The Three-Body Problem

I’ve not seen the show or read the sequels; I’ve read only the first book. It was originally serialized eighteen years ago, so not only am I not flying in with an urgent hot take, I assume this ground has been covered before. Nevertheless I wanted to share a few thoughts about Liu Cixin’s marvelous novel. (Spoilers galore, caveat lector.)

1. I was shocked by two things: first, how openly he writes about the madness and violence of the Cultural Revolution; and second, how spiritual the book is, from start to finish. I understand that Liu is an atheist, but it doesn’t show in the text; both the story and the way it’s told beg to be interpreted theologically.

2. A friend observed that the three-body problem itself—not least when it is pictured, as it is in the book, as three suns dancing around each other in an infinite, unpredictable, dangerous yet beautiful celestial choreography—is as obvious an image of the Trinity as you could imagine. Yet I’m not aware of ever having encountered it as an analogy or illustration before. Three-body perichoresis, anyone? Paging Saint Augustine.

3. I was worried, when Silent Spring appeared early, that the book would adopt an easy eco-radical, misanthropic posture. I was wrong. The narrative is bookended by the late appearance of another book, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and its explicit citation alerts the reader to one of the major themes of the book: the way that sincere and legitimate concern for anthropogenic harms or, more broadly, for the misadventures and evils of humanity—its deep-rooted inhumanity, toward itself and all else—can so easily bleed into hatred for humanity as such, a hatred that justifies far greater inhumane activities than the original offenses that first troubled the conscience. Philanthropy curdles into misanthropy and finally terminates in betrayal of all one ever loved or held dear.

4. This process, which Liu narrates with precision and compassion, is itself a mirror reflection of every totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism above all. The book, in other words, and whatever Liu’s intentions, is a science-fiction allegory of Chinese communism. Ye Wenjie, the catalyst of every major event in the book, goes from witness and victim of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution to exhausted, listless, post-ideological grudging participant in the regime’s scientific research, to a desperate woman willing to place her hopes in the potential of radical transformation from beyond the capacities of decadent and immoral human civilization, to true-believing Trisolarian ideologist, liar, and remorseless murderer. When she finally meets some of the women who, decades prior, participated in the crazed struggle session and fatal beating of her father, and their soulless eyes and defensive words reveal only pain, not apology, she is looking at her own reflection. The chapter’s title, “No One Repents,” is the perfect summation of where total revolution ends, having begun with wide-eyed good intentions but now drawn, inexorably, to hatred, deceit, madness, and murder—with no regrets.

5. The name Mike Evans gives to his invented ideology—or “maybe you can call it a faith”—is “Pan-Species Communism.” Bingo. It is “a natural continuation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” but in actuality (as he admits) of the French Revolution, which “we haven’t even take a step beyond.” The name of Evans’ ship is Judgment Day, and its single aim is “to invite Trisolarian civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, sinless world.” The ETO’s goal, in short, is a return to Eden and a redemption from sin via otherworldly powers. Once their prayers are answered, they will usher humanity into a utopia, with help from a manufactured exogenous event (=alien invasion). As ever, the advent of utopia cannot come without secrecy, deception, and untold bloodshed. As ever, too, it is not the weak or the powerless who are the agents of utopia’s arrival: it is, as Liu insists over and over again, the elites of academia, technological industry, and the media. (“To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for [common people]. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.”) These elites are the authors, the Red Vanguard, of a new and greater interstellar cultural revolution.

6. The vaguely named “Lord” heeded, obeyed, revered, and worshiped by members of the ETO is, it seems to me, a stand-in for Mao. An alien Mao, but Mao nonetheless—a conclusion supported by the late chapter offering a kind of window onto Trisolarian civilization and the role of the autocratic “princeps,” his consuls, their top-down control of the planet, and the immediate unsentimental “dehydration” and death penalty for anyone who makes even the smallest of mistakes.

7. Liu includes the following answer in response to an interrogator asking Ye Wenjie why she had such hope for the Trisolarians coming to earth: “If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.” To which the interrogator replies: “Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?” Ye: “…”

8. The single proton unfolded into three dimensions that swiftly reveals itself to be a kind of hyper-intelligent microcosmic civilization—a universal tao or logos embedded in all the logoi of creation, down to subatomic particles—that in turn seeks to destroy Trisolaris but is destroyed first … let’s just say I didn’t expect that scene, and I found it both frightening and sublime. Liu is a theologian, I’m telling you!

9. I’m well aware that Liu “believes in science” and that one reading of this book is that we ought to place our faith in scientific knowledge and development by using it, with true philanthropy, to benefit the whole human race (while remaining pessimistic and prepared for extraterrestrial visitors). This is not the only reading the book is patient of, though, and it’s not mine.

10. I’m eager to read the next two books. I’m also told that Ken Liu’s canonical books within the same world and story are worth reading. I hear that the Netflix adaptation is excellent, but a part of me wants to hold onto the text as text for a while before I allow Benioff and Weiss to replace my imagination with theirs. I’m particularly interested to learn why the Trisolarians don’t use the sophon to make all human beings simply go insane, as Wang Miao almost does within mere hours of seeing the countdown appear in his field of vision. Wouldn’t this remove the problem of human civilization and self-defense a full four centuries before the Trisolarians’ arrival? Just drive everyone mad, let them all die (like the “bugs” they are), then inherit the earth circa AD 2450? What am I missing?

To be clear, I’m sure it’s me. This is a brilliant novelist who deserves every benefit of the doubt. I can’t wait to keep reading.

Misdiagnosis

A running theme has emerged on this blog over the last few years, but especially the last 18 months or so. That theme is the sorry state of the church in the U.S., in particular “low church” traditions: non-denominational, baptist, evangelical, and other similar communions (like my own, churches of Christ). The focus is on those traditions because those are the ones that compose my world: the Christians I know, the neighbors I live among, the students I teach. I stay abreast of analogous problems in Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline churches, but they’re farther afield in terms of my lived daily circles.

Lately I have found myself struck by a commonality that unites so many of the objects of my critique and frustration within this lagging, sagging, tattered sub-world of American Christendom, such as it is. That commonality I will call a fundamental misdiagnosis of the situation, that is, of the root problems besetting the churches today. So far I can tell—granted that this is an untrustworthy mix of anecdote, hearsay, reading, and guesswork—a certain framework and diagnosis is shared among an enormous unofficial and unconnected network of pastors, church leaders, writers, and academics. When these folks look at the churches today, what they see is a surfeit of errant but otherwise strong, and strongly held, beliefs. This surplus of conviction is a problem for one of two reasons. Either the content of the conviction is wrong or the confidence in its truth is overweening. In both cases it is the pastor’s, the church’s, or the seminary’s job to exercise discipline—that is, to transform the content or to undermine the confidence. Sometimes the act of discipline is self-directed; sometimes the passion of directing it outward stems from autobiography. In any case, frustration results when laypersons do not take kindly to the attempt at discipline. Mutual distrust lingers like an aura, even in the absence of such an attempt. Each side wonders when the other will make a move.

I do not doubt that there are communities in which this description obtains. I do not doubt, in other words, that there are churches in this country filled to the brim with self-assured, belief-suffused Christians who sniff and snarl at the faintest whiff of a notion that they are not one hundred percent right in their every opinion—and, what is important to add, that many of those opinions have next to nothing to do with the gospel.

As I say, I do not doubt this. Nevertheless, as a diagnosis of what ails the churches in the aggregate, I think it is mistaken.

The problem, at the macro level, is not a surfeit of strong belief. The problem is the social, moral, and theological acids corroding every belief in sight. These acids are everywhere, affecting everyone. Marx’s description of the effects of capitalism on the wider society apply equally well here:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

Fast forward to the present and it is the selfsame phenomenon. In a word, it is liquid modernity that is sucking believers down into the depths. It is not some mass illusion of stability. The ground is breaking up beneath our feet as we speak. Or rather, it’s been broken up for some time, and only now are some of us peering down to see what little remains. Individual by individual, community by community, believers are falling through the cracks.

And what do they hear from their ostensible leaders? From the books and blogs, pulpits and classrooms, profiles and influencers? They see a finger pointing in accusation; they are told that the problem is too much belief held too tightly. Nein! I don’t know a soul in the churches under 45 years old for whom such a label fits. To a man, to a woman, they’re barely keeping their heads above the waters. And all they see is tidal waves coming for their children.

What we need, accordingly, is a shoring up of the foundations, not a tearing down of the walls. What we need, as I have written elsewhere, is not deconstruction. It’s reconstruction—or just plain construction, starting with what we have. From the raw soil and the still-smoking ruins, a shelter can be built. But we have to see what’s in front of us if are going to build at all, much less wisely, and we’ll never get around to the job if we project onto the smoldering wreckage the image of an impregnable fortress. Perhaps that’s what once was there. No longer.