Last week, I went out to see Dune: Part 2 in the theater. I loved it. It was beautiful, emotional, thrilling, and thought-provoking. I may go see it again.
With that said, I notice that most science fiction sagas like this depict human values as mostly fixed. Though Dune certainly has quite a bit of nuance, at the end of the day most of its characters are motivated or eventually corrupted by power, greed, and all the usual human vices. The stories play out just as we might expect a cautionary story from early civilizations would.
On one hand, Dune and most science fiction stories are clearly meant as allegories to the human condition today. So these familiar human vices are vital to the author’s message. I get that.
But I bristle at the insistence that humans are bound to these same dynamics for all eternity. In fact, if we do survive for millennia to come to the point where we have interstellar travel and galactic federations, I am willing to bet that it’s only because we’ve largely transcended these same old vices, that human values have evolved toward a more all-encompassing kindness, that rulers (if they even exist in the same sense) will be pre-occupied by their duty to serve the whole of all life and creation, rather than themselves or their tribes.
I’d love to see a vivid vision of the future that depicts humans truly embodying these aspirational values and ways of being. What does a tragic hero story look like when all players are motivated by love, collaboration, and kindness? Are heroes even necessary anymore? What timeless tensions and complexities persist even when we live from these values? What new stories are possible when we evolve into a new human consciousness?
