Interstellar, Tenet and Nolan’s Secular Faith

*****WARNING – SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR AND TENET******

*****WARNING – SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR AND TENET******

*****WARNING – SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR AND TENET******

*****WARNING – SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR AND TENET******

Apart from showcasing Christopher Nolan’s impressive vision and exacting execution when bringing a science fiction premise to fruition, his latest offering in Tenet confirms a secular conviction in humanism that was first clearly explicated in his equally impressive sci-fi epic, Interstellar. Indeed, Tenet is appropriately regarded as a counterpart to Interstellar, the former exploring imagined future developments on our current understanding of quantum mechanics in much the same way that the latter explores imagined future developments of special and general relativity. However, it is what they share in common that speaks most loudly of Nolan’s humanism, and that is a preoccupation with time.

Specifically, both films feature instances of actions in the future causing effects in the past, creating paradoxical causal loops. In Interstellar, “bulk beings” inhabiting a higher dimension turn out to have evolved from humanity, and therefore they have created a tesseract in the singularity of a black hole to allow the protagonist, Cooper, to send signals back in time to his earlier self and his daughter, in order to ensure the ongoing existence of humanity in the face of Earth’s collapsing ecosystems. On the surface, this seems to explain humanity’s successful endurance and progress in the universe, because it can all be attributed to our distant descendants guiding us through threats from the external world and the internal flaws of human nature.

However, in order to provide that assistance, the bulk beings must first have come into existence as our descendants, which means that they are dependent upon humanity’s survival to that point, before they can do anything to ensure humanity’s survival to that point. The causal loop therefore means that the intervention of the bulk beings does not explain humanity’s success, after all.

A similar causal loop is a central feature of the plot in Tenet, also. The Protagonist’s future self founds the titular secretive organisation and recruits himself in order to complete the central objective featured in the film, which is to recover the physical representation of a hidden algorithm before it can be used in the distant future to reverse the entropy of the universe, possibly destroying everything. Once again, the interventions of the future Protagonist cannot explain the organisation’s success in recovering the algorithm, because the future Protagonist’s knowledge of events, needed to facilitate the recovery, is also dependent on his prior self experiencing the events of the mission’s success. As the future Protagonist’s ability to bring about the recovery depends on the happening of the recovery, his intervention is explanatorily irrelevant.

In this second film, though, Nolan actually addresses this explanatory problem in conversations between the Protagonist and Neil, especially their final conversation (at least in the sequence of film scenes). What makes this conversation poignant is that the Protagonist knows Neil is about to go to his death, and he finally understands something that Neil has touched upon at several points throughout the film: you have to surrender to what you know has already happened; you must trust in fate. The Protagonist therefore understands that he must let Neil go without revealing what Neil will experience next.

This comment about trusting in fate is Nolan’s acknowledgement that causal loops resulting from temporal interventions from the future lack the capacity to explain any of the events within them, so that something beyond the loop must explain the success of individuals – like Cooper and the Protagonist – and humanity as a species. The fate that Neil counsels the Protagonist to trust in is a broader shape and tendency of the universe. Thus, the implication of the causal loops in both Tenet and Interstellar, given that they are highly improbable as mere accidents, is that the shape of the universe is to be here for us. The universe resonates or harmonises with our human nature in such a way as to ensure our continuing survival, flourishing and positive development.

So, this is Nolan’s secular faith. There is nothing in our scientific exploration of the universe that has contributed to this confidence. In fact, our best scientific theories describe a universe of impersonal and amoral forces that afford no reassurance of humanity’s future beyond an evolutionary transformation into other unrelatable species of organic or artificial life, at best, and otherwise, one of extinction. It is telling that Nolan’s only attempt to justify this optimistic conviction about humanity’s destiny is a hand-waving speculation in Interstellar about human love possibly before a force comparable to gravity in its capacity to transcend dimensions of time and space. Yet, again, this speculation is but an expression of the hope that the universe is human-shaped, after all.

Importantly, what this highlights is that there is a tension between Nolan’s desire to celebrate the current and possible achievements of science, and his desire to see the enterprise of science as a manifestation of a broader human exceptionalism that is compatible with the structure and likely development of this universe. Unfortunately, it is science that gives us reason to doubt that the impersonal forces and laws by which we can understand the universe will vindicate optimism about our significance or our future in it. If this tension is to be resolved, then it must be by positing something that – someone who – transcends the universe that we can observe and the constraints of its physical laws, wielding sufficient power to realise our hopes for humanity’s future: a more-than-secular faith.