The quest genre or monomyth has a dialectical structure. On the one hand there is the urge to leave home and explore the world. Discover the unknown. An appetite for novelty.
Avatar represents this leg of the monomyth. Our sense of curiosity. Adventure.
Yet, complementing this outward impetus is a homing instinct. A desire to return to one’s roots.
I once ran across a statement by Wittgenstein in which he expressed his distaste for Esperanto. He disliked the very notion of an artificial language since its newfangled words had no cultural resonance or historic associations. Bare denotations shorn of emotional connotations. Orphaned words.
Although, for some moviegoers, Avatar seems to represent their secularized heaven, many other people harbor a nostalgic streak. Mere space, however, spectacular or gorgeous, is emotionally unsatisfying. Too thin. Too flat.
Not space in general, but place in particular–is what they seek. A place with a sense of the past. A place that anchors them in time. Their time. Their history. Past as well as future. Familiarity as well as novelty.
Cameron represents one secular vision, but here’s another, opposing secular vision:
“All our instincts seem directed toward producing an immense fragmentation of the total human population. The typical size of inbred groups, whether the hunting groups of Neolithic humans, the medieval village, the more modern tribe or clan, or an aristocracy, is about 500 persons. So too are scientific academies and houses of parliament. Given half a chance, this is what human psychology always seems to favour–a situation that is clubbable,” F. Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution (Acorn Enterprises LCC 1999), 93.
“It is remarkable that our subjective preference for what seems desirable in life and what seems disastrous should run so exactly counter to the biological situation. Our preference is overwhelmingly for a secure life, surrounded by friends and their families, of whom we would hardly number more than a couple of hundred. Daughters and sons almost inevitably marry within the club, seeking to preserve material possessions and common cultural values. Comfortable and cozy, in contrast to population upheavals following defeat in war, in contrast to migrants quitting their home communities in sorrow due to poverty or as outcasts due to nonconformity over some issue or other,” ibid. 95.
The human heart is torn between opposing tendencies: wanderlust and homesickness. Only the Christian afterlife can harmonize these tendencies.
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