The Uncanny Valley, Latter-day Saints and the Rest of the Christian World

So I was recently pondering the great divide between Latter-day Saints and the rest of the Christian world (as you may or may not know, most of my family are all Latter-day Saints and I used to be, so it still informs much of my life view). It seems that if the recent presidential race has shown anything, it has shown that to many Christians, the only thing worse than an unbeliever is a heretic whose beliefs are close enough to be understood but not enough to be accepted. While much vitriol and hatred was reserved for the "enemy" (Barack and Hillary), the real invective was for those damn Mormons. I remember reading polls saying there were tens of millions of conservatives who would rather see a candidate like Hillary whose platform was fundamentally different from their own rather than someone like Mitt.

Well, I was wondering why this was so...

Then today I was surfing Wikipedia (a reputable source, I know, but check its sources on this one) and I came across the theory of "The Uncanny Valley." This theory "was introduced by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentch's concept of "the uncanny" ... [and] is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in the 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny[.]"

"Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

"This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction."

"The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer. In sum, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human; but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person."

The article then went on to describe another potential Uncanny Valley that occurs when things become "transhuman" or "posthuman." In other words, if men and women evolve with technology and gain prosthetic enhancements or something that moves them to be materially different in some supposedly positive or advantageous way, there is an initial revulsion before they can be completely seen as an "other" and thus seen with some level of empathy again.

I have found the following graph online that illustrates the Uncanny Valley:

[bunraku puppet obviously is in the wrong place]

Are you coming to the same conclusions as I am? Maybe the reason why so many Christians (evangelical or otherwise) harbor such revulsion for Latter-day Saints is that they have been tought or convinced themselves that the Latter-day Saints are fundamentally different from the rest of Christianity. Taking this to heart, they nonetheless see Latter-day Saints around them acting Christian and speaking the Christian language (talking of Christ, calling themselves Christian, taking the sacrament, etc). While they remain totally convinced that Latter-day Saints are NOT Christian, their Christian behavior strikes that chord of being uncannily like Christianity. And so instead of empathizing or relating like they do with Christians of other faiths, they view Latter-day Saints as mimicking and making a mockery of Christianity. The latter then fall deep in the uncanny valley and are placed in the same place as zombies or corpses, an inhuman form of unholy life not to be tolerated.

Hmmmmm....


More on this topic soon. I don't think I'm done with it.