Thoughts about and from Čapek's The Absolute at Large

Looking for some fun speculative sci-fi satire? I recommend Czech writer, Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large (1922). I finished reading this after watching (again) Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). This is a more fitting combination than it might sound. I think we often consider sci-fi to be about science, or, as Susan Sontag claimed, about disaster. But what all three of these examples show is how sci-fi also spends a lot of time thinking about religion, spirituality, and god/God. All three approach this subject differently and each to great effect. Čapek's approach is more humorous and satirical, but that doesn't diminish the potency of his point, rather it enhances it. For Čapek, the human debate about deity and the demand for absolute truth is rather ridiculous, not because God is dumb, but because our approach to and conception of deity is absurd, as is our insistence that everyone conform to our conception of the Divine (the Absolute). The problem of religion has little to do with religion and more to do with people. In the end, Čapek blasts humanity and its institutions way more than he does religion.

Here are a few passages I found especially great:

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.

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                “Look, here, sir,” he [Captain Trouble] said after a while, “what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?”

                “Less than that.”

                “Colonies?”

                “Even less than that.”

                “Commercial treaties?”

                "No. Only about the truth.”

                “What kind of truth?”

                “The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth.”

                “Hm,” grunted the Captain. “What is it, anyway?”

                “Nothing. A sort of human passion. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world.”

                "Yes. I did hear that.”

                “Well, that’s what it’s all about, don’t you understand?”

                “No, I don’t understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they’ve got can’t be the true and proper God.”

                “On the contrary,” said G.H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), “I assure you that it is the true God. But I’ll tell you something else. This true God is far too big.”

                “Do you think so?”

                “I do indeed. He is infinite. That’s just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?”

                “Aha,” said the Captain. “And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him.”

                “Exactly. In order to convince himself that God is wholly his, he has to go and kill all the others. Just for that very reason, because it means so much to him to have the whole of God and the whole of the truth. That’s why he can’t bear anyone else to have any other God or any other truth. If he once allowed that, he would have to admit that he himself has only a few wretched metres or gallons or sack-loads of divine truth. You see, suppose Dash were convinced that it was tremendously important that only Dash’s underwear should be the best on the earth, he would have to burn his rival, Blank, and all Blank’s underwear. But Dash isn’t so silly as that in the matter of underwear; he is only as silly as that in the matter of religion or English politics. If he believed that God was something as substantial and essential as underwear, he would allow other people to provide themselves with Him just as they pleased. But he hasn’t sufficient commercial confidence in Him; and so he forces Dash’s God or Dash’s Truth on everybody with curses, wars and other unreliable forms of advertisement. I am a business man and I understand competition."

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“Everyone believes in his own superior God, but he doesn’t believe in another man, or credit him with believing in something good. People should first of all believe in other people, and the rest would soon follow.”

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“A man may certainly think that another religion is a bad one, but he oughtn’t to think that the man who follows it is a low, vile, and treacherous person. And the same applies to politics and everything.”

I'd also recommend reading Čapek's brilliant play R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robots (1920). I first read it in my high school sci-fi class and only recently rediscovered and reread it. I loved it in high school and love it more now.

Enjoy yourselves some sci-fi!