Religious Control in the Farflung future.

[Monroe]

There seems to be a common trait in a lot of universes set in the distant future. Warhammer is around the year 42000 now I believe (despite its name). Dune is 10,000 years after an unknown event where machines and man fight a massive war. Genesis is 3,000 years after a massive universal war where mankind is nearly wiped out. All these cultures seem to be scientific stagnated and ruled by religion. Whereas 'younger' universes like Star Trek, Babylon 5, and others place an emphasis on technology and aren't ruled by dogmatic thinking. The break from this trend of course is Star Wars, a universe which, save maybe the Jedi, place nearly no emphasis on religion yet is still stagnated.

So isn't it kind of weird that mankind would go into religious dogmatic thinking at the height of its technological achievements? What in our psychie assumes that after a certain technological standpoint when humanity is spread throughout the Galaxy or universe that we'll suddenly close ourselves off to rationale and scientific researching. None of these religious antiutopian futures have a spiritual philosophy but is setup with a cult of mankind and keeping control. Even in Dune where aliens are nonexistance the idea of the purity of mankind exists and is reinforced by the Orange Catholic bible.

So what do you guys think? All these universes have had some tramatic event occure to humanity in the distant (by our standards) past that has evolved a religion based on controling the flow of information and technology through religious means. The medium for this contrictive flow is that humanity is pure in its natural and current state and that aliens, xenos, and thinking machines disrupt and corrupt humanity's spirit. Which of course the church of those universes knows how to protect the best.

[Aaron]

The Imperium of Man's religious leanings are a direct result of Chaos machinations and influence, though the religion isn't really what we would think of as one today. In WH40K, there really is a bunch of nasty entiities an a different dimension waiting to eat your emotions as they manifest in the Warp. The rituals and dogma of the Imperium are designed to stave off the Warp freaks and going by the Cain and Space Wolf novels, it's clear that a number of the religious practices are actually everyday things made into ritual to stave off Chaos (asking for the machine spirits blessing for example in some cases is code for: enter password).

[Mikey]

True - in WH40k, what we would call superstition and ritual actually has a real effect. Tattooing Grey Knights with pentagrammatic and hexagramatic wards, for example, REALLY does protect them from REAL daemonic and psychic attacks.

Dune is a funny situation, because in later books we have small religious sects competing with Orange Catholicism. Judaism is expressed as having survived, as are the one-offs inspired by the Missionaria Protectiva. And the root usefulness of Orange Catholicism is obviously to create a population-wide, innate, and unquestioned devotion to the morals of the Butlerian Jihad.

But yes, acutely traumatic events do seem to inspire a return to piety. They also seem to support a return to heavily centralized, monarchical rule; in WH40k, especially, the most insidious but necessary acts within the Imperium are performed in the Emperor's name - battlefield commisars or the Inquisition, e.g.

[Aaron]

True - in WH40k, what we would call superstition and ritual actually has a real effect. Tattooing Grey Knights with pentagrammatic and hexagramatic wards, for example, REALLY does protect them from REAL daemonic and psychic attacks.

Yup and as is made clear in the HH series, daemons is just a term for Warp entities. Their not literal daemons from hell, just a hold-over term from ancient Terra. Horus himself tells Loken that he could call them whatever he wants, daemon is just convienant.

But yes, acutely traumatic events do seem to inspire a return to piety. They also seem to support a return to heavily centralized, monarchical rule; in WH40k, especially, the most insidious but necessary acts within the Imperium are performed in the Emperor's name - battlefield commisars or the Inquisition, e.g.

I think it's pretty clear if you look deeper into WH40K than most do it's obvious that they turned to a religious approach to make it easier to motivate the populace and make it easier for them to resist Chaos.

[Mikey]

I'ma ctually agreeing with thos points. I used the word "daemon" merely in keeping with the WH40k convention; and the use of religious authority by the Inquisition, et. al., is simply a means to derive authority for their own purposes. Remember, the Emperor never wanted to be worshipped.

[Aaron]

Sorry, I'm trying to clarify things for WH40K newbies.

[Mikey]

my bad.

[Graham Kennedy]

There's a difficulty in writing far future science fiction called the "technological singularity" - wikipedia has an article on it. If you consider how far Humans have advanced in the last few thousand years, and consider that the rate of advance is exponential rather than linear, then projecting even a few centuries into the future gives you pretty impressive technology. Projecting thousands of years gives you... well godlike power, basically. As but one example, if computer storage doubled every two years then in a thousand years a hard drive will be 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than todays. Apply a ratio even vaguely like that to other technology and you see the implications.

But godlike power is hard to deal with in a story... imagine trying to write a series about the Q, for instance. "Ooooo, a difficult problem here... so I snap my fingers and it's solved. Hmm, short show this week huh?"

So a lot of science fiction needs to come up with some way to slow or halt the progress of technology. Religious proscriptions are a pretty good way of doing this, since religion has something of a track record of being at odds with science. The religious proscriptions in works like Dune are there so the technology of the setting doesn't become overwhelming.

[stitch626]

And in Trek it was WWIII.

[Graham Kennedy]

And in Trek it was WWIII.

The ban on genetic engineering after the Eugenics wars is another Trek example.

[Mikey]

In WH40k, it was the intervening dark ages and the loss of a great deal of technology. Subsequently, to come full circle, technology is being found/recovered and treated as a mystical/religious aspect.

[Greger]

I can see four main reasons why religious rule and dogmas have become so dominant in some sci-fi worlds.

1
First of I think that the writers of these fictions doesnt have a good enought grasp of scientific development. Sure they have impressive beam weapons, faster then light ships, super smart robots and so on, but advances i physics, chemistry, robotics and engineering do not represent all the fields of science. They seem to, in many places, leave other sciences at the same level as they are today, even thought they have been developing just as fast as any. Things like sociology, philosophy, economics, law and so on. In my opinion it would be hard to belive that things like these would suddenly stop to evolve for some reason.

And what about the ever expanding specializing of the natural sciences? 300 years ago we just had physics, now we have Acoustics, Agrophysics, Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics, Biophysics, Computational physics, Condensed matter physics, Cryogenics, Dynamics, Electricity & Magnetism, Fluid dynamics, Geophysics, Materials physics, Mathematical physics, Mechanics, Nuclear physics, Optics, Particle physics (or High Energy Physics),Plasma physics, Polymer physics, Quantum Physics and so on. And Im sure more will be added on a regular basis.

When the authors realized this and thought. "Hmm should Invest several years in coming up with good and belivable advances in all the known fields of human development or should I just stick to the technologies that are cool and get on with my story?"

And when you get to this point you need to fill out all does blanks with other stuff.. like copy-pasting from history books, or saying that "god did it", or have a religion/belife that restricts or hinders development in these fields. By design or by effect. And the furhter in to the future you go, the bigger these blanks gets and you need to fill them evenmore with things like this. So maby thats why sci-fi settings that takes place thousands of years in the future so offten have them.


2
In many places they just superimpose a fantastic future on model of a existing society. Like warhammer 40k would be medeivl europe or the galactic empire in star wars would be... I dont know the sovjetunion or the roman empire in its last years or dune beeing europe in the 16th century. Doing the same with religion is easy. So why do they do it? Becuse it is easier for us as readers to relate.


3
Communication. In the old days when religion was the bomb, it toke a long time and was dangerous to travel anywhere. Same with getting information from anyplace. Religion and dogmas was a good glue to use to keep the people in check. It told you how to act, not to rebel and keep marriges betwin families and not in them so inbreading would be prevented and so on. Today this is not so much of an issue becuse communications are alot better/faster/cheaper/safer. Hensforth, religion do not need to play such a central role to people anymore. Other then that we hade the age of reason, the seperation of churtes and state, liberalism, flying spagetti monster and so on that continued to undermine religion.

But in the future communication will be a big issue again. When going in to space distanses will make it hard to keep the infrastructure of a galactic nation. It will take years to travel betwin colonies on diffrent planets, and it will also take years for radio messages to reach there destination. What about when we invent a FTL-drive you say? well that will fix the problem, but only temporarily. People will spread out even further and distans will be an issue again.

How can we keep our colonies in check then? Reinvent religion, it woked befoer, it can work again. untill we get a universespanding broadband internet that is

4
The religion has some other practical use, like in warhammer 40k, where it is used as a weapon against a real foe like chaos, like Cpl Kendall said.

[Aaron]

In WH40k, it was the intervening dark ages and the loss of a great deal of technology. Subsequently, to come full circle, technology is being found/recovered and treated as a mystical/religious aspect.

You know I don't think they actually lost as much tech as is implied. I mean that's the schitck but their pretty much identical to the Crusade tech (a fair number of new techs as well) and for all the talk of losing tech and stuff they can't make anymore the Imperium is still around and still churning out ships and other kit at a massive rate. They'd have to remain at a comparative tech level with their enemies to survive.

In many places they just superimpose a fantastic future on model of a existing society. Like warhammer 40k would be medeivl europe or the galactic empire in star wars would be... I dont know the sovjetunion or the roman empire in its last years or dune beeing europe in the 16th century. Doing the same with religion is easy. So why do they do it? Becuse it is easier for us as readers to relate.

WH40K definitely has a gothic Europe feel but GW pretty much uses the "rule of cool" as fans call it and shoehorn anything awesome in from whatever universe (genestealers being a Xenomorph rippoff) they can find.

[Greger]

WH40K definitely has a gothic Europe feel but GW pretty much uses the "rule of cool" as fans call it and shoehorn anything awesome in from whatever universe (genestealers being a Xenomorph rippoff) they can find.

hehe yeah thats true and they dont stop at sci-fi. The hole setting has a fantasy feel to it, and I dont just mean spaceorks and necrons(who are basicly robotic undead).

[Monroe]

Interesting post Greger.