Facing the Void: War of the Worlds

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

August 21, 2005

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

Several years ago, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks did a comedy skit called “The 2013-Year-Old Man.”  In the skit, Reiner interviews Brooks, who is the old man.  At one
point Reiner asks the old man, “Did you always believe in the Lord?”  Brooks replied “No. We had a guy in our village named Phil, and for a time we worshipped him.” 

“You worshipped a guy named Phil? Why?”  “Because he was big, and mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands.” “Did you have prayers?”  “Yes. O Phil please don’t be mean and hurt us, or break us in two with your bare hands.”  “So when did you start worshipping the Lord?”  “Well, one day a big thunderstorm came up and a lightning bolt hit Phil. We gathered around and saw that he was dead.  Then we said to one another, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!’”

            “War of the Worlds” H.G. Wells novel, which was published in 1898, well before World War I and II, suggests there may be something bigger than us humans!

How many of you have seen Steven Spielberg’s summer movie, “War of the Worlds”?

Spielberg made his version of the H.G. Well’s original. Orson Welles’ (differently spelled last name) famous radio broadcast “the Martians are coming” that caused panic here in the New York area the day before Halloween 1938 was also a remake of the original, along with several others.

A short overview of the story for those who didn’t see the movie, or may never have read Well’s story: astronomers observe a series of ten flashes from the planet Mars.  A few days later a cylinder crashes into earth, like an asteroid, the first of ten “asteroids” to hit around London.  The scientifically inclined realize that the Martians have blasted these cylinders to earth.  (Wells tells us that the Martian civilization had many years head start in their development, which explained their enormous advantage over earthlings. Since their planet was beginning to cool, therefore no longer sustaining their life, they intended to colonize the earth in order to keep alive.)  To the fascination of the curious, they notice the end of a cylinder ever so slowly unscrewing.  They hear banging on the inside.  Eventually enormous machines emerge, many stories high.  With tripod legs and “tentacles” that can search and grab they move quickly.  In the original, the local scientists send a peace party to communicate somehow with the Martians.  In response a “heat ray” obliterates the peace party.  No peaceful exchange here!  As the Martians assemble their fighting machines, the enormous tripods with tentacle arms, and powerful heat rays, the Martians begin wiping out everything around, people animals, buildings, even the most powerful weapons that the English empire can bring against them.  The narrator of the story, getting by like an animal driven underground, relates the events of the relentless and overwhelming attack.

Spielberg altered the original story in several ways.  Like Orson Welles before him, he placed it in New Jersey, just outside New York.  Since the United States is the now the most powerful nation in the world, the center of a mighty empire, like England before it, it makes sense to place the galactic encounter here.  Just as the most powerful weapons of England, the battleships with their mighty cannons, were no match for Martian fighting machines, so the American army is totally powerless against the Martian machines.

I suppose in the time constraints of a movie, one can’t develop the tension as the book does between the first curiosity about the strangers, and the easy first confidence that they would be contained.  In the movie, the arriving Martians emerge from the pavement fully assembled as terrible fighting machines, immediately wreaking destruction and slaughtering massed of people.  You are pitched immediately into chaos and dislocation.

Spielberg adds a major story line to the original in the role played by Hank Cruise.  Cruise plays a divorced father alienated from his teenage son and younger daughter.  Over the course of the movie he reconnects with his children.  Gaining in the end their love and respect gives the movie additional emotional kick.  I suppose Spielberg didn’t trust that the terror of a Martian invasion would carry us without a personal story to feel invested in.  At any rate, Spielberg’s additional story line has an interesting implication.  A working-class father can’t compete in today’s world with the affluent, professional step-father.  But when it comes to basic survival, the father can prevail, and regain his children’s - and his own - respect.

But back to the main event – the Martians!  If you don’t want to know the end of this story, close your ears.  (Remember when the Olympics were being transmitted from a different time zone.  The announcers would warn you when they were about to give results from an event that you were about to watch for the first time!)  In the end what destroys the Martians is not human organization, intelligence or the most sophisticated weapons.  What kill the Martians are bacteria.  This is H.G. Wells’s account.  “[T]he Martians [were] - dead! - slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; ... slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon the earth.

....  These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things - taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.  But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many - those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance - our living frames are altogether immune.  But there are not bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.  Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro.  It was inevitable.  By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.  For neither do men live nor die in vain.” (195)  How about that for the “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part! 

Wells invites us to humble gratitude.  In our complacency, we humans – especially the English of the empire, or we Americans today as the one and only super power may presume we are at the top of the universe.  Might it be, however, as Wells ponders, that somewhere else in the universe there are beings even more intelligent and “advanced” technologically who would look on us as a possible food source?  Are we really the end of the line?  I suppose Wells couldn’t end his story with humankind driven underground like rabbits, desperately trying to escape the harvesting Martians.  So he arranged a different ending. When all our human contrivances fail, Wells had us survive due to the most basic organisms that form part of our interconnected world.  Hurrah for germs!  The germs, not the mightiest fighting force on earth, save the day.

In the original story H.G. Wells introduces a Curate who personifies traditional religion’s response to this extraterrestrial invasion.  (A Curate is a low level minister in the Episcopal Church, the Church of England.)  Spielberg eliminates this character from his movie.  Was Spielberg afraid of offending a large portion of his potential audience in America, were he to follow Wells’s original?  The Curate is a hapless character, eventually killed by the narrator of H.G. Wells’s story, when his ravings threaten to reveal their hiding place to a nearby fighting machine.  Wells again:

“On the eighth day [the Curate] began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and nothing I could do would moderate his speech.

‘It is just, O God!’ he would say, over and over again.  ‘It is just.  On me and mine be the punishment laid.  We have sinned, we have fallen short.  There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace.  I preached acceptable folly - my God, what folly! - when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon them to repent - repent!...Oppressors of the poor and needy....!  The wine press of God!’” (161)

Wells skewers the conventionally religious on at least two levels.  First, he makes fun of their rationalizing human suffering as punishment for sin.  In contrast, the narrator’s scientific understanding is much more persuasive.  The Martians are not God’s agents.  They are doing what they must to survive, that is, conquer another planet that will feed them.

On another level, he skewers the Curate’s hypocrisy.  Had the Curate been more courageous he would have challenged his flock to confront the horrendous suffering of the poor of Victorian England.  Instead the Curate preached comforting pap - “acceptable folly!”

Spielberg avoids having Tom Cruise kill a mild-mannered pastor, by focusing on a crazed survivalist instead.  (That character was the source of the reading that I presented to you earlier.)  A crazed survivalist is much more acceptable than exposing the pretenses of conventional religion, if you want to make a block buster in America.

The movie is certainly fun, but read the book to get a fuller appreciation of H.G. Wells’s satire.

Part of what intrigues me about this book, and Spielberg’s film, is that it works with one of our deepest fears.  What would our lives - yours and mine - mean if humankind were to be wiped out?  We all want our lives to count for something.  We want to feel that there is some enduring purpose to all this effort that we spend over a lifetime.  One of the basic religious questions is this.  How do we thrive knowing that we will die?   Many of us answer, “By contributing to the larger stream of life, I am doing what I can to contribute.”  So we take immense satisfaction and meaning from contributing to the well-being of the generations that follow us.  We find meaning to enriching the lives of our own and other’s children.  We find meaning in striving for a better world to hand off to the generations that follow.

But what if we were to face seriously the possibility that all life as we know it would be exterminated?

Sometimes, on a dark night, as we look at the star filled sky, as we begin to try to grasp the enormity of the known universe, as we take in that our sun is only one of billions of stars in our galaxy, which itself is only one of billions of galaxies in the universe - on those times, we may question what difference does my puny life make?   In the enormity of it all, we may question whether our life can have any significance and meaning.

The power of H.G. Wells’ story is that it invites us to confront this void.  He invites us to consider that somewhere in this universe there may be another life form, so much more advanced than our own, that to them we would be as insignificant as microbes in a drop of water.  These lines open “The War of the Worlds.”  “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own: that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.  With infinite complacency men went to and from over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.  It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.” (9) 

Could it be that we are to other intelligences as microbes are to the peering eye through a microscope.  Consider the imaginative power of our consciousness.  We can imagine a future in which life as we know it ends! 

How do we find meaning in the face of this possibility?  Some turn to God.  They place their faith in a power greater than the enormity of the entire universe, even imaginable universes, and feel that God itself cares about them individually.  That assurance inspires them, even in the face of the Martians.

Others find no assurance there.  Where then, if anywhere?

For me, I find assurance in a different approach to the problem.  I find direction in two traditional teachings: one from the Buddha; the other from a Hasidic metaphor.  A follower asked the Buddha if the universe is eternal, or if it has a beginning and an end.  (Kind of like the scientist asking if the universe is expanding infinitely, or will eventually contract back to a singularity.)  Here’s the Buddha’s response:

‘Suppose a man is wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his friends and relatives bring him to a surgeon. Suppose the man should then say:  “I will not let this arrow be taken out until I know who shot me. I will not let this arrow be taken out until I know the kind of bow with which I was shot; the kind of bowstring used; the type of arrow; what sort of feather was used on the arrow and with what kind of material the point of the arrow was made.” That man would die without knowing any of these things. Even so, if anyone says: “I will not follow the holy life under the Blessed One until he answers these questions such as whether the universe is eternal or not, etc.,”  he would die with these questions unanswered by the Tathagata.’

In other words, given the suffering of everyday life, isn’t it better to do what we know can alleviate that suffering here and now than to speculate about unanswerable questions.

I also appreciate the Hasidic teaching that we should live as if we have two pockets, one filled with gold, the other with ashes.  When we feel despairing and meaningless, we should reach into our pocket of gold, and remember that “for you the universe was created!”  On the other hand when we think too much of ourselves, we should reach into our pocket of ashes, and remember, “from dust to dust.”

In closing I invite us to celebrate the marvelous interconnectedness of our lives, as H.G. Wells invites us to do.  In our world every organism contributes, even the seemingly least noticeable, the bacteria.  While we know eventually our star will cool, and life as we know it will end, if we don’t end it long before in our arrogant abuse of our environment, may we still live this life before us with gratitude and with commitment to making it as just and beautiful for all as possible, for as long as possible.