Art imitates life: Babylon 5 and Karen Armstrong

November 24, 2014 • 12:43 pm

Reader Grania sent me a clip from the television show Babylon 5 (I didn’t know of that show, of course) as well as an explanation of the similarities between the clip (below) and the logorrhea of Karen Armstrong. Her explanation:

It reminds me of Babylon 5 again.
I’ve mentioned this scene before. A terrorist-rebel turned peace-maker tries to explain the complexities of faith and self-deceit. But his followers don’t want to think, and are not happy until he mouths meaningless deepities. They don’t want to think; they just want little slogans.
 Here you go:

She commented further:

A bit of context for those who have not seen the show:

The character is G’Kar, a disgraced former ambassador who becomes part of an “underground resistance” when his world is conquered. His hatred for the conquering race sends him spiraling into a path of hatred and violence until an encounter with another alien, this time an ancient and rather enigmatic one that makes him change and choose to use peaceful means to challenge the occupation of his world. This is what elevates him to the status of “spiritual leader” of his people, a position he does not enjoy or embrace.

It was a unique show among TV shows (to say nothing of the sci-fi genre) for tackling some quite complicated topics. The show’s creator was an atheist, although one who was fairly respectful of religion, but as a result a great many characters have no religion, and a great many religious mythologies turn out to be ancient encounters with alien races who were not above manipulating primitives for their own ends (although that’s not especially relevant to this particular scene).

The show’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, seemed to greatly admire one form of Buddhism when writing this series, and some of his philosophizing is occasionally a little tendentious; but this scene is a wonderful example of why deepities and people peddling easy answers in the form of slogans and sound bites are so often successful.

77 thoughts on “Art imitates life: Babylon 5 and Karen Armstrong”

  2. JMS, a.k.a. “The Great Maker,” has been quoted as saying it was reading the Bible that turned him into an atheist.

      1. 🙂

        I think that the difficulty B5 had in getting a bigger audience was due it being really hard to just pick up anywhere and start watching. You either watch the whole thing, or you don’t really know what is going on. I would recommend the series to anyone, and am generally fearful about the rumored “reboot” I’ve been hearing about.

        1. My local library has the DVDs. I now have a reason to hook up my DVD player and I will be binge-watching on Thanksgiving weekend!

          In the mid-1990s (and perhaps today) people rarely renamed their computers’ hard drives. I had one that always seemed to crash at the worst possible moment, like when I’d forgotten to save a document for a few hours. I named it “Bester.” It wasn’t worth explaining to the uninitiated. People who knew Bester, knew what kind of a computer I had!

          1. I eventually went and bought the whole series from Amazon as a present to myself. Still worth every cent.

        3. The first season is awful, which is what put me off the show when it first came out. Years later, a friend convinced me to make it through to the second season and beyond, and it is quite amazing. I later convinced my brother and his wife to do the same, and now they’re complete addicts.

    2. Funny, it was reading Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God” that pushed me from agnosticism into atheism …

  3. “Truth is a river, and God is the mouth of the river.”

    “And yet atheists won’t get that this is a metaphor. They think God really is the mouth of a river! But this is deep, deep stuff. We can only think of God in metaphors because it is so beyond what we can grasp. I am filled with despair over those who cannot see that.”

    Hey, Karen — you’re standing in the light again!”

    1. Holy Shit. That is so pathetic in so many ways.

      1) Egomaniacal

      2) Fainting Couch Please

      3) Claiming that there are atheists that are really that fucking stupid and thereby,

      3A) Demonstrating how fucking stupid you (KA) are or,

      3B) Lying or,

      3C) Both.

      (I could probably come up with a few more but I have to run.)

      1. Well, to be fair to Ms. Armstrong, I did invent her “argument.” It’s meant to be a parody. It sounds like her to me, but for all I know she’d either deny she even thinks this way … or insist that she’d say it more diplomatically.

        Of course, straw-manning atheism seems to be a popular international pastime so I suspect this is a genuine quote from someone somewhere.

        1. Oops. If I had been paying attention I would have, should have, noticed that.

          My apologies to Karen Armstrong. In my defense, she does provide a target rich environment.

  4. I greatly enjoyed Babylon 5 (though the final season was not as good as the previous 4). The character G’Kar had surprising depth, going through considerable evolution. He started as a hide bound fanatic, very shallow, and ended up as a deep thinker.

    1. The final season was uneven because they thought it might get cancelled half way through and rushed to tie up all the loose ends.

      As a shameless sf fan it’s hard to describe the excitement of watching this first time around and realising events had consequences, and world shattering events would not be neatly resolved after 50 minutes. That’s kind of standard now.

      1. My recollection is that the 5th season was canned, then after the story was fitted into 4 series, they then got another, so jms had to ‘fill it up’.

        I think the ‘change’ in G’kar was due to being imprisoned and tortured. Ultimately he leaves rather than become a ‘prophet’ for the Narns (his race).

        Coincidentally, i happened to be watching this episode today (How’s that for a cosmic miracle 😛 )

        This is my favourite sci-fi series, as it is a long continual story with delayed ‘paybacks’.

        1. I’m pretty sure the big transforming moment for G’kar is when he uses that telepathic rape drug to get inside Londo’s mind. Kosh intervenes and G’kar changes direction.

          You’re right though that he still develops over time.

      3. The transformation of Londo Mollari was so tragic. He was truly a Shakespearean quality character.

        1. Yup, Londo started as a ‘fool’ who enjoyed life, sought power, achieved it, but suffered immensely for it.

      4. G’Kar didn’t go through just one change. At the start he is a Narn fanatic. By the second season he had become more thoughtful. Still not accepting of Londo, but more willing to listen to what people said. He goes through more evolutions of his character, including a phase as a spiritual leader and a post-spiritual phase.

        All in all, a rather interesting character and one that made the show quite interesting.

        (BTW…I loved the way the human fighters actually flew like they were in space, unlike so many sci-fi shows where they look like planes in space.)

  5. loved B5 (at least until the last season).
    G’Kar was a fantastic character. Another great episode with him is “Late Delivery from Avalon” where he enjoys beating up the bad guys “They made a very agreeable thump.”

    There was another episode, “Believers” that had religious parents murdering their child.

        1. This is ‘survivors’, where a race won’t allow surgery as they are ‘children of god’. (An allegory of faith healing/Jehovah’s witnesses?).

          3. I still think that the Lurker’s Guide to B5 is even now the best resource on the internet for Babylon 5, including comment from JMS on each episode as they first were aired.

            The website is as old as the series, and it looks it, but it is a treasure trove of trivia and back-story to the production.

            http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html

          4. My husband’s absolute favorite episode is Passing Through Gethsemane.

            I’m all about the Psi Corps 🙂 The novels that came from the series can be good, but they are pretty uneven. The trilogy about Bester and the Corps is a good set.

          5. @ clubschadenfreude
            There are so many good ones. I think I find Dust to Dust the most moving, with the most enigmatic and withdrawn alien of all inexplicably reaching out and helping G’Kar when he is on the brink of total self-destruction.

            But it’s impossible to choose just one.

    2. I came here to mention this one. I loved B5,too, but never saw all of it, because it moved to cable at a time when I didn’t have cable. That episode hooked me, though.

      The doctor (who was the human in the clip Grania highlighted) was confronted with an alien child who needed an operation or he would die. The parents said that, if the doctor operated, the child’s soul would escape. The doctor pooh-poohed this, operated without the parents’ knowledge, and presented them with a healthy child. As I recall it, he goes to visit them, and finds they have killed the child, because they now considered him a demon.

      Quite a twist on the faith healing story.

  6. It’s interesting that G’Kar posits God as the mouth – the end – of the river of truth, rather than as its source. The image is not entirely consistent with his previous thoughts, which I guess were unsatisfying because they were about process rather than artifacts. I have had believers tell me they reject science because it’s changing all the time, whereas religious answers are fixed. I think there is some truth to the idea that people are uncomfortable with the uncertainty in process: don’t make me shine a light on the wall, just tell me what’s there and I’ll take your word for it.

    I’m personally skeptical that beings who live in the society depicted, with the kind of accumulated knowledge required to attain those technologies and interact with life forms from other worlds, would still be indulging in musings about fuzzy, boderline-supernatural concepts. But who’s to say? Under that theory, humans should already be majority-rationalists and that is far, far from the case.

    2. You could ask the same of us now, with all the knowledge WE have, and still >40% of the USA believe in a created world…

    3. My take was that G’Kar just tossed out two throw-away lines to satisfy his followers who clearly weren’t listening to a thing he said anyway. He didn’t even want to give the talk in the first place.

      In a way, there was a distinct correlation between religiosity and level of advanced civilization. The Minbari were on higher end with a no-God but sort Zen spirituality and the lower end were the Centauri & Narns with multiple gods and religions, both being doomed races. Off the scale were the Vorlons and the Shadows who imitate gods to meddle with the lower races.

      In the Lost Tales movie (which is not very good) a Catholic priest even comments on the dwindling faith of humans, and directly attributes it to advanced technology: that it had made it more and more obvious to most that God wasn’t anywhere, and there just weren’t any gaps in which to hide him.

      1. Still and all, some pretty subversive programming. I think it’s a stretch to assume all these separate races independently evolved such so similar a spiritual propensity when there’s no reason to think that it’s a requirement of intelligence. But then, if evolutionary logic were the point of scifi entertainment, there wouldn’t be such a predominance of beings who are basically humans with different kinds of skin – and none that were at all interested in coupling with James T. Kirk (and vice-versa).

        1. I agree, and I think one has to chalk that up to lazy sci-fi shorthand when they invent their alien races. They all too often end up being a distilled stereotype of one human culture.

          Luckily B5 had one director who was very hands-on about his 5 year project and on the whole creates well-written characters. In fact, one could argue that the series is really about the journey of two aliens (G’Kar and Londo) rather than about humans in space.

          And there was one episode where he tried to show that races are diverse, even amongst themselves.

          1. I think you mean ‘writer’ not director. JMS wrote most episodes (especially for the later series), and thus achieved a continuity that a ‘team’ probably couldn’t.

          2. No, JMS was writer, director and producer on the show so either will do. Perhaps I should have gone for ‘producer’ rather than writer, because as you say he didn’t write or direct every episode. But it was very much his show and his vision.

          3. JMS directed one and only one episode: “Sleeping in Light”, the finale.

            B5 is my favorite SF series, and easily one of the best things done on television in the last 20 years or so. It is not perfect, of course. It might have been better if it had a more realistic budget and wasn’t being made under threat of cancellation for 80% of its intended run. (The fifth season was always going to be the last.)

            Or maybe not. I’ve always pointed out that when George Lucas made Star Wars he had limited resources and no real support from the studio. (They thought another SF film, Damnation Alley, was going to be their hit action film of the summer. It bombed…hard.) Star Wars, of course, was a phenomenal success. When he made the prequels, he had all the money and resources he wanted…and, well, look what happened.

            “Isn’t it strange, G’Kar? When we first met I had no power and all the choices I could ever want. And now I have all the power I could ever want and no choices at all. No choice at all.” — Londo Mollari

            Naturally, the television industry learned absolutely nothing from Babylon 5.

    4. And of course preferring the “eternal” “truths” (talking about religion uses up so many scare quotes) of religion to the provisional truths of science is another great example of religious doublethink: religion’s “truths” in fact change all the time.

    1. I know, right?

      We should have a quick whip-round and present Jerry with a box set. 😀

  8. Rivers of thought, flowing out of Eden, are expressed through the mouth of God. And His mouth says He finds shellfish troublesome. But He finds big hats impressive. He’s not very good at counting the legs of His creations, and He’s very cross at being misrepresented in His books what He had ghost-written. Because that would be your chosen medium if you were an omnipotent telepath. Yes.

  10. I always meant to watch Babylon 5 & may even have the first episodes somewhere. I think the reason I didn’t get into it was, as Grania mentions above, there is a bit of commitment to it from the beginning. I think at that time DS9 was going strong & I was heavy into that (Captain Sisko is still my favourite captain).

    1. I loved DS9 too, of all the ST series I think it had the best developed characters.
      I think you would appreciate B5 though if you get the chance to watch it, it’s smart and funny and provocative and has some superb actors.

  11. There is a funny scene in one episode when G’Kar is in the bedroom of one of the human characters, who happens to have a large painting of Daffy Duck (velvet Elvis genre of artwork) above his bed. G’Kar asks him in all seriousness if that is one of his Household Gods.

  12. It’s rare to see atheists as fictional characters on television, but here’s another: Matt Albi (Matthew Perry) from Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Matt Albi is in love with a born-again Christian, Harriet Hayes, played by Sarah Paulson. I love this montage:

  14. Great clip from a great show.

    But I kind of think of G’Kar as someone with genuine wisdom who is forced to spout deepities to keep followers happy, whereas I think Ms. Armstrong actually believes most of what she says.

    To poster above on Season 1. It’s weak with a few really bad episodes, but I don’t think it is all awful.

    In 2007, a fellow Babylon 5 fan and I saw actor Michael York as King Arthur in Lerner and Lowe’s “Camelot” and although the program had over a page of his multitude credits, it never mentioned the B5 episode in which he plays a crazy man who !*thinks*! he is King Arthur. We were a tad miffed. 🙂

  15. What a beautiful voice Andreas Katsulas had. Neither G’Kar nor Tomalak would have come to life without it.

  16. Thanks for posting this!
    B5 is probably my favorite show of all time.
    The first time I tried to watch it, I got through a few episodes and gave up.
    At the start, it felt like a cheaper version of Star Trek.
    Also, if you are going to have human telepaths, there better be a good explanation!
    However, some of my friends liked it, so I got pulled along…
    Once the story starts, it really grabs you. I’ve watched the whole thing start to finish about 4 times now.
    Admittedly, there are some not-so-good episodes, but in terms of character development and story-arc, I’m not sure that
    it has yet been equalled. I think it’s one of those shows that changed what can be done on TV.

  19. Even TV offers bits of wisdom and reasoning. Like most everything else, the wisdom is masked by superstition and lost on most people.
    Thanks for this reminder.

  20. Not wanting to diss B5 (which I must admit I haven’t watched) but I don’t think atheism is particularly unusual in sci-fi shows, in fact I’d guess it’s more often the case than not. (Excluding simple-minded space-opera shoot-em-ups from that). I’ll hazard a guess why this should be so – in imagining a totally different future / alien society, there’s no particular reason why Yahweh should be relevant.

    I’d even claim those shows that have societies with their own ‘gods’ qualify as non-theistic because usually we, the viewer, are not intended to believe that those ‘gods’ are true monotheistic ‘gods-of-everything’ in the Abrahamic sense.

    Just thinking back over the sci-fis I’ve watched, which is a pretty random list, Blakes 7, Doctor Who, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (authored by DNA who of course was famously atheist), Red Dwarf, The Prisoner – all of them had no God in them. They’re all British ones by the way.

    US-based ones – Star Wars was full of woo but afaik no God. Star Trek I don’t follow. Stargate I don’t think had any Xtian overtones, it certainly had a nasty invading race of religious nutters but I don’t think their god was the Xtian one. Third Rock from the Sun – nope. Battlestar Galactica (the reimagined one) was interesting, the Colonies all had their ‘gods’ but certainly not Yahweh. I’d suggest that comparing ‘gods’ is a typically atheist pursuit since from the monotheistic worldview there are no other gods to compare. Cleopatra 2525 – nope. Farscape – had several ‘gods’, but none of them universal and none of them Yahweh and the principal Earthman in it, Crichton, was functionally an atheist, I don’t recall him ever praying.
    Firefly – I’m deeply suspicious of, I suspect Wheedon of Xtianity.

    Those are just the ones that come to mind, there are zillions I don’t know or haven’t recalled, but that arbitrary sample is pretty strongly non-theistic. Maybe that’s one reason I like (most) sci-fi, it appeals to my iconoclastic streak.

    1. Science Fiction also gives people a comfortable framework to explore motivs that would normally be harder to think about in a modern fiction context. It’s easier to think about atheists if you remove them from your own reality. This is why the bi-racial kiss worked in Star Trek – you would never see that back then on regular TV but it was accepted within the context of a futuristic show rather than one that reflects regular, modern life.

    2. Joss Whedon is definitely an atheist, not a Christian. He has said so in multiple interviews.

  22. I was a loyal B5 fan from beginning to end, but permit me to air a couple of peeves that bugged me throughout the show’s run.

    A minor peeve is the gratuitous use of apostrophes in alien names. I guarantee that G’Kar does not spell his name that way in his own native script, and any English speaker hearing his name for the first time would probably render is as Jacarr or something along those lines. So where does the apostrophe come from? From nowhere; there’s no sensible reason for it in terms of the story’s internal logic. It’s obviously been inserted by the scriptwriters simply because they thought it would be cooler that way. And that transparent violation of story logic for the sake of coolness undermines the verisimilitude of the show (for me at least).

    But my major peeve is the uncritical embrace of telepathy as an inevitable technological outcome of genetic engineering. Straczynski may be an atheist, but he apparently believes (along with X-Men fans) that mutation is a synonym for magic. This is an idea that infected SF in the 1940s and ’50s and that has tainted many otherwise fine stories ever since. John W. Campbell has a lot to answer for.

    1. But you’re OK with faster than light travel, energy weapons the size of a .38, etc.?

      Psi powers are just another science fiction convention that are present in some settings and not others. B5 treated them in a scientific manner, which is what is important. Scientists knew what genes controlled them, drugs could affect them, machines could duplicate them, etc. They were not “magic”, like e.g. the Force.

      1. Actually I do have a problem with FTL travel if the postulated physics is patently nonsensical. B5’s hyperspace physics passed at least a cursory sniff test.

        I’d argue that psi powers are in a different category. They’re based not on physics (real or fictional), but on an implicit supernaturalism (in Sastra’s sense): the idea that Mind exists prior to Matter, and can influence it by pure power of thought.

        This is a fundamentally antiscientific idea, no matter how you dress it up with talk of genes, drugs, etc. In that sense it’s not really different from the Force. Its currency in SF is due almost entirely to the influence of Campbell, who was an ardent believer in ESP. Writers who wanted to get published in Astounding (the leading SF outlet in the 1950s) were obliged to treat telepathy as an established fact, despite the complete absence of any scientific basis for it.

    2. Actually, interestingly enough, I did see at one point some posted early notes of JMS on the series, and it was written “Jakarr”, oddly.

      But how do we know his name wasn’t romanized by someone speaking a language with a (I believe it is) a glottal stop? 😉

      In all seriousness, though, I think the apostrophe is overused in SF&F seemingly to just look “cool” or “alien”.

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