Futurama and Philosophy

by Young, Shaun P. , Lewis, Courtland

  Hey, I Miss the Old Days

  The Big Bang theory remains a widely affirmed cosmological theory today. The popular TV show named after it provides evidence of its broad cultural currency. Despite this popularity, it’s not the only contender to explain the ultimate origins and fate of the universe. One striking question that’s left unresolved by the Big Bang theory is, “what came before the Big Bang?” Did the universe simply start with it? If it did, why did it do so?

  One of the major contributors to the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), favored a type of recurrence theory. He believed it had a poetic charm to it that a simple Big-Bang-to-heat-death theory did not. Despite that poetic charm, Lemaître did come to accept the standard Big Bang picture.

  More recent theories have again revived the idea of a recurring universe. These new contenders use some of the most sophisticated theoretical tools available, from the effects of black holes to energy transfer between different dimensions of reality. Jean-Luc Lehners, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Neil Turok have labelled this the “Phoenix Universe.” They propose a theory in which most of the observable universe will be gobbled up by black holes, but dark energy and collisions between different dimensions will produce new iterations of the universe. They even use the term “ekpyrosis,” which the Stoics used when referring to the fiery conflagration of all things between incarnations of the universe.

  The similarities between the Stoics and more modern theories should not be overstated. Just because new universes may appear in the future doesn’t mean that they’ll follow exactly the same path, as happens to our time traveling trio in Futurama. But the continuing debate goes to show that cosmology isn’t a closed book. Who knows, perhaps in another hundred years our best scientific evidence will point to something like the Stoic eternal recurrence after all!

  We’re Travelers of the Past, My Good Runts

  What if the eternal recurrence actually happened? Would this have any significance for our lives? The simple answer would be “no.” The length of the cycles involved are so tremendous that it doesn’t seem to matter if what we do now repeats for all eternity. There’s also the striking fact that we don’t remember any of the previous cycles, a fact that won’t change in any of the identical future versions of the universe. And if we don’t remember something, it’s hard to see how it can be of significance to us.

  However, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) attached deep significance to the notion. He introduces it in section 341 of his book, The Gay Science. There he suggests that if we take this notion seriously we may have two possible reactions. The first will be a kind of horror at the prospect of things never getting any better. The second is delight in the fact that we get to re-experience everything in our lives. The difference between the two reactions is determined by how well-disposed we are to our lives. If we truly love our lives, it only makes sense that we’d be overjoyed at the prospect of living them time and time again for eternity.

  However, it seems all people have regrets, or things they’d like to change about themselves. The more of these we have, the less satisfied we are with our lives. The eternal recurrence can give us a kind of challenge: live your life as if it were to repeat forever. Of course, to take this seriously we have to ignore the fact that we’re presumably already repeating it exactly as it has occurred. But let’s set this issue aside for now. Read charitably, the recurrence view compels us to change what we don’t like about ourselves, so that we live the best life we can. Surprisingly, we find the often thickheaded Fry taking up this challenge in the “The Late Philip J. Fry.”

  Late, Late, Later . . .

  The episode begins with Fry being kept up all night by Bender getting very funky with a lady-bot friend. As a result, the exhausted Fry sleeps until almost noon, making him late for work, yet again. When he gets to the office the Professor scolds him for his frequent tardiness. Fry tries to defend himself by pointing out that Leela isn’t there either, but Amy tells him that she went to lunch a while ago because “some idiot was taking her to lunch for her birthday.”

  Realizing that he is the idiot, Fry finally shows up just as Leela gets a piece of birthday cake from Elzar. To Fry’s surprise, Leela isn’t really mad at him. Instead, she seems resigned to the fact that Fry can never be on time. Later, while cleaning out the ship’s cannon with a giant cotton swab, Fry promises to make it up to Leela by taking her out to the swanky Cavern on the Green for dinner. She responds, “That’ll be the nicest place I’ve ever been stood up,” but Fry promises, “No matter what happens, I swear I’ll be there.” Just then, Bender rushes in and announces that Hedonism Bot is settling down and getting married to a house in the suburbs, and that night “he’s having the girls-gone-wildest bachelor party of all time.” Fry gets excited about the party, but quickly remembers the promise he’s just made to Leela, and reaffirms his commitment to take her out to a nice dinner. Here we see Fry trying to change himself and break his bad habits.

  That evening, just as Fry is about to leave to meet Leela for dinner, the Professor stops him. Because Fry was late that morning, the Professor forces him and Bender to stay and test his time machine. While the three see all sorts of fascinating events in the future, including multiple collapses of civilization, Fry remains fixated on his mission to return to dinner with Leela. However, the trio ends up in the year 1,000,000,000, where all life on Earth has perished and their hopes of returning to their own time are dashed. Fry manages to find the Cavern on the Green, and announces that he’s there for dinner with Leela, albeit a billion years late.

  Fry then finds the message that Leela left for him in the stone of the cavern: “Dear Fry, our time together was short but it was the best time of my life—Leela.” Seeing this message, Fry realizes how much he meant to Leela, and how much she still means to him. Knowing that he’ll never be able to get her back, he accepts his fate of dying when the universe ends. When the universe repeats itself, and he gets a second chance, Fry’s committed more than ever to changing himself. The perspective he’s gained from his voyage through time has made it clear what is important to him and the kind of person he wants to be.

  Just as the three finally get back to their own time, Fry rushes to dinner; fearing that he’s late again. Showing up, Fry apologizes for being late, but, to his surprise, Leela tells him that he’s actually on time! Fry and Leela find themselves both surprised by his punctuality, but Leela is nevertheless happy. When she admits she was “afraid he wouldn’t make it,” Fry responds, “That was the old Fry . . . he’s dead now.” Here we see the double meaning of Fry’s statement and the title of episode. The old Fry is literally dead, crushed by the Professor’s time machine; he’s the ‘late’ Phillip J. Fry. We also see that the habitually late (tardy) Fry is “dead” because Fry is now committed to being on-time for important events, like Leela’s birthday.

  By committing himself to changing the person he is, into the person he wants to be, Fry is taking Nietzsche’s point to heart. If we do in fact repeat our lives eternally, then we’d best fully commit ourselves to being the people we truly want to be in this life. Of course, we won’t know for sure if the universe recurs eternally until we see it happen, and we won’t achieve that until the Professor invents his time machine in 3010.1

  1 My thanks to Ruthann LaBlance and the editors of this volume for helpful comments on this chapter.

  Morbo Demands More Futurama

  18

  The Evil that Brains Do

  JOSHUA MILLS-KNUTSEN

  You may’ve noticed that, for the most part, our culture doesn’t seem to value intelligence. Maybe you’re different, since you’ve picked up a book with ‘philosophy’ in the title, but generally speaking, we’re surrounded by stories and memes that put down intellect.

  We have the “nerd” as an object of ridicule, of course, and comic-book superheroes are constantly battling “evil geniuses” like Lex Luthor and Brainiac. There’s also the stock figure of the mad s
cientist, and the way in which President Obama is derided for occasionally being too “professorial.”

  Disliking and ridiculing intellect goes deep into our cultural past. At the dawn of the industrial age there’s Dr. Frankenstein, whose quest to know the secrets of life unleashes a horrific monster into the world. In a tale dating back to medieval Europe, the story of Dr. Faustus depicts a man who sells his soul in order to gain ever more knowledge. This distrust and dislike of intellect goes back even to the twin pillars of Western culture, ancient Greece and ancient Israel. In Greek mythology, it takes the form of the first woman, Pandora, whose desire to know lets loose all of the evil in the world. Likewise, Hebrew Scriptures provide a creation myth in which the first woman, Eve, disobeys God in order to eat of the tree of knowledge—knowledge, then, is literally the forbidden fruit.

  And now we have Futurama partaking in a tradition as old as writing itself: ridiculing smart people. From its use of Philip J. Fry as the hero of below-average intelligence, to its continuing jokes about academic faculties, to the very image of the most evil and dangerous entity in the universe, a brain, intellect is not something celebrated, but shunned and denigrated. In this way Futurama provides a funhouse mirror that allows us to see the struggle between the mass of society and its intellectuals, as exemplified in Plato’s Apology: the story of the trial of Socrates, the West’s first great philosopher.

  The Mentally Challenged Philip J. Fry

  Philip J. Fry (of Earth, not Hovering Squid World 97A) is undoubtedly the hero of the Futurama Universe. By my count he saves the Earth or the Universe no less than five times. He is, the Nibblonians tell him, the most important person in the Universe, which confirms the feeling he has when he’s drunk. That Fry should have such a fantastic resume is unsurprising for the star of an animated television show set in the distant future. However, Fry’s importance is itself a subject of comedy, due to the fact that Fry is unabashedly dumb.

  The very first thing we learn about Fry is that, as a pizza delivery boy, he falls for a clichéd prank, delivering a pizza to the obviously fictitious, “I.C. Weiner” (“Space Pilot 3000,” Season One). In “The Duh-Vinci Code” he insists that the tool which we use to hammer a nail is another nail. When Professor Farnsworth says, “You’re so dumb you can’t even remember your own name, Einstein,” Fry responds by saying, “Yeah, well, Einstein is a hard name to remember.”

  Nor is it simply others who identify Fry as intellectually challenged. In Season Four’s “Leela’s Homeworld,” Leela tells Fry “I usually try to keep my sadness pent up inside where it can fester quietly as a mental illness.” Fry empathizes by saying, “Yeah, I do that with my stupidness.” There’s even the suggestion of Savant Syndrome in Season Six’s episode, “All the Presidents’ Heads,” as Fry is depicted having the abnormal ability to instantly count a multitude of objects, akin to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie Rain Man.

  We learn in the course of a two-episode story arc, which includes Season Three’s “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid” and Season Four’s “The Why of Fry,” that Fry’s “special” intelligence is due to his lacking the “delta brainwave,” which all other intelligent entities (including robots) possess. This peculiarity of Fry’s intellect is the result of the events in the episode “Roswell that Ends Well” (Season Three) in which the crew of the Planet Express ship travels back in time only to become the source of the UFO sighting at Roswell in 1947. In this episode, which posits a darker (and funnier) alternative to the movie Back to the Future, Fry ends up sleeping with his grandmother and becoming his own grandfather. When the Nibblonians explain this to be the source of Fry’s uniqueness, he affirms their account saying nonchalantly, “I did do the nasty in the pasty.”

  Whatever Fry’s intellectual disadvantage, the most important aspect of his lack of brain activity (which registers something akin to the trace amounts we would find in a dead weasel) is that it allows him to be immune to the psionic attack of the Brain Spawn, a malicious foe who first appear as a threat to the Earth and then later are depicted intending to destroy the entire universe.

  The Brain Spawn, Evil at Its Purest

  While the intellect is often depicted as evil and destructive, a corrupting force that we should be wary of, Futurama takes this motif to the extreme in the figure of the Brain Spawn, which are literally floating brains intent on destruction. But why are the brains so evil?

  In their first appearance, “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid,” Nibbler explains to Leela that the Brains seek to eradicate other intelligent life because the thoughts of others are painful to bear. This is how Fry scores an early advantage over the Big Brain, presumed leader of the Brain Spawn, by being able to think of a way to defeat it. Of course, Fry’s limited intellect keeps him from being successful in this manner for too long, despite his attempt to subdue the brain by reading Bonfire of the Vanities which, Fry explains, is neither as easy as The Hardy Boys nor as hard as Nancy Drew.

  But what does this tell us about an intellect so pure that it has “long evolved past the need for asses?” Well, for starters, it suggests that intellectuals don’t much care for what other people think. The very moment that Fry picks up Bonfire of the Vanities and inflicts pain on the Big Brain, we glimpse the trope of the intellectual who finds popular culture dreadful, even painful to bear. We see this in every academic who claims not to even own a television. We even see this in the attitude some research professors take toward articles written for the Popular Culture and Philosophy series. It’s not really a publication, they argue, it’s more of an idle waste of time, like playing with Silly Putty or teaching.

  This fundamental snobbery has its roots deep in Western intellectual history. We can never forget that the first great Western intellectual was Socrates, and he was put to death for it. At his trial we’re told that Socrates is charged with not believing in the gods of the city and corrupting the youth. In other words, Socrates was charged with thinking everyone else was wrong and trying to teach the same lesson to kids.

  What’s especially interesting about the story of Socrates—as relayed in his student Plato’s work the Apology—is that if we read past the subtleties of tone that make us sympathetic to Socrates, there’s little denying that Socrates wasn’t a likable person. Socrates doesn’t shy away from this description exactly, though he does a good job of sugar coating it throughout many of Plato’s dialogues. In his defense, Socrates does explain that most of the people of Athens don’t like him because they don’t actually know him: they’ve confused him with earlier unpopular thinkers who argued for unpopular things—for instance, that humans evolved from fish.

  During Socrates’s trial he tells a story of how his friend, Chaerephon visited the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle was revered as the mouthpiece of the gods on Earth, and when asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, she replied, “No one is wiser than Socrates.” Feigning confusion at the Oracle’s claim, Socrates proceeds to search out respected Athenian citizens and question them in the hope of better understanding the Oracle’s answer. This is where his trouble begins. His first such investigation was of a politician whom many people thought was wise:

  I formed the impression that although in many people’s opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to try to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the people present. (Apology, 21b)

  Imagine that! Spending your time pointing out that people aren’t as smart as they think they are will make you unpopular and hated. It took a philosopher to figure that out. If Socrates had stuck to embarrassing politicians he might’ve been asked to host an ancient Greek Daily Show. Instead, Socrates proceeds systematically, questioning not only politicians, but revered poets and eventually, Greek citizens who work for a living (that is, the craftsmen).

  All of these individuals fall short, and Socrates comes to realize that the Oracle was right—he con
cludes, no one is wiser than himself, because “Human wisdom is worth little or nothing” (Apology, 23b), and he’s the only one willing to admit it. In other words, Socrates feigns his own ignorance in order to demonstrate the ignorance of others.

  So, basically, Socrates interrogates many people from all walks of life and, in so doing, points out that they’re stupid. Then, he concludes that the things they do know are worthless. Don’t forget, this is Socrates’s story to the jury when he’s on trial for his life. “You only don’t like me because the gods sent me to tell you how little you know.” Such a defense isn’t exactly endearing, but it’s precisely the kind of thing the Western world hates about intellectuals.

  The Brain Spawn as Socrates

  In Futurama, the Brain Spawn exhibit the worst aspects of the Socratic character. Whereas Socrates merely goes from person to person trying to convince them to cease saying stupid things, the Brain Spawn take matters into their own hands (if they had hands) by trying to kill everyone, in order to stop their painful thoughts.

  When Fry tries to subdue the lead brain by reading Bonfire of the Vanities, the Brain retaliates by transporting Fry and Leela into several works of great literature, first Moby-Dick, then Tom Sawyer, and, finally, Pride and Prejudice. The list reads like the twelfth-grade English assignments I never read. Again, the intellectuals are constantly trying to tell us that their thoughts are superior to ours, that their tastes are better informed, and the suspicion is that, if they could, the brains in our culture would just isolate the rest of humanity.