Sixteen Volts

The much-ballyhooed new season of Survivor, this time taking place at the remote Cook Islands, started yesterday. My wife watches every episode of this show, but I have pretty much lost all interest in it, no matter how authentic and exciting it is to see modern people living like primitives and recreate the rituals that our ancestors practiced thousands of years ago. For example, after an ancient tribe had suffered some kind of devastating loss, its members gathered to the sacred ritual of "tribal council" to vote one member of their tribe to be permanently cast out. This simple ritual necessitated the invention of primitive arithmetic and led to the invention of numbers and counting, and the ritual itself later gradually evolved into what we know as the modern voting and the political elections. So you could say that this ancient ritual was actually the important seed of our whole modern society! It is historically at least as important as the Roman, Greek and Judeo-Christian legal, social and intellectual traditions that the Western culture otherwise emerged from, and I can't understand why the modern historians neglegt it so totally. An important part of this sacred ritual was also that fire symbolized life, an idea later embraced by great thinkers such as Ayn Rand.

But of course I had to watch this first episode so that I could make a blog post about the new "controversial" season where the contestants have been divided in four tribes based on race, to the great dismay of certain people. The words "social experiment" have been bandied around a lot, although I seem to remember that starting from the very first season, these words were part of the advertising copy of the show. Of course, this hook to add up viewership for the first episode will be done by episode three when the four tribes are randomly shuffled in two tribes. And then shuffled again and again, since the producers are never going to risk again having the game go like it did a few seasons ago, one tribe becoming totally vanquished and lost. And after the merge into one tribe and especially when the game gets to top six or so, I don't think that anybody even remembers what tribe each contestant originally belonged to. This might be different this season now that your race is your uniform, but even so, have the original tribes ever made any difference in this show when alliances are forged and broken in a fluid fashion? I don't think that they have.

To start the analysis of the show with one more general observation about the debate around this show, I find it very hypocritical that the crowd that normally claims that race is a social construct and doesn't even exist (strangely enough, every time I have read somebody make this claim, that somebody has been him- or herself white) and therefore it is not possible to divide people in tribes based on race and what about all those mixed-race people and so on, also seems to be the same crowd that complains that there are not enough nonwhite people on television. Well, if race doesn't really exist and it is only a social construct, how could you even possibly be able to tell what race a face you see on TV belongs to, and thus be able to say that there aren't enough nonwhite people on television?

In a similar fashion, I find it rather strange that the leftist crowd never protested the earlier seasons when the tribes were assigned based on sex. After all, the progressives have been telling us for a long time now that gender is only a social construct and that instead of two binary sexes, there is a whole continuum of gender. But funny thing... I just can't seem to remember the leftists snarkily asking what tribe the show is going assign all the numerous transgendered and genderqueer and "questioning" contestants to.

But enough of that, let's examine the show itself. When you edit a couple of days into a one-hour show, naturally the producers choose to show us the most comical moments, including the light in-group comical banter based on racial stereotypes. However, when that Latino guy who looks a bit like that singer from Biohazard but without all those tattoos said to the camera that his tribe has an advantage because they are accustomed to living in warm tropics, now I am a bit fuzzy on the details, but wasn't there a while a ago some white conservative politician in the States who got in trouble for saying something similar? (And no, by this I don't mean Arnold, but this one was a longer time ago.)

I am sure that many other bloggers will examine the first immunity challenge, what happened in it and the consequences and symbolism for the tribe that lost much better than I could, so I am not even going to touch that particular minefield.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 9:19 AM