Our family just started in on a current Apple series: “Pluribus”, which (only several episodes in…) looks to be raising some very interesting questions over what an ideal humanity might be (or how any ideal in one person’s eyes might seem like a hellscape to another person.) For me anyway, the show is raising great questions about how or what we think any “ideal” human society should look. What do we imagine God’s Kingdom (as in the realized idyllic version - ‘heaven’ if you will) would look like? The American in the story is (in my opinion) giving the quintessential ‘American’ response - probably as the rest of the world stereotypes Americans by now. It will be fun to see where the writers take it.
Question I see being put forward: How much ‘individualism’ would we retain in heavenly society (as actually aspired towards in Christ)? As opposed to … how much empathy will we have there? And in its extreme form (as portrayed in the show), will/should we all be totally transparent to each other in Heaven?
This show is from the creator of Breaking Bad I think. The lead actress was in Better Caul Saul as well.
We saw the first three episodes and I’m getting some interesting thoughts about apologetics, theology, heaven, etc. same as you.
I think one of the goals of the show is to make you wonder which side is right. That is what the after commentary said on the first episode.
I think an interesting question many of us have is along the lines of is that what heaven will be like? Most of us think heaven is sinless but we are still us to some extent so how can both be the case?
In the show the group doesn’t seem to have free will though. Multiple talks of biological imperatives. So that’s detracting me from really getting invested into what the writers want me to. But I suppose that is another issue. Are happy beings forced to not sin or simply designed that that it is not an option, genuinely happy or good? Is that ethical?
I found the lead character an bit annoying to start. If she was more likable I think the show we be a step up for me. The story and side questions are interesting enough to keep going.
Vinnie
I totally resonate with you on that. She seems a bit slow on the uptake to me. But my own family seems to have more patience/sympathy with her reactions than I do at times.
I hadn’t even looked up any commentary from the producers as you have. So the only thing I know of their agenda is what I fancy I’ve gleaned from the show itself. In fact I started into it not knowing anything about it at all - other than something vaguely apocolyptic.
From my viewing of the show, it is hard to tell if there is any individuality present in the infected people. They appear to have as much individuality as each of your fingers has. At least in my eyes, that is tantamount to losing my personhood which is a bit terrifying.
I like characters that are curmudgeons with a heart of gold, but that’s my personal taste.
I may have missed something you might have picked up (from outside commentary or otherwise). But (at 3 episodes in), I’m still feeling a bit agnostic on the ‘free will’ question - or if leaning, then leaning towards thinking they still have it. (Spoiler alerts ahead, though I’m keeping my discussion pretty vague, depends on how sensitive you are to spoilers.) Other than that they are all subjected to the vagaries of others whether they like it or not. But that’s true of all of us extreme individualists in our western society now. If one of us goes nuts, buys guns and starts a murdering spree, then everybody else around us is subjected to the things we do too. So obviously I don’t think that detracts from free will. Just means I don’t always get my life and surroundings to be exactly as I’d like.
The weird thing in the show is that all of them know what everybody else knows. One “hive mind”, kind of like the borg - only more cheerful and eager to please.
Nice comparison! Only each of these fingers still seems intelligent (with all the knowledge of the whole world in fact!) and still remembers their own life and experiences, obviously, since it’s all being universally shared. Nothing hidden from anyone. Heaven? or Hell?
The free will part I think was in their choice to take over I guess. Not free will in general. I understood it as they had a biological imperative to do what they did even though it caused a lot of bad things that they can’t seem to partake in after the fact or outside it.
That is how I am seeing it which is why I can’t buy into the writers wanting me to second guess which side I’m on or which is right. But apparently a case can be made that they have their personhood but as part of a collective. It’s a mind bender.
Yeah - there was no choice about that, for sure! (As our lead is dismayed to be learning.) But then again, I didn’t get any choice about my being born either. And yet I still insist I’ve got free will.
Yes, fair point, and you don’t have free will to fly either (I mean you can try) . All choice and freedom is within the constraints of physical reality. So it may be a question of degrees.
One of the side characters had his own . . . let’s call it a female dominant entourage. Would any of those women have had anything to do with him before they were altered? I doubt it. Are these women even capable of consent?
I’m with you on this one. There is no 50/50, there is a clear better side. Perhaps that is part of the social commentary the writers and creators are going for if in fact there is a group of people who find the hive mind attractive.
No they would not, especially in that capacity. That guy was annoying because while I would no doubt expect that to occur, it just seemed way too soon. I might have missed a timeline jump there but the guy was on AF1 and a pimp right as it happened. Didn’t take long.
If I remember, the lead character was the one who he was asking for consent to the body of her helper friend (the one that gave her the grenade). It’s almost as if the body doesn’t matter anymore. With their collective thought the show may embrace a sort of platonic dualism where the body is meaningless. Even physical desth doesn’t seem to so much matter as one do the scenes seemed to say the dead person is still a part of them. All in all I don’t like it. They are creepy alien invaders and need to be stopped. I value my individualism too much 
The description of the show reminds me of some features of Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music”.
Watching character genius* Stephen King’s hideously compelling, compellingly hideous, Mr Mercedes at the moment, with the perfect Brendan Gleeson. ‘Many’ is next.
*As The Times said of him as the modern Dickens, never mind the architecture, what about the gargoyles! He gets us right: the myth of normal, apart from that you don’t have to stretch far from the mean, not to be able to come back.
And Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Borg and The Thing! (both remakes better than the originals on whose shoulders they stand) and Phase IV and …
Our 90% selfish monkey and 10% bee, hybrid homunculus-maggot cannot possibly survive universal metamorphosis to transcendence. There will not be violence, there will not be injustice. Which is unimaginable. How can our unfree will transcend, all in the direction of love?
Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, Ian M. Banks’ The Hydrogen Sonata hint in the direction of love and intellect respectively.
I’d like to live in the endless moment, with my dog. And meet others every now and again. Forever.
Well - you’re in a lot of good company I guess! (including my own family - and surrounding culture here in the U.S.). And yeah, I’m breathing all this same air as you; I’ve been (almost thoroughly?) indoctrinated into the supreme value of individualism that infects western cultural Christianity all the way into its theological core, to the point that none of us is really capable of finding any distinction at all between Christianity and our equally sacred individualism. It takes the dreaded authoritarian Chinese or other eastern cultures to show us what any serious consideration of community-centric life might even look like! A few of us Anabaptists occasionally imagine we might have a leg up over wider western culture in this - and maybe the Amish actually do, but the rest of us … not so much. So I guess it’s just one corner of my rebel brain that found itself a bullhorn and won’t let my individualist brain just go its way unmolested. “What’s that?! You see the ugly places our American individualism has ended up taking us, and you think you’ve got moral high ground or even just any moral credibility left at all, to look down on a society in which the one gives itself up for the good of the many?! Yeah, right!” The involuntary nature of the conversion (and the question of whether what the many got was really ‘good’) still looms over this particular story’s scenario, to be sure. In the end, I - just like you, probably can’t let go of that. And yet of course, much of life’s array of choices on offer were involuntarily arranged to my individualist self too. So that sword cuts both ways and therefore, can’t quite silence the stubborn bullhorn’s intrusion into my comfortable western arrogance, so accurately and irritatingly on display in the story’s main character.
Yeah - and that is non-Christian!
I am too much an individualist myself but like to bring also awkward viewpoints into discussion. As a person with a somewhat radical protestant background I would say that we are saved individually but should grow after that into being part of the Jesus community. I do not live anymore for myself but in Christ, as part of the building (body of Christ) that God is building. We retain our individual features but we should transform towards the image of Christ - a life-long journey.
This Christian worldview is quite far from the individualism that rules in the western societies. I do not support the ‘communist’-type collective thinking in some Asian societies but I acknowledge that the Asian viewpoint may sometimes be closer to the original teaching of Christianity than the individualistic worldview of the western societies - especially, if we think how great the role of money and strive towards independence and individualistic happiness is in these societies.
May be a hard piece to swallow - should I support the original Christian model, or the caricature, the individualistic western model?
It emerged from the Reformation.
I would not claim that. Rather, during that era happened much that made the success of the reformation possible AND lifted individualistic thinking to the surface. Influential changes in European societies, the rise of nationalism, the rise of humanism, the widespread low moral state of the clergy (including the popes and the bishops) in the RCC, the rapid spread of new ideas by printed publications. All contributed to the weakening of the dominant status and the credibility of the leaders of the church (RCC) and that released the spread of alternative, more individualistic thoughts.
It is a matter of interpretation how much each of the changes altered the general thinking and guided the path towards future. Protestantism contributed, at least in the sense that the RCC could not renew its mental grip in the societies that became dominated by protestant teaching. The societies were mostly harsh, even deadly places for those who did not support the dominant interpretations but the increased diversity of thinking at the level of Europe sustained the new ideas.
In the areas hosting supporters of radical reformation (mostly anabaptists), the uncompromising strive towards following what was written in the biblical scriptures lead to repeated splitting of congregations and communities to small movements that had all their own (‘individualistic’) interpretations.
Some of the most threatened groups (radicals and individualists) emigrated to a distant land beyond the Atlantic, with well known consequences.
I should have said ‘with’.
One of scenes in Pluribus that made me laugh is when the main character claimed she wanted to go to the store to get her own food because she was “independent”. When she arrived at the store it was completely empty. When she asked for her store to be fixed, a bunch of semis and people rolled in and restocked the grocery store for her. I thought this was a great example of how Westerners like us can be unaware of how interdependent we actually are.