Monkey Business

On 'Ghost Light'.


Let's leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions - light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive - which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let's leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let's leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions... all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition.  You want an example?  How about the use of the word "wicked", which - with wonderful irony - appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak.  It's the last word of the story - the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series.  And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child... but, by Ace's usage, and by his own sly wink, he's giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let's look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the 'final' stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it's about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don't understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It's about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there's some truth in the above, there's also a lot more to it than that.

I don't think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people's ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top... and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of 'rungs' which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male... but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That's why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It's his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it's his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.


"The Ever-Changing Moral Zeitgeist"

I referred to the reactionary 'ladder' version of Darwinism as "vulgar" just now, but this is not quite right.  It is not really a vulgarisation, in the sense of being a popular misstatement overlaid upon the ideas of the original Darwinians.  Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Galton... these were respectable, wealthy, middle-class Victorian gentlemen. Progressive for their time, they were also products of their time, as were their ideas.

Hey, have some quotes.

Here's the young Darwin, in his Beagle diary:

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian -- of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? -- men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.

This next one is from The Descent of Man, Chapter 6:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Here's Darwin, writing to the philosopher and economist William Graham in 1881:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

Here's Darwin on gender, from The Descent of Man, Chapter 19:

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman- whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman. 

This next one is from T.H. Huxley ('Darwin's Bulldog'), writing in an essay called 'Emancipation, Black and White' in 1865:

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

Here's Francis Galton - Darwin's polymath cousin - in his Preface to the 1892 edition of his book Hereditary Genius:

The natural ability of which this book mainly treats ['genius'], is such as a modern European possesses in a much greater average share than men of the lower races. There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.

Even today, the wackier fringes of sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology and other forms of biological reductionism continue to lend support to reactionary views on race, gender and economics.

Richard Dawkins' idea of natural selection working mostly at the level of individual genes (which get into cartels) lends itself implicitly to concord with bourgeois ideology. Dawkins is no biological racist (though his animus towards Islam has now tipped over into culturalist racism) but his outlook implicitly supports our economic status quo. Each individual gene becomes a utility maximiser engaged in rational self-interest, each genome is a genetic economy in equilibrium. It's quite a startling resonance. Dawkins himself even uses free market metaphors in his descriptions, explicitly saying that genomes are not "command economies". These are metaphors, but they also turn upon him and start to power his logic.

It's tempting to say that there's a connection between this and his liberalism, which is individual-centred and worries about memetic cartels that threaten the equilibrium in which all the individuals supposedly live, i.e. scary old Islam. Memes may be the connective skein here. They provide an idealist cultural logic (of a very unoriginal kind, actually...) that makes human society work in an analogous way to the gene's-eye-view of biology. Individual people get themselves into cartels via the natural selection of memes. Memes, like genes, are amoral. They succeed if they work. Religion 'works' in some ways that Dawkins attempts to delineate in The God Delusion, hence it reproduces. I think, by the meme logic, religions would be seen as predators. We can see the Darwinian logic whereby their fearsome features accreted, but we still have to defend ourselves from them when they attack.

So Dawkins, like so many liberals before him, ends up enmeshed (albeit by a more circuitous route than many) in the kind of idealist, culturalist thinking that has always made liberalism into the perfect... well, the perfect 'meme' for bourgeois ideology. Herbert Spencer's notions of inherited genius tesselated perfectly with his libertarianism. The individual must be at liberty to succeed and rise according to his inborn talents and his own capacity to advance himself. Charity is fine, as long as it doesn't hinder the gifted or artificially raise the useless. This is where social Darwinism and libertarianism meet, and provide a perfect cultural logic for capitalism.


Evolving to Fit a Niche

This shouldn't surprise us.  Ideas have a social basis.  It's only to be expected that ideas generated by the enormous industrial, technical, scientific and social revolutions of capitalism should bear traces of it, should fit the niches of the social ecosystem.

Natural selection was born from studying Malthus - who worried about the limits to human progress, since, as he saw it, the poor were reproducing faster than society could feed them, whereas the more continent upper classes were allowing themselves to be outbred.

Natural selection - with its niches into which species have to fit - comes from an awareness of things like specialised tasks and the division of labour: products of the new, industrial, factory society.  As Marx wrote:

It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.

 
This, to generalise, is why natural selection is an idea that popped into the heads of two guys, roughly simultaneously, both of whom were from the middle-to-upper classes of mid-Victorian Britain... and not to, say, Democritus.  Darwin and Wallace both lived in a society that was the product of the Industrial Revolution (roughly a century old by the time On the Origin of Species was published), a society where all the manifestations of capitalism adumbrated by Marx above had arisen and changed life radically.  Darwin and Wallace both read Malthus, both explicitly naming his Essay on Population as providing them with eureka moments.  Like most educated men of his time, Darwin was highly influenced by Political Economists like Adam Smith, who provided the theoretical basis of laissez-faire capitalism (though to associate Smith simplistically with today's ultra-free-marketeers - who fatuously profess to venerate him - is to do him a great disservice).

On this matter, it's worth quoting (at length) from Darwin's finest biographers, Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Writing about Darwin's thinking in the late 1830s, they say:

Malthus had rarely been more topical. In the depth of the depression, with unprecedented distress, the poor law and pauper riots were on everybody's lips. Workhouses were still being attacked, commissioners still being pelted. Malthus had denounced charity, and the rioters abominated anything Malthusian that propped up the New Poor Law. By now the dissident groups had come together under an umbrella organization known as Chartism: they supported the People's Charter, a list of demands for universal suffrage, annual elections, and salaried MPs. This was a countrywide mass movement, and the New Poor Law was one of its prime targets. Christian Chartists denounced a system that would deny 'the distressed poor their God-given right to a dignified support on their native soil.’ They were marching under banners in September that proclaimed with the Psalmist, 'Dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.’ Chartist speeches, lambasting the 'cruel and detestable doctrines of the Malthusians,' were heard by tens of thousands in the manufacturing towns, and reported in The Times. Love him or loathe him. Malthus could not be ignored.

Darwin knew the theory. With Martineau his dinner guest, how could he not? Getting the poor off welfare increased competition among working men and reduced taxes. Competition was paramount, making Malthus a Whig free trader's godsend in the 1830s. But it was Malthus's statistics that struck Darwin with a vengeance in his primed state. Malthus calculated that, with the brakes off, humanity could double in a mere twenty-five years. But it did not double; if it did the planet would be overrun. A struggle for resources slowed growth, and a horrifying catalogue of death, disease, wars, and famine checked the population. Darwin saw that an identical struggle took place throughout nature, and he realized that it could be turned into a truly creative force.

He had thought that only enough individuals were born to keep a species stable. Now he accepted that wild populations, too, bred beyond their means. Like the architects of the poor law, nature showed no charity; individuals had to scrimp and struggle, like the growing gangs of scavengers on London's refuse heaps, with starvation staring them in the face. Darwin gained a unique understanding from Malthus.

...

In Darwin's nature, the many fall that the few might progress. Death acquired a new meaning, and there was enough of it around: with rising joblessness and homelessness, medical statisticians were compiling their 'ledgers of death' (mortality statistics) among the slum dwellers. Nature's ledgers were always open; the Reaper sat, draped in black, with scratch pen permanently in hand. Progress was not so much a hymn to divine beneficence as a dirge accompanying the savage struggle. Both Darwinian science and poor law society were now reformed along competitive Malthusian lines. Ruthless competition was the norm; it guaranteed the progress of life and a low-wage, high-profit capitalist society.

...

Emigration might solve the pauper problem at home, but others saw these boatloads of rejects wreaking havoc abroad. Dire predictions accompanied this tidal wave of flotsam. European settlers had always been 'harbingers of extermination to the native tribes,' and it was prophesied that all the 'aboriginal nations' would be wiped out within a century. At every outpost the Beagle crew had witnessed the destruction: the Tasmanians were all but exterminated, the aborigines were dying from European diseases, General Rosas's policy was deliberate genocide. But Darwin believed that colonial warfare was necessary 'to make the destroyers vary' and adapt to the new terrain. Destruction was becoming integral to his Malthusian view of humanity:

When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals. — they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other &c, but then comes the more deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts (ie intellect in man) to gain the day.

The 'stronger [are] always extirpating the weaker,' and the British were beating the lot. This imperial expansion ended the isolation of the indigenous races, and thwarted their development in other ways. As whites spread out from the Cape, the black tribes were pushed together in the interior, blending races and ending their species-making isolation. Had this not happened, Darwin speculated, 'in 10,000 years [the] Negro [would] probably [have become] a distinct species.'

With emigration in the headlines, Lyell was convinced that animals too are driven by overpopulation to migrate. He agreed with Darwin that burgeoning species become colonizers, invading new terrain and defeating the natives. But Darwin's population pressure was pushing species to the limit in other ways. The crush was a creative force. The overcrowding that sent boatloads to the colonies meant that only animals with a competitive edge survived.

Darwin's biological initiative matched advanced Whig social thinking. This is what made it compelling. At last he had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultra-Whigs. The transmutation at the base of his theory would still be loathed by many. But the Malthusian superstructure struck an emotionally satisfying chord; an open struggle with no hand-outs to the losers was the Whig way, and no poor-law commissioner could have bettered Darwin's view. He had broken with the radical hooligans who loathed Malthus. Like the Whig grandees - safe, immune, their own world characterized by noblesse oblige — Darwin was living on a family fortune, and thrusting a bitter competition on a starving world for its own good. From now on he could appeal to a better class of audience — to the rising industrialists, free-traders, and Dissenting professionals.

So you see, nothing I'm saying is original or controversial. Moreover, none of this casts any doubt upon the empirical truths of Natural Selection. To locate the intellectual roots of a scientific theory in the political and economic context of its time... or, indeed, in the Political Economy of its time... is not necessarily to cast the slightest doubt upon its truth value (nor do I). Furthermore, a theory that arises even in the direct context of another theory need not be permanently bound to it. As Engels wrathfully wrote, defending Darwin from idiot reproaches:

However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature...

(My italics.)

Darwin delayed publishing his thesis partly because he dreaded the prospect of bolstering the radical sectors of society who might use evolution as ammunition against church and state. He was a thoroughly respectable gentleman, terrified of the mob and of radicals.

Galton pioneered eugenics, and ideas about hereditary genius or greatness.  He considered 'greatness' to be a heritable trait, advocating financial incentives to 'great' people to marry and procreate.

Spencer, often unfairly maligned as a "social-Darwinist" was actually more a pioneer of what we today would call libertarianism... which, in the hands of the ideologues of capitalism, has become an ideology of free market freedom at all costs.

Of course, all these progressive, liberal, forward-thinking, modern-minded men were pioneers of the new world that was coming to replace the old, the new world of free trade and mass capitalism.


Victorian Veneer

That's what Josiah is. He's the new man. He's the forward-thinking, liberal, progressive, modern Victorian scientist. He's the guy who wants to "restore the blighted British Empire to its former power and vigour" by doing away with the obsolete old aristocratic figurehead (the Crowned Saxe-Coburg) and replace it with himself, the ultimate self-made "man of property"... whose advancement is built on keeping the poor down and helpless, locked away in the darkness.

He manifests a seemingly sincere horror and terror of Control.  He calls her "a depraved monstrosity", "quintessence of wickdness, corruption incarnate", "a foul and base creature pitted against me".

Like the men of progress who herded workers into the new urban hell holes of industrialisation, crammed them into infested hovels so they could slave in factories, sweated their children on production lines, etc., Josiah must neutralise the reality of this oppression - to himself as much as to anyone else - by demonising the people he is oppressing.  If the person you've consigned to a dark hole is evil and threatening, then why be ashamed of cheating them of their lives, of their chance to progress and advance?

Of course, like Josiah, the men who built wealth and power on the factory system and the slum were also terrified of the people they crammed into those factories and slums.  Their ideology was that of enterprise, of ruthless competition, of the Malthusian struggle, of the rightful victory of the most effective self-seeker and self-maker... and they were only too aware that these ideas cut both ways.

Remember that Control tries to rise through social mobility. She also becomes a ruthless self-seeking dealer and eventually becomes Josiah's mirror image and even takes over from him. Fashioned by Josiah's system, educated by reading The Times, she is a product of the hierarchy she was trapped under. Control was left behind, but she became integrated into the power structure by being dominated by it. She taught herself using the imperial paper of record, learning to aspire to upward social mobility, wanting to "be a ladylike", wanting to steal Josiah's power and take his place.

The people in the dark holes could just as easily seek for themselves and ruthlessly compete.  Most avenues to escape were closed to them by poverty and prejudice and religion, or thwarted by drink and oblivion... but, lurking at the corner of the eye, there was always the escape offered by the mob, the riot, the rebellion, the revolution.

Those modern, progressive, liberal, forward thinking Josiahs were all perpetually haunted by spectral tumbrils and baskets, by the downward whooshing sounds of slanted blades. The English had achieved their bourgeois revolution without any unfortunate eruptions as in France... but they all knew how close they'd come.  They all remembered Tom Paine.  Hell, like Sir Leicester Dedlock, they all remembered Wat Tyler.  They trembled and sobbed (literally, in the case of Spencer Walpole) when the Chartists took over Hyde Park.  And, much as they resented the aristocracy and the relics of the old ways, they hated the common people more.  Even as they sympathized over poverty, they hated the idea of the poor unifying to remedy their own situation.  The memory of the guillotine was, for the respectable Victorian gentlemen, a symbol of the mob slaughtering their proper rulers.  The new men of the Victorian industrial era didn't want that kind of thing happening again, any more than did the old aristos. They wanted the poor to stay poor (maybe less poor but still poor) and the workers to stay acquiescent as they - the new men - gently ousted the old landowners and Lords and Tories from the top spot. At best, there would be some reforms and alleviation of the worst suffering... but it should come from above or not at all.

Darwin, for instance, wanted Tories to die out. He wanted slavery done away with. But he wanted these remnants replaced with the Liberal 'poor laws' and 'reform acts': measures to squash the poor still further into industrial servitude, to create a kind of charitable penal system for paupers and placate the Chartists with compromises that simply extended the property qualification for the franchise. These were the modern ideas of the modern men. Meanwhile, the people were to be protected from dangerous ideas that might chip away at the ideological power of church and state... while the modern men used these dangerous ideas as the ideology of ruthless competition, free trade and industrial exploitation.

Josiah is a great reformer. A modern, Whiggish, propertied imperialist. He is the Survey and he has taken such good stock of the world he was sent to assimilate and copy that he has become a part of it. He is Victorian England, with all his rotten hypocrisy, his callous disregard, his arrogant self-promotion. He poses as an enemy of the stuffy, out-of-touch clerical backwardness of the old order. The natural laws of evolution are turned, by him, into an ideology of ruthless self-advancement. If Darwin's scientific inquiries lead him to understand that natural selection worked as 'reproduction of the best adaptation' then the society which quickly embraced his ideas comprehended them as an ideology of 'survival of the fittest', with fittest always meaning strongest and richest and harshest. Darwin himself was not, as we've seen, averse to seeing the hierarchies of his own time and place as being buttressed by the theory he had developed. That's Josiah. He's the man who still uses evolution as apologia or acceptance of the unjust, imperial, neoliberal status quo (either in crude ways like every market raider or in superficially more sophisticated ways like the sociobiologists).


Fitter, Happier, More Productive

'Ghost Light' shows the society mirrored in the system set up by an entity that has shaped itself according to this society and its new ideology.

The commercial nature of the society that has perverted this alien experiment into a miniaturised and essentialised portrait of Victorian bourgeois society shows in the way the Doctor is offered money to be an assassin, and how he eventually has to make a "deal" with Control.

The racist nature of this society shows in the imperialist ramblings of the Rider-Haggardian lunatic Redvers... in the bigotry of Inspector Mackenzie, whose diatribe about gypsies also refers to the essential idea of social-Darwinism, that it's "in the blood".

The sexist nature of this society shows in the way Josiah is served by a houseful of women, including the wife and daughter of the man he murdered, two women that he has simply inherited or appropriated in a ruthlessly Darwinian property takeover. They are literally part of the household, they come with it like the fixtures and fittings.

And the Victorian science which runs rampant and insane within Gabriel Chase is the perfect picture of a bourgeois society... a discourse of totalising taxonomy that wanted to collect, name, label, categorize, quantify every part of nature; arranging them all on hierarchical tables that mirrored its own conception of itself as a pyramid of power, desert and worth; anatomising specimens as though itemising the components of industrial machines; explaining the functioning of living things as though constructing them anew from cogs and pistons; killing and silencing and stilling and transfixing everything natural and chaotic with the pin of authority, displaying them all under the glass of respectability; crystallising knowledge of nature into the ideology of power; reserving such knowledge into cultural capital, to be distributed by gentlemen of largesse to the extent that they thought good for the multitude.


Cleansing Fire

Meanwhile, Light is a perversion and denial of both the Christian angel and the evolutionist scientist. He is the drag factor that pulls everything back. He is the worst aspect of the science that has to disrupt and destroy in order to understand things. He stands over the dead, dismembered body of a maid and says "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". If he's religion holding back science, he's also science taking things apart and being unable to reassemble them. Reductionism run mad.  Unable to cope with a barrage of change, flux, imagination, fiction and nonsense, he seizes up until he becomes a stone idol. A statue of an angel, or of one of the DWEMs that line the inside of the Nat Hist. Doesn't matter. He reveals their fundamental similarity. It is impossible for him to cope with reality as an immensely complex web of dialectical inter-reactions.  He can travel at the speed of thought but he can't think.

(The irony being that Natural Selection ultimately supports this - to use a risky phrase - 'dialectic of nature', at least to an extent, by revealing that all species are transitional, snapshots taken from an endless chain of change, isolatable only in theory from the relationships in which they nestle, always influencing and being influenced by their environment and their contact with each other. The little changes imperceptibly become massive alterations, thus transforming quantity into quality. The apparent opposites actually exist in unity. And so on.)

The Doctor, meanwhile, sides with the anarchy of teenage emotional and political anger. He can't be a scientist in the Josiah or Light sort of way. He loathes bus stations, with all their timetables and categories and delineated waiting areas... with their hierarchies and schedules and zones and order. He sides with those who want to blow up the Victorian edifice for what it shares with the kind of thinking that leads racists to firebomb the flats of Asian families.

(While we're on the subject, lets dispense with this notion that the line "white kids firebombed it" is an embarrassing clunker. I lived near Southall in the early-to-mid 80s. I remember, as a child, hearing discussions about what some of my fellow "white kids" were getting up to in the area often called "Little India". I remember the racism of the "white kids" in the dark blue uniforms, protecting National Front "white kids" while arresting Indian youths on the assumption that their bikes were stolen.  I was aware of the "white kid" coppers who'd killed anti-racist protesters with impunity. I found out, as an adult, about the riots and protests that were the inevitable result of such racism. So, basically, if you cringe at the line "white kids firebombed it" then I submit that you have missed the point.)

The Doctor sides with those who just want to explore the catalogue rather than fix everything into place and create a static tyranny of categories and labels and authority. That's why the story concentrates on the binaries that bleed into each other, on the transgression of categories. Ace and Gwendoline put on male clothes and it causes a hell of a stir, but it demonstrates that such fixed categories are just snapshots of evolution. And, of course, people can change because they exist in a social context rather than just a biological one. Humans self-create meaning. Meaning self-creates meaning. Dialectically.

This is what really bugs Light, I think, just as it bugs Josiah and Matthews in different ways.  Light, of course, is the apocalyptic intensification of their joint horror at the transgression of categories... particularly by those who had no part in drawing them up and making them law.  That's the deep reason for the apparently over-the-top description of Light and his Survey as "an evil older than time itself".  Light is evil in the senses that Terry Eagleton identified.  We ask in vain what his survey was supposed to achieve.  There was no purpose.  It had the "lethal purity" of pointlessness.  Light is against 'Being' because he doesn't understand that Being is all about change.  Ultimately this was always going to lead to an attempt at negation, at annihilation.  Meaningless in himself - because he does not change... or at least doesn't think that he does - Light wishes to expunge all meaning.  He's the angelic cleanser.  All information that is not him must be burned away.

As that eminent Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins put it (quoted by Eagleton):  "Flaws, loose ends, and rough approximations are what evil cannot endure. This is one reason why it has an affinity with the bureaucratic mind. Goodness, by contrast, is in love with the dappled, unfinished nature of things."

The irony with which the Doctor defeats Light is that very "unfinished nature" of all 'Being', even his own.  Light ("Imagination, comma, lack of") cannot conceive that any information can be invented, reworked, recreated by people.  The very dialectic of change within himself is enough to ossify him from within.  He is literally out-evolved by himself.

Wicked.

Grinding Engines

The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820 

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.  Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.

SF - with its concentration upon imagined future history, the elision of past technology with future technology, encounters with alien species further down the road of technological advancement than us and, last but not least, time travel - seems especially concerned with historical transformation, particularly with regards to technology.

Humans seem to have a tendency to imagine future disaster, or at least future decay, as a way of expressing our perception that our own world is winding down and wobbling on the brink.  This may be an inherent human feeling (like the seemingly inevitable perception that younger generations are worse than our own, which Plato was banging on about thousands of years ago).

We’re all time travellers, in a way. We all travel from ‘the old days’ into uncertain futures. This feeling has become especially acute for humans living in the modern era, when the forces of production unleashed by the capitalist mode have achieved things which previous generations would have considered to be impossible except through sorcery. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, as they attempted to express the way the emerging capitalist system was changing all human experience:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Capitalism began to revolutionise human life to an unprecedented degree, in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented speed, through the arrival of mass production, the factory system, technology, etc. The level and speed at which things changed massively increased.  Technology is a platform from which more sophisticated levels of technology may be attained, just as every scientific advance stems from earlier discoveries… moreover, since the economic basis of the technological revolution was industry, i.e. capitalism, the constant need to revolutionise the system was built into the system. Capitalists must always increase production, invest in new techniques and methods of production, pioneer new products, lower production costs, expand into new markets, etc. Capital breeds capital… and capital must be fed back into the process of expanding the productive forces. Every capitalist does this, for fear of being outstripped and put out of business.

Nevertheless, despite the dynamism of the system and the incredible material progress that it has brought, capitalism is inherently entropic.

Capitalism gave rise to the concept of entropy in the first place.   Thermodynamics (of which entropy is, as we know, the 'second law') - and with it much of modern physics -  was a scientific notion arrived at because of the Industrial Revolution, because the engineers wanted to know how their engines worked, why they didn't work, why they wound down, how they could be stopped from winding down and how they could be made to work better, stronger, faster, harder, longer. The connection continues: the application of entropy to Information Theory came from within the Rand Corporation.

Capitalism generates technological commodities which gradually run down, either in relative terms (i.e. becoming less efficient than new technology) or in absolute terms (i.e. in that they gradually get worn and used and tired) or in both.

This process generates wastage of technology. We’ve all been to the tip and seen those piles of old TVs, cookers, microwaves, freezers, etc. These are phenomena of modernity. I don’t mean that nothing decayed or fell apart in the Middle Ages or the Ancient world (of course it did), but the speed at which we produce more and more technology also increases the speed at which our world fills with technology that has become obsolete, decrepit, malfunctioning and abandoned.  The lives of humans in pre-modern, pre-technological societies are/were fundamentally dominated by endlessly repeating cycles embedded in nature.  The lives of humans in modern, technological society have many of the same cycles, but are increasingly dominated by the onward rush of change that comes with the continual revolutionizing of the productive forces.

Modernity has fundamentally reversed the old relationship humanity used to have with its creations, tools and machines.  For most of human history, the technological creations outlived the creators, both in general and often in particular.  The concept of the waterwheel would outlive the miller; often the particular wheel with which he worked would outlast him.  Now, humans outlive almost all their technological creations, except the most basic and/or monumental, like buildings... and even they have been changed, in both design practices and materials, almost beyond recognition.  The surgeon outlives successive generations of up-to-the-minute surgical tools, the web-designer outlives the most advanced hardware and software every year or so.  They even live to see the fundamental principles revolutionised.

The world that Plato died in was more or less the world he was born in, at least in terms of technology, and at least compared to us. To him, computers would have seemed like magic.  In 1980, Christopher H. Bidmead was able to write a script in which the Doctor expresses surprise that a computer retains information even when switched off. When the people who watched that episode as children (i.e. people like me) die… well, who knows?  Computers themselves may be obsolete by then.  But the undreamt-of advances of the future will leave the increasingly rickety state-of-the-art-circa-2012 standing... or more likely rotting.  Every new mp3 player or mobile phone or digital camera entails older models thrown in the scrap. DVD and Blu-Ray entailed piles of discarded old VHS tapes.  Every newly-purchased gadget means another of those little plastic-coated wire things that tie the brand new cables and leads into a neat bow.  Every DVD or CD bought means adding to the mountains of cellophane in which they come wrapped.

This is just the tip of the shitberg. From the earliest days of the industrial revolution – long before what we know as the green movement - people had been noticing the way that industrial technology generates wastage, pollution and rubbish as by-products. The railways were themselves the result of a staggering development of the productive forces of society, and their effects fed dialectically back into the system, contributing to yet more staggering development. But the combustion engine produced an enormous need to tear energy from the earth in the form of coal, it belched smoke, produced grease and dirt… and all its component parts were subject to all the wear and tear of shoe leather or flint hammers or any other tool. The gears and wheels and tracks wore away, stopped functioning properly, needed replacing, were torn out and discarded when superior innovations came along.

Time has always been, as Ovid put it, “the devourer of all things”, but it is only in the modern era – the era of capitalist industry and mass technology – that we humans have seen such impermeable and ubiquitous evidence of decay, wear and tear, abrasion, clutter and accelerating obsolescence. It surrounds us now. It demonstrates the impermanence of the things we make.  It lurks behind the latest innovations, waiting for their time to come.  And it is our creation.

It was one thing to see the natural world wither every autumn and regenerate itself every spring… these days we watch our own wondrous creations fall apart all around us, all the time, everywhere, no matter what we do. And unlike dead leaves, spent batteries don’t pass back into the soil from which they came. They sit on rubbish heaps. They engorge landfills. They float in canals. If we don’t trouble to do anything about it, they fill our drawers. And every time we open the drawer, they’re still there. Pooled in entropic uselessness. Production and consumption culminating in static malfunction. Recycling is an attempt to fend off industrial entropy as well as environmental devastation… but even the recycling collection vans belch out fumes; even the engines and crushers and pulpers and sievers of the recycling plant eventually run down.

That other great product of the modern age - world-scale, technological, industrial warfare - also creates entropy in massive doses.  All the machinery of modern war is industrially produced and industrially used.  The tanks, the machine guns, the planes, the bombs, the drones, the smart missiles, the body armour, the computer guidance systems, the depleted uranium-coated shells, the armour piercing rounds... they're all subject to the same pressures as all other industrial commodities.  Just like the mp3 players, the war machines are mass produced for profit.  Just like all machines, the military hardware wears down.  The newer model is designed and produced and sold.  A new missile system is bought by a government and all the old warheads are obsolete.  The unused weapons degrade and become useless.  The weapons that are used get bashed and battered, get sprayed with bullets or blown up (like the men who are sent to fire them).  Either that, or their gears grind and shread as the desert sand gets into their innards.  War is often said to lead to technological innovation, what with necessity being the mother of invention.  We might want to wonder how we define "necessity" in this context.

 And we might want to remember, alongside all the innovation, how much destruction war creates.  It leaves not only piles of expended and exhausted weapons, but cities reduced to rubble, the technological commodities that filled them turned to so many smithereens.  The wars that smash the wonders of the modern age to fragments are themselves products of the modern age.

The system that created the drive for hegemony, control of resources and markets which lead to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, also created the materiel which made the invasion possible... much of which was smashed, pulverised and incinerated in the process (to say nothing of the people who were turned to mincemeat or vapour).

But the loss of materiel simply refreshed the market for their products.  The debris piles grow, constantly refreshed by the engines of modernity.  In this sense, warfare is just the fastest, most extreme manifestation of the tendency inherent in capitalism towards the creation, circulation and consumption of commodities.

Modern warfare is industrial, technological... and it is like a frenzied, violent dramatization of the boom and slump cycle - the irresolvable and unreformable contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

This is where we loop back to the start and find the most basic reasons and ways in which capitalism is entropic.

It is the very necessity of accumulation to capitalists that causes crises.  In order to win in the market, the capitalist must invest in productivity.  He must produce his goods or services better, faster, cheaper.  He must drive down prices.  The primary way he can do this while continuing to turn a profit is to make workers more productive by investing in the machinery and techniques they use in the workplace.  But, in doing this, the capitalist changes the ratios.  The worker becomes more and more swamped by, integrated in and subordinate to machinery and systems.

The labour power of the worker is the source of exchange value, which appears in the market as price.  Human labour power is the only commodity that creates new value.  A worker spends only part of each working day creating the amount of value needed to perpetuate their own existence, the rest of the day is spent producing surplus value which goes to the capitalist.  The machinery used in the production process transmits some of the value embedded in it to the products, but cannot produce new value.  By itself, it can do nothing.  It must be set in motion and controlled by human labour power.  And even the value that the machinery does transmit (depreciating all the while) was itself created by the human labour power that created the machine.  When the capitalist pours surplus value back into the system, when he invests in machinery, he invests in that part of the production process that cannot create new value.  This is, ultimately, why prices drop: because the value (i.e. labour time) embedded in the product decreases.  This is all fine and dandy for the first capitalist to make the technical innovation, buy the better machine, automate more of the factory, develop the new and better software, etc... and, in the first instance, it helps him succeed against his competition.  But, over time, more capitalists invest in the same or better innovations, techniques and machines... they must, in order to accumulate in order to compete... and the level of profit across the entire system falls.

This is a tendency that asserts itself over time.  There are, as Marx readily allowed, countervailing tendencies than can retard or offset the falling rate of profit.  But, overall and over time, the tendency shows.  This analysis has been controversial but is readily and convincingly defencible.  Moreover, empirical data bears it out.  The current global recession was caused, at the most fundamental level, by just such a long term decline and stagnation of profitability.

Capitalism drives itself into chaos and crisis even as it accumulates.... because it accumulates.  It’s an inherent aspect of the system, to grind the engines until they burst apart.

Crisis leads to the wastage and destruction of excess capital.  Firms go bust.  Factories and offices close.  People are laid off.  Warehouses stagnate filled with unsold and unsaleable goods.  Town centres empty of going concerns.  Increasingly penurious ex-consumers walk past vacated shops and stare through the dirty windows - the 'Everything Must Go' posters growing faded and tatty; the sellotape holding them up turning yellow and dry - into haunted rooms occupied by nothing but worn carpet and unopened mail.  Empty facilities sit rusting in stasis.  This decay and waste reduces the amount of capital in the system, thus opening up the possibility of a restoration of profit to the average.  It was the accumulation of capital that lead to the fall, remember.

Eventually, the limping casualties that are still viable are gobbled up by the predators big enough to survive the recession.  These leviathans heave the system back out of crisis and the cycle begins again.  But capital becomes ever more concentrated and centralized into the hands of the great predators.  Their power becomes so great that their interests merge with that of the nation state.  Competition and accumulation are played out at the level of global imperialist competition.  Nation states squabble over access to, shares of, control over resources and markets.  They squabble because their existence is ever more bound up with increasingly concentrated and centralized capital.

The system generates entropy at every level.

It even generates entropy of different kinds at different levels of the concept.

Slump generates stasis and dereliction.

Boom generates depreciation and the proliferation of technological clutter and decay.

War generates massive destruction and wastage.

Peace generates the hegemony of huge capitals that standardize and homogenize everything into a vast stream of indistinguishable, banal, bland cultural porridge.  Even without the hyper-consumerism in which we now live, photography and mass production created the stripping away of the aura of the individual work of art, the vertigo of endless reproduction.

If capitalism manages to raise the productive forces as far as some think it will... if it one day creates nanotechnology that will alter matter at the ceullular, or even molecular level... there is a mooted possibility that such technology will result in the reduction of all matter into an undifferentiated mass of shuffled, randomized, unpredictable, informationless, apocalyptic unstuff.

This is the ecophagic apocalypse of the 'grey goo' scenario.  It has fascinated writers of science fiction more than it has genuinely worried scientists.  This is because it ties directly into something that we all know and feel and see about the world of technology, industry and modernity (of capitalism): that it has entropy woven into its fabric.

The world of the machine is - from certain angles - a world of monsters; monsters that champ and chew and digest and excrete human experience.

We live in the shit of Moloch.  And nothing is more entropic than shit.

*

To recap:

Modernity, which is the age of mass industrial technology, is thus also the age of science, whence comes the concept of entropy.  The scientific concept of entropy, besides addressing concerns of industry and science, also expresses - or lends itself to analogies which express - longstanding human anxieties about time, decay, death, etc.  In the modern age, which is the age of capitalism (and hence of mass production and overproduction of commodities), such anxieties are ramped up beyond any level before known in human culture because the modern age is an age of omnipresent wastage, rubbish, obsolescence, clutter, malfunction and destruction.

To expand a bit:

In the past, anxieties about time and decay were not exacerbated by technology and industrial production (for the simple reason that they did not yet exist, or predominate).  Such anxieties were about age and illness and death.  They were treated in myths, legends, fairytales, etc., with their seemingly endless concern with young girls and crones, fertility of land linked to human fertility, death and rebirth, imprisonment, eternal guardianship, etc.  Myths and legends and fairytales endlessly riff on order turned to chaos, chaos turned to order, potential wasted, youth lost, age consuming youth, youth banishing age, fertility banishing barrenness, and so on.

Science fiction is, I think, the reiteration of myth and legend in the age of modernity, hence in the idioms of technology.  There's a definition of sci-fi as being "about the relationship between man and his tools"... yet the "tools" that concern sci-fi are robots, spaceships, computers, etc... all of which are recognisably projections of trends or possibilities within modern industrial technology.  That's why it isn't sci-fi when ancient legends tell of magic swords, but it is sci-fi when writers in the 19th-21st centuries tell of advanced machines that can fly people between the stars.

Therefore, the preoccupation of science fiction - or at least certain strands of science fiction - with entropy is hardly surprising.  SF is the literary/cultural form that is more a product of modernity than any other.  It might be the said to be the adaptation of the most basic forms of storytelling to the landscape (or culturescape) of a world dominated by modern capitalism.  SF is the mythic expression of frenzied technological innovation, general commodity production, overproduction, overaccumulation, obsolescence, re-investment and re-innovation, more production, more obsolescence, more rubbish tips, and so on.

Entropy might just be a key link in this chain.  It is an idea that arose from, and is of great utility to, modernity.  It is an idea expressed in and by the industrial machine, the technologeme.  It expresses something inherent and unavoidable within all technology.  It refers to something that is more visible and intense in all our lives because of mass production.  It also provides a link to older forms of discourse that express ancient human concerns.  After all, anxieties about age, illness, infertility and death have not gone away... they have just been supplemented by anxieties about the aging, malfunctioning, failure and threatening behaviour of technology and industrial products.

Entropy might just be the missing link between myth and science-fiction.

It might just be why the quintessential modern literary/cultural genre of the machine age also became - so often and on so many levels - a reiteration of myth.

Binro Was Right

This is a rejigged new version of something originally posted at the old site.  I've snipped a few irrelevancies and amplified some conclusions.  Oh, and it's dedicated to Iain Cuthbertson and Timothy Bateson, both of whom died last year.



'The Ribos Operation' seems, at first glance, to present the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, spiralling downwards from a meeting with a quasi-God in a surreal conceptual landscape, downwards into a story about the vast conquest plans of an interplanetary warlord, further downwards into a heist caper about two semi-comic con-men, and then further downwards into a short meeting between and old man and a young man in a little flea-ridden hovel... yet it's in the hovel that we find the real message of the story.  But is Binro right?

Well, he's right about the stars being suns circled by inhabited worlds (just like his somewhat-more mystical and flamboyant progenitor Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake by the Church for, effectively, founding science-fiction... fair enough, some would say). But, in the wider sense, isn't the story's most moving and thematically vital scene compromised by what goes on around it? After all, it turns out that the universe is caught in the battle between light and dark "gods", and shaking bones about and chanting is a valid path to knowledge!

My feeling is that, ultimately, this story's real gist is a little more complex and contingent than it seems.  I'm not convinced that it's really about oppositions between good and bad, or even science and superstition... but we're going to have to work around this a bit.

For a story which sets up and begins a quest narrative about the conflict between two godlike entities called the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, 'The Ribos Operation' is surprisingly ambiguous in its treatment of morality. The White Guardian here is certainly no lovable Mr Nice Guy. On the contrary, he's a sinister old bourgeois bully, twisting the Doctor's arm into helping him for reasons that are (by anything he actually says) self-serving. If he's God (and the opening scene cheekily teases us into momentarily thinking he might be) then he's no kindly deity, but rather the Old Testament Yahweh in one of his quiet and scary moods.

(It's interesting to note that, on the few occasions when the classic series had the Doctor meeting gods, they were usually played by plummy thesps and did an awful lot of sitting around in chairs being coldly inscrutable. Really, the "gods" in the classic series really do an astonishing amount of sitting, i.e. Sutekh, the Gods of Ragnarok, etc.  By contrast, the only "god" to have appeared in the new series takes the form of a big, snarling Heavy Metal album cover. Now, the Beast may represent fine CGI, but, if you ask me, it possesses considerably less dramatic power than Cyril Luckham sipping creme de menthe.)

But, anyway... like the old geezer in the chair, Garron and Unstoffe are also hard to pin down morally. They're crooks who happily talk about mugging people, yet they seem to lack cruelty. Like Vorg in 'Carnival of Monsters', Garron can be seen as an entrepreneur, an embodiment of the cuddlier aspects of free trade and enterprise, bringing some colour to the lives of the poor souls who don't get to enjoy the benefits of the market... but he's also a criminal, a con-man.  There's no doubt about that.  But his saving grace is that he is not powerful himself, but preys upon the powerful.  Poor rubes like the Ribans have little to fear from him.  He's the kind of capitalist who bilks big investors in a shady shares deal and then buggers off to the Bahamas.  As such, he's likeable. The Doctor certainly likes him (but then, he should - they're very alike) and finds his anecdotes about past jobs laugh-out-loud amusing. Garron is another of Bob Holmes' quasi-Falstaffs: a charismatic and adorably transparent fake, loquacious, cowardly but not weasley, hedonistic and debauched (though, unlike Falstaff, not in the sexual sense: charmingly, Garron takes care to avoid touching Romana's boobs when he gets the chance).

These Holmes reimaginings of Shakespeare's fat knight can go either way (c.f. Jago and Shockeye) but Garron is also one of Holmes' quasi-Doctors, those characters of his that reflect the Doctor. In Garron, we see aspects of Our Hero.  In his way, the Doctor can be seen as an expression of bourgeois libertarian individualism... though he's too scrupulous for that role really.  But he and Garron are both opt-outs, independants and chancers, in it for the thrills and the laughs. The Doctor coolly admits to being "terrified" even as he's clearly enjoying himself. Garron is less into actual danger but evidently finds the con game, with all the attendant risk, highly amusing. Why pick on someone like Vynda-K if not from a desire to live dangerously? Garron could sell the jethryk and retire so why doesn't he think it's "worth all that much"? Because it's not really money he wants. The jethryk is a means to an end. It allows him to work his big, audacious cons; it allows him to make fools of people he holds in contempt (like the Graff). If he sold it he'd get the money, but then what? Make Garron rich and you'd bore him to death. Similarly, the Doctor couldn't cope with the easy life. He had it and he rejected it, much to Romana's bemusement. The Doctor likes to be where the action is, or even to make the action. The White Guardian knows exactly how to threaten him: "Nothing at all. Ever." is as good as a death sentence to the Doctor. Like the Doctor, Garron ran away from a home to which he can't go back. Like the Doctor, in his way, he's on a moral mission. And he has an inbuilt sense of justice - maybe not right and wrong, but justice. "All I do is take a bit from those who have too much and then I spread it around a bit. I help to keep the economy in balance!" Well, the story started with a warning about how concentrations of "forces" can lead to chaos. Garron, despite his criminality, is an agent of the balance that the Key supposedly represents. He just balances out the money. He really is the "innocent crook" of the Doctor's description. In a way, the Doctor's an innocent crook in this story too - trying to steal the jethryk not for its monetary value, but only because it's the key to his further adventures. Just like Garron. In fact, even the Graff only wants the jethryk because it's the key to his future adventures! I suppose it all comes down to what kind of adventures you have in mind.

And maybe Romana isn't far wrong when she pronounces that Garron is labouring under a "deep seated sense of rejection" - the remark might be useless, but it isn't necessarily wrong. Is Garron taking a kind of humourous revenge on a world he finds ridiculous and mean? Is he a poor boy who likes seeing the rich with egg on their faces? He wouldn't be the first. He might not have Unstoffe's righteous rage at the murder of Binro, but he certainly enjoys making the Graff squirm with his last-minute flim-flam about security agents. That's the real Garron, I think: grinning as he mocks the Graff with what he thinks are going to be his last words, ridiculing the tyrant's pretentions and pointing out that he's just a crook like the rest of them.

The Graff himself is a less ambiguous character... though he's not quite just the "big bad soldier" that he at first appears. He's tough enough to wander around in caves for a year if he gets to kill with the lads, yet he whinges feebly about the cold. He genuinely loves his thuggish old general Sholahk, though his real distress at Sholahk's death immediately transmutes into vengeful rage - a hallmark trait of the desperately immature. In fact, Sholahk appears to be the nearest thing the Graff has to family.  Sholahk clearly loves and indulges his boy, too much probably. With Vynda-K you get the sense of a big kid in an adult's body. He sulks, he throws tantrums, he has to be soothed and appeased like a baby. He's a spoilt child, deprived of affection but overindulged. You get the sense of a fractured family from the mentions of his usurping "half-brother". He's none too canny either. He was silly enough to let his half-brother steal his throne while he was off killing people. And he's completely fooled by Garron and Unstoffe (scringestone and all) until he accidentally finds Garron's bug.

Even Binro has his shadowy ambiguities. He's still alive, albeit with ruined hands. Why wasn't he burned (or whatever)? Well, maybe - like Galileo - he did the pragmatic thing and recanted... not that I'd blame him.

What makes these people interesting is the fact that they're all trapped between two different worlds and/or ways of living. The Graff doesn't know if he's a Prince anymore or not. Romana is fully qualified and well educated but next to useless in a world she's never experienced before. Her scholarly diagnoses of everything she encounters are no good when she's up against something with blood-splattered fangs. Meanwhile, Garron doesn't know if he's Ronnie Biggs or Robin Hood.

(Robin Hood seems to have been on Holmes' mind when he wrote this. Apart from Garron's idealised self-portrait of himself as a rebel wealth-redistributor, there's also the fact that "Binro" is an anagram and that the Graff is displaced by a treacherous brother while away on crusade, which is very reminiscent of King John's antics while Richard the Lionheart - or Richard the Warmongering Bastard as he probably should be known - was off splashing around in the entrails of Arabs. The Robin Hood myth is itself a product of a time of transition, a fable for people caught between forest and town, between increasingly centralised Norman power and the old Saxon ways, between the rock of law and the hard place of poverty.)

As usual in a Robert Holmes script, the story is powered by misunderstandings and, on the deeper level, by failures to understand oneself. This isn't Garron's last job, nor is Unstoffe leaving him. The Graff's plans for conquering back his throne are as illusory as Garron's business proposal, or Romana's idea that she's on a mission for her Supreme Council and can re-educate the Doctor by humouring him.

One hopes that Binro's newfound hope of vindication isn't illusory, but it may be; progress isn't a concept that this story leaves unchallenged. Binro is certainly caught between two worlds, just like all the people of Ribos. Ribos is an entire world stuck between two phases. It's not just at the mercy of extremely dualistic weather; it has arrived at the historical crossroads that divides the medieval from the modern. Ribos, one senses, is just a few Binros short of a Renaissance. It's still superstitious, but inching towards enlightenment.

In this story, we see the mingling of the sacred and the profane. This is something that the people of the Renaissance felt deeply, as they struggled through the Reformation, as the rise of Humanism began to reflect the progressive ideas of newly forming economic classes. The Riban relicary ("a holy place" says the Captain) is actually a treasure vault, full of jewelled trinkets, guarded against obviously less-then-pious locals by coppers and their pet monster, available as a temporary safe deposit box to travelling merchants (once a gratuity has gone to the head Shrieve). In one of the story's most telling details, the Graff pauses in the middle of haggling over money with Garron to notice that, outside the room, monks have started chanting matins. Even the Seeker goes all businesslike once her first Unstoffe-finding session comes to an end; you get a sense that this is one police psychic who charges overtime.

There are two worlds on Ribos, existing at once: the feudal world of shrines and devotion versus the new world of opeks and merchants and proto-banks and cannons (i.e. conglomerates and weapons tech... the Graff's world). The Greater Cyrhennic Alliance from which the offworlders hail seems to be just Ribos a few centuries on. The strangers use the same currency and wear the same kinds of clothes as the locals. You get the sense of one culture at different points: before technology and afterwards. Ribos is at the cusp of history and the Graff Vynda-K is its future, if they're not careful... because what's the Graff but the sort of person who crushes a dissident's hands, only armed with lasers and spaceships?

'The Ribos Operation', even as it champions the idea of progress through science and knowledge, interrogates the idea by showing primitive Ribos offset against a high-tech future that seems, socially and morally, to have progressed not a jot. If the Ribans embrace empirical thinking, and it simply leads them into their own version of the Graff's culture, what chance has Binro of being reverently remembered? The Levithians call the Ribans "primitive", but are they any better? Or just better equipped? Is that the only difference between "Grade 1" and "Grade 2 status"? Say the Ribans one day figure out how to get the energy out of the jethryk... maybe they'll just fuel ships of conquest, like the Graff plans to do.  The Levithians, for all their advancement, are still ridden by class and hierarchy.  Their world has planet-sellers and galaxy-spanning capitalist industries.  This is the world that the Ribans are just starting to develop, writ large and entrenched.  The Levithians still have princes and thrones, but then so do we.  Societies don't develop in linear and simultaneous ways; indeed, it is the contradictions within and between them that drives history.  The key to understanding why all that progress and science and reason (embodied by Binro) doesn't automatically translate into an enlightened society for the Levithians is to be found in the concentration of power and wealth and technology into private hands, that have harnessed minds like Binro's to developing fuel and weapons and industries.

Where does this all come from? Well, I think it has less to do with historical materialism or Trotsky's theory of 'uneven and combined development' than Bob Holmes' knowledge of Shakespeare.  This story seems obsessed with people caught between different worlds... and that's probably because a lot of it (at least in terms of story and motif rather than language) is ransacked from Shakespeare. Shakespeare provided Holmes with the literary DNA for this story, just as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' gets its genes from Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, etc. Of course, that doesn't make it necessary for Holmes to craft 'Ribos' as highbrow art (if it had, he wouldn't have done it). On the contrary, much of Shakespeare's output was, like Doctor Who, not at all "caviar to the general". Shakespeare was a man who liked money and crafted most of his plays in the hope that they would do good box office. The occasional play may have been specifically created to impress elite audiences with his cleverness and erudition (like Love's Labours Lost, which would almost certainly not have played at the Globe to thunderous applause from huge crowds of groundlings, as depicted in 'The Shakespeare Code') but, for the most part, Shakespeare was as concerned with bums on seats as any producer of Doctor Who. Falstaff - who, as I've said, bequeathed a little something of himself to Garron - was a big audience draw. The need to put on exciting adventures in thrilling historical periods and exotic foreign lands (adventures in Time and Space, you could say) explains why so many of Shakespeare's plays (particularly the earlier Histories) concern things like excitingly devious warlords who usurp or get usurped, who challenge each other to duels by chucking gloves about, who bellow insults and taunts at their enemies, who go on killing rampages for political power. Sound familiar?

Yep, the Graff not only resembles such early-Shakespearean villains as the Duke of York and his son Richard (of the Henry VI plays and Richard III) but he also resembles the war-hungry Hotspur from Henry IV Part 1 and Prospero, the former Duke of Milan from The Tempest who is displaced and banished by his scheming brother (and who plots his revenge using the resources he finds on a remote island populated by a man he treats cruelly and calls a savage). In fact, he also resembles Macbeth in taking the prophecy of a witch and then making it come true by following it as though it's his inescapable destiny. Most of all, perhaps, he reminds me of Coriolanus, who is a bloodthirsty Roman warmonger and a scornful snob, rejected by Rome for his overweening pride only to join forces with Rome's enemies and return planning to destroy his home city. Coriolanus is a child-man, just like the Graff. A spoiled brat with homicidal tendencies. He likes nothing more than wading in blood but loses his rag if you call him "boy".

At times, 'Ribos' lapses into what is almost Shakespeare pastiche... I'm thinking particularly of the "Freytus labyrinth" scene, in which the Graff and Sholahk start inverting clauses at each other and Sholahk comes close to launching into a soliloquy about their former campaign. Paul Seed catches what the script is up to and delivers a deliberately hammy, bombastic, full-throttle RSC performance to go with the quasi-Shakespearean character he's been given. Watching him, at times, you almost think you've tuned into the BBC Shakespeare by mistake. In the early 80s, the BBC did Shakespeare's first tetralogy for TV, starring Cully, Irongron, Cassandra, Major Daley from 'Carnival of Monsters', Bor from 'Terminus', Mr Magpie from 'The Idiot's Lantern', Zaphod from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Victor Meldrew's wife (amongst others). The result was the jewel of the BBC Shakespeare series, a high-octane blast of fustian bombast, arcane politics, unrestrained violence and epic squabbling in a tiny, abstract studio set. Paul Seed's performance in 'Ribos' (minus a little of the more deliberate mucking about) would have fit right in between Julia Foster's venomous Queen Margaret and Bernard Hill's seething York.

But I digress outrageously.

The thing that 'Ribos' most owes to Shakespeare is its depiction of a society caught between two overlapping and conflicting historical moments, and of how people get caught in the middle and are thus, sometimes, ground up like mincemeat. Shakespearean tragedy has less to do with "tragic flaws" of character (whatever our teachers said) and more to do with people caught inside social contradictions. In all his great tragedies, the story is the same. Hamlet is a modern, educated youth who is caught between a Humanistic version of the future and the old feudal order, built on blood vengeance and rigid hierarchies. His tragedy is that he can't be true to himself and obey his father's ghost, no matter how much he might want to. Similarly, Macbeth is caught between a different version of the same contradictions - loyalty to the old order that keeps him in his place, or advancement by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Lear dismantles his kingdom and sets up a new order based on competition, yet he can't compete! Othello owes his promotion to the forward-looking commercial city of Venice, yet he cannot shake off his awareness of himself as an outsider or the resentments of the bigots... nor can his romantic nature fully handle the Venetian conception of marriage as a property relationship.  Coriolanus cannot be both the imperious aristocratic bullyboy and the tactful politician, yet Rome demands both of him. Shakespeare reflected the anxieties of his age, a time when feudalism was in the process of being replaced by what would become capitalism. People, at that time, were caught between the old order (the rigid feudal class system, agrarianism, the power of the Church, etc.) and the rising new order (trade, industry, technology, social and economic mobility, innovations in religion). Well, as we've seen, exactly the same sort of thing is happening in 'The Ribos Operation'.

Ribos is caught between an old pattern of authoritarian religiosity and the new possibilities (good and bad) opened up by empirical thinking, weapons, trade and money. Binro is caught in the teeth of this trap; neither free to think nor able to content himself with stories of battling gods. Strangely, the Graff is caught in the same kind of trap. He's a tyrant without people to rule. He's trying to regain his glory days, unable to understand that the world has changed forever and left him behind. The Alliance doesn't need him anymore; presumably their period of feudal squabbling has ended and they're becoming a mercantile culture, complete with mining conglomerates. His own people don't want him back. The Graff and Binro are shadowy reflections of each other, walking onto the same flypaper but from different directions: Binro was trying to go forward, the Graff was trying to go backwards. And so, inevitably, they bump into each other. The Doctor's not even there, but this is still one of the key moments of the story. Even at this moment, when trying to lie his way out of trouble, Binro instinctively comes up with a cover story that betrays his empirical habits of thought: he says he's "looking for fossils". Well, he's found one... it's called the Graff Vynda-K.

Binro then says that he sells the fossils, showing the way the rise of the new world of markets and money and commodities is inextricably linked to his empiricism.

But what about the apparent contradiction between Binro's empirical insights and the story's presentation of the apparently supernatural?  Well, supernatural elements occur in many of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Even Julius Caesar - sometimes described as a spare and austere tragedy - is full of ghosts, prophets, portentous dreams and weird visions. You have to understand these things as symptoms of the conflict between the old world and the new. The ghost of Hamlet's father is less an actual ghost than he is a personification of the dying age. Hamlet (deceased) speaks of the tormenting fires he was sent to because he was murdered while unconfessed (as in Catholicism, which was the "old" faith in Elizabeth's Protestant England) and commands his son to instantly exact bloody revenge in accordance with the old honour code. The Seeker and the Guardians in 'Ribos' can be understood in a similar way.

The Seeker seems to embody the old order on Ribos. She rattles bones while chanting about ancestors, she leads the story down into the Catacombs, the "home of the long dead and of the Ice Gods". Her persona unites the past generations, the old religion and the forces of Riban authority. She brings the brutal officers of both the Shrievalty and the Graff down after Binro and Unstoffe. And this is key: she unites the forces of Ribos and Levithia in a search for two hunted men.  When Vynda-K and Sholahk begin to despair of finding their prey in the catacombs, they decide to employ the Seeker as a hunting dog for them.  They're the ones from the world of technology, allying themselves with the world of witchery... and the link is in the brutality of oppression.

The Graff might be every inch the modern imperialist, sneering at the Ribans as "primitives" and "natives", but he fits right in with their witch hunt. As already noted, he's just them a few thousand years hence. He might loathe the Ribans and plan to slaughter them, but in so doing he just makes himself look more at home in their medieval world, strewn with bones and patrolled by monsters. At this level of the story, the Graff seems to fuse with the bones and the ghosts and the Seeker and the monsters and the forces that persecuted Binro. The morbidity of supernaturalism, the squalor of ignorance and the crazed imperialism of the Graff melt into each other. How fitting that he should die because - like some Islamist terrorist - he has tried to send one of his followers out to be a suicide bomber. Of course, he also resembles the neo-con warmongers whose cynicism and irrational faiths (in extremist free market economics, for instance) mirror and trump their Islamist enemies/counterparts in their levels of destructiveness.

This is why we can't just say that Binro's materialist and empiricist conclusions are an end in themselves.  Dawkins and Hitchens and so on might see science as a potential guaranteur of humane, tolerant, liberal, modernity which ranges itself against the backward, regressive, medieval violence of religion... and there's a grain of truth in that... but not when it is allied to the kind of culturalist 'clash of civilisations' hogwash beloved of Hitchens and Sam Harris.  The thing that produces both Islamist terrorism and Western imperialism is the system of class, hierarchy and unaccountable power that also produced the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological revolution.  We need more than just science and reason, however Baconian they may be.

Binro is no political philosopher, but he understands the need to protect a hunted man from guards.  His insights are superb, but so is his humanity and his resistance to power... even the power that comes stomping in from the scientific, technological future.  That's what makes him right.