. 77).
In seeking to address origins – of nations, of religions, of communities, or of our sporting rituals – folklore provides a secular outlet for the religious impulse. Our folkloric responses and rationalisations for plague (and other natural disasters) is perhaps among the most basic, primal versions of this impulse. Vampires and werewolves are attributed to folklore arising from cholera, rabies, and other diseases. The so-called “Spanish Flu” epidemic of 1914 – 1918 was not Spanish and its victims were not (despite recent COVID-inspired vaccine denialism) victims of poorly administered vaccines. Another, more unexpected example is provided by David Keys, who suggests that the Bubonic Plague may have contributed a macabre background to the stories of King Arthur:
“Contrary to all received wisdom, the sixth-century plague catastrophe may indeed have been preserved in the oral tradition and in literature which, centuries later, acted as source material for particular aspects of the medieval Arthurian romances – especially those associated with the quest for the Holy Grail” (Keys, 1999, p. 158).
Keys points out that the supposed life and death of King Arthur in the sixth century was contemporaneous with the time of famine and depopulation associated with the arrival of Plague and climatic change. The subsequent Arthurian legends and much of their associated medieval literature refer to the so-called “Waste Lands”, a concept of landscapes and society ravaged by war, pestilence, famine or plague (Keys, pp. 158 – 165). It could be conjectured that the medieval King Arthur stories may have grown from earlier memories of the plague times and the need for society to find a hero and a hope during times of devastation.
One lesson which might be inferred from this Arthurian legacy is that the full effect of modern plagues – such as AIDS and COVID – are yet to be determined and included within our own communal folklore. Perhaps we are yet to find our modern heroic Arthur – or maybe we have simply to recognise that we have already birthed many such heroes amidst their modern sufferings.
“This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it.”
– Daniel Defoe, “A Journal of the Plague Year”, 1666.
In the nineteenth century, author Henry Murger’s novel, “Scènes de la Vie Bohème” (1851) inspired the 1890s Puccini opera, “La Bohème” and both productions included characters who were living and/or dying of consumption (tuberculosis). A century later, US playwright Billy Aaronson came up with a concept to update this material. The idea was developed into the Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway musical, “Rent”, by musical composer Jonathan Larson. Aaronson and Larson agreed that instead of tuberculosis, their afflicted characters would have AIDS (Evelyn McDonnell with Kathy Silberger, 1997, pp. 18 – 21). Thus we see popular art being used to change public understandings and perceptions of two epidemics: TB and AIDS.
Following World War Two, Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote his story “The Plague” in 1947. His tale concerns a visitation of the Bubonic Plague to a French village of Oran in the 1940s, resulting in a quarantining of the town. This tale is seen as a largely allegorical retelling of the Nazi invasion of France during World War 2. Thus was Camus able to make statements without arousing political or partisan contention.(Tony Judt, Introduction, in Albert Camus (translated by Robin Buss), “The Plague”, Penguin Books, 1947 (2001), p. viii.) His tale remains one of universal truths regarding the nature of isolation, suffering and malevolence:
“From that point on, it could be said that the plague became the affair of us all.”
(Camus, 1947, p. 53).
Historic folkloric links united all people behind the common foe of plague; in recent times we have seen that change. Australia’s early cultural responses to AIDS are an example of this: after reference to the medieval imagery and fear of the Grim Reaper, Australian television (the genuine mass media of the era) was uncertain how to approach a problem that mingled sex, plague, homosexuality and death. Efforts included deferring the problem away from homosexuality, and generally ignoring it altogether. But early fictional approaches on Australian television demonstrated patchwork attempts to address it as a social issue.
The Flying Doctors season 1 (telecast 26 May 1986 – 17 November 1986, Nine Network)
The Flying Doctors
“I came home to die. But home isn’t there any more.”
– Les Foster, fictional character dying of AIDS in “The Flying Doctors” (written by Morphett, 1986).
From Skippy and Bellbird on 1960s television; from Boney and Matlock Police to Against the Wind in the 1970s; with films ranging from Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Getting of Wisdom in the 1970s to Crocodile Dundee in the 1980s; Australians appeared to have a love affair with rural lifestyles. Into this tradition came the TV series, The Flying Doctors, fictitiously based upon the real-life organisation, the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service, in the equally fictitious outback town of Cooper’s Crossing (and which is NOT to be confused with the more recent RFDS. which was launched in 2021). After beginning as a 1985 mini-series of three episodes (Zuk, 1998a), The Flying Doctors returned between 1986 and 1991 for a successful run of 221 episodes (Zuk, 1998b). In 1986, during the series’ first year of regular telecast, the episode entitled “Return of the Hero” featured a gay character.
Given that gay characters were quite rare on Australian television at that time, and notwithstanding that this token gay character appeared for only one episode and was dead before the episode ended; his appearance nevertheless marked a courageous stand taken by writer Tony Morphett and all the others who were involved in the episode’s creation. Getting a prominent Australian actor like Gerard Kennedy to play the gay character was also a bit of a coup for Aussie TV at the time.
In the story, a local old boy, Les Foster, returns to Cooper’s Crossing after many years of living in Sydney with his “business partner”, Johnnie. Les is clearly sick but reluctant to reveal the details of his condition to his brother or the other townsfolk. However, he does disclose to Dr. Chris Randall that he is suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma and AIDS, and that he has come back to Cooper’s Crossing to die.
Encouraged by Dr. Randall, Les “comes out” as gay to his brother Ted, who doesn’t want to know – he prefers to think of his brother as a local war hero. Les dismisses Ted’s hero worship and states that his wartime experience was a very small part of his life. He wants Ted instead to acknowledge and love his whole life. This is a pivotal scene which perhaps could be seen as a metaphor for the battle facing everyone with HIV/AIDS – rather than society making it a “big deal”, their medical condition constitutes only a small fraction of their total life experience and it reflects little upon their actual personality.
In the meantime, the medicos of Cooper’s Crossing discuss Les’ HIV/AIDS status amongst themselves –a breach of Les’ privacy which, in the context of its times, was seen as acceptable and “responsible”. This culminates in a nurse refusing to admit Les to the hospital and telling his friends that he has AIDS. Such breaches of medical ethics regarding people with AIDS were not unheard of in the 1980s.
Following this public exposure, the townsfolk clearly have trouble accepting that Les is a “poofter” and this adds to their fear and stigma. The men folk refuse to drink from glasses at the pub because they fear contagion from the glasses in the dishwasher; and poofter bashers attack Johnnie (with an explicit comparison being made between homophobia and racism). Shortly before he dies, Les faces up to his former friends in the pub. They had not physically participated in the poofter bashing attempt, but their attitudes and bigotry had contributed to the atmosphere which had allowed such violence to thrive. Les implicitly berates them for this by throwing his Korean War medals onto the floor:
“I killed young men in the name of freedom… and look what I got! Well you can find yourselves another hero, fellas. I resign!” (Morphett, 1986).
One surprising incident reveals that Les and Johnnie have their own irrational AIDS fears – in a scene which mirrors the pub incident when others refuse to share glasses, Les and Johnnie attend a communion service but decline to share a communion cup with others. This causes the local priest, Father Jacko, to guess the true nature of Les’ illness. Jacko becomes the only townsman to offer Les, Johnnie and Dr. Randall his unconditional support. During his pastoral chats with Les, Jacko concedes that his church contains both “poofter bashers” and others with compassion. Jacko even assists in a reconciliation between Les and Ted during the penultimate scene when they all share communion (and the communion cup) together. Perfect love evidently casts out all fear.
Les is finally struck down with terminal pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, another opportunistic disease common for people with AIDS in the 1980s. He dies in the arms of his lover Johnnie. Later, when the townsfolk attend his funeral, they admit their shame at their own actions, wherein they had expressed intolerance and fear.
A cursory assessment of this episode might suggest that the storyline mirrors the same concepts evident in those few films coming out of Hollywood during the following decade which dared to touch upon the issues of homosexuality or AIDS (often taken to mean the same thing) – featuring stigmatized gay men and outraged or repulsed heterosexuals as a justification for implicit homophobia. Hollywood movies such as “An Early Frost” (1985), “As Is” (1986), “Our Sons” (1991), “Philadelphia” (1993), “My Brother’s Keeper” (1995) and “In The Gloaming” (1997) largely portrayed gay men as the “other” and used plotlines which focused to varying extent upon their heterosexual relatives, friends or acquaintances coming to terms with this shame and the loss caused by their son/brother/friend’s homosexuality and/or his imminent death from AIDS.
Yet it would be unfair to suggest that this episode of “The Flying Doctors” was implicitly endorsing such views. As such, this storyline paralleled the real-life discrimination faced by some Australian gay men with HIV/AIDS at the time, and it metaphorically compared their battle with that of Les as a war veteran. During the eulogy, one character states that “Les Foster was a genuine hero” and perhaps, by extension, the writer sought to imply that all gay men who faced the double-whammy of HIV/AIDS and societal prejudice were heroes of that modern-day battle.
Perhaps the creators of this episode also wanted to challenge their audience to examine their own prejudices as reflected within the shame felt by the other characters at the funeral. This is further demonstrated by the fact that the creators focused largely on the societal rather than the medical problems faced by Les. They avoided the horrifying stereotypical images which were so common in the mass media at the time – of skeletal, emaciated AIDS figures covered in KS legions and confined to hospital beds. In this medically sanitized world, Les Foster’s skin remained unblemished and generally healthy (except for his pasty white face). And despite his terminal pneumonia, he had no cough or breathing difficulties – just a general malaise and he collapsed a couple of times to demonstrate that he was unwell.
Overall, however, this episode demonstrated to its mass audience that AIDS had potentially reached everywhere in Australia – even the fictitious outback town of Cooper’s Crossing – and that it was being accompanied by an epidemic of fear and prejudice.
Conversely, the limitations in the episode are also worth of note. The gay characters made a token appearance in only one episode for the purposes of facing discrimination and death – a cinematic tradition inherited from Hollywood. They came to Cooper’s Crossing – itself an isolated country town – as a metaphor for the social isolation faced by many gay men from the heterosexual community in real life. Moreover, they were presented as isolated and friendless back in the metropolitan city that had lived – there was no gay support network, no care teams, nobody to support and care for them. Perhaps these errors can be attributed to the heterosexist ignorance of the writer and creators, or possibly to the creative restrictions of a television program with a limited time constraint within each episode; either way, all these shortcomings could have been addressed by a small verbal reference in a passing scene.
Significantly, “Return of the Hero” was only the seventeenth episode of this series to be telecast, and the producers were undoubtedly taking some risk by presenting such a controversial story so early in the run of the series. They should be commended in the eyes of history for their willingness to tackle a very strong and deeply felt societal prejudice.
A similar theme was used in episode 92 (season 4, 1988), “A Shadow of Doubt”, in which a mysterious illness was linked to racist fears and potential scapegoating. Once again, the series producers were willing to address the issue of ‘the other’.
Perhaps most significantly, the theme was revisited during Season 8 (July 1991), “Being Positive”. This story also features a visitor to Cooper’s Crossing – this time as a former patient, anthropologist Jerry Davis, who previously suffered a terrible accident that resulted in “lots of blood” being spilt – who reveals that he has tested positive to HIV, and the doctors who saved his life must await the results of their own HIV tests while battling with questions of patient confidentiality and their own fears. It turns out (unsurprisingly) that none of the medical staff has been infected with the virus, but the word slips out around town and bigot Jock Cavendish leads the outrage. Other characters also express intolerance, presuming that Davis is “one of them” until it is finally revealed that he was exposed to the virus during his work in Africa. He is safely heterosexual, and their biggest concern now is whether or not to tell his female paramour.
This episode made some attempts to address discrimination, leading one character to respond to homophobia with a comment that: “There’s not a sliding scale of respectability among victims of this thing. They’re just victims”, a well-intentioned attempt at eliciting sympathy, but which was ironic given that this was around the time that real-life people with AIDS were seeking to no longer be identified as “AIDS victims” but as “people living with AIDS”. Another response: “You should feel sorry for anyone who’s got it” comes across as patronising and lacking authenticity. A concession was made when confronting homophobia: “People like Jock Cavendish and the AIDS virus have got a lot in common: the less you fight them, the more powerful they become”. These well-intentioned attempts to address discrimination nevertheless remain problematic and flawed.
In seeking to address HIV/AIDS among heterosexuals, this episode contextualises ‘the other’ as themselves, and identifies people with AIDS as including haemophiliacs and infants with paediatric transmission, implicitly pointing out that gay men are not the only cohort impacted by the virus. However, the major flaw in this episode was its failure to explicitly mention or directly acknowledge homosexuality or gay men, effectively contributing to homophobic stigma and helping to make homosexuality invisible (or unmentionable) during an era when a medical scourge was decimating the gay male population. While trying to be rational and level-headed, the episode came across as just another example of TV and films (mentioned earlier) that attempted to reimage AIDS as a heterosexual problem and contextualise the stigma as affecting only heterosexuals – even the rabidly homophobic protagonist was quickly forgiven for his bigotry by his enraged fiance, so they could announce their heterosexual engagement before the episode ended. While this overall treatment of AIDS was less hysterical than in the earlier episode, its exclusion of homosexuality served to perpetuate the very homophobia that the earlier episode attempted to address.
A Country Practice
Australian television had also enjoyed a popularity of traditional, family-oriented drama programs. Popular series had included The Sullivans and Bellbird in the 1970s; with the show, Neighbours (commencing in 1980) featuring a number of families living in a fictional Melbourne suburb.
A new addition to this tradition, and combining itself with the previous genre of stories set within rural settings, A Country Practice, (ACP) began on Channel 7 at the end of 1981, coincidentally around the time when AIDS was first appearing on the radar. Set in a small fictional country town of Wandin Valley, the series ran throughout the 1980s to generally healthy audience ratings. Major characters included Molly Jones, a young woman whose on-screen death from breast cancer on 5 June 1985 caused national shock-waves; in the words of one commentator: “a nation was in mourning” (Mercado, 2004, p. 165). The show thereby demonstrated that it had the capacity to rouse within its audience great compassion for people afflicted with terrible medical problems. After the series concluded, creator James Davern was quoted as expressing pride that the show had tackled social issues including gay bashing, AIDS, alcoholism, rape, and domestic violence (ibid, p. 170).
In 1986, however, that same producer of ACP expressed reservations about portraying two social issues: incest and AIDS. Davern explained that topics such as AIDS were deemed unsuitable for a family-oriented show:
“We have given it a lot of consideration, and we find that, at this date, February 1986, still not enough is known about how the disease is transmitted, and I don’t believe in scaring people. And the fact that it’s linked so strongly with homosexuality makes it very difficult to make a homosexual AIDS victim a ‘goody’ and sympathetic.” (Tulloch & Moran, 1986, p. 291).
Davern’s assertion that it would be difficult to portray a gay character sympathetically is somewhat a reflection of his times – as explained by Tulloch and Moran when they clarified that the challenge faced by Davern was in “trying to make social deviants realistic yet sympathetic” (ibid) – but was also somewhat untrue. Australian television had been presenting gay and lesbian characters sympathetically (albeit extremely rarely) – since 1972 when the popular and controversial Number 96 had thrust gay character Don Finlayson onto the screen. Other Australian dramas with sympathetic gay or lesbian characters had included, Prisoner and All The Way. It appears that Davern had wanted to steer away from the stereotype that gay=AIDS, and to avoid a repetition of the storyline from The Flying Doctors which examined the prejudice faced by gay men.
Davern’s other assertion that “…not enough is known…” about AIDS and that he wanted to avoid needlessly frightening his viewers, is an interesting one. Taken at face value, it seems incorrect: by February 1986, medical science had clearly identified the virus which caused AIDS, had identified the risk factors, and had even produced a blood test to help identify those who had been exposed to it. What appears to have worried Davern was increasing public concern about AIDS as a potentially heterosexual problem – a concern which would soon be expressed on Australian TV in the form of the Grim Reaper:
“Davern was also aware of the controversy among the medical profession over whether heterosexuals were even at risk from HIV/AIDS, and he apparently wanted to wait until the medical profession had ‘got its story right’. He decided to wait until a different angle could be found and the ‘story’ of heterosexual transmission had been confirmed.” (Tulloch & Lupton, 1997, p. 102).
Nevertheless, following the appearance of the Grim Reaper and Suzi’s Story, the producers of ACP evidently felt further pressure from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to finally broach the subject of AIDS:
“According to James Davern, the AMA had been putting ‘some pressure’ on him since 1987, trying to persuade him to produce an AIDS story for ACP.” (ibid, p. 101).
His response was to adopt this ‘new angle’ to AIDS, focusing on the danger suggested by the Grim Reaper: that is, that non-gay Australians were also at risk of exposure to AIDS *(ibid, p. 102). Specifically, the dangers faced by females and injecting drug users became the focus of a four-part ACP story, episodes numbers 591 to 594 (MacAlpine, 2009?a), entitled, Sophie, telecast in 1988.
Sophie was the daughter of the major character Dr. Terence Elliott. She was a news journalist who had travelled the world for her work MacAlpine, 2009?b) – also developing a drug habit along the way. Her death from AIDS gave viewers a glimpse of AIDS which avoided the gay stereotype, but it simultaneously revisited the subject matter of the Grim Reaper advertisement and Suzi’s Story in that it presented a young woman dying of AIDS. The only ‘new angle’ in the story was that Sophie was an injecting drug user – a topic which might raise questions at that time about whether it comprised “wholesome family viewing” relative to homosexuality.
One of the writers of these episodes was Tony Morphett, who had previously written the first AIDS episode of The Flying Doctors. He was reportedly quite keen to produce a story about injecting drug users because he felt that this was a target audience which needed to be informed and educated about the dangers of AIDS.
Despite this, in the context of history, then, ACP can arguably be seen as a disappointment because the story of young Sophie Elliott and her battle against AIDS lasted only 4 episodes – and in the final episode of the series, a “flashback” included recognition of actress Lorraine Bayly who had played the mother of an “AIDS victim” in another story (Mercado, 2004, p. 169) – taking the number of episodes to feature AIDS to a mere 6 in the entire run of 1058 episodes. At the time, gay men were primarily afflicted with AIDS, but ACP evidently shied away from this topic apparently because of Davern’s previously-stated concern that a gay character with AIDS would not attract viewer sympathy. This was not an unwise perspective: societal homophobia was still rampant across Australia, and positive portrayals of homosexuality might easily have led to viewer protests, outrage or boycotts.
This treatment of AIDS ties in with American television’s treatment of the same issue at that time: up until 1988, the only characters to die of AIDS in US daytime soap operas had been women (eg. see Waggett, 1997, p. 36). That did not change until 1988, when the program As the World Turns introduced a gay character whose off-screen lover was HIV-positive (ibid, pp. 62 & 63).
We can see these programs as interacting with communal folklore: although not necessarily folklore in themselves, they were influenced by – and, in turn, contributed to – our national AIDS folklore at the time. Other TV shows that came later (in particular “GP” on ABC television) had more inclusive and diverse perspectives, and will be examined in later blog posts – as will books and films.
How To Have Sex in an Epidemic:
One of the earliest COVID fiction books to be published was Love in the Time of COVID, and its author is attributed with exploring a more individualistic approach to the impact of this most modern of epidemics:
“Have a nice big helping of residual simmering rage (so great for the immune system!) at being abandoned by our ‘leaders,’ at the profiteers and incompetents and liars, at a cleverly murderous microscopic entity that wants to exploit you as a host and strip your organs for parts.” – Kipnis, 2022, quoted by Iglesias, 2022.
This appears to contradict another COVID story which is more in line with the writings of Plague-era Daniel Defoe:
“People were dying in the city. Some more than others. The virus had roamed the earth but had chosen to settle down there.” – Dee Cameron, watching the COVID epidemic from afar, in “Our Country Friends” (Gary Shteyngart, 2021).
It seems our modern folklore of AIDS, and COVID (and its consequent epidemic of loneliness) has yet to be invented and written. Will we remember our heroes, or our denialists?
[EDIT: This blog was edited on 4 September 2024 and again on 29 October 2024 to add and reinterpret material from its analysis of the “Flying Doctors” episode “Being Positive”.]
William Bascom, 1954. “Four Functions of Folklore“, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 67, No. 266), October – December, pp. 333-349 (JSTOR).
Albert Camus, 1947. (Robin Buss translator), The Plague, Penguin Books, reprinted 2001.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., 2004. “Preamble: INTRODUCTION TO THE 2004 COMMEMORATIVE EDITION”, in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949 (reprinted 2004), pp. xxiii – lxv.
Diane E. Goldstein, 2004. “What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway? Contemporary Legend, Scientific Speculation, and the Politics of Blame in the Search for AIDS Origins”, (chapter) in Once Upon A Virus, University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press, pp. 77-99.
Gabino Iglesias, 2022. “Are we ready for COVID-19 as a central theme in literature?”, npr.org, 24 February.
Tony Judt, 2001. “Introduction”, in Albert Camus (translated by Robin Buss), The Plague, Penguin Books, originally published in 1947.
Kitty MacAlpine, 2009?b. “A Country Practice: Dr. Terence Stephen Elliott”, http://acountrypractice.com/Char/tselliott.html[dead link], accessed 16 January.
Evelyn McDonnell with Kathy Silberger, 1997. Rent by Jonathan Larson, HarperCollins Books.
Andrew Mercado, 2004. Super Aussie Soaps, Pluto Press.
Tony Morphett, 1986. “Return of the Hero”, The Flying Doctors, Crawfords Productions.
Gary Shteyngart, 2021. Our Country Friends, Random House.
John Tulloch & Deborah Lupton, 1997. Television, AIDS and Risk, Allen & Unwin.
John Tulloch & Albert Moran, 1986. A Country Practice: ‘Quality Soap’, Currency Press.
Gerard J. Waggett, 1997. The Soap Opera Encyclopedia, HarperPaperbacks.
T. Zuk, 1998b. “The Flying Doctors/RFDS“, Australian Television Information Archive, page created 10 November.
= = =
This was preparatory work for my PhD studies on, “A Social History of HIV/AIDS in Melbourne During the ‘Crisis Years’ 1981 to 1997”; this latter work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
On a warm summer evening in 1979 – we are told by Joshua Zeitz – some 7000 violent fans rioted in a Chicago baseball stadium, leaving it in tatters. ‘It wasn’t bad pitching that incited the mob to storm the field between games,’ he quotes from a newspaper account, ‘It was disco.’
It seems that a local media celebrity had proposed “Disco Demolition Day” which would feature physically blowing up a pile of disco records on the playing field during intermission. Egged on by the local media, fans brought along their vinyl for destruction, which they used in part as frisbies (or projectiles) to assist in the build-up of escalating tensions, which also included waving protest banners, storming the field and tearing out the batting cage, setting off firecrackers and starting fires; and ultimately inciting a riot that led to dozens of arrests and injuries. Ultimately, Zeitz concludes of this particular demolition sentiment:
“… An obvious explanation for the Disco Demolition Night riot might center on the desire of white, working-class baseball fans to strike out against an art form that they associated with African Americans, gays and lesbians, and Latinos. A long decade of stagflation, conflicts over busing and affirmative action, fallout from the Vietnam War, and popular anxieties about relaxed sexual mores left working-class whites desperate to put a human face on the impersonal, highly disruptive social changes that were reordering their world. Disco, which claimed its roots in urban black and gay neighborhoods, and which celebrated a libertine approach to sex and personal expression, was a perfect target for white rage.”(Zeitz, 2008)
A generation after the Disco Demolition movement, we observe a much larger, vocal and potentially dangerous groundswell that has been building over the intervening years. We now see a large voting bloc of disaffected US whites who face a choice: to vote for a President out of a spirit of fear and anger, seeking to destroy everything that they perceive as a threat to their privilege; or to vote more wisely for temperance and democracy. This situation is reminiscent of “Nightfall”, an old science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, about a world that faces darkness once every era, when an eclipse covers their world, with the resultant societal panic and chaos causing the downfall of civilisations.
How does this relate to the space program? Aside from the obvious loss of science and scientists in any upcoming Christian Taliban Dark Age, there are lessons that western leaders and culture have failed to learn from our science and its history.
“If I could travel back into time, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls. The destruction of the library was a warning to us 1,600 years later: we must never let it happen again.” – Carl Sagan (Ovenden, 2020).
In Cosmos, Sagan spoke about the loss of the Library at Alexandria, repeating a common myth about the methods and forms of its disappearance (O’Neill, 2017; Ovenden, 2020). However, one thing that he did explain accurately: the loss of the Library was a tragedy to the world’s literature, sciences and history. We must avoid a repeat of the social conditions that led to its disappearance, so as to avoid a repetition amidst our modern forms of libraries, repositories and archives – plus all the networks, educational centres and opportunities they represent. As I write this, the world is recovering from an outage that disrupted some elements of the world Internet. Can we ever afford to lose it all, even for a short amount of time? Or what would a fascist Gilead era do to our accumulated wealth of knowledge today? Or for that matter, if the great unwashed white hordes with their pitchforks and torches descend once again on Washington DC after the upcoming November Presidential election, who will speak for civilisation?
Sagan made one final observation about the fall of the library: that its loss did not appear to make a splinter of difference to the world as it was at the time. Why was this? Because the scientists and scholars in the library did not apply their knowledge to the outside world. Expert knowledge about agriculture or ploughing, for example, might have been left inside the walls of the Library and not shared with the farmers outside – hence its loss made no difference to the huddled masses.
We must be careful to avoid a repetition of this cultural failure. Education (including public television education) is needed. Perhaps this is where we need to have fewer Kardashians and more Cosmos; less Survivor and more Sesame Street. We need to point out to anti-science conspiracy theorists and Moon landing deniers that they live in the modern world, replete with space age technology – ranging from their smart phones and GPS tracking to the CAT and MRI scanners that may have saved their lives. We need to educate them about how much of the modern world – ranging from agricultural and food refrigeration techniques, from satellite weather forecasting to bushfire and flood mitigation, from air traffic control to vaccine storage technology, from the Internet to social media – have impacted their lives after being invented or assusted by the space program.
Apollo 11 lunar footprint (NASA photo)
This to me is NASA’s greatest deficiency: not because they failed to return to the Moon for fifty years, but because they neglected to inform the masses during the last five decades of how their spinoff technology has changed and improved our lives forever. They forgot to remind us all about space spinoffs beyond astronaut ice cream, gravity defying pens, and space blankets. To me, that’s like Christopher Columbus returning from his voyages of exploration, invasion and conquest, and informing Queen Isabella that the future of the Americas might be extrapolated as providing paltry farming land for corn and a few forests of firewood – but little else.
The Apollo program provided the largest injection of cash and funding into non-military science in history. Its offshoot so far is over 2000 spinoffs and ongoing technological development that is worth at least $469 billion today.
Against this reality, NASA’s greatest failure of imagination was not failing to anticipate and prevent the Apollo 1 disaster, but neglecting to fully exploit its own proven potential to change and save our future. The best is yet to come.
“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” — astronaut Bill Anders.
In 1968. astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’ from lunar orbit (see photo at the top of this article) and this spearheaded the greatest environmental movement in human history. NASA’s subsequent ‘Mission to Planet Earth’ became the vanguard for a movement to utilise space technology and research to focus on improving our lives on planet Earth, that pixel of colour in a cold, largely dead cosmos. This included using space and satellite data to warn the world about the hole in the Ozone layer, motivating world governments to fix the problem. The same opportunities exist today to mitigate against climate catastrophe.
This is the greatest reality we overlook: that despite our insular wars, even refugees have access to space age mobile phones that link them to the outside world; that satellites are documenting our escalating climate change crisis; and that it is becoming increasingly difficult for dictators and monopoly news media to censor and oppress nonconformist voices. This is the genuine dissent that conspiracy theorists promote without any real understanding of its true potential: we are the world; we can shape and change our future thanks to space. Science can get out the word if we make it a priority.
Radio personality Casey Kasem, is known for the sign-off signature of his radio program: “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” Such a metaphor summarises our daily challenge: to keep striving for betterment through the space sciences while remaining firmly grounded in reality. This may yet prove to be our ultimate calling as a species.
References:
Burtel Edison, 1985, “Mission to Planet Earth”,
Science (New Series) Vol. 227, No. 4685, January 25, p. 367. (JSTOR)
Tim O’Neill, 2017. “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2 July.
Richard Ovenden, 2020. “The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today”, Time, 17 November. (JSTOR)
J. Zeitz, 2008, Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October), pp. 673-688. (JSTOR)
