Something Less Than Human

“Welcome to the human race.”

Doctor Who S5 E3, ‘Victory of the Daleks’ (2010)

A robot called Kismet, designed to simulate emotion-conveying facial expressions in order to test human responses to them. Thanks to Polimerek on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.

Well, it seems to have taken me ten years, but I’ve finally cracked why that scene in ‘Victory of the Daleks’ annoyed me so much. In case you haven’t got quite such an encyclopaedic memory of New Who as to be able to recall the particulars of the scene I’m talking about from that sliver of quotation I gave you above, allow me to recount it properly.¹

The Doctor and Amy are in World War II Britain, where the Daleks have been passing themselves off as weapons invented by a Scotsman called Edwin Bracewell for reasons I won’t go into here: suffice it to say that, as usual, their plans are dastardly and shall cause a great many deaths if they’re allowed to get away with them. In particular, poor Edwin is, as it turns out – unbeknownst to him – not a human being at all, but a robot created by the Daleks to give themselves a plausible backstory. Worse than that, actually, he’s a walking, talking bomb that will send the entire earth reeling into another dimension if it detonates – which, at the point we enter the scene, it’s going to do in less than thirty rels (about thirty-six seconds).²

The Doctor tries to deactivate the bomb by getting Bracewell to recall his (admittedly stolen and artificially implanted) human memories, in the hope, I suppose, that if he can demonstrate his humanity hard enough, his robotic body will be convinced of it, and leave off being a bomb instead of a person. Bracewell remembers how his family ran the Post Office by the ash trees. He remembers how his parents died of scarlet fever and the grief felt like a physical wound, worse than that even. He also remembers fighting in the trenches in the previous world war.

“Good,” says the Doctor, as the countdown continues to tick onwards. “Remember it now, Edwin. The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad, and losing them, and men in the trenches you saw die. Remember it. Feel it. You feel it because you’re human. You’re not like them. You’re not like the Daleks.”

“It hurts, Doctor,” sobs Bracewell. “It hurts so much.”

“Good. Good, good, brilliant. Embrace it. That means you’re alive. They cannot explode that bomb because you’re a human being. You are flesh and blood. They cannot explode that bomb. Believe it. You are Professor Edwin Bracewell, and you, my friend, are a human being.” But when he looks, the countdown is still going. The Doctor is at a loss: “It’s not working. I can’t stop it.”

Amy steps in and tries a different tack. “Hey, Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn’t?”

“What?” says Bracewell, perplexed.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” continues Amy. “But kind of a good hurt.”

“I really shouldn’t talk about her,” Bracewell tells her.

“Oh. There’s a ‘her’,” infers Amy, her tone intrigued.

And it’s at this point that the countdown starts ticking back down the other way – a fact which is not in any way lost on the Doctor, who immediately lends his own efforts to Amy’s plan. “What was her name?”

“Dorabella,” Bracewell replies.

“Dorabella?” the Doctor echoes. “It’s a lovely name. It’s a beautiful name.”

“What was she like, Edwin?” Amy asks Bracewell.

“Oh, such a smile,” remembers Bracewell. “And her eyes – her eyes were so blue, almost violet, like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Dorabella.”

And with that the bomb is deactivated. No dimension-jumping for Planet Earth today, thanks to Amy’s line of questioning and Dorabella’s violet-blue eyes. And do you know what the Doctor says to Bracewell next? “Welcome to the human race.”

 

Like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Poetic, huh.

Because apparently that’s what fundamentally distinguishes a human from a robot, or a Dalek, or a walking, talking bomb. Not, as it turns out, the capacity to feel nostalgic for the ash trees by the Post Office, or to love someone to the point where loss feels worse than a physical wound, or to inherently recognise the sanctity of human life that makes war so horrific. Nope, we’re obliged to conclude that what makes a human human is the capacity to fancy people. The capacity, furthermore, to fancy a reasonable number of different people, or the odds of one of them being off-limits would have been too low for Amy’s particular approach to be warranted. What if Bracewell hadn’t ever fancied someone he knew he shouldn’t? Whoops, well, looks as if he’s not quite human enough to stop the bomb going off after all. Sorry, Earth.

To be fair, it’s not exactly news that our culture is constantly telling us that being sexually active is a necessary component of being a normal, functioning, fulfilled human being. I think we see this most strikingly in the way that not being sexually active is put across as deeply weird, as pathetic or pitiful, as a fault to be determinedly corrected or ‘cured’. I’ll hand you over to Sam Allberry to illustrate the point:

Culture sees the kind of singleness we’re talking about as Christian believers as being laughable. So let me give you two examples of that. The first is the movie The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, and the title of it tells you, this is a comedy – because the idea of being forty years old and a virgin is comical. And I’m not wishing to spoil the movie, but it’s been out for, like, ages, so if you haven’t seen it by now … the ‘happy ending’ is when, thankfully, at last he loses his virginity and joins the rest of grown-up humanity. There’s another movie – I’ve not seen this one, but it’s called Forty Days and Forty Nights, and the tagline for the movie is: one man is about to do the unthinkable. What’s that going to be? No sex whatsoever for forty days and forty nights. Forty days and forty nights, that’s a month and a half, right? I’m forty-three years old, someone can tell me how many units of forty days and forty nights that is, and what on earth does that make me? If that’s ‘unthinkable’, to go for six weeks without sex, then we are some kind of – I don’t even know where we begin with how unthinkable we are.

That’s an extract of a talk from a Christian conference called Single Minded (which, though based in Australia, for some reason seems to book exclusively Brits as its keynote speakers). I’ve been listening to some Single Minded talks this week,³ and I thought Mr. Allberry did a really solid job of presenting a Biblical view of singleness and debunking some of the lies we often get in our heads about it. The point he made that I personally found most helpful was this: God gives people sexual desires not so that those desires might be completely satisfied through sex, but to make them aware of the greater, spiritual desire that is completely satisfied through union with Christ, for which sex is only a metaphor. In this way, not having sex is not a waste of your sexuality. On the contrary, what would be a waste of your sexuality is not realising, regardless of how much sex you’re getting, that your sexual desires are only a fragmentary picture of the great love between Christ and his bride. Not being stirred to worship by the reality behind the metaphor – that would be a waste of your sexuality.

A similar point was made by Ed Shaw in his keynote speech for a different installation of Single Minded. I say ‘similar’; it wasn’t the same. Now, I have massive respect for Mr. Shaw and his work – I seem to recall saying some rather nice things about his book in a previous blog post⁴ – but I massively disagreed with the direction in which he took this point. Let me quote him:

The power of our sexual feelings are [sic] needed by us, are essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us; to appreciate the passion of God’s love for us; to appreciate how hard it is when we walk out on him in response to his passionate love, when we reject that love and wander away. If you want to be convinced of this, spend some time in Ezekiel 16. Read it some time soon, and recognise that God is using sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people, really powerful sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people. And recognise as you read it that you can only feel the full power of that passage, the full passion of God’s love, because you are reading that passage as a sexual being, who gets these feelings, who gets what God is on about. If you didn’t have a sexuality, if you didn’t experience sexual desire yourself, you would read that passage and be slightly baffled by it. You wouldn’t get the enormity of God’s love for you. The gift of sexuality, the gift of sexual desires, helps us appreciate his love for us, in passages like Ezekiel 16. It’s not just a one-off part of the Bible: we see that in the Bible book of Hosea; we see that again and again in the Bible book of Song of Songs, where God’s love for his people is portrayed as a husband’s love for his wife, and where some of the most graphic sexual imagery I’ve read is there in the Bible – only to be understandable to me because I’m a sexual being, with sexual desires. We can feel, we can only feel the full power of God’s love because he has given us sexual desires. If we ever ask him, Take away these sexual desires, take away my sexuality – if we said that, if we felt that, we’d be asking him to take away, I would be asking him to take away one of the things he has most used to help me get, feel, how much he loves me, which would seem to be a stupid thing to do. So next time you just feel the power of your sexual desire – you know those times when sexual desire sort of takes your breath away and overwhelms you for a moment, and you’re sort of left reeling a bit, next time that happens, just reflect that God’s love for you is like that all the time.

“You know those times…” he says. No, I reply to the screen. Literally cannot relate to that at all. And heck, I’m only, like, further towards the ‘asexual’ end of the spectrum than most people seem to be; there are some human beings out there who legit do not experience any sexual feelings, not even heavily abstracted, depersonalised ones like mine.⁵ If you don’t believe me, try talking to someone who identifies as asexual and see how she likes it when you tell her you know what she’s capable of feeling better than she does. But according to Mr. Shaw, experiencing sexual desire is something which is needed by us, essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us. So what about those of us who are less sexual by nature than he seems to think is necessary, then? I suppose we’re doomed to never truly be able to understand God’s love for us. I suppose if we’d been in Bracewell’s position, the Daleks would have succeeded in propelling the earth into another dimension. I suppose we must be something less than human.

 

Apparently this Dalek is just on permanent display at a bookshop in Charing Cross. Amazing. Thanks to the anonymous photographer on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en.

In other words, while Mr. Shaw’s position avoids the Forty-Year-Old Virgin error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity, it falls instead into the Victory of the Daleks error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity.

You’ll have already gathered that I don’t in any way dispute that God does use sexual imagery to communicate his love, and indeed invented sex for that very purpose; nor that it’s good to use whatever we experience in the way of sexual desire to reflect on God’s love. What I dispute is that it’s impossible to grasp God’s love to the extent that he would have us grasp it if we don’t relate to what it is to desire someone sexually. I argued last week that the number-one-priority thing to pray for fellow-believers revealed in the Pauline epistles is increased knowledge of God’s love. That’s basically our first and highest aim for Christian living, because everything else springs out of it. Are people who lack the requisite amount and form of sexual desires in some way excluded from pursuit of that goal by the God who has called them to know him? Now that’s what I’d call unthinkable.

Of course, that wasn’t what Mr. Shaw was arguing. He was arguing based on the premise that all adult human beings, by virtue of being adult human beings, know what it’s like to be overwhelmed by sexual desire for someone, and I would hope that, with that assumption disproved, he would adjust the rest of his argument accordingly. What, then, about passages like Ezekiel 16? Well, I’ve read Ezekiel 16,⁶ and frankly, I feel a bit insulted at the idea that, just because I don’t personally really know what it feels like to sexually desire another person, I ought to be ‘baffled’ by the imagery in play. I have such a thing as an imagination, after all. I have learned to empathise with all sorts of feelings that I don’t experience personally, by extrapolating out from feelings I do experience personally. That’s something we all, as adult human beings, learn to do. In fact, isn’t that a better criterion for what it is to be human, in emotional terms, than experiencing sexual desire – the will to understand the feelings of others? Doubtless each of us will find that particular bits of scripture make particularly vivid sense to us because of our personal experiences, but that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed to never truly understand the other bits, especially if we’re well situated in a community of believers with varied experiences who can help us to understand better. In sum, the fact that God uses sexual imagery to describe his love does not automatically mean that it is a requirement to directly relate to those feelings in order to comprehend what he’s on about. After all, he also uses the image of being a Father to us his children: are people who don’t have children excluded from the opportunity truly understand God’s love because they haven’t for themselves experienced that sort of love? Unthinkable.

So Mr. Shaw is wrong that sexual desires are a necessity to help human beings appreciate God’s love. But he’s not wrong that they’re a gift to help human beings appreciate God’s love. Indeed, are they not all the more precious a gift because they are not a necessity? In giving people sexual desires, God is not merely granting them the bare minimum of what they need to know and understand his love; he is showing additional generosity on top of that. I don’t imagine it feels much like an extra-especially-generous gift in those breathless and overwhelmed moments – y’all actually get those? Wow – but that part of Mr. Shaw’s argument stands, and indeed, stands all the firmer.

What I’m urging, then, is that we shouldn’t correct one error only to fall straight into another. Our culture is wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper adult human being, and it’s also wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper adult human being. The manner in which sexual desires manifest themselves in you, and/or the manner in which they don’t, is irrevelant to your ability to know and love God. If he has called you to himself, then he has placed no limit on your capacity to know him better. If he has called you to himself, then he has called you to devote your whole self, including your sexuality, whatever it looks like, to loving and serving him. And that, in the end, is how we access the greatest, fullest version of what it is to be human: by becoming more like our Lord.

Footnotes

¹ And if you want to start work on said encyclopaedic memory, all episodes are currently available on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006q2x0/doctor-who.

² I love little world-creation details like different units of time: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Rel.

³ Here they are, should you feel inclined to do the same: https://www.singlemindedconference.com/past-events.

⁴ His book is called The Plausibility Problem and I think it’s well worth a read: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/18437/the-plausibility-problem. The previous post I mentioned it in was ‘The Trouble With Romance’s Monopoly on the Vocabulary of Affection’, back in April 2017.

⁵ I’m not going to make this post even longer by doing the bit where I explain my sexuality, but long story short, I’m what the world calls ‘demisexual’, and even though I’m none to keen on labels in this sphere, I have to say it’s been quite a relief to know that there’s a word for my weirdness.

⁶ So can you; here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel+16&version=ESVUK.