Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  A New Beginning

  Telling a more complex story than the two serials described above, “Genesis of the Daleks,” a re-imagining of the Daleks’ origin, unambiguously portrays the Kaleds (the Dals of the earlier serial) as Nazis. In this serial, the “thousand year” war is still in progress and has reached a state of attrition that makes Skaro’s battlefields look more reminiscent of World War I than those of World War II. High-technology coexists with relatively primitive weaponry as two exhausted peoples each pursue survival through the eradication of the other. Humanoid (pre-mutated) Kaleds are dressed in black uniforms and jackboots, carry Lugers as a sidearm, and greet each other with fascist salutes. There’s even clearer evidence of hatred of the other, as Kaleds irradiated during the long war with the Thals, or “Mutos,” have been banished to “keep the Kaled race pure.” Their hatred of the Thals is no more subtle, with an officer boasting that the Kaleds will “wipe the Thals from the face of Skaro” and “Our battle cry will be ‘total extermination of the Thals!’”

  But “Genesis” allows for greater complexity by making the Thals almost as despicable, genocidal, and totalitarian as the Kaleds. For instance, the Thals use the Mutos and Sarah Jane in forced labor in a lethally irradiated missile silo, building their own devastating “distronic” weapon to wipe out their foes “in seconds.”

  The story also introduces a crucial figure, the horribly disfigured Kaled super-scientist, Davros, who’ll create the Daleks. This is an essential point of difference between the two origin stories. Scientists will be the ones to bring about the ultimate destruction, the ultimate evil, and deliberately so. Davros’s team has projected the effects of the ravaged environment onto their species’ future and discovered the mutated “final form”—a small, feeble, and hideous being. Davros has invented the metal armor that’ll give the mutated Kaleds a means of motion and self-defense—the Mark III Travel Machine. But his ambitions are larger, and darker. He’s manipulated the genes of the mutated Kaleds to make them pitiless and amoral. His totalizing vision has a remorseless logic. Davros is creating a “Master Race” that will “survive only by becoming the dominant species. When all other life forms are suppressed, and the Daleks are the supreme rulers of the universe, then we will have peace. War will end.”

  Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!

  What “Genesis” makes clear in rewriting the Daleks’ origin myth is that they’re evil by design. Davros has engineered all traces of conscience out of their genotype, leaving only creatures intent on domination of the universe, primarily by exterminating all life forms in their path. Why would he do that, particularly when it’s easily predictable that, in the tradition of Faust and Frankenstein, it must end badly for him, exterminated as an imperfect life form by his own creation, his crippled hand stilled before it can connect with the wonderfully kitschy “Total Destruct” button as he realizes, too late, his fatal error?

  Remember that, in “The Daleks,” the serial that introduced the creatures to a nation cowering behind their couches in a Britain still rebuilding from World War II and terrorized by the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, we saw two peoples locked in an eternal, fatal struggle for domination. The motivation for the Daleks’ genocidal plan, to wipe out what little life remains on the ravaged planet through a massive neutronic explosion, is their need to survive. Permanently irradiating the planet will make it more hospitable to them (and only them). This is the pessimistic view of the “state of nature” as described by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), his response to the destruction and chaos of the English Civil War.

  In a world of limited resources—in other words, any world imaginable outside the most utopian of fantasies—one doesn’t have to posit any innate evil in human nature (no Original Sin, for example) to predict conflict. The survival imperative is enough to induce competition over resources, enough to produce violence and mutual destruction. For Hobbes, the answer was a strong state—a ruler to use force and fear to keep people in line. In a situation of civil war, or of the strategically balanced and mutually-destructive war between Thals and Daleks, there’s no such outside power to bring order out of chaos. So for Hobbesian political Realists such as the Daleks, survival remains dependent on the destruction of the other. Hence their plan to irradiate the planet, wiping out their rivals in a final solution.

  But the Daleks, despite their signature cry of “Exterminate!” aren’t all about destruction. They’re also about order—“perfect little Hitlers” as Kim Newman puts it—”Though they seem to be individuals, they act as one” (p. 32). They’ll be supreme, because no other species can match their power or their ruthless pursuit of their goal. And while their vicious efficiency will make them hated and feared throughout the universe, the second origin story offers a warning for humans that goes beyond evil intent. For they represent not only the obvious parallel—Nazis, or other genocidal totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century earth. More broadly, for Terry Nation, they “represent government, officialdom, that unhearing, unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it wants to destroy you.”81 This isn’t the passionate drive to destroy of the Berserker or the fanatic, but the bureaucratic imperative to make things tidy, orderly, complete.

  Daleks are creatures of unquestioning dedication to rules and order. In the name of procedure or orders or regulations or efficiency, the greatest horrors can be perpetrated, and very effectively so. The chilling real-world parallels include the functionaries who operate death camps, torture chambers, show trials, and the other machinery of modern authoritarian states. But they might also represent other inhabitants of what the sociologist, Max Weber, famously referred to as the “Iron Cage” of modernity—all those involved in modern bureaucracy, and more broadly in the instrumental rationality (ends justifying means) that drives so much of modern life. In this, the Daleks aren’t exciting monsters at all—they’re bureaucratic drones. Their “evil” is in their single-minded pursuit of the logical solution to their problems of survival and order. Mostly they’re following a facile plan to reach their collective goal; mostly just carrying out orders. This is the terrifying truth to which political philosopher Hannah Arendt wished to draw our attention in her famous observation on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Holocaust: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”82

  Scarred Relics of Ourselves

  The warning of the Daleks isn’t about the dangers of genetic engineering. Hitler didn’t genetically engineer concentration camp guards to be without compassion. There are more subtle technologies at work in the construction of the banal, bureaucratic human monsters whose echo we recognize in the Daleks. The Daleks are so terrifying in part because they’re at once alien and all-too-recognizable. They are our terrors of what humans can become, if combined irresponsibly with runaway technology and with schemes to “perfect” the species through transformation of the self. The Daleks combine the destructive power of technology in their armor-plated travel machines and death rays, with the physically weak, emotionally stunted, and amoral mutant inside—a projection of what can happen to the human soul in certain environments, in certain possible futures or, indeed, pasts.

  Many of the most insightful analysts of the technologies and environments that mutate the human soul in these ways were, like Hannah Arendt, refugees from the cataclysm that overtook Europe in the Twentieth Century—in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, leading lights of the “Frankfurt School” of political sociology, and co-authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment. For it was the European birthplace of the Enlightenment, of modern ideas of freedom, tolerance, and human rights, that also spawned totalitarianism and the peculiarly effective techniques of high-tech, modern mass murder. The two halves of this pair were there at the start: the French Revolution brought both the Declarat
ion of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the industrialization of death in the form of the guillotine (this symbol of efficient state murder is the ancestor of the gas chamber, of the gulag, of napalm). It isn’t that science and technology and reason are in themselves evil. Far from it. As Jacob Bronowski argued toward the end of his landmark television series, The Ascent of Man (1973) reflecting on an ash pit at Auschwitz, it isn’t knowledge, but the aspiration to total knowledge, “the knowledge of gods,” that ends in the gas chambers. The great evils of the age of totalitarianism came when humans disregarded Cromwell’s plea: “Think it possible you may be mistaken.” Bronowski urges us to cure ourselves of the “itch for absolute knowledge and power.”

  Horkheimer and Adorno warned of the dangers of what they termed the “culture industry,” the industrialization of cultural production, the irresistible pressure toward conformity in modern societies. Even apparently benign systems that afford choice, individuality, and self-expression can have the perverse effect of enforcing or incentivizing conformity, through market or other social mechanisms. Consider the operation of fashion to limit self-expression, the boundary-setting power of literary, artistic, or academic canons, or the creative deadening induced by inflexible regimes of intellectual property rights. Our social environment imposes certain choices on us: are not the avatars or uniforms or images we “choose” to project in social spaces, online and off, equivalent to Dalek carapaces, protective, allowing travel, concealing any ugliness and weakness within? If we couple their insights with those of Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere, showing how modern institutions like the school, the prison, and the clinic work to transform the inner as well as outer life of citizens, we can begin to see how the disciplinary technologies of the modern state and other powerful institutions (such as corporations) can be equivalent to Davros’s genetic manipulations in excising the individual conscience, or at least suppressing it, of eliciting the drive to conform, the obedience that’ll ultimately commit murder for the state, even mass murder, if so ordered. Just like the Daleks, humans can be made monstrous.

  Which of You Will Do It?

  Humans can be monstrous enough to commit genocide. What of gods? It’s not difficult to perceive the practically immortal, time-and space-traveling Doctor as god-like. His superior vantage point and detachment allow him to make horrible calculations, sometimes sacrificing individuals for the greater good. He sees space-time in a way that’s beyond human comprehension, understanding the sweep of history as from the point of view of a being that’s outside both space and time, and yet who can intervene in and manipulate them. For all his genuine attachment to his various human (mortal) companions, he’s ultimately a lonely being, a perpetual traveler, an observer to whom individual human and similar beings, with their limited life spans and understandings, must seem puny and ant-like. In “Genesis,” the history-changing, god-like figure comes clearly into focus when he’s tasked by the Time Lords with interfering with the Daleks’ evolution, because they “foresee a time when they will have destroyed all other life forms and become the dominant creatures in the universe.” And yet he questions that right of intervention. He must weigh costs and benefits as we must, but on the unimaginably vast scale of the whole history of the universe.

  Next to this terrifyingly powerful, but charmingly irreverent and benign figure, Davros’s aspirations to the status of god seem both tragicomic and desperately frightening. The Doctor feels the weight of his power upon him. Davros aspires to ultimate power without responsibility. Consider the following exchange between Davros and the Doctor, when the latter has been captured and Davros has discovered that he could learn secrets of the Daleks’ future from his time-traveling visitor. Davros tortures the Doctor’s human companions to force him to disclose these secrets, seeing his compassion for them as a weakness, and one that mustn’t be allowed to plague his Dalek creations: “You are afflicted with a conscience.”

  The Doctor appeals to Davros to change his plans for the Daleks: “Why not make them a force for good throughout the universe?” “I could do it,” admits Davros. Why, then, make them evil? Davros explains: “Evil? No. No, I will not accept that. They are conditioned simply to survive. They can survive only by becoming the dominant species. When all other life forms are suppressed, and the Daleks are the supreme rulers of the universe, then we will have peace. War will end.” This fits the Hobbesian view—destruction as a means of survival in a competitive and lawless universe. But it doesn’t end there. The Doctor, speaking to Davros as a fellow scientist, appeals to his reason by presenting an analogy. What if you could create a virus so deadly that it would destroy all other life? Davros answers in a speech that rises to a hysterical peak:Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand a capsule that contained such power. To know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure of my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes, I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks I shall have that power.

  Here’s a moment when the difference between malign and benign reason is thrown into sharp relief. The Doctor, a more knowledgeable and powerful scientist (or god) would never create the doomsday virus, much less exploit it for absolute power. His cocky irreverence covers a deep reverence for life in all its crazy variety, and a passionate affection for silly, flawed, dangerous humans. But if the Doctor were himself more human, would he be as monstrous as Davros?

  The Genocidal Doctor

  In “Journey’s End” (2008), in a plot that recalls “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” Davros has been rescued and revived by Daleks who have also perfected time travel, making them an even deadlier enemy who has wiped out the Doctor’s own people in the Time Wars. Davros and a rebuilt Dalek army have again determined to move the Earth (along with twenty-six other planets) in order to use it as a weapon of vast power. After plunging the TARDIS and the Doctor’s latest human companion, Donna, into the molten core of “The Crucible,” a sort of Dalek mother ship, Davros reveals his plan to align the planets he’s hijacked to use as a transmitter for his “reality bomb” that’s capable of dissolving “every form of matter” within every single dimension, leaving nothing behind but The Crucible and its horde of Daleks. Here’s what may have been truly at stake during the Time Wars: “This is my ultimate victory: the destruction of reality, itself!”

  Before the device has fully charged, the TARDIS rematerializes to reveal both Donna and a second Doctor. As the TARDIS was on the point of breaking up in the fiery heart of The Crucible, the Doctor’s hand, severed during his previous regeneration and stowed onboard, suffused Donna in residual regenerative energy, generating a duplicate, half-human Doctor and making Donna part-Time Lord, with a knowledge rivaling the Doctor’s own.

  The part-human Time Lord and part-Time-Lord human now save reality. Donna commandeers a Dalek control panel, powers down the reality bomb, returns every planet but Earth to its proper co-ordinates, incapacitates the Daleks, and once more places the Doctor in the position of deciding whether the Daleks shall live or die. Only this time, it’s the half-human Doctor. He barely even hesitates. Considering the massed Dalek army to be too great a threat, he flips a switch blowing every one of them to bits. The true Doctor is horrified by this genocidal act and rushes from the TARDIS into the flaming debris of the disintegrating Crucible to rescue Davros, who dies screaming, “I name you forever: You are the destroyer of worlds!”

  The Doctor exiles his half-human self to a parallel universe. The Time Lord-human hybrid is a being too terrible, too dangerous to be permitted to exist in this universe.

  The Ninth Doctor was born out of the Time Wars that have seen his people and (so far as he knows) the Daleks wipe each other out. This was the angriest Doctor yet, often on the edge of violence. The Tenth Doctor is more like the affable Fourth Doctor who faced the decision in “Genesis.” His part-human counterpart that emerges from the crucible, though, is also born in war, also infused with a veng
eful spirit. Far more crucially, though, he’s infused with humanity. Just as Sarah Jane urged the Doctor to abort the Daleks at the dawn of their existence, not seeing past their evil deeds to the larger picture that troubled the Doctor, so now it’s the human within that enables the Doctor to commit genocide.

  The Dalek Within

  We should not ... no, cannot exterminate the Daleks. We are the Daleks, at least potentially. What we can and must do is guard against the Dalek tendency within. That means guarding against the harnessing of the survival imperative, and the fears it fuels, to the dangerous politics of xenophobia and illusions of our own perfectibility. It means accepting and protecting difference, not pursuing uniformity. It means also recognizing and avoiding the dehumanizing effects of the application of cold reason alone to human problems, effects magnified by the modern technologies of bureaucracy, mass education, and mass communication.

  As the anthropologist James C. Scott warned us in Seeing Like a State, even the most well-intentioned projects of human progress can have horrific effects when married to the power of the modern state and applied on a mass scale as if all citizens were homogeneous and perfectible. Given the temptations of hubris and untamed reason and given our susceptibility to social engineering, our humanity contains within it the potential to make us all Daleks. But our humanity also contains the potential to fight the Daleks wherever we encounter them, through compassion, curiosity, and creativity. The latter qualities may be one reason why the Doctor is so fond of our puny species. The former are why he should be wary of us. After all, it was only with a dose of humanity that the Doctor of “Journey’s End” was able to bring himself to do what the Doctor of “Genesis” was unable to do—to exterminate the Daleks.