The new Land of the Lost movie is probably horrible, but one thing I can thank it for is that it inspired the Sci-Fi Channel to run a marathon of the original series yesterday. Between that and seeing Anvil, I’m sure I melted many brain cells. But, looking at the show after 25 years or so, I’m impressed by how ambitious it was for a Saturday morning kids’ show. It even lurched into philosophy at some points, such as when our hero, Rick Marshall, starts arguing with a humanoid lizard with the personality of a Vulcan.
The lizard, named Enik, believes that his race is advanced and peaceful, unlike us human barbarians. But he has traveled through time and realized that his people are going to go all Morlock in the distant future, so he has to go back and warn them to control their anger. Marshall wants to use the same technology to get back to his own time and place (present-day Earth). This causes Enik to use his telephatic powers to give Marshall terrifying visions, which Marshall points out is awfully violent, given that Enik is supposed to be advanced and peaceful and all. “Using force is fine with you so long as it’s dispassionate — unfeeling!” he says, as I paraphrase it from memory. “That’s what destroyed your people! You don’t need to restrain your anger — you need compassion — feelings!”
This was all sounding awfully familiar, and I realized it echoed very closely a fascinating article I read recently about the evolution of the idea of compassion as a virtue. The ancient Greeks, says poli-sci professor Clifford Orwin, saw compassion as neutral to negative, because it was a feeling:
They recognized its power and therefore its utility in political life, but doubted its reasonableness and therefore its justice. It figures in Plato’s Republic primarily as a threat to justice (cf. Republic 415c, 606a–c). Aristotle treats it not in his Ethics, his account of those virtues for which human beings are to be admired, but in his Rhetoric, his exposition of those passions by which those lacking virtue are swayed. Since for both thinkers virtue consists of the proper (which is to say rational) disposition toward the passions, it follows that pity, as a passion, is not to be confused with the virtues. Just as virtue requires us to get a handle on our other passions, so it requires that we become masters of our pity.
Christianity took a more benevolent view of compassion, but during the Middle Ages its goals were distinctly otherworldly: doing the compassionate thing meant helping your neighbor get to heaven, with earthly concerns distinctly secondary. It took the Enlightenment, and particularly, Rousseau to start celebrating emotive compassion as a virtue:
Of the resources available to social man, only compassion addressed both the utopianism of early liberal thought and the harmful effects of commerce. It was not calculated but spontaneous, and the bonds that it forged with our fellow human beings were mutual and genuine. It alone permitted those who had received a proper education in it to transcend the barriers of inequality as of other divisions among human beings. Rousseau’s imagined paragons of compassion were the “great cosmopolitan souls” of the Discourse on Inequality, who “surmount the imaginary barriers that separate Peoples and who, following the example of the sovereign Being who created them, include the whole human Race in their benevolence.”
This is not the only time in the series that Marshall sounds kind of like Rousseau, and Enik sounds kind of like an ancient Greek. “No one has the right to rule anybody!” Marshall shouts to an alien with delusions of grandeur. At another time when Marshall needs his help, Enik goes along not out of pity, but because it shames him when a human shows more self-control and self-sacrifice than himself.
This probably doesn’t speak to how many philosophy courses the show’s writers took, as it underscores Orwin’s point that this debate is deeply embedded in our culture. A lot of academic theorizing seems pretty disconnected from reality to me, but it was neat to read that article and then see it confirmed in such an unlikely place. And I’m sure that’s one reason why it was already lodged in my brain, unarticulated, from so long ago.
