Of the many reactions to commentary over Avatar, my least favorite goes something like this: [Read more →]

I appreciate Tim Kowal’s long, thoughtful response to my post on Ben Stein and intelligent design, but after reading and re-reading it I’m afraid it misses the mark.  Lines like “Strictly speaking, natural selection is not a scientific theory” only help to harden that impression. They don’t call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.

Science, as I see it, is the process by which we as humans attempt to better understand the natural world.  Whether we want to phrase this as “God’s creation” or merely as “the natural world” is unimportant.  When it comes to actually taking apart the radio and figuring out how it works, we don’t need to ask whether it was made by hand or by a machine, in America or overseas. All we need to do is take it apart and then put it back together.  Similarly, with science – whether it is biology or geology or physics – all we need to do is ask the question “how?”

How does it all tick?

That, to me, is science.  The exploration of how the natural world ticks.  To me, as a person of faith, I think of this as a way to better understand God also, to understand how creation ticks. I find the anthropomorphizing of God in “theories” like Intelligent Design to be insulting both to God and to my intelligence.

Let me explain.  Let’s take, for example, the rock cycle.  This is the natural cycle whereby rock is pressed down into the earth and then reemerges as magma.  That rock – now igneous rock – is  pressed slowly down into the earth, turns into sedimentary and then metamorphic rock, and finally is melted down once again into magma.  It is a process which takes millions upon millions of years.  Understanding this process helps us understand the earth beneath our feet (and a great deal more) and it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of this process whether or not it was created or designed by God.  If a group of Intelligent Rock Cycle Designers came around arguing that instead of this being a natural process it was instead one guided by some other Intelligence, I simply fail to see how their alternative theory would be at all useful to our understanding of the rock cycle.

But does it diminish from it? [Read more →]

Sullivan nods approvingly at this passage from Conor on Avatar’s Na’vi:

The problem with the noble savage cliche is that it is demonstrably untrue. The people who inhabited North America before the arrival of Europeans warred, died for lack of medicine, sometimes killed animal herds so unsustainably that they faced starvation — so despite the manifold wrongs done by the Europeans to indigenous peoples, it is inaccurate and simplistic to screen stories where savage Europeans war with noble natives living in utter harmony with nature.

James Cameron isn’t portraying native people of our world. His alien protagonists aren’t intended as stand-ins for the Navajos or the Aztecs or the Cherokee. In his different world, the native people really are in communion with nature. Were his purpose to comment on European history, this would be a terrible choice, but in fact Avatar is a film whose purpose is allowing humanity to reflect on its circumstances and fallen nature in a novel way. That is why I approve of the decision to portray the kinds of natives that were shown.

Conor is off the mark here.  Cameron’s Na’vi were the noblest of noble savages – hands down the least complicated, least dynamic, most shallow savages written into a major film in – I don’t know – decades?  Years?  A really long time.  And Cameron was commenting on European/American history.  Science fiction is always about history.

The movie theatre I saw this in was packed, and about half the audience were Navajos.  My home town is mostly white, but the second largest racial demographic is Native American – mostly Navajo and some Hopi.  In college, pretty much all my lit classes were on multi-cultural themes, but the vast bulk of time was spent on Native American literature in particular.  I have spent more hours than I care to count thinking about these issues – about Native American rights, land rights, the various myths and religious themes which surround Native American culture, and the ways in which popular culture (and Hollywood) has portrayed native peoples in America.  I have a number of friends (past  and present) who are Navajo (or Diné, as they prefer to be called).  We even have a public elementary school here which teaches one third of all its material in the Navajo language (and one third in Spanish).

So, whether the Na’vi are simple “stand-ins for the Navajos” or whether Cameron was trying to write his very own native-from-scratch is immaterial.  Surely Conor has heard the term “extended metaphor” before.  Cameron’s alien moon, Pandora, may not be the American frontier, and the Na’vi may not be the Diné, but the parallels are obvious and purposeful.  And the real problem is not that such parallels exist but that Cameron’s handling of his Pandoran tribal people is so one-dimensional.

Why not rip off The Last of the Mohicans and have some bad Na’vi thrown into the mix?  That would at the very least be more interesting, and certainly more honest.  A film wherein the natives are not only exploited but turned against one another – whose weaknesses are exploited as well – would be more complex and realistic.  Or Cameron could have taken some pages from the The Mission - a film which took seriously the questions of colonization, religious colonization and the indigenous response, and the merits of passive resistance. [Read more →]

Ever since Will posted about Roger Ebert earlier I’ve been reading Ebert’s blog (which is fantastic) and came across this explanation of why he never formally reviewed the Ben Stein mockumentary (er, documentary) Expelled.  For those of you who don’t know the premise of that film, it’s basically Stein’s extremely dishonest propaganda exposé on Intelligent Design.  Here’s a passage (though you should read the whole thing):

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actuallydid want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

I know that both Ebert’s post and Expelled are old news at this point, but the debate itself is ongoing.  Will linked to this frightening story of the revanchist push in Texas to infuse creationism into Texas public school classrooms.  Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars. [Read more →]

This seems oddly relevant in the age of twitter: [Read more →]

Justin Gardener points out the obvious (something the mainstream media seems incapable of doing): [Read more →]

Rortybomb expands on his Evil Rorty scenario with a solution: [Read more →]

“In short, liberals and conservatives refuse to see the areas in which they have common ground because far too often they simply cannot get past the cultural markers that prevent them from even listening to the substance of what their cultural opposites are saying.” ~ Mark Thompson

In this post Mark is responding to what he sees as Jamelle’s assertion that the “hidden” welfare state is bad, whereas the “visible” welfare state is good.  Essentially Mark is asserting that liberals attempt to build the visible welfare state on top of the hidden welfare state, whereas libertarians and conservatives try to make the hidden welfare state smaller and more visible.

Now, I think this is not really what Jamelle was saying.  I think Jamelle was saying that we have a welfare state and that many Americans both appreciate the services that this state provides while at the same time not really realizing that it’s a welfare state providing them – the whole “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” thing.  He’s saying that Americans exist in an illusion of free markets and bootstraps while in reality we have a very large state apparatus which provides safety nets, subsidies, and numerous other benefits to countless people and businesses.  What he’d like to do is make that more obvious so that people appreciated it more and then, in turn, supported a further expansion of the welfare state once they realized what a good thing it, in fact, was.  Contra Jamelle, conservatives and libertarians would like to draw down the welfare state because they see it – whether it is visible or hidden – as an encroachment upon liberties, upon the economy, and upon prosperity, job growth, and so forth.  These two goals are entirely at odds.

So I don’t think that it is simply a cultural barrier which prevents liberals and libertarians/conservatives from working together.  I think it is a fundamental political difference in core beliefs about the size and scope of the welfare state which separates the two groups.

But it’s also the culture.  After all, politics is secondary to culture.  Cultural beliefs and norms and expectations drive politics – not the other way around. While political shifts can lead to shifts in culture, this is usually unintentional. Mark is certainly correct that it is the cultural divide more than anything which keeps liberals and conservatives from forming a united front, but then again that isn’t the whole story.  I think some groups of conservatives or libertarians could align quite nicely with specific elements of the left.  We’ve seen such an alliance in economics, actually, with the stronger elements of both the right and the left embracing free trade.  But the Tea Party right and the progressive anti-corporate, anti-free-trade left have much less of a chance at uniting because of the vast, gaping cultural divide between the two sides.

Can you honestly see Glenn Beck and Michael Moore coming together on many issues?  Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich may both be united in their opposition to many more mainstream bills and practices in Congress, but when it comes to their political goals the two are – save perhaps on foreign policy – complete opposites.  Their ultimate goals may be similar – a more honest government, working harder for the people and not for the elites and the corporations – but Kucinich and the progressives believe this can be done with a bigger state and smaller private sector, whereas Paul believes that the state is at the heart of the issue and should be dismantled as much as possible.

I’m very drawn to Mark’s liberaltarian cause, and to the idea of the sides working together in this way.  I’m just perhaps too cynical to believe in it.  I myself am rather a mixed bag and can find common cause with both elements.  But most people in these groups are not mixed bags. They’re die-hard partisans.  And they don’t like each other much, or at least what the other stands for and believes in – especially culturally, but politically too.

Mike Konczal (aka Rortybomb) has a really fascinating thought experiment over at his blog wherein, a la Star Trek (and later Southpark) he transforms into “Evil Rorty” in order to make a point about the predatory nature of credit cards on the poor, the cognitively weak, and other more disadvantaged types. The point he’s making is basically that the whole “irresponsible borrowers deserve what they get” argument is a false one, and I tend to agree.

The whole process of luring in irresponsible borrowers and then saddling them with fines, fees, and extremely high interest rates strikes me as fairly awful. People with very little credit and fairly poor credit – high risk people like college kids, poor people, and so forth – are nevertheless given high credit limits, are lured in with perks and benefits, and are then pushed into a cycle of debt that is often extraordinarily hard to recover from. Many of these people were high enough risks that responsible lenders should never have extended so much easy credit to them to begin with.

At the very least, already we have two irresponsible parties – the borrowers and the lenders. Both have incentives to get into bed with one another.  The borrowers are typically low income or young. Having a line of credit increases their standard of living, at least at first, giving them some financial wiggle room, more purchasing power between paychecks, and a lifeline in case of emergencies. A relatively short line of credit is usually enough for this. A thousand dollars in case the car breaks down or in case you run short on bills and still need to pay for food and gas.

The lender has a more insidious incentive: when the borrower inevitably fails to “act responsibly” the irresponsible lender starts making some real money. That’s why they don’t give out just a thousand dollar credit limit but rather two, three, five thousand dollars – on top of other credit card companies who have already extended similar lines to the same borrower.

People who don’t see a problem with this relationship usually focus on the borrower rather than the lender as the sole irresponsible party, but that’s a wrong-headed way to look at things, especially since many of the people who get into these situations are young, ill-informed, and not prosperous or wise enough yet to manage the sort of responsibility that comes with having credit. In America, this sort of borrower is considered fair game, and the people who lend to them are called “bankers”. In more civilized places we refer to these people as “loan sharks”. In civilized places the burden of determining who is a responsible borrower falls on the lender’s head. This is what separates bankers from loan sharks.

This also reminds me of Bastiat’s parable of the broken window. Let me excerpt a bit of that here. Imagine the window in question is actually an unsustainable credit card debt and the expense of fixing the window is the expense of paying all the fines and interest on that debt: [Read more →]

I’m a little more than half way through the second book of Steven Erikson’s sprawling Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series.  And I must say, Erikson takes epic fantasy to a whole new level – and from what I’ve heard, the books get better as the series unfolds. Certainly the second – The Deadhouse Gates – is far, far better than the first – Gardens of the Moon.

I keep thinking back to R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, which was the first series I started since George R. R. Martin’s books that I thought was anywhere near as engaging or well written as Martin’s masterpiece – and I have to admit, I’m enjoying the Malazan books a lot more than Bakker’s work. While I think the actual prose found in The Prince of Nothing is better than Erikson’s, I also think that Bakker suffers from an obsession with characters who you simply have to hate.  You don’t love to hate them – you just hate them.  You don’t care about any of their fates.  You watch them suffer dispassionately, because you know that each and every one of them is awful and probably deserves it.  Even the characters you think have some shred of decency – when pressed – compromise that decency to become slightly more awful.

It’s sort of a masochistic experience. It gets hard to take.  I think Bakker wants us to believe that this is just the ugly truth – that humans are just selfish, manipulative and despicable at their core. Whether or not he’s right, it makes for some agonizing reading after a while, no matter how fascinating his world and the history of that world may be, or how lush and dark his prose.

[Read more →]

I’m not a widely published writer.  In fact, I’m not really published at all except in my various self-publishing venues.  (I mean to change that when I get around to it….)  But I do write in various forums, and it’s remarkable to me how differently I end up writing from one place to the next.  I don’t mean just the experience after the fact, either – the experience of engaging with commenters and so forth – but the actual process of writing changes between writing here at The League and elsewhere (at True/Slant or David Frum’s site or at the assorted other places I’ve guest-posted).

Here at the League when I write a post I have in mind the potential conversation that will ensue.  I feel like many of the readers and commenters here know me on a somewhat personal level or at least on as personal a level as is possible online.  And I ‘know’ many of the commenters.  There is an understanding between us, an ongoing relationship with its incumbent expectations and history.  People who have been reading me a long time know that I have flip-flopped on entirely too many issues, and many expect that I will continue to do so.  I am changeable.  And here at this particular venue, I feel free to explore ideas with that openness to change.  I can use my weaknesses to my advantage.   [Read more →]

I finally saw Avatar (in 3D) without anyone threatening to beat me up.  It was everything I thought it would be.  The 3D was cool.  The glowing plants in the jungle were really quite pretty.  The special effects were spectacular.

But for all its spectacular spectacle, beneath the blue-skinned exterior there wasn’t really any meat.  It’s basically Ferngully meets Dances with Wolves.  It’s a crowd pleaser if the crowd happens to be a new-agey set of anti-war, anti-capitalist environmentalists or, in other words, Hollywood.  The native Americans Na’vi are perfectly in tune with nature, and Avatar’s director, James Cameron, treats them like directors have been treating native people in Hollywood for decades – as noble savages.  The word “condescending” leaps to mind.

The evil soldiers are made all the more wicked because they’re working for a private corporation whose sole mission is to destroy the natural world of Pandora in order to strip it of its precious minerals (or mineral, rather – unobtanium to be precise….)  They are not only violent and callous, they are also greedy and imperialistic and doing it all not for love of country but for love of money.  The only people who are almost as noble as the savages are the scientists – and the wayward marine and heroic protagonist Kevin Costner Jake Sully.

Anyways, I won’t summarize the story.  I still think you can enjoy the film if you go in with low expectations for the plot.  Like I said, the visuals are really amazing.  I haven’t seen a movie in 3D in ages and it was entertaining.  I wasn’t ever bored even if I wasn’t ever really emotionally engaged, and even if I thought the plot was a bit contrived and a bit too much of a cliché.  That didn’t take away from the cool monsters and the battle scenes or the glowing flora and fauna.

I think Jonah Goldberg is right on the money here:

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I’m certainly one of those cranky right-wingers (wanna see my decoder ring?), though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

No, Cameron wasn’t trying to be controversial.  He was sailing in calm waters and he aimed to please.  And as an escapist jaunt in an alien world, it was a pretty good flick.  It wasn’t deep.  It didn’t have the emotional appeal of other epics like Braveheart.  And speaking of Mel Gibson films, it certainly paled in comparison in terms of quality or depth to Gibson’s marvelous Apocalypto.

It is what it is, and it can be a fun ride if you don’t expect anything more.  It is, as Douthat termed it, a “gorgeous disappointment.”