While watching BSG, Adama returns throughout the series to the following theme: "It is not enough just to survive, one has to be worthy of survival ... and that they never asked themselves why they deserve to survive." When looking at the longterm effects of the human race on the Earth, this unconsidered is worth asking. The blending of survival, meaning, and ethics is a move that provides longterm trajectories to the critical statements about local rhetorics. For it combines the needs of the global as a local-cultural issue: what makes us worthy today of using Earth and its resources?
I can't remember if I blogged this before, but the mid-season ending of BSG was brilliant. Of course, they find Earth. And of course, it's been destroyed from a nuclear devastation. Mankind is still looking to implement a worthy ethics for its survival.
2 comments:
Would you mind if I answered your question? While, my response may sound trite, I have been pondering this thought nugget for awhile...
What makes us worthy of using the resources? Evolution. We won; we are the most fit--the most capable, the most adaptable. We are the critters best suited to populate the environment. As a result I have a difficult time understanding the appeal of the notion of “worthy of survival” or the earth would be “better off without our survival”. If we adhere to the notion of evolution and its workings, then such a concept (the ethics of evolution?) seems, well, rather contradictory.
I have been struggling to link conservation and evolution for some time. The two principals seem to be in considerable conflict (like in your question, or at least in the way I answered your question).
I don't mind you offering this idea at all. For me, the difficulty with this answer is that "Evolution is not Progress." We so much want to construct meaning over time (in our lives) that we imagine a progressive linearity to evolutionary theory and the universe. In fact, survival of the fittest does not mean the best survived; it means the "good enough" for a given situation were allowed to continue. Stupid luck or environmental conditions may have allowed species to survive while other advanced life died.
I haven't watched the last episode of BSG, so maybe I'll have more to say then. However, I have to think that our ethics can't rest with assumed progress or platonic being. I keep hoping human-cylon will develop the rhetorical means to navigate aggression against one another as they come to realize they can identify the other in themselves.
Maybe, this is too Utopian; maybe, all I can continue to do is work towards a socio-critical ethics?
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