The special effects in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” may have wowed audiences of the time, but the film continues to inspire today because of the concepts it involves. A brilliant being from a distant world, Klaatu, similar to humans, but vastly more advanced must deliver a crucial message to the world, but Cold War era fear and suspicion are working to thwart him.

The film was geared toward 14 year old children, and proof that this movie captured the hearts and imaginations of this age group in its day is found in all the inside-joke references writers and directors make to it today. Steven Spielburg has the film playing on a television in his film “E.T.,” which bares similarities in theme and structure. The films “Toys” and director Sam Raimi’s “Army of Darkness” both quote the famous alien command “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” used to control the sentinel robot Gort. Even George Lucas named three aliens playing in the cantina band of his film “Star Wars” after these words.

In writing there is the concept of “show don’t tell.” The same principle applies to filmmaking. Audiences recognize Klaatu as a superior being despite his unassuming nature. Statements he makes, the actions he takes, everything about him is reserved and collected. He is a walking understatement, and, beyond one incredibly dramatic demonstration, we are only given hints at the many other incredible powers he must keep in check.

Klatu presents an ideal, an attainable ideal, to the audience. He represents what the human race may aspire to through science, reason, and technology. He defeats the angry and the fearful with a calm collectedness. There is no harm the parochial humans can inflict upon him that he cannot overcome.

At the same time, Klaatu does not look down upon the human race, but recognizes its accomplishments along with its faults, which are seen more as behaviors we will eventually grow out of. He tours the mall in Washington DC, recognizing Abraham Lincoln as a great individual. He approves of and indulges young Bobby’s curiosity about his spacecraft, even though a bystander mocks his explanations.

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” falls into that category of futurist storytelling that is hopeful for the future and intellectual in its approach to the conflict. Similar to “Star Trek” or “The Uplift Saga,” the film’s protagonist’s strongest virtues are his reason and his humanity. The film’s message has secular humanist origins, and is one of human improvability, emphasizing the need for cognitive mastery over our irrational emotional reactions.

Spoiler Warning!

I love the fact that Klaatu shuns the established authority and instead seeks the help of of a well-known scientist. The “calling card” he leaves for the Doctor is ingenius, a hint to solve a complex equation the Doctor is working on. Klaatu wants to deliver his message to people with similar ideals, not those concerned with power and control, but those serving a higher purpose.

The crowd assembled at the film’s conclusion, brought together at Klaatu’s request, is not composed of world leaders, dignitaries, or ambassadors, but of scientists. They are the closest things Klatu has to peers on our tiny planet. The film strikes another chord of secular humanism in this respect, a faith in scientific principles over established paradigms of the time.

Klaatu Barada Nikto!

Also known as “Posthumanism,” this concept is approximately defined as “Persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity, self-programming, self-constituting, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals.”

Humanism finds reasons for ethics and morals without traditional religion, basing its philosophy of life on empirical observations of the world around us. Recognizing the trends, seeing the millions of years of evolution improving biological designs, followed by thousands of years of human beings evolving culturally, humanists and transhumanists both recognize the purpose of life is to improve.

Transhumanism defines its focus differently. Transhumanism chief concern is vision. The Transhumanist takes a proactive, technology-focused approach to life. Their aim is to transcend our basic design as species homosapiens and become something more through science and technology.

Many Transhumanists look forward to a time in the future known as The Singularity, when human thought and communication will accelerate to a point incomprehensible to present day humans. For readers who consider this mere fantastic speculation, consider how the average human IQ in industrialized nations has risen 17 points over the last half century. This trend is accelerating, just as our technology and the scope of our understanding is accelerating.

We could no more hope to comprehend human life a thousand years from now any more than humans a thousand years ago could hope to comprehend ours. The Transhumanist recognizes the high probability, nearly inevitable outcome to human evolution and takes the reigns, actively working toward it.

Salvation Through Technology

The Transhumanist school of thought for many has become a fantasy of immortality, a quest for the technological Fountain of Youth. The ideal of salvation through science reduces many Transhumanists to religious zealotry.

To understand the cause of this emphasis on technological salvation, we must understand that many Transhumanists are also atheists, and do not therefore believe in the transcendence of the soul. If physical death means the permanent end of a unique, individual consciousness, then the only means to escaping the fate of non-existence is in through the regenerative potentials in stem cell research, transcribing consciousness to computers, cryonic suspension, or cloning spare bodies and parts.

Popular Transhumanism is extremely concerned with augmenting biology, a lofty goal, presently unachievable. The Transhumanist’s preoccupation with replacing biology requires future developments; yet, there is insufficient attention being paid to the immediate steps we can take to compliment biology.

Transhumanists who subscribe to these beliefs are also the most vocal proponents of controversial technologies. Organizations, such as the World Transhumanist Association, seek to expand the rights of human beings to use emerging technologies for self-improvement.

Injecting nanobytes into my bloodstream to repair my cells, replacing my eyes with optics that can see a wider visible spectrum, or transcribing my mind to a computer chip are all great ideas for a future when these are possible, but realistically I must work on myself now.

PostHumanize NOW

Transhumanists must cognitively differentiate between futurist speculation and practical present-day solutions. Transhumanisms’ strength lies in its vision, but fantastic speculation is the realm of Futurism. There are many actions the Transhumanist can take right now to transcend their biological inefficiencies.

Nutrition and Fitness sciences are figuring out the details of extending our longevity and improving our current health each day with a multitude of studies. Diet recommendations, Vitamins, Creatine, Glucosamine and Condroiton are just a few of the ways we can improve our body’s functions.

Psychology and Neuroscience has made significant gains in understanding how our minds and brains work. Thanks to Biofeedback Therapies, we can now recognize how our minds affect our body’s functions and cognitively master both. Thanks to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we are learning how to actively control our thoughts to improve our mental health.

Technology is improving the way we think as well. We are taking in more information thanks to the Internet. Televisions and radios are now old technologies, less efficient for data consumption. We are filling our heads with more facts more quickly thanks to computers. At the same time we are improving our data output and productivity using these same cognitive prostheses to calculate for us.

All of these developments require a social architecture that supports free inquiry, academia for generalized research, and free enterprise for applied research. Transhumanists must support our continued progress as a species by supporting a culture that fosters science and technology. We must use technologies like the Internet to organize and promote our beliefs, proactively lobbying for a society that moves forward to improve our collective quality of life.

Transhumanists VS Luddites

Environmentalist liberals oppose the most viable alternative fuel in the world, nuclear power. Religious conservatives oppose the most promising medical research, stem-cell therapies. Many conservatives and liberals support both of these technologies. One of the goals of the transhumanist movement is to redefine American politics along a pro and con axis concerning technology, rather than the vaguely defined and inconsistently applied liberal and conservative axis.

With the term “Progressive” already being used by the American left, Dr. David Brin has suggested calling this movement “Modernist.” The term’s antiquated associations make it ripe for redefining.

Modernists support emergency contraception and the drug mifepristone because these drugs do not endanger the woman’s health and because modernists do not recognize the cluster of undifferentiated cells that is the embryo as human life. This same reasoning is why we do not protest stem cell research, but support all of these advances and potential advances in medical technology because they improve our quality of life.

Modernists support reasonable environmentalism. They recognize Nuclear Power as a vastly superior source of power compared to Coal-burning power plants. They recognize the problems of environmental sustainability in growing organic foods. They reject the recidivism of the most extreme elements of the environmental movements, which rejects all technology and seeks to return to nature.

Modernists support animal research, but they also support heavy regulation of the practice and restrictions on its application. Modernists support Genetically Modified foods; although, they also support strict oversights of its implementation. Modernists support rationality and moderation in all things.

Modernists may squabble over the details and degrees to which all of these political issues are implemented. They recognize there are no simple solutions and modern issues are rife with complexity. Yet, such a shift in the American political axis would transform our country’s direction. The Modernists of the left and right united would create such a majority that the anti-progress elements in both parties would become completely irrelevant and we could all continue walking forward as a country again.

A friend of mine in early College was making a “Pros” and “Cons” list concerning Geneticially Engineered Food Crops. As a very environmentally concerned person, her “Cons” list had grown substantially larger than her “Pros,” and she was asking me to describe additional benefits/problems of GM Foods.

One concern I voiced was the introduction of genetically modified genes appearing in the bacteria of human digestive tracks, but I didn’t quite feel comfortable relegating this to the “Con” column because we don’t know what effect those genes would have. Then on the “Pro” side was the immense potential GM Foods had to bring nutrition to famine-stricken countries, and while this was a single “Pro,” it also carried enormous weight. At the same time it was conditional on the implementation of GM Food technologies being closely scrutinized by the scientific community to ensure safety.

I realized shortly after our conversation, that my position on the issue was far too nuanced to fit neatly into a stack of “Pro” and “Con” bullet points, but rather required a flow chart of conditional statements to articulate what positions I found acceptable and unacceptable on the matter.

Human beings love to dichotomize things, but the real world does not work that way. We divide High School debate teams into “Pro” and “Con” on a myriad of issues, completely denying the gray zone that most real-life people must live in. Debates are framed as zero-sum games, where commentators decide who won and who lost while pragmatically there can be no such thing in disputation, only an ever-shifting ideal mean.

Those who recognize this reality are known as “Centrists” or “Moderates,” and most people take a dismissive attitude toward our political perspective. We are accused of trying to have things both ways, of lacking strong convictions, and of being ineffectual. The “Centrist” is the favorite kick-around of inflammatory pundits, who are trying to shame moderates into taking a side… theirs.

Yet who was it that brought compromise on the filibuster debate? It was the moderates of both parties, who bravely came across the aisle to negotiate an equitable solution. This tiny minority of less than a dozen politicians was able to break the disputational stalemate.

For this accomplishment, the Moderates of both parties were demonized by both sides. They were called “Democrats/Republicans In Name Only,” DINO and RINO respectively, accused of lacking principle. The hardliners on each side were attempting draw attention away from the implications of such an awesome demonstration of political power. They did not want the public to see the obvious: centrists are the ones who rule our government.

Each election cycle the two parties have rallies to motivate their respective bases. They whip their supporters into near religious fervor, trigger their flocking behavioral instincts, and herd them into ideological compliance in preparation for the battles that lie ahead… and then they forget all about them.

During the “crunch time” of the political campaign, politicians reach out to the most powerful base in the country, they are the only ones invited to all of the debates, they are the ones the polls focus on, they are the ones that leave the election outcome in doubt up until the votes are counted, they are the “Undecided.”

Party loyalists have very little political clout because of their fanatical devotion. Whenever a politician has the choice between satisfying the party base or pleasing everyone, they will try to please everyone. It’s the undecideds who put them in office, the party loyalists are mere ideological slaves with nowhere else to go.

Hardliners make ridiculous claims about moderates and centrists being wimbly and unprincipled because making outrageous claims is what hardliners do to everyone who fails to share their irrational absolutist ideals. News cameras and blogs are drawn to their antics, which give the appearance of primacy but are actually pathetically sycophantic in their efforts to please their constituency of sheep.

Meanwhile, the Centrists continue to quietly wield their power, holding greater influence over our government then the saber-rattling majorities. In moderation lies political power, because everyone knows you have the potential to change your mind.