Three Body Blood Libel Narrative

 

Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem is one of my favorite works of science fiction. I have just started watching the Netflix adaptation so I do not yet have a firm opinion of it. One of the things that I admire about the book is its exploration of the insidious power of propaganda. At the beginning of the novel, we are treated to a mob of Cultural Revolution students calling for the blood of a professor for teaching the "heretical" theory of relativity. This raises the question of how one goes about creating such fanatics. We are given a possible answer later in the story with the Trisolaran video game. 

(Spoiler Alert)

The alien Trisolarans, in order to prepare the way for their invasion of Earth, are recruiting human followers. Their method is through a video game. The game appears innocent at first. What players do not realize until they are well advanced into the game is that they have been learning the history of the Trisolarans and that these Trisolarans are not fiction. Having absorbed Trisolaran propaganda, the human players come to believe that the beauty of the game indicates that the Trisolarans must be virtuous and that it would be a good thing if they took over the Earth. To be clear, what makes the Trisolarans so interesting as villains is that, throughout the series, the reader is repeatably tempted to believe that the Trisolarans actually are good at heart, despite what they do, because of their artistic talent. 

The obsessed game players come to form a society to help the Trisolarans, the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Having come to completely identify with the Trisolarians, members of the ETO turn into utter fanatics in their desire to betray humanity. They hate humanity and believe that the only way they can redeem themselves and become truly Trisolaran is by destroying the human race. As such, members of the ETO have this schizophrenic view of the Trisolarans. Much like Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, they simultaneously believe that the Trisolarans will bring about a golden age where both species live in peace together and that the Trisolarans will wipe out humanity because humans do not deserve to live.         

Considering this idea that you can create fanatics by surrounding people with a propaganda narrative, I was struck by the Time review of the series. Normally, you would think that a review of a show based on a book written in Chinese nearly twenty years ago would find no need to bring in contemporary Western politics. Instead, we are treated to the following paragraph:     

What resonates most about the series is its ambivalence about the prospect of an alien civilization annihilating humanity. The Oxford Five’s debate on the matter does seem timely, in a world where, in a state with anti-trans policies, a non-binary teen dies a day after being beaten at school; and the massacre of 1,200 people in one country is answered by the killing of 30,000 people and counting next door. Even without extraterrestrial meddling, scientists’ decades of warnings about the climate crisis didn’t prevent 2023 from setting a record for carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

One is struck by the dishonesty of the claims being made. The student in Oklahoma did not die from injuries sustained in a fight that it seems they started so it is absurd to fault State officials (or, for that matter, Chaya Raichik). Israel is not simply killing people out of revenge. They are attempting to go after members of Hamas who carried out the massacre even as the fact that Hamas has embedded itself among Gazan civilians guarantees that many innocent Gazans will die as well. The main reason why carbon emissions continue to rise is that people outside of the West, particularly in China, have been making economic progress and can now afford cars. 

The point of throwing these comments in the middle of a review is to serve a narrative that closely parallels that of the ETO. There are these terrible people, religious Christians and Zionists, who are out to murder trans-kids and Palestinians. They are also responsible for global warming. Clearly, if we do not form mobs and murder these people, the whole Earth is going to be destroyed. As with all good propaganda, the point is not to make arguments as arguments require evidence and can be countered. What you want is a narrative as you cannot argue with a narrative. It is simply what “everyone” already knows to be true  

2018 in Reading

Here is a shoutout to some of my favorite books, whether on Judaism, history, education, or science fiction, that I read this past year. 

Judaism

Hasidism: A New History. Ed. David Biale.

This book reminds me of the famous H. H. Ben Sasson Jewish History as a large single volume with multiple people writing different parts that summarize where the scholarship stands at a particular moment. This is not an easy book, but, certainly, one that repays careful reading. On a personal note, my father's favorite shul, Emunas Yisroel, gets a paragraph as an example of how Hasidism can function without a formal rebbe. 

Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson by Elliot Wolfson. 

The book about Chabad messianism by a former professor of mine not named David Berger. Wolfson exemplifies an argument that figured prominently in my dissertation on Jewish messianism that, at the heart of rabbinic Judaism, there is a thin line between the spiritualization of messianism and its elimination. Reading Wolfson has helped me make sense of a line of Chabad apologetics I have run into in personal conversations in which the Rebbe was a successful messiah if we just properly understood what messianism is supposed to mean. 

Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage by Nathan Lopes Cardozo.

This is one of those books designed to generate conversations/pick fights. One can make a fair case that Cardozo is a heretic from Orthodox Judaism in the sense that, even if his beliefs cannot be refuted merely by appealing to the source material, there is something about his thought that subtly undermines an aspect of Judaism that is necessary to its identity. Critical to Cardozo's claim to legitimacy is the assumption that there exists a constituency of halakhicly serious Jews who do not identify as Orthodox or at least might become serious if only they could be presented with a more flexible less morally tone-deaf version of halakha. I fall into the former category but have never gotten the sense that you could build a community around people like me. The Conservative movement is collapsing and I fail to see where there exists a market for a more traditional but still not conventionally Orthodox version of the movement. Perhaps things are different in Israel. 

American History

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro.

I have read three of the four volumes. I still need to read the really big one on LBJ's years in the Senate. These books are the real-life version of the kind of politics you see in House of Cards. 

Much like Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Caro seems caught between his heart and his head. Both writers feel a compulsion to insist that the New Deal protected the common man from big business or blacks from segregationists. At the same time, the actual story they are telling is how New Deal politicians were corrupt and in bed with the worst sorts of business interests and segregationists.  

The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind - and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healey.

One of the challenges of history is to get your mind wrapped around the idea that people thought differently. Here, we have a critical part of the story of how the J. S. Mill understanding of free speech came to replace the more traditional one of William Blackstone, which only stopped the government from arresting people before they publicized an idea but not afterward. The Blackstone model while keen on protecting the people's ability to have the information needed to make use of their vote, did not value diversity or believe in social progress. The group in charge believes that they are right and oppresses their opponents. If a minority is willing to undergo martyrdom for their beliefs, maybe one day they will seize power and turn the tables on their oppressors. Ultimately there is no wider value system built around freedom of expression beyond the letter of the law. One advantage of this position is that it does not require you to rely on the intellectual honesty of your opponents that if you allow them to spread their ideas, they will allow you to do so in turn. In a world in which both the right and the left accuse the other of hypocrisy when it comes to free speech, it might make sense for both sides to drop Mill and replace him with the narrow legalism of Blackstone.  

Classical History

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown.

Here is another book that asks you to rethink terms you take for granted. In this case, wealth, poverty, and charity. Brown's larger project has been to map out a period of late antiquity from the fourth through sixth centuries in which Rome did not suddenly become Christian and come to a violent end leaving the Middle Ages to come out of the rubble. In this book, Brown charts how one goes from a pagan Roman understanding of wealth as something to be spent for the benefit of the city in order to gain honor to donating to the Church to earn a reward in heaven. This also involves the invention of the poor as a trans-urban class with their paradoxical states of blessedness and pity/contempt. Libertarians will find inspiration in considering how the modern welfare state, as the product of a post-Christian world, is the heir to this same paradox when confronting poverty. This book will also prove helpful to readers of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois series trying to understand her argument that bourgeois values are a product of the eighteenth century as Brown offers us a distinctly pre-modern unbourgeois understanding of wealth. 

Spirituality

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem by Rod Dreher.

In looking over the ruins of the conservative movement in the wake of Donald Trump, one needs to consider the failure of the conservative intellectual tradition that made this possible. In order to reconstitute such a tradition, conservatives will need to go back to educating a class of intellectuals from the foundation up. This means literature, which sets the agenda for the imagination. Dreher provides a good example of what it means to read literature from a religious perspective. In addition, we have a powerful memoir of a difficult and ultimately tragic family life. Dreher's family reminds me a lot of my own in that my parents and siblings have made different decisions in our lives and, no matter how much we love each other, it is the kind of love best conducted at a distance. In contemplating the challenge facing conservative intellectuals trying to affect the modern imagination, see also Alan Jacobs' Year of Our Lord 1943, which takes a critical look at the failed attempt by Christian thinkers such as C. S. Lewis to influence the course of post-war culture as it was being born.     

What I Believe by Leo Tolstoy.

If you think of Tolstoy as simply a writer of long melodramas involving Russian aristocrats, welcome to the other later and highly subversive Tolstoy. Here is the Christian Tolstoy at war with all Churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox one. If you have trouble understanding how serious spirituality will inevitably threaten any religious establishment, here is a good place to begin. What I found particularly intriguing about Tolstoy is his brutal consistency as a pacifist. He recognizes that pacifism will not end oppression nor lead to peace on this Earth. On the contrary, as a Christian, Tolstoy embraces martyrdom as the endpoint of his pacifism. Furthermore, Tolstoy is an anarchist and does not dance around the fact that, forget about the military, no true Christian can allow themselves to serve on the police, in the legal system, or hold any political office.  

Education (Politics)

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

For fans of Jordan Peterson and the whole school of "owning the libs," here is a better alternative. This is a book that could have simply been a polemic against Social Justice Warriors and probably would have sold more copies if it did. Haidt and Lukianoff, perhaps because they are not creatures of the right nor are they trying to ingratiate themselves with the right by offering it a pat on the back, are able to implicitly attack the campus left by avoiding the trap of left vs. right. This may not sell books but, in the long run, this is how you reach out beyond your echo chamber and influence people.

In a similar vein, I recommend Sen. Ben Sasse’s Vanishing American Adult and Them, which deal with the failure of modern American education to create proper pathways to adulthood and how this has contributed to our current politicized discourse. In examining the origins of this politicization Yuval Levin’s Fractured Republic points to the fact that both the right and the left show a certain nostalgia for mid-20^th century America. He argues that the social revolutions of the period such as the civil rights movement and the counter-culture were made possible because they were working off of the strong social cohesion of the 1950s. In essence, both liberals and conservatives want to go back to a part of the 50s while ignoring an essential aspect of what made that culture possible. All of this literature owes a debt to Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community, which argues that Enlightenment relativism has cut off the very branch that it relies on to make itself possible.  

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan.

One of the frustrating things about trying to make the case for not sending my kids to school is that defenders of conventional education operate as if the burden of proof is not completely on them. Instead, they turn around and make unicorn arguments premised on assuming that schools actually do what they are supposed to. I am then challenged to explain how my admittedly flawed alternatives can possibly compete with their ideal system. The key to reading Caplan is to not whether you find his figures convincing. Rather, it is to recognize that it is even possible to seriously question the value of conventional schooling. The moment you find Caplan even vaguely plausible then a crushing moral burden has been placed on defenders of education. Either they produce evidence to justify spending billions on education (the kind of evidence that would convince people to throw similar kinds of money on pharmaceuticals) or they must step aside and allow for the separation of education and state.   

Autism

Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer. 

Some of you may have noticed that I have stopped referring to myself as an Asperger. In recent years, the reputation of Dr. Hans Asperger has taken a downturn as more information has surfaced indicating that he was a Nazi collaborator. Sheffer offers another nail in the coffin for anyone still wanting to hold on to the belief that Asperger was a humanitarian physician trying to protect special needs children from being murdered. Beyond the question of Asperger's clear guilt, the book illuminates a certain conservative collectivist mindset that valued being amiable with the status quo as a critical part of social intelligence and ultimately of one's value as a human being. Such a perspective made it frighteningly easy for people who were not Nazis to become full collaborators and wash their hands of the affair afterward. 

Science Fiction

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson.

In a break from the dense worldbuilding of the Cosmere, Sanderson tries his hand at a fairly conventional YA novel essentially featuring a Katniss Everdeen as a fighter pilot. This is a book that was predictable and should have been lame were it not for the fact that Sanderson is a master subtle dash of humor writer, something that is easy to lose sight of in the shadow of his world-building. Jerkface could have easily been a straw-man villain but he is actually kind of sweet even if it is still fun to hate him. Keep an eye out for the computer M-Bot, who snuck up on me as my favorite character largely because he is an autistic type character who is allowed his "humanity." 

Star Wars: Lost Stars by Claudia Gray.

I believe that the Force, with its struggle between the light and dark side, is essential to Star Wars. One of my concerns with Last Jedi was that it tried to refashion Star Wars without Jedi and Sith. That being said, this book, like Rogue One, did a magnificent job even though it is also guilty of trying to get away from the Force. I guess it is possible for a Star Wars book to be good without necessarily being a good Star Wars book. That being said, it is great to see the original trilogy from the perspective of "regular" people on the ground. Also, Gray deserves credit for what she has added to the Star Wars universe in that she has effectively written an apology for the average imperial soldier. The two main characters are teenagers who want to get off their home planet and make something of themselves while improving the galaxy along the way. So they end up in the Imperial Academy and become imperial pilots. If a few imperial bad apples commit war crimes, that does not make the Rebellion innocent, particularly as the Rebellion does not offer a clear way forward as an alternative to the Empire. In the end, one of the characters defects to the Rebellion but that comes across as a personal decision that does not lessen our sympathy for the one who stays with the Empire. 

The Anti-Judaism of the New Doctor Who

I am a long-running fan of Doctor Who. One of the things I respected about the show has been its ability to be liberal in ways that were subtle and did not get in the way of smart storytelling for people of different ages and across the political spectrum. This was possible because the writers knew how to pick their shots and let their values flow from the narrative. Doctor Who, at a fundamental level, is a show about tolerance founded on curiosity about the other. The hero is a time-traveling alien, who takes people on journies across time and space. From this perspective, human concerns about race, religion, sexuality, and gender are going to seem rather provincial. There is no need to preach tolerance. On the contrary, the show's valuing of tolerance should emanate naturally from its very premise. This brings me to my problem with the newest season. While I was excited for Jodie Whittaker becoming the first female Doctor, as she was excellent in Broadchurch, the show has gotten into the habit of wearing its politics on its sleeve which is not only boring, it is also counter-productive for getting its message across.

This embrace of liberal polemics goes beyond giving the Doctor his usual humanist speeches in keeping with a character who is a talker. Furthermore, the show regularly used to turn its liberalism on the Doctor. From his own perspective, the Doctor is the liberal humanist that he is because he has seen the dark side alternative within himself when he became the War Doctor during the Time War and was willing to destroy his own people, the Time Lords, in order to rid the universe of the Daleks. This sense of guilt, most notable in Christopher Eccleston and more recently with Peter Capaldi, often allows the Doctor to empathize and try to reason with the villains. I cannot think of a show in which the "big scary monster" is more likely to not simply be a bad guy in need of being destroyed. This willingness to avoid easy answers was part of what made Doctor Who's lessons in tolerance so effective; it habituated viewers, in ways like no other show, to question the Manichean good versus evil framework that comes so naturally to us that ultimately is the root of intolerance.

This hard-earned embrace of tolerance is discarded in this new season in an effort to engage in virtue-signaling. Just in case anyone doubted where the show stood on race and gender, not only is the Doctor now a woman but she now has, as companions, a black guy, a Pakistani woman plus a middle-aged white man to provide some diversity. There are episodes dealing with Rosa Parks and seventeenth-century witch trials in England. The show "bravely" teaches us that racism and sexist witch-dunkings are bad. A useful contrast here is the last Capaldi episode which gets much of its humor from confronting the highly patronizing attitude toward women in the early incarnations of the show back in the 1960s.

I would like to focus on one particular incident from the Witchfinders episode, which, for all of its flaws, is partially redeemed by Alan Cummings' portrayal of King James I. The Doctor confronts a witch-hunter, who quotes from the King James Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).  The Doctor responds: "In the Old Testament. There is a twist in the sequel, 'love thy neighbor.'" First, on a basic factual level, the Doctor is mistaken. "Love thy neighbor" comes from the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18. The New Testament simply quotes the Old. The second but more disturbing issue here is that the show is playing into the stereotype of the Old Testament as the book of judgment in contrast to the New Testament with its love and tolerance. This is the true foundation for Christian anti-Judaism, far more pernicious than the notion that the Jews killed Jesus.

While Jews have been convenient scapegoats, Christianity has never truly needed to blame Jews for killing Jesus, particularly those Jews who were not alive during the first century CE. The real Jewish challenge for Christianity has always been that Christianity could never escape the fact that the New Testament serves to modify an already present scripture. Unless there was something wrong with Judaism that Christianity could realistically improve on (obviously, neither religion has ever lacked for pious hypocrites), Christianity makes no sense. For traditional Orthodox Christianity, the solution has been that the Old Testament lacked the Son of God dying to atone for the sins of the world. This, though, raises the question of what was the point of the Old Testament if it could not save. The answer is that the Old Testament teaches us about sin by showing us how we utterly fail to keep the Law (Romans 7:7-25). As such, Christians need to read the Old Testament as the law that condemns despite everything the Old Testament has to say to the contrary. If the God of the Old Testament knows that we are imperfect sinners but will forgive us if only we truly want it then there is no need for Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus becomes a denial of God's perfect forgiveness.

To be fair to traditional Christians, their anti-Judaism can be kept in check with an Augustinian embrace of man's total depravity. From this perspective, Jews, even as Christ-killers, can never be worse than depraved humanity as a whole. Any other group of human sinners would have failed God's test just as badly. At least the Jews have the advantage that God chose them despite their utter depravity.

With modern liberal Christianity, this problem of anti-Judaism actually gets worse. As Amy-Jill Levine argues in The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, liberal Christianity's desire to escape from traditional dogma easily turns into a backdoor for precisely the kind of negative stereotypes of Jews that it was supposed to have transcended. If the point of Jesus was not that he was the Son of God sent to atone for sin then it must be that Jesus taught a new value system. This means that the old system must have been really backward and in need of replacement. For example, if Jesus came to liberate women then Judaism must be some oppressive Taliban-like religion. If Jesus helped the poor then Judaism must be the religion of the greedy rich. If human beings are not all depraved then there was something wrong specifically with the Jews that caused them to reject Jesus' message of peace and love. 

If you think that attacking the Jewish scriptures is not an attack on members of the Jewish religion then consider what it means to attack the Koran. If the Old Testament (or the Koran) does not simply have problematic texts that believers have to struggle with but teaches hatred then that religion is tainted and its practitioners must be condemned as haters as long as they do not formally abandon their religion. We would not accept "moderate" Nazis with their "liberal" reading of Mein Kampf as anything other than a sick joke and a cynical attempt to make anti-Semitism acceptable in polite society. By contrast, we can easily ignore those Jews in the past who might have killed Jesus as not real Jews as they failed to live up to the "true" teachings of Judaism, which is peace.

The fact that Christians believe in the Old Testament as opposed to the Koran only adds to the problem. The Muslim reading his Koran is outside of the Christian framework and can, therefore, be ignored. The Old Testament practicing Jew as an opponent who is also part of the Christian framework all too easily becomes the embodiment of Christianity's failures, allowing Christians to pass off whatever they secretly hate about themselves as really being the fault of the Jews. Since this Jew is a Christian construct without any real connection to actual Jews, it can flourish even in the absence of Jews. Hatred of this theological Jewish construct could fester unconnected to people who actually practice Judaism until it manifests itself in the actual murder of Jews.  For example, the medieval unbelieving Christian, who could not accept that Jesus really was present in the Eucharist was transformed into a Jew in spirit. This, in turn, got actual Jews killed as host desecrators.

This same formula helps explain witch hunts. You start with the construct of the witch as a servant of Satan. Since this fantasy has no connection to real people, it can evolve into something ever more sinister, capable of literally committing any depravity no matter how heinous, until someone is made to wear that label and die for it. In the hands of Doctor Who, witch-hunters in seventeenth-century England (which officially had expelled its Jews in 1290) become people in funny hats who quote the Old Testament without seeming to realize that there exists a New Testament; in essence, they are Jews. This is dangerous because, despite the fact that Jews were not responsible for European witch trials, viewers are being primed to associate Jews, as followers of a "harsh" Old Testament law, with witch-hunting and ultimately with the forces of intolerance.   

To be clear, I do not think the writers of a certain British science-fiction show actively hate Jews or consciously meant any harm. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am some paragon of tolerance who never makes harmful prejudiced comments. I beg the indulgence of members of the practically limitless groups that I am not part of for my ignorance. You are human beings (or perhaps aliens) and my failure to treat you as such is simply an oversight on my part. If you are a member of such a group, feel free to point out where I have treated you unfairly. Since I am not claiming to be a tolerant person, just someone who tries to be, I have no reason to reject your criticism and might just take it to heart. Likewise, I should forgive the writers for not being on top of the history of anti-Semitism and its role in Christian biblical exegesis. There is plenty of evil out there in the world and I should not take it personally if writers wish to focus on other issues besides anti-Semitism.

Here is the problem though. The show has now made a point of its great tolerance, allowing itself the moral authority to treat those possessing the various failings of very real historical prejudices as caricatures. We are no longer dealing with a show in which tolerance is a tool for self-examination but a weapon to castigate others. If the writers believe that they are some model of enlightened tolerance for others to look up to then any demonstration of prejudice, even a small one, ceases to be innocent. We now have no reason to assume that they would accept that, even through oversight, they are guilty of prejudice as this would undermine the very moral authority that saves them from being Puritan Pharisee Jews, whose obsession with the prejudices of others has blinded them to their own prejudices.   

Just so we are clear, I have no objection to Doctor Who criticizing the Old Testament. It has many problematic passages. My problem is that the show did so in a way that is factually incorrect. Worse, it used this falsehood as a means of propping up the New Testament, making the central argument of Christian anti-Jewish biblical exegesis. This is not an innocent issue but one with real blood attached to it. The writers owe the Jewish community an apology and a commitment to educating themselves about anti-Semitism. Perhaps this can be the basis for an episode next season. Might I suggest that the Doctor team up with the Golem of Prague to stop a blood libel?

Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part II)

(Part I)

Connected to Game of Thrones' pessimistic anti-heroism is a sense of realism. Beyond a few dragons, there is remarkably little magic. In fact, the series often seems to function more as historical fiction, only being held back by the technicality that the story is not actually taking place within the War of the Roses or the French Wars of Religion but on another planet. Just as the series abandons the physical magic of fantasy in favor of a disenchanted realism, it abandons fantasy's psychology of heroism in favor of a more "realistic" disenchanted anti-heroism.

Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Chronicles has much in common with Game of Thrones. While there is a lot more magic, Sanderson represents a key turn within modern fantasy toward science-fiction. Mid-twentieth century science-fiction, as exemplified by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, turned away from black box technology that differed little from magic in favor of engineering stories that placed how a technology might plausibly work at center stage. Similarly, even as Sanderson starts from a different set of natural laws, his characters approach their magic in a scientific spirit. It is useful to think of Stormlight as the kind of science-fiction novel that someone living in a platonist universe might have written. The naturalism in Stormlight goes so far as to include heroes like Jasnah Kholin, who is an atheist, and her uncle Dalinar, who loses his faith in the Almighty as the series goes along. These plot lines are particularly intriguing as Sanderson is a religious Mormon.

The really crucial connection between the two series is this crisis of heroism. In Stormlight, this occurs very literally at the cosmological level with the death of a divine being called Honor. Nine of the ten Harelds refuse to continue to damn themselves to Desolation every few thousand years in a never-ending cycle to save the world from the Voidbringers. In essence, Jesus has refused to get back on the Cross. At a human level, the story focuses on the implications of this death, much in the same way that Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God presaged the start of World War I. In fact, the war between the Alethi and the Parshendi, the central event of the story, is essentially a fantasy world version of World War I. You have the assassination of a royal figure, King Gavilar of Alethkar (an event that is retold in every book from the perspective of a different character). This leads to a war that quickly turns into a stalemate on the Shattered Plains.

The irony of the Alethi light-eyed aristocracy is that they had just enough sense of honor to declare war to avenge the death of their king but not enough to stop the war once it became a stalemate and spare the lives of the common soldiers (particularly the bridge crews, callously sacrificed as cannon fodder). The dark truth is that the light-eyes have the pretense of an honor code without its substance. The pretense, as manifested in the keen attention to ritual, is necessary considering that their lives of privilege could only be justified by laying claim to serving a higher code. Beyond the rare sets of shardplate and shardblades, what protects the light-eyes is that the masses of dark-eyes honestly believe that the light-eyes are honorable and deserve to rule. The moment they stop believing this, you will have a revolution on your hands (which is one of the main subplots of the second book, Words of Radiance). The pretense of honor allowed the light-eyes to declare war to avenge their king while serving their real goal of collecting gemhearts out on the Shattered Plains battlefield and plotting against each other to improve their individual family positions. The real reason why this war is not ending is that the light-eyes want there to be a war as an end in itself.

Worse than honor just being dead, its very death has allowed it to be corrupted. The light-eyes, in a  sense, have the corpse of honor, its ritual forms. Because of the almost total absence of actual belief, they are able to parade themselves draped in that corpse. (Considering what shardplates and shardblades are eventually revealed to be, this is not exactly a metaphor.) Honor becomes what elevates them above the rest of society. This means that, by definition, everything they do becomes honorable. Furthermore, acts that conventional thinking might consider dishonorable are now not only not dishonorable but the very height of honor for only a "truly honorable" person could ever do them. In dealing with light-eyed villains like Amaram and Sadeas, much of their charm and effectiveness comes from their ability to be openly cynical about honor and still to be thought of as honorable. As with Ayn Rand villains, their nihilism is not taken seriously. This makes it a surprise when they can commit such cold-blooded actions without any sense of guilt or remorse.   

This crisis of honor is played out from the perspectives of the dark-eyed commoner Kaladin and the light-eyed Dalinar. Kaladin comes into the story as an idealist, who believes in the honor of his light-eyed commander, Amaram. This faith is cruelly shattered when Amaram repays Kaladin's heroic slaying of a shardbearer by taking the spoils for himself and having Kaladin's men executed to leave no witnesses. As for Kaladin, Amaram's "mercifully" has him branded and sold as a slave. This eventually leads Kaladin to serve on Bridge Crew Four.

If Kaladin is disenchantment from the bottom up, Dalinar is disenchantment from the top down. He is part of the aristocracy, the brother of the assassinated king, and one of the main Alethi commanders. More than anyone else, he honestly tries to live up to the code of chivalry as taught in the Way of Kings. Because he is a true believer, he is unable initially to see the treachery around him as manifested mainly by his friend, Sadeas. From Sadeas' perspective, betraying Dalinar to his death is the decent thing to do for a friend, who has lost his touch and a truly noble defense of the aristocratic right to feud without the forced unity of a strong king. One of my favorite moments of the entire series comes in book two when a stylized duel is allowed to turn into a trap for Dalinar's son, Adolin. Dalinar is left pleading for mercy and with the realization that none of his fellow light-eyes, including his nephew, King Elhokar, possess anything but the hollow outward trappings of honor.

To deepen the disenchantment, it is not just that Kaladin and Dalinar are good people in a bad world; they themselves are highly flawed individuals. Not only have they made mistakes, their mistakes are of such a nature that there is no coming back from them. Repentance is, by definition, impossible as any attempt to do so demonstrates that one never truly appreciated the gravity of the sin in the first place. Beyond Kaladin's anger at Amaram's betrayal, he is weighed down by the guilt of failing to protect his men. He joined the army because he wished to protect those who could not protect themselves, particularly his drafted younger brother Tien. The reality is that, despite his best intentions, he has only gotten people killed. First, he failed in the particular task of protecting Tien and then he failed even at the symbolic level of protecting the men under his command. The need to redeem himself by fixing the world leads Kaladin to agree to allow Elhokar to be assassinated despite having sworn to protect him. There are good reasons for killing Elhokar and it is not unreasonable to imagine that Alethkar would be a better place if Dalinar took over. There is just that small issue of cold-blooded murder and treachery. 

As for Dalinar, much of the new Oathbringer novel is devoted to revealing that, for most of his life, he was not really any better than Sadeas and Amaram. Dalinar's slaughtering whole towns in "service of the Crown and the Almighty" led to the death of his wife. His subsequent turn to drink to drown his guilt led to his being drunk during the assassination of his brother. In fact, it was Sadeas, who put himself in harm's way trying to protect Gavilar. Dalinar finally managed to strike a magical bargain to escape his guilt that removed all memory of his wife from his mind.

It is Kaladin's and Dalinar's task to save the world by restarting the ancient order of Knights Radiants, who once served the Harelds. In essence, they have to reenchant the world by restoring heroism to it. In this disenchanted world, in which even the heroes are irreparably tainted, reenchantment is achieved by acknowledging both one's sins and inability to atone for them. Next, one tries to do better even while knowing that this may fail. The most important step in a journey is simply the next one. In a story about saving the world, it is amazing to the extent that the major acts of salvation come about by people not trying to save the world but by humbly doing the right thing in front of them.

Kaladin comes to accept protecting a flawed king after Elhokar acknowledges his failures as a king and asks Kaladin to teach him to be better. Elhokar's limited repentance with its honesty in looking at both the past and the future allows Kaladin to step back from "heroically" trying to fix the world in one grand gesture to redeem his past failure to fix the world and instead simply do the honorable thing. It should be noted that Elhokar's moment does not mean he transforms himself into either a good king or a good person nor does it mean that things turn out well for him. 

Similarly, Dalinar's "heroic" attempt to live according to the Way of Kings, while well-intentioned, simply continued the light-eyed practice of donning the forms of honor. He is still trying to atone for his sins, which, as this is an impossible task, leads to him simply continuing to run from the past and ignore it. The big change is when he struggles to negotiate a complex series of alliances as the head of the new Knights Radiant. He is burdened by the fact that he has no experience in trying to convince people to cooperate as opposed to using brute force. With time ticking down to an apocalypse, Dalinar begins his redemption by not trying to seize power even as that accusation is used as an excuse by others to not confront the looming threat in front of them. This sets ups the climax when Dalinar attempts to resist possession by the satanic figure Odium. The trap is that Odium can offer Dalinar the one thing he has been seeking all this time, salvation from guilt. If only Dalinar would consent to possession, he would no longer be responsible for his actions. One might even put this into the past and say that Dalinar had always, in some sense, been under the control of some evil force, which is really what was responsible for what he did. Dalinar saves himself precisely by embracing his guilt and asking to remember. Rather than being a hero, he takes responsibility for his own past and allows the heroic image of himself to be destroyed.

It is interesting to contrast Sanderson and Martin in terms of their production. Sanderson's gigantic body of work has essentially been produced over the same time as Martin has given us only Dance of Dragons. A possible reason for why Martin has not been able to finish his series is that a disenchanted world, by its very nature, does not allow for a satisfactory ending. Martin has to choose between not solving anything, which would be true to his world even as it would be narratively unsatisfactory, or solving things (Daenerys and Jon Snow getting together and ruling happily ever after), which would be dishonest and probably unsatisfactory as well. I suspect we are heading to something like Lost in which, at best, we can hope for an ending that is emotionally satisfying in terms of the characters even as the real issues are ignored. As for Sanderson and Stormlight, there is still a long road ahead and I am sure it will happen at some point that he will write himself into a narrative box. That being said, I am confident that he will see this through and much as a saved Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and brought it to a satisfactory ending, Stormlight will end in a way that justifies having read it from the beginning.   

  
 

Fuzzy Aliens Learn About Theory of Mind

I found myself up early Sabbath morning so I read John Scalzi’s new novel Fuzzy Nation cover to cover. (It is not that long a book.) I find good science fiction the perfect ticket to feeling spiritual enough to actually pray. This is not Scalzi’s best novel, but considering that this is the author of Old Man’s War we are talking about, that is hardly a knock on the book. The basic premise of the book, a reboot of a novel from the 1960s, is that a prospector, Jack Holloway, finds himself at the center of a pair of major discoveries. The first a major gem stone find on a newly explored planet and the second that one of planet’s native species just might be sentient. Think of this book as Avatar with actual characters and a sense of humor. My favorite part of the book is Holloway; in classical American heroic tradition, he is a self absorbed man-child, though a charming one and one who turns out to be a much better man than even he believes. (If they ever make a movie I would want Nathan Fillion from Firefly to play him, though I would not say no to Josh Holloway of Lost.)

What particularly caught my attention was a part in which the female scientist, Isabel Wangai, gets one of the Fuzzies to make a sandwich and then is surprised that the Fuzzy “demonstrated theory of mind” by offering her the sandwich. I doubt Scalzi meant anything by it, but theory of mind (ToM) is a rather loaded term within Asperger culture thanks to the nonsensical notion put out by researchers like Tony Attwood and Simon Baron-Cohen that people with Asperger syndrome lack a “theory of mind,” the ability to recognize that other people think differently.

In truth there is no such thing as a theory of mind unless you mean it in the very narrow sense that a person, having made the Cartesian leap to recognize that they have a mind and are not simply figments of their own imagination, uses Occam’s Razor to conclude that other people also have minds along with their own likes and dislikes and are not simply figments of his imagination. As the inner workings of the minds of others lies outside of empirical science and logic, the only way to know what someone else is thinking is to guess based on one’s own mind, usually a hazardous decision, or have the person tell you what they are thinking. In this Aspergers are at a disadvantage because they think differently from neurotypicals, making it practically useless to guess based on oneself. This leaves the Asperger with only the option of asking neurotypicals to clearly state verbally what is on their minds. The proof that Aspergers have no particular lacking in theory of mind is that neurotypicals are equally ill suited at intuiting our minds as we are at intuiting theirs.

If a stranger asked me to make a sandwich, I would assume that the person was assessing me to see if I was a rational being, who could understand language and follow instructions. In other words a being who could be negotiated with in order to form social contracts and possibly even a government, a preferable alternative to coercion and violence. As I desire to build relations with other beings based on negotiated agreement and not coercion, I would happily comply with such a test and make the sandwich. While I am making the sandwich I might even regale the person with tidbits of information and stories relating to sandwiches (such as Arthur Dent serving as the prophesied sandwich maker for a group of aliens in one of the Hitchhiker books) to demonstrate that I posses culture and am therefore not some barbarian incapable of social negotiation. After my demonstration of rationality, I would eat the sandwich. Do I lack a theory of mind? Hardly. I was not informed what kind of sandwich the person liked and would be unable to come to such knowledge through logical intuition. Obviously going on my own taste would be useless here. Why would the person want me, a complete stranger whom they have no relationship with, to make them a sandwich in the first place? If they desired to make me their servant to be coerced then I do not care to feed them.

If I were a Fuzzy dealing with a human scientist, like in the book, I would be correct. The purpose of the  interaction would have been to prove that I was a rational being, who should be granted rights and left to exploit my own planet for myself and for the rest of my kind in peace.

Academia as a Bulwark Against Conservatism (Part II)

(Part I)

Now if society, in order to function, needs to be a fundamentally "conservative" one, where everyone accepts certain rules already in place, it is also important that this established status quo be regularly challenged by a "liberal" force. This allows for progress and for society to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. Following J. S. Mill, I believe a healthy society functions as a dialectic between conservative and liberal forces, where the liberal advocates for change and the conservative defends the status quo, resulting in society slowly changing as it adopts the stronger liberal points while maintaining its fundamental integrity. This is a reforming society as opposed to a revolutionary one.

The chief value of a university is that it serves as this liberal force in society. Professors, whether they are actually smarter than others, are people of the mind and as such are naturally well suited to thinking outside of societal conventions and asking whether certain things are truly necessary or even consistent with the higher values that the outside society holds for itself. University students are no longer children but are still without the cares and responsibilities of adults. This puts them in an ideal situation to experiment with different lifestyles and values. Left to themselves neither the professor nor their students have any direct influence over the larger society, but this is also part of their value.

The university thus serves as a giant lab experiment, run by the professors. Students come out of high school and for four years are allowed the privilege of entering a sort of "black box" in which they can do and be whatever they want (barring causing direct physical harm to others), with no fear of future consequences. One suspects that most people will simply use this freedom for a rumspringa of sex, drugs, and alcohol. And there is value even to this as it might give cause to think about issues of sexuality, gender, and the pursuit of happiness. Hopefully, at least some students, though, will embrace this process as an intellectual journey and make their way to the classrooms of their professors, in both body and mind, where they might pursue some of these larger questions in a more vigorous and systematic fashion. After four years they reenter general society no longer children, but as adults, with what they learned, both inside and outside the classroom, and will be free to apply this knowledge as either liberals or conservatives as they take part in the larger societal discourse. 

Some of you may find this ironic, but the man who opened my eyes to this use of the university was Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, who used to serve as the Orthodox rabbi at Harvard. According to Rabbi Klapper, his service to the wider Orthodox Jewish community was that he was running an experiment in finding different halachically feasible ways to allow Orthodoxy o adapt to changes in societal norms, particularly in the role of women. Harvard is not an established Orthodox Jewish community with set norms. The students come from other communities and in a few years will leave for other communities. In the meantime, under Rabbi Klapper's guidance, they are free to experiment with different ways of doing things to see how it plays out with no real consequences to fear. As they leave to become leading members of other communities, they will take what they have learned and be able to make suggestions as to how best to apply these ideas.

It should be stressed, though, that in order for this experiment to work it requires a radical disjunction between the university and the rest of society. The value of the professor is precisely in that he is cut off from the rest of society, living in a world of theory without the power or inclination to change society. This "innocence" gives the university its moral authority and protects it from outside influence. The moment universities become engines for particular movements it becomes part of society. This means that there is no reason for anyone to respect what goes on inside the university as the source for refined theoretical thought, outside of the inevitable prejudices of the societal discourse, to give it the protection that is the logical consequence of this purity. If the university can be used to serve one faction of society then why should the opposition not, in perfectly good conscience, attempt to subvert the university and turn it to its cause?

In many respects, my ideal university has much in common with the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which deals with a future alternative universe in which the philosophers are placed in medieval-style monasteries. Because these philosophers can have no direct influence on the larger society they are free to pursue their work without threats of violence or interference.

(To be continued ...)

Speculative Fiction Readers for Libertarianism

Damien G. Walter at the Guardian has an article about the present state of science fiction and fantasy about how, despite some of the incredible work in these fields over the past decade, works of science fiction and fantasy are still overlooked by Man Booker prize judges. As Walter sees it, this does not mean that speculative fiction is being ignored just that it is still not acceptable to openly write as one. 


Over the same period, the fashion of literary fiction writers borrowing ideas from SF has continued. Putting aside concerns that novels such as Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go lag more than two decades behind in their treatment of cloning and genetics, for the Booker judges to consider SF ideas when recycled by literary authors, but to ignore the source of those ideas, only highlights the narrowness of the award's perspective.

Now one can ask why readers of science fiction and fantasy should care if they are not respected by the literary establishment to see the books they cherish receive prizes. (Yes it would be nice to see a favorite author receive some extra money beyond what you can give by buying his book.) I see this as another example of how government-empowered special interests come to affect all sorts of unexpected aspects of life. In the non-libertarian world we live in, we must all pay for government-funded schools which teach literature. This of course raises the question of what counts as literature. Not an innocent question as whoever receives the legitimacy of being titled an author or expert on "literature" will receive public funds and a platform to define and shape public values. Now we have a literary establishment ranging from literature teachers to authors as well as the judges for prizes in literature. People in this establishment react like all other groups of people when faced with government involvement in their field; they form special interest groups and attempt to manipulate government to suit their own private ends.

As long as literature prizes are a path to government money, the literary establishment will act to protect their interests at the expense of people like us in the science fiction and fantasy community, who are not part of this establishment, in order that we remain outside the establishment and therefore at a disadvantage when it comes to public funds and influence. On the flip side, as long as government money is in play, I, as a science fiction and fantasy reader will insist that the literary establishment acknowledge the literature that I love and place it in school curricula. Not just because I want to read such books in class, but because I want my sort of authors to be rewarded and their values to set the tone for the rest of society. 

    

And I Called Her Kitty Stew

Recently, I have been spending more time than I ought to playing Mass Effect. (Time better spent on work or this blog.) This game has great action and a truly gripping story. The basic premise is that human beings, having recently made first contact, are now stepping out into the wider galaxy as one of many races of intelligent beings. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to anyone, galactic civilization leads a precarious existence. Outside the galaxy live an artificial intelligent race known as the Reapers. Every few thousand years, they come through the galaxy and systematically destroy all advanced organic lifeforms. These Reapers are about to come once again. The main character, Commander Shepard, turns up evidence of this Reaper plot as he tracks down a rogue alien named Saren, a willing collaborator with the Reapers. Shepard has to stop Saren before he brings about the return of the Reapers and the destruction of galactic civilization. Saren is actually a really interesting villain. His logic is that, rather than suffer the inevitable destruction of all, they should submit to the Reapers, prove their usefulness in the hope that the Reapers will allow some part of civilization to be saved. This is a story about hard moral choices. At one point you are even forced to choose between the lives of two characters on your team. The choices you make actually affect the larger story, changing the actual game.

I chose to make my Commander Shepard a woman and named her Kitty Stew Shepard. My roommate asked me if this was supposed to be a nickname. Well, Kitty can be short for Katherine and Stew can be for Stewart. Hello Galaxy; meet your new savior. Katherine Stewart Shepard was born on Earth to a respectable secular Jewish family, with parents who expected her to go to law school. But she instead joined the Alliance military as the Kitty Stew Shepard of the SSV Normandy you know now. She travels throughout the galaxy armed with her pistol, shotgun, and biotics meeting new alien life forms and making difficult moral choices. Does she try to sleep with the aliens (an alien does not count as a gentile so she can bring one home to mom and dad) or just blow them all to bits? One thing is certain, whatever she does, she will look damn hot doing it.


On a side note, here is the trailer for Mass Effect 3:    

Isaac Asimov and the Submission to Law

In an earlier post, I spoke about the necessity of submission to Law as a form of salvation from "every man doing what is right in their eyes." I was recently reading an Isaac Asimov novel, The Stars, Like Dust, that, in its own way made a similar point.

Before I continue, I might as well say something about the novel as a whole. It is very typical Isaac Asimov, both in its strengths and weaknesses. It is a pan-galactic mystery novel with a square-jawed hero, Biron Farril, a female companion, Artemisia oth Hinriad, who serves no purpose but to be a mindless damsel in distress and fall madly in love with the hero midway through the book, and a wise old comically endearing scientist, Gilbret, to serve as the voice of reason, off on an adventure through space. Writing in 1951, Asimov did an incredible job covering the technicalities of hyperspace travel with plausible sounding jargon. That being said, he has his characters stick paper labels on ship controls, and smoke cigarettes on a space ship. One can only imagine: "Welcome aboard my spaceship. Please take a cigarette. No need to worry about such primitive diseases as lung cancer; you will be blown to bits by the exploding oxygen long before that." Asimov had this problem covered by something even more bizarre. He seemed to have assumed that it is necessary to constantly breathe in carbon so his spaceships have carbon in their atmosphere and his spacesuits have small carbon emitters. I have no idea where he got that idea. Perhaps one of my readers who know something about 1950s science could help me out here.

Our heroes, Biron, Artemisia and Gilbret are on the run in a stolen space cruiser from the evil Tyrannians (pun very much intended). Seeking to free the Nebula Kingdoms, our heroes search for the hidden rebel world. Along the way, another mystery keeps floating over their heads; there are references to a secret document from ancient Earth that if ever revealed would destroy the Tyrannians. While fighting for freedom and justice, our heroes have a problem; they are all noblemen and, as such, illegitimately rule over their subjects just much as the Tyrannians do over them. In fighting against the Tyrannians are they merely seeking to replace them? This ceases to be an idle question when they come up against a rebel leader who is trying to do precisely that.

After many twists and turns (and Asimov was nothing if not clever), our heroes finally find the rebellion and meet its leader. The leader, it turns out, has heard of the secret document from Earth and even has it in his possession. Biron breathlessly asks the leader to reveal what is in this document; how could a mere document be so powerful as to destroy an empire? The leader explains that, yes, this document, once revealed, will destroy the Tyrannians as well as the nobility, paving the way for a truly just government. He begins to recite the text by heart: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

And the novel ends just like that.

There is a simple beauty to Asimov with his utter faith in classical liberal principles, that a free society combined with scientific rationalism could bring the salvation of society. As ironic as this might sound talking about an agnostic scientific rationalist, but, in reading Asimov, I cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the force of his faith as it demands that I too submit myself to the power of such law and put my faith in it. (See also On the Comforts of Reading Isaac Asimov.)

Vote Cthulhu for Your Planet’s New Deity

I finally got around to reading Eoin Colfer's attempt to step into Douglas Adams' shoes And Another Thing …. Those who are not already familiar with Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, with its very British intellectual insanity, are not likely to understand nor appreciate this book and would be better served in starting from the beginning (when the Earth is blown to bits by the Vogans to make way for an interstellar highway). Hitchhiker fans are unlikely to go for this new entry either. It is not that Colfer is not capable of imitating Adams' particular manic writing style and his random storylines; Colfer can certainly effectively imitate Adams. The problem is one of Colfer being capable of resurrecting Adams in body, while ignoring the spirit. This may sound counter-initiative, but in a random absurdist story like Hitchhiker, character and plot matter all the more. However absurd Hitchhiker might become, we need to care about Arthur Dent and his travails. His relationships with Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the depressed robot, and Trillian have to work on a very human level. The absurdity is not an excuse to ignore this; on the contrary, it makes it more important. If we have nothing else to hang on to that makes sense we need to be able to grab on to the characters. The other thing to consider is plot. Hitchhiker worked best when it had a plot, no matter how ridiculous, to guide the story. The reader needs to be heading to some recognizable destination whether it is finding the ultimate question (the answer to which is 42) or saving the universe from cricket playing assassin droids. Without a goal, the story descends into a random sequence of acid trip jottings. (Adams did claim to have conceived the whole idea for Hitchhiker while drunk.) In all fairness, not even Adams was capable of consistently living up to this standard.

There was one short sequence that I found worthwhile and worth sharing. The planet Nano, and its leader Hillman Hunter, decide they are in need of a deity. They, therefore, turn to consider none other than H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu. (Do not bother trying to figure out how to pronounce it. It is not designed to be pronounced by human lips.) For those of you not familiar with Lovecraft, he specialized in macabre short stories and novelettes mainly about humans using science and dark magic to cut through the thin veil of their earthly reality. At which point they look out into a universe bereft of any benevolent deity, but instead populated by monstrous "ancient ones" like Cthulhu, a prospect that generally drives the unfortunate humans into insanity.


A huge anthropoid was seated uncomfortably in the interview room's office chair, its grotesque, scaled torso squirming in the confines of the small seat. Tentacles dripped from its chin like fleeing slugs, and hard black eyes glittered from the depth of a pulpy face.
Hillman Hunter shuffled the pages of the creature's resume.
"So, Mr. Cthulhu, is it?"
Hmmm," said the creature.
"Good," said Hillman. "A bit of the ineffable, I like that in a deity." He winked conspiratorially. "Still, it wouldn't be much of an in-depth interview if we couldn't get a few facts out of you, eh, Mr. Cthulhu?"
Cthulhu shrugged and dreamed of days of wanton genocide.
…

"I see here you were in people's minds a lot a few centuries ago thanks to Lovecraft. Not much since then?"Cthulhu spoke in a voice of meat and metal. "Well, you know. Science and all that. Put a bit of a kibosh on the god business." Clear gel dripped from his tentacles as he spoke. "I kicked around Asia Minor for a while, trying to drum u a little fear. But people have penicillin now, even poor people have reading material. What do they want gods for?"
…

"Next question. Our last god was a less is more kinda guy. Sent his son down, but didn't show up too often himself. I think, and no disrespect to the man himself, that was probably a mistake. I honestly believe that he would put his hand up to that himself now if we could ask him. What I'm asking you, Mr. Cthulhu, is: Are you going to be a hands-on god or an absentee landlord?"Cthulhu was ready for that one; he had been practicing his answer for that very question with Hastur the Unspeakable only the previous night.
"Oh, hand-on, absolutely," he said, leaning forward to make clear eye contact as Hastur had advised. "The days of blind faith are over. People need to know who is blighting their crops or demanding virgin sacrifice. And now I am going to look away, but only because prolonged eye contact will drive you insane."
Hillman shook the sudden torpor from his head. "Good. Good. Quite a stare you have there, Mr. Cthulhu. Handy weapon to have in the arsenal."
Cthulhu accepted the compliment with a flap of one prodigious tentacle.
"Let's move one, shall we? Where do you stand on the whole Babel fish argument? Proof denies faith and so forth."
"My subjects will have proof and faith," rasped Cthulhu agitatedly. "I will bind them to slavery and trample the weak underfoot."
"I seem to have hit a nerve there," chuckled Hillman. "Again, I think you're on the right track; maybe you might want to pull back a little on the slavery and the trampling. We have quite a lot of weak people here, but they are big supporters of the church, whatever church we eventually pledge to. …"
"So. An old standard next. Presuming your application is successful, where do you see yourself in five years' time?"
Cthulhu brightened. Thank you, Hastur, he beamed into space.
"In five years, I will have razed this planet, eaten its young, and stacked your skulls high in my honor." He sat back satisfied. Succinct and informative, a textbook answer.
A spluttering cough blurted from Hillman's lips. "Skull stacking! Come on, Mr. Cthulhu. Really? Do you think that's what god do today? These are interstellar times we've got here. Space travel, time travel. What we need on Nano is what I like to call an Old Testament god. Strict, sure. Vengeful, fantastic. But indiscriminate eating of young? Those days are gone."
"Shows what you know," muttered Cthulhu, crossing his legs."

(Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing … pg. 91-93.)

The Asperger Fiction Reader: Not a Contradiction in Terms

From the moment I started reading Michael Makovi's blog, I suspected that he had Asperger syndrome. This was someone who wrote about theory and was willing to follow theory to its practical implications without concern with making friends. His focus on political theory, particularly within the context of the minutia of early modern history, as opposed to practical policy could not simply be a coincidence. This was someone who did not fit into the obvious political and religious categories and who clearly formulated his view of the world from reading and not from some social group. Once he started talking about his failures with women, I was convinced. So I asked him if he was familiar with Asperger syndrome and pointed him to the Simon Baron Cohen quiz. Makovi has now posted his results. Normal people usually score a sixteen. People on the spectrum usually score above thirty. Makovi scored a 37. I would like to hereby welcome him to the club. I take this as a testament to my ever increasing power to infect people with Asperger syndrome. I usually have to bite people, I guess now I can infect people through a blogospheric evil eye. Mothers lock up your children and be afraid; I am autism and I am dangerous.

The Baron Cohen quiz is useful, though I have one objection to it. It assumes that people on the spectrum would have a problem with fiction. The quiz asks how well the following sentiments fit:

20. When I'm reading a story, I find it difficult to work out the characters' intentions.
21. I don't particularly enjoy reading fiction.

The idea here is that fiction requires the reader to consider other people's motivations and emotions. People with Asperger syndrome are not supposed to have a theory of mind, to understand that other people think differently from them, and have a difficult time putting themselves in other people's shoes. Our Asperger book club in Columbus was started and received funding to study the relationship between Asperger syndrome and fiction reading, precisely on the assumption that we would have a problem with fiction. One of the ground rules, which we were placed under, was that we had to choose works of fiction for the club and could not do non-fiction. Ironically enough they were not able to put together a separate control group of neurotypicals to see how our reactions to the reading material differed from theirs. They could not round up a group of neurotypicals to participate in a book club.

I certainly have not done a full study of this, but, in my personal experience, it is not so simple. I, for one, do enjoy fiction. I would argue that my interest in reading is not despite my Asperger syndrome, but is one of the ways that I manifest Asperger behavior. Obviously, I take to books more easily than people. Books are much better friends than people; they are easier to decode and you can open and close them as it suits you. Books do not misunderstand you and try to hurt you. Fiction provides precisely the sort of "human" relationship that I can deal with. The motivations of characters are written in words that I can decipher, as opposed to facial expressions.

Among the members of the group, there were quite a number of readers. Even one of the more "non-readers" is a big Tom Clancy fan. I would argue that Clancy is a good example of fiction that would be a good fit for Aspergers. It has lots of technical details, plot-driven stories, and characters whose motives are fairly simple to follow; there are the bad guys out to unleash some global calamity and the good guys trying to stop them. There are a number of hardcore science fiction and fantasy fans in the group. Again these are types of fiction that would seem to be very well suited for the Asperger mind. The focus is less on forcing the reader to grapple with figuring out the character's emotions and motivations. Instead, we have world building, where the reader gets to explore the rules of a different world and what makes it work in all its technical detail, and an action centered story, where people do things.

I am not suggesting that all Aspergers like fiction, let alone Tom Clancy, science fiction and fantasy. I do wish to argue that the fiction/non-fiction model is too simplistic. There are types of fiction that may appeal to Aspergers precisely because of their Asperger syndrome. Thus I would amend the questions on reading from simply a matter of whether someone likes fiction to whether they like non-plot oriented fiction in which the point is to guess at character motivations that are never explicitly put onto the page.

Articles of Interest (My Captain, Hebrew Science Fiction, Conversion, Muslim Fathers, and Selling Out the Humanities)

My uncle, Rabbi Dovid Landesman, has another article, this time on Emes Ve-Emunah, on the concept daat Torah (religious authority). He has a great story about my late grandfather going to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ztl about some issues with the mikvah (ritual bath) that he built in the side of his garage for his community in McKeesport PA.

Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli science fiction novelist, writes about the implications of writing science fiction in English as opposed to Hebrew. Apparently the slang term in Hebrew for science fiction is madab, short for mada bidyoni.

Rabbi Marc Angel, in the Forward, throws down the gauntlet against the Haredi rabbinic establishment in terms of handling conversions. He uses the example of Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel, who argued for the legitimacy of converting people who were not yet ready to take on fully observant lifestyles.

Thomas Friedman writes about the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted Christmas Day suicide bomber, who tried to warn authorities about his son. Friedman hits the nail right on the head when he writes:

Unless more Muslim parents, spiritual leaders, political leaders — the village — are ready to publicly denounce suicide bombing against innocent civilians — theirs and ours — this behavior will not stop. … Every faith has its violent extreme. The West is not immune. It's all about how the center deals with it. Does it tolerate it, isolate it or shame it?

This is a point I have tried to make in regards to the Haredi world. There is no moral difference between those who openly endorse extremist behavior and those who piously, with nods, excuses and winks, say it is wrong and then make excuses for it. If anything the latter is worse; at least those who do the former have the moral spine to openly say what they believe in their heads and their hearts.

Kate Zernike writes about attempts by colleges to make the humanities relevant to students and turn it into something that will help them get jobs. Allan Bloom must be turning in his grave at this sellout of classical education.



Then again maybe this is a vindication of his attack on the liberal university establishment? Our humanities departments are lining up and confessing that they have nothing of value to teach, no reason for students to come to them instead of going to business school. Thus, they have no choice but to surrender and destroy their departments in all but name.

Avatar is Not Liberal Propaganda (It is Something Far More Pernicious)

I went to see James Cameron's new science-fiction extravaganza, Avatar, last night. Let me say, right from the beginning, that I loved the movie. In terms of story, acting to say nothing of the special effects this movie must be judged as a full success. Particular mention should be made of the climatic air battle between the human invaders and the native Na'vi of the moon Pandora. It also should be said that not since Emperor Palpatine's finest Imperial Stormtroopers were routed by the koala bears of Endor in Return of the Jedi has modern armor and lazar guns proven to be so ineffective against Stone Age technology. Liberals correctly criticized the Bush administration for their failure to provide armored vehicles to protect our soldiers against road side ambushes in Iraq. What are citizens of Cameron's future universe to think of their soldiers going into battle in vehicles whose windshields are not even arrow proof? Perhaps in the deleted scenes on the DVD we will find out that Cheney and Rumsfeld were transported to the future to lose this war for the humans. This brings me to the main point of what I wish to discuss here, the movie's politics. Conservatives have been up in arms in attacking this movie, accusing it of being liberal propaganda. There are good reasons for this. This is a movie made for over two-hundred million dollars about an evil imperial corporation (somehow this is not a contradiction) out to destroy a pristine native culture in the service of their greed for unobtainum (yes it sounds as corny as it looks). I believe this is a mistake, one that hides the true dark side of the film's message. When Cameron and other members of the Hollywood left attack free enterprise corporations and venerate hunter-gatherer cultures, they are not being liberal. On the contrary, they set the stage for the destruction of liberalism, for fascism.

For all of their moral flaws, corporations are built around individual freedom. People, of their own free will, choose to work for these corporations and people freely choose to purchase the goods and services provided by them. No physical coercion is used. (Corporations wielding heavy armaments designed for use in offensive warfare are no longer private businesses, but governments. So, when properly understood, Avatar is a story about big government oppression, despite the corporate label.) In stark contrast to this is the hunter-gatherer society, living close to a state of nature. Life in all observed hunter-gatherer societies here on earth is proverbially "nasty, brutish, and short." Considering the Skull Island quality of the natural life on Pandora, life would be nastier, more brutish, and shorter. A society living under such conditions would need to devote itself nonstop to providing food and fending off enemies, creating a militarized leadership. Everyone must carry out their assigned tasks and live their lives according to the decisions made by the leadership. All forms of deviance are, by definition, acts of treason and punishable by death. In other words, this is the conservative society par excellence and one that is inimical to liberty. One might even be tempted to call it primitive Fascism. This is not as absurd as it sounds when you consider that, in the Western tradition, it was the same Rousseau, who idealized man in a state of nature and also venerated the Spartan model of society. In the end, Rousseau even denied the notion of personal freedom, choosing to define freedom in terms of subservience to a people. Ironically enough, while the non-evil human protagonists are capable of making individual choices and turn against the evil militarized corporation, the Na'vi are defined by their lack of significant individual choices. (Yes, the Na'vi girl makes out with the main character.) We are told that these aliens have no interest in human goods, medicine, or technology (though they do speak English at a level far outstripping many Hispanic immigrants and Haredim). We are to believe that not a single member of the Na'vi species, not even their teenagers, can be tempted by fast food, antibiotics, or even a ride on a starship, the things that could make liberty meaningful, to vote for selling out on their pantheist religion and their mother trees. Abstract moral choices are only possible in minds educated at above subsidence levels. Only a mind raised on the luxuries of eating every day and effective medicine that will allow it to live to die of old age can worry about things like rights for a less fortunate group or protecting the environment; all these being necessary tools for a Na'vi resistance in the first place. Of course, none of the Na'vi are attracted to human ways, desire to live past thirty and travel to the stars, just as all Palestinians only desire to shed their blood in their nationalist cause of war with Israel, without any coercion or brainwashing.

If I were telling the story of Avatar I would make the corporate hatchet man, Parker Selfridge (played by the talented, but underused Giovanni Ribisi) the hero of the story instead of a villain. He is a young man of enterprise, who, despite growing up in difficult circumstances, has become so rich that he can fund interstellar mining expeditions. His personal background has given him an appreciation for the abilities of other less fortunate people. Because of this, he is willing to make a woman his lead scientist, hire minorities and even a crippled ex-marine. Selfridge comes to Pandora without the backing of the military industrial complex government back on earth and their protection, confident that he can peacefully make a deal with the Na'vi. Instead of guns, he turns to new forms of science that allow him to send his loyal employees to the Na'vi in Na'vi bodies. Many of the Na'vi are eager to trade with Selfridge, allowing him to mine their land, and join him in created an economic paradise for all. The conservative Na'vi leadership, though, concerned about their hold on power, refuse to negotiate and attempt to drive the humans away by brute force. War seems inevitable, as Selfridge finds himself tempted to hire mercenaries and meet force with force, until the crippled ex-marine, Jake Sully, having fallen in love with Pandora's environment and a Na'vi girl manages to find a way that the precious unobtainum could be mined without causing too much permanent damage to the trees. Selfridge is initially skeptical about Sully's tree-hugging liberalism but agrees to go along even though it means making less money than he had initially hoped. Selfridge's employees defeat the conservative Na'vi leadership by demonstrating that they actually have a greater interest in protecting the environment than even the so-called earth lovers. Meanwhile, back on Earth, word has spread to the government, about Selfridge's success and they demand that Selfridge pay special taxes and that the Na'vi submit to Earth as a colony. The Na'vi refuse and Selfridge and his employees find themselves agreeing to put their lives on the line to fight for what they have created. Selfridge calls in some favors with some smuggler contacts of his and manages to arm the Na'vi with at least some modern weapons. There is a climactic battle in the air over Pandora as the Na'vi heroically fight off the Earth armada, with Selfridge and his employees manning the front lines. In the end, the Earth military is defeated. Selfridge and his employees permanently join the Na'vi by taking on Na'vi bodies and help negotiate a trade deal with Earth, giving all Na'vians a life of luxury and freedom unimagined by their ancestors.

Now that would be a liberal story and I do not think it would take a Robert A. Heinlein or Ayn Rand to appreciate the dramatic possibilities of it.