Vignettes

Well, especially considering the lengths of my last posts, I'll try to keep this one very short. The hour has little to do with it, I swear. To that end, I'll eschew talking about the actual plot and focus on Banks' general style. (And I'll just add that I love post-scarcity economies. And I thought a Replicator where you could order "Tea. Earl Gray. Hot." was good...)

To me, the novel felt like a series of fascinating vignettes, almost completely self-contained little stories that with a serious amount of cleverness coalesce into a really fun story. The opening event reminded me of a dinner party in a mid-'70s Woody Allen movie - high praise, indeed.

Banks keeps hitting on some pretty heavy stuff in this vignette format - especially the veracity of experiences in a world where virtual reality is so ubiquitous and lifespans are virtually infinite.

~With one of these silvery things and an implant people here probably never have to actually remember the name of a single other person.
~I wonder if they ever forget their own. (p. 188)

Bam. And then it's gone, and we're back in what we can only term to be the "real world." Same thing with the "what is edible?" question near the beginning. I don't have an exact direction where I'm going with this; rather, I just really enjoy Banks' stylistic treatment of these great little existential questions that go to the core of one's being. Thank god Jack Burden wasn't around. (Eh, I lie. All the King's Men is one of my favorite books, but Idealism? Come on.)

Perhaps in the end, these vignettes end up being more Ingmar Bergman, one of Woody's idols, than Woody himself. There's just something in the whole thing that conjures images of playing chess with Death and delivering long monologues at right-angles to the camera.

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.

"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."

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.

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...

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!]

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.]

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.

We'd Like to Enter an Affirmative Defense

Our class Tuesday bounced back and forth between culpability and rationalizing, but instead of comparing one instance of each to its counterpart, I though that we skipped from one side to another without marrying the two. Here's what I mean, because I'm not sure that made any sense.

We had two examples from the book of who could be guilty, but didn't have proper knowledge: the buggers for the first invasion and Ender. Though we briefly touched on this similarity, I thought that the issue had some legal depth. The way I see it, if the buggers were guilty, Ender was guilty. This certainly has the effect of tying their fates together for all time, which makes the whole cocoon thing work even better as the mysterious prologue-y ending. If we're going to use our own legal tradition, we would have to conclude that no, neither the buggers nor Ender are guilty because they did not have intent to commit a crime. The buggers simply didn't know that they were destroying sentient life and Ender thought he was playing a war simulation. No intent, no crime. However much we'd like retribution for our dead, punishing the buggers is like punishing an innocent man. No intent.

On the communication issue, it seems very deliberate that the "other" is in bug form. Can our bugs on earth show us some kind of intelligence? They create massive, intricate anthills and ordered honeycombs. But we don't think of those as grand works of architecture, even though they could be the Eiffel Tower of anthills, or maybe the I.M. Pei Honeycomb. In much the same way, our buildings could seem so different to an outside race that they just seem like anthills - the sign of life, but not necessarily intelligent life. So, you start clearing out and what's that? Oh, crap, they're fighting back. Well, bees fight back when you hit their honeycomb. Oh, crap, they've got some pretty sophisticated stuff. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe we should try talking to them.

So let's try! Meanwhile, from Earth's perspective, this entire thing has been an unprovoked attack. An attack, not an accident, not a misunderstanding. So you prepare to wipe the sons of bitches off the face of the... plane of the universe with all necessary speed. In that sense, as a race, humans had every right to send their fighters off into space via that other neat affirmative defense, self-defense. Your entire history with these things is that they come and attack you. Even though your best option is to collude, to put this into the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, you have no reason to believe that your enemy will collude, so you minimize your losses and wipe your enemy right out of existence. So in that sense, they're justified.

But then there's the problem of communication. Should they have tried communicating, both ways? Absolutely, but it's more complicated than just sending a Red Telephone over with a note that says "Call me!" Maybe they could have started by rattling off a bunch of prime numbers - that's generally a good sign of intelligence. Maybe rip the plaque and the record off of Voyager 1 and give that a shot. You could even send them a turntable to play it on. So yes, there were probably better ways of trying to communicate that the I.F. didn't try. Oops! You just killed off a whole race! Thanks for playing, try again.

And finally, a few words on Aliens. It's a good movie to watch, especially with a proper sound system (though until the model classroom gets a center channel, I'm not comfortable with calling it a proper system). You get all these fun little glimpses into the Company from Paul Reiser's character and you wonder how the hell government exactly works in the future. And it's a shitload better of a movie than Alien^3 or Resurrection.

But cinematically, it doesn't hold a candle to Alien. As Prof. PTJ mentioned, Alien is much more of a horror movie than Aliens, which leaves Aliens something like "Space action." Aliens is filled with the horrible dialogue between the Marines and the annoying kid with the worst scream this side of Six String Samurai. What this film loses that Alien had was a true fear of the Alien. There was only one. And he was a lurking badass that no one knew how to kill. But you can shoot the thing? And it just dies? That's it? What a ripoff. Unfortunately, few people know how to keep an infinite badass alien villian going.

Enter the Borg. They were the infinite evil badass - it was simply impossible to communicate with them. Impossible to reason with them. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own." That's it. That's Borg communication. You get assimilated. That's it. But then, instead of keeping them as infinite cosmic badasses, they get a queen. So it turns out, all of the drones do play second fiddle, instead of all sharing first fiddle. And I don't buy the "I, Borg" thing that individuality ended up in the collective bullshit because Picard says that the Queen was there on the cube that was sent to Earth. And also, Voyager doesn't count. There, I said it.

So back to my point. Alien had the infinite badass and Aliens removed the "infinite." Which doesn't make it a horrible movie, though the Marine dialogue brings it close. It just makes it a considerable letdown from the original. Seriously, the first time I watched it, when the Marines are about to shoot one, I thought to myself, "Oh, shit - you've got another thing coming if you think you can shoot these things." And then they did. Lame.

But again, it's not a bad movie. Alien^3 was a bad movie. Resurrection was godawful. It's just the 2010 to Kubrick's 2001. It kills the mystery, though it leaves something generally satisfying in its place. But it kills the infinite badass.

Now, I'm just imagining what would happen if James Cameron and Michael Bay worked on the same movie. Three hours of gratuitous explosions? I'd watch that.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, author and visionary, is dead at the age of 90. As a class full of science fiction geeks, I think we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.

CNN article
Another

This is the End

Well, it's about time. My uncle gave me Ender's Game and a couple of other Orson Scott Card books for Christmas (you mean the atheist celebrates Christmas?) at least seven years ago and I never got around to reading it. At the time, and actually until sometime in late 2006, I had never heard a thing about the book except my uncle's recommendation. I guess I should call him up and thank him again for the gift. It was a pretty good book.

Unfortunately for my appraisal of the book, I also just finished reading Contact. Also a book about contact with alien life and how humanity reacts. Vastly different circumstances, though. The full disclosure on this one is that Carl Sagan is one of my idols. I lament that science and rational skepticism have not had such an eloquent and visible champion since his death. He might be my guy - you know the one I'm talking about. "If you could have a conversation with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?" Perhaps one of two people Issac Asimov ever claimed was smarter than he himself (I think the other was a mathematician).

I had to have been 9 when I saw the movie version of Contact. This was before I knew a thing about Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke or just about anybody but Stephen Hawking and Gene Roddenberry. I sort of want to go back there and have a conversation with myself about the movie because though I remember it vividly, I can't imagine the ways in which I enjoyed it when I was 9. It's probably one of the events that defined my atheism. I've meant to read the book since before I even got Ender's Game at some Christmas. And the book's spectacular.


Next rant is that the novel is better than the movie, but that doesn't take away from the movie. The film necessarily removed certain plot elements, especially the Cold War element, because of changed times. There's a lot less to the movie. But it's an excellent movie nevertheless. That's partially because you just can't put all the crap from a book into a movie; they're different media. Even if you did, it wouldn't make a good movie. Douglas Adams was a master of this. He knew what would work on a radio show that he called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then, he knew what would work in a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, he knew what would work in a BBC TV miniseries called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Though all three forms of my favorite "increasingly inaccurately named trilogy" are very much alike, they are also radically different. Visual humor is not audio humor is not written humor. Visual drama is not audio drama is not written drama. What works onscreen is not what works on radio is not what works on the written page. Why the rant? Of course, because V for Vendetta is a good movie. I'm not giving up on this one.


Maybe I should talk about the thing we're actually reading for this week. The point of that long digression was twofold: one, to explain my blasé attitude toward Ender's Game. I'll expand upon that. The second was just to go on a further rant about movies based on novels (I saw an excellent one over break, by the way - No Country for Old Men. I can't believe I didn't catch it in theatres, but oh well.). I was thinking of this over break. The conventional wisdom is, read the book, then see the movie. As with so much of conventional wisdom (or all of it, as John Kenneth Galbraith, the term's inventor, might suggest), I think this needs to be challenged. Relatively, no one who reads the book first is happy with the movie and the book. But see the movie first, and you've got a fighting chance. I realized while reading Contact that I probably wouldn't like the movie as much if I saw it now for the first time, but when I saw the movie first, it became one of my all-time favorites. It still is because I have this personal connection to it. And of course, I understand that a lot of you in this class saw V for Vendetta as a movie before a graphic novel, just as I did, and I know most of you decried the movie. But I think it's also because that's an incredibly fashionable thing to do, especially among geeks. If it's not "The book's better," it's "The English translation sucks. You should learn Farci to read it properly." Perhaps it will soon end up as part of Stuff White People Like, the funniest thing to hit the Internet since Ted Stevens' series of tubes. (Among the Stuff White People Like that we've discussed: Hating Corporations, Barack Obama, Gifted Children (I imagine this'll come up tomorrow), Apple Products, Irony, Knowing What's Best for Poor People, Recycling) Anyway, to me, it's running Microsoft Word and having someone tell you that you haven't really experienced Word until you've read millions of lines of zeroes and ones. I'm sure there's a beautiful elegance in the zeroes and ones, but for the moment, I'm typing a blog entry. What is immediately useful to me is that it is a word processor.


Rant over. I promise. Maybe. No, probably not. But for now.


So back to the first part of my initial rant and my first reason for mentioning Contact. I liked Ender's Game, but I loved Contact. Everything about Ender's Game, despite it being a completely different book and a completely different brand of sci-fi, just didn't match up. It's a cool book and a cool idea - perhaps Futurama was directly referencing the concept in Bender's Big Score, where the nudist aliens are essentially playing the battle for Earth as a video game.


But if I'm going to throw this really far off-track, I can throw this somewhere it shouldn't be. It's along the lines of "What if we lived in the Matrix?" - the answer doesn't matter as long as the Matrix follows its own rules 100% of the time. That would be our observable universe. Damn. Ranting agian. What if every video game we play is actually a real battle going on somewhere? What if video games are actually our interface into another universe? Wouldn't that really suck for the people of that other universe? Imagine that your entire world is comprised of Blade Runner-style backdrops or World War II and the only rule of the universe is to pwn n00bs. So the next time you pick up your Atari to play Pac-Man, remember only this:

And yes, Threadless is mentioned on Stuff White People Like.

EDIT: It just occurred to me as I was leaving a jet lag-induced sleep that I missed a prime Star Trek reference for this post. "A Taste of Armageddon," of course. It's the reverse of Ender's Game in that instead of a game representing real violence, the game is designed to prevent violence. These two warring planets, instead of solving their problems, decide to go into a stalemate where a supercomputer decides the outcome of hypothetical battles. When someone is declared dead, he goes to an execution room and is executed painlessly. They've taken the war out of war. And that's when the computer records the Enterprise as dead. When the crew inexplicably refuse to die, it throws the entire war into a state of disarray. Kirk destroys the supercomputer and the planet's leaders fear that the real war will resume. Finally, the two sides agree to mediation to actually end their war.

Brings up the same question raised at the end of the book. What's up with a war that you only play on computers? I won't go on, mostly because I want to see what happens in class.

V for Verbose

Well, since I'm getting the hell out of Dodge tomorrow, I'd better put up a reflection on class now. What to say? We didn't really cover much in my opinion, always coming back to the question of how V gets the right to do what he does versus Susan and Norsefire. One thing is for sure: V is not of the body. Peace and tranquility is not with him. He does not know Landru.

Okay, actually, that's a start, actually. "Return of the Archons" - classic original series, just after the magic microphone that can detect heartbeats and right before Khan. The Body is this huge subconscious telepathy system that makes people seem absurdly calm save one hour a day, the Red Hour. Bottom line, the Body is actually controlled by Landru, a 6000 year old computer that was programmed to help the people of Beta III. Unfortunately, instead of doing this in some reasonable way, it decides that people having free will is too much of a risk to their own safety and takes it away. Kirk and Spock convince the computer that it has betrayed its own programming by doing this and it goes up in wonderful 1967 special effects "the computer's going up in smoke" smoke.

Or we go to the second season (Chekov shows up, so it's a good time) - "Patterns of Force." A Federation historian breaks the prime directive and interferes with a culture, organizing it in accordance with fascism, hoping to only duplicate its positive aspects. Long story short, the historian gets overpowered, a new guy takes charge, and then all the bad parts of fascism take over. Say, genocide of another planet. Once again, free will goes by the wayside as the new leader attempts to achieve racial purity. Spock mind-melds with the historian, who tells the planet that the Final Solution analogue isn't a great idea, then he gets shot, but it's all cool now.

All right, so we've got message one, that free will is the all-important marker of a society. Even if you can be guaranteed safety under Landru, you won't really be alive because you don't have freedom of choice. Let's go with the quest for free will to vindicate V's agenda over Norsefire's.

And then we've got the great little critique of fascism and human hubris. Sure, it can do some great things, but despotism's built into the system. As soon as Gill gets overthrown and the evil dude starts up, you've got bad fascism. Whoops. I guess the historian didn't really learn about history until he recreated it. And the Enterprise flies off to its next mission. Dum da da, da dum dum da da, DA!

Last, an additional word on the movie. I can see the graphic novel being turned almost verbatim into a great movie. Unfortunately, the only director I can see doing it, David Lean, died in 1991. Lean had this wonderful skill: being able to throw all sorts of wonderfully subversive politics into a damn entertaining movie. I just still don't see a way to properly capture the novel on film in 2005. In 1990, we're talking a different story. It could have been that crazy project that a director does before he dies (see Eyes Wide Shut for a prime example). Maybe the next David Lean (added bonus on his being British) can take V and treat it right. But in any case, the Wachowskis made a fun movie.

I, for one, take no joy in shooting fish in a barrel, which is pretty much what comparing a movie to its original book usually is. Sure, we have that award for Best Adapted Screenplay every year, but usually the movies that win take a so-so (or completely unknown or foreign) book and turn it into a good movie. Notable recent exception: LotR, where Peter Jackson took an excellent (though dry as all get out) novel and turned it into what many die-hard LotR fans call a so-so movie version (or a travesty, depending on how die-hard the fan). I, for one, hated reading the books but loved the movies because they didn't make fight scenes as interesting as a stackable combination washer/dryer with Energy Saver cool dry mode manual. But I digress. My point is, judge the film not on the graphic novel. That was Alan Moore's job, and we know his answer. Come down off your high horses, judge the film as a film, and tell me it's not enjoyable, being all "high and mighty" offended notwithstanding.

In Defense of the Wachowskis

Let me begin by saying that I really enjoyed V for Vendetta in its graphic novel glory. In addition to being fun to read, it serves as a fine warning against Thatcherism, fascism, and, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, all the -isms. I enjoyed the characters, though not being used to the graphic novel format, I would occasionally have to look back to figure out who someone was. The multiple narrative strings are a great storytelling tool, one I enjoyed more here than in He, She and It. Let me also indicate that I'm not saying that the movie is better than the novel.

That being said, I still say that V for Vendetta is also a damn fine movie; it just happens to have very little to do with the novel. We've got the same protagonist, a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask who went insane during medical testing. We've got the same general idea of constant surveillance and 1984-ishness. The backstory of how we got to that point is pretty vague in both instances. And there's a girl. Other than that, we're pretty much blazing our own trail.

Saying this, I have the benefit of just having watched V for Vendetta as HBO has decided to play it constantly for a few weeks. Even if I caught a few minutes halfway through the movie, I enjoyed watching it. It's a cool movie. It certainly doesn't give the same message and the path it takes is substantially different from the novel. But this isn't to the detriment of the film. There was a lot to cover in the novel and a movie wasn't going to catch it all. Instead of really trying, the Wachowskis took the premise and messed with it, creating their own story while retaining some of the most badass lines of the original. Sorry, Alan, but them's the breaks.

This isn't to say that some graphic novels can't be turned directly into films. Sin City and 300 are both fine examples of carbon copies of their graphic novels and they're both excellent films. I just can't see an exact copy of V for Vendetta (maybe V for Verbatim?) working as well onscreen. I don't think the Wachowskis could, either, so they tried to write something that could at least live up to the namesake, and I think they succeeded.

Here's a trick to enjoy any movie with Hugo Weaving. In V for Vendetta, imagine V as Agent Smith. In The Matrix, think of Smith as Elrond. And in Lord of the Rings, of course, think of Elrond as Smith. Also in that one fight scene in LotR, think of Christopher Lee as Count Dooku and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Trust me. It all makes more sense that way.

We're Not Alone!

I don't know how many of you read Slashdot (I don't recommend it, actually - most of the posters seem to be insane at this point), but in any case, there was a post up there that I couldn't resist looking into: "The Law and Politics of Battlestar Galactica."

Fans of the show Battlestar Galactica might be interested in our interview with writers and producers Ron Moore and David Eick. Three law professors at the blog Concurring Opinions have an hour-long interview with Moore and Eick about the legal, political, moral, and economic issues raised by the show. The interview is available in audio files; alternatively, people can read a transcript of the interview (Part I) and (Parts II and III). Part I examines the lawyers and trials in the show, how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security. Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet. Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically."

I guess we're not the only ones in academia looking into the "social science" end of sci-fi. The interview touches on a lot of what we've been grappling with, and it's perfect for our discussion of "Exceptional Circumstances," this week's theme. How about a robopocalypse (yeah, that's right, a robopocalypse) for exceptional?

Also, callback to last week: "Is there anything morally wrong about beating a machine?" - Ron Moore in Part I-B.

And back to last week's movie:

Moore (jokingly): First of all, what's Blade Runner? It figured into our discussions from Day 1. Very influential.
Eick: And yes, Deckard is a replicant, for the record.

He, She and It = They. That's all we needed to know.

Like much of the class, I too enjoyed our discussion on Tuesday. I think that the most important lessons were that the Model Classroom is alive and that Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place would have lasted longer than four seasons if the pizza place was alive.

I like to approach books from a literary standpoint first. This is one of the reasons I really liked He, She and It and didn't find it at all uncomfortable. Though I was always aware that I was reading a book by "feminist author Marge Piercy," I was willing to accept her version of the world and I didn't at all mind what some of the class characterized as almost separatist feminism. I did think that Shira's Ari subplot was a little off-putting, which is why I was worried that I wouldn't like the book for the first few pages. I didn't want the book to turn into another Tom Jane comedy (Please, somebody get this reference).

We touched back on Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but glossed over it so quickly that I think we created two classes of sentient computers: people and living machines. Heinlein wrote Moon without there being a question of Mike's being alive, but in He, She and It, we skipped the alive part and moved right to personhood. This brings us back around to the pizza place: is Malkah's house alive? A person? The "law" stated that no human-shaped cyborgs could exist, but not necessarily how smart they could be. The law seems to be more concerned with the practical aspects of having cyborgs infiltrating the multis for unknown ends, not the philosophical aspects of creating a person/human/future-crab.

And is this some weird offshoot of Clarke's Third Law? In fact, I'm coining it, right here. Even though I don't have a First and Second Law. DiPrima's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a person." So, if we're talking .999999999..., aren't we just talking about 1.0? Well, not exactly, but we're a different form of giant computer, too. We're just squishier. So I guess we're all .999999999...

This is not turning out to be more focused than my original post. That's probably because I've been on a lot of cold medicine since Tuesday, though I'm now almost through the bloody thing. One last thought, though, on Blade Runner. First, Ridley Scott is the master of pacing a movie, perhaps in this one even more than in Alien. In case anyone missed the revised ending thing that wasn't in the original theatrical rape of the film, Castillo/Jaime Escalante/Adama leaves the unicorn to show that he knows Deckard's dreams - that Deckard is actually a Replicant. What's great is, the first time I saw the movie, I saw the theatrical cut that really gives no hint of Deckard being a Replicant. In contrast to He, She and It, Blade Runner's version of AI people is that they're organic, but not alive until they accumulate about four years' worth of experiences and develop their own emotions. How does this work into Yod, who's preprogrammed with emotions? Whose are they, anyway? Are they Tyrell's niece's? And does it matter, as long as you can still play the piano?

First and Foremost

Before even delving into the social science or science fiction of He, She, and It, I'd first just like to say that I think that it is a great novel. For me, at least, it was an absolute page-turner that I never wanted to put down. Considering there's not a lot of "action" (read:explosions) in the book, that's an absolute testament to Piercy's literary abilities.

Why? Well, it's a pretty interesting post-apocalypse. Gigantic corporations, megalopolises (megalopoli? megalopola?), free cities - fun stuff. Was anyone else thinking of Weyland-Yutani whenever they mentioned Y-S? The world that Piercy paints for us is quite engrossing - she reveals a lot of detail to us without ever simply going off on a historical lecture. Nothing in the plot ever seems like a deus ex machina - the plot actions all seem reasonable. This is really the result of well-defined character psychologies. I felt that all of the main characters were at least understandable and mostly relatable.

That all being said, I suppose I should touch on Yod, but I don't find that there's much to say. He's a tragic figure, a person beholden to his creator and doomed never to quite fit in. His only possible fate in his world was death. There was never a way that he could have fit into his society as an equal. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that the discrimination against him is completely arbitrary - he is the ideal end to all of the tinkering that people are already doing to their bodies. Is the the one-drop theory - would one drop of human blood have done it for him? Exactly where is that line? The novel's society seems like it will only ever accept modified humans, and in the end, it doesn't seem like it will be a problem for a long time. I see Avram as Dr. Soong, Data's creator from ST:TNG - he was way ahead of his time, to the point where humans won't be able to match or surpass his work for generations. So... problem solved, I guess.

As always, my pre-class post is rather amorphous; I suppose it's my brain trying to put everything in order. We'll see tomorrow how this all fits together with the course itself. It's no surprise, though, that this week's movie is Blade Runner, and thankfully, we'll be watching it in its un-studio-ified form that actually lets Ridley Scott deliver his message. Robots... people... lines... Philip K. Dick's obsession with eyes...

The Answer?

I don't know if anyone else enjoyed that class as much as I did, but considering the number of people who have already given reflective posts, I'd say that it at least interested people.

Okay, Dune. Messiah... Only problem is, we're thinking of this all wrong, and so we're sort of half-right on the whole thing. As I said in class, I have a very limited knowledge of Islamic Second Coming myth, so I really can't speak as an authority on this. However, what I have learned is that the Mahdi (literally: "The Guided One") is not the messiah. He is referred to a Hadrat, literally "Great Presence."

As with any religious figure, not all Muslims agree on the nature or even existence of the Mahdi. I think, though, that I've found a pretty mainstream belief and summarized it here. First, the Islamic belief is that Jesus was not killed, but ascended to heaven alive and became a Muslim. My understanding of what I've read is that the Mahdi will begin a series of wars all over earth to fight the False Messiah, "al-Masīh ad-Dajjāl." In the midst of this, Jesus, the messiah, will come back down to Earth to slay the Anti-Christ. The Jews and Christians will convert to Islam and Jesus will reign over a peaceful, utopian Earth for 40 years. He will then die and be buried beside Muhammad.

So I get out of this that the Mahdi is, indeed, just a guided "seed" to cause the actual messiah's return to Earth. Also, messiahs can die; they just have to do it according to prophesy. I don't know if this is the definitive answer, but I'm almost certain that Herbert was aware of all this when he was writing Dune.

Prof. PTJ touched upon a great point, one that a friend of mine mentioned to me when I first read Dune about ten years ago. As a Judeo-Christian-influenced society, we're expecting a Jesus story when we start talking about religious figures who lead their people out of oppression and to the promised land. Herbert was aware of this expectation and so he wrote an Islamic-based story. This is a brilliant move - it makes the story seem a little exotic, but also familiar. Sociologists have shown that people tend to like things that are slightly exotic, but also familiar.

In other news, perhaps I was a bit harsh on Weber. Our discussion pulled out the good points from his lecture. I still think that the bloody thing was too damn long, though. In my initial post, and once in class, I noted what I perceived to be a realpolitik bent to Weber's argument. Perhaps I should have left it as what I first called it in my blog post, "For the Love of God, Please, and I Can't Emphasize This Enough, Understand the Difference Between Theory and Practice." The term realpolitik is too Machiavellian for what I actually took Weber to mean; it just happens to be more concise than "For the Love of God, Please, and I Can't Emphasize This Enough, Understand the Difference Between Theory and Practice."

Finally, a reflection on the class itself. As I said earlier, I really enjoyed our session, especially the first part. I thought that we had a great conversation going. As Prof. PTJ said, the Pro/Con list itself wasn't the point, nor was finding an answer, really. It was a (highly effective, in my opinion) tool to get us talking about what a messiah actually is, how the book addresses it, and, to bring it back to social science, how societies believe in messiahs. Jonestown, for example. And then, in The Fifth Element, we'll see a savior who no one even knows we need.

I'm skeptical about the court reporter concept we're going to be experimenting with. My personal concern is that I won't be able to do it very well - the only classes I've ever taken notes in are math classes. My mind works more like our discussion did - stream of consciousness style and filled with random pop culture references. My overall concern is that whoever is reporting will be taken out of the discussion. That's one of the reasons why I half-jokingly suggested a transcription. Since I don't do it, I forgot that people follow some sociological variant of quantum theory and act differently when they're monitored. Then again, our discussions center more on the Heisenberg Principle: the more you know about the conversation, the less sure you are about where it's going, and vice-versa.

This is the power of the course, I think. We're actually going somewhere, instead of most classes where you go along a set path to find an answer that people already know, then put a bow on it and take a regurgitation test. Almost any time a class discussion ends in an answer, I'm disappointed. Yesterday's class, by contrast, left me invigorated enough to write an absurdly long reflection. I didn't write it yesterday because I didn't want it to be too long, in fact.

As a rule, I hate postmodernism. I can't stand postmodern architecture or philosophy - I see it exactly as Nietzsche would, I think - it's the road that brings us to the Last Man. Overall, postmodernism is nihilistic and worse, a conversation killer. Not every argument should end with "Well, that's just your opinion," like much postmodernist thought dictates. There are answers to things. Not all things, but some. There are correct and incorrect value judgments; they are not all solely matters of opinion. I'd go so far as to say that postmodernism is causing the increasing rates of depression among all age groups, especially the younger ones.

This class, though, is a perfect example of the good parts of postmodernism. We mentioned going off on tangents in class, to which Prof. PTJ (and maybe Dirk Gently) responded that nothing is actually a tangent. Our class is a great example of that omnipresent characteristic of postmodern art: pastiche. It's what makes (some of) us like Family Guy, its constant references that contain both respect and irreverence. In much of postmodern art, it is the fusion of "high" and "low" culture - some of that architecture I hate is a perfect example. One architect recently featured in the New York Times is building a housing development based on slums, even - merger of "high" and "low," considering how expensive these places will be. Pre-ripped jeans? I see it as an extension of the same concept. I always imagine some starving child in China ripping every pair of jeans that comes past him, crying, "But why? Why do the Americans want holes in their jeans? They let the cold in! Oh, so cold. So... so cold."

But I digress (anyone get the wheat reference from my substantive post yet?). Here we have a great merger of "high" and "low." Science fiction, though it has come a long way from pulp magazines, is still widely considered as "low culture." Social science is "high culture." We merge the two and find that sci-fi can tell us more about social science than can social scientists. So it's only natural that we end up talking about the Comfy Chair or any number of pieces of pop culture. They all contain some understanding of the problem we're looking at. Even the Family Guy cutaways.