![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2011 06:18 pmSo I'll admit I'm not completely done with the novel yet, as I have had a ridiculous amount of extra work to complete this week, but I have read enough of the second half to be able to ask this question:
Why are humans so afraid of anything alien to us? I mean, in the case of Dawn, the alien things are actually aliens, but the fact is that human beings are always afraid of the unknown.
Dawn shows us that fear in a most brilliant high noon, but it's not the only novel. In fact, I believe this to be a very major theme of the novel- substituting 'something alien' for actual aliens. Human beings fear what they do not know, and this novel uses a metaphorical replacement to prove this.
But we are afraid of all sorts of things that we don't know. Death is obvious-- we have no idea what comes thereafter. Public speaking-- ranked higher than death on a national fear list-- I'd assume because there's no way out and therefore the unknown circumstances such as whether or not you'll forget what you're talking about halfway through your speech can rustle through your brain and paralyze you. Also things like spiders: I mean they're creepy, yeah, but I think the genesis of that fear is that they are so ridiculously different from humans. About the only thing we share is the idea of legs, but other than that they are basically aliens to us.
One can explain fear in an evolutionary sense-- we have developed the capability to fear as it is necessary to avoid extinction. Fearing death seems a pretty good thing if a species doesn't want to, you know, die and stuff. But why aliens? Why public speaking? Why spiders? Why is the genesis the unknown as opposed, simply, to death? It seems that we should fear things that might cause death, but instead death is one of the symptoms of an even deeper fear. This seems counter-intuitive.
Dawn shows that fear pretty creatively, and I think the answer is this: We humans don't crave survival anymore-- maybe we've moved beyond that-- now we crave comfort, and far too often we have found the unknown to result in discomfort, and therefore we have recently developed an inherent fear of the unknown. That's my thesis, and I think Dawn supports said theory.
Why are humans so afraid of anything alien to us? I mean, in the case of Dawn, the alien things are actually aliens, but the fact is that human beings are always afraid of the unknown.
Dawn shows us that fear in a most brilliant high noon, but it's not the only novel. In fact, I believe this to be a very major theme of the novel- substituting 'something alien' for actual aliens. Human beings fear what they do not know, and this novel uses a metaphorical replacement to prove this.
But we are afraid of all sorts of things that we don't know. Death is obvious-- we have no idea what comes thereafter. Public speaking-- ranked higher than death on a national fear list-- I'd assume because there's no way out and therefore the unknown circumstances such as whether or not you'll forget what you're talking about halfway through your speech can rustle through your brain and paralyze you. Also things like spiders: I mean they're creepy, yeah, but I think the genesis of that fear is that they are so ridiculously different from humans. About the only thing we share is the idea of legs, but other than that they are basically aliens to us.
One can explain fear in an evolutionary sense-- we have developed the capability to fear as it is necessary to avoid extinction. Fearing death seems a pretty good thing if a species doesn't want to, you know, die and stuff. But why aliens? Why public speaking? Why spiders? Why is the genesis the unknown as opposed, simply, to death? It seems that we should fear things that might cause death, but instead death is one of the symptoms of an even deeper fear. This seems counter-intuitive.
Dawn shows that fear pretty creatively, and I think the answer is this: We humans don't crave survival anymore-- maybe we've moved beyond that-- now we crave comfort, and far too often we have found the unknown to result in discomfort, and therefore we have recently developed an inherent fear of the unknown. That's my thesis, and I think Dawn supports said theory.
