[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Of the many themes[.small-caps] of dystopian literature and film, the loss of the individual stands out as a recurring fear of the modern West. From George Orwell’s 1984 to Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Star Trek’s the Borg, writers frequently explore the dread that our individuality will be erased, that we will be subsumed under some collective that will annihilate our individual wills, freedom, and autonomy.[.article__paragraph--cap]

Vince Gilligan’s recent Apple TV series Pluribus follows this tradition, imagining the extreme end of collectivism: a virus has infected almost all of humanity, resulting in a hive mind existence. Only thirteen people on earth are immune to the virus, retaining their own minds and thus their own senses of self. 

Two of these thirteen survivors vehemently resist this reality. Carol, a Romance novelist from Albuquerque, expresses her refusal most often in an uncontrollable rage. Manousos, a Paraguayan self-storage manager, initially rejects all contact with “them.” Later, as he battles through the deadly Darién Gap on his way to try to connect with Carol, he repeats to himself: “I am Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.” In this mantra, he both asserts his existence as an individual person, claiming and holding on to his name, and positions himself against those trapped in the hive mind. 

And yet for all Carol and Manousos’s at times violent resistance, Pluribus complicates the desire to be an individual by showing the terrible loneliness of a life in isolation. At the first news of another like him, Manousos goes to courageous lengths to meet Carol. Before Manousos reaches her, Carol’s loneliness causes her to succumb to the fantasy that one of “them,” her chaperone Zosia, is in love with her – particularly, as an individual.

And for most of the other survivors, their eagerness to join the hive mind as soon as the hive mind finds a “cure” for their resistance to the virus demonstrates the power of relational ties. They have husbands, sons, parents, who are now closer than they have ever been, and being shut out of that connection is painful. The hive mind’s self-proclaimed happiness is attractive, making the less-than-perfect happiness of life as an individual seem even more unbearable to these survivors.

While not all of these characters are sympathetic, through them Pluribus reckons with the complexity of modern life in which we prioritize the individual and her autonomy above all else – and yet we cannot extinguish the desire for a communal life, one that is open and honest and without selfishness. Carol’s discoveries about her deceased partner, Helen, reveal the difficulty of relationships. Knowing that the hive mind cannot lie, she presses one of them about Helen’s true feelings about her books and learns that Helen’s praise of them wasn’t truthful. Later, Carol discovers a camera hidden in the liquor cabinet, a sign of Helen’s mistrust and concern about her drinking habits. Relationships between individuals, clearly, are fraught. 

Perhaps the most striking element of the world that Gilligan creates is the lack of music. Post-viral-apocalypse, the world is silent, with music returning only at the request or for the sake of the survivors, whose every whim and desire the hive mind goes to great lengths to satisfy. Carol comments on the lack of music in an elevator, to which the hive mind immediately responds by playing smooth jazz over the speakers. In a remote Andean village, the villagers comfort survivor Kusimayu with songs in Quechua as Kusimayu prepares to join the hive mind. Their call-and-response singing carries Kusimayu through the process, ceasing abruptly – and eerily – once the virus visibly overtakes her. Now that she is one of them, music is superfluous. 

Music also marks Carol’s moments of defiance: she loudly sings to herself on her road trip from Las Vegas, she plays a CD while putting golf balls from a city parking garage roof into the windows of neighboring skyscrapers, and she accompanies her raucous fireworks display with music. The music reveals the turmoil of her mind and heart. Through this, Gilligan links music to the expression of personality – art as a way of communicating individual emotions, perspectives, and values. For the hive mind, such communication is unnecessary, and it doesn’t aid the efficiency that drives their actions. 

In one sense, the silence of this new world is the silence of modernity. As Dante demonstrates in Paradiso, the premodern imagination conceived of the universe to be filled with “strains of harmony tempered and tuned” by God. Only Earth, under the curse of sin, remained deaf to this music – the “silent planet,” as C. S. Lewis called it. In contrast to Earth’s silent corruption, the fullness of beatitude – complete peace and relational harmony – is described in musical terms. Only since modern science have humans imagined the universe to be cold, dark, and silent.

Christian theology reinforces the connection between music and beatitude. Theologians throughout the centuries have used the musical term harmony to describe the perfect relational peace of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Yet, as powerfully attractive as the idea of harmony seems, for the modern person, the fear of erasure often lingers in the background. How can such a harmonious life be possible and still keep a sense of self intact? Does not a movement toward cosmic harmony threaten to flatten difference, even to erase it, in the name of unity and peace? The idealism of the American melting pot has given way to a tribalism in which each group walls itself off, fearful of being absorbed into the culture of the Other. As Jean Louis Chrétien puts it, “if [one voice] can sing only with others, does it not also, as it melts into the choir, lose everything most beautiful and naked that it can give, all that is unique and irreplaceable in its timbre and its grain? Does it not thus risk becoming the voice of an anonymous member of the choir, one that is no different from all the others?”

Particularly when it is the powerful who speak about harmony, the historical reality of colonialism shades such concepts. For one example, consider Jonathan Edwards. Known for his attention to beauty, Edwards spoke effusively about the harmony of the divine life and the harmony that awaits saints in heaven. He writes of:

a time wherein the whole earth shall be united as one holy city, one heavenly family, men of all nations shall as it were dwell together, and sweetly correspond one with another as brethren and children of the same father.… A time wherein this whole great society shall appear in glorious beauty, in genuine amiable Christianity, and excellent order…. And then shall all the world be united in peace and love in one amiable society.

Such a vision of harmony quickly turns sour, however, when we read these words against the backdrop of Edwards’s ministry among the Housatonic tribe. Of their languages, he claims that “they are wholly unfit for a people possessed of civilization, knowledge and refinement.” Such a claim reveals that harmony, in this context, means assimilation to Edwards’s colonial way of life. Unity means a flattening of difference. 

Despite this history, most Christian theological retrievals of premodern ways of thinking about beauty uncritically embrace concepts of harmony and proportion. For musicologist Daniel Chua, however, harmony, as understood in modern thought, poses a significant threat to joy. Chua’s book Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life seeks to answer the “absurd” question of whether music is joy. After traversing ancient and medieval conceptions of a musical universe and seeking to retrieve ways of understanding music as joy, Chua problematizes the claim that harmony is the most fundamental aspect of music. For the modern world, he argues, harmony has become the music of the One: a “monophonic order” of a zero-sum game in which the winner takes all. Order prevails, Chua says, but its harmony is fragile and joyless, as difference is erased. Such a harmony, Chua argues, simply reduces to control. It is the nightmare of the hive mind, the erasure of the individual in the sea of the collective. 

But difference, Christians confess, is crucial for orthodoxy: “For the person of the Father is a distinct person, the person of the Son is another, and that of the Holy Spirit still another,” as the Athanasian Creed proclaims. Chua shows that for Christianity, as for other ancient ways of thinking, “one is irreducibly plural.” While the Trinitarian relations are not an easy analogy for human community, they do give us a picture of reality that is, at its very source and ground, peaceful in difference. David Bentley Hart argues that this is not a unity or synthesis of the One and the Many – that Christianity knows only “differentiation and the music of unity, the infinite music of the three persons giving and receiving and giving anew.” As the result, he says, “…all persons express and unfold the human not as shadows of an undifferentiated idea, but in their concrete multiplicity and hence in all the intervals and transitions belonging to their differentiation (freed from sin); and so human ‘essence’ can be only an ‘effect’ of the whole.... Every unlikeness, enfolded in the harmony of the Logos, manifests in an irreplaceable way the beauty of God’s likeness.”

The beatitude of God’s being grounds our understanding of difference, both of humans to each other, but also of humanity as distinguished from God. If in modernity, the Other looms as a threat, God then, conceived of as the most powerful “Other,” represents the greatest threat.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Crucially, the attention[.small-caps] that Pluribus’s hive mind humanity showers upon the survivors is not an attention that delights in difference, but that instead seeks to overcome it. In this world, difference has not been delighted in and negotiated in the careful dance of attentiveness and appreciation. Zosia returns Carol’s romantic interest, not as a desire for her as an individual or for her sake, but for the sake of the whole, who must not rest until Carol becomes one of them. Their unity and its purported peace and happiness is belied by their rejection of music, which signals the absence of joy.[.article__paragraph--cap]

In the rhythm of the hive mind, there is no room for improvisation, only strict adherence to the set beat. As each individual responds to a need, the resulting movement is deliberate and measured, if mechanical. It is the rhythm of efficiency, the lock-step beat of the individual keeping perfect time with the whole. In this universe, there is no room for extravagance – no room for beauty.

In contrast to the world of Pluribus, the Christian life, as N. T. Wright has described it, is a life of improvisations – of hearing the music and joining our lives to its rhythm in ways that harmonize without reducing all performances to monotonous repetitions. The shape of the Christian life allows for infinite variations, a vast multiplicity of lives that do not simply replicate the beat, but create an abundant, excessive plenitude of performances that cry, in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s words, “Whát I dó is me: for that I came.” Such a rhythm, Chua argues, expands to incorporate difference and variation. These variations are not a threat but an enhancement: one note, Chua argues, has no rhythm. Only in repetition, and then in differentiated repetition, is rhythm created. This rhythm generates a harmony: Christianity proclaims a harmony that is not an erasure, but instead a differentiation that is endless peace. 

Of course, there are lives lived “out of step” with the Spirit, to riff off of Saint Paul. But rather than imagining that these ways of living are finding a different rhythm and living according to it, I wonder if it may be more accurate to describe them as refusing to join the dance at all. If the divine life is the only source of joy, and music is joy, as Chua finally concludes, if the divine perichoresis is a beatific communion of infinite love, then Dante’s imagining of Satan frozen in ice is fitting. Outside of the divine rhythm of life, there is not an alternate rhythm, but no rhythm at all. There is only a refusal of life, of joy, of music. 

To keep in step, then, is not the lock-step march of those who function as interchangeable parts in a collective, but the responsive particularity of those who are members – of one to another, and of Christ. It is through this membership that we become people capable of perceiving the other as a gift – a perception beyond reason, beyond calculation, beyond fear.