Where No Man Has Gone Before
Where No Man Has Gone Before (Because We Didn’t Let Him): Predetermination and Human Value in Interstellar
By Elizabeth Rotunno
In the mysteriously undefined future™, Earth’s food and air supplies are ravaged by a mysterious blight; if humans don’t starve, they will suffocate. To accommodate, society turns to perpetual farming for survival, rejecting all technology and development. Militaries, space exploration, and even engineers are seen as archaic holdovers from bygone days, and organizations like NASA must operate in secret. So begins Interstellar, acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping 2014 science-fiction film, a love letter to the indomitable human spirit. Throughout the film, its titular main character, Joseph Cooper, faces black holes, homicidal maniacs, murderous planets, and a host of other antagonists best described as “concerningly hostile,” but against all odds, he perseveres. One of the few things he cannot overcome, however, is his son’s school principal, who insists that his son, Tom, scored too poorly on tests to be admitted to university. Tom is thus forced to turn away from schooling and become a “useful farmer” (because education matters less than human survival). While this logic isn’t unreasonable, per se, the circumstances of Tom’s situation make the school’s decision highly unethical, allowing viewers to consider the nature of human worth on varying scales.
On a personal level, the decision to dictate Tom’s future based on perceived potential is immoral in how it is conceived. Their argument rests upon the assumption that both potential and utility are inherently unquantifiable. In other words, it is impossible to accurately predict the potential benefit contributed to society by one person because a human being is infinitely complex, and the number of variables that would be involved in defining such an abstract concept makes this particular equation impossible to solve. Extending this to the issue at hand, we see that the only metric used to gauge Tom’s potential is a standardized test. Aside from the myriad of flaws that make standardized testing an unreliable measure of most everything today, Tom’s educational system has attempted to assign a neat, discrete value to his existence for the purposes of deciding his future, which, as established, is virtually impossible. The underlying objective of such a test is unsound, thereby invalidating whatever result may or may not be returned by it. Derived from this fallacious reading of Tom’s potential is a judgment of his utility which is, economically speaking, equally unquantifiable when considering the many things someone could be utilized for. In one career path, utility may be measured using specialized scales, such as output quantity for farmers, but attempting to compare the benefits of two different fields only leads to a falsely dichotomous comparison that pretends to understand unattainable data. Since his potential and utility are determined from false data, the judgment made is unjust and misrepresentative of the truth. It then follows that, because unjust actions are assumed to also be unethical, the underlying nature of the measures used to restrict Tom’s future prospects makes the decision unethical.
An examination on a larger scale corroborates this argument. Perspectives tend to shift when evaluating arguments in the grand scheme of the universe, making macro-level evaluation a useful tool of analysis. Though an unconventional basis for ethical argument, understanding Tom’s situation through scientific abstractions helps to contextualize it, classify the decision to deny him a college education as unethical, and provide an insightful perspective on humanity’s intrinsic value in the universe. For all intents and purposes, humans are a mere speck of dust in the infinity of space. Tom himself makes up a minuscule fraction of that dust speck, and whether or not he goes to college would appear to play no significant role in the immense story of everything. But it is this insignificance which makes the school’s decision immoral. The well-known Butterfly Effect tells us that the most minuscule change in the initial conditions of a system can have massively disproportionate effects: a butterfly flaps its wings, and a typhoon forms on the opposite side of the world. At the risk of sounding cliché, Tom may well be the butterfly; that infinitesimally small difference in whether or not he goes to college could trigger a chain of events that betters all of humanity in some distant future. In terms of the grand and incomprehensible workings of the universe, it would be detrimental to impede whatever benefits could result from Tom’s education. It should also be kept in mind that the butterfly example is not a direct analogy for Tom’s situation, as the workings of the Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory, in general, are largely indecipherable and beyond the scope of this analysis. It merely illustrates that on the macro scale, Tom going to college might lead to one advancement, and then another, and then another, precipitating positive developments that could collectively advance humankind. As it stands, there is no accurate way to tell whether he has more or less potential than anybody else. Therefore, preventing possible positive outcomes hinders human potential as a whole and makes the school’s restriction of Tom unethical on a wider scope.
Of course, there is always the possibility that Tom simply won’t thrive in college or will use his knowledge for evil, but it is no more likely that he would choose to wreak havoc as an engineer or doctor than as a farmer, rendering this counterpoint moot. If he caused one more race in the likely infinite sea of them to die out, the universe wouldn’t know. If he caused that race to survive, however, then everyone within it would. Thus, the decision to force Tom to become a farmer prevents one more possibility of human survival. It is the ultimate act of pessimism.
In recognizing this unfair system, Nolan has audiences consider our definition of worth and how much value those around us truly have.
Let’s bet on it: Fifty dollars says you would attribute more worth to your loved ones than that test.
