Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders here with this week's Philosopher's Zone.

They are among the most loved, or most feared, villains in science fiction. They are, of course, the Daleks.

Fans of the long-running British TV series, Doctor Who, will know that the Daleks appeared in some of the first episodes of the show in the early 1960s.

But what is it that makes Daleks such great baddies? It can't just be their appearance. They look like giant salt shakers with toilet plungers sticking out of them. And really, their speech gets a little repetitive, doesn't it? 'We are superior. Exterminate.' And yet as most people will agree, Daleks are evil.

So what constitutes evil, and why do the Daleks represent a very specific idea about rationality and morality? Today we'll try to find out. Robin Bunce, from the University of Cambridge watched the show as a child.

Robin Bunce: I grew up in a family of science fiction fans, particularly my dad, he's a big science fiction fan and my dad also worked at the BBC. He was a cameraman and he shot lots of the original Doctor Who series. So yes, we always watched it, and I loved the Daleks because they terrified me.

Alan Saunders: Robin Bunce joins us this week to talk Daleks, evil and morality. He's a fellow of the University of Cambridge in the UK, and has written about Daleks in a book of essays entitled Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside.

Robin Bunce: One of the reasons I found them scary is because they have no face, so it's entirely impossible to kind of read; and they have no kind of body in a human sense, so it's entirely impossible to read body language of them, and it's entirely impossible to read facial expressions of them, and therefore you know, it's like talking to a brick wall in a sense.

Alan Saunders: Apart from being scary, what makes Daleks villainous -- or more villainous than other baddies?

Robin Bunce: Yes, I mean this is the essential question I address in the essay I wrote; for the book, Doctor Who and Philosophy. Yes, my concern was you know, what is it about the Daleks which we recognise, we human beings, from the planet Earth recognise as evil? And what I argue is that they're essentially since 500 BC, there have been two big theories about what makes things evil.

The first theory is the theory that Socrates puts forward and Plato picks up and we know it through Plato. And his theory is that good and evil are a case of knowledge and reason. So if we're reasonable people, we're rational people, and if we've got a good sound knowledge, then we're likely to be good. Whereas if we're ignorant and if we're irrational we're likely to be bad. So for Socrates and the tradition that follows from Socrates, reason and goodness go together.

The other tradition and the other great ancient moralist of course, is Jesus. And Jesus argues and that in fact if we want to be good we need to love each other. So his appeal is to something quite different, it's not to reason but it's to emotion, and specifically the emotion of love. So yes, we've got these two different theories of what makes things bad.

The daleks are scary because I think intuitively we recognise that something which has not got the capacity to love cannot be morally good. So I think that's what Terry Nation was trying to do in the script, and I think that's what some of the adults in the audience picked up on.

Alan Saunders: Well the Daleks first appeared in 1963 and you've argued that the historical context is crucial to understanding them, and more specifically the ideas of good and evil and rationality and morality that you've just mentioned that the Daleks embody, or as the case may be, failed to embody. So let's work our way through the early days of the Daleks. What was going on in the 1950s and the early '60s that's relevant here?

Robin Bunce: Well yes. I mean essentially my argument is that if we going to understand any text, say Hobbes's Leviathan to take one example, or Doctor Who, any text is really only understandable, the meaning of the text is really only understandable in the context in which it was written. So I'm arguing that in order to understand the original dalek script, which is what I focus on in my essay, we need to understand the context of the time.

The context of the time and the context that Terry Nation appeals to, is the context of a period of maximum nuclear danger. So between say 1957 and 1963, there's this kind of half a decade sort of thing, where the world faces nuclear war on three occasions. So there's the Berlin crisis, and there's a crisis over the Taiwan Strait, and there is of course the best-known of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happens just a year before the Daleks is written.

So there's an awful lot of fear in the public imagination about nuclear war, and because it looks like a realistic possibility. And if you look at the science fiction films of the time, films like The Day the Earth Caught Fire or films like The Time Machine, all of these are positing that nuclear weapons are in some way going to wipe us out eventually. And I think if you watch the film, The Time Machine, as the time traveller moves forward I think he hits 1966 and a massive explosion goes off. So clearly in the minds of the people making The Time Machine in 1960, a nuclear war was something which was on the immediate horizon.

So that's the immediate context which Terry Nation is writing in. Something else happens in 1969 which is -- so nuclear war is the general context for the Daleks; 1959 something specific happens and that is that a new kind of weapon is hypothesised and this new kind of nuclear weapon is what's called a neutron bomb. The amazing thing about a neutron bomb is that unlike traditional nuclear weapons which blow things up and just destroy things physically, a neutron bomb will destroy things by emitting a huge dose of radiation.

So a neutron bomb is unlikely to destroy a whole city, you know, buildings will still be standing, cars will still be working but it will kill people because it will emit a massive dose of radiation. So the thing about the neutron bomb, and as I say, the word 'neutron bomb' is first used in 1959, the thing about a neutron bomb is it's particularly morally evil because it destroys people and not things. And this is the weapon which is referred to time and again in the dalek story.

Alan Saunders: Yes, you discuss at some length the way in which the planet Skaro on which the Daleks and their enemies, the Thals, live. It clearly shows signs of having undergone a neutron bomb holocaust. The Daleks have mutated and you suggest that even the trees are affected, because the material substance hasn't been altered, but they're just not growing any more.

Robin Bunce: Yes, absolutely. I mean in the first two and a half episodes of the Daleks, essentially all the companions do is talk about 'Oh my goodness, this planet is like it's been ruined. I'm not feeling very well.' So there are all these clues about there's been a nuclear holocaust and the radiation is still in the environment and it's still ready to kill people so yes, for the first two and a half episodes Terry Nation is really playing on the fears of nuclear war.

Alan Saunders: Now the Daleks themselves are mutants, aren't they? And I wonder whether it matters that the Daleks are not just mad robots, that there is actually something squishy inside them?

Robin Bunce: I think from a moral point of view, the answer is absolutely. And here I argue that what Terry Nation is doing is he's appealing to a very new model of dehumanisation. So traditionally, if you look at literature and if you look at philosophy and you could look at politics, the way that we turn people into enemies is that we dehumanise them. So traditionally, the way we've done this is we've alleged that other people are like animals, they're brutes. And they're animals because they're less rational than us. So again, rationality being equated with humanity.

What happens in the early 20th century is that we get a new set of metaphors for being inhuman. And this new set of metaphors are based on the human being who has become like a robot or a human being who's become like a computer. Or, in the case of the book Brave New World, the human being who's gone through a rational process and through this kind of scientific rational process, has had their humanity stripped out of them.

So the new metaphors are about the human being who is less than human because they're more rational. So this is a complete change-around from traditional metaphors. This is exactly what's happened to the Daleks. They have gone through a process which has stripped them of their emotions so their bodies have been mutated, but also their psychology is mutated, too. And so yes, I think it's very important they're not just robots. It's very important they are human -- they used to be human and they have become like robots. That's chilling.

Alan Saunders: And the Daleks embody the relatively new idea that rationality is something capable, unlike love perhaps, of destroying our humanity, rather than being a crucial constituent of our humanity. To what extent do you think this idea had spread through culture by the time the Daleks appeared in 1973? Or was it still a little radical?

Robin Bunce: I think it was a fairly well-known cultural idea by 1963. As I've said, Brave New World is a classic example of this, but there are a whole series of other books that do similar things. To some extent, 1984 which is a classic text and everyone's read it, is like this. 1984 is kind of, it's a dystopia like Brave New World but it's a much more sadistic one, and Winston Smith, the hero of 1984 by the end of it, by the final chapter he is no longer really properly human because he's had his capacity to feel love stripped out of him in the Ministry of Love, through a scientific process of psychological tricks, drugs and torture. And so I think it was pretty well bedded down in culture by 1963.

The other of course, great writer, who plays with these kind of ideas is HG Wells. And HG Wells is a very unusual guy because on the one hand he really liked reason and he's trained as a scientist and he studies biology or is it zoology, I can't remember, but he's a very, very rational guy. But on the other hand he's kind of frightened by rationality as well, and lots of his villains in The First Men in the Moon for example, in The Time Machine to give another example, and to some extent in The War of the Worlds, lots of his villains are inhuman because they're just too rational and they're scary for that reason.

Alan Saunders: And the Daleks are not only extremely rational in their thinking or at least in their way of processing information, which they are capable of getting quite excited, but as the Doctor himself says at one point, 'They are very intelligent and from a very, very advanced civilisation'. So this is a clearly underlining the message that smarts aren't necessarily connected with goodness or morality.

Robin Bunce: Absolutely. And that's another big idea that you find in pop culture at the time. And one classic science fiction film, I think it's from the late '50s, is Forbidden Planet, and the thing that happens in 'Forbidden Planet' is that the people who live on this planet which we never ever see because they destroyed themselves, they become so clever and so intelligent and so able to manipulate the world of physics that they destroy themselves, and to some extent, again, this is a metaphor for nuclear war.

What's happening in the 20th century is we're becoming better and better at creating rockets, better and better at manipulating things, we can split the atom; this is amazing, we've created this amazing civilisation and yet the product of this civilisation, the nuclear bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, is something that could destroy us all. So yes, so I think those were very real worries at the time.

Alan Saunders: Robin, even the limited vocabulary of the Daleks is limited not because they're not smart and rational creatures but because they communicate only the bare efficient minimum for what they are trying to achieve; which is to say domination in the first series of the Thals, and later on of the universe.

Robin Bunce: That's right. Then again this is another idea which is very much in the air, and at the time that Terry Nation's writing. Yes I think that that's a place you can go to to find this link between the impoverishment of language and the development of evil is George Orwell's 1984 again, because what the villains are trying to do in 1984 is they're trying to control what people think and control what is possible to imagine through the recreation of language. And the language that they create is not standard English but the language they turn standard English into this thing called 'Newspeak', or what George Orwell calls 'Newspeak'.

And of course the thing about Newspeak as one of the characters says, it's beautiful, because you're destroying words, you're continually limiting the vocabulary to make what is thinkable insofar thought is the dependent on language, limited. So yes, so I think you're right. I think this is something that Terry Nation has picked up from things like 1984, the idea that if we reduce vocabulary we also reduce our ability to feel and think.

Alan Saunders: How is the American philosopher, the late Richard Rorty useful in thinking about the Daleks which is I suspect something he never thought he was going to be useful in?

Robin Bunce: I don't know. Richard Rorty was a remarkable man and I think although he didn't think of the Daleks because he wasn't British, and he's American and probably didn't see the Daleks. Richard Rorty was very interested in pop culture, and he thought that the way to make people more moral was to appeal to the moral imagination. And that of course is what Doctor Who does. So Rorty is very, very helpful in a few says, first of all because he's interested in pop culture. He believes that to be good we need to expand our imagination.

Secondly he's helpful because he is on the side of Jesus which is a weird thing to say because Rorty is an atheist, but nonetheless he does acknowledge this. He's on the side of Jesus in the sense that he argues that to be good is to love people, and he argues that the human capacity to be good is grounded in our ability to feel for one another, to recognise that even my enemy is part of a community and part of a family who will grieve if he's harmed.

Alan Saunders: This is The Philosopher's Zone and we're talking evil, rationality, and the Daleks with Robin Bunce, from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Alan Saunders: Well we managed to get this far in our conversation without mentioning the Nazis, so let me bring them in now. Terry Nation has been quoted as saying that the daleks were in fact much influenced by the Nazis with the daleks embodying 'the unhearing, unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it wants to destroy you.'

Robin Bunce: Yes. This is the traditional perspective on the daleks. The Daleks are the Nazis. And the interesting thing is that Terry Nation I believe says that in the 1970s, so he's saying it kind of ten years after the daleks first hit the screen.

I don't want to dispute what Terry Nation is saying per se, but I would like to qualify it to some extent. My feeling is that the Daleks become the Nazis probably the second time you meet them. So the second Dalek story is called 'Dalek Invasion Earth', or something of that nature. And in that we have a London which is bombed out like blitz London, we have a resistance movement a bit like the French Resistance, and we have the Daleks wandering around shouting 'We're the masters of Earth', in a very kind of Nazi way.

So I think the Daleks do become the Nazis and I think the Daleks are at their most Nazi in the script 'Genesis of the Daleks' which was written about ten years after the Daleks first hit the screens. So yes, the Daleks, clearly there is a link between the Daleks and the Nazis.

What I would want to say on top of that however, is that the first time we meet them, the first Dalek script, the Daleks are quite different. They're all about radiation, they're all about HG Wells, and yes, they shout, and perhaps the voices are a little bit like British pastiches of Nazi officers, but the Nazi thing is very much in the background, and HG Wells and mutation and the effects of the neutron bomb are very much in the foreground. So I think we're mistaken if we read the Nazis too much into Terry Nation's first Dalek script.

Alan Saunders: Yes, and as you say though, it certainly goes that way. There's a line from the Dalek leader Davros during an episode when Tom Baker was playing the Doctor and Davros says, 'They talk of democracy, freedom, fairness. Those are the creeds of cowards. The ones who would listen to a thousand opinions and try to satisfy them all. Achievement comes through absolute power, and power through strength! They have lost!'

Robin Bunce: Exactly. I mean that could be the translation of a speech by Hitler couldn't it?

Alan Saunders: Yes.

Robin Bunce: So you're absolutely right. And Davros also is Hitler on another level and I think this is a very clever thing that Terry Nation does in the script 'Genesis of the Daleks', because here we have somebody trying to create a Master Race, that's what Davros is trying to do, that's obvious what Hitler was trying to do. But the thing about Hitler and Davros is that in their own terms, both of them are physically imperfect. Davos is never going to be as perfect as the Daleks he's creating, and Hitler looks nothing like Aryan race that he tried to promote.

So yes, so I think you're absolutely right. By that time, the daleks were the Nazis or at least for those couple of scripts the daleks were the Nazis. And the interesting thing about the Nazis was that although we know later that their system of government was deeply, deeply irrational, in the period that Terry Nation was growing up, the Nazis are always understood as being very, very rational, very, very efficient, very, very organised. And there's something terrifying about -- at least in the period that Nation's living in - there's something terrifying about the kind of ruthless rationality and efficiency of the Nazis.

Also you've got to remember that Nation's background is in comedy. He's writing lots of comedy scripts, so Nation... and comedy and rationality don't -- there's an uneasy mix, or they don't sit together easily. So I think yes, I think Nation is intuitively or instinctively concerned about rationality and when he comes to make his villain, that's what he pours into them.

Alan Saunders: And they do become obsessed with superiority and inferiority don't they?

Robin Bunce: They do, and I think that's because later scriptwriters picked up on the direction that Terry Nation was going in. But even the daleks as Nazis metaphor doesn't quite work in 1963 in the first script, and it doesn't really work in some of the later scripts either. I think what Terry Nation and subsequent dalek writers have done, which has been brilliant, is that time and again they reinvent the daleks and time and again they locate the daleks within our current fears.

So in the late 1960s and I've never seen these because the dalek scripts have been lost, it seems to me that the daleks are pretty much neo-imperialists, they're going around torching forests, and this looks to me like American GIs, using napalm in Vietnam in the late '60s. Later on, in 2005 when the Daleks come back, the Daleks are clearly religious fundamentalists, because in 2005 you know, post-9/11 what are we frightened of? We're frightened of religious fundamentalists.

The point about the new Daleks is I saw Mark Gatiss, the guy who wrote the script, interviewed, and he said, 'Oh well yes of course, we all know the Daleks are the Nazis and this is what I tried to do in the script.' And once again Gatiss is right, the Daleks as they came back I think it was last year, were clearly the Nazis and they have a face-off with Churchill and the RAF you know, he couldn't have flagged up the Daleks as Nazis more clearly.

But he was doing something else in the script which he didn't acknowledge, and I'm not sure if anyone noticed this. And the thing is at the same time that Gatiss was writing the Dalek scripts, he's writing a television adaptation of HG Wells' classic book, The First Men in the Moon, and the thing about the aliens in The First Men in the Moon, is that the aliens in The First Men in the Moon have a very, very regimented society.

So some of the Moon -- oh, what are they called -- oh, I can't remember, anyway some of the lunar creatures are drones, some of the lunar creatures are very good at language, some of the lunar creatures are very good at intellectual tasks, so they have a very, very stratified society in this book, and what does Gatiss give us in the Daleks? He gives us an incredibly stratified Dalek society with drones and scientists and warriors and a Supreme Dalek. So yes, the Daleks are the Nazis in that script, but Gatiss is also playing with another idea he's got from HG Wells, and that is to say the stratification of society.

So I think what Terry Nation and later writers have done is they've reinvented the Dalek, so they've made them evil by locating them in whatever it is we're frightened of at the time and I think that's a very clever thing to do.

Alan Saunders: Robin thank you very much for being with us.

Robin Bunce: My pleasure.

Alan Saunders: Robin Bunce is a Fellow of St Edmund's College at the University of Cambridge. Links to the book of essays, Doctor Who and Philosophy, Bigger on the Inside on our website.

The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, Charlie McCune is the sound engineer, I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be beaming down again next week.

Now we really couldn't finish the show this week without paying tribute to Roy Skelton, one of the early voices of the Daleks, who died just recently at the age of 78. Roy Skelton voiced the Daleks from the early days in 1967 up until 1988. So thank you, Roy. And here he is in an outtake from the 1983 Doctor Who episode, 'The Five Doctors'.