I’ve been thinking lately about why science-fiction seems to be very enamored with the Gnosticist flavor of mind-body duality. Star Trek and Star Wars popularized an idea that seems to have been old since at least Childhood’s End in science-fiction, and was an old religious idea millennia before that: that the truly advanced beings will be “pure energy.” Bodiless souls immune to the corruptions of the flesh, which will transcend evil (and perhaps good) and go on to heights of intellect that we poor meatsacks can hardly imagine.

I suppose it isn’t much of a mystery where this comes from. After all, it is our bodies that  usually die and get hurt before our minds. It is our bodies that hunger, thirst, and age. It’s tempting to believe that without them, without the constant need to care for them, that we could be so much more.

And yet, the whole idea smacks of the same kind of naive folly that leads Terry Pratchett’s Leonard da Quirm to conclude that humans granted the power of flight would transcend war and crime because they would no longer be limited by geographical boundaries. With the power of flight over a hundred years old, we can see the ridiculousness of that claim. But it’s harder to imagine what beings of pure energy would be like, and what crimes they might commit.

The interesting thing is that these energy beings aren’t usually portrayed as terribly morally good, just… advanced. And “advanced” always seems to mean more powerful, and seldom “better.” Perhaps a good analogy might simply lie in the classism that we often see in our own cultures that assumes that rich people who work — or steal — with their minds are better than poor men who must make do with their muscles. As below, so above. We see muscle without guiding minds about us all the time in the bodies of animals, and assume that the opposite — guiding minds without bodies — must be superior. The equally possible conclusion, that such an extreme might be as damaging to us as the animal state, does not seem to occur to us.

Why is it so hard for us to see that Dorothy Sayers called it rightly when she suggested that the calling of a manual laborer to do his work honestly and well is just as important as that of a clergyman to serve with integrity and piety? Is it simply because we cannot conceive of a moral duty without moralism? With a moral sophistication that has nothing to do with a physical sophistication?

If so, it is a failure of imagination, and not its manifestation.