Finally, A Simple Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a near miss

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

Psychology

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

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

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

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

Eighty Directions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a sparrow's chance in hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conceptual Wars

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Evident, Redux?

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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