Avatar—The Rest of the Story

Avatar was a feel-good movie. Not only was it visually stimulating, but it was emotionally inspirational as well. Once more the good guys—the underdogs—won; and they did so in rousing style. Surely we should all be moved to emulate their environmental purity. If we do, perhaps we too can presumably share in the benefits of a simpler lifestyle.
Then again, there may be a small problem. History has not been kind to “noble savages.” In the movie they came out on top, but what we saw may only have been Part I of a longer tale. As the radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, there may be a “rest of the story.”
Hopefully some of us remember the sage of George Armstrong Custer. He, it will be recalled, went out into the wilds of Montana to tame the rebellious plains Indians. Tribes, such as the Sioux, refused to be confined to bleak reservations; hence they fought to retain their traditional way of life. If it were up to them, they would continue to hunt the buffalo whether or not the United States government approved.
Custer may have been sent out to enforce the dictates of his superiors, but he quickly ran into a buzz saw. Much as was the case in Avatar, an aroused people, despite their technological inferiority, banded together to defeat the trespassers. In their rightful indignation, they descended on Custer’s troopers and wiped them out.
But that, of course, was not the end of the Indian Wars. The rest of that story involved a larger military expedition that returned to finish the job Custer started. And they did. The Indians won a battle now and then, but they did not win the war. There were simply too many Americans and they were too well armed.
One imagines that if there was a real Pandora, and it harbored huge deposits of “unobtainium,” those who coveted it would soon return. Only this time they would do so having learned lessons from their previous complacency. First, they would assign a less supercilious leader to the expedition. And second, they would come better armed, with more appropriate weapons.
Instead of a low level attack, they would probably devise a stand-off strategy. As a space-based power, they would surely utilize this superiority. Having learned the central importance of the Navi’s sacred tree, they would attack it from a distance. Deploying nuclear weapons, or at least the equivalent of a blockbuster bomb, they would obliterate this icon with a missile shot launched form thousands of miles away.
Since this would completely annihilate the primitive Navi’s home-court advantage, the war would be as good as over. Given the small numbers of defenders, they would no more be able to resist renewed hostilities than could the Sioux.
This is not an unusual story. It has recurred many times during the course of human history. In England, for example, the Romans were able to conquer the less technologically advanced Celts despite indigenous resistance. Queens Boadicea was able to lead the Iceni to several bloody victories, but in the end, the Romans rallied. They mobilized their military machine and crushed the locals with merciless efficiency.
By the same token, the Khoi-San found they could not resist the Bantus, the Mamalukes could not expel Napoleon, and the Australian Aborigines could not defeat the British. None of these represented romantic victories for the underdog. In each case superior numbers and/or superior technology eventually told.
The point is that primitivism, no matter how environmentally friendly, is doomed. It cannot compete with better weapons that are better organized. This may not be fair, but, as even Jimmy Carter recognized, life is not fair.
Like it or not, if we take Avatar too seriously and retreat into the woods to be closer to nature, we too will ultimately be exterminated. The movie tells us that the Earth invaders earlier destroyed their own green planet, but if they did, they had not done so at the expense of their technological capacities. As a result, they, and not the Na’vi, were likely to be the eventual winners.
Environmental romanticism has its entertainment value, but heaven help us if we take its lessons too seriously. If we do, we too may wind up seriously dead.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University