the anti-cave

It's been a long time since a post, but I'll still be brief as I'm doing this waiting for other things to finish. I feel compelled to write a little bit because of watching THX 1138, the science fiction movie by george lucas that preceded his star wars fame. The movie is long and complex, but the important part for us, dear reader, is the very end. At the end, a man who has spent his life embedded in a strange, cavernous, underground city doing odd and seemingly empty tasks coordinated by a huge, faceless bureaucracy emerges into the sunlight of the surface world. This immediately evoked Plato's Allegory of the Cave for me. In brief, Plato's story is about people in a cave looking at shadows on the walls they are completely convinced are the whole world. The story tells us about one brave enough to break with the peer pressure and emerge from her cave and see the daylight and the real objects the shadows on the wall pretended to be. The similarity of Lucas's movie to Plato's Cave is striking, and I'm sure it's no accident either.

However, it seems to me that there is a huge shift in perspective between the two stories. Plato's point is that what we see in the cave is like what we see every day. The real world of our every day experiences is Plato's cave - according to Plato. The sunlight that we would emerge to see is the world of "forms". These are the universal truths that underly our universe. Almost all modern science descends from the basic principle Plato lays out here: the world is illusory but there are eternal truths to be discovered for those who seek them in the right way.

Not that I would put Lucas on the same plane as Plato, but it's interesting to me how his movie contrasts this. In THX 1138, the world is the city man has made and that is driven by all his inventions. These inventions, of course, are the products of scientific pursuits. Everything in this city is essentially the embodiment of an idea. Safe to say that it's an attempt to build a world more closely modeled after the universal forms Plato gives to the scientists. This world, based on the ideas of man and built by the engineers who make those ideas come to life, is so horrifying, so bleak that all the hero of the movie can do is contemplate getting out of it.

Is it just a sign of the times? Or are we damned if we do (go out into Plato's sunlight) or damned if don't (escape Plato's sunlight in favor of the actual Sun in Lucas's movie)?

Ask a hardened scientist and you'll likely get blame pointed at the engineers of the city for building it all wrong. The engineers will blame the scientists for not designing it correctly. Everyone will blame the philosophers for setting the bar too high - asking for the impossible. Almost no one will blame themselves. Yet another herd of oxen running full bore across the plains without any idea where it's going - just hoping they are following the right trail.