[ad_1]
How to begin? Well, last week, Netflix dropped its bold adaptation of the first book of Liu Cixin’s trilogy, Three Body Problem. This version has eight episodes (the Chinese TV adaptation, which also covers the first book, has 30 episodes), and it has its pluses and minuses.
On the plus side, for example, the series accurately portrays the opening of the science fiction novel, which is set during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. On the minus side, this opening scene really excited, delighted, and validated the Musk-loving right.
They equated the “struggle session” that kills a Chinese physicist for believing spacetime composes the fabric of the universe with the “woke mind virus” that’s stunting, stifling, and castrating Western Civilization. Behold, with a content warning for ableism:
what’s funny about anti-China conservative retards talking about the Cultural Revolution is that many of the Maoists positions mirror their own
not LGBTQ wokeness pic.twitter.com/GKmK707vxQ
— Kim Chill Sung (김칠성) 🇰🇵🇻🇳🇨🇳 🤝 🇺🇸 (@IAmDouglasKim) March 25, 2024
And:
Very few Western university students know anything about the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution
They are too busy planning protest marches and coming up with chants such as:
– “Globalize the Intifada”
– “Yemen make us proud, turn another ship around” pic.twitter.com/noOtt4M0yD— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 24, 2024
And best of all:
The craziest thing about watching this portrayal of a struggle session during the Cultural Revolution is that I know people in Seattle who would 1000% love to do this to techbros/landlords/hedge funds/whatever pic.twitter.com/cxhxvRyRzC
— Grant Slatton (@GrantSlatton) March 23, 2024
It goes on and on.
Never mind the fact that the right is banning books, attacking professors, and denying the science of climate change. Never mind the fact that the right would cut off Dr. Anthony Fauci’s head given the opportunity. And please don’t mention the right’s largest party, which is led by a shameless authoritarian.
Let’s instead forget those facts and get to the core of this scene. What is its significance? In the narrative, it offers us the source of protagonist and astrophysicist Ye Wenjie’s profound and ultimately apocalyptic misanthropy. Here, she turns her back on humans and embraces the extraterrestrials. That process begins with the Cultural Revolution, which attacked her class (intellectuals) and killed her father (a physicist who refused to denounce Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity).
From Liu Cixin’s perspective, which is the perspective not only of a Chinese science fiction writer but also a Chinese computer programmer, it concerns the promotion of science, whose conatus (or motive force) is not the dreams of the Enlightenment but the realities of international competition.
Cixin is warning China not to abandon or challenge science ever again. The country’s status as a world power depends on increasing its command of the physical world: physics, chemistry, biology, hydrology, biogeography, cosmology, and so on.
How this directive jibes with the weltanschauung of America’s right is far from apparent. The left, for example, accepts climate science, and so does Cixin, who actually places Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at the center of Wenjie’s intellectual development and final rejection of her species. The noise 3 Body Problem‘s showrunners (David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Alexander Woo) make about the Cultural Revolution is matched by the noise they make about this book, which popularized the environmental movement and was denounced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as much as the theory of general relativity.
Following the debut of Netflix’s “3 Body Problem,” the book series upon which the show is based (“Remembrance of Earth’s Past”) and “Silent Spring,” a title frequently mentioned throughout the first season of the show, are now bestsellers on Amazon. https://t.co/2l7DrCS8vw
— Variety (@Variety) March 25, 2024
And so we have two movements in Cixin’s work. One that’s nationalistic, and one that is cosmopolitan. The nationalist movement says: China, place your faith in science. The international one says: Humans, place your faith in science. If the GOP was the party of science, if it really believed in these principles… Does more need to be said?