The Netflix sci-fi television series 3 Body Problem – an adaptation of the Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin – is a paradigmatic case study to pinpoint and analyse shared intercultural desires, beliefs and fears.
This blog article focuses on the kind of messages transmitted from the Chinese written source to Westerner screens that the audience unquestionably understands and accepts: humanity desires peace and unity, we believe in the myth of progress, and we cannot imagine peace without an enemy.
This is not a series review, and I am not going to discuss the book (and the other two books forming Liu Cixin’s trilogy). Lacking Chinese language skills, I cannot write about the book’s English translation, the Chinese TV adaption by Tencent and their relationship with the Netflix TV adaptation, although I am avidly reading with other people’s thoughts about the ‘Americanisation of the story’. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/22/netflix-3-body-problem-divides-viewers-china]
The cultural historians of the future will find a mine of information about our times rebuilding the reception and adaptation of this Chinese story in the West. But for now I am interested in putting cultural and political controversies aside to present the messages that an international audience seems to tacitly, and perhaps subconsciously accept.
The myth of progress
In the 3 Body Problems, the San-Ti aliens are more technologically advanced than humans and they build a fleet to conquer our planet Earth. But the San-Ti need four-hundred years to reach earth from deep space with their fleet. By observing our exponential technological progress, the aliens are afraid that human technology could advance enough in four-hundred years to beat their conquest attempt. For this reason they force human scientists to commit suicide or stop their research thanks to two (almost) almighty high-dimensional supercomputer the size of a proton called ‘sophons’.
According to the ‘aliens’ in the fiction we make this progress thanks to scientific technology which leads to economic growth and more scientific technology, and so on. This is a very human and westerner linear concept of history. Prometheus stole fire from the Greek Gods on mount Olympus and gave it to the humans for their first step in our relentless technological advancement. Agriculture was invented in the Middle east 12,000 years ago, industrialisation in eighteenth-century Great Britain and Facebook in the Silicon Valley yesterday. What comes after is always better than what was before. Growing is always positive, more is better than less. This is what we do and think as humanity. But it is true?
This is a triumphant story of progress following precise stages that the West tells in hindsight, but it is just a story that was repeated so many times that it became true to many. Undoubtedly, it is a story that has elements of truth, but it ignores a lot of other data and points of view. Societies do not develop in neat and precise stages like human ages simply because we cannot use technological (or military, or economic) development, as the sole parameter to judge their success.
Historians can depict a biased image of the past if they believe that the present is the best place humanity has ever reached. Even our image of the future is distorted through the lens of the myth of progress, but science tells us that continual expansion is impossible because of our inefficient use of resources as signalled by biologist Thomas Wessel’s The Myth of Progress (2006, 2013). For these reasons the myth of progress can be a toxic and unjust story.
Europeans claimed superiority over the populations that they aggressively colonised when their technological progress overlapped with the idea of a ‘more advanced civilisation’ – just like adults telling children what to do. Colonisers could wrongly say: ‘We have better weapons. We built roads and bridges. We have the moral right and duty to command you’.
The 3 Body Problem project and reverses this logic: we need to compete technologically with the aliens otherwise they their colonial oppression over us is somehow justified. H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) – the first story ever describing an alien invasion – compares the conquer of Victorian London by Martian War machine to the British annihilation of the indigenous population of Tasmania. According to this vision, technological and military competition seems the only possible interaction between two different ‘civilisations’ where the opponent at the lower stage of progress loses it all.
The origin of the story
The myth of progress is a story that is told by cherry picking bits of historical truths and mixing them with the narrative devices and themes of older stories.
The origin of this myth can be found in part in Hebrew and Christian sources promising the final reward after a challenging journey. The Book of Exodus (sixth–sixth century CE. And the period described refers to 1300–1200 BCE) narrates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and their difficult journey towards the Promised Land, a land overflowing with milk and honey where God promised them a life of happiness.
The Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse of John, 81–96 CE) describes the last stages of humanity before the return of the Messia and God's kingdom comes on earth. During the centuries, influential Christian writers such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Gioacchino da Fiore (d. 1130–1220) consolidated the story that humanity was walking collectively towards heaven on earth passing through stages. Like the branches of a tree the story had several variations stemming from the same trunk.
Some of these variations fell from the original tree to give birth to a new tree: the Judeo-Christian stories describing humanity striving towards something better were so deeply modified that the presence of God became an accessory or even removed for the most defiant of the status quo. This new tree of stories fully expressed the myth of progress.
Two ways of thinking gave great energy to these stories: humanistic thinking (from the thirteen century CE) – which highlighted the agency of human beings – and the scientific method (end of the sixteenth century) – which questioned previous theories through experiments. The myth of progress found space in literature, philosophy, art and science replacing the idea of Heaven and the role of God in building human destiny.
Sir Francis Bacon’s utopian novel New Atlantis (posthumously in 1626) describes the plan and organisation of his ideal college based on proto-scientific research: ‘The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.
The eighteenth-century French Enlightenment confirmed the idea that progress is a process of rationalisation against the irrationality of religion typical of some periods (the myth of the Medieval period as a ‘Dark Age’ is based on this biased historical analysis).
Italian ‘Futurists’ violently claimed a future dominated by technology and reckless innovation to destroy the past in a continuous cycle. Their artistic Manifesto (1909) recited:
‘We stand on the cusp of a new era! Why should we look back, when we can break through the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed’. [‘Noi siamo sul promontorio estremo dei secoli!.. Perché dovremmo guardarci alle spalle, se vogliamo sfondare le misteriose porte dell'Impossibile? Il Tempo e lo Spazio morirono ieri. Noi viviamo già nell'assoluto, poiché abbiamo già creata l'eterna velocità onnipresente’].
Clearly the myth of progress influenced 3 Body Problem’s author, Liu Cixin. He pointed to Jules Verne (1828-1905) – who celebrated the technological and scientific progress of his time – as his favourite childhood author.
These few examples show how the myth of progress derives from and influenced many stories through time and space until now. This explains why the story of the 3 Body Problem originated in China but makes sense to many people around the world. Even opposite ideologies such as Capitalism and Marxism agree that History is a line that only goes up progressively in stages. Inevitably the Chinese economic experiment that unites socialism and a global market-driven economy believes in the myth of progress.
Previously, humanities had to prepare for the end of times and attempts to be saved from Hell thanks to religious practices. According to the 3 Body Problem, scientific practices will save as from the aliens, or we will succumb.
It is realistic and ironic that the aliens believed in the myth of progress considering that they cannot distinguish lies from the truth, even if this is an unintentional meta-joke by the book’s author or the Netflix series’ creators.
Peace and unity through fighting: a soothing contradiction
Even if we believe the myth of progress to be true: humanity has more technological development, economic growth, and goods pro-capita than ever. BUT are we happy? Are we so ‘civilised’ when we destroy our natural environment and damaging our physical bodies? Are we morally better when we cause injustices and inequalities in our societies and other countries?
In the 3 Body Problem the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (protagonist of the flashback, but villain in the present) wants the aliens to solve these human issues. Precisely what has to be changed and how is not clear, but the aliens will figure it out being more advanced technologically than us.
Ye Wenjie’s worries resonate with everybody from China to the West who agree that something is not working for humanity. But the specifics about which problems to tackle and the proposed solutions are part of history’s longest running debate. Ye Wenjie’s removes human agency and believes that aliens will sort our problems in way that we cannot understand like somebody believed and believes (a) God(s) could do.
Whilst Ye Wenjie represents humans’ desires to believe in something bigger and avoid collective and personal responsibilities, the ‘good characters’ in the 3 Body Problem defend the idea of humans’ agency and independence.
The problem is that the ‘good characters’ completely ignore the original human issues to keep going even strongly to fervently chase technological progress. Justified by the aliens’ alleged arrival in four-hundred years, they waste an incredible amount of money and resources in mainly useless scientific research, and they even commit terrible crimes against innocents.
As in all works of fiction, the 3 Body Problem reveals and compensates society’s beliefs, desires, contradictions, and fears. We fear the future, but we do not want to stop believing in the myth of progress that soothes our anxiety. Thomas Hobbes’s political treatise Leviathan (1651) described this continuous state of worrying:
'For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repaired in the night: So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’.
During sleep and in works of fiction, we dream of the existence of hostile aliens, so we are reassured that we do not need to change to be in peace. We can go on with technological competition and war. We believed that like in Willl Smith’s Independence Day (1996), humanity will eventually unite when we are on the brink of the apocalypse.
But the cultural battle to control the narrative of the 3 Body Problems with a Chinese and a Western version demonstrates that we do not even agree on which fictional military-industrial complex would save the day. The fictional cure is real life’s poison. Thirty-two countries are currently at war (March 2024) with more countries indirectly involved in selling arms, technology, information and providing specialised personnel. If humanity can have peace only fighting an enemy coming from another planet there will likely never be real peace (at least not in the foreseeable future).
This article does not advocate for an impossible, nonhistorical and undesirable ‘return to the origin’ which is another potentially dangerous myth. Progress in the sense of ‘time going forward bringing changes’ is inevitable and welcomed, but maintaining the industrial-technological complex in command of the progress of humanity is a choice. And as the wide and positive international reception of the 3 Body Problem demonstrates, we often make this choice subconsciously.
However, as a society we can consciously choose what progress means for us. What about if progress means peace and to end all the wars now? Just in case if aliens are coming…
'Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress' – Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)
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