“I know what is written”: Babylon 5’s “Believers” (Science Fiction and Charles W. Mills’s Critique of “Ideal Theory” Part II)

Just as Lieutenant Alara Kitan was successful in resisting the surrounding dominance of the realities of imposed Ideal Theory, there are occasions in which that resistance can be met with a loss. In the season one Babylon 5 episode, “Believers” (1994), Dr. Stephen Franklin is confronted with contentious dilemma. An Onteen child, Shon, is suffering from a life-threatening congestive blockage. Dr. Franklin informs his parents that it is easily treatable with surgery, but their religion forbids cutting into the skin for fear that to do so would cause the spirit or soul to leave the body, leaving only a shell. In time Dr. Franklin request that Cmdr. Sinclair give him the legal authority to intervene and go against Shon’s parents’s wishes to perform the surgery.

Eventually, Cmdr. Sinclair denies Dr. Franklin’s request. Babylon 5 cannot be a station that respects the beliefs of each culture and species if they dismiss those beliefs and religious practices when they are in disagreement with human values and beliefs. Sinclair believes doing so would undermine the authority of Babylon 5, and he was correct in that judgement. However, Dr. Franklin ignores the command and performs the surgery against the parents’s wishes. The parents, Tharg and M’Ola, react in shock when they see that Shon has recovered. It is as though they are seeing a living demon. The parents return to take Shon with a travel robe. Dr. Franklin realizes too late the travel robe is intended for death ceremonies and that the parents are going to kill Shon now that his body has been cut open during the surgery. When Franklin arrives in their quarters Shon is dead, surrounded by candles, and Shon’s mother tells him not to worry, “This was not our son. This was only a shell.”

Let us take a sharp turn and consider what Charles W. Mills wrote in his essay, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology”:

[C]onsider conceptual innovation at the more local level: the challenge to the traditional way the public / private distinction was drawn, the concept of sexual harassment. In the first case, a seemingly neutral and innocuous conceptual divide turned out, once it was viewed from the perspective of gender subordination, as contributing to the reproduction of the gender system by its relegation of “women’s issues” to a seemingly apolitical and naturalized space. In the case of sexual harassment, a familiar reality – a staple of cartoons in men’s magazines for years (bosses chasing secretaries around the desk and so on) – was reconceptualized as negative (not something funny, but something morally wrong) and a contributor to making the workplace hostile for women. These realizations, these recognitions, did not spontaneously crystallize out of nowhere; they required conceptual labor, a different map of social reality, a valorization of the distinctive experience of women. As a result of having these concepts as visual aids, we can now see better: our perceptions are no longer blinded to realities to which we were previously obtuse. In some sense, an ideal observer should have been able to see them-yet they did not[.] (176)

For the Onteen parents, this concept that a spirit will escape the body if there is a cut from surgery, “like farm animals,” the mother says, to paraphrase, is another example of the so-called Ideal realized and being practiced as a matter of fact. The episode attempts to show that when Dr. Franklin imposes his own belief system and performs the surgery, that, too, is suspect and another manifestation of pre-configured idealism, which is punished in a form of Shakespearean morality tale, and Shon still dies, this time through an even greater tragedy of being murdered by his own parents. However, I argue that punishment for Franklin’s single-mindedness and desire to save the child only reinforces the blanket reality of the harm that the Ideal brings on the innocent.  

As Mills states, “an ideal observer should have been able to see [the harm being done by their perceptual belief system] – yet they did not” (176). This demonstrates the force of strength of the Ideal and how embedded it is in our culture, in all of the world’s many cultures. At the risk of stating what has been repeated many times, Ursula K. Le Guin famously stated, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Just as in Mills’s example of the previously accepted behavior of “bosses chasing secretaries around the desk and so on,” so too can any Ideal structure be broken down and bring what I have argued before needs to be a change in the discussion. Even the very idea of idealism needs to be altered. What it means to be spiritual needs to change and we should teach that achieving an elevated state is not required to gain wisdom.

We are still working to leave patriarchy behind and have even fallen farther back in that struggle for equality. We are even further away from deconditioning the public that capitalism is okay. The fetishism of capitalism is far too enveloped in the U.S. to begin to get a grasp and push up and out the manhole cover to lift ourselves out of the sewers. What can we work on? As Ursula K. Le Guin states: words. Rephrasing, restating, reigniting the old-world ideas with new ways of seeing them. There will be Onteen parents along the way; authority figures who believe they know what is written, but if futurism itself holds no direction in which to guide us responsibly, then that language is invalid. As Charles W. Mills shows us, what is perceived as Ideal is not diverse or inclusive; it lacks spontaneity. That is why so much of the majority of the political left, that claims to hold such values, are in reality, center left. These various visions of reality, just as with Mills example of sexual harassment as a norm, need to be forced into the community discussion: “These realizations, these recognitions, did not spontaneously crystallize out of nowhere; they required conceptual labor, a different map of social reality, a valorization of the distinctive experience of women” (176). I had mentioned the Wages for Housework campaign in the first installment of this series. This should allow that inclusion to bring greater clarity. Corinna Dengler writes in her essay, “Rereading the Wages for Housework Campaign: Feminist Degrowth Reflections on Social Reproduction, Commons, and a Care Income,” that,  

First, the so-called dual systems theory built upon Heidi Hartmann’s (1979) paper The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. It discussed prospects for a feminist-Marxist tradition that regards capitalism and patriarchy as two independent but interrelated spheres with the goal of overcoming the notion of patriarchy being a mere side contradiction of capitalism (Sargent 1981). The second important debate concerned domestic labor and included the international political WfH campaign, which refused the predominant liberal feminist idea of female emancipation by means of entering the unchallenged, male-dominated sphere of wage labor. At first glance, WfH seemed to be a reformist demand for money for all the unpaid work carried out mostly by women. Arguably, this misinterpretation was partly responsible for the practical abandonment of the strategy by the end of the 1970s. However, as Louise Toupin (2018, 46) notes in her comprehensive anthology Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77, when “reduced to a monetary demand, the entire political analysis with which it was associated, as well as its subversive capacity, is too easily bypassed.” (2-3)

And unfortunately, the slow progress, that is still ongoing, of women’s liberation required a great deal of personal loss. The painful divorces, the angst of misguided men, the personal cost of spousal abuse for attempts to set grounds for equality, these are all the Onteen parents were willing to kill their child just for having a life-saving surgery. The Ideal is the resistance to the resistance of norms in favor of social evolution. The Ideal is so certain they “know what is written” that they are willing to punish progress. They will even resist progress that leads to better health and safety as we saw during the worst parts of the global Covid pandemic. They are not out of aggressive fomenting and incitation just yet. And we are still very early in our attempts to formulate the right words to counter their perceived norms.  

By the end of the 1970s, however, WfH had lost traction in international women’s movements. While some strands of feminisms (most notably radical, Black, Marxist, and ecological feminisms) have built upon and expanded the importance of social reproduction, “the domain of social reproduction was not the strategic choice of the women’s movement” (Toupin 2018, 3). Rather, the focus by the end of the 1970s was on the integration of women into the largely unquestioned sphere of wage work. This strategy of “stirring women in” was an attempt to universalize the androcentric model of the 40-hour week in Western Europe and the US. Nancy Fraser showed in her landmark publication Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History that this “has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism” (Fraser 2013, 220), with the feminist fight for the right to sell one’s labor being a major instrument to fuel global economic growth. (Dengler, 2023, 5)

The Onteen parents have the final say. The global feminist movement was disabused to encourage and strengthen exploitation capitalism. It was organized into an agreeable center left promotion of capitalist fetishism. Dr. Franklin’s attempts to take a stand worked against him. And against Shon. The feminist movement reinforced standards and divisions of labor exploitation. However, we can take comfort in knowing that if David Gerrod could find the words to illustrate the Onteen dilemma when he wrote “Believers” then we can find the right words and the right time, be in the right place at the right time, through a faith in the treble of spontaneity, to counter norms of industrialization, bad faith practices, and exploitation.    

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