Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.                             

A Fresh Look at the Expansion Theory

When I first heard of the Expansion Theory years ago, I don't think I ever really considered taking it seriously.  It struck me as the sort of cornball idea that's only good for shaking up your preconceptions and possibly motivating you to consider different perspectives, the typical sort of thing that inevitably comes up in conversations about "thinking outside the box", something akin to my "microcosm" idea mentioned a few months back.  But yet, the theory has stuck with me, nagging at my mind from time to time, and tucked away on some back shelf where I didn't really bother talking about it.  Today, however, it somehow came up in a conversation I was having with my daughter, and this leisurely day of leftovers and laying around watching TV provided me with an occasion to dust it off, bring it down from the shelf, and reconsider it.  After some brief hunting around on the internet, I found some people who actually take the idea seriously, as well as some interesting arguments for and against.  Some of the advocates of the theory seem a bit...crackpot-ish, even a little too...Flat Earth, but some of them seemed to make a fairly sober and compelling case.  I won't say that I'm completely sold on the idea.  Far from it.  But I'm no longer so quick to dismiss it either.

For those of you who've never heard of it, the Expansion Theory is basically the idea that all the matter in the universe is in a constant state of expansion, and this expansion is fairly uniform.  Since (under this theory) we're expanding along with everything else, this expansion is nearly imperceptible.  If fact, it only manifests itself in one obvious way: gravity.  Confused yet?  Don't worry, my daughter didn't know what the heck I was talking about either.  Let me see if I can't find a way to make it clearer.

If I hold a ball in my hand, and I let it go, it appears to fall to the ground as though pulled there by a force of attraction.  What the Expansion Theory is saying is that the ball doesn't fall at all; it doesn't actually even move.  The Expansion Theory says that the Earth and the ball come to meet each other as they expand, filling the space between them.  Because I'm growing, and the room is growing, and...well, everything is growing, then I don't see that the ball gets any bigger.  I just see the ball and the Earth rapidly colliding.  You see, as long as I'm holding the ball in my hand, and I'm standing solidly on the ground, then the ball and I are both being pushed outward through space by the expanding surface of the Earth.  But the second I let go of the ball, it stays at that same point in space until the surface of the Earth expands to meet it.  To our eyes, it appears to fall.  (See figure below.)

I know, it sounds crazy, right?  The idea that you, your computer, and the room you're sitting in have all doubled in size while you've been reading this seems absolutely ludicrous.  But is it really any more ludicrous that attributing gravity to a curvature of space that you can't see?  Anyway, like I said, I'm far from completely sold on the idea.  It has a few obvious problems, and a few not-so-obvious problems.  For one thing, you have the fact that gravity gets weaker with distance.  At first glance this seems to definitely contradict the theory, but I've come across some intriguing proposals for tackling that problem.  Again, I haven't gone off the deep-end completely.  It's just something interesting to pursue on a lazy day while I lounge around the house digesting my turkey, a little worthwhile time spend outside the box.  I'll keep you posted.             

The Aliens Who Already Walk Among Us

What I am about to tell you is shocking.  If you have small children then you might want them to leave the room.  Of course, then you'd have to come back here to read the rest of the post, and that would leave the little tike unattended.  There's a good chance that they could hurt themselves or start crying because you left them alone.  That would be a big distraction.  To be on the safe side you should probably wrap them up in duct-tape and shut them up in a closet until you're done reading this.  I wouldn't want them to be traumatized.

If you've seen the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, then you probably know by now that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids.  If you haven't seen Ancient Aliens, it's basically a show made by people who think Occam's Razor is something you use to cut up lines of coke as you spin more outrageous alien theories for you next episode.  They use aliens as a ready explanation for all the mysteries of archeology, as though they had an unlimited tube of the stuff.  Primitive stones cut with amazing precision?  Must have been aliens.  Hieroglyphic carvings found in darkened chambers?  They must have had alien light bulbs.  Impressive feats of engineering?  Here, let me squeeze a little alien on that.  There you go.  It may at first glance seem like the stupidest show ever put on TV, but Giorgio Tsoukalos (pictured on the right) passes the History Channel's "fringe theory/crazyman beard" test, so there must be some credibility to what he says.  Yep, that's pretty sane looking facial hair he's got there.  Nothing weird looking about that guy.

Okay, so I think we've pretty much established that aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction.  I mean, we've established it to everyone's satisfaction, not that the aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction, although we do seem pretty happy with them.  Thank you, aliens.  Anyway, while the aliens were hanging around, overseeing the construction of these pyramids that were having built so that they could...ummm...well, uhhhhh...so that they could...ohhhh...  Anyway, they probably had camps set up on the site, and maybe they even had their families with them.  And maybe, just maybe, they even brought some of their household pets with them.

Now, we also know that the legendary Egyptian gods were actually aliens.  I think I heard that on Ancient Aliens too, or maybe it was that Stargate movie.  Anyway, that's not important.  The point is that if the Egyptians considered the aliens to be gods, then it figures that they would consider the aliens' pets to be gods as well, or at least highly superior beings, objects of reverence in their own right.  So what would happen if some of these alien pets got loose and ran away, as pets are known to do?  And what if some of these pets were left behind after the aliens had departed?  And what if the Egyptians found some of these strays, and because of their reverence for them, decided to keep them as pets themselves instead of cooking them over a barbeque?

So this is what an alien looks like, right?

Okay, you ready for it?

Ready!?

BOOM!  I rest my case.

              

The World (Reposted)

I originally wrote this piece for a project which Vincent and I were working on during this past summer.  I'm not sure how much sense it will make when taken out of the context of that project and all the strange metaphysical disputes Vincent and I were having, but I figured it might serve as something appropriate for Rachel Hoyt's latest sociology study which is on the theme of "doors & windows."  Anyway, it is what it is.  It's about the World.  I'm not sure how else to put it, so I'll just let it speak for itself.

It's Early Morning.  The light is just beginning to show in the sky outside my window.  A bird perched somewhere in the tree below greets the day with its delicate call.  Man has several names for this bird and this tree in various languages, and science has names for them in Latin which identify their genus and species.  I don't know these names, but then neither do the bird or the tree.  These names were not affixed to them by nature, but rather by man.  However, these names do identify genuine natural realities about them.  The words "bird" and "tree" signify them as something distinct from one another, and their particular names signify their distinctions from others of their type.  If it is a sparrow in the tree, we call it so in English because it possesses those attributes in common with birds of the type "sparrow", and in contrast to the attributes of another bird which we would call a "blue jay."  It has possessed these defining attributes for millennia before mankind affixed these attributes with the name "sparrow", for millennia before there even was such a thing as man, and it was certainly long, long before man began to be confused by himself and to doubt himself and to doubt the world and to ask, "Where is this 'sparrowness'?  Is it real?  Is it in the bird somewhere?  Could I find it if I cut the bird open?"  But the sparrow has gone on, simply being what it is, contently singing its unique song sung only by sparrows, oblivious to the sweet, simple, and breathtakingly obvious answer its providing to our question.

At this hour there is very little traffic passing by on the road below.  The road and the vehicles that travel on it are creations of man.  They were ideas conceived in the mind of man, and turned into physical realities by shaping and manipulating matter, giving it the form and function designed by the human mind.  These things stand as a testimony, as evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind.  The matter involved behaves according to physical laws, and the people who designed these things were able to do so because they discovered these laws, they believed these laws, and they shaped the material involved in such a way that they would be able to use these laws to their advantage.  The car travels on the road because of the laws of motion, of thermodynamics, of combustion, and many more besides.  If these laws were simply the invention of man, or if they existed solely as a fantasy in the mind of man, or if they had no relation to physical reality outside the mind of man, then the matter involved in the car and road would behave completely indifferently to these laws.  They would slump like stubborn horses refusing to stir as man struggles at the reins of his desires.  They would sit rotting in a field as useless heaps of junk.  For they themselves are objects which lie outside the mind of man and beyond its direct control.  The fact that the car works stands as proof of the accuracy of man's concepts of these laws.  Like the bird and the tree, man has named these laws, man has studied these laws and formulated theories about them, man has designated them by the general word "laws" because of his confidence in his own ideas about them, but the functions and relationships between physical matter that they designate are genuine realities.  And again like the bird, these functions and relationships existed long before man discovered them, long before man existed.  "Nature", Francis Bacon said, "to be commanded, must be obeyed."  The car drives by as elegant proof of this.

As the car passes, its sound increases in pitch as it approaches me, and then abruptly switches to a low pitch as it goes by and speeds off in the other direction.  This is called "The Doppler Effect", and it is a peculiarity of my perception.  The sound of the vehicle never actually changes, but yet this effect is not entirely an illusion either.  It is a relationship between my ear, the speed of the vehicle relative to me, my position relative to the vehicle, and the compression and decompression of the sound waves as they travel the distance between the car and me.  There are a number of such peculiarities.  These are not delusions or unrealities, but rather consequences of my perspective on the world.  The way the information of the world reaches my senses and my mind is itself part of the world, and it too behaves natural law.  Like the Doppler Effect, these things can be discovered, scrutinized, and studied as part of the reality with which we all have to deal.

Sometimes these peculiarities have led man astray, and such an example is appearing now just over the trees.  In casual speech we still say the sun is rising, but by now it is common knowledge that the Earth is turning to meet the sun.  It is true that I have no first hand verification of this fact, and that I'm forced to take other people's word for it.  It is possible that mankind is in error about this "common knowledge", or that a vast number of people have lied to me about it all my life.  But when I consider the evidence that the human race as a whole claims to possess on the matter, my mind is set at ease on the issue of error.  When I consider the number of people that would have to be involved in a "lie", various world governments, various space programs, phone companies, GPS manufactures, astronomers...well, the list goes on....I'm persuaded to accept this "word" as honest in the face of the alternative.  I'm confronted frequently by such situations, most of them not as clear cut and easy to decide on.  I weigh the available information, consider the agendas of the source, consider its fidelity to other information, and consider how much internal sense it makes unto itself.  It may not be the most solid foundation to decide what one believes in, but given the limits of my own first-hand experience, it's the best that I can do if I hope to learn anything beyond the limits of my own life and the things that I personally witness.  I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be, nor do I believe anyone else can claim to be.  It is always possible that I am mistaken, or that I have been misled.  But I believe that the truth is constant, irregardless of my wanderings.  I have seen Saturn through the lens of my own telescope, and I have seen that Venus has phases like our moon.  This is valuable corroboration of what I've been told, as well as an awe-inspiring experience.  There's nothing quite like seeing it for yourself.

Although I must occasionally rely on my fellow man for factual information, it is not through man that this information is fact.  Whatever the actual relationship between the sun and Earth, or the actual nature of anything else for that matter, the facts of these things exist without regard to whether they are known or believed by ten or ten million people.  I may rely on my fellow man in my belief that the world is round, but if the world is round, it is not out of respect to the opinions of men.  For thousands of years, man believed that the Earth was flat, and the world stayed round in absolute indifference to that belief.  When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by comparing a shadow made by the sun at Alexandria with a shadow made by the sun in Egypt, the truth of the round Earth was waiting there to be discovered, outside of the ignorance of man.  When Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the sun, the rest of mankind was still in the dark, scratching their heads over retrograde motion.  If facts existed entirely through men, then the entire history of science would just be men making things up and then selling the rest of mankind on the idea in order to make it fact.  It was the evidence presented by Copernicus and Eratosthenes that changed the minds of man, not the minds of man which changed the evidence.  The power of consensus is in its persuasiveness, not in its control over reality.  How can I know this for sure?  Another car drives by, reminding me of the physical laws by which it operates, reminding me of man's cooperation with those laws as facts beyond themselves, reminding that the inventions of man have often worked in defiance of consensus and the general faith of the population.

If I decide to trust in my fellow man, not as the determiners of my reality, but rather as fellow travelers seeking to discover its true objective nature, then I am able to gaze with them beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, and out to a distance of 14 billion light years in any direction.  This is not believed to be the limits of our universe, but it is the limit of what we can see.  We believe that this is so, because we believe that the universe came into being 14 billion years ago, and light from anywhere beyond that hasn't had time to reach us.  This last idea is bit controversial back here on Earth, it challenges what many other people believe, and leads to a lot of arguments along the frontiers of what we know, and what we are capable of knowing.  But like my sparrow, the universe goes on, placidly indifferent to the conflicts and confusion of man.  It is what is.  Whole stars are born and die out without man ever setting eyes on them, possibly without anyone ever setting eyes on them.  They burn just fine without the fuel of being seen.

So, this is the world as I find it.  My confidence in it begins with me, with my first-hand experience and with the rational conclusions that I have drawn from that experience.  I extend that confidence to the experiences, the explorations, the discoveries, and the ideas of my fellow man, depending on what degree I'm willing to trust them and how much I concur with their conclusions.  But I believe that the world out there beyond me and the facts of that world exist without regard for my confidence, or my confidence in my fellow man, or their own confidence in what they think they know.  I believe that the world out there is what it is regardless of what I think I know about it, or what anyone else thinks they know about it.  First-hand experience has convinced me of that much at least.  The world has demonstrated its constancy to me time and again.  I go to sleep, and reawaken and the world shows every evidence of having gone on steadily without my knowledge.  The world has cut me and bruised me many times to prove its solid existence.  It has often frustrated my efforts and at other times it has rewarded them in turn to demonstrate its indifference to my whims and wishes, and its obedience to my cooperation with its facts.

My understanding of the world begins here with me, in this room.  I can doubt the things I've been told about it.  I can doubt my own conclusions that I've drawn about it.  But I can not doubt the world itself.  I can not doubt the foundation of it, which begins for me with my immediate experience.  It could be said that I have no grounds for believing in this world, but yet I have no grounds for doubting it either.  The world itself transcends belief and doubt, because the grounds for those things have to be found in the world.

Suppose I do try to doubt the world.  I reject the world wholesale as it begins for me here in this room.  I try to flee from it through a door marked "doubt."  I find that this door opens onto this same room, and it returns me right back to the world, searching for the grounds with which to justify this doubt.  I dismiss this world as a dream, and again I try the door hoping it will return me to waking reality.  I find myself right back in this room facing the world which provides me with no evidence that I am asleep or that there is any "waking" world beyond this one.  I defiantly declare that the world is an illusion unto itself, and I flee again through the door, only to find myself dumped again on the solid floor of this room, the world showing me no distinction between physical matter and the illusion of physical matter.

As a thinking being, it is my privilege to keep insisting on trying that door for the rest of my life if I like, to perpetuate my attempt at doubt indefinitely, but I can not escape the fact that that door will always return me right back to this room.  It is not that I have grounds for believing in the world.  It is not that I have a reason to believe in the world.  It is simply that the world is inescapable.  My only choice is between the futility of trying that door over and over, or embracing the world as I find it, as it begins here with my immediate experience in this room.  Only by embracing the world can I leave this room, to explore it, to learn about it, to understand it, and to experience it.  

I Clone Bearing Memories

It probably shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that I have a fondness for identifying tropes from TV shows and movies, and I enjoy reading about tropes that others have identified.  But although I also indulge in the inevitable smart-ass tone which attends the descriptions of such things, I usually have some appreciation for the dramatic, esthetic, and even sometimes financial, considerations behind the use of these devices.  Even as I smirk at the contrivance, I still understand why everyone who goes on a soul-searching road trip in a movie drives a classic convertible, (Unless it's a family trip.  Then they'll usually drive an old, lime green, station wagon or a comically impractical behemoth of an RV.)

There is however, one trope in particular which I'm completely mystified by.  I've noticed it in several movies in recent years, the idea of a clone having traces of memories from the original subject.  Now, bear in mind, I'm not talking about the old school, Gee Whiz Bang!, type of cloning here, the kind where the subject steps into a big silver contraption covered with dials and switches, and after a few seconds of banging hammers, popping springs, and slide whistles, they step out in a cloud of steam with their very own doppelganger.  As preposterous as such scenarios are, there's still a certain internal logic to the idea that the memories carry over.  Such cloning works on the principle of a copy machine, and if the machine makes a perfect replica of the body, then it figures that the mind would probably be copied as well.

No, I'm talking about the more modern variation, where the clone is grown in a lab from strands of hair or tissue samples.  Frequently...too frequently...in such stories there will be a "startling revelation" at some point that the clone somehow possesses fragments of memories from the original.  "Residual memories" they'll often call them, as though your memories could leave a residue in your fingernail clippings.  I'm not sure how even one screen writer could reach such an ignorant conclusion, and yet the idea pops up again and again as if it's transcribed from some underground Bible of Hollywood mythology.  I'm not sure if it's just a holdover from the old method, or the product of some kind of New Age mysticism about the endurance of the human spirit, but it makes about as much sense as thinking people have to be shrunk down before they can fit in my TV set.  Considering that we are all, in a sense, "cloned" from a combination of our parents' DNA, you'd have to wonder why all our dreams aren't troubled with memories of our own conception.

And yet the trope persists.  It has become nearly the fastest way of ruining a movie for me.  Well, it might not ruin the movie, but it does remove me from its reality.  Just as the film thinks it's laying this Earth-shattering twist on me, I'm just shaking my head in weary disbelief, sighing because it happened again.  And it pops up in quite a number of different ways, and it serves the story in different capacities.  I'm going to break these capacities down into the categories of character, plot, and theme, and provide an example of each. (Be warned: All these examples contain major spoilers of the movies in question!!)

CHARACTER

The creators of the film Alien Resurrection were faced with a bit of a problem.  How do you continue a franchise when your main heroine committed suicide by doing a back flip into a pool of molten metal in the previous movie?  They did what any self respecting film-makers would do when they had a cash cow that desperately needed milking.  They had her cloned by some shady government operatives in a plot to harvest the alien embryo that had been gestating inside of her before she died.  Now, we can try to just accept the notion that the alien's DNA was bound up with her own, just from having the embryo implanted in her chest.  Whatever, we'll roll with it.  But then there's a scene early on where the scientists are informing the top military guy in charge that the clone appears to have traces of Ripley's memories.  Dum-dum-dummmm. "Why does it have memories?", the military guy asks.

Why, indeed?  I would speculate that they did it for the sake of character continuity, and for the sake of the audience.  If Sigourney Weaver was going to reprise her role as Ripley, then they wanted to establish some connection to the character she had played in the past three films.  I'm not sure why they bothered though.  Ripley spends half the movie in a creepy daze; she barely has any dialogue, and she even has a strange affection for the aliens as part of her genetic bond with them...or something.  That couldn't be farther from the original character, who's defining attribute was pretty much her seething hatred of the aliens.  I cringe to think that they may have just included the cloning clause so that they could turn Ripley into a walking collection of clever sound bites for the movie trailer.

"So I hear you ran into these things before.  What'd you do?"

"I died."

Uggghhh.  Moving on.

PLOT

As a fan of the animated series, I found the live-action version of Aeon Flux to be a bit disappointing.  Like many film adaptations of TV shows which aren't helmed by the original creators and don't grow naturally out of the series' original run, Aeon Flux failed to capture the tone of the source material and only superficially built on the original concept.  The animated series featured a dark and grotesque dystopian future, a mechanized nightmare that felt inescapable.  The movie, on the other hand, featured a botanical paradise where the organic blended smoothly with the technology.  It had a somewhat appealing look, and some inventive ideas that would have been right at home in a video game, but it just wasn't the same.

But I digress.  The plot involves Aeon uncovering some tired conspiracy where they've been abducting people and cloning them and circulating the babies back into population.  It's kind of a human recycling program.  I'm not sure why this would come as a surprise to anyone as the human race had been sterile for centuries, but maybe I missed something.  At any rate, Aeon eventually discovers that those Random Flashes of Images (now there's a phrase that should be trademarked) are memories from a woman named Katherine who lived hundreds of years ago, memories which have piggy-backed on the DNA samples down through the ages to arrive in a bad movie.  Turns out this Katherine and the original of the main bad guy were married in some past pre-clone life, and...oh hell, let's just move on. 

THEME

Of the three movies discussed here, The Island is the only one to make a definite statement against cloning.  It tells the story of a society driven underground after a devastating plague.  They all eagerly wait for their name to be called in a lottery where they'll win a chance to go to "The Island", the last disease free place on Earth.  Or at least, that's what they want you to think.  Turns out the inhabitants of this underground complex are clones of people out in the real world, and the only place they go when they win the lottery is an operating room where they get their organs harvested.

The movie uses a couple of conceits to convey its anti-cloning message.  The head of the company tells his investors that the clones are kept in a persistent vegetative state, but he later confides in someone that they found the organs to be useless unless they came from living, conscious, active bodies.  This is what necessitates the society in the underground facility and the whole fiction of the Island and so on.  This comes off like a desperate contrivance to justify the plot, but it's probably the most realistic thing in the movie.  For the past few years, scientists have been trying to clone a meat substitute from cow DNA, which they call "smeat."  The problem is that this smeat has the consistency of gelatinous goo.  It doesn't have any muscle tone because it doesn't come off of a living, active cow.

Less realistic are the dreams of one of the clones, Lincoln Six Echo.  It turns out these Random Flashes of Images are memories from his counterpart in the real world.  I file this under theme, because I think they're trying to make some sort of statement about cloning and the soul and...I don't know.  But I'm afraid they also threw it in to explain why Lincoln is such a quick study in the fast-paced action scenes.  Turns out the real Tom Lincoln is a bit of a "petrohead."  This is a Michael Bay film after all, and we all know he's a bit of a "dickhead."  So yeah, things get a little muddled.  He even throws in one of those "I'm not a number; I'm a name; Kunta Kinte" sequences, but it's so mishandled that it lands like an incomprehensible dud.  It comes off as tacked on, and when you come right down to it, the "Lincoln" part of his name is just as much a matter of bureaucratic filing as the "Six Echo" part.  I guess you'd have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about.  But then, if you haven't seen the movie, then you shouldn't be reading this anyway.  Don't say I didn't warn you!!                         

Ballad of a Slender Man

A few years back someone started an internet "hoax" about a mythical creature known as The Slender Man.  I hesitate to use the word "hoax", and I rope it off behind quotation marks, because even at the time of its origin, the creature was never presented as anything other than fake.  I'll say that again, as it bears repeating, The Slender Man was openly and clearly created as a made-up story.  It even appeared for the first time on a forum thread specifically designated for posting fake, photoshopped, paranormal images.  From there it grew on improvised details of child abductions and a catalog of manipulated images that amounted to the creepiest game of Where's Waldo? ever.  And yet, there are apparently people who believe that The Slender Man is real, and they report their own sightings without a touch of irony.

Which brings us to the point.  In the comments below the last post, Mr. Doug Cheese and I had a little tea party where we discussed spaghetti monsters and which one of us has the bigger crush on Justin Bieber (Doug, of course.)  I said that Richard Dawkins and the spaghetti folks base their entire case on the argument that people shouldn't believe something just because the possibility exists that it might be true.  The problem with this argument is that no one, to my knowledge, has ever believed something strictly because it was a possibility.  The poor bastard would be at the mercy of anything you told them.  You could tell them there was a giant pumpkin buried under the Statue of Liberty and they would start shifting anxiously in their seat, eager to get their hands on a shovel.

In fact, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a completely unfair model of belief, precisely because it's deliberately designed to be something that no one would ever seriously believe in.  It's a calculated absurdity.  It really tells us nothing about why someone would believe in something in the absence of solid evidence.  All it does is hold such people up to mockery, and try to make them look like buffoons.  It may be amusing, but it isn't enlightening.

On the other hand, we have The Slender Man here.  This is something that some people apparently do believe in, not merely in the absence of evidence, but with all available evidence actively pointing to the whole thing being an outright fabrication.  So, why?  The skeptical heathen in me would say that once you've removed evidence and reasonable argument, you're left with little more than wishful thinking.  But this comes off as more derogatory and cynical than I intend for it too.  "Wishful Thinking" isn't just the refuge of delusional fools.  It's a significant part of all our lives.  It fuels our dreams and, as the insistence on The Slender Man shows, even our nightmares.  It is a necessary ingredient of any leap of faith, and some leaps are greater than others.  It can lead us astray, but it doesn't necessarily always lead us into error, and this is where our more prudent sides look for proof.  Sometimes we rely on evidence not just as a map of reality, but also as a way of tracking landmarks in our flights of fancy, something to tell us that we might not just be kidding ourselves.  And we all do this.  We all get out ahead of our more sober judgment at times, pursuing the intriguing possibilities.  It may even be an indispensable part of human existence, something we couldn't function without.  It may drive us to make fools of ourselves at times, but before people get too smug in their mockery, they should remember that we all chase our own spaghetti monsters in one form or another.

The cautious, incremental steps of the scientific method are an invaluable aid for keeping us grounded, and keeping us from getting too carried away by these impulses.  But people like Richard Dawkins sometimes come to think of the scientific method as a lens through which you view the world, instead of a tool with which you check your work.  There's always something to be said for dreaming, for speculating, for following a crazy idea just to see where it leads.  It might even lead you to a open clearing of breath-taking truth that you wouldn't have found otherwise.  

Now, Doug, that's a stickman with angst ;)                  

The Richard Dawkins Elimination Scheme

In several interviews I've heard evolutionary biologist and notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins, make a statement to the effect that over the ages mankind has gotten rid of a vast pantheon of gods, and all that remains is for us to rid ourselves of the last remaining one.  He seems quite satisfied with this formulation of his, as often as he's repeated it.  I think its pat simplicity appeals to him.  It suggests that history is on his side, trending towards his point of view.  Now, I'm not here to defend religion.  I'm not even here to take a definitive stance for or against Dawkin's atheistic position.  I'm just here to take issue with this idea of his, which I think gives him the appearance of having a very shallow and superficial attitude towards religion, and which plays into the stereotype of atheists in general.  He comes off as the sort of person who dismisses belief in a deity as a bunch of superstitious poppy-cock, good for nothing but providing comfort to gullible idiots.  Such flippancy isn't going to do much to help his case.

For starters, his formula isn't even accurate.  While it's true that the three major, Western religions are all monotheistic, and that they all have roots in the same Hebrew texts, I'm not sure that anyone can say for certain that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all worship the same God.  Is the differences between them just a matter of doctrine, or are they all following completely different deities?  Are they on different trains or different tracks?  Who can say?  At the very least, the other two religions definitely don't agree with Christianity about Jesus being God, or a part of God, or a dimension of God.  That alone suggests that they're operating in different spheres.  Also, you have the plain fact that polytheism still exists in the world, most notably among the Hindus.  However, I'm most certainly not here to take Dawkins to task for toe-stepping or offending people.  That was pretty much inevitable from the moment he declared himself an atheist.

No, the far more troubling problem with his formula is the impression it gives that monotheism was arrived at by a process of elimination.  You almost picture an all out death match among the gods, and Jehovah ended up being the last deity standing.  This completely misses the fact that a monotheistic deity is of a completely different stripe from a polytheistic one.  Divine apples and celestial oranges.  Monotheism wasn't the result of some stream-lined clearinghouse of the gods.  It was a revolutionary concept.  A completely different approach to the matter of religion.  Abraham's belief in one "true" God took everything in a fundamentally different direction.

Oddly enough, monotheism opened the road for a scientific outlook to eventually emerge.  Under polytheism, the workings of nature were often attributed to a kind of drama among the gods, this god controlled the wind, this god controlled the sea, and so forth, and the storms and shifts in the air were a result of conflicts between them.  By consolidating the workings of nature in a single deity, monotheism consequently suggested the idea that this deity had designed nature to work by a certain clockwork system, rather than by the struggles and politics between opposing gods.  There is a placid austerity in the creation story recounted in Genesis that stands in stark contrast to the violent chaos found in other creation myths, and it's even been suggested that God's "day of rest" was specifically included to highlight this fact.  The monotheistic universe is not a product of strife and war, but rather of contemplated design.

Also, I believe that it's no coincidence that Abraham's monotheistic revolution came with the stipulation that no one was allowed to create a image or likeness of their new God.  You see, one of the problems with polytheistic gods is that they can't really grow as concepts.  They are almost inevitably bound in the form of concrete, perhaps ever physical, creatures by the relationships between them.  The fact that the dramas between them make it necessary to even imagine them speaking to one another and interacting in a clearly physical way, keeps them tied to Mt. Olympus instead of ascending into the ether.  A polytheistic society can only really progress by outgrowing their gods, to relegating them to the realm of stories and fairy tales.  Polytheistic gods are bound by their presence to one another, but a monotheistic God is present only to itself and only briefly glimpsed or sensed by the creatures on the mortal plane below.  A monotheistic God can be invisible, ineffable, limitless.  It can pass effortlessly in the mind between the abstract and the substantial.  Ostensibly, I'm sure the taboo against creating images of God was considered a token of reverence and respect, but in reality, I'm quite convinced the taboo was there to keep them from trying to place any concrete limits on the concept of God.  An impressive precaution.

As such, there are no limits to which man's understanding of a monotheistic God can grow.  In fact, it is an integral part of the concept of such a deity to perpetually transcend those limits (something I plan to get into in an upcoming post.)  A monotheistic God keeps pace with human progress, rather than falling behind as the polytheistic gods inevitably do.  The human concept of a monotheistic God changes and grows and evolves, and from the believer's standpoint God is up there, constant and beyond comprehension, and it is man changing, growing, learning, and groping up gradually towards the light.

None of this necessarily invalidates Dawkins' atheist position, but it does put a different spin on his dismissive flippancy.  He can't expect a monotheistic God to fall by the wayside like many of the polytheistic ones have.  A monotheistic God is a far more tenacious concept, more resilient and adaptive then he's willing to give it credit for.  I don't think it's something that is simply going to fall out of fashion.  A belief in God may even persist as long as there are human beings.  I'm not sure I can even conceive of a point along the time-line of human progress where a believe in God would become completely impossible or insupportable.  And as long as that possibility exist, there are always going to be people who believe in it.  Richard Dawkins might have to just accept that.                   

Collateral: The Things That Matter to Us

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

That line comes from Vincent, the coldly efficient hit man in the movie Collateral.  It's arrives at a pivotal point in the story, and it expresses Vincent's extremely nihilistic outlook in a simple and straightforward manner.  It's a clear-cut moral rationalization, and yet it has a sort of enticing logic to it.  It would seem that from a far enough perspective, and on a broad enough scale, that the problems of three little people really don't amount to a hill of beans.  Vincent's night of systematic elimination might seem brutal and tragic in close, human terms, but to him it's all "a speck on a blink."

This statement, however, leads to an unintended epiphany for Max, the cab driver which Vincent has coerced at gun-point into driving him around all night as he runs his "errands."  Max's epiphany and his subsequent actions reveal the fatal flaw in Vincent's philosophy.  Here he is declaring that nothing really matters on the grand cosmic scale, and yet all night long he has been using the things that matter to Max as leverage against him: his life, his mother, his job, his hopes and his dreams.  This blatant contradiction throws Max into a rage, and yet it also gives him the clarity to see through the things that have been holding him back in his life.  What Vincent takes as a nihilistic blank check that justifies murder, Max takes as a liberating affirmation that allows him to see the concerns that have been restraining him for the petty trivialities that they really are.  He takes Vincent's philosophy to its logical conclusion, jams on the gas, and flips the cab at full speed, nearly killing them both.  Perhaps Vincent would have been better off keeping his rationalizations to himself.

But Collateral, after all, really is Max's story.  Through-out the night we're given enough information to piece his life together.  He has been driving a cab for years, but he harbors a secret dream of someday owning his own limousine service.  "Island Limos", he calls it, and he grows somewhat wistful when he speaks of it, "You never want to the ride to end."  He says that he's just waiting to get enough money together, the right client list, ect., but there's a sense that underneath it all that the dream will stay a dream, and deep down Max fears that he'll spend the rest of his life driving the cab.  Vincent cuts immediately to the core of this fear and he needles Max relentlessly with it.  He taunts Max with it, rubs it in his face, because...well, maybe just because that's where Vincent's predatory mentality drives him.

Vincent arrives in Max's life like a walking personification of the kind of near-death experience that kicks someone out of the comfortable complacent place they've settled into.  He starts off as just another fare, but even then he's waving a wad of money in Max's face, asking him to bend the rules and chauffeur him around for the rest of the night.  Max reluctantly agrees, already a little out of his comfort zone.  When the first of Vincent's victims falls out of the night and lands on the windshield of Max's cab, he suddenly discovers exactly what kind of insanity he's gotten himself into here, and now there's far more than his cab license at stake.  His life itself is at risk, minute by minute, as Vincent turns his gun on him and tells him to get in the cab and drive.  It's the kind of thing that puts your life in perspective.

But Collateral is more than a movie about a man taking stock of his life in a dangerous situation.  It pivots on Vincent's philosophy.  For Vincent it is a bleak declaration of despair and meaninglessness.  For Max it is an awakening to the fact that his life is his to take control of, and make the most of.  In a pointless "speck on a blink" what does he have to lose?  Isn't "Island Limos" a small risk to take in the great scheme of things?  That's what Vincent is missing.  The things on this little speck matter, because they matter to the creatures living on this little speck.  Max sees liberation, because he cares about something, because he has a dream, and because he sees that the dream only matters because it matters to him, and it's up to him to do something about it.

By confronting us with a man who lives beyond the concerns of morality, who murders his victims with the cold efficiency of checking off a laundry list, Collateral propels us out there to that place beyond the galaxies and stars where it all becomes meaningless.  And then through Max, it draws us back to Earth with a renewed appreciation for the things we truly care about, and the fact that we alone give them meaning.  "Island Limos" might mean next to nothing on a speck of dust in limitless space, but it's Max's piece of that speck and it means something to him.  A powerful argument against Vincent's nihilism, and an elegant display of philosophy in action.  It's a deceptively simple movie that raises some complex issues.            

Deer Jerky is Delicious

From the looks of it, it appears that every Monday morning someone shows up at my work with Sunday's paper, and then they proceed to have an epileptic fit which involves throwing the sales flyers around in all directions.  Every Monday night, we find the aftermath of this episode scattered all over the break room, and we all sit around thumbing through these flyers and having fairly insipid conversations about them until someone has the good sense to finally gather the whole mess up and throw it in the garbage.

This past Monday I came across a flyer for a sporting goods store which featured deals on several different hunting rifles, and I was struck by the fact that Deer Season is here again.  Even for a vegetative, indoorsy person like myself this fact is inescapable at this time of year in Northeast Ohio.  Plus, given the random proliferation of hunting magazines that pop up all over the shop, I'm guessing someone around there really has it in for the deer.  So I was looking through this flyer, and I made the off-handed remark that the way rednecks act about hunting always strikes me as "borderline psychotic", which I admit is a fairly exaggerated statement, and probably grossly unfair.  But then this woman that I work with that was there in the break room replied that it was "nature", which would have been the stupidest argument that I've ever heard for hunting, if she hadn't followed it up moments later with the notion that it's a "sport."

For the record, I eat meat.  I eat a lot of meat.  Three of my four basic food groups are meat, and the fourth one is whatever kind of animal fat that is that they deep fry Hostess Fruit Pies in.  So, I'm obviously in no position to get a holier-that-thou attitude about killing animals.  Any animal that sees me coming with a fork would be well advised to run the other way.  Also, I'm not so blinded by liberal outrage that I can't understand that hunting was once a necessity of human survival.  Food wasn't always neatly packed on Styrofoam trays, shrink-wrapped in plastic, and placed on display in the local supermarket.  You either grew it or hunted it, and there was even a time when the cultivation needed to grow food was beyond the range of humanity's mental horizons and the comfort of their living conditions.  There was a time when hunting was the only way to survive.

I suppose that an argument could even be made that hunting in the modern age is a way of passing a vital tradition down from generation to generation, a way of preserving a skill that could be needed if civilization ever collapsed and we were driven back to stalking the woods for our food.  I can see that.  There's something to be said for not surrendering completely to the comforts of a technological society, for keeping the gun loaded and the eye steady should the wolf reappear at the door.  I can almost even understand the mystical reverence that people like Ted Nugent have for the practice...almost.

However, I don't think that throwing the word "nature" at the subject is a valid argument.  What's natural about laser powered scopes and night vision goggles?  Is the fact that you're going out to the woods with your gear make the activity an inherent part of nature?  Is it natural because animals hunt one another?  Is it natural because our ancestors hunted?  Declaring that something is "nature" seems like a vast cop-out, as though it's something beyond argument or morality, something we're driven to do by our lower reptilian brain and our baser instincts.  Sorry, I don't buy that.  Civilization means, at the very least, an attempt to rise above these things, to curb these primitive impulses.  If we're going to start throwing out "nature" as an excuse for our actions we might as well strip down now and abandon the cities and return to the trees.

Arguing that it's a "sport" is an even bigger cop-out.  How does calling something a "sport" magically supersede the moral issues involved?  What exactly qualifies it as a "sport"?  I suppose the tracking requires a certain amount of skill that could be classified as sportsmanship, but other than that it's basically just picking up a gun and killing a defenseless animal.  It's a bizarre sport where the other team isn't aware that they're even playing, they never asked to play, they were never asked if the wanted to play, and their only notification that the game was on was a bullet between the eyes.  They don't even get endorsement deals!  Seriously though, even if an argument can be made that it is a sport, then it still seems to me like a lame point to raise against ethical objections.  "Well, it's a sport!", comes off pretty weak.

So, I can understand the idea of keeping the skills sharp, and I have no room to object to the idea of killing animals and eating the meat.  It's hard to argue that point with a roast beef sandwich in each hand.  I guess it all comes down to a sense that for some of these people it isn't about survival, or tradition, or even food.  For some of them it comes off as simply a twisted need to go out and kill something.  Still others seem to do it for some kind of masculine validation.  Either of these seem like pretty dickish reasons to go out and shoot an animal that was minding its own business.  At least, that's my opinion.