Surviving, Thriving, and Neoclassicism

Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex tries to figure out the different worldviews underlying conservative and liberal attitudes. He calls his result the Survive-Thrive spectrum. In his view, right-wingers tend to imagine that civilization is hanging by a thread: therefore, right-wingers want lots of police to prevent the loss of order through crime, and lots of soldiers to prevent it coming from outside. Citizens (or, anyway, the right citizens) should have lots of guns, just in case the threat is too big even for the police. Egghead intellectuals are of no real use: you need practical on-the-ground knowledge. They’re suspicious of outsiders, who not only take the stuff you need but might also destabilize the existing order. As Alexander writes, right-wingers look for “hierarchy and conformity.” If you want to imagine how a conservative thinks, you need to imagine you’re in a zombie apocalypse. Their goal is to Survive. (I suggest you read the whole post; he ties a lot of seemingly disparate conservative concerns into this point of view.)

Liberals, meanwhile, imagine society as headed towards utopia. Since crime is on the decline, police are more likely to cause trouble trying to assert their authority than they are to protect people. Because we have more than we need, it is more important that jobs are safe and fulfilling than productive. And because we have everything we need, we can focus our energy on more distant and longer-term concerns: the environment, eradicating inequality, etc. Liberals are oriented not towards Surviving but Thriving.

With the caveat that this is of course a spectrum rather than a dichotomy and that many people are inconsistent, acting sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, I think Alexander does a good job of describing some conservatives and some liberals, but his thought experiment has some problems as well. One of the biggest is that he omits a particular kind of conservative from his framework, the kind I’d call the neoclassicist.

Some conservatives, thinking that civilized society is hanging by thread, do not react by acting as though civilization is already crumbling and becoming either a military state or acting like roving bands of zombie-hunters, but by acting as civilized as they possibly can. Think of C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, where the protagonists insist on acting honourable despite the approaching apocalypse, or G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, where the protagonists fight anarchists by not being anarchists. In order to keep civilization from crumbling, these conservatives double-down on tradition, on etiquette, on the arts, on philosophy and science and other intellectual pursuits. In Battlestar Galactica, Commander Adama suggests that the fleet must do more than survive; they must also act such that they deserve to survive. So Survival is important to these conservatives, but they can only Survive by Thriving. Anything else isn’t Survival.

But they still wind up being very conservative. Because civilization depends on being super-civilized, they won’t tolerate many breaches of etiquette. Moreover, they can be very hostile towards different value systems. Civilization, after all, relies on everyone being civilized, so you cannot tolerate your neighbour’s polyamorous relationship or your daughter’s anarchist politics. Conformity is as necessary in this view as in Alexander’s conservative view, but Alexander’s Survivalists will allow certain standards to slip in order to react to the apocalypse which the neo-classicists won’t tolerate, since those slippages would result in the apocalypse. And changes or experiments in culture are potentially dangerous things, since they might turn out to destabilize the whole foundation of that culture; it’s not only art that is held to fairly conservative standards, but also social forms. If you allow same-sex marriage, the very idea of marriage would change, letting polygamy, incest, bestiality, and pedophilia in the door. Examples of neo-classicists include C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton (as I implied above), Edmund Burke, the contemporary conservatives who tend to quote those people (see many of the writers for First Things and the American Conservative), and of course Alexander Pope and the other 17^th-century neoclassicists I’m naming the whole group after.

(17^th-century neoclassicists, roughly speaking, adhered to the following six principles: 1) Reason and judgement are the most admirable human faculties. 2) Decorum is paramount. 3) The best way to learn the rules is to study the classical authors. 4) Communities have an obligation to establish and preserve social order, balance, and correctness. 5) Invention is good in moderation. 6) Satire is a useful corrective for unreasonable action, poor judgement, and breaches of decorum.)

The neoclassicists are much more logical, I think, than the survivalists: if both groups note that civilization is hanging by a thread, the neoclassicists try to prevent the civilization from collapsing while the survivalists act as though it already has. The neoclassicist could point out the survivalists’ ironic mistake: by acting as though civilization has already collapsed, when it hasn’t yet, the survivalist may actually make the collapse more likely.

And, by the same token, I think Alexander describes certain liberals quite well, but I wouldn’t consider my own position well-described by his spectrum. Even if society is headed toward utopia, we clearly aren’t there right now. Acting as though we live in a utopia is a fantastic way to prevent a utopia from happening. So I would notice that some liberals might act like we’ve already arrived at utopia, but a more considered liberalism works towards making that utopia happen. The first sort of liberal is, ironically, less inclined to change than the second, because if you think you’ve achieved utopia, why bother changing anything? However, if utopia is possible but not yet attained, you have to work hard to get there: it’s from this more considered liberalism that we get anti-racist activists and ardent environmentalists and so forth.

Indeed, at a certain point and in some respects, leftists look a lot like neoclassicists. I would include myself among these. Some leftists reject the whole “headed toward utopia” vision; we would note with relief that we’ve made great strides in knowledge and medicine, but utopia is far off and we’ve maybe made some things far worse. Income inequality is in a terrible state, and economic mobility does not seem any better today than in 1600. 1600, however, did not have the threats of nuclear war, environmental collapse, or corporate ownership of your genetic material. Indeed, some leftists (including me) would see the world as drifting towards dystopia, not utopia. Civilization is hanging by a thread. But the solution (in our view) isn’t to double-down on tradition and so on, because the existing social order is part of the problem; the existing social order is what produced those nuclear warheads and this environmental precarity and that economic inequality. And the conservative avoidance of change and refusal to accommodate different perspectives is what creates a dystopian government. So my leftist response to thinking that civilization is hanging by a thread is not to double-down on tradition any more than it is to act like there’s a zombie apocalypse going on: my leftist response is to try and tear out all those bad traditions and replace them with something better. We want to try new things and welcome alien perspectives, because our own traditions do not contain the answer, or at least not the whole answer. Perhaps Alexander is right in not counting this as liberal; it may be better called radical. It’s the politics of socialists and anarcho-pacifists. The neoclassicists do not fit so well on Alexander’s Survive-Thrive spectrum, but we radicals fit even less well.

A final word on the Survive-Thrive spectrum: I am not sure how well the zombie apocalypse thought experiment works. It’s easy and tempting to think of a zombie apocalypse as ending civilization, but I don’t think that’s right. I suspect that neoclassicists and survivalists would respond to a zombie apocalypse differently: survivalists would become bands of disciplined survivors, while the neoclassicists would insist that the only way to really prevent the zombies from winning would be to still act honourably despite the apparent absurdity of that honour. In other words, perhaps it isn’t so telling to imagine that survivalists act like they are living in a zombie apocalypse because the culture people come out of would impact how they acted when that culture appeared to collapse. Rapture-ready folks would not act the same as transhumanists and singularity-mongers.

Possible glossary, bearing in mind that this does not describe all of the political landscape by any stretch:

Survivalist: a kind of conservative who, believing that civilization is hanging by a thread, acts as though the apocalypse has happened or has started. Think right-wing US gun nuts or al-Qaeda.
Neoclassicist: a kind of conservative who, believing that civilization is hanging by a thread, acts as civilized as possible. Think Edmund Burke, C. S. Lewis, or Eve Tushnet.
Thriver: a kind of liberal who, believing that society is headed towards utopia, acts as though society is already a utopia and therefore sees little point in challenging the status quo. Think… Hollywood celebrities, mostly?

Activist: a kind of liberal who, believing that society is headed towards utopia, acts to usher that utopia in. Think David Deutsch, Barack Obama, or Gene Robinson.
Radical: a kind of leftist who, believing that society is headed towards dystopia, acts to prevent dystopia by tearing out the parts of civilization pushing it that way. Think Marxists, Christian anarchists, or David Suzuki.

Caveat 1: This is all just a reaction to Slate Star Codex’s framing. I’m not sure how useful it will wind up being, and I don’t expect to think of people or movements primarily in terms of the glossary I’ve offered. This is no more than an offering, no more than one way of colour-coding the thoughtscape.
Caveat 2: I have not read enough of Slate Star Codex to know whether Scott Alexander has already addressed the conservatives I’m calling the neoclassicists. From my skimming, he does an excellent job showing some things that are terribly wrong with what I’m calling the survivalist viewpoint, but I don’t see much about the differences between neoclassicism and survivalism.

(Thanks to Leah Libresco for linking to Scott Alexander's post in one of her own and thus drawing it to my attention.)

Unnatural Acts and Unnatural Ingredients

or, What Kind of Pure?
A Moral Foundations Theory post

[EDIT 25 July 2012: I feel like this needs a caveat. I do not really believe that the distinction between natural and unnatural acts is a valid one. At best the distinction relies on an ontology that I consider to be erroneous; at worst it is incoherent. So when I talk about people calling acts unnatural, I am trying to mention those claims in the way of anthropology (that is, they are the subject of my consideration) rather than citation (that is, they are not claims I'm using to support my own). I'm not sure if anyone has been reading this differently, but I want to make it clear. But I should also note that I am a pescetarian/selective vegetarian now and I was one when I wrote this post.]

From the outset, I will cite my primary resource for these speculations: Richard Beck's book Unclean, which looks at the psychology of disgust and how it relates to Christian culture, theology, etc. I don't have the book to hand, so I can't block-quote a relevant section, but it deals with the underlying psychological mechanisms of disgust, and how we use disgust metaphors when talking/thinking about morality. One of Beck's claims (one that I think bears up under scrutiny) is that about the only domain in which the purity metaphor controls our conversation about morality is sexuality. Chastity is controlled by a logic of purity (and therefore disgust), but lying or consumerism are not.

Indeed, I noticed that a number of the questions which I suspect contribute to the purity and sanctity measure on the Moral Foundations test dovetailed with Beck's observations (as they would; Beck drew on the theory in his research). There was a question about chastity, there was a question about whether an act's "unnaturalness" was sufficient to make it immoral, and there was a question about whether feeling disgust about an act was an indication of its morality. There was another question about whether pleasing God is relevant to an act's moral status, but I'm going to deal with this concern elsewhere. According to Moral Foundations Theory, purity tends to be the most political conservative of all of the scores; it is here that there is the greatest discrepency between liberal and conservative participants (much to both groups' horror, I'm sure.) I wonder about this, though, because I see purity/disgust governing another ethical realm, one I generally consider more left-leaning, which I touched on in my post on authenticity: environmentalism.

Like last time, I have no systematic evidence for this but instead have a cluttered list of examples. If you've seen the movie Fern Gully, however, you might have some kind of idea: the environment is possessed of a certain purity which pollution (maliciously) defiles. While clear-cutting and poaching are foci of environmental activism, the ones I tend to think of are all concerned with introducing foreign substances into the environment (which is the basis of disgust, cf Unclean): oil spills, CO2 emissions, ground water contamination, garbage in the oceans. Landfills, floating garbage islands, smokestacks, filthy water pouring into rivers: these elicit disgust. For this reason, I think a lot of environmentalist activism, if not theory, operates with an implicit purity logic or rhetoric.

The word "unnatural," so often used these days to describe homosexual activity, comes to mind also in terms of the food we eat. People fear unnatural ingredients (despite the fact that this term has no clearly definable meaning) and unnatural foods (as in genetically modified foods); as far as I can tell, this fear has a viceral more than logical force. Many vegetarians express revulsion at the thought of eating meat, and lots of vegan activism relies on extremely disgusting images of slaughterhouses (which, you know, can hardly be photographed in a non-disgusting way). It makes sense that we would be particularly vulnerable to purity-thinking with regard to our food, because disgust's primary function is to prevent us from ingesting harmful substances.

I don't think either environmentalism, vegetarianism, or the organic food movement (only carbon-based foods!) are especially right-wing these days (though I'm skeptical that political orientations like right-wing or left-wing are historically consistent, and certainly there have been avowed reactionaries, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, who have been environmentalists). So there seem to be, at least in contemporary Western moral reasoning, two kinds of purity: sexual and biological. One of these is conservative and the other liberal.

I would really like to see empirical studies of this, because if I'm right, then purity/sanctity may not be a strictly conservative measure. Instead, the test's questions pick out a single kind of purity at the expense of another, skewing the results. Of course, we might want to say that sexual purity and biological purity are different moral foundations altogether, but 1) then biological purity should be represented in Moral Foundations Theory and 2) I am skeptical that they are very different, but are instead one moral foundation (purity/disgust) mobilized in different realms (sexual, ritual, environmental, dietary) like authenticty can be mobilized in different realms (truth-telling, existentialism, spontaneity, emotional self-expression).

If one moral foundation can be mobilized in different realms, though, this might call into question certain assumptions that Moral Foundations Theory makes, or at any rate certain assumptions that I made about Moral Foundations Theory and how we can use it, particularly to talk about politics.
I should also note that the description given of purity/sanctity does not really seem to reflect the concept, or at least not as elucidated by Beck. The quiz I took describes this measure as being about abstract religious or philosophical views about morality, which doesn't seem right at all. At the very least, things like utilitarianism and deontology, about as abstractly philosophical as you could get, are not well captured by the questions the quiz uses to detect purity/sanctity. Either that or I'm badly misunderstanding this measure, which I think is possible.

Moral Foundations Series Index

Those Ghastly Mountains

Today is Earth Day.

I am an environmentalist, though not as effective at it or active about it as I likely should be. Most of my environmentalism comes from the heart rather than the head, though, as always with me, it is greatly affected by the latter.

The truth is that I love so-called natural spaces: mountains, swamps, forests, rain forests, badlands, beaches, prairies. If I ever have the chance to visit steppes, tundra, saltflats, deserts, or dead seas, I'm quite sure I'll love those, too. I love red pines and pond scum and thistles growing out of pavement. I love pigeons and moths and butterflies and jumping spiders and centipedes and goats and giraffes and leeches and hagfish and lionfish and hoopoe. I find all of them beautiful, even those most people find ugly or creepy.

I heard a story once about Northrop Frye visiting Vancouver. Vancouver is surrounded by mountains and temperate rain forest; from pretty much anywhere in the city you can see those mountains, but of course some places have better views than others. Frye was visiting friends and sitting on their back deck, and someone said, "Look at the view of those mountains," and Frye said, "Yes, aren't they ghastly?"

To Frye, the wilderness is horrible because it is inhuman. He considers the natural world to be hostile to human efforts, but I'm sure if you pushed him on it he'd consider that it isn't really hostile, but merely indifferent. It does not care about us one way or another. Neither a mountain nor an ant acknowledges me; as far as they are concerned, I do not exist. It's not an issue of power, precisely; I could easily kill the ant, or pick it up and keep it in environments where I could manipulate its action all I like. But it would still not care at all about me. Nothing I do could make it spare the slightest attention for me. It is this which Frye finds so ghastly, but it's also what I love so much.

Animals, plants, fungus, geological formations: these are alien to me. Some have no life or consciousness at all; others have psychologies which are in some ways very similar and in other ways wildly different from human psychology. When I meet them I am meeting an Other more Other than any human could be. Such an experience is sublime (in its aesthetic sense, not the sense perverted and ruined by advertising, where it seems to mean something like sensual). But its indifference to me also forces me out of narcissism. It reminds me that much of the world does not care about me at all. I don't matter so much as I think I do. To someone as neurotic as I am, this reminder is always needed, and also always a relief.

It's that indifference that kills our Earth, though. The Gaia hypothesis is wrong in this way: if the Earth were truly concerned about self-regulating, it would be exterminating us much more vigourously. So as an environmentalist, what I seek to defend is the Earth's indifference, which by its own nature cannot make a defense for itself.

(But then, I also love dogs, who have evolved so that they can communicate with humans, and tigers, even when they are stalking humans--one of the most chilling sights, even when they're behind double-fences at the zoo--so it's obviously more than just indifference that I love.)

The Fort Chip Adventure: Where We Take the Winter Access Road North

These photos are of the Winter Access Road stretching north of Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan. Some of them will be blurry, unfortunately, because I took them from a moving vehicle. These may seem repetitive, and I'm sorry about that; I tried to stick to different types of forest or terrain.

Notice what the sign is attached to.

I am posting a disproportionate amount of pictures of the Delta (below) than of the Sand Hills (above) because I think many of my readings will find the Delta more visually unique than the Sand Hills. Also, we stopped more often on the Delta, leading to better photos.

Here we are entering the Delta.

In this photo there is a ptarmigan.

If you can, look closer at the photo below; you will be able to see Fort Chipewyan in the distance.

Winter

Having just read Em the luddite's post about snow in the South, I want to be clear about something.

Notwithstanding how much I gripe about the cold and how little anyone in the 'South' (ie. south of me, ie. most of populated Canada and the rest of the world) will be able to understand just how cold it is, I do find it quite pretty here. "Quite pretty" fails semantically. Whenever I see the hills from work, I pause--only for a moment, but I do pause--with a sense of blessedness that I get to live amid these hills. This was true in the summer, but in the winter it is more striking because it is newer. I've never seen these bluffs cloaked in white before. They look wilder like this, and I just want to get into them, tromp through forest drifts. I probably will do so this week.

There is a view in Fort McMurray which does, upon first seeing it, take your breath away. Whether you fly in or drive north on Highway 63, you will enter Fort McMurray at its southernmost point, which is the Gregoire-MacKenzie Industrial Park-Beaconhill trifecta. Driving north along 63 from there, you will come down "the hill"* into the Lower Townsite-Waterways area. As you come down, the hills still climb to your left but, as you ease around something of a bend and as Gregoire peters out, the trees and rocks and bush to your right will drop away and you'll see meadows roll down to a cluster of pines and spruce that give in to the Clearwater River, behind which the long, bare cliffs of the further hills can be seen. In the summer, when you first see it, the meadows are the light rich green of grass and the forest is the dusty dark of pines and the Clearwater is quicksilver and the cliffs behind are a pale earth forested with more pines and spruces that show, again, just how wide a palette "green" can be. I have not yet seen this during the daylight in the winter; I have seen it at dusk and by moonlight. Tomorrow I will go with my folks to pick my brother up at the airport, though, and this will be during the daylight. I wait with bated breath, because what little I have seen through the gloaming has hinted that it will be wonderful.

I love the winter light. It is white. Summer's warm radiance, signified best to me by a patch of gold on the rug, is nice in its place. But nothing says 'bookisness' to me like the white of an overcast day, and nothing says 'holidays and happiness' to me like bookishness. For those who haven't experienced it, when the ground is carpeted in snow and the sky is overcast, what sunlight comes through is reflected between the snow and the clouds back and forth, as though trapped between mirrors. Unlike a day with snow on the ground and a clear sky, it's usually not painfully bright (though it can be). The light, since filtered by clouds and reflected by snow, is white. Next to an incandescent bulb it looks blue, but next to a fluorescent bulb you can see what real white light it is. And since it's muffled from above and deflected from below, it's diffuse. There are no shadows. Nothing glows; there is no clear light source. There is just light.

I dislike the cold, I get claustraphobic and frustrated if I'm overdressed, my hands and legs hurt if I'm underdressed (in -35 to -45 Celsius, at any rate), I don't like getting footprints in snow, I don't like the time it takes to get dressed or the snow and water that spreads through the house no matter what you do or the mud that spreads through stores no matter what you do. You cannot kayak in the winter and there are no dragonflies or moths. Walking the dog becomes a much bigger chore than in the summer and shoveling snow emerges as grave and mature as Athena but as needy and tiring as a baby. Winter is not my favourite season--it ties for last with summer--but I must say that despite the recurrent frustrations--frustration so blinding that it's like panic only not rooted in fear--it can like no other season give a sense of underlying peace, joy, and maybe even rapture.

The hymns I associate with spring are ones of hope and renewal. I associate no hymns with summer, actually, but as a season I would characterize it as having a sense of possibility and maybe freedom. Autumn must always be new to me, gemini to spring, because that's when I start school (except this year); were it not for that it would be reaping the fruits of industriousness, winding down, impending rest. The hymns I associate with winter, though, are not properly hymns but rather carols. "Jingle Bells," yes, and, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," but more often the slow ones, so full of circumstance: "We Three Kings," "Silent Night," "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," and "O Come O Come Emmanuel." These songs are full of majesty. Not bursting with majesty, but full like filled wineskins or a well-packed lunchbox. They are soft, quiet, paced. And they are minor key, many of them. I don't know much about music theory, but minor key always strikes me as more monumental, as somehow out of our realm--fey, ominous, portentious, netherworldly, tragic, wild, or ecstatic. These carols are thus majestic, reserved, gentle, wild, full, rapturous, and otherworldy. They are that which is good about winter.

Winter is also dangerous. As a recently-initiated local historian, I am learning about fronteir Alberta in the early 1900s and am discovering just how dangerous winter could be. To us it means broken hips and sliding tires and poor visibility. To others it meant--and means--starvation and hypothermia and crashing planes and isolation and cabin fever and windigo and madness and darkness and other versions of death. If during winter the earth sleeps, than the earth has violent parasomnia. Winter is dark and dangerous and deathly, and that's how it functions as a metaphor in Frye's seasonal genres and in C. S. Lewis' fiction. This cannot be ignored, and as I pause before those hoary hills whenever I glimpse them at work, I also feel as well as I can how the early settlers of Fort McMurray must have felt about those hills--promise and freedom, hardship and death, mundanity and superreality cheek-by-cheek.

Winter is not my favourite season, no. But it is to me by far the most evocative, and I hope I always feel it.

----------------------

*Sorry to confuse you, but there are at least three "the hill"s in Fort McMurray, four if you live in or know someone who lives in Abasand Heights.
**Once I have an appropriate one, I will post a photo of Fort McMurray in the winter on here.

7 Quick Takes (XVIII)

1. This weekend I worked on my SSHRC stuff. This meant that over the course of Saturday and Sunday I did a number of on-line form filling, but I also did an interesting activity: I composed a bibliography of sources that I have not read. Not only have I never read them, I haven't even held most in my hands. I found them in library catalogs and on-line databases. I am still unsure as to whether or not the process expected you to have read them or not. As far as I can see, they can't expect you to have. It still seems absurd to me that I'd have to go through this. Anyway, I got 45 of them or some such thing. It was a lot of work.

2. I mailed the package off on Tuesday. I hope it got in on time.

3. And now, for the first time in a long time, I have something like free time again. The next due date is not until January. I will of course work on this earlier, but it will be a more relaxed process. To celebrate my free time, I wrote that very long post on Tuesday about disabilities and sexiness. If you follow, you know the one.

4. Jumping back, I went to church on Sunday, and one of the other training servers was up there. She's a youngun. I made sure to give her a thumbs up just before she helped prepare the Host.
The sermon was on not worrying about the future: Jesus said there will be wars so we oughn't to worry too much over that, and the world won't end. In part of this, the priest (I'm still unused to that designation) suggested that global warming was a joke. He seemed to imply that the carbon dioxide in question came from exhaling. Now, I've discussed global warming before and won't do it again, but I do think he was a bit off on this. Saying, "Don't worry, it's part of God's plan" is legitimate in a sense, but the impression I walked away with was that he was saying we shouldn't really worry about doing anything about environmental destruction, ethnic conflicts, terrorism and counter-terrorism, and all the assorted other things which quite likely threaten the integrity of civilization as we know it.
I think that we can and are obliged to try and prevent 'apocalypse'--not world-shattering destruction, but huge political/ecological/cultural changes that damage people's integrity. And on environmental apocalypse, let's not forget that we're been given custody of the earth, and so far we've been pretty bad custodians.
I think he's right to tell us not to let fear drive us. We as a culture are too driven by fear (especially considering how relatively little we have to fear). But I'm worried about the implications of passivity that might result.

5. At work I've begun to write text fragments for my virtual exhibit. Though this is work that I "like" doing, it gets difficult, typing at a computer all day (and yet here I am doing it again). For the last few days I've been doing bios on assorted priests (Catholic) that came to Fort McMurray, and some of these are so interesting. The lives of either Father Maurice Beauregard or Father Bernard Brown could be made into successful movies (there's already a bio on Beau called Father Maurice Beauregard, OMI: Life is wonderful...). The history of Fort McMurray can be very interesting--as likely can the history of any community be, if given the right attention and presentation.
<Edit 11 Mar 2013: I have recently received a message that Father Maurice Beauregard has committed sexual assault against minors. I have been unable to corroborate this, but nonetheless I want to emphasize that sexual assault is heinous and inexcusable and that I would not endorse a figure that I knew to be guilty of that crime. At the time that I originally wrote this post, I had heard of no such allegations.>

6. Today was Charlie's last day. Charlie (pseudonym) works at Heritage Park, seasonally. He's going on his 4-5 month winter vacation. Good for him. He officially retired a while ago, but hasn't stopped working.
Oh, and I held a baby today. I think it's the first time in my life. I just thought of it as a cat, and it worked out fairly well.
(I'm just kidding: I thought of him as a cat. I did know his gender.)

7. I am reading a bit again. Still in Isaiah. I am trying to finish my Lovecraft collection for Christmas. I'm on "The Shadow over Innsmouth." It's the second last in the collection. I have for the moment abandoned Heart of Darkness. I prefer Lovecraft's torturous style to Conrad's, I suppose. I'm thinking Rebecca or Moby Dick or lullabies for little criminals or maybe something about more trash lit next.
I am also repeatedly drawn to Frye. I'm not sure why. I think reading Fyre too much will destroy my own writing. I was trying to get something going where there were four characters, each with equal head-space time. Each of these four characters would show the story with a different emphasis and a different structure. One character's story would be a tragedy, one a satire, one a comedy, and one a romance (using these words in the sense Frye does--for tragedy, think Wicked or Hamlet; for satire, think Gulliver's Travels or The Miller's Tale; for comedy, think Pride and Prejudice or As You Like It; for romance, think Indiana Jones or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). The whole structure would be a romance, since that's the structure best suited for containing all of the others, and thus the character who was the romantic hero would be somewhat more prominent, though not by much. I was working on four-fold symbols and such, but the whole structure got just too complicated. I might return to such a project when I'm better at novel-writing (for a novel is what this would have to be), but in the meantime I need to move on. I feel as though I should return to the YA project I started for the UBC application, but I'm not so sure about it right now.
I'm also trying to piece together a Frye-based understanding of the horror genre, and it's not easy. I think this is a rare thing: sometimes it's on the border between romance and satire, which shouldn't be possible. Lovecraft is certainly satire (not in the sense you'd think of it, but in the sense of Frye's definition), though in a strange and fantastic way. But I think it can go either way for other authors, and that should be impossible. (There's also a strong case for tragic, in some stories, but not most.)

Anywho, away I go.

Quick Takes Queen.

Global Warming

Right, so it's Blog Action Day and I'm supposed to talk to you about Global Warming.

Now, maybe one or two of you have been reading my blog for more than a year now, or have gone through my archives, or whatever, and are now saying, "But didn't you once try to poke holes in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth?" Well, yes, I suppose I did. But that was because his data wasn't conclusive--or even relevant--and his argumentation had gaps in it, not because I disagree with his cause. Some people will point it out if you have a hole in the seat of your pants; some people will point it out if you have a hole in your car door; I point it out (or want to) if you have a hole in your argument. That's all. I dislike blatant misinformation.

"But," you might say, "didn't you say in that same post that you don't believe that global warming actually has been proven beyond all doubt?"

Well, of course I said that. I'm even marginally informed and I try to be honest, which pretty much means that I don't believe that global warming has been proven beyond all doubt. Not only do I think that almost nothing is proven beyond all doubt (which is impossible in an empirical system of knowledge, fyi), but I recognise that there is some evidence which suggests that global warming either a) doesn't exist or b) isn't man-made. That's not the same as saying that it's proven beyond all doubt that it doesn't exist or that it is even unlikely to exist. All it means is that there is room for doubt, or interpretation of data, or disagreement, or what have you.

If you did read that article, you may remember that I said we ought to act as though global warming exists, whether it does or not. Firstly, I think that it may very well exist. I think there might even be a good chance that it exists. Secondly, even in the event that it doesn't exist, most of the means that I know of for trying to prevent/postpone global warming are good for the environment for other reasons, too. Fewer emission is better for the air (and all that breathes it). Decreased fuel consumption is not only better for human civilization in terms of long-term energy reliability, it might also help mitigate ecosystem destruction. And so on.

Except that I add a caveat to this: we ought to be careful about what we do to mitigate the damage. Consume less, by all means and any means. Of course. I mean we ought to be careful about assuming that our 'green' energy programs are actually greener. We must check that relying on wind power doesn't kill off the endangered Tibetan cuttlefish and Australian ground sloths and Chilean pushmi-pullyus. In our well-meant but hasty drive to prevent one disaster, we must be careful that we don't cause another.

I suppose what I mean is this: Let's all start by consuming less. Much less. That's a good one, and it doesn't require a whole lot of thought to get started. Don't drive when you don't have to, put your thermostat lower, wash clothes only when you have a full load, fly economy if you must fly, buy domestic, buy used, buy less, throw out less, eat less. (Keep your empty jam jars, because they make good cups. Read those red-neck repair jokes not for laughs but inspiration.) And then let's all think very carefully about what our next step is, and not let partisan biases and our fear of not sounding environmentalist enough get us headed the wrong way.

And let's not lose hope. Or, let's find where we put our hope. 'Cause on this issue and on all environmental issues, I'm not sure I've still got mine handy.

I know! Let's pray on this. And I mean this not in a pray-as-an-automatic-response way, like lots of Christian-type bloggers will, but in the way of modern media. In Battlestar Gallactica, one character is diagnosed with cancer. They talk about treatments, and the doctor half-jokes about trying prayer. But then, just as the doctor walks out of the room, he turns to her and says, "And for the record, I would seriously consider prayer." For some people, prayer really is a last resort, and I'm scared that that's where we are right now: on the edge of apocalypse. That by now it's out of our hands, and our only job is to try not to make things worse and just hope they get better. I'm really, really scared that this is the case.

But I'm sometimes struck by something. A person who has been shot three times in the torso can sometimes still walk to the hospital. Our bodies are frail enough that a little damage in the right place (well, wrong place, I guess) can kill us in seconds, and yet our bodies can also stumble on when damaged beyond recognition, and still even recover. I know a man who was hit full-on by a transport truck, and he was walking again within a year. Maybe, just maybe, even after all the abuse we put our world through, it (we) can still stumble on and then recover. But in order for that to happen we must stop the abuse, and I suppose that's what this whole Blog Action Day and every environmental awareness campaign is supposed to be about. I think the problem is that we need to stop being so big on 'awareness' and more about 'action plan' and 'hope.' 'Awareness' just seems to be code for 'fear-mongering,' and breeds either despair or resistance. Neither of these are any good at all. What we need is cooperation. And practicality. And cheerfulness.

I saw a This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes skit where the newscaster said that the Catholic Church was criticizing advertising companies for using sex and greed to sell products; they should do what the Church has always done and use guilt and fear. My first thought was, Isn't that more of an environmentalist or social activist thing than a Catholic thing? I recognize that elements in the Catholic Church have used guilt and fear a lot and I also recognize that many social activist groups are trying to get past that, but it does seem to me that there's little difference between hell-fire and gun-fire or forest-fires as far as public relations go.

One way or the other, I hope the global warming/environmental responsibility campaign will come around.

I probably did not write something in the spirit of the Blog Action Day proposal, did I? Well, I suppose this must do, because I have nothing else.

Good luck. Go read more useful Blog Action Day posts.

Movie Review: Wall-E

Pixar's Wall-E, as I understand it the last of the great films conceived in the Toy Story, Finding Nemo, etc. night, is certainly a wonder in execution and personality. It is, as expected, perfectly delightful. It contains everything you'd expect of a kid's flick these days, with love, companionship, adventure, misfits, environmental ruin (and redemption), and silliness.

It also carries a bit of commentary with it that was perhaps surprising. There is a fair amount of sting against rampant consumerism; the attack, though, is not on the corporations so much as the consumers. The megacorporation Buy & Large seems responsible for the destruction of the Earth, but the effects we see of it are the idiotic, selfish, unobservant, and bloated human population of the space cruise, served by the mechanized robot crew. While the movie is enjoyable, the picture it paints of humanity's future is bleak, and happily it does not posit technology as the answer.

Overall, though, these messages are only evident to someone trying to pick up the ideology. It is subservient to the brilliant, creative, and precise visuals, the whimsical plot, and Wall-E's little puppy-dog eyes. I can see how some jaded critic would find this movie too cute, but I didn't. What I found most fascinating is that Wall-E and Eve came with complete characters while maintaining robot-natures, determined by switches and protocols. They were both empathizable and machine; that is not an easy trick to perform.

Of course, as always with Pixar, the real show was in the visuals. The gargabe world of Earth is old, massive, and well-rusted, very believably an abandoned planetary landfill. The spacescapes were beautiful, and the inner workings of the spaceship were fascinating, if less obviously time-consuming than Earth.

This one was well-worth the hype, in my opinion.

Movie Review: Aeon Flux

[Note: spoilers.]

Aeon Flux: Perfectly mediocre. I did not expect much, and that's what I got. It's a serviceable sci-fi utopian deal, and the secret past gimmick was not a huge surprise. As always, they got the technology a little wrong--as with The Island, there's no reason cloning should work like that--but whatever. And the female assassin bit worked exactly as I expected, so nothing wrong there. I was a bit surprised when she was overcome with lust for her archenemy and proceeded to lay him, and I was also a little surprised when she handily killed him afterwards--but then didn't after all. I expected a bit more interesting characterization when she strangled him, but maybe I oughtn't have.

One thing that bothered me (as with Daredevil) was characters' ability to move at peak human performance despite crippling injuries. Aeon's four-handed sidekick managed to continue acrobatics after getting her hand-feet pierced by those nasty grass-razors, for instance, and the male lead managed to assault his clone-brother despite his bullet-wounds. Unlikely.

Everything said and done, it was an enjoyable movie, but not one that you should feel any qualms at all about missing. Likely, you've seen enough similar movies already that you needn't see this one. Unless you really care to see Charleze Theron in those bizarre supposedly futuristic outfits, which often double for no outfit at all (left). I'd also be interested in hearing ecocritical readings of the film.

The Ant War

Just a brief note on something I saw at work the other day...

There's a theatre camp at the park where I work, and I overheard from the kids that there was a massive ant battle. Well, I had known there was a carpenter ant infestation nearby, so I just assumed that there had actually been two. The kids showed me the battlefield, and it was indeed littered with little ant corpses. The teacher and most of the kids mourned a little, which was surprising and heartening. Two girls asked me why they would suddenly start fighting, and I explained that ants are territorial. Because food can sometimes be scarce, ants are 'programmed' to try to destroy any nearby colonies. Often this results in large battles and the wholesale destruction of both colonies. I had almost said that, in this, they were remarkably human, but I decided they were two young for such cynicism and, really, that way of thinking is terribly unhealthy. The Cold War did end without nuclear holocaust, right?

Ants are interesting things. I was given ant-extermination literature at work so that I could deal with the ant problem, and learned some things about carpenter ants. They will have six different castes of ant in their nests. Their nests, tunnelled into wood, are called "galleries." A single queen establishes a parent gallery, and then other colonies are started as the population grows. In this sense they really are imperial. Unlike other ants, however, the queen does not usually reside in the parent nest, but either goes out starting new colonies or forages in the nearby area. This means exterminators have a harder to eradicating carpenter ants than other kinds, since servant ants cannot bring the queen toxic food and destroy the population at its source.

I also had the luxury of seeing aphid farms on trees and weeds at work. Since none were on seedlings or plants we want, but instead plants we don't and mature maples that can handle the low populations, I saw no need to exterminate them. It is really interesting, watching the ants scurry about the aphids. I'm led to wonder whether they herd them to new food sources when the local one runs out. I had read that this does happen, but I don't recall how reliable my source was. I certainly didn't see that sort of activity when I was watching them.

Incredible things, ants. Very interesting.

Tempering the Previous Post

I realized that my "An Unconvincing Truth" post was confusing, so I'll try to clear it up. The post is "An Unconvincing Truth," but then the article says how it was more convincing than I expected, and then I point out all the ways it failed to convince me. By way of clarification, let me say this: it was more convincing than I had expected, in that I am now not sure what I think about the veracity of the issue. Previously, I was pretty sure it was "the biggest hoax pulled on the American people," to quote his critics in the movie. (I can hear people saying, "How could you think that?" with incredulity and outrage. Let's just that, if you look for it, there's a fair amount of evidence against the popular global warming position.) Now I think global warming might be real. So I'd say it was more convincing; it was not, however, as convincing as I've heard people say it is.

Hopefully that clears it up a little.

An Unconvincing Truth

(or, The First Time I Saw a Democrat Afraid of Change)

I just watched An Inconvenient Truth, and I must say, I was more convinced by it than I thought I would be. Yes, more convinced. I had thought that I'd sit through it and be able to holler, "That's a load of crock!" at the TV screen for the whole movie. I, unlike your average viewer, I think, was almost convinced that global warming was neither dangerous nor man-made before I watched it (I'm assuming here that the average person who watched this movie just gobbled it up). Now, I'm not so sure.

I have stylistic issues with the movie: I don't think the movie required the long expositions on the hardships of Al Gore's life, and I think it could have used a longer section about what we can do to help (the almost unreadable print mixed with the credits were too out-of-the-way). However, this isn't as bad as the content issues.

First, I've heard data that contradicts his. For one, as I understand it, significantly more than 0% of all scientific articles discussing global warming express doubt. I heard it was north of 50%. However, I don't know whether I can trust this source. It was on-line. What I have heard is that it makes a lot of difference whether you're reading the paper of a climatologist or a meteorologist, and, on top of that, I've learned to distrust both the level of certainty people claim the scientific community operates on (the media usually makes it out to be higher than the scientists themselves claim) and the level of certainty that the scientific community claims (since I'm fairly sure bias creeps in more prominently than they care to claim). So his whole spiel on the scientific papers seemed faulty to me.

Second, he also seems to be leaving data out. I've read that all of the parts of Antarctica that he did not show in his 'documentary' are actually growing. Only that peninsula is melting. This is true of other glaciers he has not mentioned. This makes sense to me. Of course our geography is in flux! Why would we expect otherwise? Also, the stations that measure temperature are located in increasingly urbanized areas, which create microclimates which happen to be hotter than the average climate. This data, therefore, seems to be skewed.

The problem is, the contradictory evidence comes from semi-credible on-line sources that try to summarize the conflict in the scientific community (which I'm going to take for granted, notwithstanding Gore's claim to the contrary), and the "missing" evidence comes from a Michael Crichton novel, which I know I can't trust. He does have all sorts of solid research in his novels, but he also has all sorts of complete fabrications. This is part of what makes him an excellent novelist--his blending of fact and fiction is almost seamless.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), we don't have to worry about the credibility of external sources disproving what Gore's movie says because it has internal flaws as well. Gore leaves several gaps in his logic that he never fills in. The biggest I noticed, and the one I will deal with, is the carbon issue. Not once in the entire film does he actually demonstrate for me that carbon emissions have anything to do with global warming. I'd like to see that done, please and thank-you. Oh, sure, he showed that graph with the carbon and the temperature lines matching nicely, but I learned a basic logico-scientific premise back in my first year of university (and in Psychology, which apparently isn't a "real" science) and that was that correlation does not equal causation. So, by the scientific community's own standards, that data means diddly. Perhaps higher temperatures cause higher carbon dioxide levels. Perhaps they are both caused by another factor. Perhaps the causes and effects are so complex that we can never tell for sure. So this was a problem for me.

Another gap that puts Miss Teen South Carolina to shame is that saving the environment produces a better economy for the sole reason that it is "a step forward." First, I could rant for hours (and indeed have) about the ridiculousness of the Western liberal fantasy of progressive history, and this seems to come straight from that (North) American Pipe-Dream. However, I think it's easy to say that it just doesn't compute. A step forward does not mean a better forward. A step forward means nothing at all. However, he does show some data later which indicates that there might be a benefit, though I'd again caution against the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. More importantly, he points out that without an environment we cannot have an economy. This I buy.

So, needless to say, there are massive holes in this movie that rival the apparently fixed hole in the ozone layer (which I hadn't heard was fixed but, hey, Gore said it, so it must be true). Which tempts me to burst into a rant on the increasing fervour of leftist propaganda (yes, it exists, and in scary amounts), the silliness of thinking that we can't let the Earth change on us (this coming from a scientific community which is still fighting for the recognition that species and climates have changed in the past), and the preposterous arrogance that we must possess to think that we foolish, insignificant creatures could actually make this monstrous, global change. Notwithstanding this urge, I will change track entirely and say...

I agree with Gore's conclusions. Not his premises, necessarily, nor his argument. But, aye, I agree with his conclusions. See, the thing is, I think that if there is even the chance that there is a problem, and there is even the chance that we can do something about it, then we must commit everything and try until success or death to fix it. As I see it, the proposed solutions will not destroy us; instead, they could make us stronger. Sure, there will be short-term problems. but, overall, I think there will be benefits regardless of whether global warming exists. So, by all means, we ought to act as if it does.

Now, my critics will accuse me of conservatism, of swallowing industrial propaganda, and of being against the environment. Perhaps I am 'guilty' of the first at times, but I don't listen to conservative pundits, so you can be sure that I'm not swayed by any organized conservative organisation or trend. In other words, I think for myself. And, no, I have not been swallowing industrial propaganda. As you can see, I am advocating thought and consideration, and then action in spite of doubt, and these are not things that even Gore claims the industrialists are trying to make me think (when they do spread doubt, they want me to be paralysed, not to advocate action in spite of it). The thing is that I also advocate skepticism in reading anti-industrial propaganda as well. And, finally, I would call myself an environmentalist. I turn off light switches; I've run colloquiums on environmental concerns; I buy used; I recycle; I'm on board the cloth-bag phenomenon; I use public transit... I do the whole gambit. I participated in Earth Hour. And, really? This has been said before, but, Earth Hour? No. Earth Lifetime. Earth Aeon. Earth Eternity. Not Earth Hour.


And that's my rant. My conclusion: An Inconvenient Truth is an interesting piece of propaganda indeed.