We Are Star Stuff

[Response to "Carl Sagan's Religion" - I will dispense with a traditional introduction, considering this post already borders on 3,000 words.]

I realize that declaring religion and science as monolithic concepts is false and somewhat unsatisfying. I will use the term “science” to generally mean the “hard sciences” that deal in empiricism and skepticism, which base themselves on the scientific method. For religion, I generally mean those institutions based on the faith that there is a higher power that created the universe and at some point influenced humans to have faith in it. Because I am most familiar with these, my statements will mainly involve those religions which believe that the word of their God is contained in the various books of the Bible, though my arguments are not confined to the Abrahamic religions.

This essay’s purpose is twofold: first, I will directly examine PTJ’s claim of “Carl Sagan’s religion;” second, I will examine the validity of the “live and let live” sentiment in terms of the intersection of science and religion. I need not directly address PTJ’s statement, “A coincidence's status as a miracle is neither provable nor disprovable. It's not a scientific claim.” Instead, I will end up addressing it as a natural consequence of the course of my argument.

[I am, of course, not without my own influences. I have never been religious, though for a long time I thought that I was with the majority. Back in elementary school, I knew many people who went to church, but none of them seemed to actually believe in God; rather, they seemed to believe that church was a waste of a beautiful Sunday and something their parents made them go to. (I’ve been to eight religious services in my life: my christening, a Catholic mass in the “Screaming Children’s Room” with my grandmother (I wasn’t screaming, for the record), two Presbyterian services in Pittsburgh, a bar and a bat mitzvah, and two Passover seders.) My ordered thought on this topic, then, comes a bit more recently and draws its influences from Carl Sagan, by way of Douglas Adams, running it by his longtime friend Richard Dawkins (who, no matter what I may think of his methods, aligns with my argument at the moment), passing it to Arthur C. Clarke. Pity only Dawkins and I are alive, probably the least agreeable of the five.]

I.
Santa Claus is Coming
Do you believe that an omnipotent being not only created the universe, but that it continues to manage the events on a thoroughly ordinary blue-green planet in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy, causing genuinely inexplicable events to occur? Let me rephrase: Do you believe that a large man in a red suit flying a sleigh powered by reindeer visits the individual residences of millions of children in a single night?

I know it’s a cheap shot. But they are both explanations for what seem to be inexplicable events. To a child not familiar with the laws of physics, the Santa Claus myth is plausible. What other explanation could there possibly be for those toys that show up than a fat man who comes down a chimney?

Of course, the nature of Santa Claus is completely falsifiable, or is it? Of course, a single fat man could not and is not responsible for those toys getting there. But the toys appear nevertheless. Is it indeed possible that Santa Claus is a god who influences parents to buy toys for their children? Should universities have a Santa Claus studies chair in their religion departments?

We worry about children who, after a certain age, do not reject the Santa Claus myth. But why? Does it matter if people continue to believe in Santa Claus? What possible harm could come from it?

Carl Sagan’s Religion
Carl Sagan was indeed an eloquent and outspoken proponent of science and skepticism. He was also an outspoken opponent of pseudoscience and illogic. His life’s work was teaching science to the masses. Cosmos was the most watched public television series in US broadcasting history and the accompanying book is one of the most popular non-fiction books ever written. It would be safe to say that his life’s work was at least partially successful.

One of the arguments commonly posed against Sagan’s was that the pursuit of science is emotionally unfulfilling. His specific answer to that was, as PTJ rightly points out, that the knowledge (Latin: scientia) of the universe is itself a fulfilling endeavor. It is important to note that in all of his writings that I have encountered, he carefully divorces his sentiments from his empirical work. (He was always careful to do the same thing when addressing things like SETI and the Drake Equation.)

Is this indeed Carl Sagan’s religion, as PTJ contends? Certainly, the wonder is evident in Sagan’s eyes when you watch Cosmos. His exuberance is evident in his writing. We are, he was fond of saying, “star stuff contemplating star stuff.” So this is certainly Sagan’s answer to the religious argument that science is unfulfilling. But is it religion?

Without trying to sound too semantic, Webster will be my guide for a moment. Religious is defined as “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.” [Emphasis mine] On the surface, PTJ’s contention cannot be discounted because deity is not the only possible path to religiosity. “Faithful devotion,” though – let’s dig deeper.

Faith has a more complex definition. “2(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust; 3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially: a system of religious beliefs” If we take the third definition and remove the “especially,” we still cannot remove Sagan’s statement from the realm of religion. It strikes me, though, that all these definitions hinge on the word “belief.” Let’s dig deeper still.

This gets even messier. Believe is defined as follows: “1 a: to have a firm religious faith b: to accept as true, genuine, or real.” We’ve still gone nowhere. The definition of belief, though, is somewhat more enlightening. An excerpt from the synonyms section: “belief may or may not imply certitude in the believer . faith almost always implies certitude even where there is no evidence or proof .”

Here we are. To (over)simplify, belief allows for doubt whereas faith does not. Carl Sagan had many beliefs. He never contended that they are facts. In his “manifesto for clear thought,” The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan ends many sections with the words, “But I might be wrong.” His point is that knowledge is asymptotic; that we cannot know “the truth,” but that we can get pretty damn close (Sagan 28). By and large, though, religion deals in absolutes. “Birth control is against the will of God.” Says who? “God.” Prove it. “I’m a manifestation of God and I said so, QED.” One must take it on faith that birth control is against the will of God, and that the real reason behind the statement isn’t more something like, if you don’t allow your flock to use birth control, you will bolster your numbers. (In practice, this is called Irish Catholicism.) Of course, I still can’t prove that God isn’t against birth control, but I can draw upon strong evidence to indicate that the terrestrial origins of such a stance are much more rooted in realpolitik than divinity.

Sagan’s statements about the nature of the universe can indeed be considered “religious” by a loose but accurate definite of the word. They are indeed a set of beliefs surrounding an ultimate truth; however, they are markedly different from conventional religion because they do not proclaim to know or have a monopoly on the truth. Where traditional religions are conservative in that they are loath to consider new evidence that would suggest their fallibility, Sagan’s view of the universe is progressive, inviting new ideas about the nature of nature. If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know.

Sagan uses Newton as his example (Sagan 33). For three hundred years or so, scientists believed Newtonian physics explained the universe. Then Albert Einstein came along and showed that Newton was only an estimation of the actual mechanisms of physics. Indeed, Newton’s physics works very well for conditions that we see in everyday life and is used to model those situations. I defy anyone to find a single scientist, though, who still believes that Newtonian physics is more accurate or explanatory than Einstein. (I know that this is a horrible oversimplification of classical mechanics as well as relativity and quantum theory as classical mechanics is still a usable model for "normal" conditions, but I believe that the point stands.) It is hard to imagine a mainstream religion that so easily rejects something at the core of its “belief” system that is proved to be false and indeed not only rejects its former belief center but also actively looks to poke holes in its new one. (Again, this is an oversimplification, but I mean more than “questioning one’s faith.”)

What’s the harm, though? Why not let religions do their own thing? Why do I go out of my way to contrast skepticism and religion? Why can I not just let the two coexist? Indeed, the question returns: what possible harm could come of it?

II.
The Jews Are the Chosen People
Genesis 17:13 reads, “He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.” Judaism and Islam particularly take this message to heart; circumcision rates approach 100% in Jews and Muslims. There is strong evidence that circumcision significantly reduces one’s risk of contracting HIV. Therefore, God has chosen those religions to survive AIDS at a greater rate. (The Christian Church technically banned circumcision in 1442 as a matter of politics, but the pope is part of the voice of God, so that God seems to have forsaken them in 1442.) Thus, they will inherit the Earth when everyone else dies. Further, we should do nothing to help the uncircumcised fools because they are not God’s chosen people. Further, if medical science finds a vaccine against HIV, it should only be administered to the chosen ones. If it was given to everyone, it would be a violation of God’s will. I smell a smiting.

But is it coincidence? Is there, in fact, no connection between the passage in Genesis and AIDS? (And if there is a connection, couldn’t God have mentioned it as confirmation of His existence? I mean, how cool would that be, anyway? “Just get used to it now because you’ll thank Me later when you guys survive AIDS better.”) To paraphrase Machiavelli, I cannot answer, but I can tell you which is safer. The stance that it is happenstance allows for less genocide. Indeed, as PTJ wrote, “‘because God wanted it that way’ is always an appropriate -- if scientifically unrevealing -- answer to any question about how or why something happened.” The potential dangers with accepting the “because God wanted it that way” answer are too numerous to even attempt to itemize.

The Collision of Religion and Science
Science (at least scientific empiricism) does not specifically seek to be at odds with religion. Indeed, if religion confined itself to a certain kind of agnosticism and did not make statements about the nature of the world, there would be no conflict. However, when religion makes claims on the empirical world, they enter the world of science and are subject to its scrutiny.

I do not have room here to cite even a tiny fraction of the number of times when religion has intruded into the observable world. I do not need to mention the number of times where it has ended in disaster. Let’s leave it at Galileo.

What’s the problem with believing in heliocentrism? It can hardly affect one’s day to day life. Most of us never need to understand the nature of gravity or eclipses or earthquakes. They happen and we react. So what’s the danger?

The danger is credulity. If people do not hold all of their beliefs up to the light of skepticism and test them, then they are in danger of being led astray by the first Jim Jones who walks by. It means that people who use the Hamitic hypothesis can Rwanda things up. We can, of course, prove that all Homo sapiens are virtually identical, but we can never disprove that God intended for the Tutsis to rule over the Hutus. Conveniently, this absolves the individuals committing genocide from responsibility because it is God’s will. I cannot tell you which is right, but I can tell you which is safer.

If we treat religious claims with skepticism, we may question whether or not there ever was a Ham. (We could figure out whether there was a Great Flood. If no, then no Noah and thus no Ham.) Religion must be held up to skepticism because not doing so will eventually result in disaster. If we do not put all of our beliefs up to the light, we risk falling into total darkness. (Sorry Carl, but you picked too good an image for me not to steal.)

This is a separate issue from that of Ultimate Significance. Even if there is a creator of the universe, there is no credible evidence that the creator cares about us, or indeed is still watching at all. Empirical evidence leads me to believe that religions were created for a very practical reason: to explain the unexplainable. (Churches frequently invoke God for practical purposes. Take, for example, priests’ chastity. If priests do not have heirs, they cannot pass their land on to anyone except the church.) Explaining the mechanisms by which the world functions is now the domain of science. Imbuing events with some separate meaning is not my concern; my concern is not even directly that of Christian Scientists refusing medical treatment. My concern is that Christian Scientists who refuse medical treatment are turning their back on reality. If they shy away from reality in one area, what is to say that they will not in others? Science and religion are indeed at war, not over the domain of ultimate significance, but over the observable universe. “Live and let live” is simply not possible when two irreconcilable viewpoints are directed at the same domain.

What is Ultimate Significance?
I’ve used the term “ultimate significance” many times. PTJ asked how one can, without ultimate significance, answer Camus’ question about suicide. As someone who does not believe in any order to the events of the universe beyond that which is observable, I can answer that question. It is fallacious to assume that human beings need to find some meaning beyond the observable world. With no evidence that there is life beyond that which we experience in our physical forms, this is quite literally all that anyone has, but it is not unfulfilling. It is not, as PTJ put it, “mundane” (perhaps “quotidian” would be a less emotionally charged word). Am I, or was Sagan, injecting ultimate significance into the study of the world? If there is no end beyond this life, if indeed our deaths are the end of our existence, then the work we do in our lifetimes is literally our ultimate – final, fundamental – work. (Dave Barry has what I find to be a more realistic version of Camus’ points: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” So perhaps Camus should have listed his profession and religion as “Humorist.”)

This is what I see as Carl Sagan’s point. Indeed, there is significance in what we do here. By all indications, there was no part of our existence before our [conception/birth/brain activity/mirror test/latest Supreme Court ruling], and there will be no part of our existence after our deaths. Just as our planet is “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” we ourselves occupy only a tiny corner of the universe (Sagan, Pale Blue Dot). But it is all that we will ever know. Is this a religious claim? It certainly has the imagery of wonder. That is Carl Sagan’s message. One can experience wonder while confining oneself to the empirical universe. Further, this path to wonder does not require Ultimate Significance because skepticism admits uncertainty, which I am hard-pressed to reconcile which such an absolute concept as Ultimate Significance. Is it all significant beyond our bodies and beyond our mote of dust? Who knows and who cares? We’ll find out when we’re dead but for the moment, we’re here. Have I made a leap of faith, or have I used the instruments of empiricism to give me a working hypothesis?

I close with a quote from Carl Sagan, who set this whole thing off. It is infused with the concept of Significance, though I still question whether or not it is ultimate. Though he uses the language of wonder, his statement is remarkably grounded in the observable world. Sagan knew the importance of the "Blue Marble" photo from Apollo 17 in capturing the world's imagination about everyone's home planet, and made sure that Voyager 1 turned around and took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"Doubt is good."

What if I showed you twenty pictures of twenty turtles on twenty fence posts? Pretty unlikely, right? So unlikely, in fact, that it would lead you to the conclusion that this could not have happened by chance. And if I told you that I had proof than no person had put the turtles on the fence posts? Further, that no visible outside influence had put the turtles there, but that they were there nevertheless? Wouldn't that make you consider the possibility that a "higher power" had put the turtles there?

But then, what if I showed you a wider picture of the entire scene? Turns out, a construction company had left thousands of fence posts standing next to each other in the middle of a turtle farm. And even better, they had thrown them into a depression in the ground, so the tops of the posts were barely an inch off the ground. Of course, you couldn't tell any of this in the first picture I showed you, but you made the series of assumptions that led you to believe that no natural event could have put so many turtles on so many fence posts.

The title of my post is a quote from Russell's readers' guide. According to Russell, "the moral of the story is to be suspicious of your own certainty. Doubt is good." I'll believe her because I believe in author's intent, no matter how poorly the author wrote the damn book. What was the first thing that Sandoz was really certain about? When did the Jesuit value of patience go out the window? Turtles on fence posts. This is God's work. "Everything we thought we understood - that was what we were most wrong about," Sandoz says. And Sandoz thought beyond anything else that God had put him on Rakhat. So he was most wrong about that.

This is why Mike's post struck me as weird. He seemed to still be going off the assumption that Sandoz was a Catholic saint and that God did, indeed, bring him back full circle to achieve some order of inner peace. (Mike, please correct me if I've misrepresented your argument.) This goes back to one of the reason I can't stand this book. The "doubt is good" answer came from Felipe Reyes at the end of The Sparrow. It completed the statement of the novel. It completed the literary journey of Emilio Sandoz perfectly. As I wrote in my response to Mike's post, I do not care about Emilio Sandoz as a person because he is not a person. I care about the literary creation that is Emilio Sandoz. This character had a complete statement written around it in The Sparrow. Children of God is not only useless, but so poorly written as to harm the story itself.

A word on my hatred of the book. All of the other books that I've really not enjoyed this semester, I've forgiven after our class discussion. In class, we were able to really delve deep into those texts and pull out the ton of stuff that actually lies down there. For our discussion of this novel, however, I never felt like we were able to dig deep into it because there was nothing there. The only times where we did, the concepts were so far abstracted from the actual meat of Children of God that they could have been brought up while discussing The Sparrow and we wouldn't have had any less to talk about.

My criticism of Children of God comes primarily from a literary standpoint, though I realize that the syllabus says that the class "is not primarily a literature class." However, I contend that the writing is so poor, beat-you-over-the-head direct, and thin that nothing in the novel merits discussion beyond that of The Sparrow. There is simply no content in the book. Further, by demystifying the aliens, Russell harms The Sparrow. The only good thing that came out of Children of God is realizing that Supaari and Sandoz simply had the galaxy's funniest case of mistaken double entendre. But is that really worth the rest of the book? Well, it was hilarious, but no. Russell could have made that into one of those weird short stories that's all from an alien's point of view - something like an x-rated version of all those Twilight Zone episodes where you think they're all on Earth, but it turns out that they're headed toward Earth.

My French realist literature class had a debate the other day about Emile Zola's Germinal, a politically charged novel. The question Professor Loesberg posed to us was, are novels with explicit theses inherently or automatically bad novels? I used science fiction as an example of novels that many times have some sort of explicit thesis but are not automatically bad. The class (rightly, in my opinion) decided that no, having an explicit thesis does not automatically ruin a novel. Writing a shitty novel ruins a novel. Mary Doria Russell wrote The Sparrow and Children of God with virtually the same thesis, and it's pretty explicit, though much more so in the latter. The former is a good novel; the latter is atrocious. The writing is so bad and so thin that the novel is without any form content, or at least without content that even comes close to or stretches beyond that of The Sparrow. Russell's lack of willingness to let sleeping dogs lie leaves us with a statement that is much weaker than that of The Sparrow, even though the final message is meant to be virtually identical.

I agree with Andrew that this novel had so many Mary Sue/wish fulfillment moments that it almost felt like fan fiction and not the work of the original novelist. It's a shadow of its original self. Perhaps Marx was right, as I quoted in my Todorov post. The first novel as tragedy, the second as farce.

Children of Some god or Another

I think it's much more fair to compare a sequel to its predecessor than our heartless comparison of movie adaptations to the novels they're based on. With that disclaimer, I'll begin with my The Sparrow/Children of God comparison.
Though it was interesting for Emilio's tale to be "wrapped up," it was not satisfying in the same sense that The Sparrow was. Where the plot of The Sparrow served to explore religion and morality, Children of God was a heavy-handed continuation of something that may have been better left unresolved. It was fitting in The Sparrow for awful things to continue pecking at the very core of Sandoz's beliefs, as that was what Russell was exploring, but in Children of God she merely used the same mechanism, without any real purpose behind why.
As for the entire Revolution idea...it was far too easy. Just like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress having Mike in the background, controlling communications, strategy, security, weather satellites and horoscopes, there was never a question of whether the Runa would be successful. They had Sofia and her iPhone hiding in the forest to arrange everything against the Jana'ata. I enjoyed the idea of said revolution because it had just cause and provocation, as I would have had the various Meso-Americans risen up against the oppressive Cortes instead of their bleak fate, but the solve-all method Russell used to orchestrate the revolution was too easy. (I'm not volunteering to develop something better...but I did expect more after The Sparrow.)
Nico and Isaac were both interesting charactre additions. Carlo could have been interesting, but after he failed to really add anything to the plot other than Emilio-snatching and telling Emilio he was going to add something to the plot...he just became deadweight. None of the other new crew members seemed to develop either (the only thing Sean Fein was good for was his name and the accompanying joke), and even John Candotti wasn't very insightful or forgiving or optimistic or humourous.
Upon reading the ending of Children of God, I kind of just wondered where any of it had come from and if it had really gone anywhere. As I mentioned before, the idea behind the revolution was interesting. The reservation idea was cute. Sending Emilio back to Earth, again, seemed useless to me in his overall redemption process, and I was just left wondering if he had made his peace with his religious beliefs, as I assumed was the goal of the novel.

Children of God Substantive

As many of my fellow bloggers, I felt that the second book was far inferior to the first. The Sparrow is one of those texts that has such an interesting ending that you almost don’t want to know what happens next. I’ve only truly felt that way about one other book, and have refused to read its sequel(s?) because I liked the way it left me thinking so well. Despite believing this book to be completely unnecessary to the story, it does have a few interesting developments, i.e. Sofia becoming the Runa Moses/revolutionary leader. Unlike Scott, I would give her the award for Most Unexpectedly Religious.

I think one of the most interesting things about this book is just how much a society can change in a relatively short amount of time. Between the time Emilio left and his return, the Jana’ata have been completely kicked out of power and all but exterminated, while the Runa have managed to overcome their oppressors and set up their own government to take the place of what was there before. It’s also interesting that Emilio returns prepared to find Rakhat exactly the way he left it.

Whoa, Hold on people

After reading through a bunch of the other blog posts, I'm struck with a horrible thought: you're largely a bunch of moral relativists! I cannot have this; this will not stand. Let's get a few things out of the way.

1. The moral of the story is "be suspicious of your own certainty." Russell says so in the Reader's Guide at the end. I'm glad we worked that out.

2. Russell's answer to "does the end justify the means?" is "No!" (Seriously, with the exclamation point and everything). Which leads me to my next point...

3. Ex post facto rationalization. Russell goes out of her way to leave the question of divine intervention a question; if The Sparrow is the story of a man losing his faith, Children of God is about him fighting to get it back, using whatever weapons he has at his disposal. Sandoz is the kind of man who is constantly trying to make the best of a bad situation, even joking around with his captors on the Giordano Bruno. It's natural for him to seek sense in the bad things around him, and from the moment he goes of Quell, you can observe him steadily reconstructing a mental framework that has room for God.

Several times Sandoz makes sardonic comments hinting at atheism, but it's always clear that these are mere jokes to him. His need for a God who understands and loves him, not to mention wouldn't torture him needlessly, are so strong that I believe he would take any evidence he could find to justify his own experiences.

If Isaac didn't exist, then Sandoz would have to find his music elsewhere. And he would, even if it would be in a different form.

4. To anyone who thought the ending wrapped things up too neatly: are you sick? Do you hate Sandoz even more than Russell does? Give the man a break!

P.S. Did anybody else catch shades of Dune in here? The ideological differences between mother and child, the lack of appropriate monitoring in the south, groups of nomadic warriors...now that I think of it, the same intercultural communicative aspects exist in both sets of books, but Dune glosses them over by making it so the main characters don't really have any trouble communicating. Curse these prevalent themes!



And now, to mix things up, some Sparrow/Children of God superlatives.

Most Likely to Possess an Unexpected but Necessary Skill
John Candotti

Most Likely to be Beautiful After Being Put Through a Meat Grinder
Sofia Mendes

Most Unfinished Business
Supaari VaHaptaa
(r/u Vincenzo Giuliani)

Most Underused Unintentionally Hilarious Character
Jholaa
(r/u Edward Behr)

Most Testosterone
Djalao

Most Conceited Death
Hlavin Kitheri

Most Salami
Nico D'Angeli

Most Unrelatable
Danny Iron Horse

Most Reliant on Silver Linings
Emilio Sandoz

"I'm bored by it!"

"I'm tired of it. I'm bored by it!" - Sandoz, page 412

This is my sentiment toward this book. Unlike Mercury Theatre's general consensus, my thoughts on this novel were clearer than those toward The Sparrow. I hated this book. I found the characters to be paper-thin this time around and too many times, Russell steps out of the narrative to pigeonhole. For example,

"Believers found it a miraculous confirmation of God's existence and evidence of Divine Providence. Skeptics declared it a fraud - a clever trick by the Jesuits to distract attention from their earlier failures. Atheists did not dispute the music's authenticity, but they considered it just another fluke that proved nothing - like the universe itself. Agnostics admitted the music was magnificent, but suspended judgment, waiting for who knew what?" - page 431

Come on! Jesus Christ, how more trite can you get? The entire plot felt completely contrived. And what pisses me off worse? It hurts The Sparrow because it resolves Sandoz. From the Reader's Guide: "I left my main character impaled on the horns of a dilemma, and I wasn't able to let it go at that." Why the hell not? It makes for a better ending - don't answer the damn question. That is an ending, separate from this. Ambiguous endings are meant to make you wonder what happened on the surface, but the real point of them is to be ambiguous. That's a message. And this isn't a general rule, either - I don't hate the movie 2010, for example, just because it answers the questions that 2001 left open. In fact, I like 2010. It's a different, but still good, entity. This is not.

(And oh, by the way, when you're only dealing with four basic building blocks of DNA, of course you will find overlapping sections. It's not God; it's an odds game. Only if putting the DNA into a Tricorder and having it show you a video of someone telling you that you've been designed does it really imply design.)

The occasional references to things that have changed through history and Sandoz's pop culture references just got annoying. (The one exception was when Russell finally admitted that Nico was Luca Brasi on page 385.)

A couple of comments that I held in the back of my mind when I was reading:
SOCIAL CONTRACT ... IN ... SPACE! - Response to Sofia
page 346 - Only good page
(And the ever-frequent) Bullshit!

And the thing that annoyed me the most: "...the difference between God and science, that there were different ways - parallel ways - to think about the world." - page 259. This isn't true, though it's a convenient out if you don't want to be controversial. Science deals with everything that is empirically disprovable (Disprovable. That's why I loved Sandoz's line, that he "felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust."-page 93 - that's the way you do it, goddamn it. That's the way you do it!). The God hypothesis itself is not disprovable, but that God is exerting influence is. Following Occam's Razor, nothing in either book happened because of God because that would be an unnecessarily complicated step in the causation. Everything can be explained the simpler way, equally well, so it should be.

And that quote that I nested in the parentheses is a great example of the wonder of knowledge that appears only a few times in the book. Scientists love to try to disprove theories. They are constantly thinking of ways to (dis)prove parts of Einstein's relativity. Just a few months ago (or maybe it was a year or more, I'm not sure), NASA sent up a satellite to test a part of relativity and it came back positive. But the point is, they don't take any part of relativity on faith; they are always testing, always looking for holes. And of course, they've found them, in the way that everything we understand breaks down at the quantum level. So they're working on ways to explain the mechanisms at work there. And then scientists will test the hell out of them, because that's the only way to prove whether they're right or wrong. Bringing this back out of the real world and back into a theology discussion, most organized religions (including the one in which the Jesuits ostensibly believe) believe in some kind of intervention or Providence. This can be disproven. So science and God are not parallel - not non-intersecting. They do.

Going back to our discussion on The Sparrow and if they could have known better: "The subsequent unexplained disappearance of the Magellan party suggests that they, too, fell prey to the near impossibility of avoiding fatal mistakes on Rakhat." - page 17 (emphasis mine).

And then there's the reference back to the beginning of The Sparrow: where that novel began, "It was predictable, in hindsight," this one contains the line, "It was absurd, in hindsight - the very idea that a handful of humans might have been able to do everything right the first time." - page 21. Again, my bullshit detector goes off as I think to myself, "NOT JUST IN HINDSIGHT! IT WAS ABSURD. PERIOD."

Requiem for a Genoan

I'll be the first to admit it; I'm a proud apologist for Columbus. My analysis of his actions as described in Todorov and his own travel journals aside, I can't help but be taken in by the romance of risking everything to explore distant lands.

Last semester, a resolution went through the Undergraduate Senate here at AU that basically sought to condemn Columbus for actions that lead to genocide. I was taken aback by the nature of this resolution, knowing as I did that Columbus would have been aghast at the idea of purposefully obliterating an entire race of people. I argued with several Student Senators, finally bringing some around with examples of Columbus' love of nature, but it was pretty shocking how uninformed the majority of people generally were concerning the facts of Columbus' voyages.

Then again, how much knowledge is enough? What is the magic point when you know enough to condemn someone? If understanding leads to love, then we choose not to understand someone when we judge them. A judgment represents a conscious decision to disregard an individual's defense of his own actions, and to hold him to a separate standard than that which he holds for himself.

Even though I wanted to tell these people that they were wrong about Columbus, I realized it was futile. Their arguments, after all, were basically irrational; they were condemning actions which had been a direct influence on their own existences. I was stunned by the absurdity of individuals wearing American flag pins castigating Columbus, as though the country they love could exist in its present shape without him. Madness.

Wonder: Just Add Discovery

One of our recurring themes in recent weeks has been where one finds a sense of wonder. With The Sparrow, we've seen what can happen when your wonder alarm goes off without any kind of degree of skepticism or, more generally, rational thought beyond, "Ohmigod! Ohmigod! We gotta go!"

So they got caught up in the "beauty of belief." But what about the real wonder and beauty you get by actually knowing something? By really learning? Shouldn't that make grown men just as giddy, or indeed giddier?

The Discovery Channel's latest ad certainly has an answer:



And before I get any complaints about Discovery's shortcomings, read this too. It reminds me of the delicate interplay in The Right Stuff between Buck Rogers and bucks. Yes, we blow stuff up to get you to watch, but we are teaching you something in the meantime.

But anyway, the message is, be thrilled to know, or at least know as well as we can. There's a whole universe out there to discover, and what's more satisfying than doing so? Deep thoughts for your 4/20.

Todorov and Jazz

What's the problem with listening to jazz or folk records? The problem is, one of the cornerstones of both jazz and folk is that they are played differently every time, adapting to the precise moment in time when they are played. If you've heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris," you have only heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris." In a real way, you have not heard the music, nor can you yet understand it. What's the solution? Well, the Count is dead, so that takes being there out of it. But you can listen to more recordings. You can begin to get a feel for the essence of the music. Still, though, there is a real way in which none of us ever have heard and ever will hear the Count's "April in Paris."

There is a fundamental level on which we can never completely understand anyone but ourselves. Even an individual mind puts up mental blocks to things that it cannot reconcile with its own person. We can, however, get a good approximation of another person's though processes by observing their environment and history and we may even be able to predict to a fair degree an individual's personal actions.

To me, this is what Columbus comes down to. My point in mentioning this is not to say that Columbus is unknowable. Quite to the contrary, we can reconstruct a lot of Columbus from his legacy. My main point in bringing this back up is that, as I said in class, Columbus may have had other options that seemed obvious and equally likely to him that we cannot even envision. In the ultimate form of hindsight bias, we can only see what happened as what could have happened. Unfortunately, we would need more than a few hundred pages of Todorov to even imagine the alternatives.

By that same token, I do not believe that Columbus was schizophrenic or particularly deluding himself. I do believe that he encountered some sort of cognitive dissonance when he swore his crew to claiming that Cuba was the mainland, but I do not believe his position toward the natives would have seemed crazy to Columbus or any of his crew.

I keep bringing up that for both The Sparrow and The Conquest of America, I felt the characters and situations to be farcical. That is, they present improbable but eminently possible situations. Of course, in the case of Todorov, we know that the events could actually happen because they did. But being in Columbus's position, with Columbus's dispositions that are so foreign - alien - to us, I do not imagine that he saw two irreconcilable world views fighting for attention. Rather, his different set of pretensions led him to a wholly different understanding of the other.

Thanks to ST:TNG's "Darmok," I've been toying around with the linguistic idea that we do not have a distinction between alien and alien, principally because we have not met any of the extraterrestrial variety. The word alien comes from Latin and is closely related to alias - of or belong to another. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (the other OED, I guess...), the term was first applied to foreigners around 1330 and was first used to mean "from another planet" in 1944.

Eh, whatever. I don't see where this is going. In any case, I'm looking forward to Children of God to see what He hath wrought upon Rakhat. Buncha amateurs. Why the hell did you land? ... Farce.

Oh, forgot one thing - I'm glad that I'm not the only one who believes that the best way to hate someone is to know them really well. There's also a third category that we didn't bring up - people we admire, even idolize, find out more about them, hate them, but still idolize them. The Pattons or MacArthurs of the world. Or the ancient Greek war heroes. Douchebags, but idols nevertheless.

Tragedy?

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." - Old adage, probably not by Mark Twain, but most certainly attributed to him

As we were walking out of Martin "The Horror" Sheen's little shindig, Phil pretty much summed up The Conquest of America, something to the effect that it's exactly The Sparrow, only real. Upon, further review, yep, that sums it up to a great extent. I could go on about how great the lies that we always learn about the conquest of America are (Conquest? America wasn't conquered! The land was just there, and it was, like, free! Conquered! Pish! Communist...)

However, I'd prefer to just mention the events in their relation to the two quotes up top. Putting those two together, I'd challenge that the first time is not itself tragedy, but simply comedy with a lack of removal. My first comment in class about The Sparrow last week concerned my being infuriated with the book while simultaneously enjoying it for presenting its events practically as farce: You know, thanks to the flashback format, that the mission and Sandoz are doomed, but you see the whole thing play out as farce. It is, in a very real way, comical. The frustrating part is that the farce is hidden and not specifically brought out by the narrative voice, except in the few circumstances we discussed. Since I was reading Flaubert at the same time as The Sparrow, it reminded me greatly of the narrative style of Sentimental Education, though American sci-fi and French realism don't exactly line up. Still, style indirect libre much?

Here, too, we can view history with the same detached irony because the process is so farcical. We know what the endgame is, and I couldn't help but laugh along the way? To paraphrase Maddox, Oops! I'm racist.

By the way, freaky sidenote, the last page of the epilogue has a completely flattened bug in it. Even weirder, since the book came shrink wrapped from Amazon. Not going to lie, I tossed the book across the room when I saw it.

The Structure of Todorov

I touched on this in my wiki post on Todorov; I'm very fascinated by the meaning behind the order in which he chose to discuss the various conquistadors/priests. The way he leads us through the progression of European understanding of the Indians is especially interesting considering the multiple spectra they each occupy. Love for the Indians, understanding of them, the ability to recognize value in those who are different, the ability to use or interpret signs; Todorov creates a highway of meaning, but it is an ironic one. As understanding of the Indians increases, we move further and further away from the time of their prominence (and eventually from their existence).

We can posit a critical moment in history when scholars like Sahagun have maximized their knowledge and understanding, but the Indians themselves are on the verge of disappearing (either from being slaughtered, dying of sickness, or interbreeding with the colonists/slaves). What information might have existed in this last moment? Of course, I'm assuming a knowledge on the part of the scholars that never existed. We can only ponder what has been lost.

Conquest of...

"The conquest of information leads to that of the kingdom." (pg 104)

"In other words, is any influence, by the very fact of its externality, detrimental? (pg 177)

In conjunction with The Sparrow, these were my two favourite quotes from The Conquest of America. They highlight certain aspects of the Jesuit Mission's interaction on Rakhat and how that could potentially have led to either a conquest - had they been more successful in communicating - and how in actuality the human presence merely had a detrimental effect because its externality upset the existing balance.
The different ideas of communication were particularly interesting to me. Todorov points that such a seemingly arbitrary difference as viewing time linearly or cyclically could propagate such deep cultural misinterpretations. In this light, its no wonder that merely planting a garden could wreak such devastation.
Todorov also caused me to acknowledge that because interhuman - though from radically different cultures - interaction with the "other" can be so contorted, our potential contact with any other species of "other" has a high probability of disaster. If humans can't even judge and communicate with eachother, how well do we expect to do when faced with something absolutely foreign?
Along that pessimistic line of thought: the second quote I mentioned also seems only to ask if there is any hope for positive relations with the "other". I'm not sure. Todorov, though incredibly interesting, offers only a possibility of success on this front in future interactions, but nothing for certain.

The Sparrow

I think The Sparrow was my favourite book we've read. More of the tragedy variety, but still. Brilliantly written, speckled with humour, and it really made me ponder.
I think the shortest quote to sum most of my impressions up is found on page 404, "...comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Emphasis on the "awful," part.
I was reminded of Dune, by the foreshadowing, but not through prophecies- through what we'd already been told of the mission to Rakhat. The first chapter tells that Emilio Sandoz was the only survivor, we merely have to wait and see how everyone dies. I just reread that last sentence and it sounds horribly gruesome, but that was what I was thinking while I read. I wonder how everyone dies, because I already know they will. It was an incredibly effective method for Russell to emphasize how important the religious themes were to everything that unfolded. Switching back and forth to Emilio's inquisition and recovery with Vincent Giuliani maintains that connection with all of Emilio's actions on Rakhat being for the Society of Jesus, and how whatever his story is leading up to, what it is causing him to question is his spirituality.
If Russell had merely written this as a narrative of the Jesuit Mission to Rakhat, and tacked Emilio's return to Earth and "recovery," onto the end, her message wouldn't have evolved in the same manner. Her religious arguments would have been lost and Emilio's final acknowledgment of having been raped would not have truly represented how deeply he'd been injured, rejected.
The inclusion of different religions also strengthened the overall theme: Jimmy the Catholic, Jewish Sofia, atheist George and Anne Edwards, and all of the personal beliefs of the various Jesuits. I appreciated the spectrum of argument this gave Russell.
Of course, everyone dying and Emilio's life being reduced to confetti was a bit disheartening, but didn't weaken a brilliant novel.

Mistakes? Likely not.

Many of the posts people have written for this text are discussing the idea we talked about in class that the crew somehow made a mistake in either the planning or execution of the mission, however I would like to consider this, not as we did, looking back on the mission with an outsider’s perspective, but by trying to imagine if different decisions and actions were even feasible considering who the characters are and how they think.

I believe we are all agreed that at least until the point where the signal from Rakhat arrives, no one does anything to cause the mission to fail. At this point, the first possibility for different action takes place, instead of calling in his coworkers and superiors, upon receiving the transmission from another world, Jimmy brings his friends in to hear it. If he hadn’t done this, the Jesuit mission may never have been planned because Emilio’s comment would not have sent everyone thinking as to how it could be accomplished. Calling this the mistake that caused the mission to fail is interesting, however, because it implies that the only way the mission could have been successful is if it had been nonexistent. Granted, in that case, none of the characters would have met their horrible fates, but it is a cop out as a choice for preventing the failure of the mission.

Discussing the planning of the mission, I believe that saying they had other choices they could have made in the way they chose to run the mission betrays the characters. Though I agree with most of the class that unmanned craft and attempts at radio communication prior to sending a manned mission would have been a good idea, the characters that we meet in this text would never have gone that route. When everything seems to work out in every stage of planning, why would they question their plan? Particularly as each instance of things working out further backs up Emilio’s belief that they are going on a mission planned for them by God.

Within the mission, I don’t think the fuel situation that stranded them on the planet would have made much of a difference. Most of the deaths that took place would not have been prevented by making a timely retreat to the orbiter. D.W. and Anne were attacked out of the blue, Sofia, Jimmy and the others were caught up in a local conflict that resulted in their deaths. None of these would have been prevented by being able to return to the asteroid. Even if they had fuel, I believe Emilio still would have accepted the protection of Supaari.

The one aspect of the mission that I believe they truly made a mistake in was the planting of a garden. They had enough scientists with them to understand the ways in which foreign species can take over a new land and disrupt an ecology, even though they say they chose low-impact plants, I don’t think that they would have necessarily planted a garden without having more data on the local ecology. Side note: who can think of another time when a garden got people into trouble? (Hint: it’s religious, too).

For a discussion of Sofia’s rebellion see Jen’s post, where you can also get a look at our fun list of who should go on a contact mission.

Affirmative Action in Space

We didn't have time to discuss it in class, but I wanted to raise an important issue that nobody else seemed to consider in staffing their expeditions. Is it important for us to stock our ship with a racially and sexually diverse staff?

It makes sense to me that the team we send isn't only important in its capacity to keep themselves alive and interface with the aliens; they are equally important in the impression they give of us as a species. Are you comfortable, then, with the idea of the aliens imagining us as a bunch of white guys?

Your first instinct is to say "well, whoever is the most skilled at each necessary position." A fair argument, but what if you have two people who would be equally suited to the task, only one is white, and the other black? Do you follow the path of fairness - deciding randomly - or make the choice that better represents our diversity (and out identity) as a species?

Same goes for male-female; in the book, Voelker (eternal scum as he is portrayed) claims that the greatest mistake was in sending women along on the mission. Would you be too worried about the possible relationships that could develop and harm the mission, or the possibility of pregnancy? Or would you rather represent our species properly, as sexually dimorphic but otherwise, ceteris parabus, equals?

Finally, A Simple Answer

Could they have known better?
Yes. They did make realistically avoidable mistakes. And, as I argue in my response to Lindsay's post, we could even accept these characters not making them, or at least making less of them.

Sandoz's first tragic mistake is believing that the series of events placed before him was the result of divine intervention. As Felipe says at the end, (even if there is a creator), the creator does not change the rules of its creation. There is no such thing as divine providence. Of course, there are gigantic problems with a Christian or any religious believer agreeing to that because they're based on a book that they purport was given to them by God.

Every subsequent problem that the team has is caused by Sandoz's mistake. Here's why he shouldn't have made it and why the rest of the team should have stopped him:

1. They got a "dumb" message.
Getting a radio transmission of singing implies several things: a) The environment in which the sound was created contains a substance through which sound travels; b) There exists in that environment a group of people who have the electrical know-how to create a radio; c) The group is most likely attempting to communicate with its own kind. This last point implies some other structures. However, receiving the radio transmission does not even imply the existence of a planet. For all we know, there is a ship passing through the star system, transmitting a normal message back to its home planet. It also does not imply that the message was intended to be received by anyone else. "We always expected a string of primes." (p. 93) This kind of message implies that someone is actually looking to make interplanetary contact. No part of singing implies contact.

2. Nothing in the message tells them anything about the planet (assuming it is a planet).
If we are to assume that the message is from a planet (several years of observation would be a good way of learning if, when we get there, the people who sent the message wouldn't be gone), we have no knowledge of it. Therefore, we cannot realistically prepare for it. What if the planet was substantially bigger or denser and had too much gravity? What if there was no oxygen? What if the species that produced the message is so xenophobic that they destroy anything coming near it? What if they're afraid of near-planet asteroids and have a way of destroying them if they get too close to their planet? What if they have superbugs that can and would immediately adapt to the human immune system and kill anyone who set down within a matter of hours? What if all the plants that grow are poisonous? What if their planet is governed by religious zealots who have a Centauri-centric view of the universe and claim that the stars are points of light on a black sphere? Do I have to keep going, or is it obvious that I'm just scratching the surface of things that could go wrong?

3. Divine providence doesn't even make sense.
Short point: the people in that room were not the most qualified to go to another planet. Oh, yeah, let's have a soap opera on an asteroid on the way over! That's a great group to send to another planet to make first contact! Even sending a musicologist is presuming that the music is music and not just communication.

So send a damn probe. Even if you follow it a year later, send a goddamned probe. Send something that can move fast, land, and send back data. Get it there in five years. Put the Golden Record on it, just in case "they" find it. And while you're at it, send a string of primes to them. If they actually have decent radio technology and they're looking for life, send them a message.

Skepticism versus Cynicism
A few times in class (and I tried to correct the mistake each time), a couple of people mentioned that the team should have been more cynical. That's not right because cynicism gets you no further than blind faith, just in the other direction. Cynicism is contemptuous distrust of human nature and behavior (says Merriam-Webster) and is not based in empirical findings. (Of course, the M-W definitions are as limited as dictionary definitions usually are: the first definitions of "cynic," "cynical," and "cynicism" all just point to each other) Skepticism is an attitude of doubt toward all things. Skepticism is informed doubt, and in our age, takes the form of the scientific method. "See uncertainty," says M-W. A skeptic never stops asking why and has a high standard of proof. (A cynic, by contrast, has an impossible standard of proof.)

Love it, Hate it, or Both
As I mentioned in class, I loved and hated the book for the exact same reasons at the exact same instants. About 3/4 through the class, my reasoning sort of coalesced. I love the prose and sympathize with all the characters, yet I detest everything that happens and everything that the characters do. This is absolutely a credit to Mary Doria Russell's skill as a writer. I'm looking forward to loving and hating Children of God in two weeks...

Until then, Gort! Klaatu barada nikto! Robots + Bernard Herrmann = awesome. Imagine if Taxi Driver had robots...

a near miss

Something like a sample of what next week has to offer...

Psychology

Like Jen, I was very aware of the parallels between the alien/future societies in this book and in Time Machine, though the societies on Rakhat were much more developed than the Morlocks and Eloi. I suppose that what I found most interesting in the alien contact portion of the book was the team’s willingness to settle into a routine life among a group of people who were obviously not the society they came looking for. I understand that some of them wanted to take the time to study certain cultural aspects more in depth, and maybe it’s just me, but I would want to get more of an overarching view of Rakhat before settling in to examine the details.

The part of the book that was most interesting to me overall, however, is the portion set farther in the future, when we see the struggles of the other Jesuits to help Emilio and draw his story out. The psychological transformation Emilio goes through between the two time periods is so huge and seemingly abrupt that it continued to draw me on to find out what happened to him. Of the two Emilios, however, I found the traumatized one more engaging to read about because he was more complex and his struggles seemed more real.

I also enjoyed the interactions Emilio had with John Condotti and with the Father General. Both of them were trying to help Emilio to recover, but did not really know what it was they were trying to help him recover from. Because of this lack of knowledge, they would make mistakes in the ways they chose to deal with him. The Father General was more perceptive in his treatment of Emilio, but both men developed a loyalty to Emilio throughout the story even before they knew all of the details of what he had been though. I think much of this is due to Emilio’s perseverance. He does not give up on himself when he has trouble with his hands, and as the Father General points out, “Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all” (400).

Bringing this back to something more relevant to the class, I was interested in the beauty being good concept that Phil brought up as well. Not only does Russell have the characters immediately assume that the beautiful music is good, but she also spends much time discussing Sofia’s beauty, the beauty of Rakhat, and several other things. My question is: where does that leave D.W., whose appearance Russell takes pains to disparage every chance she gets?

Eighty Directions

There are about eighty directions in which I could go in this post. However, I've been advised by TPTB(PTJ) to keep my posts more to a length befitting posts and not essays. No promises on the reflections, though, and I plan to continue making pictures of Carl Schmitt and Telly Savalas. Feel free to skip down a little. I've made it obvious when the good stuff starts up.

I simultaneously immensely enjoyed and detested The Sparrow. While reading, I would come to those discordant conclusions at the same instant. If anything, this led me to deeply respect Russell as an author... and the Wachowski brothers, perversely. I've caught the second Matrix about ten times in the last two weeks. Every program in the Matrix is deterministic, perhaps most notably the Keymaker. So listening to Sandoz's deterministic, hindsight-biased view of the events that unfolded before him struck me as farce. We all know that stories don't work that way these days. Neo chooses Trinity, the Matrix doesn't get reloaded, Elrond takes over the world.

Of course, this is Sandoz's fatal flaw: thinking that God was playing a role in his life. The final description of God is the one that I'll use to link to the one other of the eighty directions I'll go in for this post. The whole thing about the sparrow falling, how bad things happen to good people, why a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. You know, those little injustices. And it finally comes down to the idea that if there is a creator (leaving "God" out of it), he abides by the laws that he created and does not interfere. He can love his creation, he can watch it, he can laugh and cry at and with it, but he does not interfere. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice; Stephen Hawking later replied that God does, indeed, play dice. In fact, God doesn't have the dice anymore.

Which brings me to my point. (START READING HERE) The discovery of the radio signal purposely alludes to Carl Sagan's Contact. How am I sure?

"See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence."-p93

In Contact, the message that Earth receives from Vega is, at first blush, a repeating series of prime numbers. And:

"Yeah, well, we're about as likely to collect as Carl Sagan is, and he's been dead for years."-p103

If there was any doubt in my mind that this section is a direct allusion to Contact, this removed it. Further, the concepts of skepticism and truth found through science are brought up a number of times in the next few pages. Anne, for her part, "played Official Skeptic," capitalized and everything, though she was not particularly good at it. Skepticism itself is treated as somewhat of a joke:

"Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternative explanations... 'But none of it sounds like what we picked up.'"-p113

And finally, the people chosen to go on the first contact mission (this is different from the movie version) are a diverse bunch with religion playing a significant role on who is chosen to go. As I'm trying not to make this an all-out dissertation comparing Contact and The Sparrow, I'll try once again to confine myself to a few points.

One of the reasons why I like and detest the book at the same time is the treatment of skepticism and the role of actual hard science in first contact. Additionally, I find the weird run-up to the launch to be, well, stupid. This is part of the overall problem I have with the first section of the book: it explains that the world is different, but only gives us tiny glimpses into it. At the same time, I enjoy these same sections because they seem farcical considering what we know will happen to Sandoz and the others. Satirizing would be too strong a word, warning to soft, to describe what I think Russell is going for in this depiction. Further messing with the whole thing is how weak Anne is as a skeptic:

"I believe in God the way I believe in quarks... People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did."-p110

Obviously, she has never heard of Occam's Razor. As we find out in the end, quarks fundamentally describe the universe; God does not. And if God is not necessary for the universe to exist, or rather is the more complicated answer, God does not belong in the equation. Quarks do.

I have more, but it's a discussion probably best confined to people who have read both books. Mainly so I don't give anything away. As usual, my substantive post has ended up a bit sprawling and directionless; class tomorrow will surely better order my thoughts for my reflection.

[A personal note on the author: I'm three degrees of separation from Mary Doria Russell, apparently. Mary Doria Russell married the college roommate of my parents' tax attorney (a huge sci-fi fan - I sent him a copy of our syllabus). He went to their wedding in the '70s and later even got his copy of The Sparrow autographed. I also feel a special bond with Chicago-based Russell because of the brief mentions of us long-suffering Cubs fans. Pity that in her world, we haven't won yet - this "100th anniversary of our last World Series title" thing this year has got me hoping, anyway. As any Cub fan can tell you, hope springs eternal. Go, Cubs, Go!]

a sparrow's chance in hell

To begin, I'd like to say that my favorite line in The Sparrow comes from Father General Guiliani on page 402. After reading through the terrible account of Emilio's final months on Rakhat, I was as emotionally strung out as possible. Then, in response to a simile supposing Emilio had fallen in love with God, comes the following:

"'Offhand,' said the Father General wearily, in a voice dry as August grass, 'I'd say the honeymoon is over.'"

I found this line to be cathartic, a sort of rationalization of everything that had happened in the book to that point. It really cast into relief the meaning of a relationship one has with God...Todorov discusses the impossibility of two-way communication with the supernatural (sorry to refer to something we haven't yet read as a class), but one may interpret nearly anything as a sign from God, and who is Todorov to declare that it isn't? Reality is, at best, defined by our ability to perceive it.

I don't feel qualified to wade into the sort of mucky theological discussions that could emerge from this incredibly dense and complex book. My original plan was to write a section about the religious elements and then a separate section about the sci-fi elements of the novel, but then it occurred to me that the only other The Sparrow post up now features that same distinction, and I assume many others will too. Therefore, I think I'd rather consider the religious and sci-fi elements as all-of-a-kind; after all, we had no problem with it in Dune, where the religious and technological had mixed over millennia. The fact that this book opens approximately ten years from now should serve as no obstacle in this regard.

In case you didn't catch the reading group questions, I'd like to take an excerpt to set the groundwork for Earth circa 2019. This is from section 2:

"This story takes place from the years 2019 to 2060. The United States is no longer the predominant world power, having lost two trade wars with Japan, which is now supreme in both space and on Earth. Poverty is rampant. Indentured servitude is once more a common practice, and "future brokers" mine ghettos for promising children to educate in return for a large chunk of their lifetime income."

By 2060, it is strongly implied, the Earth is straining to support its population of 16 billion. On page 379, Emilio points out the suffering of children as the price humanity pays for individual freedoms. The strict population controls on Rakhat may be horrible, he admits, but at least they do not allow for the starvation of the impoverished. Indeed, it seems that the technological developments on Earth even at that point cannot compensate for the burdens of the masses, as humanity must turn to space to gather enough minerals to support industry. The Jesuits are strong, so Earth apparently retains its spiritual hunger. The citizens of Rakhat, on the other hand, seem to be completely occupied by material concerns; the Runa cannot really imagine anything else, and the Jana'ata are, for the most part, too worried about status (presumably so that they will be able to reproduce) to waste much time thinking about their souls. With one visible exception, even their art is purely hedonistic or practical. Their songs are used to coordinate hunting or to commemorate a particularly memorable tryst. The only exception is the bizarre liquid-painting ritual the Marc observes, which may or may not be a form of worship; Russell never touches on it again.

Although Russell's idea for this novel came from the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage, the differences are immense. Although Columbus explicitly set out to convert other civilizations to Christianity, the Jesuits are on no Mission to Rakhat. As far as we are told, the only time any member of the expedition hopes that any of the aliens may worship God is Emilio immediately before he is first raped.

Really, though, I was surprised at how unlike us these aliens were (concerning religion), considering how ridiculously similar they wound up being in many other ways. I was disappointed by the physiological similarities, especially in terms of nourishment. Having heard about scurvy throughout the bookout, I was hoping that some aspect of the team's diet would be the cause, that I could see something uniquely alien. But it was not to be; while some foods tasted good or bad, it was almost all food, and easily digested by humans at that. My disappointment extended to the immediate physical similarity of the aliens to certain Earth species, their apparently entirely verbal language, their possession of identical sets of emotional responses (right down to, I was horrified to read, laughing!). The differences weren't sharp enough to cause me to feel that this was something alien; rather, we entered Uncanny Valley territory, something human but slightly off. The sad part is that the similarity wasn't obvious right away. Only after learning a little bit about the Jana'ata did I realize we were basically the same, with just a few deviations.

I could have felt joy at the idea that we share so much with these aliens. Unfortunately, I had gotten myself so psyched up over the idea of aliens being truly "different" from us that I found the slightest similarity grating (which isn't to say that the similarities I found were only slight!) Here I'm reminded of the Mulefa creatures from the His Dark Materials series, which lived in a world that had taken an entirely different morphological path in its evolution than our vertebrate history. They were sentient, but communicated physically and verbally at the same time, making it difficult for humans to replicate their language accurately. That is the kind of different alien I was hoping for! Not a bunch of sociopathic ecology nuts in cat suits.

Lastly, I feel that the major thing that caused the expedition to go wrong was its assumption that it would meet with a more intelligent species than humanity, whereas the residents of Rakhat are clearly our technological inferiors. Next time, let's hope they send some sort of vast warship filled to the brim with gung-ho space marines, to better interface with the enemyaliens.

P.S. Did anyone else see any similarities between the Jana'ata and the Ssi-ruuk? Just asking.

Conceptual Wars

I’m going to preface this reflection by saying that much of our discussion from this class focused on concepts that I don’t know much, if anything, about (ex. European history, which I have never studied, and other political theories or conflicts that I’ve not heard of). Because of this, I can’t really comment well on our discussion, so instead I’m going to bring up in more detail one of the points I found interesting in the text.

As Sarah mentioned, our society has become much more likely to declare war on an idea than on a group of people, for example, the war on terror, or the war on drugs. I think this relates back to Schmitt’s discussion of a pacifist movement gaining enough hostility toward war to declare a war against war on page 36. Long quote, bear with me:

If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove pacifism truly possesses political energy because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and enemy. If, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possibility, war and even the reason for war.…This war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity….[the enemy] must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.

Though practically, this would be a war between pacifists and nonpacifists, the war would be more accurately described as a war against war, and in order for war to be defeated, the pacifists must utterly destroy anyone who is not a pacifist so that no possibility of another war could exist.

The same could be said of any of the wars we have declared on concepts. The war on terror will never be complete until we have completely annihilated every terrorist in the world. Simply pushing them back into their “borders” would not work both because we would have to determine what constituted the border of a terrorist organization, and also because once pushed to that border, the remaining terrorists would be unwilling to admit defeat, and continue to participate in terror acts. Similarly, the war on drugs is in all practicality impossible to complete unless all drugs, and people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs were destroyed.

Self-Evident, Redux?

I enjoyed our discussion about Schmitt, though now that I reflect upon it, I haven't raised my opinion of Schmitt at all. I still think that his points are, for the most part, obvious. His definition of political still strikes me as annoyingly limited, actually. As I said in my first post, "politics" is what happens when two people interact. So I'll start from there.

Politics is what makes us different from atoms, which is what makes social science different from physics. My definition is not exactly a new one, either, but I don't purport it to be. In fact, the phrasing I'm using is reminiscent of Complexity by Waldrop. That book is essentially a brief history of the founding of the Complexity school of thought: that life, economics, evolution, etc., are governed by a simple set of rules that cause them to do some pretty complex things. It's related closely to autocatalytic sets. Anyway, at one point in this whole process, the social scientists are talking with the physicists, and they decide that the main difference between the two is that physicists deal with "dumb" particles. So political science is the study of "smart particles," ones that can remember the past and think about the future. And politics is what happens that's different from a dumb particle's reaction.



And yes, as you interact with people, you decide who are your friends and who are your enemies. So maybe Schmitt's a predecessor to Kojak: Who loves ya, baby? But I find this whole thing to be too obvious to even have been revolutionary in 1929.

So how could Schmitt have become famous? Well, because his IR implications seem to indicate that since killing is the only political thing you can do, you had might as well design your government to kill people really well. So how about that? Hitler. Maybe this is the vital piece of political wisdom that that Federation historian forgot in "Patterns of Force," which I mentioned earlier (note: I'm linking to a wiki, but it's for a piece of recent fiction and it's Memory Alpha, where I trust that there are enough Star Trek geeks like myself to remove the errors present in Wikipedia).

Anyway, back to smart and dumb particles and Carl Schmitt. I'm surprised that we didn't get into the more Nietzschean implications of Schmitt's final warning. Okay, we've got us and them. We're good, they're evil. But now we're at that postmodern point where we can't claim that their evil because we can listen to them. So now it's "We represent humanity" versus "We represent humanity" on the other side. You lose meaning, war starts only making meta-sense, and the next thing you know, crabs on a beach.

Which brings me to my actual point, the nature of postmodern war. Unfortunately, we only just barely touched upon this a couple of times in class. Most obviously, we hit upon it during the Cola Wars discussion - is there a limit to propoganda? Well, the Cola Wars seem to tell us that yes, there is an end to propaganda. In war, you need to be able to villify your enemy, or else there would be no reason to fight against them. How do you do that? Propaganda? But what if you can hear their side too, thanks to the miracle of modern communication? How can you claim that they are the evil other when you can talk to them? The final implication is that a postmodern war is unwinnable. This too is pretty self-evident, considering the empirical evidence of every war after WWII, and how great is it that we haven't actually "declared" war since then, either (I agree with PTJ: this legal distinction is significant)?

We find these implications in Aliens, Ender's Game, and Starship Troopers. How do you have a war against something in the future? Make it impossible to communicate with them. Though this is probably most evident in Aliens, it's also clearly a significant part of the other two's wars. The only way to win a war after the modern era is to somehow make it a modern war. (Modern in the epoch sense, not the "current" sense.)

So can Schmitt still be relevant as anything other than a history lesson in the postmodern era? I think not. And what's the last paragraph about? I think it's a last attempt to rail against liberalism and what turned into postmodernism, because liberalism puts a dishonest face on the reality of his "politics." It turns out that liberalism is another form of politics, but one that trys to deny that it is "political." How rude. How postmodern. Certainly the path to the Last Man, not the Ubermensch.

And back to Nietzsche and Prof PTJ's post. The quote that he pulls from On the Genealogy of Morals reminds me strikingly of Carl Sagan's reason for studying science. It's also his argument against people who claim that science makes people meaningless in the universe:

Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago. We are, as I like to say, starstuff. (The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

And another of his famous quotes: "We are a way for the universe to know itself." (Cosmos) The study of such things, as Nietzsche's quote indicates, gives meaning to our very existence. Why we seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Why we boldly go where no man has gone before. Or, put more dramatically,

They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That's like saying that you wished you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great great great great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk... Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. (Kirk, TOS: "Return to Tomorrow")

It's a Kirk speech. (voice breaks) Works every time.

[A word on my title: I did a search of Backyard Rocket's RSS feed and found that I've used the term "self-evident" three times in my blogging. My original, from which I got the title for this post, was "Self-Evident Truths," about Manifest Destiny. The second time I mentioned it was in my scathing review of Weber. And now I've used it again for Schmitt. For Stephanson, I used it to say that I hoped that his points were self-evident but I feared that they were not. In Weber's case, I ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt in my class reflection. But for Schmitt, even after our class, I still claim wholeheartedly that his points are indeed self-evident.]

I liked it, at any rate.

Personally, I found Schmitt’s essay to be a fascinating read. I get that most people seem to have been bored by repetition, both internal and external, or galled by oversimplification (Andrew’s post seems to be an example of both). Perhaps it’s just that as a generally apolitical person, I haven’t run across these ideas before, but I thought that Schmitt’s essay was really fun and interesting, both in the general ideas he discusses, and as a period piece. *Acknowledges general grumbling and disagreement.* I do agree that the way he boils down all political action to the ability of a group to declare war, whether it chooses to do so or not, is an oversimplification of the way we view the “political,” however using the definition of the political that Schmitt provides, his theories have an internal consistency. Schmitt says that, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). Because this is his definition of the political, it makes sense that he continually comes back to conflict, war, and the enemy as defining factors in what makes a state, the political entity. This definition of the political comes across well in his description of party politics. He says

The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. (32)

Thus, Schmitt argues, “party politics” can exist without being “political” because the conflict between the two parties would have to escalate to the level of civil war in order for them to be political entities, or groups that have acquired the power to wage war, whether they exercise that power or refuse to exercise it.

Like Liz, I found that I couldn’t help comparing some of what Schmitt said with concepts we discussed in Ender’s Game. Beginning with Schmitt’s concept of the “other” as “existentially something different and alien” (27). I found it interesting, however that only a few paragraphs later, Schmitt argues that “An enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (28). So, despite our finding something completely alien about our enemies, in order for them to be enemies, something similar must exist between “us” and “them.” Unfortunately, this point comes across in the middle of his differentiation between the private and public enemy, so he does not go on to describe what is similar, only that a similarity exists.

Another concept I found spoke well to our discussion of Ender’s Game is Schmitt’s idea of who can legitimately judge the validity of a conflict. He says

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. (27)

Therefore, as outsiders to the conflict, we cannot judge the legitimacy of the IF’s decision to fight the buggers because we are not actual participants in the conflict. Since the IF believed that the buggers “intend[ed] to negate [their] opponent’s way of life,” they were justified in going to war. Further, Schmitt says, “The justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideal or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy” (49). Since the IF viewed the buggers as a “real enemy,” their war is also justifiable, according to Schmitt.

There are a couple of other quotes that I found interesting, but since you're probably getting tired of reading this post by now, I'll spare you. From reading other posts, you all know much more than I do about political theory, so feel free to correct any misapprehensions on my part.

Unless the Aliens Come!

After I got over the terminology differences between Schmitt and the real world (how's that for a value judgment?), I did not particularly care for the essay. This is not a criticism of the essay form itself - Tim implied that essays are inherently more boring than novels, which I do not believe to be true. For an example of a fascinating, engaging essay on the form of the essay, I'd recommend going over to Paul Graham's site and reading "The Age of the Essay." I guarantee that you will never look at the essay form the same way again.

Back to my criticism. This may be Weber all over again, where the concepts that Schmitt explains have become so ingrained into the language of political science that it is no longer revolutionary, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is only part of the problem. I think that Schmitt does deserve credit for looking at international relations in a unique way, but I think that his terminology differences are largely superficial and indicate that the knowledge he imparts already existed in the political science community.

In particular, his definition of the state - trying to escape from the "the state is political is the state" definition - is severely lacking. His notion of what the state, and by extension, the political, is seems almost pre-Westphalian to me. In this vain, the essay seems to make coherent internal sense, but such a limited version of the state cripples the argument's outside applicability.

Of course, a vital part of nationalism is the identification and destruction of "the other" - be it human, or actually alien (the only condition, apparently, where Earth could unite governmentally without not having something resembling a state anymore). However, a state is different from a nation is different from politics. "Politics" is something that happens when people interact. A "state" is the body which has a right to force over its own territory. A "nation" is a self-identified group of people - an imagined community, if you Benedict. And then there's war... well, this might get too complicated for a blog post.

So I'll leave it at that until our discussion (no laptops, I hope). Pardon me while I whip out my Nationalism.