by Cuddy, Luke
Lastly, what of the cloned boy left behind on Eridanus-II, replacing the original John who was abducted and taken to Reach? The clone was created by taking a tissue sample from the original John, replicating the DNA, and growing a copy in an accelerated process known as flash-cloning. It is true that clones share DNA with those they were cloned from. But this does not mean that they share personal identity.
For one thing, having the same DNA does not imply being the same person, even in the real world—identical twins share DNA but each have their own personal identities. For another, the clone and the original diverge in a host of different ways—they have different bodies, timelines, and psyches. Finally, the underdeveloped technology of flash cloning generates only poor copies of natural persons—flash clones do not share the memories of the original, have to be trained to walk and talk, and suffer from a host of genetic maladies. They never acquire full mental capacity and degenerate after only a few months.
And so, although there may have been two Johns for a short while sometime around 2517 C.E., in the world of Halo, there’s really only one Master Chief. Luckily, in our world, there can be infinitely many.
2
Master Chief and the Meaning of Life
JEFF SHARPLESS
Large explosions from a volley of Brute fuel rod guns struck the advancing company of marines from the ridgeline some meters above. The precision ambush by Covenant forces effectively decimated the marines. Each plasma round rocked and obliterated the helpless men below, leaving only a few survivors. The debris clouds temporarily hid the surviving marines from the sights of Covenant snipers trained on them. Damaged and disoriented, the men of UNSC Bravo Company scrambled for cover behind a thin rock wall. It was only moments ago, the sergeant was screaming on the COM for support; now, only an assortment of body parts spread across the marble landscape. As the dust began to settle, Private Wilkes tilted his helmet back in the futile attempt to clear his vision of the blood from his fellow soldiers who had been destroyed by the explosions. Looking frantically for a weapon, he pressed his back to the wall anticipating the next barrage. What he felt was the force of a severe impact different from the energy blasts before. The impact shot dust, rock, and debris into the air, again blinding and disorienting. Emerging from the dust, with a sudden blinding speed, two Spartan warriors launched out of the cloud with weapons ready. The sight of Spartans immediately opening fire, one with an M6 Spartan Laser and the other an M19 SSM Rocket launcher, brought adulation and confidence to Wilkes and the other marines. The simultaneous fire hit the rock face above with precision and caused the precipice to fold. Dozens of Grunts fell to their deaths. The Spartans split and continued their assault with incredible ferocity. Within ten minutes the battle ended, over 200 hundred Covenants, 90 marines, and a Spartan lay dead on the battlefield. The remaining Spartan and marines were evac’d off the planet by a Pelican dropship to the UNSC battlecruiser in orbit. The battle on the ground was over, another battle would rage for the surviving Spartan.
This battle scene reflects the environment of the Halo universe. For humanity, it’s a future marked by the colonization of outer space and by terrible conflict. The same problems that have plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization, conflict and violence, continue in outer space. However, humans are not alone in the universe.
The Covenant, a technologically advanced alliance of different species led by the Prophets, deems humans inferior beings and begins massive assaults on the colonies. Earth unifies in a bitter struggle for survival. As the human colonies fall, there is a beaming ray of hope that strikes admiration and awe among the common soldier and citizen alike, the legendary elite Spartan warrior—genetically enhanced both physically and cognitively, and trained to be the ultimate soldier.
These heroic super-soldiers are deployed to achieve the unachievable. The famed Spartan Master Chief John-117 fights without question, thirsts for battle, and makes only one request, “I need a weapon,” while going on to destroy the enemy with inhuman efficiency. The battle scene above illuminates why the Spartans garner such admiration and awe as heroes fighting to defend humanity from a malevolent enemy. However, Spartans have a dark history that raises questions of meaning for the warrior. Master Chief and his brothers and sisters face a challenge, as all humans do, to find a meaning to their existence. Yet for the Spartans, this search for meaning is far more desperate, partly because of their origins and partly because of their role. The Spartans are born from a hard-line military thinking which accepts that the ends justify the means.
The Spartan Warrior
At the close of the twenty-third century, humanity is in dire conflict with itself and the use of genetically enhanced soldiers is developed by the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) to control outbreaks of violence. The Spartan II Project, an offshoot of the previous Orion Project deactivated some years before, is a reaction to a tactical change from larger forces to small, highly skilled elite tactical units to put down insurrections on outer colonies and prevent civil wars. The brainchild of Dr. Catherine E. Halsey, the Spartan II Project is a new level of development attempting to integrate genetic enhancements with a new battle armor called MJOLNIR.
In 2517, seventy-five children approximately six years of age are selected based on their genetic profiles, to be used as candidates for the new project. The children are replaced with genetically defective clones to cover the conscription, records of the children’s identities are erased, and the children are given a three-number code as their designation. In the years that follow, the children are subjected to rigorous physical and comprehensive academic training. In 2525, the fourteen-year-old candidates undergo a series of radical operations to enhance their skeletal, muscular, optical, and nervous system. According to reports, of the seventy-five original children only thirty-three survive the operations, thirty are lost, and twelve severely crippled by the process. After the final union of the candidates and the MJOLNIR armor, the Spartans are operational within the year, their first operation against rebels in an outer colony a great success. Since their deployment in 2525, the Spartans are embraced as heroes in the fight to save humanity against the invading Covenant Alliance.10
What Did They Die For?
Spartans fight and die as heroes, but for them the admiration is tainted by the facts of their origins. It will be in the moments of reflection that these warriors think about the meaning of their lives and call it into question.
As the Spartan stepped off the Pelican dropship, the voices on deck went silent, with only the hum of the ship breaking the silence. The light struck the green tint of the battle damaged MJOLNIR armor. Many of the workers on deck stopped what they were doing and watched the Spartan as he began walking toward the bridge to debrief with the Captain. They all wanted to catch a glimpse of the rarely seen elite Spartan II. Looking out through his visor at the faces of the men and women of the UNSC battlecruiser, he could see some people nodding their heads in acknowledgment, others brimming with admiration, others showing uneasiness and fear. The Spartan could hear the whispers and chatter from the personnel and wondered if they knew what he had lived through and sacrificed for them, and what his brothers and sisters had sacrificed.
Exhausted after the battle and debrief, the Spartan retired to his room. Resting alone, his thoughts turned to the battle and the loss of his brother, Spartan Kurt-051.11 His emotions surged as the overwhelming pain of loss hit him. Kurt was not merely a fellow warrior; he was a survivor of countless battles and a friend that stood fast before Covenant onslaughts. Kurt cared for humanity and his family of Spartans. Yet, for Fredric-104 he could not help feeling the pain of losing his people. He often chalked these feelings up to the need for good Spartans to win battles, but this was a guise. After each battle, the questions would grow in his mind. He could not help but ask, “What did they die for? Why are we here? Why was I taken from a normal life, experimented on, enhanced, and trained to be the most efficient ruthless warrior humanity has ever known
?” He thought about his life and what was taken from him. He thought of the faces of the troops on the deck and felt the distance between what were to be his people, the human beings he was fighting for, the people his brothers and sisters died for, and the people that created him as an instrument of war. If war is a force that gives us meaning, then why does each battle and each loss only show its unending emptiness and cruelty?
The Anti-Hero
The above is how I imagine a Spartan reflecting on the meaning of his or her life. A life of war will take its toll on any human beings, enhanced or not. To live with such violence as the core of our existence would lead many of us to question the psychological wherewithal of the Spartan. What the reflections of the Spartan show is only a fragment of what they have to understand as super-soldiers. What’s missing in the Spartan’s inner monologue is perhaps the most glaring and important, namely the fact that at the age of six these children were taken by their government and experimented on for the purposes of violence. To be taken and exploited does not seem to weigh heavy on his mind, but it is a crucial factor in a Spartan questioning his life. It’s the combination of their history and their role as super-soldiers that render their lives, as philosopher Albert Camus suggested, absurd.
According to Camus, living brings with it a dense strangeness, an incomprehensibility as to the reasons why we are alive, and the certainty of death. There is anxiety, discomfort, and a palpable nausea that life has a genuine possibility of being meaningless. Through the history of the Spartans, we learn there is a reason for these soldiers, super-soldiers for a futuristic death squad against other human beings. It was only a war with the alien Covenant that made these Spartan warriors the “saviors” many see them as; they could have easily been seen as monsters bred to suppress the voices of dissent. The Spartans fight and die for a humanity that denied them their basic rights to dignity and self-determination; this is absurd. Yet, it is the reason for their creation, to fight for the governing oppressors as robot-like monstrosities. Their deaths are meaningless and all the killing they do is thoughtless. They are slaves of an uncaring master. The Spartan warrior must face Camus’s claim in an acute way since their exploitation and abuse for the betterment of humanity is a possible interpretation of the meaning of their lives.
This rather disparaging narrative does capture the reality for Spartans in many ways—they are condemned to a life of war and murder, programmed to follow without question. Master Chief’s famous statement, “I need a weapon,” is a hollow, empty action of an absurd robot with a corrupted will. Nevertheless, human beings are experiential creatures who seek to make sense and meaning of their lives. The Spartan will want to make sense of his existence no matter what programming he or she has been fed. If a Spartan were to examine the meaning of his existence, I think it would be rather bleak, as I have described above, and the conclusion that life is absurd for the Spartan would ring true even more so than for the ordinary human being. If the Spartan were to see his life as absurd and his life and death meaningless, why not commit suicide? What keeps the Spartan going? We’ll come back to this, but first we have to look at a myth.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus describes an ancient story that, for him, captures the nature of life and brings home the starkness of living to human beings and Spartans alike: the Myth of Sisyphus. It is the story of Sisyphus, a king’s son condemned by the God Zeus for his crimes to push a rock up a hill and watch it fall back down for all eternity. This chronicle, for Camus, is the plight of humanity—each of us is born, we grow up, we live the variety of possible lives one can live, and then we die. All that goes on between birth and death is but an empty platitude and each person is condemned by fate, the Gods, or God, to a life of pushing a rock up the hill and watching it fall down.
Camus says, “At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.”12 The story of Sisyphus becomes tragic when he becomes aware that this is his fate for eternity; just as the worker realizes she too is locked into a life of possible toil; or the Spartan, who becomes aware of the absurdity of his existence, each battle, each loss, and the imminent threat of pain, suffering, and death. The Spartan will see his own rock being pushed up the hill. Suicide is a tempting option for escape, but Camus believes that even in the face of such a desolate understanding of life, there is a response that defies the conclusion of suicide. He points to the moment in the story of Sisyphus where he has pushed the rock up the hill and it begins to roll back down. Sisyphus turns to walk down the hill; he is exhausted and tormented, yet in that moment of turning and beginning his descent, there is a sense that revolts against the toil, pain, and torment. Camus illuminates this point:At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go, the rock is still rolling. (Camus, p. 123)
For Master Chief and the other Spartans, the meaning to their existence is challenged by their creation and their lives are filled with violence and pain. But as Camus shows, their absurd life has meaning in the fleeting moments where they are aware that they are still fighting and still standing. They are not heroes but anti-heroes, standing fast in an absurd and hostile environment of their lives. They go on fighting and sacrificing to defend the undeserving humans who created them. They push their rock uphill and stand defiantly as it falls down; in that moment for human beings and Spartans, there is something we might call happiness. The answer to the question “Is life worth living?” is a defiant yes!
This seems a fair philosophical interpretation of life at times and perhaps more so for the Spartans. Nevertheless, we can question the conclusion that Camus draws about life being absurd, since the term absurd can be ambiguous and it is a rather extreme way to interpret living. Could we not argue that we merely do not understand the so-called strangeness of being alive? What in life leads us to think it is absurd? In addition, it is unclear that life is similar to the Myth of Sisyphus. Life can certainly appear so and, in the Spartan’s case, it does seem to hold up as a narrative. They are not heroes but anti-heroes. Yet, it is equally possible that the Spartan’s life is more than a sorrowful tale of exploitation by militaristic government. Millennia before Camus talked about the absurdity of life, the Greeks showed that life for the Spartan can have meaning and happiness.
The Stoic Warrior
In the time of Halo, some three thousand years will have passed since the group of thinkers known as the Stoics suggested another path to meaning. As we saw in the previous section, the Spartan warrior faces incredible challenges that may lead him to think life is meaningless, but he stands fast defiantly as the anti-hero. The ancient philosopher Epictetus suggests that even with the difficulties that human beings face we can live with peace and tranquility; this can be true for the Spartans as well. Epictetus and his fellow stoic philosophers teach a “fundamental rule” where there are things within our control and things outside our control. It is only when one is clear and can distinguish between the two, that human beings can cultivate tranquility. It is the attitude of the mind that determines the meaning and worthiness of life, not the situation in which one finds oneself.
The fundamental premise of Epictetus’s thought is that by understanding what is within our control we can better master our desires. Those things that are outside our control, we are to ignore. The highest good is virtue, living in accordance with one’s nature as a rational being or right reason while evil is living contrary to virtue, right reason. Human suffering and the occurrence of severe events such as natural disasters, slavery, or being conscripted for a military experiment, for example, result in physical pain, but the problem lies in how we respond to pain and the psychological movements of thought
that occur from our habits of experience.
Epictetus would say that events like the Spartan II program, where the children are kidnapped, genetically engineered, and trained to be super-soldiers, are all instances beyond the control of the individuals. What we experience or possess in life can come and go and people are genuinely helpless to do anything about what is outside their control. What we do have control over is how we manage our psychology. Stoic psychology breaks down impressions (the things we experience through the five senses) from sensations (more developed feelings from these impressions). Stoics argue that we can give “assent” to, or make a choice to accept, certain impressions and deny others; there are actions and instances that are “up to us” and “not up to us.” This is where we can assert our control. Our goals and our attitudes are up to us, and in giving assent we allow those thoughts, experiences, and emotions to influence us. Epictetus says, “When we suffer setbacks, disturbances, or grief, let us never place blame on others, but on our own attitudes.”13 The Stoics believe we can select the positive thoughts, experiences, and emotions, and deny, or not give assent to, the negative thoughts, experiences, and emotions. To give into negative thoughts is considered an error in judgment, by placing importance on things that elude our control.