After The War

Other Blogs

2008-06-29T19:19:00.001-07:00

I've decided to suspend my project here for the moment as I work on revising some posts I've made here.

In the mean time, I've created two other blogs, one for reading and one for writing, here:

http://everyonesreadthat.blogspot.com/ (reading)

and here: http://stevendholmes.wordpress.com/ (writing)

Yes

2008-05-14T17:32:00.001-07:00

So I haven't updated in a while. I plan to throw some stuff up over the coming weeks but in the meantime I'm still not even sure I want to continue using blogger. I'd kinda rather practice just making an original webpage. But that would require effort, and a small hint of technical skill, so I guess we'll see.

An Open Letter To A Post-Contemporist

2008-04-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

Dear A Post-Contemporist,

I first read the Post-Contemporary essay sometime in mid-January when I became aware of it via Parmandur. I wrote you an earlier version of this letter but you never got a chance to respond, so I've edited it as per the one item we discussed over lunch.

I don’t mean to come off as harsh, but I also feel like jumping right in to my impressions of the essay. I want very much to sympathize with your arguments, and can grasp their appeal, but when reading the essay I also am irked by several moments that I feel obscure the heart of your argument. To begin with, I find your caricaturization of the ideologue to be facile. “But look, I started with the same text you did!” You must be thinking of something to generate a caricaturization like this. What Beowulf critic uses Beowulf to create “a sordid mockery of the original text”? When you add in the “scientifically proven!” jab later on, I also wonder what critic appeals to science in their arguments. The only critic I’ve seen that does that is Marx, and Marx has become unread in this hemisphere in the past four decades.

Also, who has taken criticism as anything other than an interpretation? Who regards the criticism as the canon and not the text? The only critics you remark on through the essay are Aristotle and Barthes. I’m not even sure I should include Aristotle, since he’s neither an ideologue nor is he even a literary critic, he’s more of a proto-critic.

But in particular, I find question with sentiments like this, “We usually do not have the builder of the tower to speak to; we cannot know his or her intentions nor his or her desires.” What? Why not? After all, can I not ask you, as a living author, about the content of this essay—albeit this essay isn’t literature, but I have for other works. If the purpose of the tower is to look at the ocean, then we certainly do know the intention of the author.

Excuse me if I drift into shorthand here. Later you say, “Universal truth n'existe pas.” Is it universally true that universal truth does not exist? Also, why is this in french?

Later still, “Aristotle wrote -- but he attempted to create reason for it! Reason, founded as it is upon belief, cannot explain that which lies beneath reason. Anthropologists have found that facial expressions are pancultural -- can not pathos, sympathy, and in fact, elements of the text also be so?” Why do you appeal to scientificity in an anti-scientific essay? Why do you presume that pancultural traits cannot be rational?

Why do you presume that unconscious traits cannot be rational?I think that I can sympathize with many of your sentiments. The above direct questions in response to specific quotations are not meant to imply that I am unsympathetic to your arguments. The pathos, ahem, of your piece is exemplary. We do, after all, want to love texts. Yet.

Yet you seem to put the reader on a pedastal. In reading your arguments, I feel like the “text” is a body upon which to be inscribed. The “author” is inaccessible—why I do not know—and in his/her inaccessibility becomes irrelevant. You emphasize the “human” value but you then imply that the author is totally irrelevant. What is human about putting the text above the author? What you seem to mean is putting the human reader above the human author. But then, that will happen anyway, since most readers will accept their own reading as the correct one unless the author specifically states otherwise.

Your arguments speak out against the ideologue and ideological criticism as though both these too were inaccessible. Yet your argument itself drifts in the direction of imperialism. The reader becomes the colonizer. The author, “the other,” inaccessible and therefore irrelevant, and his/her text is the colonized, to be exploited regardless of any will either sought to expressed.

Your arguments take on fascist characteristics when they say: when you see propaganda, give in to it. I too am overwhelmed by the beautiful, the sublime; it is, after all, the sublime. Yet, I refuse to evacuate critical responses to preserve any and all traces of beauty. I refuse to be enter into the relationship of slave and master with a text.

You seem to be arguing for transideological criticism when this perhaps the most ideological thing I have ever read.

Perhaps as the reader I have misread your text? Do you as the author, transcendant of your writing, become irrelevant to any further discussion of any misreadings? Or can you—or rather, are you obligated—to defend your arguments? Anyway,

thanks for the essay, hope to see another soon,

Le Creature De Flames

Humpty Dumpty is Jesus

2008-04-04T20:56:00.001-07:00

Whereas Jesus is birthed from Mary as a virgin, Humpty is sans-birth, thus taking on a hyper-virgin origin. He is a proto-being. Just as the tragedy of Jesus is in part the penetration of a virgin body (as he is stabbed on the cross by the roman soldier, Longinus), so too the tragedy ofHumpty Dumpty is the destruction of a virgin body.

Humpty Dumpty is hyper-aware of how his name shapes his form. When Humpty says, "my name means the shape I am--and a good handsome shape it is, too" this is a return to the pre-lapsarian role of man, where the word gives form to the shapes. As Humpty explains, "when I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." So it is with Jesus.

Humpty, like Jesus, is also the epitomy of paradox--just as Jesus is, as both God and Man. Consider Stillman's, "What is an egg? It is that which has not yet been born. ... how can Humpty Dumpty be alive if he has not been born?

Jesus mirrors the fall of man by dying and embarking on the Harrowing of Hell. So too, Humpty Dumpty surmises the epitome of Man's journey by falling. And just as Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again, so to is it that Jesus cannot return to being Jesus after his death--instead, he transforms into the Holy Spirit.

Chomsky's Moral Integrity

2008-03-17T22:14:00.001-07:00

A Minimal Level of Moral Integrity

Central to Chomsky’s arguments in Necessary Illusions, and to the significance Chomsky applies to the propaganda model, is an appeal to “a minimal level of moral integrity” (139). Chomsky offers no counterpoint to this vague moral integrity. By leaving the appeal to morality at the periphery of his arguments, instead of engaging in it directly, Chomsky fails to evoke the reconciliary mode that would be necessary to bring about the moral social change he demands, democratizing the media, with a case in point being Chomsky’s inefficient treatment of Herbert Anaya and Armando Valladares.

Chomsky does not argue for “democratizing the media” at the beginning of Necessary Illusions even though that may very well be his project. Instead, Chomsky explains why “the concept of ‘democratizing the media’ has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States” (2). The qualifier, “within the terms of political discourse in the United States” hides Chomsky’s argument. Chomsky later implies that he does not regard himself as writing “within the terms of political discourse”—rather, he engages in institutional analysis outside it. Chomsky does not proclaim that his project is indeed institutional analysis. Instead, he more often admits to engaging in such only through negatives, such as when Chomsky argues, “We [the respectable intellectual community] may speak in retrospect of blunders, misinterpretation, exaggeration of the Communist threat, faulty assessments of national security, personal failings, even corruption and deceit on the part of leaders gone astray; but the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature” (40) [italics mine]. Adverbs indicate Chomsky’s personal regard for the issues at stake and the moral assumptions underlying his characterization. Just as the ignorance of institutional analysis goes against the minimal level of moral integrity that Chomsky relies upon in how scrupulous it is, so is his work and the work of those with him valuable because of how scholarly it is. Although appearing scholarly may be important to Chomsky, the impenetrable distance he takes toward most of his subjects takes the teeth out of his arguments. Instead of arguing for a positive scholarly method for democratizing the media, Chomsky persists in putting up critical airs while nevertheless revealing himself and his morality through obtrusive adverbs. Chomsky’s argument that the US Media’s adherance to the Propaganda Model is indeed immoral should be central in his work. The pretense of writing scholarly and maintaining critical distance detracts, rather than adds to, Chomsky’s assessments.

By witholding his point so frequently, Chomsky risks coming off as resorting to tu quoque. For instance, an effective argument could be created based on the information that Chomsky presents regarding the difference between the prison memoirs of Armando Valladares compared to that of Herbert Anaya. Chomsky quotes news sources reporting on the books portrayal of, “’bestial prisons,’ ‘inhuman torture,’ and ‘record of state violence’” (138). Instead of positing an argument around these quotations, though, Chomsky begins the paragraph by saying, “To take another case” and ends with, “Subsequent coverage was pitched at the same level” (138). The result of this void of argumentation is that it appears the use of quotation itself is Chomsky’s argument, that by leaving all of the quoted material as quotation instead of as plain text it is somehow untrue. Chomsky then juxtaposes this material to the following paragraph depicting the US media’s treatment of Herbert Anaya, or the lack thereof. Chomsky’s only quote in that paragraph is “lightheaded and cold-blooded Western intellectuals” the source of which is not obvious. Chomsky begins to fall into his own propaganda model. Whereas all his coverage of Valladares’ case remains compartmentalized behind quotations, Chomsky is only too willing to offer speculation about the actual conditions of Herbert Anaya, even going so far to presume that his assassination came “probably by the U.S.-backed security forces” (138) with no evidence whatsoever. Following this juxtaposition Chomsky presents what appears to be the only argumentat on the preceding two paragraphs, that US media employs a “double standard” (139). If Chomsky employed the rhetoric of the moral integrity he values, then he would have built his ethos first by condemning the treatment of Valladares by Castro. Chomsky’s moral integrity, minimal though it may be, should be enough to recognize that the mistreatment of Anaya, and the representation of Valladares by the US media, does not diminish the wrongs done by Valladares or the atrocities of Castro’s prisons. Without this condemnation, it seems Chomsky suggests that Valladares and his criticisms, by being represented in the US media, is less valid a subject of injustice than that of Anaya. Chomsky would do better to argue that the treatment of both prisoners was immoral, even if it meant echoing some if not all of the claims by the US media. Instead, leaving his paragraphs devoid of argumentation, he risks portraying the treatment of Valladares as justified because of the treatment of Anaya.

By not positing how a democratized media would be more effective at representing both subjects of Valladares and Anaya, Chomsky further risks positing a false dilemma between either opting for the existing media of the US or Europe. Chomsky discusses the methodologies of using the propaganda model in regard to US coverage of elections in Nicaragua against El Salvador and Guatemala. As Chomsky argues, “One approach has been to compare the U.S. coverage of the two cases; another, to compare U.S. and European coverage of the same case. The results provide a dramatic indication of the subordination of the U.S. media to the goals established by the state authorities” (139). While this assertion may be true, it nevertheless does not present a form of media that lacks subordination. Chomsky’s argument would benefit from an identical comparison for a similar case for European coverage to see if it too follows the propaganda model. If so, then perhaps Chomsky need not be worried about democratizing the media at all—if one read European coverage of American interests, and American coverage of European interests, it seems possible to avoid the propaganda model altogether. This solution contradicts Chomsky’s concluding paragraph to Necessary Illusions, however, which argues, “The answer will lie in the prospects for popular movements, with firm roots among all sectors of the population, dedicated to values that are suppressed or driven to the margins within the existing social and political order…” (136). This would seem to be what Chomsky means by democratizing the media, yet this is not the mode that Chomsky engages in throughout the rest of the work. Instead, just as he referred to the vacuous appeal to a minimal level of moral integrity, in regard to the elections of Nicaragua, Chomsky argues that, “By any reasonable standard, the elections in Nicaragua were superior in circumstances” (139) [italics mine]. This comes off as a snipe instead of a substantive argument. Instead of engaging with potential reasons why the US media would feel justified in its coverage of the Nicaragua elections, Chomsky assumes a priori the position of knowing a universal “reasonable standard.” Again, doing so frames Chomsky’s arguments so that he seems to regard the Nicaraguan elections as the apotheosis of democracy and elections in El Salvador as an unequivocable sham. As two democratic elections of differing methodologies, both are equal candidates for praise and scrutiny. Arguing that the US media fails to characterize both subjects does not promote the democratic grassroots agenda that Chomsky views as the salvation of America. It offers a dilemma with no solution; the choice becomes buying the propaganda model or opting out of news coverage in its entirity.

Chomsky offers no central thesis that unifies his arguments in Necessary Illusions. Instead, Chomsky refrains from making overt political arguments by retaining the façade of scholarship. Chomsky does not posit for a democratized media capable of maintaing moral integrity and reasonable standards, and even these positive traits are based on uncritical presuppositions. Instead, Chomsky reproduces his own propaganda model, apologizing for non-US actions while exercizing all the capacities of his imagination to portray the US in the least positive light possible. Much of Chomsky’s evidence could be used to create compelling evidence for a raison d’etre of a grassroots democratic media structure, however, Chomsky does not use it to that effect.

What if the answer is "yes"?

2008-03-03T23:09:00.001-08:00

“Are Black Women Really Apes?”

We all know that black women are not really apes. The absurd racism of previous centuries can stun us, and this question seems more of a rhetorical device than it is a real question—after all, who would argue that any human being is non-human today? Yet, if it is a rhetorical device, what is the end of the rhetoric? What point is it supposed to reinforce?

It is tempting for a reader to say: “No.” No further explanation is necessary. Humans and apes are not the same species; sexuality has no impact on specization, and so the question essentially answers itself: by defining something as “woman” we presume that that woman is not ape. “Woman” implies humanity.

So what is the end of this essay, “Are Black Women Really Apes?” Is it to ask that question—or another?

A better question to ask might be, “How, and why, would anyone ever even ask such an absurd question?” That question is far more difficult to answer.

The paragraph that immediately follows the title appears at first to be a red herring, some sort of pretentious overture set out to present the tone as one that is all-knowing, the speech of an elite speaking from the armchair of Enlightenment.

Yet it is also disconcerting. The first sentence, “Through the 19th century, carnivals put on the freak show.” Why is it “the” freak show? Why not “freak shows?” It almost seems as though this sentence, and this entire paragraph, should be struck from the essay. It would be better to get to the point quicker, faster. If it is to be an elegy for Sarah Bartman and Joseph Merick, as it appears to be at times throughout, then why not write a poem instead even? Why does this essay exist?

Another sentence that is infuriating: “We only recently have evidence as to what real disease Joseph Merrick, or “The Elephant Man,” had.”

By what right does this author deem him or herself worthy to use the term “we”? What is this author presupposing in such a claim? Surely he or she had no part in the historical study that discovered this nearly irrelevant factoid.

Also, as far as overtures go, this is a poor one indeed. Here we are having recent evidence when we still do not really know who Sarah Bartman or Joseph Merrick are. Why are we reading about them? Again: Why does this essay exist?

And why all these fancy schmancy medical terms in the next few paragraphs?

Skipping until the next mark of irritation, without really bothering to understand what exactly all those fancy schmancy words mean, we come to this bizzarro sentence: “But what name do we give the disease of the spectators who paid to gaze at each of them?” Oh. Zing! Heyoo! Wow, what an overuse of the rhetorical question. Don’t you love the presupposition here—yet it’s not even really a presupposition, it’s more of a flat out accusation. The people who paid to poke this black woman’s ass were “diseased.” Cute. Clever. But not compelling.

Yet another moment of extreme frustration: “If you are having difficulty making the link between sexual organs and being an ape, perhaps other great scientists can help clarify.”

“You” the author says. You don’t even know me. Who are you to use “you” against me? Why are you presupposing that I can’t follow your argument (not that I can). And of course another little jab, “great scientists.” I’ve never heard of these douchebag scientists, and of course I don’t regard them as great. I’m bourgeoise enough to recognize a snarky comment like that as simple flippancy.

It’s at this point that I begin to lose patience. Why should I bother reading this essay and not another? Why must be there so much rubbish thrown into this argument? I can’t discern a thesis, I can’t follow half the claims, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

I can’t decide.

A further point. Joseph Merrick too was dissected. Joseph Merrick too was put on display after his death. The difference between them is less extreme, after death, than any dissimilarity in life. So they were not so different.

For each, scientists tried to understand them. The desire to understand may have come from the desire to substantiate a racist claim—but they still sought to understand.

If that is this case—and the essay might even emphasize that it is—then is it to mock the scientists of the past from afar? Or is it asking a different sort of question altogether.

The question asked at the beginning, that obviously rhetorical one, “Are black women really apes?” Did they not need to test that claim? And so they tried to. They were willing to put their racist beliefs to the test and see what happened. Their mode of interpretation, however, despite any pretenses at the “scientific method” was not enough to dissuade them—instead, their preconceived notions shaped what they saw as “evidence” and helped them mount a growing discourse on the female body as reflective of the tendencies of the female mind.

The spectator has nothing more than idle curiosity—and in pursuing that curiosity, to pay to have the experience of poking the black woman’s ass, that “curiosity” leads very directly and obviously to exploitation. Yet, in this case too, the “Scientific” impulse too led to exploitation. And in this case, the scientific impulse was based on seeking out observable phenomena.

This was Science. This is Science. Perhaps this essay’s final question is: Who are the martyrs to Science? And in the end, was it all worth it?

What if the answer to that last question is “yes”?

Wilhelm Reich and Severe Sexual Conflicts

2008-02-10T04:02:00.000-08:00

Wilhelm Reich and Severe Sexual Conflicts

The intention of Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism appears both clear and admirable. He wants to understand the roots of Fascism, and in doing so, to prevent further atrocities like the Holocaust from occuring. The crux of many of his arguments rely on his medical experience. Yet, as a scientist, Reich’s credibility is less than ideal. His research into orgonomic functionalism has been largely abandoned and ignored by psychologists and physicists, his books even burned by the US Government. However, this does not make his arguments false. But, crucial in Reich’s argument is “the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility” (202). The inhibited thinking from these sexual conflicts, Reich contends, is one of the most important causes of Fascism. This paper can make no claims as to whether that fact is objectively true or false. However, whether Reich’s text will succeed in its task of inhibiting the next rise of fascism is a matter of how well his own arguments are supported by his text. Reich’s appeals to scientificity, however, are nonetheless dwarfed by the volume of unsupported assertions perforating the text. Looking at the crucial argument on the linkage between sexual conflict and inhibited thinking, this paper will explore how Reich’s arguments fail in their appeal to scientificity due to their lack of falsifiable, reproduceable claims that are the basis of post-Popper scientific discourse. Reich’s arguments may still have value, but as moral or philosophical, not scientific claims.

First and foremost in understanding the cleavage between scientific discourse and Reich’s claims can be demonstrated by a close reading of Reich’s crucial argument, beginning with the context of his uncritical acceptance of Freud. Although the quotation comes in a section entitled “The NonPolitical Man” it actually is the most lucid explanation for a phenomenon Reich discusses through the entire work and is the ultimate metamorphosis of a question posed toward the beginning. “For what sociological reason,” Reich asks, “is sexuality suppressed by the society and repressed by the individual?” (28). Reich first must demonstrate that sexuality is indeed suppressed; however, this task he leaves to Freud. Instead of building upon the conclusions of Freud examples from his own research, however, Reich instead takes Freud’s claims, and his interpretation of Freud’s claims, as “fact” a priori.1

Reich comes close to making scientific claims again when discussing the propensity for religion to negate sexuality, but instead again opts to leave his assertions supported by other works that are accepted without question. As Reich claims, “Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control” (55). This lengthy and incredible assertion, however, is not clearly supported by any example from his research that he shares with the audience. Instead, Reich footnotes a work by Ernst Mann as “an especially informative book for the recognition of these relationships” (55). His inability or unwillingness to characterize this assertion, like the assertion at the crux of his argument, again leaves doubt over what Reich means by “severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious” (202). Reich does offer one example when discussing the unconscious struggle against one’s own sexual needs, the one that gives rise to mystical thinking. This example, not based from his clinical experience, but instead a reading of National Socialist ideology, is his observation that sentiments of, “personal honor, family honor, racial honor, national honor” (56) pervade National Socialist propaganda. This he righfully remarks has a corrolation with his proposed structure of the individual psyche. However, this corrolation does not provide evidence in support of the original structure he proposed. Once again, the shape of what Reich means by sexual conflict is left very much in doubt.

The shape of what Reich means by sexual conflict becomes even more obfuscated when he uses the term tautologically, while further moving away from the scope of scientific discourse. As Reich argues, “One does not have to be a psychologist to understand why the erotically provocative form of fascism offers a kind of gratification, however distorted, to a sexually frustrated lower middle-class woman who has never thought about social responsibility, or to a young salesgirl who could not arrive at sexual consciousness owing to an intellectual deficiency caused by sexual conflicts” (202). This sentence, instead of clarifying Reich’s terms or emphasizing his arguments, instead drifts into absurdity. First is Reich’s mention that one need not be a psychologist to understand the example; he is quite right, since one need not have even read the preceding 201 pages to understand why the sentence is a tautology and uninformative. If we remove the unnecessary inclusion of political terms, Reich’s sentence could be rephrased to, “One not need be a psychologist to understand why the sexually provocative appeals to the sexually frustrated.” Indeed, the comment could be even further revised to, “One not need be a psychologist to understand why the provocative appeals to the frustrated.” One need not be a psychologist because the provocative, by the definition being provocative, will appeal to the frustrated. In a final rephrasement, Reich could have instead written, “the provocative appeals” or “the provocative is provocative.”

The political ramifications of Reich’s major claim has direct entailments for the role of religion and his position as anti-religious. As Reich argues, “natural sexuality is the arch enemy of mystical religion” (178) and that “sexual consciousness is the end of mysticism” (179). Yet, Reich also claims that all human beings and creatures are “subject to sexual tensions” (147). Following this admission, Reich differentiates religious man from normal man. Due to “sex-negating religious conceptions” the religious man “suffers from a chronic state of physical excitation… He is not only shut off from earthly happiness-it does not even appear desirable” (147). Bearing in mind that Reich is talking about, as he deems them, “the masses”—not religious extremists—for once Reich has at least made a scientific claim with a testable hypothesis. Under this system, to contradict Reich’s claim, a single example of a religious man showing an inclination for worldly happiness would discredit his hypothesis. Considering the plurality of such examples, Reich’s claims can at times be scientific—but when they are posited in a scientific manner, they tend to be demonstrably false. Since the sexual conflicts that allow fascism to occur are, according to Reich, the same conflicts that brood mystical thought, it thus seems that the “severe sexual conflicts” he describes at the crux of his argument do not, in the broadest sense of the word, Reich can not be shown to exist.

If Reich refocused his claim, away from the vacuous “broadest sense” and at least contextualizing the significance of the difference between conscious or unconscious sexual conflict, then perhaps the crux of his argument would be more compelling. After all, Hitler sexual repression was evident in Hitler’s Germany. Yet, Hitler also rose to power through the politics of anti-semitism, through militarism, and through romanticism.2 In any case, Reich’s arguments seem incomplete as scientific claims. Those claims that are testable or reproduceable nonetheless seem demonstrably false when applied blanketly to the “mass” of religious people, and those claims that aren’t seem to be so vague as to be non-science. This does not make the claims false, yet it does raise a question of Reich’s audience. If Reich’s audience was scientists, he failed. Reich was rejected from other scientific discourse—his arguments did not become psychiatric policy. If Reich’s audience was the victims whose rationality was supposedly inhibited, then Reich failed. By appealing to scientific discourse, he appears at best elitist and at worst insolent, and by failing to provide concrete examples demonstrating his claims he fails to appeal to even pseudoscientific discourse. No religious or “mystical” person would find his claims and arguments compelling, many will reject claims of sexual repression, and many more will reject any linkage between religious belief and fascism. If Reich had instead posed his arguments in a reconciliary mode, focusing on his readings of fascist propaganda—as just that, readings, not scientific diagnosis—then his arguments may have been more compelling. If fascist states do not rise again, it is unlikely they will have been inhibited by this work.

Endnotes

1. Reich seems outraged whenever he mentions anyone mounting any criticism whatsoever against Freud. In footnote 8 on page 58, he says, “He who would want to dismiss these facts as “Freudian” would only give proof of his scientific cretenism. One should argue and not chatter, without possessing special knowledge. Freud discovered the Oedipus complex. Revolutionary family politics would be impossible without this discovery.” Ignoring for a moment the incoherence of the second sentence which I will throw up to a translation issue, the fallacy of poisoning the well could not be more obvious in the first sentence. In Reich’s understanding, the very act of disagreeing makes one a cretin. His unconditional acceptance of Freud’s discovery and emphasis on “special knowledge” borderlines on becoming the very mysticism that Reich derides through most of his work.

2. If it is indeed the case that sexual repression was the result, and not the cause of the patriarchal authoritarian order, as Reich seems to assert on page 88, then how Reich seeks to cure fascist behavior based on his proposal for sexual consciousness is left even more vague than it already was. A complete discussion of this topic, however, is outside the scope of this paper.

Natural Selection vs. Survival of the Fittest

2008-01-25T15:36:00.001-08:00

Distinguishing “Survival of the Fittest” from “Natural Selection.”

It’s possible that the only thing greater than the current debate of “evolution” vs. “creation” is the sheer volume of misinformation currently being presented in regard to evolution itself. Although anyone can access certain resources to understand evolution, comprehending it entirely can be a complex matter.

Consider an article from July 18, 2007, on MSNBC called “Why does the survival of the fittest allow runts?” Even from the title, you might notice something. “Survival of the fittest” is given agency, not only does “survival of the fittest” control the traits of our children, this title seems to imply, but it—as though on a whim—also allows our children to become runts. “Man, I hate that ‘survival of the fittest,’” I think from this title, “Always messing with my children.”

When we continue to examine the article, it doesn’t get much better. “Like a secret ingredient to a signature recipe, ‘survival of the fittest’ is a crucial part of the theory of evolution. The fittest individuals survive to mate and pass on their genetic lineage, and the weaker creatures fail to pass on their wimpy genes.” Without “survival of the fittest,” this article seems to imply, our souffle is going to turn into a stew—the stakes of this argument seem to be the theory of evolution as a whole. We also get a personification of genes. We have wimpy genese and we have “fit” genes. In third grade the wimpy genes get beat up by the fit genes. In high school the fit genes date the prom queen—the wimpy gene stays at home playing The Sims. You know the story.

Dave Mosher, our author here, can perhaps be forgiven his rather painful characterizations. After all, he’s not writing for a scientific audience—he’s writing for “the masses” “the proletariat” “the mob” AKA, you and me (presuming, you, like me, do not have a Ph.D in Biology). Dave is just trying to convey the results of a rather nuanced study and make it interesting, entertaining, and whatnot.

But then again, when you consider how little changes give way to bigger problems, you may be less patient with Dave’s creative zest.

Why is it, after all, that most biologists generally don’t use the term “survival of the fittest”? Dave has no qualms with using it—and giving it the agency of a god. After all, what does his first question even mean, “But if that's how it works, where do all the runts in nature come from?” Is that really what this study was asking? Or is that Dave’s take on it?

Now, what phrase do biologists tend to use when they want to accurately describe the systems they’re discussing? “Natural selection.” What is the significance of the distinction?

“Survival of the fittest” is a problematic term. It risks becoming a tautology when applied to biology, since what is termed “fitness” tends to be deemed by what reproduces. As wikipedia glosses the subject, “The reasoning is that if one takes the term "fit" to mean ‘endowed with phenotypic characteristics which improve chances of survival and reproduction’ (which is roughly how Spencer understood it), then ‘survival of the fittest’ can simply be rewritten as ‘survival of those who are better equipped for surviving’.” It’s not, or at least less of a tautology if you bear in mind that most good biologists tend to refer to heritable traits, not individuals.

In short, Dave was wrong. His stated assumption that “Like a secret ingredient to a signature recipe, ‘survival of the fittest’ is a crucial part of the theory of evolution.” To continue the awkward cooking analogy, “survival of the fittest” is not the “secret ingredients”—it’s more like peanut toppings that half your audience might be allergic to. The “secret ingredient” if there is one is not “survival of the fittest” it is “natural selection.” The difference might seem trivial, but it is not if you have any interest in accurately conveying information. As George Will said, “The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be scoffed at.”

Natural selection, unlike survival of the fittest, is a testable hypothesis—and one that has been complicated by such notions as “neutral theory” which includes a large role of genetic drift in genetic variation, and has been revised to work with Mendel’s work in genetics. Darwin’s work on evolution was impressive, but it alone was not the entire picture of how evolution works. Darwin himself even favored the term “natural selection,” which describes how phenotypes that will help a given species succeed in a given environment tend to become more common among groups of reproducing organisms. Over time, these variations in the frequency of phenotypes will, according to the hypothesis, result in adaptation, and depending on time and context, speciation.

This does not carry the apparent moral connotations that occur when one makes the claim that “survival of the fittest” is important, or has agency, in the theory of evolution. It is a descriptive tool, not a prescriptive one. After all, isn’t it still more efficacious to make use of “artificial selection” in breeding pigs and cows and chickens? We don’t want the chicken to worry so much about surviving the storms—we’ll build them henhouses for that. We want them to lay eggs, and lay a lot of them. Or, we want them to be fat and meaty for when we cook them. We may even want them so fat and meaty that they would almost certainly die were we not taking care of them.

Just the same, just because over time we have grown in certain ways, this does not mean that those ways are inherently good or just or efficacious. Even Darwin argued that a population with strong moral codes might be more able to work together, and thus more able to pass on those phenotypes, than a group of individuals all working for themselves. Dawkin’s (DaWKin, not DaRWin) work on “The Selfesh Gene” might include scientific claims but it can also appear quite misleading, and for an attempt at sociobiological argumentation does not present a particularly compelling picture of human relationships.

Human interaction is far more simple than always only being out for yourself. “Survival of the fittest,” that is, does not really have agency. It is not something that compels you. Although an individual may want to reproduce and to reproduce successfully, that does not mean that every single action works with that end in mind. If you hit their knee and the leg kicks as a reflex, that is not something there to further progress toward the end of reproduction. Although a simplistic and mechanistic example, the leg’s reflex action underscores my point. Countless human actions do not have reproduction as their end. Altruistic impulses, whether they be good or bad, effective or not, exist in their own right and to insist that they are always only working for the self is not the most effective explanation.

Although the work of Dawkins and those with him might be important in its own right for political reasons and certain biological claims, it nevertheless seems to have done more to cloud mass understanding of evolution than to illuminate it. But they may even be a far more sympathetic example than the volumes of far worse arguments and conceptualizations of evolution and natural selection.

Let’s consider an argument from Alan Keyes, entitled, “Survival of the fittest?” The question mark is very important. Alan Keyes ran for president, therefore he must be smart, right?

What does Alan have to add to the discussion? Let’s see:

“Is the debate over evolution a political question? Surely it is, first of all, a scientific question.”

We do already know that “survival of the fittest” must be a question, since, after all, the title includes a question mark. Just following the first two sentences of his post makes me wonder: what? What exactly is the “scientific question” that it is “surely” “first of all”? Is it evolution? The debate over evolution? The question whether the debate over evolution is a political question? Perhaps the “scientific question” Keyes refers to is “Survival of the fittest?” Question indeed, Alan. Question indeed.

“And yet, it is a sign of how far we have strayed from our common sense as citizens that the implications of evolutionary theory for our project of self-government are almost never seriously considered. The American nation and our way of life were founded on an articulated and explicit moral premise – one which the doctrine of evolution directly contradicts. We better start thinking about this.”

What? No, I mean, seriously: What? First of all, evolution is not a “doctrine.” I do not believe that the theory of evolution “contradicts” the “articulated and explicit moral premise” that “The American nation and our way of life” was founded on. Perhaps the “We” that Alan refers to that needs to “start thinking” is actually a “I.” “I better start thinking about this” might be right Alan. Perhaps before you post an essay on the subject.

Alan does take the time to explore that “articulated and explicit moral premise” in his post, explaining:

“‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ Those stated principles remain the moral premises of our way of life, and it is on them that we base our commitment to due process, and voting, and representative government and the truth that every human being has rights and an indefeasible dignity that government has to respect.

“And what, according to the Declaration, is the absolutely first principle of justice that our political order respects? It is our common duty to acknowledge the will of the One who made us. The reason that it is necessary to establish government on a basis that limits power in accordance with respect for human dignity and human rights is that those rights and that dignity come from the Creator – God. That's clear. It's straightforward. It's simple.”

It’s simple, clear, and straightforward. Perhaps even, -gasp-, self-evident? There may very well be some reasons that “The Declaration” is not part of the Constitution of The United States of America, you know, the one that is actually held as law. But putting aside that (rather large) problem for now, since The Declaration is still important, let’s consider some of these “simple” claims. What exactly does Alan mean that “the absolutely first principle of justice” that America respects is “our common duty to acknowledge the will of the One who made us.” I’m sorry, haven’t we already pointed out the self-evident truths? Why do we need to rephrase the self-evident truths? Aren’t they, after all, self-evident? And where exactly does the Declaration say we need to acknowledge the “will of the One who made us?” Perhaps we do—in holding the self-evident truths as self-evident. But if we’re already holding the self-evident truths as self-evident, why does Alan feel compelled to make the argument, rephrasing the self-evident truths, that includes acknowledging the will of “the One who made us”? (evidently, Alan is too good to just say “Creator” as the Declaration does)

But, although Alan’s arguments are ripe for contention, all the way through his article, I nevertheless feel compelled to skip to the parts that actually get back on topic. But unfortunately, Alan doesn’t ever really answer that question, “Survival of the Fittest.” His arguments are too large to stay on topic—and so he abandons it altogether.

He ends with a final tip of the hat:

“The empirical evidence, which is just "the way things turn out," does not generally support the claim of the weak, the conquered, or of anybody except those favored by circumstance, and confirmed and affirmed in the result. If our sense of justice relies on "the empirical evidence," there is no compelling case to be made that justice requires respect for the dignity and the rights of any except those who have the power to defend themselves, or to assert their claims and make that assertion stick.”

Is this what Alan thinks the implications of evolution are? Alan, multiple presidential candidate and all in all famous person? Alan might have been better served by simply pointing out the fallacy that such an argument would rely on: “Is” does not equal “ought.” If I am hungry, that doesn’t mean I should be hungry. Just the same, if those who have favorable evolutionary predipositions to a certain environment survive well, that doesn’t mean that they “should” in some sort of transcendtal, supernatural, or objective sense. Just as “natural selection” differentiates from “artificial selection” so does the theory of evolution—a descriptive theory—not entail a prescriptive theory.

For about a zillion more unsorted and unedited comments on the 2001 piece by Keyes, feel free to google it.

When “survival of the fittest” is given agency, instead of being treated for what it is—an ad hoc saying for a far more specific descriptive theory—it provides fodder for those seeking a strawman position to use to “knock down” evolution as a whole—those who, on either side of the debate, concur with Dave’s comments that survival of the fittest is “critical” to evolution.

Deeper Into "Free Will"

2008-01-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

What are the stakes of Free Will? If Free Will exists, or doesn’t exist, who cares? What is even meant by Free Will? A few examples to warm our minds to the subject.

Ryan’s choice:

“Jack has a physiological condition that whenever a certain keyphrase is given, he is unable to disobey any order given after the statement of the keyphrase. Jack is unaware of the condition. Ryan knows about this, yet he refuses to use the keyword, instead believing that Jack’s Free Will is so important that it should not be tampered with. Not only this, Ryan refuses to tell Jack about his condition, even though his enemies actively use it.”

The problem I see with Ryan’s decision is that it presupposes that Jack has Free Will in some sort of objective sense. By the terms of this exercise, Jack cannot resist any order given to him using the keyphrase. Whether such a condition as the one described here could actually exist is a legitimate concern, but for right now arguing that Jack has Free Will is impossible. Jack does not have Free Will. He can do what he is ordered to do in any way that he might see fit, perhaps, but he cannot resist obeying the commands.

Ryan sacrifices his own agency for no reason. As a man, and as a leader, Ryan’s refusal to at least inform Jack of his condition compromises his own life. Encouraging individuals to have their own agency is a legitimate argument and moral standpoint, but with it comes the responsibility to defend one’s own agency, and own life.

Plato:

Plato has made an extensive list of arguments in terms of will and justice and whatnot, and instead of attempting to gloss all of them here instead I will present an argument that is not Plato’s but instead is my own argument with some, but not all, of Plato’s arguments in mind.

A Platonic-ish argument: “We are incapable of doing what we believe is wrong.”

I distance Plato so much from this argument because I want to explain my problems with it in its own terms, instead of treading through all of what Plato has said. First, it is important to point out that this argument is poorly designed, poorly defined, and poorly conceived. It is, in essence, an argument that is either true or false depending on your fancy. If it is true, it relies on a self-correcting system.

How could it be true? I actually have argued a very similar claim, however in such a way that includes my penchant for nuance. I phrase it as such:

“All individuals act in regard to their own perceived best interest.”

This is a self-correcting system, and I believe that because of this it can be regarded as a true but nearly useless statement. I only use it as a reaction against other claims that I think are even worse.

Why is this a self-correcting system? Because it can emphasize different parts of the clauses at different times. What if someone does something that they believe will hurt themselves? Well, if they have decided to hurt themselves, then they believe that that is the best course of action. What if someone tries to help someone but hurts them instead? Well, they acted in what they perceived to be the best course of action—but they were wrong.

The problem with this sentiment, and this statement, is that if you understand the way in which it’s true, if it is true it can’t be shown to be wrong. If it can’t be wrong, that technically makes it a belief—and that is due largely to its phrasing, and simply being too general. (Perhaps you could try to argue against it on empirical grounds—suppose you include reflexes in your definition of human behavior. If you do, then you can hardly say when someone’s leg kicks after you hit the knee with a rubber mallet is a result of their “perceived best interest.” Suppose you hit someone’s knee and they precede to kick a child in the face. That would not exactly support Plato’s claim either.) In any case, you cannot gloss human nature so quickly and do justice to the complexity of human relationships and human choices.

Now, does this argument support or deny Free Will? As always, that largely depends on how you define Free Will. My version might at first seem to support Free Will, whereas Plato’s might seem to go against it—even though both essentially argue the same thing.

Desmond’s choice:

Desmond’s friend Al has a magical rock that will make anyone obey his will. Desmond believes that Al using the rock to control others is a morally wrong choice, because it interferes with their Free Will. Yet, Al argues that his choice is incredibly just, since he seeks to end all war.

The problem with this example, borderlining on some problems with “Ryan’s Choice” is that it oversimplifies human action. The “magical rock” in this example is very poorly conceived. I would say that if Al really was a “good” person and only used to the rock to end certain forms of conflict, then how “wrong” really would that be? Desmond’s choice here comes very close to Regina’s choice that I will discuss later on, both positions of which I disagree with for the same reason that I disagree with Ryan’s choice. Free Will may very well be the case, but if it is, then you too have it—and you too should express it. And if you believe that certain forms of violence are wrong (the third Crusade, for instance) then to NOT use the tools available to you to end that conflict, then you sacrifice your own free will for absolutely nothing.

Going back to the “magic” of Al’s “magical rock”—does the rock tell people when their hearts beat? When to breathe? At least the command word in Ryan’s choice was contingent on a command word, and even then we have to presume there was a fair amount of interpretation. Here, the magic of Al’s rock presume absolute control of the human mind and human body. Quite frankly, too much occurs in the human body to presume that absolute control can be expressed verbally. How many muscles must move, how much blood must move, how many times must the heart beat to simply open and close a hand? And if not all of those processes are taken over by the magical rock, if there is room left for interpretation, then how absolute is this supposed control? Is there not still the very “will” that was supposed to be taken? And is there not even, then, still the propensity and capacity for violence?

Now, let’s consider Regina’s choice, as she recounts:

“The Holy Spirit took me into an experience, which I call a "gratitude experience." In this experience, Holy Spirit took me to see war. As I looked on the war with the Holy Spirit, I saw all of the horrors of modern war. There were horrible injuries, death, loneliness, fear, suffering, destruction, lack of life sustaining necessities like food, water, electricity... I heard wailing, and I smelled fear.

But then, Holy Spirit seemed to take me beyond the war to a place or dimension that was behind it. This place was formless, so there was nothing to see with eyes, but yet it could be seen (or known) with the mind. And what I saw there is what I call Us. It was one thing...one formless thing of movement...and it was Us as one.

I remember what I felt when I saw this formless movement. It was a feeling that defies description, because it was gratitude beyond any gratitude I have ever felt in the world. I feel certain it was Holy Spirit's gratitude that I felt. And Holy Spirit was grateful for the perfect freedom that this thing was. To Holy Spirit, war was not the suffering I seemed to see before we passed through the veil. War was a symbol of Our perfect and unlimited freedom. Holy Spirit was grateful...joyously and celebratingly grateful...that We are perfectly unlimited in Our freedom. And war was a perfect symbol of that unlimitedness.

I'll never forget this experience, because the war at this point became meaningless. All I cared about was that freedom. Freedom without limits was the most magnificent gift imaginable, and to witness it with such love was incredible. I wouldn't have changed a single thing about the war that I had seen, because I would never have wanted to interfere with the gift of perfect unlimited freedom.”

Before I respond or comment to Regina’s choice here, the argument that she “wouldn't have changed a single thing about the war that I had seen, because [she] would never have wanted to interfere with the gift of perfect unlimited freedom” which is the major claim I question, I will further contextualize Regina’s choice by positing further arguments by her:

Regina argues:

““We have free will and our actions in every moment are pre-determined.” "Determinism," or pre-destiny, comes from our absolute and perfectly unlimited free will.

We are not separate beings, but one creative mind experiencing itself as separate beings. Free will is not expressed at the level of experience (separation), but at the level of creation (oneness).

Our oneness is like a child playing with several dolls. The child makes all of the decisions. If the child decides to play war, the dolls have no choice about being played with in that way. If the child decides to act out a romance, the dolls are played with in that way. If a car accident and heroic doctor are imagined, that is the game that is played. If the doll had awareness, the doll would experience determinism or destiny. Yet the doll's experience is not separate from the child's Imagination or decisions.

At the level of child (or oneness), there is complete free will. At the level of doll (conscious awareness or point of experience), there is only experiencing what has been determined. But since we are really the child, it IS free will. Determinism is only the experience.”

The “dolls and children” argument is an interesting one, yet it relies on an appeal to some sort of collective consciousness that I have difficulty accepting, especially when it results in the sentiments expressed that “I wouldn’t change that war” in the gratitude experience. That aside, I can see how Regina’s arguments could work, if you take it from a vaguely solipsist point of view.

It is true that our minds mediate our experience, that what we perceive as “reality” is in fact our mind recreating our events and creating the façade of narrative based on available stimulus. From this, one might make the argument that what we experience is a mixture of determinism and free will. Our brain, if it is true that it shapes how we perceive the world, would indeed dictate through its free will a world that we would perceive as determinism.

Yet, I dislike the sense of agency withdrawal that Regina seems to accept as an entailment of this conceptualization. Because our minds shape our experience, or any other form of oneness, does not imply to me that we should “not interfere” with the “unlimited free will” of our minds. Even if this scenario is true, there is no reason not to express our desires and actions as based on the conscious part of our mind and brains.

To accept that there may very well be a relationship between what we perceive and our sense of “free will” and “determinism” is not to leave us feeling as though someone has just uttered the secret keyphrase, that we are now helpless and without agency. In truth, the arguments only really become relevant when pitted with agency, and our capacity to interact with the world.

I am more compelled to agree with the sentiment of a different conception of Free Will: one that advocates agency instead of an “objectivity” unmediated by criticism of the mind.

As Andy argues:

“For instance, some say you can't fly by flapping your wings, so they don't have their version of "Free Will". My idea is that, although of course we have a course we follow which is more or less set by our chain of life choices made previously...we can, if we desire to strongly enough, change that course...WITHIN the LIMITS of ENVIRONMENT, HISTORY, ABILITY, and PHYSICS. Most of us have shaped our course into a comfortable cruise lane, and see no need to make drastic changes...but that does not preclude our doing so.

In my case, for instance, I had a very accomplished and successful and enjoyable career in Aircraft Electronics for 26 years...then in '96 I became disenchanted with the Ethical environs of the Industry...and stopped working in it. It was a huge life-altering decision, and not demanded or determined by anything in my previous history, other than my Ethical decision to do it. It was, in fact, economically and realistically VERY difficult to make –and carry out- that decision.

I call that "Free Will".”

On Free Will

2008-01-15T18:24:00.000-08:00

On Free Will

The thought that man might not have free will can at first be terrifying. It makes it seem as though they are strapped to a table, unable to move, to speak, to do anything.

Yet, this is not what people always mean when they say man does not have free will. Instead, they might take issue with the idea of what could be regarded as “determinism.” Under a deterministic model, you can do or say anything you would otherwise do. In this sense, the world operating under a deterministic model and the world operating with “Free Will” are synonymous, and the distinction between them is meaningless. Neither can be defended or supported without relying on some sort of post-hoc or ad-hoc change, in a way similar to the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. “I chose to do that” or “You were going to do that anyway.” How much of a difference does it really make if either is true?

Some who fear a deterministic model of the universe characterize their worries in terms of a lack of what I will call “specialness” in human action. An argument might go like this):

“There are no brilliant thoughts or ideas; all thoughts and ideas are determined. Without independence, all you are left with the necessary effects of antecedent causes… In fact a thought and a non-thought are exactly the same thing: the necessary effects of antecedent causes.”

Does a deterministic model mean that there are "no brilliant thoughts or ideas"? No. After all, not every creature on the earth can think the same thoughts. That the capacity think is determined by antecedent causes does not mean that all thoughts are the same. Quite the contrary, thoughts are just that: thoughts. That is not a “good” or a “bad” thing, it is merely a state of affairs. It is only a problem if you need to have your existance, or your thoughts, or your actions, "validated" or “made special” by some hypothetical otherworldly or supernatural being, something outside the control of human agency.

What an opponent of determinism doesn't want to believe is that *they* are the result of antecedent causes. Their concerns of “Man” having or having not a “determined” life is peripheral. They assert “independence” and their unique “specialness”. The specialness, that, it seems, is only possible when it is given by something outside their direct control. Other kinds of specialness, the love of friends or family or pets, a sense of purpose in their real lives, or other forms of value are irrelevent, somehow outside the imaginative prospects of someone if they don’t have “free will.”

Certainly a sense of worry might arise that “love” for instance is anything other than transcendant, or near-supernatural. To assert that love is anything other than the result of some transcendant “choice” appears to be blasphemy. “No matter what, X will love you.”

However, how important really is that sense of love? “I love you. God has told me that I have to hide you, starve you, and eventually kill you. So that is what I will do. No matter what, I’m sure you’ll love me, and I’ll love you, though.” What is more important to you—the fact that this person loves you, or the fact that they’re going to starve you to death for no reason other than because “God told me to.” If they really loved you, they might let you exercise some of that “free will” so often argued about and get the hell out of there.

What are the limits of “Free Will”? If you were shot right now, could a moment later could you "choose" to have not been shot? No. If you were in a car crash, could you "will" your car back into rightful being? No. If you can't do those things, what really does "free will" mean? After all, doesn't "free" mean "without restrictions?" And if I have no restrictions, shouldn't I be able to do *anything I want?*

People don't have absolute free will. There are antecedent factors in all “choices” and antecedent causes to all events on the level of daily events (that is, ignoring for now certain questions of cause in theoretical physics).

My capacities for language are governed by the gramatical patterns established in my brain, and my knowledge of what qualifies as a meaningful sentence and meaningful words. As such, language has “antecedent causes.” If my brain was damaged, I would lack the gramattical capacities to write meaningful sentence. I would not be able to choose to write a meaningful sentence. If I am unable to have absolute control over how I express my thoughts, how relevant is the question of whether I even have free thoughts or free will at all?

Does this mean I don't have free will? Well, there is such an immensity of stimuli, and so many factors that go into any given decision I make, that due to the incapacity of my own or anyone's mind to understand the complexity of my decisions, you may as well call that free will. Free will need not be absolute or transcendent to still be meaningful. Calling what I choose to do “my choice” is still more efficacious than always going into the milieu of antecedent causes. Although this may be misleading, my choice to regard writing this sentence, for instance, as an example of choice does not therefore imply a belief in transcendant, or rather, supernatural choice as the result of “Free Will.”

The Wheat from the Chaff

2008-01-13T03:35:00.001-08:00

It is easy to play the Bible Game. That’s what I call it. The Bible Game, as I call it, is the game that strong/mean atheists and “fundamentalists” / evangelical Christians play amongst each other. Google and wikipedia can make anyone a Bible expert in a relatively short amount of time. Like all easy games, The Bible Game bores me for this reason.

Yet, the Bible does not bore me. It is not easy to find passages that are moving, entertaining, or whatnot. The Bible is not a novel, it is a library. You do not go to a library and start at “A” and start reading there, nor do you go to whatever is at the far left because that’s “the beginning.” You could, of course, and certainly you’d have an amazing reading list! You’d certainly read all the classics that the library has to offer! But what happens when you reach the romance section [if romance novels are your thing, then insert a different genre, fantasy, or Joyce]? Do you read all the pulp that’s ever been printed? You could, but most people don’t read what doesn’t seem interesting. Why do so with the Bible?

Like those who play the Bible Game, I can go through and find all the parts of the Bible that conveniently fit my arguments [be they pro or con] and skip the rest, or I could use the Bible as a library: something to be used when you need it. I for one don’t need The Bible every day. Weeks or months go by without ever feeling compelled to glance inside. As far as libraries go, it is dramatically incomplete. I can tell you, it didn’t help me at all as a Senior in high school trying to learn Java. It can’t teach me to play the drums. It can’t teach me to operate machines. But then, a library can’t *really* do a lot of these things either. The only way I can learn is by practice, by experimentation, by making mistakes, and learning from people who already know how to do these things. Some books can help in understanding the basic structure, the names of certain apparatus—and it is these books that the Bible, as a library, lacks.

What does the Bible really even say? There are plenty of boring passages. But there are also poems, and stories, and metaphors. But in terms of a message, what does the Bible really talk about? Information systems and social structures.

Take the parable of the sower. “There went out a sower to sow, and it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.” That’s the introduction to the heart and soul of the parable, and although discussion of it occupies almost the entirity of chapter 4 of Mark, most of the discussion only goes to clarify the meaning of the metaphor. More time is spent explaining the metaphor as is spent stating the metaphor. Yet, in the end, the metaphor becomes much clearer than it would have been otherwise. Yet, the explanation is only given to those who are already devote followers. As Jesus eventually explains, “The sower soweth the word.”

The sower, then, is the disseminator of information. The field is the audience. If there’s a “stony ground” then the seed has less to work with and may die. On the road, the seed has hardly fallen before “Satan” takes it away. When there are thorns, the seed is choked out. Christians are quick to give this parable Christianity-specific explanations, as though Mark and Jesus needed to rationalize or explain their religion instead of just stating it. Some might claim, “This parable highlights the reason it took three decades to write the gospel, it needed time to grow.” Although cute, to anyone interested in understanding the gospels, the three decades really just aren’t all that important. Ironically, anyone trying to quickly rationalize the meaning of it becomes indicative of the “stony ground” that Jesus speaks of. Unless you give the parable some room to work in, the meaning is quickly squandered.

Many can sympathize with the message of the parable. If you have some valuable product, and you want to spread it, even if it is a good product it’s not necessarrily going to do well. Imagine you actually are a sower. If you are a good sower, you will want to maximize the benefits from your seed, and will want to focus on good ground. Why spread it where it won’t grow? And if your land is rocky, then you may very well need to clear the rocks before you can sow your seed. That is, even with a good product, you might need to work beforehand to prepare for your product. There are no real maxims that completely describe the meaning conveyed by this parable. It’s a simple yet effective metaphor, and quite frankly, one that many Biblical “scholar” game players seem to ignore.

There is nothing so astounding as the constant importance of the Bible being the immaculate word of God, yet the parables it sows being so completely ignored by so much of the modern “fundamentalist” movement. How can fundamentalism be so fundamental if they ignore so much of the Bible? Why do people argue so much about Genesis and evolution? Because that’s the part that’s at the very beginning. You know, the part that people read before they hit one of the boring parts. (Deuteronomy? Screw that, I’m gonna turn on the game!)

I am of the sincere opinion that if people who profess belief (or for that matter disbelief) in the Bible actually read the Bible more often on its own terms and not on theirs, they would have a much better job defending it or refuting it. (Of course, if it was so easy, why bother?)

Why are parables effective? Because they characterize. They demand information not be stripped out of reality, even if they are a metaphor. A single parable can complicate so many “straightforward” answers. After all, “omnipotence” comes up quite frequently in non-theistic discussions. And among theistic discussions, I understand that “the correct translation” of the Bible is frequently discussed as well. After all, if God can do anything, why can he not communicate in a more universal manner?

Instead of referring back to Genesis for explanations (I think that using Genesis to explain just about anything that isn’t about Genesis is dumb. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s.) maybe one should try understanding God from what he does, rather than what someone somewhere said about God. Jesus spreads the faith by communicating. No telepathy here. Jesus doesn’t even use telekinesis—he commands the storms to abate, and they listen. After all, this is Jesus we’re talking about. He’s just like that.

Is God omnipotent? If Christianity is so great, why do people reject it? A great amount can be explained by the parable of the sower. Just as seed will not take root in rocky ground, so will Christianity not take place with someone with no interest in sociality. See: a simple explanation as to why so many Scientists deny Christianity. And not even in a way that diminishes the value of either science or Christianity. They live in rocky ground. Or, suppose you’re selling an original operating system. Thorns (Microsoft) may very well choke you.

I think atheists, too, could do well to give Christianity credit for what it accomplishes when it’s due. In “The Demon-Haunted World” Carl Sagan gives faith-based prayer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to psychological-pain conditions, for increasing the life-span of people with certain types of cancer, etc. Why? Because prayer can relieve stress and pain, and when one doesn’t have stress or pain different chemicals operate in the brain and in different parts of the body. A sad, hopeless person lives longer than a happy person with hope as a scientific fact, and a better life too.

When Christianity is effective at providing hope and relieving stress, it is worth it. But, when it misleads, when people bring drastically sick people to a fake faith healer, real damage is done and real pain is felt. Twain argued that the benefits of Christianity, in providing hope and relieving stress probably ends up keeping people healthier than all the deaths suffered by the extermists who bring the dramatically sick to faith-based healers. Yet, I don’t see why it is so for good and just people to do both—to recognize that, if speech, if talking was good enough for Jesus, why is medicine not good enough for man or woman?

Jesus spoke. He did not telepathically communicate. What is meant by omnipotence? Evidently, omnipotence includes the necessity for language. If that’s the case, then any definition of omnipotence that isn’t capable of including it simply does not describe the God and Jesus of the gospel of Mark.

I can appreciate a good metaphor when it’s a good metaphor, and I can hardly be said to be an unusually Christian person. In addition to having to talk to the storm to calm it (as also happens in chapter 4 of Mark), it took four gospels to convey the story of Jesus. Four differing accounts. Not every parable works for every man, and you cannot summarize everything in the world with a single parable. Metaphor is woven into our very language. To expect otherwise is to stand in a stony field and expect fruit to spring from the ground. What is this, Exodus?

Phenomenology and Existentialism

2008-01-11T00:23:00.001-08:00

A person exists and can express being; can manifest the phenomenon of being through language. Being, as Alan (online) argues in a gloss of existentialism and phenomenology, what distinguishes man from a rock. A rock exists. A man exists, but has a sense of self, and interiority. To Alan, the phenomenon of being and life is, at its forefront, a miracle. A miracle, that is, being something that lacks explanation.

Although all phenomenon appear miraculous at first, I choose to investigate and examine phenomenon to see if they can be replicated. Although some have argued the mind naturally forms order out of pattern, I do not believe there is anything inherent in this process, but rather a derivation from the choice to live and interact in the world, and the phenomenon of living.

What is there must be accepted so far as I can distinguish what is real for what is real, and what is real from what is unreal. From this acceptance, a belief, I choose to understand the phenomenon and understand its cause.

Some choose, at least in theory, to reject this choice and instead to argue that instead of believing that what seems to be real is indeed real, that nothing is real at all. Yet, such people tend to nevertheless live their lives, and to interact in the world, so that as such I do not think that they really believe what they claim to believe.

There is much in this world that I do not at first understand. Many people do not understand many things; some of them choose to regard all that they do not understand as miraculous. To an extent, there is nothing wrong with this. They choose to interact with only that which they believe they understand. Yet, I believe that much of that which others may find miraculous lack answers that have been found yet, not answers altogether.

Andy adds, “I just don't understand the argument that nothing 'really' exists...if we're able to read about someone else being able to formulate that argument, there has to be SOMEONE there to formulate it, no?”

Yet that presupposes our worlds operate in a way that "makes sense." Consider your dreams. Have you ever had a dream, and after waking you didn't feel like you understood where it or parts of it came from? You can choose to believe that the dream really is a sign of the divine (many Biblical prophets were first and foremost dream interpreters). Or, you can consider that nothing is real--that what experience is itself just a dream, and we will wake up to something else, and perhaps even that will be something to be waken up from.

Or you can consider where, in this world and this experience, it makes the most sense for the dream to have come from: the brain, the human mind, and personal experience.

Atheist FAQ

2008-01-10T16:58:00.001-08:00

The following is an “Atheist FAQ” I’m modifying from a form on: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html . I have removed most of the entries I find either less compelling or redundant and revised or shortened the ones that I kept, and added some of my own.

“I have proven God exists! Now that means that [X/Y/Z] that it says in the Bible/Qur’an is also true!”

No. Even if you prove God exists, that does not mean that you have also proven that the Bible/Qur’an is the expression of that God’s will.

“God is true because the Bible says so!”

This is a circular argument; it usually relies on the argument, “The Bible is true because God says so.” X is true because Y is true; Y is true because X is true.

“[X/Y/Z] argument is true because it says so in the Bible/Qur’an!”

Bottom line: No. This might be an effective argument in your local church group, but if you want your argument to be compelling at all to someone who is not in your denomination, this isn’t good enough. If you don’t want your argument to be compelling, why are you making it? Who are you talking to?

To make an argument like this to someone who does not believe in your denomination, you must first demonstrate that *every* claim in the Bible/Qur’an is true. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your own time.

"God must by definition exist."

Things do not exist merely because they have been defined to do so.

"I managed to prove that God exists from [X/Y/Z]."

Before you begin your proof, you must come up with a clear and precise definition of exactly what you mean by "God." A logical proof requires a clear definition of that which you are trying to prove.

Different religions have very different ideas of what 'God' is like; they even disagree about basic issues such as how many gods there are, whether they're male or female, and so on. An atheist's idea of what people mean by the word 'God' may be very different from your own views.

Reality is not decided by logic, logic is decided from reality. Even if you could rigorously prove that God exists, it could be that your logical rules do not always preserve truth--that your system of logic is flawed. It could be that your premises are wrong. It could even be that reality is not logically consistent. In the end, the only way to find out what is really going on is to observe it. Logic can merely give you an idea where or how to look.

Logic is a useful tool for analyzing data and inferring what is going on; but if logic and reality disagree, reality wins.

A clear definition of 'God,' plus some objective and compelling supporting evidence, would be enough to convince many atheists.
The evidence must be objective, though; of other people's religious experiences isn't good enough. And strong, compelling evidence is required, because the existence of God is an extraordinary claim--and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

"Atheism (or science) is still just an act of faith, like religion is."

First, it's not entirely clear that skeptical/weak/nice atheism is something one actually believes in.

Second, it is necessary to adopt a number of core beliefs or assumptions to make some sort of sense out of the sensory data we experience. Most atheists try to adopt as few core beliefs as possible; and even those are subject to questioning if experience throws them into doubt.

Science has a number of core assumptions. For example, it is generally assumed that the laws of physics are the same for all observers (or at least, all observers in inertial frames). These are the sort of core assumptions atheists make. If such basic ideas are called "acts of faith," then almost everything we know must be said to be based on acts of faith, and the term loses its meaning.

Faith is more often used to refer to complete, certain belief in something. According to such a definition, atheism and science are certainly not acts of faith. Of course, individual atheists or scientists can be as dogmatic as religious followers when claiming that something is "certain." This is not a general tendency, however; there are many atheists who would be reluctant to state with certainty that the universe exists.

Faith is also used to refer to belief without supporting evidence or proof. Skeptical atheism certainly doesn't fit that definition, as skeptical/weak/nice atheism has no beliefs. Strong/mean atheism is closer, but still doesn't really match, as even the most dogmatic atheist will tend to refer to experimental data (or the lack of it) when asserting that God does not exist.

"If atheism is not religious, surely it's anti-religious?"

No. Atheist attitudes towards theists and religions cover a broad spectrum.

It is an unfortunate human tendency to label everyone as either "for" or "against," "friend" or "enemy." The truth is not so clear-cut.
Atheism is the position that runs logically counter to theism; in that sense, it can be said to be "anti-religion." However, when religious believers speak of atheists being "anti-religious" they usually mean that the atheists have some sort of antipathy or hatred towards theists.

"How do atheists differ from religious people?"

Presuming you meant, "How do people differ from theists?" They don't believe in God. That's all there is to it. If you really meant the question as is, then technically there's no inherent difference whatsoever.

"Aren't atheists less moral than religious people?"

No. Only if you define morality as “acknowledging and obeying God” can this inherently be the case. An atheist might be less moral than others, but atheists and atheism is not less moral. In first world countries, atheists tend to be more moral than others.

Usually when one talks of morality, one talks of what is acceptable ("right") and unacceptable ("wrong") behavior. To understand these terms, and to act according to these terms, does not require a belief in any God(s).

One moral system, similar to that expressed by John Stuart Mill, runs as follows:

“Humans are social animals, and to be maximally successful they must cooperate with each other. This is a good enough reason to discourage most atheists from "anti-social" or "immoral" behavior, purely for the purposes of self-preservation.”

There are countless moral systems that do not rely on a belief in God.

"Is there such a thing as atheist morality?"

If you mean "Is there such a thing as morality for atheists?," then the answer is yes, as explained above.

If you mean "Does atheism have a characteristic moral code?," then the answer is no. Atheism by itself does not imply anything much about how a person will behave. Many atheists follow many of the same "moral rules" as theists, but for different reasons. Atheists view morality as something created by humans, according to the way humans feel the world 'ought' to work, rather than seeing it as a set of rules decreed by a supernatural being.

"But surely discussing God in this way is a tacit admission that he exists?"

No. I can talk about Frodo Baggins too, that doesn’t mean he exists.

"Isn't the whole of life completely pointless to an atheist?"

No. Even if it did, that wouldn’t mean that any God(s) exist. Things do not exist because it is convenient for them to exist.

"[X/Y/Z] aren't real believers!"

This is rather like the No True Scotsman fallacy.

“No True Scotsman..."

Suppose I assert that no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. You counter this by pointing out that your friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge. I then say "Ah, yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

This is an example of an ad hoc change being used to shore up an assertion, combined with an attempt to shift the meaning of the words used original assertion; you might call it a combination of fallacies.”

What makes a real believer? There are so many One True Religions it's hard to tell. Look at Christianity: there are many competing groups, all convinced that they are the only true Christians. Sometimes they even fight and kill each other. How is an atheist supposed to decide who's a real Christian and who isn't, when even the major Christian churches like the Catholic Church and the Church of England can't decide amongst themselves?

In the end, most atheists take a pragmatic view, and decide that anyone who calls himself a Christian, and uses Christian belief or dogma to justify his actions, should be considered a Christian.

Maybe some of those Christians are just perverting Christian teaching for their own ends. But, if the Bible can be so readily used to support un-Christian acts, how effective is it as a moral code? If the Bible is the word of God, why couldn't he have made it less easy to misinterpret? And how do you know that your beliefs aren't a perversion of what your God intended?

If there is no single unambiguous interpretation of the Bible, then why should an atheist take one interpretation over another just on your say-so? If someone claims that he believes in Jesus and that he murdered others because Jesus and the Bible told him to do so, we must call him a Christian.

Thanks for reading this FAQ, I hope it has clarified the answers if you had any of these questions.

We exist. I exist. You exist.

2008-01-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

“We exist. I exist. You exist.”

I choose to believe that I exist, that you exist, and that therefore I can state that we exist. The act of speaking presupposes these three things, a subject, an object, and a relationship between subject and object.

Ontological skeptics offer all sorts of hypothetical scenarios in which one of us does not exist. Perhaps a demon haunts us and shapes our dreams. However, if a demon does shape my dreams, and if he does a good job of it, there’s no way for me to know that. If there’s no way for me to know that a demon shapes my dreams, then whether he does or does not is irrelevant.

If this is a dream, then it is a convincing one, and I cannot presume that I will awaken upon its end.

As a speaker, I am also separate from you, the object of my speech. Our brains are spectacular things; if I speak to myself, a different part of my brain processes the information and the information itself feels different, or can be different, upon inflection or pitch or tone. When I speak to myself, however, I must accept that in a way I am treating myself as two separate individuals. I am not trying to convince myself, I am trying to convince a different part of myself.

Just the same, when I speak to you, I must hope that you understand what I am saying. If, in talking with you, I begin to feel that you do not, I can go back and try to explain myself differently. This is a great and powerful tool, the possibility of refrain. Or perhaps we speak different languages. If our minds are similar enough, perhaps one day we will learn to speak the same language. If not, I hope I don’t have anything important to say!

We share a great lot in common, you and I, if you understand what I say. And although, if you were to ask me “who is a part of this conversation?” I would say, “we are, you are, and I am,” conflating us two people, this “you” and this “I” into the same pronoun is not to destroy our individuality. “We” are not one in the same. By reducing us both to this word, that does not change the fact that we are both still here, both still individuals, men or women though we may be. We are divisible, you are, and I am. And our union likely will not last forever.

“I am. I think. I will.”

I have possessions, things that I control. My hands are my own. My eyes. My ears. My brain. My body.

“I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.”

By speaking, if I choose to be rational, I choose to accept these three premises. “We exist. I exist. You exist.” I do not have to speak. I do not have to be rational. Speaking does not prove that I exist. My choice to speak to you does not prove that you exist. And though, by speaking, “we are in dialogue,” this is a tenuous binding that can be broken with silence.

The choice to speak is a choice that demonstrates the first of all beliefs. It is a belief so paramount that it is the basis for all knowledge. Knowledge is not universal, not absolute, not transcendent. If a demon, should a demon exist, ever come down to me and explain that everything I experienced was his doing, then that could very well indeed demonstrate that all what I regard as “knowledge” is not knowledge at all but instead an elaborate lie.

Until that day comes, however, when I choose to speak, I choose to accept my own beliefs, and I choose to express those beliefs.

So it is the case that all action, the act of living itself, presupposes these things. They can be called into question. I could be dead and not know it, and these could be but memories. But until I find a way to test that this is not a memory, then whether it is or not is irrelevant. By living, by acting, I choose to accept these beliefs. And this is the basis for mine and all cosmogonies, all justice, all truth, and all other beliefs.

The Problem of Pain

2008-01-08T19:01:00.001-08:00

Although this essay will begin with a very poorly written overview of the Christian “Problem of Pain” it will eventually become a discussion of the agnostic “problem of pain.” It is partly a continuation and further clarification of my other essays on suicide.

Christianity, I think, does a pretty lousy job of dealing with pain. Clive Staples Lewis wrote what is regarded as the best apologist argument defending Christianity from “The Problem of Pain.” But even Lewis’s creative meandering doesn’t really work for me. The line of reasoning argued by someone (not Lewis) and reiterated by an endless stream of meanderers is:

Christianity proposes that God is almighty, all-knowing, all-good. Yet, I or someone close to me feels pain. Therefore, does not God have to be either not all-good or not almighty, and Christianity be wrong?

I have more than enough problems with Christianity, but this isn’t really a home-run attack on Christianity for me. Lewis touches on an argument that actually might fall in the same ballpark as my own:

“The possibility of solving [the problem of pain] depends on showing that the terms 'good' and 'almighty', and perhaps also the term 'happy', are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meaning, then the argument is unanswerable.”

Basically, what I think it comes down to is that the popular “Problem of Pain” argument comes down to this, always unstated popular belief:

“Happy is Good. Pain is Bad.” As Lakoff is quick to point out, we also believe that “Happy is Up” and “Pain is Down.” When someone gets “high” they are using substances to produce a sense of happiness, although the term can be more general to include more forums of intoxication than just happiness.

Just to play “Defend Christianity,” I ask, “Where in the Bible does it say that Happy is Good and that Pain is Bad?”

Jesus certainly didn’t like pain. “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (NKJ).

The case of Jesus underscores the problem I have with Christianity. When a Christian experiences pain, they feel like God has abandoned them. A Christian might think: Since God is all-good, if I am feeling pain, I must have done something bad. At this point, one response might be: So, God must not love me. So, on top of feeling pain, they also feel abandoned.

What Would [did] Jesus Do to respond to pain?

He felt abandoned and alone, and then he died.

Since he was being crucified at the time, this is wholly understandable. But, for someone trying to use Jesus as a model for their own life, this leaves an awful large hole. Jesus presents no model other than death for coping with pain.

Jesus too felt pain. And Jesus too was pissed at God about it.

Again, I think it’s simple to ignore the problem of pain. Either accept that Jesus isn’t all-good or almighty. One might consider Joseph Rowlandson’s arguments as one response, the one that I like to summarize as, “God is a Gangsta.” God need not be all-good or almighty to be worshipped. If he’s evil, he might even require more worshipping than otherwise. Suppose God couldn’t grant you a million dollars, but could only grant you $77. That’s still $77 more than you’d have without prayer. Who needs an all-mighty God, so long as he’s able to do something or other?

But as many will insist, “Joseph Rowlandson’s God is not My God.” Many people, if they love God, will find a way to forgive him for putting them in pain.

But, there’s still an easier way to solve the problem. (Two, if you count, “God doesn’t exist, so it’s not a problem.”) That is, to accept that if it is indeed true that “pain is bad” it is not bad in some sort of moral, or absolute, or universal way. Pain is bad because you don’t like it. Pain is not bad because it means that you’re “losing” or because you’re “wrong” or because you’re “evil” or anything else. Pain is bad because it hurts.

I don’t think pain is bad because it means God doesn’t love you, and any Christian who would argue such I would find despicable.

Of course, one argument about pain that Christians make is that, no matter what pain you experience in life, in the afterlife you will be blessed with eternal happiness. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. But, if when I die everything will be super great forever, why don’t I go off myself right now?

Well, a Christian (Catholics at least, I can’t claim that all denominations will agree) responds that, “Oh no, that’s cheating. If you off yourself you go to Hell. And I would not be exaggerating to say that Hell is less than spectacular.”
The bottom line is that most good Christians will find some way of using the afterlife as an explanation for why someone should cope with pain.

How then does an atheist or anyone else deal with the problem of pain?

The problem of pain is very different for an atheist than it is for a Christian. There is no added fear that God doesn’t love you when you’re in pain. God doesn’t exist, and thus doesn’t care whether you’re in pain or not. Pain is a problem because it hurts.

Pain is moreso a problem, because if our cosmogonic center is indeed the body itself, then why live in the face of pain? Sure, usually death is not the most expedient answers. A lot of the time changing our behavior, or using an aspirin or some other drug can relieve pain. But why live when there’s a lot of pain? When pain begins to seem unbearable?

One of the most frequent arguments I come across is that “Nothingness is a relief.” I can agree with some of the political stakes of such an argument, so far as it argues for the right of someone to die, but on the other hand, I have to disagree.

As I have previously argued, “Nothingness is not peaceful. Nothingness is not a relief. Nothingness is just nothingness.”

I am asserting that nothingness is itself, A is A. That's what it is by definition. To assert that "Nothingness is a relief" is to alter the definition, and the burden of proof would lie on whoever alters the definition.

It is true that we simply do not know what happens after we die, so I cannot prove that nothingness is not a relief in the same way that I cannot prove that heaven or hell do or do not exist. Even if I am incorrect and we do not experience nothingness, there is still no guarantee that death would result in relief. If there is something other than nothingness, it just as easily can be far worse than what we already experience, something that what in our lives we called "unbearable pain" seem like nothing at all.

No one can prove what the case of experience after death is. To do so would be to prove that you have some experience that you not only could know of outside of your physiological condition, but also can remember it when you "return" to life. If you could do so, you would prove what occurs naturally after death and no meaningful debate would really be possible on the subject.

But, again, what we do know is what happens to the body. The body does not enter into "relief" after death. The body decays. I do not find the process of decomposition something I would call "peace." I would say it is far more violent than any "unbearable pain" we experience in life.

Yet I would agree that nothingness is also not unhappiness or struggle. A is A.

Now, does that mean that, since nothingness is not unhappiness, that it is a relief? Again, I don't see how you can call it that if you cannot be aware of the relief you are feeling.

How would you characterize what you felt before you were born--not even while you were in the womb, but before humanity existed at all. Was that peaceful for you? I have no recollection of anything that happened before I came into existence. So, indeed, unhappiness and struggle were not a part of that experience. And if I were in "unbearable pain" I too would likely seek any means to escape that pain. But that does not make my decision to do so strictly rational.

Rational is not synonymous with happy or right or good. It is simply the capacity to understand the relationship between the phenomenon of life.

Pain is not the theoretical worst of all possible things. I do not like pain, I try to avoid pain, but when I am in pain, I struggle to subdue the pain, I strive to live. However, the pain I have experienced thus far I would not call "unbearable" even though it sometimes felt.

If I am in pain, and in one bottle is a single aspirin and in the other bottle is a hundred million dollars, I might very well go for the hundred million dollars if I can subdue my desire to end the pain at least for a short while. I have the means to cope with some pain.

If I am in unbearable pain, by definition, I will always go for the single aspirin, no matter how much I can do with that hundred million dollars--maybe even find a way to make my unbearable pain not so unbearable? If I go for the money, it might not even be a rational decision but mere chance, derived from the inability of my mind, suffering from unbearable pain, to make a distinction. But when the aspirin is in effect, I will realize that I should have gone with the hundred million. I will, while I am lucid, be able to recognize what the rational decision was. After all, even if all I do is buy two aspirins, that is still a 100% increase over what I would have gotten if I only chose the single aspirin.

Suicide is, and always should be, an option. And there is nothing wrong with that. I don’t want to encourage suicide, but I also cannot discourage it as though there was strictly a right or wrong answer, even if anyone I met was thinking about it I would almost certainly discourage them.

But I also disagree with the sentiment that “unendurable pain is to be in a losing position to nothingness.” Nothingness is not really a “draw” just as death is not “losing.” I would not call someone in pain a “loser” nor would I call someone dying a “loser.” Life is not a game of chess, suicide is not conceding defeat. In a game of chess, when the game is over you get up and walk away and whoever won generally laughs at whoever lost and calls them a loser. If life has no “winner,” then life too can have no “losers” or “draws.”

Pain is not “good” or “bad” in the same way that suicide is not.

We simply do not know what happens after we die.

We can only go on what evidence there is, and there is none.

We do not see the manifestation of pain or agony after death, but we bury our bodies, or burn them. But we do not watch the bodies burn, usually. Nor do we watch the slow decomposition of the body after it has been buried. There is no consciousness, there is no mind there to interact with and say that there is pain, to cry or to scream. But the body is destroyed nonetheless.

Suppose you have been unconscious due to lack of oxygen to the brain or chemicals. You usually won’t recall the experience being violent or painful. Some imagine death to be like that. I do not look forward to such an existence. But, should it become inevitable, nor would I run from it for long.

After The War

2008-01-07T19:24:00.000-08:00

What happens after the war?

After World War I, “production had begun again and it was thought that better times were coming.” And then Hitler rose to power.

What happens so often after a war? Is there reconciliation? No. What happens after the war is preparation for the next war.

Is the US going to win the “war on terror”? How is that war being fought? Will it succeed if the “war on terror” becomes a “war on Islam” or a “war on the Middle East” or a “war on Arabs”?
I am proud of my country. I love America. I love the freedom it entails. I love the opportunity to eat new foods, to speak new languages, to read books I haven’t read before, to see movies I haven’t seen before, the freedom to own what I like, the freedom to live where I like and worship (or not worship) what I like. I love the freedom to engage with others, even if sometimes those engagements will end in argument or dislike, just as I love eating new foods that might not agree with my stomach.

But why was it that Hitler too cried out against “Internationalism?” Who else cries out against “Internationalism” and is it for the same reason?

There are two frequently recurring arguments that sometimes come up whenever people don’t have anything good to argue about and instead want to get down to the ethos of things. “Einstein was a Christian!” “Einstein was an atheist!” “The founding fathers were Christian!” “The founding fathers were Deist!” “George Bush is a NAZI!” “Hitler was a Christian!” “Hitler was an atheist!” “Hitler was a pagan who worshiped one of those fake gods!”

I do find it interesting, though, that when authors, creative people, look to creating some sort of artistic representation that seems to mirror or depict Hitler in some way, he frequently seems to be explicitly atheist. Hitler would not have agreed with a slogan like “No Gods, No Kings. Only Men.” as the authors of “Bioshock” use.

Quite frankly, I like that slogan. “No Gods, No Kings. Only Men.” The end of World War I was in many ways the end of the God-Kings, the long line of leaders who were believed to be leaders often because of their appeal as God-Kings. Our lives are those where there are No Gods, No Kings.

But this need not be a terrifying dystopia as in Bioshock, or as in 1984, or as in so many other dystopias.

I’ve heard reports that most people would rather vote for a gay black Jew than an atheist.

After all, it hardly matters what Hitler was. What we do know is that Stalin was an atheist, and he killed more people and therefore his actions were worse than that of Hitler anyway, QED. Therefore all atheists are evil. QED. Besides, the Chinese are atheist and they’re the enemy, QED.

Why is this? What does this come from? How many times must I hear that eternal echo: “I don’t understand how an atheist can have morality.”

If God gave man free will, then man does not need to believe in God to still have that Free Will and have as much capacity to make good and just decisions as a Christian, even from a Christian perspective.

America is not founded on the 10 Commandments. America is founded on the Beatitudes. If you don’t understand the distinction, you’re not a good Christian or a good American. [Kidding… Sorta.]

But I’m drifting from my point again. God is not necessary for morality; or, if you think it is, then your conception of morality is useless.

Even the most devout Christian does not consort with God for the majority of decisions that they make. They may pray, and the confidence they gain from that praying may give them faith in their own decision, but only the extreme radical few would ever say that God told them what to do.

An atheist is just as capable of reading the Bible and judging the moral arguments in it as much as anyone else, and choosing which ones they interpret as being true and important.

I do not mean for this argument, for this series, for this blog, or anything else to appear to be a manifesto for atheism. I do not believe that a sole manifesto for atheism is possible; atheism is easily as diverse and multi-faceted in its moral principles as the monotheistic religions in all their branches and sects. Atheism is not central to anything; atheism is not something that can be built upon. I am not even an atheist. I am not part of any atheist alliance or empire or anything else. I am a person who is aware that he has a choice, and use the processes of my own mind to inform my decisions, just as anyone else does.

You too have a choice. Some people never realize that they have a choice. Some do, some know they have a choice, and choose to believe in whatever God they choose to believe in. I respect that. But I want all people to know that they have a choice, I want all people to think about what governs their life, so that when they reach a critical decision they have the tools they need to make the best possible choice.

Some of my arguments in my past few essays on suicide boil down to a question of whether we have personal ownership of our bodies and minds, and whether our lives are ours alone. In order to say that suicide, for instance, is wrong, we inadvertently take the view that they do not own their own lives. Why do students attack schools? Because they feel like the school owns them—not that they own the school. They attack the Master because they feel like slaves. Just as the mind attacks the body that it feels enslaved by. Just the same, to say that suicide can ever be “right” we might have to take the view that each man is an island. Men are not islands. No one lives for long completely alone. Every man has a mother, every woman has a father.

This is not the final draft of this post, this is not the full explanation of my project, but it is a start.

No Gods, No Kings. Only Men.

Do not hang it on a banner, sing it.

On Euthanasia and Suicide-Bombers

2008-01-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

I previously defined suicide as “the successful act of deliberately killing oneself.” Some questioned how it could possibly be anything else, and that question I will now answer by providing a different definition:

Suicide is the choice to kill one’s body with the objective being that of killing one’s body.

This is a more convoluted definition than the other one, and the distinctions are significant, because in further exploring the topic I have to ask: are cases of “suicide bombing” or “euthanasia out of desperation” really suicide?

If a man (let’s call him Aiden) is in so much pain that he seeks his own death, is he really seeking suicide—or is he only seeking to stop the pain, with death being the cost he is willing to pay?

If a woman (let’s call her Sophia) wants to defend her friends and family, and is ordered to do so by someone she regards as a legitimate spiritual leader, is she really seeking suicide or is she a political radical who is willing to ensure her political goals at any cost?

I am not adding quotation marks to the last two paragraphs to make them rhetorical questions, where the answer is “obviously” no—I regard them as legitimate questions.

I would like to start by looking at the case of Aiden. Aiden has been diagnosed with a disease that [is terminal / isn’t terminal] and causes him an excruciating amount of pain every moment of every day. As one of the people responding to my previous essay asked me, “How many DECADES of endless mental anguish will you put up with before you decide it's just not going to get better?”

Yet, based on what I know and do not know, I cannot help but feel that whether mental anguish will “get better” or not simply isn’t relevant. Death does not make things better. If after life there is only oblivion, oblivion cannot be said to be “better” than endless pain. This line of thought is itself full of presuppositions that are part of a particular cosmogony: that pain is bad because pain is bad, that pain is bad because it is the worst of all things, that pain is bad because it hurts. I don’t like pain, I don’t like sadness, I don’t like pain, and in that sense it is “bad” to me too. But, even if pain does not ever “get better” – is that to say then that feeling nothing is “better” than pain? I do not believe that it is.

Aiden does not have to believe in the afterlife to commit suicide. Aiden does not have to believe in anything to commit suicide. Aiden can commit suicide for any number of reasons. Aiden might not care what he is running to—it might be that Aiden is running away from his pain. Once again we return to the “escape” metaphor, as seen in countless variants, including the Schopenhauer version I briefly discussed in the previous essay. Admittedly, if Aiden is so blinded by pain, my words are likely to have no impact on him. If Aiden is blinded by pain, then it may very well fall to a doctor or some other caregiver to decide whether to help him in his pleas to “escape the pain.” Drugs can only go so far, after all. We do not have illimitable dominion over the human body, we cannot turn pain on and off like a light switch. Should a doctor have the right to kill a man who seeks it? Should a man be denied the right to have a doctor kill him if he seeks death?

I do believe that doctor-assisted death is something that should be available to someone who desires it. Man often needs instruments to carry out his will; one man who wants to kill himself uses a gun. Yet a doctor is not a gun—a doctor is sworn to protect the man he takes care of and his body. A doctor has a will of his own.

If I sought death, if I was in pain, then it’s entirely possible I would greatly appreciate something as seen in “Soylent Green.” No, I am not referring to the consumption of Soylent Green, but instead to the scene where Sol (Edward G. Robinson) is killed by his own request. He walks into a room, is assisted into a bed, and has the opportunity to listen to soothing music and watch a short film that he finds pleasant while a substance kills him mostly painlessly. Yet, the ritual need not even be so elaborate. The bottom line, even if it were in a grotesque, painful manner, I would not want to be denied my right to die. I do not know of anything wrong with suicide. And I do not feel it is right to deny that right to Aiden.

The implications of this do not go unnoticed. Far more people, after all, attempt and fail to kill themselves then actually do so. For those that do not really seek death but instead want attention, or want love, or for whom the attempt to commit suicide is something they generally will regret—would not a doctor helping, with his superior skill, make it so that those that don’t “really” want to kill themselves would be killed?

I am not wholly satisfied with the answer countries whom currently support doctor assisted death give to this question. Generally, those who propose doctor-assisted death do so with the requirement that such assistance only be given if a subject is already terminally ill. This seems like a policy that comes more out of deference to the doctors and their Hippocratic Oath than it is out of deference to those who seek death.

Doctors have means of killing which ensure a more painless death than anything one can achieve without access to certain chemicals. Although not universal, men tend to try to make things quick and immediate, hoping the pain will be over before they really have to suffer, whereas women will take their chances with sometimes slower means that will have hopefully less pain. Sleeping pills are a very difficult means, since the body might automatically reject them, leaving permanent organ damage if the attempt is not successful. Other means take long enough that one might change their mind half-way through. There are few sure-fire methods of death, and many of the methods available, if the attempt is not successful, will leave a person in incredible pain and far more “invalid” than they were before.

But I am also hard-pressed to say that there is anything “right” or “good” or “correct” about suicide for anyone, ever, just as I do not believe it is “wrong” or “bad” or “incorrect,” at least in any sort of universal or abstract sense. I know I have a body, I know my body feels pain, and I value my body and my life. I know that death will destroy my body and that the process of dying might be quite painful. But death is the question I raise at the moment, not “dying” which itself implies death as an endpoint. I cannot make an appeal against suicide on the grounds that there is some sort of reason not linked in the body, and in the mind of the individual, that it is wrong.

This is not to say that you cannot, or should not, convince a person not to commit suicide. People are talked down, and for many—to them, they made the right choice. They reconciled themselves to their life. For me, it is good and right to live, to be happy and to live well, and had I been “talked down from the ledge” earlier in my life I would be thankful to the person who did so now.

Sophia is a very different case than Aiden. It seems that Sophia does not think about her death, even though a bomb is strapped to her chest and she is about to kill a dozen people in an attack that she believes is in defense of her home. Perhaps she wants to be a hero. My description of her might make you believe she is a terrorist. What I would like to emphasize about her condition is that she is a person willing to sacrifice her life for something.

What are the grounds on which someone should, or will, value their own life and body less than an abstraction, a promise, a hope, or a belief? A US soldier captured may be temped to destroy themselves rather than risk confessing something under duress. Is it suicide if a man jumps on Sophia as her bomb explodes in the hope it will dampen the blast? In the first definition, yes—his actions caused his death, it was suicide. In the second definition, it is not—it is sacrifice.

One of the most difficult cases of suicide to confront on an abstract bases are the newish vein of media suicides, assaults on schools and other locales as an assault on their peers, as an assault on “society.” They know that their attack will not kill enough people to make any sort of lasting change. But, they hope that the media reporting of their violence will result in change.

In trying to understand the crimes and the causes that have been committed, some measure of the goals of such people is achieved. Their words and actions are reproduced digitally for all to see, even when broadcast media tries to avoid doing so. Killers post threats or videos online. Some send packages to media outlets.

How do we respond to such tragedies? We may very much feel that they are wrong. I do not believe that random acts of violence can be justified. I do believe that there are a multitude of ways to say that such things are “wrong.” Yet, for the purposes of this essay, I must ask whether it is the “suicide” element of murder-suicide that we are outraged at? I do not think it is.

After the first essay, one person asked me what I would say to someone like Robert Hawkins, the Westroads Mall shooter.

Before committing his crime, Hawkins attended therapy, took medication, and was hospitalized for depression by the time he was 6 years old. He'd already cost the state 265,000 dollars.

I cannot presume that I would have been able to see the future if I had known him. I might have known he was depressed, as neighbors of him said, “troubled.” Nor would I have trusted words alone to be enough if I confronted him as he was holding the gun. And what would I say to him now? I myself would have little to say to him now. Before he’d decided to end it all, I might have tried to socialize with him, tried being friends. But, considering he’d threatened to kill his mother-in-law, I also must admit that if I felt threatened I could not have helped him by being his friend. I cannot be friends with someone who I cannot trust not to hurt me, and I would not put forward an insincere friendship. And we cannot say that his lack of friendship, that those around him, caused his spree.

Hawkins was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, mood disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and parent-child relationship problems. His physiological problems most likely had a large part in forming his death impulses.

But, if we are to drift into hypothetical situations, when would I have talked to him? Let’s say that he wrote his suicide note, but before he’d gotten access to guns he’d been stopped and hospitalized. Based on his final note alone, one might I have said? Even then, I would have difficulty. There might not be a perfect response, but if I did have that chance, then I might say something like this, and it might be more effective than an accusation of some sure afterlife, like Hell:

Dear Robert,

Many people feel isolated from one time or another, and many of us feel compelled to destroy out of this sense of isolation. I remember there have been many times I have had this feeling. There are many times when I too have felt like a burden on those around me. But, I realized that I should live, that I should create. You too should live. You should eat delicious food and sleep in warm beds, and when you wake, you should walk out into the sunlight and talk to people you like talking to, you should do what you enjoy doing, and you should try to remember all that is good in your life.

Your life is meaningful to you and many others. You can live for something, and when you die, you can choose to die for something. You encourage others to remember the good times you had together, but perhaps you yourself should remember the good times you have had, and imagine the good times you can yet have, the places you can go, the things you can do, the people you can meet. There is much in your life that you have not yet done.

You love your parents, but you should know that your parents want you to love yourself.

If you doubt the sincerity of your friends, or the desire of your friends to see you live, then you should know that any bridge you have burned can be rebuilt. New and better opportunities can be found.

The people you see on the street are good people who live their lives as best as they can. There is nothing good or interesting about a man or woman being killed for no reason. It is harder to create and protect than it is to destroy, but it is better.

You will not become famous for destroying the lives of a few people for no reason. You will be pitied, hated, for a brief while, mourned by those you love, and then you will be forgotten. If you want to be famous, you should try to find goodness in this world and to create it.

If you choose not to live, though, then that choice should come from you and your actions should only reflect that choice. Do not destroy the lives of others for no reason. You may feel the right to take your own life. If so, do not feel compelled to strip that right from others for no reason.

No Gods. No Kings. Only Men.

2008-01-06T00:08:00.001-08:00

No Gods. No Kings.
Only Men.

I am here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.

The creator originates. The parasite borrows.

AFTER the War production had begun again and it was thought that better times were coming, Frederick the Great after the Seven Years War had, as the result of superhuman efforts, left Prussia without a penny of debt: at the end of the World War Germany was burdened with her own debt of some 7 or 8 milliards of marks and beyond that was faced with the debts of 'the rest of the world' - the so-called 'reparations.' The product of Germany's work thus belonged not to the nation, but to her foreign creditors: 'it was carried endlessly in trains for territorities beyond our frontiers.' Every worker had to support another worker, the product of whose labor was commandeered by the foreigner. 'The German people after twenty-five or thirty years, in consequence of the fact that it will never be able to pay all that is demanded of it, will have so gigantic a sum still owing that practically it will be forced to produce more than it does today.' What will the end be? and the answer to that question is 'Pledging of our land, enslavement of our labor-strength. Therefore, in the economic sphere, November 1918 was in truth no achievement, but it was the beginning of our collapse.' And in the political sphere we lost first our military prerogatives, and with that loss went the real sovereignty of our State, and then our financial independence, for there remained always the Reparations Commission so that 'practically we have no longer a politically independent German Reich, we are already a colony of the outside world. We have contributed to this because so far as possible we humiliated ourselves morally, we positively destroyed our own honor and helped to befoul, to besmirch, and to deny everything which we previously held as sacred.'

If one or another amongst the leaders were really not seducer but seduced, and today, driven by the inner voice of horror at his crime, were to step before the masses and make his declaration: 'We have all deceived ourselves: we believed that we could lead you out of misery, but we have in fact led you into a misery which your children and your children's children must still bear' - he cannot say that, he dare not say that, he would on the public square or in the public meeting be torn in pieces.

There are two principles which, when we founded the Movement, we engraved upon our hearts: first, to base it on the most sober recognition of the facts, and second, to proclaim these facts with the most ruthless sincerity.
And this recognition of the facts discloses at once a whole series of the most important fundamental principles which must guide this young Movement which, we hope, is destined one day for greatness:

1. 'NATIONAL' AND 'SOCIAL' ARE TWO IDENTICAL CONCEPTIONS. At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it ''National Socialist.' We said to ourselves that to be 'national' means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be 'social' means so to build up the state and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honorable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it.

2. And then we said to ourselves: THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS CLASSES: THEY CANNOT BE.

And if you say 'But there must after all be a difference between the honest creators and those who do nothing at all' - certainly there must! That is the difference which lies in the performance of the conscientious work of the individual. Work must be the great connecting link, but at the same time the great factor which separates one man from another. The drone is the foe of us all. But the creators - it matters not whether they are brain workers or workers with the hand - they are the nobility of our State, they are the German people!

We understand under the term 'work' exclusively that activity which not only profits the individual but in no way harms the community, nay rather which contributes to form the community.

WE WERE FURTHER PERSUADED THAT ECONOMIC PROSPERITY IS INSEPARABLE FROM POLITICAL FREEDOM AND THAT THEREFORE THAT HOUSE OF LIES, 'INTERNATIONALISM,' MUST IMMEDIATELY COLLAPSE. We recognized that freedom can eternally be only a consequence of power and that the source of power is the will. Consequently the will to power must be strengthened in a people with passionate ardor. And thus we realized fifthly that

WE AS NATIONAL SOCIALISTS and members of the German Workers party - a Party pledged to work - MUST BE ON PRINCIPLE THE MOST FANATICAL NATIONALISTS. We realized that the State can be for our people a paradise only if the people can hold sway therein freely as in a paradise: we realized that a slave state will never be a paradise, but only - always and for all time - a hell or a colony.

POWER IN THE LAST RESORT IS POSSIBLE ONLY WHERE THERE IS STRENGTH, and that strength lies not in the dead weight of numbers but solely in energy. Even the smallest minority can achieve a mighty result if it is inspired by the most fiery, the most pas sionate will to act. World history has always been made by minorities. And lastly

If one has realized a truth, that truth is valueless so long as there is lacking the indomitable will to turn this realization into action!

These were the foundations of our Movement - the truths on which it was based and which demonstrated its necessity.

For three years we have sought to realize these fundamental ideas. And of course a fight is and remains a fight. Stroking in very truth will not carry one far. Today the German people has been beaten by a quite other world, while in its domestic life it has lost all spirit; no longer has it any faith. But how will you give this people once more firm ground beneath its feet save by the passionate insistence on one definite, great, clear goal?

And through the distress there is no doubt that the people has been aroused. Externally perhaps apathetic, but within there is ferment. And many may say, 'It is an accursed crime to stir up passions in the people.' And then I say to myself: Passion is already stirred through the rising tide of distress, and one day this passion will break out in one way or another: AND NOW I WOULD ASK THOSE WHO TODAY CALL US 'AGITATORS': 'WHAT THEN HAVE YOU TO GIVE TO THE PEOPLE AS A FAITH TO WHICH IT MIGHT CLING?'

Nothing at all, for you yourselves have no faith in your own prescriptions.
That is the mightiest thing which our Movement must create: for these widespread, seeking and straying masses a new Faith which will not fail them in this hour of confusion.

People are ignorant. They'll feel better as long as someone is punished.

There's nothing like the sound of hundreds of voices screaming in unison.

On Suicide

2008-01-04T15:32:00.001-08:00

For this argument, I will define suicide as the successful act of deliberately killing oneself.

The World Health Organization believes that nearly one million people kill themselves every year. The WHO, which regards suicide as a disease, also believes that a large percent of suicide is due to pesticide poisoning. For this argument, I will not be discussing suicide that comes as a byproduct of pesticide poisoning. Although it is generally believed that high self-esteem, “connectedness,” social support, stable romantic relationships, and religious commitments tend to diminish the risk of suicide, these factors nevertheless do not wholly account for causes. Some argue that some suicides are triggered by media reporting of suicides.

Unlike other “diseases” suicide afflicts the younger half of the population, and is in all countries one of the “three leading causes of death for people aged 15-34 years.” For all but some countries, suicide rates are higher than homicide rates.

Why do people choose to kill themselves, or choose not to? Although the question of pesticide poisoning is not central to my argument, it does posit one almost undeniable factor: suicide will often have a physiological element.

Some of us have more control of our brains than others. Some people are cursed with brains that have problems distinguishing fantasy from reality, with fatal delusions prompting them to leap from tall buildings. Some, for whatever reasons, consume brain-altering drugs that cause similar problems. Not all decisions for suicide are made from the conscious part of the mind, and even in the cases where it is, often that desire will be rooted in other physiological problems. People suffering from chronic pain, or from a sense of extreme isolation might feel compelled to kill themselves.

But, many of those 15-34 year olds who kill themselves are not sufferers of chronic pains. They are not delusional. Their impulse for death is rooted instead in something else.

One of the shaping features of such a decision may very well be a belief in the afterlife. Interpretations of the afterlife often shape social conceptions of suicide. To some Japanese individuals, suicide is often regarded as an “honorable way out.” In Christianity, official dogma often argues that suicide will cause the individual to go to Hell. In certain Muslim sects, suicide, if used to attack one’s enemies, is a guarantee for a paradise after death.

We have very few compelling documents detailing post-death experience. Some people who have experienced near-death have described several similar phenomena: the bright-light, the tunnel, a movement away from the body, the majority of which you will likely have seen depicted in some television show or movie. Our accounts of this, however, are not post-death, and these experiences likely are the brain’s response to being critically threatened—not divine visions.

You may disagree. The argument, if you made one, would likely fall toward the closest analogy: the dream. If you believe that dreams have divine origins, then you may also believe that near-death experiences are also supernatural phenomena. Or, you might believe that you have personal knowledge of the afterlife. If so, you may not find the following arguments compelling. If this is the case, please leave a comment or e-mail me, as this essay will not engage with those arguments at this point.

What is known of the afterlife is anti-knowledge: we know that we cannot know if there is or is not an afterlife, positive or negative, nor can we know whether suicide will have no impact on the afterlife, will result in a negative experience in the afterlife (Christianity), or will have a positive experience in the afterlife (Islamic martyrdom).

Some argue that suicide should always be regarded as the “merciful option” in cases of extreme pain. Jean Amery, for instance, argued that suicide represents the ultimate freedom from society. Schopenhauer argued that suicide was justified, and compared it to being allowed to wake from a bad dream (the dream metaphor again).

There is no evidence to suggest that there is any reason to commit suicide, nor is there evidence to suggest against it. Regardless of religious or lack of religious belief, there is no convincing argument one way or the other that suicide is “good” or “bad.”

The analogy of Schopenhauer to that of waking from a dream is erroneous, because it assumes that “waking up” (death) is inherently better than the worst dream. There is no evidence for this. The worst dream may be positive and better than the waking life. Suicide could be regarded as the ultimate freedom, but so could it also be regarded as the ultimate slavery, for in death one may be totally and completely restricted by the confines of one’s body, or lack thereof.

The void is neither better nor worse than existence. It is incomparable.

The arguments of those like William Godwin, that more pleasure is gained in life than in death and therefore life is preferable, too do not mount compelling arguments. Happiness does not collects or last in death. The amount of happiness one achieves in life is irrelevant once one is dead.

The arguments of those like Valinda, an online friend of mine, also would do little to sway me away from death if I felt compelled to embark upon it. She argues that one should not kill oneself because others will be forced to clean up your body. That might work for her, but I imagine that most of those considering suicide aren’t too thrilled with the people around them, and probably don’t particularly care whether others have to clean them up or not. But I’m sure there are exceptions.

What I do believe is that many of those who commit suicide hold a high premium on their own life, and that their views on the afterlife, one way or the other, hold a meaningful weight in shaping such a decision. Whatever you believe suicide will bring you, consider the simple possibility that it won’t. I for one am not convinced that there are empirical arguments, one way or the other, that suicide is ever a “right” or a “wrong” choice. Just the same, I can mount few abstract arguments to someone in terminal pain about whether they should or should not commit suicide. But, to a young man or woman who feels that suicide is something important that they should do, I have simply to ask: Why? If your best response is “Why not?” then I have only to wonder if that response is really good enough for you.

Conclusion of The Invisible Subject

2007-12-31T01:12:00.001-08:00

V. Conclusion

In Lee’s Native Speaker, Herny Park did not become invisible due to his being Korean, he first became invisible because of his speaking Korean. In Auster’s City of Glass, Quinn becomes invisible through ceasing social contact with others. Both, in contrast to the pre-Ellison tradition of invisibility, reinforce the new motif of invisibility. Invisibility is the point where power does not become maximized, but is instead minimized, where the violence done to an individual’s agency is at its greatest extreme. Only when Quinn abandons all social relations, all economic holdings, everything that Foucault would call the micro-physics of power, does invisibility become possible. This invisibility is only possible, however, through the decrease in public knowledge about oneself—the lack of self-representation; the allowance of public knowledge to dominate the interior space, just as “Glimmer & Co.” became Henry’s title for the company in actuality. It is through speaking Korean that Henry becomes invisible, but the violence done to him is more dramatic to him than it is to the other Korean-Americans because he is an English-speaking man. He internalizes his invisibility only when he does not represent himself. Only when the individual is incapable of engaging with others, and seeing them too as individuals, do they become invisible themselves—as is the case in Ellison, Lee, and Auster. And, through becoming invisible, their individual identity and agency disintegrate. The obliteration of identity is not limited to race. It is due to confronting the phenomenon of the individual in the multiplicity, of the man alone in the city. The city, a panopticon, gazes in on all—and it is because of this that Peter Stillman Sr. believed the only way to gain the language of man, the means to represent himself and give shape to the world, would be by raising a child without internalizing the panoptic gaze of the city, to become invisible. Yet, his quest was always in vain because to become invisible is not to gain the ultimate form of agency, but instead to lose it all and more. The texts of Auster and Lee do not offer an empirical judgment on the limits of human knowledge, or a conclusive definition of what exactly constitutes a man’s identity. Each demonstrates, however, how language constantly breaks down due to those very limits, allowing people in the city to not only allow others to reduce them to non-descript categories and see them as interchangeable with those categories, but can come to view themselves as those categories. With the breakages between what an author intends and a reader infers, those reductions easily become so prevalent they reduce category members to near-invisibility. Representing oneself through language allows the potential to be seen, and also can allow sight—to read others through engaging with them. Representations through language are the only way to become visible in the city and to constitute one’s own identity, and to imbue that identity with power, and not to be reduced to invisibility.

The Annihilation of Identity

2007-12-31T01:10:00.001-08:00

IV. The Annihilation of Identity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Unlike Henry Park in Lee’s Native Speaker, Daniel Quinn in Auster’s City of Glass does become completely invisible before the novella’s end. Quinn begins the novel as an author of detective fiction, but after a series of phone calls from Virginia Stillman who has mistaken him for a detective—one named “Paul Auster”—Quinn decides to take up the persona of detective Paul Auster and accept the case Stillman pleads for him to take. Viriginia hires Quinn to protect her husband, Peter Stillman Jr. More specifically, Quinn is hired to observe Peter Stillman Jr.’s father. After Peter Stillman Sr. dissappears, Quinn believes that the only way to protect Peter Stillman Jr. is to watch his apartment unendingly, ensuring that Stillman Sr. cannot approach the apartment undetected. In the course of doing so, Quinn begins living in an alley alone, eventually becoming invisible—dissapearing into the city itself. Quinn’s invisibility is not rooted on the racial blindness of the observer, as Tina Chen argued for Native Speaker, but instead is due to his own unwillingness to see others. More dramatic than being reduced to being “Korean” or “Asian,” as Henry was for Janice, Quinn’s transformation into “part of the city” is to become non-human, to become blind not only to individual identities, but to the concept of The Other itself.

Through reproducing events and refraining simple crimes, Auster’s novella makes a compelling case for his use of biblical metaphor, each crime becoming not just a transgression against an individual but a problem of ontology. The most striking commonality between Auster’s and Lee’s novels is also the grounding that enables the emotional conflict of each novel: the death of the son. We learn that Daniel Quinn once had a son, but the son has died. What we learn of Quinn’s son in City of Glass is mostly through Quinn’s mirroring of his son with Peter Stillman Jr. In addition to reminding Quinn of his son, Quinn’s son was also named Peter. Quinn’s rationale for accepting the case offered to him to protect Peter Stillman Jr., what prompts him to use his knowledge of the detective genre to become a detective is not only the commonality of his dead son and Peter Jr., but more specifically his desire to avoid allowing the crime committed against his son to be reproduced. Stillman Sr.’s crime against his son was a vain attempt to rebuild the Tower of Babel. In a sense, Stillman reproduces the sin in the original myth. Peter Stillman Sr. theorizes in his work within a work, The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World, that the fall of man as depicted in Paradise Lost was both the fall of man and the fall of language, the loss of God’s will from language, mirrored in the fall of the Tower of Babel.

Stillman’s project only left a pale man, with everything about him white. On the one hand, watching Stillman Jr. walk was like a “watching a marionette trying to walk without strings” yet “it was as though Stillman’s presence was a command to be silent.” To some extent, then Peter Stillman Sr.’s project is a success, if one might call it that—the image of Stillman turns Quinn into the equivalent of an object in the Garden of Eden. Just as Stillman and his wife Victoria change Quinn’s name to Paul Auster by calling him on the telephone until he accepts the title and define his identity as a detective, for Quinn, Peter Stillman Jr. indeed represents the language invested with the power of God—the capacity to make what one calls something, and what something is, identical.

If the case is that calling someone a detective makes them a detective, then that begs the question in terms of understanding the category of what a detective is. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is regarded as detective fiction, yet the Literary Review claims that it is not just detective fiction; it is a series of seductive metaphysical thrillers. One might argue that the detectives of Auster’s novels are not detectives at all. They are men who prefer invisibility and acting as someone they are not. In City of Glass, Quinn only puts on the façade of the detective and plays the part from his experience writing detective fiction. Each protagonist has more in line with the Noir film genre’s antiheroes. In City of Glass there is some basis for the observations of detection—Peter Stillman Sr. reportedly locked his son in a dark room for several years, and despite having spent years in prison and being deemed rehabilitated, might return to try his experiment again. Yet, this explanation is tenuous at best, and even if it were satisfactory, it is unlikely that Quinn alone could successfully take on such a case. Jake Gittes in Chinatown required an entire team of men to follow one subject for a few days, and even then there was a multitude of misinformation he confronted.

Auster’s novel beckons a reevaluation of the detective genre as a genre, recentering the genre away from the heroism of the protagonist, instead emphasizing the primary action as the confrontation with the overwhelming phenomena of the world, where the detective’s real job is to select objects of meaning for the sake of forming some sort of narrative. As critic Barry Lewis, argues, “At the beginning of an investigation everything is a potential clue, and both the detective and the reader operate at their height of attentiveness.” Ontologically, this mirrors what Peter Stillman Sr. did before being arrested; he reduced all potential red herrings from the development of a child in the hope of forming a narrative of human existence. This process came off as insanity, demonstrating what Arendt and many others would regard as the fundamental violence of the act of detection: “He locked Peter [Jr.] in a room in the apartment, covered up the windows, and kept him there for nine years.” The result, however, is a man who can speak—after years of rehabilitation—but not in a way that is immediately clear as being somehow more representative of mankind’s narrative arc. Further, in addition to questioning his sanity, one must also question Peter Stillman Sr.’s methodology. The covering of the windows serves a dual purpose: it prevents Peter Jr. from seeing out, but also keeps all others from seeing in. It is, in essence, the opposite of Bentham’s Panopticon. Peter Stillman Sr. seems to view New York City as a panoptic structure. He covers the windows and seals the room to prevent his son from internalizing the threat of the panoptic space, to feel unimpeachable against mankind and thus, in a sense, to become akin to a God.

Auster’s recentering of the detective genre is also to a purpose: he uses the detective genre to deconstruct of identity. Daniel Quinn is the opposite of Peter Stillman Jr. Quinn is a man with a plurality of identities, and in his quest to prevent the violence done to Peter Stillman Jr., he nevertheless allows himself to be subjected to the same experiment, to be reduced to nothing more than a man. He proceeds through the novel with a multitude of identities: the narrative voice describes him as Daniel Quinn, yet he also identifies himself with Max Work, a fictitious character that he creates, and uses William Wilson for a pseudonym. He plays the role of detective Paul Auster. When Quinn confronts Peter Stillman Sr. after following for days, he identifies himself as “Quinn.” On their second meeting, he identifies himself as “Henry Dark,” a character that Stillman created—and finally as Peter Stillman’s son, “Peter Stillman.” From this multiplicity of identities, Quinn reduces this multiplicity of identities by seeking to determine who he really is, or at least who he really believes himself to be. When he takes on the persona of Paul Auster the detective, he performs the identity as though he were Max Work, his own fictive creation. In confronting Peter Stillman Sr., Quinn has to realize that the Paul Auster/Max Work character is not central to his identity, and returns to Quinn. In performing that identity for Peter Stillman Sr. however, in regarding what he used to pretend his identity was as a character of his own fictions, he realizes that that too was never really who he was. He must take on the persona of Henry Dark for the sake of understanding that Henry Dark always had been a narrative device and never a physical entity. Anne Cheng’s argument that “the subject effects mimicry in order to lose, rather than save, itself and, in doing so, finds itself” is central here—yet, even it presupposes that there is some sort of fixed identity to be found. A different reading might be more effective, such as that which Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble, that identity is constituted by the performance of that identity. Peter Stillman Sr.’s quest to return to prelapsarian innocence was always futile because to believe that a Man is defined as a Man and constituted by a Man begs the question of what a Man is; without an Other, something else to distinguish it from and understand it in terms of, language is without meaning. Instead, what Peter Stillman really seeks is to constitute his son’s identity not in the power system governed by the gaze of civilization, but constituted in the power of language. To do so, he seeks to escape language so that he might understand what language is. Just as is the case with performing identities, however, language is constituted by the performance of it.

To lose language is to lose everything, and Quinn, in reproducing the experiment done by Peter Stillman Sr. on Peter Stillman Jr., does so. As Quinn loses his language, he loses the investments in the world around him, his sense of structure, and every iota of power he ever held. The narrator states, “A long time passed. Exactly how long it is impossible to say.” Next is his place of residence and, after this, his sense of decency. Instead of living in an apartment, he lives in an alleyway overlooking the apartment where Peter Stillman Jr. lives, seeking to ensure that Peter Stillman Sr. never tries to contact him. He learns to defecate into garbage bins and to live without food or sleep. He does not talk to other people except in rare occurrences. The only thing holding him together is his sense of duty to Peter Stillman Jr., and through him, to his long dead son. Even that too becomes unnecessary when Quinn learns that Peter Stillman Sr. committed suicide shortly after their confrontation. Quinn is left with not only nothing to go on, he is left with absolutely nothing. As he becomes aware of how little he has, he moves into Peter Stillman Jr.’s apartment which he learns has been empty for much of the time he spent watching it. Only when he is in the room, completely alone, does he realize he is connected to the city intrinsically. Ironically, “he felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large.” The goal of Peter Stillman Sr. was always to unite man with language, to make it so that categories were absolute and real. Yet, in attempting to do so, for the first time Quinn feels that his words are no longer a part of him. And, in losing his language, Quinn has to confront that he has lost himself—or, more, that “he” or “himself” as a coherent identity had never existed in the first place.

Stillman, in his goal of uniting man with language, also presents the problem of a fluid language. As Stillman claims, “Most people…think of words as stones, as great unmovable objects with no life.” Quinn has no problem accepting the malleability of language, even if he accepts the stone metaphor—stones, after all, can be chipped or worn away, the reduced thing no longer having the same identity. Stillman’s primary example is that of an umbrella that has broken. Since an umbrella is something that serves a purpose, to block the rain, an umbrella that doesn’t work isn’t necessarily an umbrella. As though accepting the failure of his old quest, Stillman’s new quest is to create a language that “will at last say what we have to say.” It is for this very reason that he has come to New York, since New York is a place where “the brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal.” Stillman has to accept that he cannot regain prelapsarian innocence; just as one third of the Tower of Babel burned down, and as Henry Dark’s manuscripts burnt down in a fire, so did his apartment and project. Although in essence one facet of his old goal remains the same in his new project—to provide a name for all things in the world, he no longer seems interested in having a language that gives the world shape. His project has become descriptive, rather than prescriptive. When he completes his project, though, he believes he will “hold the key to a series of major discoveries… the key. A thing that opens locked doors.” This statement evokes the locked door he enclosed his son behind, as though this new research will somehow resolve the issues at stake when he first entrapped his son. The combination also presents the central metaphor behind the second novella in the trilogy, The Locked Room; the difference between the signifier and the signified, and the difference between what a writer intends to imply and what a reader infers.

Auster’s novel demonstrates the obliteration of identity without needing to racialize it, and in doing so reconceptualizes it. The first refraction of identity occurs with the disappearance of Peter Stillman Sr. After confronting him, Stillman disappears; as the text describes, “Stillman was gone now. The old man had become part of the city.” Stillman, having committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, is “part of the city” both in the sense that his body had become part of the physical structure of the city, and because his individual identity was obliterated by the collective of the city. The case of Peter Stillman Sr., however, pales to what happens to Quinn in the alleyway. Devoting himself entirely to ensuring that Peter Stillman Sr.—despite being dead, unknown to Quinn—does not reach Peter Stillman Jr.—who has vacated his apartment already, also unknown to Quinn—Quinn takes up living outside Peter Stillman Jr.’s apartment in the hope of ensuring that Peter Stillman Sr. never threaten Peter Stillman Jr. In effect he becomes a derelict homeless man, not quite a beggar, hiding in garbage bins to avoid the rain and pissing in the corner of his alleyway. Yet, the narrator never goes so far as to call Quinn homeless, or a bum, or to categorize him at all. He is still Quinn, and his actions persist in being represented as that of a detective. Quinn does continue to act out the plot of detection through his continuous gaze at the apartment of Peter Stillman Jr. The only mystery accepted, in fact, is the mystery of “how he managed to keep himself hidden during this period.” If New York City were a panoptic space, then simply hiding when trash collectors came by should not be enough to avoid detection; further, if Quinn persisted in his quest, as he claims to, of never allowing his eyes to leave the apartment where Peter Stillman Jr. continues to reside, then Quinn could not have avoided detection. The only explanation is for Quinn to have himself, a white male in New York City, become invisible. Quinn, as the narrative says, “melted into the very walls of the city,” and became as Peter Stillman Sr.— part of the city.

Quinn’s invisibility was based off his own unwillingness to see others. As the narrative describes, “Because he did not want anyone to see him, he had to avoid other people as systematically as he could. He could not look at them, he could not talk to them, he could not think about them.” There may be garbage collectors, passer-bys, pedestrians, or anyone else on the street, but the most important facet of not being seen is to not see them, to not engage with them. To allow oneself to become “part of the city”, the most general of categories and far more dramatic than “Korean” or even “Asian”, to become non-human, one must not only give others individual identities, it is to make the Other itself a non-entity; and only then is complete invisibility possible.

The Blindness of Native Speaker

2007-12-30T02:25:00.001-08:00

III. The Social Blindness of Lee’s Native Speaker

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is regarded as a “spy novel.” Yet, as literary critic Tina Chen points out “Henry is at pains to distance himself from the spy hero”. It takes Lee’s protagonist Henry Park 17 pages to say that, “in a phrase, we were spies.” Even then, Park has to qualify the term. He’s not the spy “you naturally thought or even hoped existed.” He’s not a patriot. His corporation “pledged allegienace to no government.” Most of all, he is an anti-hero. He knows nothing of “weaponry, torture, psychological warfare, extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives.”

Lee’s protagonist prefers invisibility and acting as someone he is not. Even some of the least heroic detectives, such as Jake Gittes from Chinatown, were paid to watch someone due to the belief that they had perpetrated some sort of crime. Park spies for no other reason than because he is paid to. The reason Henry is paid to spy on Korean-American political candidate John Kwang is unknown even to him. Although Henry continues to grow closer to John Kwang, the object of observation for most of the novel, he goes off the fear of repeating his experience with Luzan, a psychoanalyst that, although Henry spied on at length, never ended up knowing any incriminating information. Yet, his observations does not enfranchise Park with power. Instead, after Park learns of Kwang’s most dramatic misdeeds, he is left with violence, assaulting Kwang in a mob of other faceless, nameless, nearly invisible people. Yet, this facet of the plot, despite taking up what is presumably the focus of the novel and the climax that the spy genre demands, only presents a superficial response to the emotional stakes underpinning the novel and does more to mask the psychological conflict than to clarify it. The emotional conflict introduced earlier on does not revolve around the spy genre elements, but instead around coping with the death of Henry’s son, Mitt, reconciling himself with his wife, Lelia, and understanding his role as a partially invisible American subject. These conflicts, Lee does not, and perhaps can not, completely resolve.

Perhaps the strongest microcosm for the relationship between visibility, invisibility, and ontological secrecy was not necessarilly intended by Lee, that being the role of the title of Park’s spy company. When Park first introduces the name, he admits that his company worked, “under the name of Glimmer & Co.” implying that “Glimmer & Co.” was in fact a false name they used for those they didn’t want questioning their presence in the office building they inhabit. Yet, having never given another name for the company, when Park must continuously address the corporation he works for, it becomes unequivocally the name of the company. When Henry describes his reports to Hoagland, he claims that, “it was likely that Glimmer & Company itself was involved in the manufacturing of happenings.” With the need for repetition and reproduction, the false title describing the company becomes its actual title in the novel. Secret or invisible titles mirror the titles individuals give themselves, titles that, as Henry emphasizes, are self-given. In example, when Henry believes he is penetrating deeper into John Kwang’s identity, Henry “believed I [Henry] had a grasp of his [John Kwang’s] identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family… but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his own private mirror.” Yet, when secret identities are not performed, repeated, or reconstructed, they allow the visible, or the public identity to become the identity that is performed or categorized even when described in the space of a man’s interior mind, as we are given in Park’s reproduction of the text. In doing so, it allows what one regards as their real identity to become hidden even from themselves, or obliterated altogether.

The problem of naming and describing phenomenon takes center stage in the conflict Park has with his wife in describing the source of their son’s death. Lelia, Henry’s wife, thinks that they caused the death of their son through some sort of metaphysical crime:

“Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you say his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was.”
“What was it?” I said softly.
“It was the worst thing that ever happened to us… the worst thing we ever did together.”
“It was a terrible accident.”
“An accident?” she cried. “…can’t you see, when your baby dies it’s never an accident… Sometimes I think it’s more like some long turning karma that finally came back for us.” [italics mine]

Racism, like conspiracy, is something that one cannot pin down. Racism lacks a body. Henry’s deferral of the question of who killed his son masks the fact that both of them know exactly who killed their son: white children, the same children whose parents Henry and Lelia confronted beforehand to discourage picking on him. Yet they cannot accuse the children, after all, as one white child keeps screaming, “It was just a stupid dog pile” [italics Lee’s]. As children, the murderers cannot be held accountable for their crime. Not only that, just like the woman who fills Park with rage after she calls him an “Oriental Jew” or the man that bumps into Ellison’s protagonist on the street, the subject charged with racism always lacks a name and lacks the very identity that the victim of racism accuses the racist of not respecting. Henry Park does not see the children who killed his son as having coherent identities and none of their parents are individually described. Yet, since Lelia and Henry are punished through the death of their son, there must be some agent perpetrating that punishment, taken up in Lelia’s abstract terms as “the world” or some other non-descript force. The problem Lelia and Henry face manifests itself as an ontological problem. They cannot name the actor that punishes them for the death of their son. Such is the case with all cases of violence that seems racially, but is in fact linguistically charged, throughout the novel.

Before the death of their son, Henry and Lelia’s central conflict arose over the problem of trying to call objects by their names. Once again, Lee hints at cultural or even racial differences. Conflict erupts between Park and his wife Lelia that Henry didn’t know the name of his father’s maid. As Park explains, “Americans live on a first-name basis. [Lelia] didn’t understand that there weren’t moments in our language—the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants—when the woman’s name could have naturally come out. Or why it wasn’t important.” Growing up in his father’s household, Park never heard his father speak the woman’s name—but then, he also never heard his father speak his mother’s name. The name they use for her, Ahjuma, is not a name, but is instead a form of address used for unrelated Korean women. This, the first of many conflicts between Park and his wife, erupts over Lelia’s desire to have Henry call Ahjuma by what Lelia regards as her real name. Or rather, the name she uses for herself. Although framed as a cultural or even racial difference between Korean-American culture and American culture, the problem manifests itself as a performative one.

Although Lee’s characters are hyphenated Americans, assuming that this facet was the largest determinant of their identity would mask the cause of Henry’s invisibility.
Henry became aware of his capacity for invisibility while working in his father’s stores. To spite his father, Henry speaks only Korean to the other workers in the store. In doing so, Henry “saw that if I just kept speaking the language of our work the customers didn’t seem to see me. I wasn’t there. They didn’t look at me… I could even catch a rich old woman whose tight stand of pearls pinched in the sags of her neck whispering to her friend right behind me, ‘Oriental Jews.’” Yet, unlike what Tina Chen or others might argue, this invisibility does not come from being Korean, but instead from speaking Korean. What gives Henry his symbolic invisibility, what causes people not to look at him, is the act of speaking another language.

Although some argue that the race of Native Speaker plays on the representations of Asian Americans in the spy genre, this only superficially encompasses the deconstruction Lee embarks on, or even masks it. Critic Tina Chen argues that, “the figure of the Asian American spy is itself a cultural convention. Stereotyped as sneaky and inscrutable, Asians and clandestinity have proven a particularly compelling combination” as a play on fictional Asian or Asian-American detective figures or villains from Charlie Chan to Dr. Fu Manchu. Yet Chang-rae Lee’s novel does not play on racial stereotypes of Korean-Americans unless the reader already has knowledge of those stereotypes. If the reader does, then it deconstructs those norms. When Park had to spend summers working in grocery stores with his father, he later finds out from his friends that they merely thought he was religious. They do not assume that because he is Korean that he works in a grocery store. Instead, Henry is more aware of the racial stereotypes, and how he falls into them, than the people he imagines would hold the stereotypes. Critic Anne Cheng argues that “the subject effects mimicry in order to lose, rather than save, itself and, in doing so, finds itself.” When Park pretends to be a non-English-speaking grocer, he is not being himself—but in doing so, he becomes aware that he is performing an identity, and becomes aware of what it means to to perform the identity of an English-speaking American. It is to know he holds the right to forsake the path of the immigrant he inherited.

Lee even seems to imply the attempt to latch on to a singular ethnic or political identity itself moves toward social invisibility. As an example, Lee opts for the case of John Kwang, his campaign, and its managers. The problem of becoming a hyphenated American does not occur in Kwang’s speeches, but instead of becoming wholly “American” he instead becomes wholly “Korean”. During Kwang’s meeting with “the black ministers,” in regard to the history of breakages in African-American communities, Kwang claims that, “We Koreans know something of this tragedy.” Kwang, as a political leader, avoids hyphens, but to address the problems of racial divide nevertheless opts to speak of different racial groups in non-hyphenated ways that emphasize difference rather than inclusion. Mirrored in Park’s narrative comes descriptions such as, “The crowd was much larger than we’d expected, an even mix of Koreans, blacks, Hispanics.” The choice not to capitalize “blacks,” despite perhaps being technically correct, nevertheless seems arbitrary. Further, the choice not to hyphenate any of them makes them seem as though, like Park himself, the people he address are not Americans—not patriots. To lose the hyphenation implies becoming, as Park is, a racial spy, a secret voyeur of American life. It is to, in Arendtian terms, do great violence to the American facet of racial minorities.

The structure of racial relations is further complicated by Janice, John Kwang’s Scheduling Manager. She claims that she “knows you Koreans” and as evidence says that she had Asian roommates in college at Berkeley. She, unlike Kwang, does not even reduce Park to a Korean. She reduces him to the even more vacuous term of “Asian,” and then later begins to oscillate between the two as though “Korean” and “Asian” were also synonymous. As their conversation progresses, she says that, “You [Henry] never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in” and she makes the synthesis that Henry, as a member of “you Koreans” also represents “you Koreans”. The ontological critique of racist reductions is that they imply that the category a member falls into represents an individual, and that an individual represents a category that includes other people as simultaneous equations. The enthymemes that might represent Janice’s remarks would be: Henry Park is a Korean therefore Henry Park represents all Koreans, and Henry Park is a Korean therefore all Koreans represent Henry Park. These two enthymemes both rely on the major premise that all Koreans are the same and interchangeable. When Janice defends her remarks against Henry’s criticisms that all of her friends were Asian, and that therefore he does not have the right to critique does not mean that her claims do not lead to the conclusion that all Asians are the same, instead her argument is that she has evidence for her claim, which is to say that after critically assessing her premise that all Asians are the same she came to a conclusion, with evidence, that they are. Henry, with his background being raised “to speak quietly and little,” although not afraid to gently poke fun at Janice’s absurd claims, nevertheless lacks the motivation to confront her masked racism. And yet, Janice is the planning manager for a man who seeks to represent the Korean-American community in New York. One might wonder if it was the views of Janice and others that really caused the downfall of John Kwang. After all, it was always the motive of Henry Park to “fuel the fire of [his object’s] most secret vanity” or so he claimed. Park, as a spy for Glimmer and Co., did not seek to confront Janice. In fact, he wanted to fan her racism. In her “most secret vanity,” she believed that she was justified in her own racial views, in her willingness to reduce people to categories.

Emphasizing the tropes of representation, however, in the case of John Kwang and his group nevertheless displaces the central conflict of the novel. The violence done to Henry’s son cannot be named. Although after abandoning his paid profession as a spy, Henry cannot completely reconcile himself with his wife. Instead, he is “always coming back inside. “We [Henry and Lelia] play this game in which I [Henry] am her long-term guest. Permanently visiting.” Instead of reconciling or resolving the conflict and space between them, the problem is eternally displaced by presenting the illusion of temporality. Even at the end, children must look at Henry’s face to make sure that his voice moves in time with his mouth. Finally, Henry’s body can be completely masked—he wears a green rubber hood in his role as the Speech Monster. One might argue that Henry embraces his invisibility, yet it nevertheless reflects the loss of power he has encountered throughout the novel. He has lost his well-paying job and put himself at the mercy of Lelia in terms of holding their home and his new job together. He abandons essentially all social relations except for his wife and his job with the children she teaches, and these do not seem to be meaningful relationships. The only catharsis Lee’s novel can offer comes through violence, through Park assaulting Kwang amidst a faceless mob. None of the emotional conflicts can be confronted, and instead of engaging with others more directly, Park instead distances himself even more dramatically from all his social friends, becoming alone except for Lelia, with whom he has an uncrossable and unspeakable distance. All is left displaced.

Theorizing the Invisible Body

2007-12-30T02:06:00.001-08:00

II. Theorizing The Invisible Body

One of the easiest, but also one of the least rewarding, readings of Henry Park’s role in Native Speaker is to explain his dilemma as a result of the condition of the modern Korean-American. As literary critic Tina Chen argues, “Henry’s vanishing acts… are a logical extension of his personal history as a Korean American struggling to negotiate the divide that separates how others perceive him and how he sees himself.” Henry Park is not, as Tina Chen claims, an invisible man. He is, even in his own words, only “hardly seen.” To claim that he is wholly invisible undermines the very complexity that pervades Lee’s text; and acts as a refrain on the complexity that includes both it and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison’s protagonist is not invisible either; he is only invisible to the people passing him on the streets of New York City. He can be seen by the men and women who share his ethnicity in the prologue. Ellison’s unstated definition of invisibility is the incapacity to be recognized as an individual, and by this definition, Ellison’s protagonist is blind himself. When Ellison’s unnamed protagonist confronts a man in the street, he first realizes that the other man “had not seen me, actually” and later mocks the man when he reports that he’d been mugged, berating him as a “Poor fool, poor blind fool… mugged by an invisible man!” Yet, this blind man nevertheless is only described as “a man” with blonde hair and blue eyes. In terms of penetrating the façade of the man he confronts, Ellison’s protagonist cannot claim to have seen the other man. By his definition, Ellison’s protagonist too is blind. Anne Cheng, in Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure discusses the connection between racial blindness and invisibility in the fiction of Ellison and Chang-rae Lee, but unlike Chen, does not see the metaphor as so simplistic in its entailments. For instance, although “white visibility” relies on the invisibility and assumed normality of whiteness, “black invisibility” acquires its shape precisely through its very visibility as difference. Yet, the result of both is quite similar.

Where this leaves the situation of Asian-Americans, or specifically Korean-Americans, is even less specific. The tropes of invisibility only include “white” and “black”. What exactly constitutes the difference between “white visibility” and “black invisibility” is even less clear if applied to Ellison’s text. Both Ellison’s protagonist and the man on the street cannot discern much about the other. What they lack is the capacity to be differentiated, the incapacity to be an individual and not a repetition of the norm, and an inclusion in no other category than “The Other.” What seems to underlie every form of racial blindness is the sense of Otherness that is constituted only through appearing different than someone else. If this is the case, then one need not think of invisibility in terms of race, but instead as the result of social blindness.

This blindness and invisibility leads to an obliteration of identity itself. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble discusses gender not as a solid construct but instead as a “repeated stylization of the body” that over time produces the “appearance of substance.” Butler’s description of gender could be analogized to any facet of identity. Identities congeal in the performance of that identity. One needs to be able to perceive a distinctive performance, whether another’s or one’s own, to recognize a subject as an individual holding their own identity. The problem both Ellison’s narrator and the man he bumped into encountered was that neither could recognize anything in the other that others would not do. In this case, since their behavior did not differ from a perceived norm, their individual identity became akin to invisible.

According to philospher Michel Foucault, the knowledge that one can be seen is itself the basis for modern sociality. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison where each cell looked in toward a central tower with Venetian blinds or some other means to prevent the prisoner from seeing inside the tower. Each prisoner, without knowledge of the tower’s interior, might believe that the guards in the tower could be looking at them at any time. Ideally, the prisoner would internalize this belief, and would adjust their behavior to reflect the belief that they could be seen at any time. Panoptic structures are reproduced in almost all public spaces: the school, the hospital, the corporation, etc. If visibility is the basis for social behavior, then invisibility is the basis for asocial behavior.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s arguments in On Violence suggests that the asocial individual is also the one with the least power. According to Arendt, “The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.” Further, Arendt explicitly defines power as, “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” Although Arendt’s work was specifically tailored toward political revolution, her definitions might serve as a theoretical basis for understand the relationship between violence and vision if one extends her metaphor. The invisible individual, reduced to asociality, lacks the capacity to represent themself and will never be able to act in concert. Instead, they will always be reduced to acting in violence, forced to pit themselves against all else, and perhaps even themselves.

An Introduction to Invisibility

2007-12-30T01:58:00.000-08:00

I. Introduction

In 1953, Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man, racializing the discourse of literary invisibility by centering his novel on a man invisible explicitly due to his being African-American. Some critics, from Vogue to Tina Chen, believe that the novels of Chang-rae Lee follow directly in Ellison’s footsteps by representing the Korean-American male as an invisible man. Yet, Henry Park, the protagonist of Lee’s Native Speaker, is not wholly invisible, nor does his camouflage explicitly come from his ethnicity. He is a spy that, as the narrator sometimes suggests, is helped in his job due to his Korean-American heritage. The racialization of the discourse of invisibility does more than merely displace the real causes of that invisibility. It implies that invisibility is limited to racial minorities when this is not the case. Paul Auster’s City of Glass, part of The New York Trilogy, may offer a solution to Lee’s inability to resolve the ontological problems his novel raises. By avoiding the racialization of social invisibility altogether, Auster focuses his text on its ontological roots and emphasizes its implications. Whereas Lee’s Native Speaker distorts the meaning of his novel by hinting at racial, and racist, causes of invisibility, yet still links the invisibility to language, Auster avoids racial issues and emphasizes the ontological roots of invisibility and has a greater capacity to explain the emotional issues at stake.

The Faulknerian Dream

2007-12-27T14:33:00.001-08:00

Faulkner’s American Dream & Anti-Dream
Or: Tragic Racism
December 27, 2007
Revised From: May 2, 2006

It would be a vast oversimplification to state that all people in America have, do or ever will share one and only one desire. Nevertheless, the dreams of many Americans have common ground, frequently including such things as the ownership of property, the pursuit of happiness, and a prosperous family. Perhaps no character epitomizes these traits more than Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom! Yet, the landscape Faulkner paints is also a paranoid one, a nightmarish dystopia. Something happens, something that destroy Sutpen’s family. That something is the specter of racism.

Rosa Coldfield, says of Sutpen that he
“came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land
with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation—(Tore
violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore
violently.”

Sutpen comes from nowhere, without warning. Like the gaze of the warden in Foucault’s Panopticon, Sutpen can appear at any time, prompting the individual to act as though he were always present. Why does she emphasize the idea that he “tore violently a plantation” instead of simply saying he built one? Even if you demarcate a plantation with a fence, it cannot be said that you are “tearing” the plantation as a metaphor for building it. The verb implies an object that can be torn. Rosa argues later that, “inside of two years he had dragged house and gardens out of virgin swamp, and plowed and planted his land with seed cotton.” To Rosa, Sutpen tears the plantation out of the earth itself, out of “virgin swamp,” out of virginity itself.

The place of “strange niggers” in Sutpen’s dream, or in Rosa’s paranoia, is a precarious subject. When Thomas wrestles with “negro,” Rosa believes Ellen and the audience should be as outraged as she is. Instead of explaining her own disgust at the violence of the scene, however, she tries to embody and give voice to Ellen, believing she can speak for her and represent her. “That is what Ellen saw,” Rosa says, “her husband and the father of her children standing there naked and panting and bloody to the waist and the negro just fallen.”

Sutpen’s racism generates most of the novel’s conflict. When a young Sutpen is sent on an errand to the city, he encounters an African American there who is better dressed than he is, and that it is only because the African American, who “happened to have had the felicity of being housebred.” Following this encounter, “All of a sudden he [Sutpen] found himself running and already some distance from the house… He wasn’t even mad. He just had to think…” That Sutpen “wasn’t even mad” that a “nigger” looks better dressed than he does implies that it would be expected, and acceptable, for Sutpen to be mad, and that his lack of it—his anger over this simple distinction—is what drives him nearly to insanity. Sutpen “went into the wood” and realized “he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life.” The success of the African American threatens Sutpen’s very capacity to live with himself. Sutpen’s ambition to live a good life is not a desire to be rich, but a means to be superior to African Americans.

This same racism also spawns the melodrama of the novel. Melodrama is embodied in the person of Charles Bon. Charles Bon is Sutpen’s son with Eulalia Bon Sutpen, a woman from Haiti who previously married Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen learned that Eulalia had “negro blood” and repudiated her and their child, Charles Bon. All this Thomas Sutpen left behind him when he moved to Yoknapatwpha County until Charles comes and asks for Thomas Sutpen’s daughter’s hand in marriage. On Christmas in 1860, Sutpen forbids marriage between his daughter Judith and Charles Bon. In response, Henry Sutpen, Thomas’s son, repudiates his birthright and leaves with Charles Bon. As first described in the book, “something happened.” This “something” that happens is Thomas Sutpen reaping the seed he had sown when he repudiated Eulalia Bon because of her negro blood, and abandoned his firstborn child. The reason Sutpen denies marriage between Charles Bon and Judith is not because of incest but because of race. Sutpen was convinced that all his problems had, “come from a mistake and until he discovered what that mistake and been he did not intend to risk making another one.” It is this mistake which leaves Thomas Sutpen a sonless widower.

What Postmodernism Is

2007-12-26T20:46:00.000-08:00

What is Postmodernism?
Or: What was Modernism?
December 26, 2007

If the sailboat of your mind should ever drift into the waters of academia and academic criticism of literature, thought, philosophy etc. one might encounter such words or phrases as “new historicism,” “post historicism,” or perhaps “post contemporary,” the last of which which my friends and I made up just a little while ago. However, if you even pretend to take such subjects seriously, the word you are likely to be most frustrated by is “Postmodernism.” “What the hell?” you might think, “This is about stuff that comes after today?”

And you would be wrong. Your error, however, is probably not rooted in understanding “postmodernism” as you might think. Your problem is probably in thinking you understand “modernism.” If you ever go to the museum of *modern* art, you will likely see various things like the four squares of color, the ink blobs, the white canvas. You may be tempted to think: oh, this is so postmodern. What you’ll mean is that it’s artsy bullshit. But you will have forgotten where you are. You’re in the museum of modern art, not the museum of postmodern art.

Is modernity this style of art that makes me feel like the art world really is so pretentious? The answer: yes. Modernity, despite your inclinations to think there is something “modern” about it, ostensibly began in architecture. At this point, I have no interest in discussing anything other than literary or philosophical modernism and post-modernism, so I will skip that part. When did literary modernism begin? I would make a case for 1913-1914. Two events mark this decision. The first is the publication of the first part of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” in 1913. The second is the dawn of World War I. Now, considering Proust began writing his tome before 1913, we can theorize that “modernist” thinking can go back to perhaps even 1880. However, modernism did not begin to shape the world until World War I.

Okay, so now we have a date. But even then, what do we say about it? What was modernism? If one wanted to be facetious, one could say that modernism is really “postpremodernism.” That is, in some ways modernism is only discernable because it is different from what came before modernism. This is one of the many points at which one has to confront the prospect that “modernism” and “postmodernism” aren’t very good tools to use in understanding the historical development of ideas. Yet, that description is facetious, and there really are more effective ways to discern modernism.

Modernist philosophy is religion without God. Modernist literature is marked by realism and hyperrealism, by the introduction of the “psychological story,” by the domination of the conscious mind over all else, whether it be subconscious, unconscious, or the natural world, by democracy, by nationalism and hypernationalism, by the belief that one mind represents all minds, that one subject represents all subjects, that one language represents all languages, and by imperialism. Yet, it also is the dawn of extreme paranoia, the end of trust in fellow man, the end of the aristocracy, the replacement of tradition with history, and the end of faith.

Proust presents the best method of understanding what Modernism is. It is to believe aesthetics, instead of God, are the center of your cosmology. That is the essential difference between pre-Modernity and Modernity. Why the white canvas as a painting? Why the red squares and blue squares? Because they represent foundations upon which all other art is built. They are a center, an absolute shape and figure. They are the “Genesis” of Modern Art.

At its worse, or perhaps best, is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce is so Modernist he can actually appear to be Post-Modern. Finnegans Wake tries to capture the “Everyman” with the “Everyman’s voice.” It tries to represent all people for all time. A task which, if you think about for anything more than only a few moments, will likely demonstrate why Joyce and people who read Joyce are so incredibly pretentious, and why Joyce can fail so hard as to appear to be the opposite of what he is. Part of the reason Joyce fails so hard at actually conveying his intention is due to the desire to pursue his conjoined objective.

Joyce believed he could pursue this goal through a nearly unmediated representation of the “sub/unconscious” mind. This goal is more redeemable and a far better explanation for why the book reads as it does. I include the “sub” out of mercy to Joyce. In truth, what this amounted to was the inclination to try to represent dream thoughts and how the mind works when it isn’t conscious. It is this objective that earned Finnegans Wake the title of “Joyce’s Book of the Dark.” While Ulysses is Joyce’s book of every waking thought, Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s book of every sleeping thought. Why then is Finnegans Wake so incomprehensible? Because what it amounts to is a form of literary pastiche, a tossing together of everything that happens to pass through Joyce’s mind. Nothing appears relevant or meaningful. Everything is fanciful and cute. It leaves one with the impression that one could open at any page, read that page, and have as much understanding of the text as someone who has worked on reading it for their entire life.

It is difficult to conceptualize Modernism because it isn’t the best of categories. It is not a genre, and although many Modern artists will have similarities, they will have differences that will often appear more significant than anything discussed here. And if Modernism is hard to follow, Post-modernism is far worse.

I will offer the “traditional” view of Postmodernism, and then I will offer my own which, being my own, I vastly prefer. The traditional view can be summarized by philosophers like Derrida or Lyotard. Lyotard argued that the “Postmodern Condition” is an “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” Not that there’s any good reason to have seen this movie, but if you have it will help illustrate my point: consider the case of “Conspiracy Theory” with Mel Gibson. There’s the point where Gibson yells at the men who have captured him, “You guys are with NASA!” The audience goes: No. You are incorrect sir. NASA has nothing to do with this movie; if these guys are with NASA, I’m walking out of this theater. The audience in this instance has an incredulity toward Gibson’s narrative, or the inclusion of NASA in that narrative.

What is an incredulity toward meta-narratives then? It’s an incredulity toward individual thought and interpretation; an incredulity toward morals. QED: the Post-Modernist is more than anything else incredulous of the figure of Jesus, and more specifically, the argument that Jesus is an effective metaphor for modern living. They are incredulous to the interpretation of parables. This is why Post-Modernists, in the traditional view, take on the appearance of children. They are the ones who don’t think The Chronicles of Narnia have anything to do with Jesus.

Lyotard’s interpretation is mirrored, or perhaps echoed, in that of Derrida, and his arguments that there has been a great “De-centering.” That is to say, the condition of Post-Modernism is the one in which there is no center at all. That, unlike Proust’s Modernism with the center of the Aesthetic, and the previous centers of God, Jesus, and Religion (who take form in The Aristocracy as the God-Men of any given era, ala Shakespeare’s center), Post-Modernism is the era of the great lacking, of having an incredulity toward Centers.

In many ways, Lyotard and Derrida’s arguments are highly representative of many arguments people will tend to make. Many of these, however, amount to child-like mantras that can be flown in the face of anything, “that’s just your opinion,” “don’t state opinion as fact,” and will then begin to drift into skeptical arguments like, “we don’t really know anything.” However, I don’t find these arguments particularly compelling. Consider that Derrida is in many ways rooted in Finnegans Wake, and yet he now argues the exact opposite of what Joyce implicitly argued. Joyce believed that he could represent everyone always. Derrida argues that no one can represent anyone ever. Both drift into unnecessary extremes, and although both certainly represent something, that something is nonetheless convoluted and quite frankly, boring.

Again, Derrida’s and Lyotard’s version of Postmodernism does have potential, especially in the murky relationship between Deconstruction and Postmodernism which I will not get into right now, or perhaps ever.

The bottom line is that both Lyotard and Derrida miss the point of Post-modernism. My interpretation of Post-modernism is more a return to pre-modernism. It is not an incredulity toward meta-narratives, but an incredulity toward extremes. It is not pastiche for the sake of pastiche. It is montage for the sake of conveying meaning. In many ways, Post-modernism is actually a return to Pre-modernism.

Consider, for a moment, Milton. I like to joke that Milton was the greatest fanfic writer to have ever lived. Yet, in the strictly abstract sense, how different is Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. If you remove questions of quality formal complexity, then in many ways the two works are quite similar: an attempt to recenter the popular cosmogonic center. Both wanted to take the central myths of the Bible and change them somehow to reflect their own political and moral center.

Is The Da Vinci Code Postmodern? Not by Lyotard’s or Derrida’s description. But that does not make it Modern. And if it is not Modern or Postmodern, if neither of those terms can effectively describe a popular work of art in the 20th or 21st century, then the terms are almost completely useless. I, however, would argue that The Da Vinci Code is Postmodern. It appeals to the sense that what it argues is true, yet it nevertheless comes with the sense that Brown is attempting to tell a story, albeit a trite and contrived one.

By my definition, Postmodernism is a return to many of the tropes of Premodernism: of not being afraid to accept that a work of fiction actually is a work of fiction, to be conscious that one is telling a narrative story, to be aware of structure and style but not enslaved to them. But, this does not inherently impinge upon the potential for narrative to convey meaning.

Consider House of Leaves as an example of the best and worst of Postmodernism. The House of Leaves takes the metaphor of writing and expresses it in architecture which is mirrored in the formatting of the page. The “Labyrinths” chapter involves a great staircase which the text of the page mirrors. When the staircase appears long, it takes longer for the audience to read and there are more meaningless lists throughout. When the staircase appears short, there are fewer words per page. On the one hand, the novel functions as one of the truest reproductions as to the relationship between reader and text, narrator and narrative, while still providing a narrative. Yet, that narrative can only manifest itself through the notes of a blind critic. This makes it the case that what the reader becomes interested in is not the narrative itself but the relationship of the narrative to the reader. Be that what it may, it also results in the narrative drifting into senseless pastiche, moving toward the sense of Postmodernism expressed by Derrida and Lyotard. One might say that, at its worst, Postmodernism allows the potential for meaningless narrative. At its best though, the great majority of stories you know and love have elements of Postmodernism, or are explicitly Postmodern.

Neither Modernism nor Postmodernism are always bad or always good. Each represents an epoch that corresponds to some of the most prolific writing ever to stir our world. Each holds the capacity to fail miserably, each holds the potential to be quite honest and effective. Each holds the potential to be tedious, each holds the potential to be beautiful.

I end by describing when I believe that Post-modernity began and where Modernity ended. I believe it happened on a day. I believe that day was August 6, 1945. It is this day that makes one understand what the “center” was that Derrida believed had been destroyed. That center was the belief that Modernity, that Science, was inherently Just and moving forward toward Peace. On August 6, 1945, man learned that Science alone would not guarantee Freedom or Peace or Greatness. That aesthetics might not be enough to shape the minds of our world. In the midst of discovering the full extent of the atrocities in Germany during World War II, in the midst of what might have been the most important war in modern cosmogony, came a Little Boy.

The Timeless and The Dated

2007-12-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

Nouns, The Difference Between The Timeless and The Dated
Or: Why You’ll Probably Never Read “Like a Hole in the Head”
December 25, 2007
Revised From: December 1, 2006

If you ever attempt to read a “modern masterpiece,” it’s wholly possible you’ll be tempted to pick up “The Companion” to it, that will clue you in on all the references that were hip when the book was written but have since faded away. It’s partly a result of theater and film, that writing in a prop demands having that prop present, not an object that the narrative itself must constantly return to. When effective and read in time, this gives the audience a sense of immediacy about the text. An author always has to bear in mind his expectations for what things his audience will know and pick up on. Some authors will constantly push this tendency to the limits. Take for instance Jen Banbury’s Like a Hole in the Head. The narrative revolves around Jack London’s The Cruise of the Snark, yet despite the centrality of this text it is hardly described at all. One of the reasons you will likely have never heard of Banbury’s novel is probably due to this choice.

Banbury emphasizes London’s novel in such a way that it’s likely the audience will be left with the sense that there’s some sort of inside joke one will understand if they have read The Cruise of the Snark. However, that is not one of London’s more famous works, and even if one is familiar with it, it provides little insight into Banbury’s novel. Any linkages are extremely tenuous at best. As an element of realism, there is nothing wrong with this choice. As an element of fiction, however, this choice is terrible. The novelist should not emphasize the meaninglessness of choices they make if they seek to engage the reader.

In terms of other terrible stylistic choices, consider Banbury’s opening:

I woke up with a hangover and roof tar on my feet and a vague recollection of
pacing around up there half the night. I think I threw a bottle at the building
next door and somebody yelled something.

Again, this novel was recommended to me on the grounds that it “was the most accurate description of a hangover ever.” On retrospect, it occurred to me that this should never be a selling point. Consider how vague this opening is. “Somebody yelled something,” “a vague recollection,” “I think I threw a bottle at the building next door.” It’s sort of funny if you choose to read it humorously, but it’s funny in the way a bad college movie is funny: it’s unintentionally campy. Even if this is a drunken recollection, how can the protagonist be so unaware that they don’t know what their next door building is, or have some interesting way of characterizing it? And “somebody yelled something”? Funny or not, it’s simply bad writing.

Returning to my original point, though, I would like to discuss Chuck Mangione. There’s a slight chance you remember Chuck Mangione. He was a real (music) artist, and might be characterized as a real one-hit wonder. Even if you do remember him, there’s very little reason that you should. At the end of the second paragraph, Jill explains she left home because “the lady below me had put on her Chuck Mangione record so I was just as glad to be leaving.” Chuck Mangione is no longer a brand name that all readers would be familiar with. Chuck Mangione was an international success in 1977 with a jazz-pop single, “Feels So Good”. His songs were used in the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games. However, perhaps his most significant current claim to fame is inclusion as a secondary character in the animated television program, “King of the Hill”. None of this information is provided by the novel. There’s a chance that the audience at publication, young adult males, were not born when Chuck Mangione was famous. Yet even if the reader understood the reference, it’s still not a great line. Why does Jill dislike the musical choice? Is it his voice, his melody? Is the record too loud? Has that particular record merely been played too frequently? The answer to this question is one of those little things that, when an author includes it, gives life and flavor to the world of a story. When it is not, the audience is pushed further away from the narrator. And why name the author of the record if the narrator, Jill, was unwilling to name the bottle or brand of alcohol she was drinking last night? The neighbor’s “loud record” or “annoying record” would at least indicate the nature of Jill’s grievance. Jen Banbury, however, opts for the brand name.

Films offset this lack of accessibility, because instead of relying on the mental representation of a brand name, they provide a visual representation of all the objects in a scene, eliminating the necessity of the brand name. If there were a film version of Like a Hole in the Head, the audience would not need Chuck Mangione’s name, but they would likely understand by how the record sounded in context as to why it was so irritating.

While talking to a character who is described with his most distinctive feature being a single glove on his left hand, the “glove guy” remarks, “I like the postmodern gangster films”, to which Jill responds, “Postmodern. That phrase is meaningless in that context. Completely meaningless. It’s a description some ex-weatherman idiot film reviewer probably thought up”. Why is it so meaningless? Could it be because Jill doesn’t actually understand the meaning of “postmodern” and thus can’t explain why a “postmodern gangster film” is meaningless? This makes it seem like Banbury herself doesn’t know what she’s talking about which, quite frankly, she probably doesn’t.

I have tried to point out throughout this article that you certainly can enjoy Like a Hole in the Head. There are certainly worse books out there. I wouldn’t feel compelled to discuss a novel that was strictly bad in every sense of the word. (Well, yes I would, but that’s aside the point.) However, if you happen to enjoy Banbury’s sense of humor, you’ll probably enjoy it. The thing is, with every passing year, as the referencs become more distant, they will first transform into nostalgic reminders of the 90s, and finally into mind-numbing trivialities. In essence, if you haven’t read this book already, you probably never will. It’s barely been a decade and the book is already dated. But hey, if you want to know what I’m talking about, you can buy a hardcover for 1 cent from amazon. Even if you don’t end up liking it, you can always use it to start a campfire.

On Christmas

2007-12-24T15:59:00.000-08:00

On Christmas
Or: Why and How an Agnostic Celebrates Christmas
Written on: Christmas Eve

I do not honor Saturn or Thor. I do not celebrate the birth of Sol, Elah-Gabal, Ishtar, Mithras, or Jesus. I do not believe in Santa Clause. I am entertained by the thought of the “Winter Solstice” but it does little for me. But I do celebrate Christmas.

I recognize the significance of Christmas to the economy of the USA, but that is not why I celebrate Christmas. I do practice gift exchange, but those gifts need not come from a mall.

Nativity Scenes are unnecessary but not offensive. If the mayor wants to have one on his front porch, I don’t see why he can’t have one at the town hall. I like Christmas Trees, but if my Christmas Tree was a blade of grass or some moss growing on my window, even if my lights were just a spot of ink from a highlighter, it would still be my Christmas Tree and it would still be Christmas. Christmas Trees can be beautiful, but they are not central to Christmas.

I have joked in the past of celebrating “Capitalism Day” but in truth Christmas has little to do with capitalism. Gift exchange flies in the face of capitalism. There is no guarantee that you will receive a gift of equal economic value. If you give someone a gift and you do not receive one in return, that’s fine. Gifts are given to show appreciation to those you love or care about. (“Secret Santa” does not count as Christmas.) I do not have a problem with companies trying to make a buck off Christmas, except when their commercials are annoying.

Why celebrate Christmas? Why is it on one particular day and not another? Well, to be honest, the day doesn’t really matter. If it’s on the Winter Solstice or not doesn’t matter to me. But I like there being one day for Christmas. A tradition is something that you practice that other people also practice. A tradition survives because you respect it and you enjoy it. For me, there are six holidays: New Years, Valentine’s Day, Independence Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If New Years wasn’t so important to me for personal reasons, then Christmas would be the most important.

Christmas is the fulfillment of the essence of Thanksgiving. You can speak thanks to someone or something on Thanksgiving, but unless you can do something it doesn’t feel like you’re really giving Thanks. You give presents on Christmas to be true to how you felt (or how you wanted to feel) at Thanksgiving.

When a Christmas Tree is beautiful, it is beautiful for two reasons. The first, is because of lights—the lights glowing and pushing back the ever growing darkness of the winter months. The second is when a tree is personal, when it is shared with whatever your family may be (even if no blood is shared between you), when it is filled with the detritus of your lives. The light is the light of your mind and your memories, the bonds of kinship that you can remember. They need not be hung, but as with any physical reminder of a memory, it is more enjoyable if you can see it, and touch it.

There is no magical promise that Christmas will be beautiful. You have to make it beautiful yourself, forming the bonds with your own hands. Or, if that will not work, you can hope.

Here’s hoping to a Merry Christmas!

What Freud Said

2007-12-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

What Freud Said and Why He Said It
Or: Why Derrida Is Wrong
December 23, 2007
Revised From: March 9, 2007

Someone like Derrida might take a look at the impact Freud had on modern thinking and claim: “One consequence of Freud’s thinking on dreams and the unconscious is that we can never be sure of where our ideas and words come from.” Freud’s On Dreams, however, does not necessarily deny our capacity to be certain about origin of the entirety of ideas and words. Freud offers a more nuanced view. A dream is not completely unknowable. Dreams are drawn from a variety of factors, some of which might not be directly represented. Although Freud argued that his dreams were indicative of the unconscious thinking which provides “the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement, and dramatization” this dream-work nevertheless does not undermine the entirety of thought as a whole—Freud specifically leaves his discussion to that of the unconscious. Although the unconscious plays a large role in the life of an individual, it does not dominate or undermine conscious thought. Intention and the capacity to express that intention is not undermined by the existence and the aloofness of the unconscious. Freud’s analysis demands that we include in our definition of “intention” that, what we conceive of as “meaning” often will require understanding the symbols underlying it. The symbols that Freud identifies as underlying the dream always come from the individual’s experience in the world. The only challenge is in identifying which facet of the individual’s experience is the cause of which representation in the dream.

Freud, instead of denying the capacity to know where ideas and words come from, offers several possibilities of where they can originate from. Freud asserts that “only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer’s own mind.” Freud makes a distinction—he believes that the mythological interpretation of dreams, that dreams are of demonic or divine origin, has been rejected, and instead reasserts the argument that dreams originate from the dreamer’s own mind. Freud does know where dreams come from—they come from the mind. Although this seems obvious now, it nevertheless is a starting point, and a starting point that rejects several millennia of dream interpretation. This origin of dreams is not questioned. What is left unknown are the “conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life… but what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams.” The significance of dreams is what Freud leaves as the center of his object of debate, rather than the capacity to know dreams at all. After all, if Freud regarded dreams as completely unknowable, then there would be no point of psychoanalysis.

Freud conceptualizes of dreams as representative of the impulses and manifestations of mental forces which have been obscured during conscious life. The first is the overvaluation of the dream, as akin to the ancient mythologies which took the dream as the will of some supernatural agent. The prototype Freud provides for this line of thought is that of Schubert, that “dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature.” Freud rejects this overvaluation, but nevertheless he probably would associate his conceptualization of dreams more with this extreme than he would with the other, that one held by “the majority of medical writers” to whom “dreams scarcely reach the level of being psychical phenomena at all.” Freud’s own conceptualization of dreams certainly is not that held by the “majority of medical writers” nor would it be that of Schubert. Instead, his conceptualization would be closest to that of Scherner and Volket, who insisted that dreams arise from mental impulses, and represent manifestations of mental forces “which have been prevented from expanding freely during the daytime.” Freud certainly would not argue that every element in every dream is an expression of a repressed desire, but nevertheless he certainly would be willing to accept that this was the case some of the time. Freud adds to this the idea that dreams frequently condense, dramatize, or displace events and thoughts which occur during waking life, and focuses on the multiplicity of associations that can be inferred from the events of a dream. For instance, Freud likens the activity of a dream to a painting that represents “all the poets in a single group in a picture of Parnassus.” Many of the poets in such a painting would not have ever been together at the same place at the same time, but because the mind associates the poets together the mental representation of them places them close together in proximity. Returning to the views of Scherner and Volket, Freud likens his interpretation of dreams to theirs in the case of wish fulfillment in dreams. Freud argues that there are three types of wish fulfillment: infantile, dreams with repressed wishes, and dreams with wishes that are not repressed, but usually are accompanied by anxiety. It certainly is true some of the time that dreams include repressed wishes—nevertheless, the content of dreams include much more than this.

The sentiment, like Derrida’s, that Freud’s arguments negate the capacity to understand the origin of thoughts stem largely from his conclusion, where he makes the caveat, “one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense.” This caveat is far from the sentiment that it often evokes. Freud’s argument makes it clear that we must accept the possibility that sometimes we will not be able to understand where the constituents of our dream come from. However, to say that one can never be sure of where our ideas and words come from is to deny the magnificence of the associative links that underlie many of our dreams, and the many cases where in all likelihood the interpretation of the dream is centered. There is very little doubt in the painting of the poets in a picture of Parnassus where the images that the painting is based on came from. Although Freud expands his arguments to be indicative of the unconscious he nevertheless does not negate the capacities of conscious activity to understand the origin of its words and ideas. The dream that Freud speaks of is not necessarily the same dream that Martin Luther King Jr. speaks of in his speech, “I Have a Dream.” Freud is specifically discussing dreams that occur during unconsciousness. The conscious mind is one that is capable of producing dreams as well, but the conscious mind creates ones that express clear and well-stated desires that do not have to produce anxiety, but can produce hope instead.

Freud, like many of his predecessors, identifies his center: it is the ego, the self, as the shaping force behind all dreams. Just as Aristotle begins the Poetics by arguing that most forms of art are imitation or representation, and Victor Shklovsky identifies the maxim, “Art is thinking in images”, Freud has his center. It is through the center that one can exert intention. It is through the center that one can be reminded that some of the time, one can understand where what is said and thought comes from. Just the same, one can infer from reading Aristotle that art is the expression of the intention—it is the expression of the intention to reproduce or imitate something else. Or, for Shklovsky, art is the intention to think in images. However, the sentiment that one cannot know the origin of thoughts or words, as the prompt posits, echoed by Derrida in Structure, Sign, and Play when he links Freud with Heidegger and Nietzche in precipitating what he calls “this decentering, this thinking the structurality of structure”. Derrida remarks on “the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession.” Derrida, in typical form, provides no work, let alone page number, of Freud’s to refer to that would allow the reader to substantiate this claim. Instead, Derrida refers to “the Freudian critique,” a term so ambiguous it could be a critique which need not even necessarily originate from Freud, but from all that deem themselves “Freudian.” Yet, although it is true Freud critiques consciousness, and indeed further critiques the modern medical establishment for essentially ignoring the unconsciousness, Freud never renounces consciousness. We might sometimes not be able to comprehend our dreams consciously, and this might be a criticism of consciousness. But a criticism of consciousness is not a renunciation of consciousness—and Derrida’s inclusion of Freud as one of his central forces of “decentering” is flawed.

Perhaps instead of asking whether it is ever possible to write or say what one means, one might ask whether it is ever possible to not write or say what one means. Dreams always come from one’s self, and our own personal associations, and our own personal experiences. If this is the case, then there is no situation in which we cannot express what we mean, as all expression is the result of some will, either conscious or unconscious. Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s The Intentional Fallacy offers an example that follows these lines; that of Elliot’s note to The Waste Land where Elliot explains that “The Hanged Man… fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples of Emmaus…” As Wimsatt and Beardsley argue, Elliot explains his poem in terms of his own intentions, and his intention in terms of his associations. This style nevertheless creates a problem for the earlier assertion that we cannot express what we do not mean, since, as Saussure argues in The object of study, there may be a distinction between what is expressed and what is intended to be expressed, as there is the capacity for miscommunication. But this only requires revision to the earlier proposition: all of our expressions are causally related to our intentions, even if our expressions do not always express our intentions. This, although rephrased, is essentially the same paradigm that can be inferred from Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Everything in our dreams is comes from our mind, even if the recollection and expression of our dream does not allow us to comprehend the intentions that are the causal basis for the dream’s occurrence.

Derrida’s criticism and the sentiment that it is impossible to comprehend the origins of thought provides an incomplete picture of Freud’s arguments. Freud’s arguments include a center, and that center is the ego. Through this center, one can, at least some of the time, express thought and language, and know the origin of it. This origin often will take the form of some desire, whether repressed or infantile, but also sometimes will be the result of condensation or dramatization. Although sometimes we will not be able to comprehend the nuance of the origin of our dreams, the origin remains constant. A better question from a Freudian perspective might be, “Can we ever express what we consciously want to express?” But that question too would be flawed, for it would seek to divide conscious activity from unconscious activity. The conscious mind and the unconscious mind inhabit the same brain; each is linked, and each takes in information from the other. Perhaps the ultimate objective is to ask, “Can we ever have such a perfect filter that none of our unconscious desires would seep into our conscious thought and speech?” Freud would probably offer that that is the true center, and the ultimate objective, of psychoanalysis.

The Meaning of Whiteness

2007-12-23T01:02:00.001-08:00

The Madness Of The Whale
Or: The “Meaning” Of Whiteness In Moby Dick
December 23, 2007
Revised From: December 10, 2005

In the “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter of Moby Dick, Melville combines so many different possible interpretations of whiteness as a symbol that thinking of “whiteness” as a symbol becomes absurd. Instead of the color of the whale holding some sort of deep meaning or significance for the reader, perhaps it is better to view its importance to the characters of the story. It is a deflection away from the personal feelings and status of the individual. Just as this is true for Ahab, who seems to become obsessed with the whale for some inexplicable reason that almost certainly is either sexual or racial in nature, this also may be true for Ishmael. Ishmael’s search for meaning in Moby Dick may actually be to deflect away from his own inadequacies and his own private madness that questions the very reasons that Ishmael is on the Pequod to begin with.

Ishmael cyclically restricts the freedom of others and himself. In the first paragraph, Ishmael discusses his reasons for going to sea. What is included is not as important as what is not, however. What lacks from his explanation are references to family, friends, or anything social. He refers to methodically knocking people’s hats off, spontaneously following funerals, and other antisocial activities. While he says that he joins the Pequod to be part of a fixed social hierarchy, he never explains why being part of a fixed social hierarchy is at all a good thing. Instead, once again, what he does not refer to is as important as what he does. The physical act of being on a boat for several months at a time is the uttermost form of restricting his physical, social, and personal freedom. Those on the boat might be the epitome of civilization, but they are also the epitome of confinement. Opposed to this, Moby Dick is the epitome of freedom. Ishmael is incapable of grasping why it is that he joins along, at the beginning of the “Moby Dick” chapter, with the others. It could be because Moby Dick is everything that Ishmael failed to accomplish—Moby Dick is free, and shows no signs of being disconcerted with his own natural surroundings. Instead, Moby Dick seeks to destroy the humans that try to kill him as one might expect any animal to. When viewed in conjunction with his actions of joining the boat at all, after coming from a state of total freedom, Ishmael’s decision to help kill Moby Dick does not seem at all perplexing. Just as he destroyed his own freedom, he seeks to destroy the freedom of others, in this case, Moby Dick. A facet of the rage Ishmael and the crew expresses toward Moby Dick could be one of jealousy, of the satisfaction with freedom they do not have and never will acquire. The men of the Pequod destroy freedoms they desire but have left behind for social tolerance, a freedom which only is regained with the destruction of society, or the Pequod, as a whole, as at the end of the novel.

The fundamental tenet of American society, that of freedom, is something which Ishmael, Ahab, and the whole Pequod is unable to comprehend or accept. Moby Dick, being merely an albino whale, is a blank template upon which they thrust unending hatred, in the case of Ahab, or in Ishmael’s case, a multitude of meaning when really there is none implicit. The real dilemmas are those that are not spoken of in the novel, because they are too focused on trying to discover the meaning of the whale. They externalize their own loneliness, and the prisons they create for themselves, so that they do not have to confront them. If Ishmael were capable of giving meaning to his life on the boat, he never would have allowed Ahab to lure the crew into an obsessive quest to destroy the whale. Instead, he too tries to give the whale meaning, allowing Ahab’s complete deflection of his own inner demons to consume the crew as a whole and, ultimately, to destroy the Pequod and all on it, save Ishmael himself.

Are P2P Technologies Really P2P?

2007-12-22T02:44:00.000-08:00

Is “The Public” of Tomorrow Going To Be a Network?
Or: How Significant Are P2P Technologies?
December 22, 2007
Revised From: May 8, 2007

Some contend that the emerging peer-to-peer networked public sphere differs from the mass mediated public sphere. While this certainly is the case to an extent, it nevertheless does not take into account discussions by Phil Agre and Yochai Benkler that, although peer-to-peer technologies are emerging, there nevertheless remain strong forces assert the power of broadcast media and traditional proprietary models. How significant can this transformation be when the peer-to-peer network technologies are themselves mediated by monopolies such as Microsoft, SBC-Yahoo, Google, Comcast, and Apple? To further complicate matters, it is difficult to say when the period of the “mass mediated public sphere” begins. Why do we regard the “preceding era” as mass mediated, when, after all, broadcast television is itself regarded as a “network”? Why do we refer to some technologies as “peer-to-peer” when the users operating them are not necessarily peers? Perhaps both the future and the past are murkier than they may appear. The significance of new technologies like MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, File-sharing Programs, etc do not implicitly change anything in particular.

In 2003, when Phil Agre wrote P2P and the Promise of Internet Equality, he was still living in the cusp of the transformation to the music industry the full force of which is only recently being received. He argued:

The post-Napster institutions of music distribution will presumably depend on new technologies. At the moment, most technical development is aimed at two models: P2P models that resist legal assaults and rights-management models that preserve existing economic models or migrate toward subscription models. It is unclear whether a thoroughly P2P architecture can survive, particularly if monopolies such as Microsoft change their own architectures to suit the record companies' needs.

Over time, we have seen the relative success of both models, but not necessarily through the means that Agre predicted. Over the past few years, the market has finally seen the theorized decline of record sales, but not because of P2P models: instead, because of iTunes, and other models. iTunes and similar programs allow artists to have guaranteed revenue that’s directly reflective of their sales, it co-opts many of the most successful artists that otherwise would be attracted to P2P models by allowing them to release their music digitally, but through a media formation that is more broadcast in origin than P2P. One might argue that through programs like iTunes, the artists win: they can sell their records without having to work through a traditional record label. But on the other hand, iTunes has merely become the record label of all those artists that use their services. iTunes isn’t a P2P model. Like Microsoft, Apple has become a powerful center of information technology. Agre suggested that Microsoft might change its structure to suit producers’ needs. Instead, Apple changed its structure to suit artists needs, and in doing so Apple guaranteed that music will continue to be mediated by proprietary models.
Agre’s predictions captured many points of what would come to be. However, Benkler’s discussion in The Wealth of Networks may ultimately be more relevant. Peer-to-peer technologies are challenging traditional proprietary models of intellectual property, Benkler’s arguments explain, but they are now the subject of a legal backlash. As Benkler explains,

…the DMCA and the continued dominance of Microsoft over the desktop, and the willingness of courts and legislatures to try to stamp out copyright-defeating technologies even when these obviously have significant benefits to users who have no interest in copying the latest song in order not to pay for the CD-are the primary sources of institutional constraint on the freedom to use the logical resources necessary to communicate in the network.

Not only Microsoft and the DMCA, but other monopolies or near-monopolies, such as Disney, continue to fight for longer copyrights and more trademarks. New biotechnologies continue to expand traditional perceptions of what can be the subject of a patent, now including chemicals and elements produced by the human body. Traditional proprietary models, based on exclusive intellectual property rights, continue to lobby major governments to illegalize network models, and sometimes use guerilla tactics to attack network models directly. In one regard, one has to accept that a completely open peer-to-peer technology is completely open to attack, when those who are actively attacking peer-to-peer technologies can gain access just as easily as the creator of peer-to-peer technologies, or the average user interested in looking around to see what’s offered. One has to ask when this is the case: what really constitutes a peer?

Even Benkler has to discuss the illegal activities of millions of the people using peer-to-peer technologies. Certainly the backlash against peer-to-peer technologies, starting with Napster, originates in the threat traditional models sensed; the threat that the users illegally trading music would lower record sales. Few answers exist to understand why so many users of peer-to-peer technologies now associate with criminality. Further, monopolies offer few answers as to why old methods of broadcasting information for limited or indirect profit, such as broadcast radio, did not cause record labels to worry that their music was being “stolen”. As Benkler argues that, “Music, like all information, is a nonrival public good whose marginal cost, once produced, is zero.” If this was all there was to the case, then the illegal users of peer-to-peer technologies really never had any excuse.

Failure to understand the illegal users of peer-to-peer technologies is rooted in the failure of many to understand peer-to-peer technologies at all. As they are, peer-to-peer technologies are wholly rooted in a multitude of expensive products whose sale is largely dominated by several monopolies and major international corporations. Benkler was right: once produced, music has little cost to reproduce. However, the cost of production can be extraordinary. The ownership of a computer, the technologies (like Microsoft’s Windows), the specialized information-producing technologies, and the instruments necessary will rarely cost, combined, less than several thousand dollars. Following this, there are the most important costs: the time, talent, creativity, and energy required to produce information technologies. In the time it takes an individual to produce one piece of music, they could download a thousand songs. In the time it would take to produce one full length movie, they could download a hundred films at least. To produce a film and share it on a P2P network, a user would require a camera: to own a competitive model, they might want to go for a something like a “Canon XL1 Digital Camcorder Kit”—cost on Amazon, $2,500. That’s $2,500—paid to a different major corporation, Canon. Once a film is made, it is then converted to a different digital format on a computer (perhaps run off a desktop like Microsoft’s Windows). That desktop software is then connected to the Internet—powered by either SBC-Yahoo or Comcast in all likelihood—and then connected to be shared for no immediate financial return on a P2P sharing site. To produce music, there are different monopolies and major corporations one must instead pay. And even then, to access some networks, one might need a portfolio.

If an extra $2,500 was a requirement for every community, then the world would be filled with countless lone individuals. It is not surprising then, that those that are regarded as the most “successful peer-to-peer” technologies are those that demand the least in terms of “sharing” original content. Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogs can be accessed by almost anyone and demand almost nothing. All the content is either already present or can be offered with very little cost of either time or money. Yet these networks nonetheless aren’t always P2P technologies. MySpace and Facebook are both owned by individuals, and can be sold—and completely deleted—at will. YouTube is more of a P2P form than those others, but it nevertheless is the subject of countless attacks by major corporations and the government, demanding that songs be removed, that movies be removed if they use songs or clips of popular movies, or music videos. Most of the “Peers” on a sight of YouTube do not have the money, the time, the energy, or the talent to compete with the media distributed by broadcast media. Instead, the most popular members of YouTube are those who use cheap webcams or podcasts to convey essentially the same information as that of a post on LiveJournal. If this is the freedom promised by some, then it is an awfully limited freedom—and hardly utopian.

Perhaps the “real” P2P formations were those that existed beforehand in Broadcast media: those who work to produce the News for CBS may all work for a major corporation, and once hired, they may very well be Peers: by working for the same corporation, they know who each other are, and what they can produce. If they lack sufficient production, then they are fired. But those who work for the major corporation have guaranteed pay, whereas those who work for the Peer-to-Peer community may receive very little in return. The risk remains that those with the most interest in developing professional, competitive products will often be drawn toward the major corporations and monopolies for guaranteed returns—thus lowering the amount of quality original content on Peer-to-Peer networks. So what are P2P technologies left with? Millions of people without the means or energy to produce content joining P2P networks consisting of millions of other people without the means or energy to produce content: the only content available being that produced by major corporations.

So is there an emerging Peer-to-Peer network sphere? Communities such as YouTube and MySpace are still owned by individuals; although their content may be generated by individuals, they are not implicitly more or less “Peer-to-Peer” than the Networks of Broadcast Media, and the continued thriving of Networks undermine P2P Networks at least, if not more, than the P2P Networks undermine the Broadcast Media. And there is no end to mediation, in any sphere.

Did All Native Americans Ride Horses?

2007-12-21T02:24:00.001-08:00

Is “Dances With Wolves” Historically Inaccurate?
Or: Did All Native Americans Ride Horses?
December 21, 2007
Revised From: October 12, 2005

In “Dances with Wolves,” Kevin Costner rides out with the Native Americans and intermeshes with their culture. When viewing such a film, it is easy to say that “That’s not how Native Americans really were!” It does seem like Costner is interested in integrating himself into “Native American” culture, not the culture of “post-colonial Sioux.” If one views “Dances with Wolves” as representative of “Native American” culture, than it is indeed erroneous. However, if they are viewed as only representing the Sioux, then the film is remarkably accurate. Yet, the tendency to lump all Native American tribes together into some sort of unified cultural entity consistently works to alienate, rather than unify, the two groups.

The myth of the Native Americans as a completely mobile, roaming people is inaccurate for most tribes other than the Sioux. For instance, Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire, was remarked as, “a city as large as Cordova or Seville, entirely within the lake two mile from the mainland.” The Aztecs, a Mesoamerican people of central Mexico, were perhaps the largest empire south of the plains Indians of North America. The Aztecs were not the Native Americans that the colonists confronted on their frontier, however, and thus they are not a part of the myth of Native America that is depicted in film and movies. Even the Sioux, while they did eventually become a horse-back riding tribe, did not have horses before the European Americans imported the animals.

The Pequots, while not established in great cities like Tenochtitlan, were not a roaming band of Indians either. The Pequots, as are many of the tribes of Native America, are not incorporated into the modern popular myth of Native America. The reason for this is understandable—they were almost completely annihilated in the Pequot War. Richard Drinnon in his chapter of “Facing West” on the Pequot War, even notes that the colonist, “sought, as Mason said, ‘to cut off the Remembrance of them from the Earth.’ After the war, the General Assembly of Connecticut declared the name extinct.” The Pequots, as with many other tribes that did not last as long as the Sioux in terms of war, were annihilated so completely that no trace of them could be left for the modern mythos to accept. The myths of modern America will never be able to include these stories completely in its myth, due to the lack of information regarding the truth of the people, and the myth of Native America will never be able to accurately reflect reality.

Due to the political atmosphere of colonial times, there were strong differences in the interactions between Native American tribes and the colonists. Tribes in the southeast and northeast were exploited by the English trade in skins and slaves much more readily than did the Muskogees. The Muskogees even managed to retain cultural autonomy for a longer period of time than many of their neighbors. However, none of this mattered aside from delaying the inevitable, in terms of United States, and ironically, this indifference to Muskogee culture strengthened Muskogee resistance. While the United States, as Joel Martin explains in “Sacred Revolt”, “was determined to force on the Muskogees an ideology that not only repressed the logic of gifts and the egalitarian society that it nurtured but also asserted that the Moskogees could become fully ‘civilized’ only by becoming identical to Anglo-Americans.” While the United States general attitude was to reduce the assorted Native American tribes to that of mere savages occupying otherwise vacant land, their actions and attitude undermined their capacity to negotiate or confront the Natives at all. Martin also notes an incident in which Georgians killed Lower Muskogees in revenge for crimes of the Upper Moskogees, alienated the Lower Muskogees from the Georgians and “led to a rapport between the two major Muskogee factions.” The United States unwillingness to recognize variation in Native American culture led to increased solidarity among the Muskogees. Their denial of Indian culture, however, allowed the United States to create an economic justification in taking the Muskogees’ supposedly vacant lands. The denial of Native American cultural autonomy both ensured the animosity on racial lines, and “justified” the United States for annihilation.

Huck Finn, Mary Sue

2007-12-19T17:44:00.001-08:00

Huck Finn, Mary Sue
Or: Twain Didn’t Write A Political Ending
December 19, 2007
Revised From: November 13, 2005

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers is one of the first popular American novels. Some might argue that it painted the myth of America that persists through today. Natty Bumpo made the novel successful, with his “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude. Yet, The Pioneers is not a critical favorite. As far as most critics are concerned, American literature began with Mark Twain, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, even Twain’s novel is often regarded as a failure in regard to all of its political investments. One might say that almost the entire second half of the novel is unnecessary, and that the real climax occurs between Huck and Jim on the river. Why is Huck Finn regarded as central to America, whereas The Pioneers is not?

As far as bad endings go, Cooper is even worse than Twain. He ends the novel by having Elizabeth Taylor marry Oliver Effingham, the character that Cooper wanted to be the hero, but that no one cared about. Oliver Effingham represents meaningless traditions and upper class values. Oliver Edwards reveals that he is actually Oliver Effingham, son of Major Effingham, on page 437 of the text—chapter 40, just one chapter before the ending. Having Oliver on the periphery, with his identity masked until the very end, makes Oliver come off as unreliable and dishonest. Are we really supposed to believe that it is because of his intellectual superiority that he duped everyone in the novel, and the audience?

Oliver also has to wail about the injustice done to his grandfather—that he had some sort of rightful claim to being a better person than anyone else because of what his lineage suggested. If there’s a sure way to lose an American audience, it’s this. And, compared to what Natty goes through, such as getting shot at the beginning of the novel, Oliver simply has less credibility than Natty.

Why would Cooper want Oliver to be the real hero of the novel? Well, he is an intelligent character, and he does listen to those around him. He’s attentive. In a way, Oliver is exactly what Cooper, in his pretentiousness, wanted his American audience to be. He wanted them to appear to be Pioneers, but to actually end up being Aristocracy in the course of reading his novel. The Americans knew who they were, though. They were Natty Bumpo, victims, heroes, and survivors—and honest. It’s no wonder that Cooper retired in England, where he could return to aristocracy and classical roots.

Perhaps the central reason that Huck Finn is so effective as a protagonist is because he essentially combines the best elements of both Natty and Oliver, without the baggage of either. He has the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” style of Natty, but the propensity for deception that an author finds so likeable in a hero. Like Natty, Huck is a poor white males on the fringe of society. Just as Natty is shot by a judge at the beginning of The Pioneers, Huck is abused by his father at the onset of Huckleberry Finn. Like Natty, Huck ends the novel by deciding to Go West. Yet, unlike Natty, Huck lies. As Oliver deceives everyone, making them think he’s someone lower in the social hierarchy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Huck pretends to be dead, pretends to be a girl, and later pretends to be George Jackson. The first two are perhaps more obvious in how they would change Huck’s social relations to those around him. Huck pretends to be George Jackson, however, to retain his anonymity. Who is George Jackson? He, too, is no one, with a name so generic that no one is likely to remember him. These are things Natty Bumpo would never do. And, by casting the story from Huck’s perspective, and keeping the audience in on the jokes, they are amused, rather than offput, by Huck’s deception.

If Twain so fluidly combines the appealing elements of Cooper’s characters, why didn’t he also find a way to write a more satisfying ending? Perhaps it can be understood in how each character tries to legitimate themselves. Huck’s story begins with oppression at the hands of his father. Natty’s story begins with his oppression at the hands of the Judge. Oliver’s story ends (and in a sense begins) with the oppresion of his Grandfather. How does each of those compare, though, to the oppression the slave Jim experiences in Huck Finn? Jim is a slave, whipped to work, and denied education. An audience tends to sympathize with oppressed characters. Yet they also need a character that reminds them of themselves, that they can identify with. When an Other is presented that deserves more sympathy, an audience becomes too aware of the political investments of a story. Suppose Twain had developed the Christian metaphors for Huckleberry Finn. If Jim became a Christ figure, tortured and maimed and killed, the audience would have sympathized with him even more—and Twain would have become a political writer, rather than a comedian.

Who Wants To Be Subjective?

2007-12-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

Clinging On To That Phantasmal Stuff
Or: Who Wants To Be Subjective?
December 18, 2007
Revised From: December 3, 2006

The key insight of Slavoj Zizek’s article “Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket” could be summarized in a quote that occurs halfway through his article: “It's not so much that we are losing our dignity and freedom with the advance of biogenetics but that we realize we never had them in the first place.” From this, Zizek concludes, “Reducing my being to the genome forces me to traverse the phantasmal stuff of which my ego is made, and only in this way can my subjectivity properly emerge.” When one makes such sweeping claims about what “humanity” is, and how our conceptions of “humanity” are being changed, one wonders how other ideas, such as justice, value, or meaning, also stand up. If we view “humanity” as no more than a genome, are these things to reduced to “subjectivity”? Unfortunately, Zizek does not define what he means by subjectivity in that article, and for now I will refrain from using his other works on a presupposition that he uses the term consistently.

Do these arguments reconceptualize “value” as something that is so fluid it is meaningless? Does how we live our lives change if we accept Zizek’s terms—are we left compelled to do, or not do, anything?

Let’s use Zizek’s terms in looking at an example from Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire. In Sterling’s novel, the world is full of “post-humans.” I used to think that they were post-human simply because they were too old to be regarded as human. In some senses, this is the case. Their bodies have deteriorated so much that they require constant medical attention just to stay alive, and some of these operations change them at nearly every biological level. Yet, in some senses, this isn’t the complete cause. I forgot to include another factor. They are dependent on the medical system to ensure that they continue receiving these life-extending treatments. This means that they are incapable of doing anything that differs from the norm. They are incapable of exploring the world, of acting in new and exciting ways, at the threat of losing their medical coverage that they depend on to live. At the very onset of the novel, after all, a character commits suicide, unwilling to live on those terms.

Yet, on the strictest sense, that is not enough to regard them as post-human, if we use Zizek’s terms. Instead, they should still technically be humans—since they should still have the same genomic structure. In regarding the world as humans, reduced to preserving their particular genomic structure, but not their freedom, or the capacity to behave in new ways, once certainly might say that their “subjectivity” has emerged. Yet what do they gain from this? Are they not, in a sense, still slaves to the medical industry?

Consider a different case, a man who is not strictly speaking post-human. Emil is a an artist, and not much of the novel dwells on him at length. Emil hates who he is, so he takes drugs to erase his memory. His friends regard the post-amnesiac Emil as a completely different individual. Is his “humanity” changed as a result? Not by Zizek’s terms.

What does one gain or lose in affirming or denying one’s “humanity”? Why does one want to view the world in terms of subjectivity? It may very well be the case that Zizek is correct, that our humanity can be reduced to our genome. Yet, who wants to live with that conclusion in mind? What’s so great about subjectivity? If that is the case, then Emil lost nothing, and gained nothing, in taking the drugs that turned him amnesiac.

Influenza as a Bioterror Weapon

2007-12-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

The Potential For Influenza as a Bioterror Threat
Or: What is This Terrorism Thing Anyway?
December 17, 2007
Revised From May 4, 2005

We are familiar with influenza as a naturally occurring disease that has caused countless deaths worldwide. There have been several epidemics worldwide over the past century, including an avian form that has decimated bird populations. Older estimates of casualties from the 1918 form, sometimes called the “Spanish Flu,” is said to either have killed 40-50 million people (in older reports), or 50 to 100 million people, possibly more than the entire course of The Black Death.

It is left to speculation to imagine the toll of the detonation of an atomic bomb on an American city. Of course, it depends on the bomb, and the city. Certainly, bombs today have exponentially more capacity for destruction than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, would even one of those have the capacity to kill 40 million people—at least?

Today, the genomic structure of the 1918 form of Influenza has been published online at the GenBank database. (Actually, it was published back in 2005).

Suppose the Spanish Flu was not only recreated, but weaponized. Would we be able to avoid a toll like the one in 1918, of 50 million deaths? We could stockpile the vaccine. But, due to influenza’s short time between exposure and the onset of the virus, stockpiled vaccines would not necessarily help those exposed.

Because it is a disease that is not only contained to a laboratory but also is naturally occurring, it holds an additional capacity for bioterrorism because any outbreak of a weaponized form may be misattributed to the more common form. On the one hand, this thought is terrifying. But, on the other hand, it means that we might be able to respond to each with a similar apparatus.

Longini et al. used the pandemic of 1918 and the 1957 Asian influenza pandemic as a basis to analyze the health care system’s potential to withstand large scale pandemics. They recognize that a vaccine may not be fully capable of helping in the case of a pandemic, so they recommend stockpiling anti-virals. If the vaccine should become available, they believe that vaccinating 80% of those aged 18 and below would be 93% effective in containing pandemic influenza.

The steps necessary to prevent a pandemic are not purely based in vaccinations. Should a pandemic begin to emerge, vaccinations and anti-virals would be vital in curbing the spread of the disease. However, in preventing a pandemic, since subjects become symptomatic only 1-4 days after exposure, early detection of the disease is much more necessary than it would be in similar diseases such as smallpox. Further, a paper by Madjid found that influenza can be aerosolized, and the aerosolized form is more virulent than other forms.

The possibility of influenza being distributed in an aerosolized form suggests that instead of focusing purely on vaccination, we also could have detection systems in place. With the strain’s genomic structure becoming publicly available, the capacity for it to be released in an aerosolized form increases drastically. Even though influenza is a virus that has confronted American society for over a hundred years, longitudinal studies have learned more about the repercussions of the disease in recent years. Further, the capacity for vaccines to remain functional requires constant analysis on how the disease develops. Many further studies need to be done to combat the disease not only as a disease with the possibility for causing an epidemic, but also as a potential bioterror threat.

Even though influenza has been evident in society for a lengthy period of time, it is still a developing and changing disease. As we learn more about it—with the impending release of its genomic structure, and its evolution over time and adaptation to vaccines, influenza is as much a threat now as ever. With the new capacity of it becoming a bioterror agent, investing in combating it is doubly necessary not only to combat the naturally occurring disease, but also to prevent its use as a biological weapon.

Who would do such a thing, as weaponize influenza and then release it? Diseases, unlike bombs, can mutate in the course of their destruction. Perhaps the reason that we have not seen a weaponized pathogen like Influenza released successfully has been due to its capacity for mutation and coming back to annihilate the makers. Yet, the “pros” of bioterrorism to a successful assailant suggest that a strain like this one might still be developed. Unlike nuclear warfare, weaponized pathogens hold the capacity to kill an entire population yet leave their natural resources in-tact. Stockpile the antivirus to the disease in your own country, and then release it somewhere else. When the first reports of the disease spread, close your borders to that country and any country with reports of infection. The 1918 form was released in the hopes that it would help scientists combat modern forms of influenza, and the avian flu. Let us hope, and work to ensure, that that is all it is ever used for.

Who Would Listen To A Magic Mirror?

2007-12-17T02:43:00.001-08:00

In Defense of The Queen
Or: Who Would Listen to a Magic Mirror?
December 16, 2007
Revised from April 28, 2007

Convinced that it would fail, the Hollywood film industry labeled Snow White "Disney's Folly". When it was finally released, it held the title of “highest grossing film of all time” until the release of “Gone With The Wind” a year later. It was the first full-length animated feature film to come out of the United States. When the DVD hit stores in 2001, more than 1 million copies were sold on its first day.

Considering how much production cost (Disney had to mortgage his house to finish production), it’s amazing how many scenes were cut for its theatrical release. Some cuts were due to censorship, such as the opening with Snow White’s mother. But even with such cuts, when the film opened at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, all the velvet seat upholstery had to be replaced. Young children were so frightened of the sequence with Snow White lost in the forest that they wet their pants.

Snow White established the franchise that persists today: the Disney Princesses. AFI ranked The Queen #10 in its list of top 50 villains of all time (Snow White didn’t even make the top 50 heroes). The Dwarves, Dopey in particular, have been one of the most visible icons at Disneyland for years.

Even before Disney remade it, Snow White was one of the most celebrated fables of Europe. Its origin might even go back to The Middle Ages.

What made this story so popular? Why has it survived over the years? And what does it mean today, in its current incarnation as film? In asking these questions, I am led to ask more specific questions about the entailments from certain incongruities in the film, and led to question most of all the representation of The Queen. Why is she so mad—and why on earth is she talking to a Magic Mirror?

Lets start with The Dwarves:

In the original Grimm fairytale of “Snow White,” the dwarfs were not named. Early drafts of the Disney version included an extensive list of possible names. But, as Walter Brasch in Cartoon Monickers explains, “the final list included only descriptive names: Awful, Bashful, Biggo-Ego… Grumpy, Happy… Sleepy, Snappy, Sneezy, Sneezy-Wheezy, Snoopy.” Dopey and Doc were added later. The directors named Doc after they developed him as “The guy who was aggressive and liable to take leadership… He ended up being called ‘Doc.’ I suppose that would stem from the fact that a doctor is somebody who is supposed to be able to point the direction.” Brasch attributes these choices to Disney’s ingenuity. Yet, Brasch both fails to capture why the dwarfs were so appealing to American audiences, and completely ignores the fact that the characters in the original fable, Snow White, The Huntsman, and The Queen, were all also descriptively named.

Now we move on to the intricate relationship between The Magic Mirror and The Queen. At the onset of the movie, The Queen asks, “Magic mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” The question, with its alliteration and rhyme, is probably the most famous line of the movie. Yet the answer is often forgotten, despite its significance: “Famed is thy beauty, Majesty. But hold, a lovely maid I see. Rags cannot hide her gentle grace. Alas, she is more fair than thee.” Notice what we learn about the mirror from this line. Not only is the mirror capable of noticing beauty, but also it holds the capacity to see subjects who are not present. Just as a camera captures and image and reproduces it on film, so is the Magic Mirror capable of reproducing the image of someone far away. When The Queen demands “Reveal her name.” The Mirror responds, “Lips red as the rose. Hair black as ebony. Skin white as snow.” To which The Queen exclaims, “Snow White!” The Mirror, like the camera, cannot name the character it sees—like the camera, it is only capable of showing that information. But in the world of Disney’s Snow White, with its descriptive names, that is all that is necessary.

There is something else only hinted at in this scene. What is the real cause of Snow White’s “gentle grace” that “rags cannot hide?” Is it her “lips red as the rose. Hair black as ebony. [And] skin white as snow.” How “deep” can this mirror really see? Can it penetrate her soul, or merely her clothes?

There is something else, too, in the elaborate plan The Queen sets up to kill Snow White. Her plot involves more than simple murder. It is an assault upon the images and symbols of feminine beauty associated with Snow White. “Take her far into the forest,” The Queen orders The Huntsman, “Find some secluded glade where she can pick wildflowers… and there, my faithful huntsman, you will kill her!” The Queen is a Queen, why must she hide this execution? Why must it be secluded? Who is she hiding it from?

Really, we see very few people in Snow White. We do not know the intricate familial relations that put Snow White at the mercy of The Queen. Yet, in this instance, the question begged is: Where is The King? Why would he allow Snow White to be transformed into a servant preceding the beginning if he lives, and who is The Queen hiding Snow White’s murder from if he doesn’t?

I can think of two possible reasons The Queen wanted to kill Snow White in the glade that does not involve hiding from the King. First, it is possible that The Queen wanted to hide Snow White’s death from herself. This, however, is unsatisfactory. After all, she has very little hesitation in trying to kill Snow White later.

The second possibility is that The Queen was not trying to hide Snow White’s death from anyone. Instead, The Queen did not merely want Snow White to die. She wanted Snow White not only to die, but to die in a glade in the forest, stabbed by The Huntsman. The Queen exercised uncontested power within the castle, and with her magic, she could have killed Snow White easily and without repercussion. Yet, The Queen wanted to kill Snow White not out of jealousy, but to violate the very imagery of the forest glade, and the symbols of feminine innocence associated with Snow White, such as the flower. The execution is a spectacle, and one with a very limited audience: Herself, The Huntsman, and—The Magic Mirror.

The audience knows that The Queen has access to The Magic Mirror. Why, then, does The Queen order The Huntsman to bring Snow White’s heart in a box? The only compelling explanation is that The Queen ordered The Huntsman to kill Snow White not only to kill Snow White, but to bring about some manipulate some sort of influence on The Huntsman and The Magic Mirror (this begs the question of who these characters are, and what they represent not only to the audience but to The Queen as well, and we will return to this question soon). If The Queen wanted proof of Snow White’s death, she could ask the Magic Mirror. Yet, she does so anyway, after she has received the heart. She even keeps the heart until she talks to The Magic Mirror. Yet, she accepts the word of The Magic Mirror over the evidence of the heart she holds in a box. The Queen ordered The Huntsman to put Snow White’s heart in a box not as proof of death, but for the sake of having Snow White’s heart in a box, and as a way to spite the Magic Mirror.

The appeal of the heart in a box returns to the plot that occurs before the beginning of the film: The Queen’s forcing Snow White to work as a servant. When we first see her, Snow White is “garbed in rags.” When the Magic Mirror says, “Rags cannot hide her gentle grace,” what the Magic Mirror conveys to The Queen is that her attempts to mask, to compartmentalize Snow White’s beauty has failed. The task of The Huntsman, then, is to fulfill The Queen’s original plot: to compartmentalize Snow White. The other possibility, not mutually exclusive with the first desire, is to defy the judgment of the Magic Mirror.

The Mirror is more than just a mirror, it is a Magic Mirror, capable of replicating the same experience the audience receives with film. Yet, more than that, it might also be something hidden, and something displaced. The Magic Mirror is the voice of the missing King.

The Magic Mirror is located within The Queen’s bedchamber and is the only human figure other than the Huntsman that appears in a closed domestic space with The Queen. If one includes information stricken from the film by censors, we also know that The Queen is not the original Queen. She is a replacement, and the daughter of the king is not of her blood. We do not know much about The Queen’s relationship with the King either from the original fable or from the film, yet it seems that to become Queen, The Queen was judged almost solely on beauty. So, when it is the duty of The Magic Mirror to judge The Queen’s beauty, and is represented as the sole male figure in the bedroom, this implies that The Magic Mirror judges not only The Queen’s beauty, but her legitimacy as Queen.

When critics argues that Snow White is a sexist film, and seek to include The Queen in their interpretation, they point to her as a symbol of crazed vanity. After all, she is a woman who spends most of the movie staring into a mirror. (Instead of “Magic” think of the mirror as a “Crazy Mirror.” When The Queen looks into a mirror, she does not see herself. She sees Snow White, with a male voice saying: this is the fairest woman in the land. Identity issues, anyone?)

The “madness” of The Queen comes very explicitly from the Magic Mirror: when The Queen tries to see herself, she cannot. Instead, her perception of herself is mediated by the voice of the king; a king with a child from a former marriage. When the king, or the mirror, asserts that Snow White is “fairer” than The Queen, he is in some regard negating the very essence of The Queen. The Queen is not queen if the king still loves his dead wife, and their child, more than her. Yet, the madness of the Magic Mirror extends even beyond that. When The Queen looks at the mirror, she does not see nothing—she sees a male disembodied face. In a metaphysical sense, the mirror accurately represents The Queen from the perspective of The King’s. She is an intangible non-person, who can only speak with the voice of a man (the king). (Remember that The Slave in The Magic Mirror can still be interpreted as The Queen’s reflection.) The Queen has no purpose, because the previous wife has already provided a spawn, and the king is the sole voice of authority. She has no body because she has no direct power. She speaks with the voice of a man, because men are the only ones capable of being represented. That the mirror, then, asserts that Snow White is more beautiful is a crushing blow: the identity of The Queen is crushed by her sole means of mediation, and the king has admitted to finding his daughter as the most beautiful woman in the realm. The vengeance The Queen is not just out of vanity; it is revenge, for the king’s infidelity of voyeurism.

The betrayal of the Huntsmen, then, finally is the ultimate reaffirmation of the Magic Mirror, and it is he that levels the criticism that most accept without question. “She’s mad!” the Huntsman says, “Jealous of you [Snow White]! She’ll stop at nothing!” The first accusation is perhaps the most significant; the huntsman responds to The Queen’s desire to compartmentalize Snow White by then verbally compartmentalizing her under the category “mad.” The next, however is more informative: The Huntsman has no reason to believe that The Queen is jealous, unless he himself agrees with the Magic Mirror that Snow White truly is more beautiful, as the Magic Mirror contended. The Queen no doubt chose The Huntsman precisely because of his masculinity; his masculinity being reproduced by the dagger he wields. (The Huntsman has a very small phallic object…) The Queen wanted to destroy the appearance of Snow White’s virginal beauty by removing her status as virgin.

The Huntsman’s betrayal shows that The Queen never really had power. The Magic Mirror really is always right, especially in regard to beauty. The Queen has no power, neither as woman—since Snow White is more beautiful—nor as Queen—since The King outweighs her. If this is the case, then the madness of the Queen is that she asked the Huntsman at all. Since the Mirror is always right, she should have known she has no power.

When the Queen tries to kill Snow White again, she will not attempt to rely on her beauty to kill her—she knows that, so long as the Magic Mirror asserts that Snow White is more beautiful, she cannot work within the power structure already in place to reject the Magic Mirror’s assertion of beauty. Instead, she can only displace her rage by putting on the façade of something The Magic Mirror would characterize as ugly.

The Queen concocts a formula to:

transform my beauty into ugliness. Change my queenly raiment to a peddler’s cloak. Mummy dust, to make me old. To shroud my clothes, the black of night. To age my voice, an old hag’s cackle. To whiten my hair, a scream of fright. A blast of wind to fan my hate. A thunderbolt to mix it well. Now, begin thy magic spell.

Here the underpinnings of beauty come to the forefront. Clearly, the two most important facets of the transformation are clothing (indicative of status/wealth), and age. In the world of Snow White, age and ugliness are interchangeable, as evidenced by three of the ingredients being directly tied to age: the mummy dust, the old hag’s cackle, and a scream of fright, all transforming her to look old. Yet, the clothing is also quite notable, especially considering how the mirror stated in the beginning that clothing could not hide beauty. Yet, of them all, perhaps the most perplexing is the “blast of wind” to “fan my hate.” If the Queen is truly mad with jealousy and rage, there should be no reason for her hate to be insufficient.

What’s the point of this disguise? The dwarfs, after all, do not need an explanation that it is really The Queen beneath the disguise. There are only two figures that will ever see this disguise: Snow White, and The Magic Mirror. From the pragmatic perspective, the purpose of the disguise is to deceive Snow White. But once again, why the blast of wind? That would not help at all in deceiving Snow White. Instead, the fan of hate marks this disguise as not even wholly for Snow White’s sake: the fan of hate is only there to play into the sentiments of the male figures, of the Huntsman, the Dwarfs, and the Magic Mirror, because it is them that view her as hateful. And through The Magic Mirror, so too will the camera view her as hateful.

This transformation, partly to deceive Snow White, but partly to parody the Magic Mirror, is compounded and exaggerated in the object the Queen chooses to poison Snow White: the apple. Like the inclusion of the box, the flowers, and the forest glade in her orders to The Huntsman, the choice of the apple is more significant than merely as the instrument of murder. This significance is more easily explained if one takes into account the fable version of Snow White. The fable version follows the same basic arc, of Snow White’s expulsion, her hiding with the dwarfs, her biting the apple, and being kissed by the Prince. But the fable version includes two murder attempts directly preceding the use of the apple. First, the Queen appears and uses stay-laces to bind Snow White so that she cannot breathe, and when that does not succeed, she uses a poisoned comb. The symbolism here could not be more direct: The Queen is literally trying to suffocate Snow White with a symbol of “feminine beauty” in the case of the laces. When she poisons Snow White with the comb, she even remarks that Snow White is a “model of beauty.” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic discuss these images for precisely what they are, arguing, “the comb, stay-laces, and apple which the Queen in ‘Little Snow White’ uses as weapons against her hated stepdaughter… simply carry the patriarchal definitions of ‘femininity’ to absurd extremes, and thus function as essential or at least inescapable parodies of social prescriptions.” Although Gilbert and Gubar speak in regard to the fable version, their analysis is no less accurate in regard to the movie version.

Toward the beginning of the film, Snow White stands by a well and sings, “We are standing by a wishing well / Make a wish into the well / that’s all you have to do / And if you hear it echoing / Your wish will soon come true.” While she sings this, the camera moves away and watches a Prince, drawn by her singing, climb a fence and stand next to her. However, for Snow White, it appears that the echo of the well was what allowed her to meet Prince Charming. Afraid both of his sexuality and his dreamlike appearance, she retreats to her room. This is the only scene in which the camera records the Queen watching Snow White, and it is precisely this scene that the Queen chooses to parody when she seeks to destroy Snow White. The Queen says, “It’s apple pies that make the menfolks’ mouths water. Pies made from apples like these.” And later, “And since you’ve been so good to poor old Granny, I’ll share a secret with you. This is no ordinary apple. It’s a magic wishing apple… Yes. One bite, and all your dreams will come true.” The Queen seeks to not only destroy Snow White, but all she represents: including her desire to have her dreams magically fulfilled. Further, in the context of the fable, this scene allows the Queen to attack the final facet of Snow White’s appearance that demarcates her as “beautiful.” The three descriptions the Magic Mirror uses at the beginning of the film pertain to Snow White’s black hair, her red lips, and her white skin. The Queen’s choice of objects includes a comb for her hair, lace for her skin, and an apple for her lips. The comb, which in the fable shapes her naturally beautiful hair to the “latest style,” and the lace the Queen does “properly for once”. The apple, however, is the most significant: first, it parodies the “wishing” dreams of Snow White from the beginning of the film which no doubt reflect the “gentle grace” the Mirror remarks upon, the physical description of Snow White, and finally, as a parody of the myth of Original Sin. (If this last bit sounds absurd, bare in mind that both the tellers of fables in the 1800s and even American audiences in the early 20th century held Original Sin with much more significance than modern audiences might.)

In reproducing the narrative of Original Sin, The Queen becomes the Snake, or Satan (if one is going off Milton’s version). Like Satan, The Queen undergoes a transformation to provide a disguise. Like Satan, the only person to see this disguise is the recipient of the apple. Like Eve, it is Snow White’s innocence that allows her to be tricked. Both apples essentially have the same result: Eve, and all of womankind, must confront her sexuality as a result of eating the apple, and become clothed. Snow White, eating the apple, must forsake her fear of Prince Charming. The historical Christian argument has always been that it is because of woman’s biting the apple that facilitated humanity’s fall from Eden. All this imagery, The Queen co-opts in her plot to destroy Snow White. Eve could be said to be the prototypical virgin, and the epitome of innocence. The previous imagery that the Queen attacks, with the flowers and the forest glade, all evoke the Eden that Eve supposedly lost. Now, however, what is resulting in the fall—or rather, what is resulting in The Queen’s fall—is Snow White’s new innocence, and complete unabashed willingness to commit herself wholly to the masculine prescriptions for femininity. What the Queen ultimately parodies through the apple is the “gentle grace” that the Magic Mirror finds so attractive; what in other words, amounts for The Queen, as mere feminine dormancy in the wake of masculine power.

Ironically, Snow White’s bite of the apple does allow Snow White’s dreams to come true: when she awakes, The Queen is dead, and she has become Prince Charming’s lover. All the sacrifice needed was the loss of absolutely everything, including her voice and consciousness. In other words, all that was required to be Prince Charming’s lover is to become a completely dormant woman. Prince Charming functions within the film to confirm the notion of beauty asserted by the Magic Mirror. Yet, as the antithesis of the Magic Mirror, he also obliterates it. He has a body where the Magic Mirror is bodiless, and he is a Prince while the Magic Mirror is a slave. Yet both share precisely the same views of beauty. In doing so, he embodies the Magic Mirror’s thoughts. The movie begins with the Queen calling forth the Magic Mirror and demanding an assessment of female beauty and identity, and that assessment is given: it is Snow White. The film ends with the ultimate reaffirmation of this assessment. Prince Charming kisses Snow White, the masculine voice of judgment is upheld, and identity continues to be determined by image.

When The Queen looks into a mirror, she does not see herself. Despite this, she is often regarded as narcissistic. Not only narcissistic, The Queen is remarked upon as “mad,” “jealous” and homicidal (this last one being undeniably true, despite the problematic implications of the first two). Yet the film never directly explains the madness of the Queen. She is mad because she is violent and she is violent because she is mad. No consistent explanation is offered as to why the Queen demands Snow White’s heart in a box. No convincing explanation is given for her transformation into an old woman. No meaningful explanation is given for the choice of the apple. And the entailments of the apple as a choice are completely ignored. The film’s neglect of explanation leaves the audience with no voice other than that of The Magic Mirror, a figure whose awakening births the movie, and of which the antithesis—Prince Charming—removes from the screen entirely. Even from this view, however, and especially with the help of the fable, one can see that what is asserted as uncontested truth in reality is merely an argument, and although we perhaps still are not sympathetic to the murderous intentions of the Queen, we nevertheless do not have to regard her strictly as “mad,” and although she may be jealous, that jealousy no doubt is facilitated by the warped reflection she sees when she looks in a mirror. The Queen may not know that she is within a movie, and certainly is unaware of how the film operates the same as The Magic Mirror, but nevertheless by rebelling against the mediation of the mirror, she also is rebelling against the camera itself. This is the real heart of her madness; her unwillingness to be a moderated woman, the mediated woman, the figure that Disney, and perhaps the audience, regard as beautiful. Instead, if she cannot win a beauty contest, then she will assert her power through the only means she has: by choosing to gain control of her own appearance, and to reject and parody the Mirror’s conception of beauty. In a warped way, she may have even been successful. She made the top 20 of AFI’s “Top 100 Villains of all Time” list, whereas Snow White does not even make Top Heroes list at all. Most criticism that praises Snow White does not focus on Snow White or the Queen, but on the Dwarfs—those figures who manage to be distinctive despite their stereotypes. Snow White may be lumped together with the other “Disney Princesses,” but the Queen has been a favorite of artists other than Disney. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen entertains romantic fantasies with the Queen—perhaps expressing something resembling a backlash to her character—but nevertheless capturing the absurdity of her characterization. “You’re just upset,” Woody Allen’s character says, “You must be getting your period.” The “Wicked” Queen responds, “I don’t get a period. I’m a cartoon character.”

Why Does God Kill Children?

2007-12-15T15:51:00.000-08:00

When God Forsakes His Own
Or: God Felt Like Killing Your Children Today
December 15, 2007
Revised from a draft written on October 12, 2005

Mary Rowlandson’s The Grace and Glory of God tells the story of how, after witnessing the murder of her friends, the death of one of her children, and suffering starvation and depression, she is finally ransomed back to her husband for the cost of twenty pounds. How did she reconcile her traumatic experiences with her devout faith? Perhaps her husband can explain.

Following her return to her colony, on November 21, 1678, her husband, Joseph Rowlandson, gave a sermon entitled “The Possibility of God’s Forsaking a people”. The preface to Joseph’s sermon argues that, “As God’s presence is the greatest glory to a People on this side of Heaven, so his absence is the greatest misery on this side hell.” Why would God ever condemn man to this hell?

Well, as Joseph tells it, “When God forsakes his own, yet they cry after him, he withdraws himself from them sometimes.” Now it all makes sense. No, but really, Joseph asks, “why doth the Lord forsake such a People?” Well, Joseph is happy enough to provide “The Reasons” to his own rhetorical question.

“To Shew that he hath no need of any, he hath forsaken many, and may forsake many more, to shew that he hath no need of any. God would have all the world to take notice, (that though all men have need of him, yet) he hath no need of any man.” In other words, God forsakes man to show that God don’t need no one. God’s an independent man. You need God, God doesn’t need you.

“To testifie his Sanctity, and severity against sin. He will not spare them, that have been near him, if they will not spare their sins for him. He will not spare them, that have been near him, if they will not spare their sin for him.” God doesn’t need you, and if you don’t do what God tells you to do, he’ll up and blow town. In other words, “Do what I tell ya, OR ELSE.” Maybe God enjoys ordering people around?

“To be a warning to all that enjoy his gracious presence. That they see that they make much of it, and that they take heed that they do not sin against him, and forsake him, and provoke him to forsake them also.” Basically, if you like God, then you better enjoy him while you have him, because if you don’t love God enough, he’s outta here. Going, going, gone!

God will forsake you if you sin. Why is there injustice? Why do the Others come for you, kill your children, steal you from your home, and starve you? Because God felt like reminding you that no matter where you are, no matterwho you are, he might forsake you just to prove that he can. Even in spite of, or perhaps especially if, you love him.

Truth, Justice, Cosmogony, & Belief Part 1

2007-12-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

The Freak Show

Or: Are Black Women Really Apes?

December 9, 2007

Through the 19th century, carnivals put on the freak show. We only recently have evidence as to what real disease Joseph Merrick, or “The Elephant Man,” had. It was Proteus syndrome, named for the shape-shifting god Proteus. As for Saartjie Baartman, “The Venus Hottentot”, she had a condition known as steatopygia, and a sinus pudoris. The steatopygia enlarged her buttocks. As for the sinus pudoris, or enlongated labia, that wasn’t really a disease. It was merely an unusual genetic trait.

But what name do we give the disease of the spectators who paid to gaze at each of them? What name do we give those who paid extra to reach out and touch Saartjie Baartman’s enlarged buttocks? When Saartjie Baartman dies in Paris, Georges Cuvier compared her anatomy to that of an ape. Although he might have regarded as an intelligent woman who spoke Dutch fluently, he concluded she had an apish character due to her thick lips.

Cuvier was not an extraodinary case. William Smellie argued that nature “has formed the human species into castes and ranks.” Smellie argued African men and women were closer to apes then white men. Why? Because of what appeared to be the unusual shape of her sexual organs. If you are having difficulty making the link between sexual organs and being an ape, perhaps other great scientists can help clarify. Adrien Sharpy, for instance, believed that “the prostitute is an atavistic form of humanity whose primitive nature can be observed in the form of her genitalia.” In Sharpy’s cosmogony, black women and prostitutes were seen as very similar, a centeral bridge between the natural world and the civilized world. Black women and prostitues together were seen as being more like monkeys and chimpanzees than white bourgeois women. Scientists tried to cement this cosmogonic distinction and structure with experiments and surveys, so that breast size and pelvis shape were both characterized based on race and ethnicity.

But of course everyone knows better now. Just look at the arguments surrounding “The Venus Hottentot” and her return to South Africa. The BBC’s article “’Hottentot Venus’ Goes Home” includes the remark, “The French were concerned that to return Baartman's remains might lead to claims from other countries for return of artefacts held in French museums.” Yes, even today, the remains of Saartjie Baartman remains an “artefact.” What do you think the BBC would say if a white Christian male’s remains were examined by scientists post death, preserved and held on display for a century, and and then eventually asked to be buried by his descendants? Would he too be an artefact? Isn’t Lenin’s head floating around in a glass case somewhere?

Let’s return to Joseph Merrick, in particular Lynch’s adaptation of his story. Joseph (John in
Lynch’s version, reproducing an error going all the way back to Sir Frederick Treves) first goes to Dr. Treves as part of a deal Treves has with Merrick’s canival showman. During this first encounter, the scientific encounter directly mirrors the carnival encounter. In both, Merrick is objectified and regarded as inhuman. To be objectified does not imply that Merrick likes or dislikes the experience of being displayed; his desires are simply regarded as irrelevant. The community is impressed by his deformity. Yet, as the hospital leader points out, they cannot do anything for Joseph Merrick beyond the most superficial level. He is incurable, and thus the scientific community’s interest cannot be regarded as medicinal. Treves displays Merrick explicitly because of his phenomenal value as a biological Other. Once he has been seen and displayed, his value dissappears. Just as in the carnival, he is exploited and his rights as an individual are ignored. The first encounter between Treves and Merrick is not medicine, and is not even science.

However, the second encounter begins to take on a different shape. When Treves and Merrick begin speech therapy, and when Merrick surprises both Treves and the hospital manager with his intelligence, Treves begins to engage with Merrick on a more personal level. Some might argue that this stage too is exploitation. The character of Mothershead remarks that the people who visit him still only come because they “only want to impress their friends!” However, Merrick is capable of talking to the people who come and visit him on his second return to the hospital. To confine Merrick to indefinite confinement would no doubt be a greater error than to grant him sociality even if people still have difficulty accepting his appearance.
The film does differ from reality in many ways, but some conclusions remain the same in either case. The scientific community eventually wanted to help Merrick. This flies in the face of what happened to Baartman. She was dissected; he was cared for. What was the essential difference between them?

What insight Georges Cuvier believed he received from devoting 9 out of 16 pages of his dissection to the topic of her genetilia, one can only speculate at. His claim that, “there is nothing more celebrated in all of natural history” than her genetilia undoubtedly says more about Cuvier, and 19th century science, than Baartman herself.

Which was the freak—the sick man on the stage or the audience watching? Which was subhuman—the black woman or the men paying to poke her ass?

You decide.

Afterword

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