Scale of planets and suns. I had no idea, for example, how large Arcturus was.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3974466981713172831&hl=en
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Archive for February, 2007
Relative Scale
Posted February 28, 2007 By John C WrightSpace Pirates Wooing Space Princesses
Posted February 27, 2007 By John C WrightThe revolutionary literary movement THE NEW SPACE PRINCESS MOVEMENT is only one day old, and already people have found the fundamental logical flaw in it. Namely, while ninja and dinosaurs are mentioned, what about Space Pirates? This is an importent point, and one that must be rectified! In order to lend more gravitas to the movement, I am reposting this peice I wrote last year for Meme Theurapy:
The fine fellows at Meme Therapy have posted a discussion about which Science Fiction starship one should own? The general consensus there is the TARDIS, as this vehicle travels both in time and space, is user friendly, and grants the Gift of the Time Lords, allowing one to speak all languages. However, this assumes that vehicle is ment to be used for sight-seeing or other Lawful Good purposes.
But we all know the real purpose behind man’s yearning for star-drive, do we not? The Lensman core was specifically designed in response to this real purpose: the real purpose of starships is to commit outrages on distant worlds and be away faster than the speed of light before the crime is detected. PIRACY! Being a pirate is passing brave, to be sure, but being a Space Pirate is the ne plus ultra of human ambition. It is like being a pirate, but with rayguns.
Let us agree, without further discussion, that the Death Star is the best SF star-vehicle for piracy. It has mass and presence, and when it is seen rising like a dark moon above the horizon of the capitol city of some hapless victim world, all will quail when the radios of the world clamour: THIS IS CAPTAIN BLOODSTAR of BOSKONE. PLACE ALL YOUR GOLD AND VALUABLES INTO ORBIT AT ONCE! Hapless redcoats will run every which way while TIE-fighters manned by scurvy Tortuga mongrels fly low over burning buildings, taking pot-shots at the panicked crowds.
But what act of piracy to commit? Looting treasure? Nawr, maties. Ar. That is not big enough. You want to kidnap a Space Princess and hale her back to your hidden lair on Skull Asteroid for a quick Pirate Wedding. Law won’t touch you if your married to Royalty! And not just any old Space Princess! We want a thionite-sniffers dream, a seven sector callout!
The question then merely becomes, which one? Which Space Princess do you want to carry off?
Many pictures of Space Princesses below the cut
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The New Space Princess Movement conquers the universe!
Posted February 26, 2007 By John C WrightRight now the movement consists of me and Karl Schroeder, along with our honorary founder, Alex O. Raymond. However, we have achieved the very Matterhorn of fame, including mention at SFSignal.com, and a webcomic at Steve Wilson’s MY ELVES ARE DIFFERENT:
http://bp1.blogger.com/_DwjgYnVpvas/Rd13ocxd_KI/AAAAAAAAAHE/poRUQlci004/s1600-h/070221a.jpg
There! That is at least six people who know about it! The New Weird Movement is already beginning to quake, their teacups rattling in their nervous hands, looking from eye to eye with each other, seeking solace, wondering if the latest Bas Lag novel might not have been improved by the addition of a nubile half-clad space-princess named Adora or Alura!
We also have our own GEAR! Take THAT you rival literary movements!
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Which had no less proved certain unforeknown
Posted February 23, 2007 By John C Wright“By the way, do you believe in an omniscient God? Does that mean knowing everything about the future as well? If so, how do you reason about this? If God knows what you are going to do, how can you still have free will? I note that earlier Christians where strong believers in a deterministic universe where everything was predetermined – that’s what I’ve been taught anyway. Is this what you believe?”
Well, I am sure we can wrap up this simple question in a sentence or two.
Oh no, wait, this is one of those can o’ worms that theologans have been puzzling over for centuries, isn’t it?
You know the Internet, in some ways, is the worst imaginable forum for discussing these high matters. It is almost impossible to stick to a thread of argument to the end. But I will take a stab at answering this paradox.
I am what you might call a compatabilist. When I read a history book, and I see the choices made by George Washington, it is my belief that George had free will to make choices other than he did. On the other hand, what is written in the history book is written, and cannot be changed. History books are not a choose-your-own-adventure book. From my point of view, the deed is done. The Delaware is crossed with the same fatal finality as the Rubicon (although with nobler outcome, for Washington came to create liberty, not as Caesar to quench it.) But from any point of view, past or present, the deed cannot be understood except unless we posit free will as an axiom. Absent free will, it was not a human action.
Human action assumes free will axiomatically. If it was merely a mechanical action like one billiard ball striking another, it means no more than a billiard ball rolling. We never sing the praises of an cue ball for its boldness in striking the eight ball, or admire the dexterity of the nine for jumping into the side pocket so adroitly.
I believe the relation of me to God is much the same as the relation of characters in my stories to me. Some of the character behavior is driven by plot logic: I cannot both have my characters fall in love and have them be automatons, because to love is to exercise free will. Logic does not allow this to me an as author. Some of the character behavior is due to deux ex machina that I introduce: I put a autobiographical character in the story, a sock puppet to represent my views and opinions, and he performs signs and wonders, because his character is based on the author.
The charactersface choices, otherwise there is no plot, and in that sense have free will. In another sense, I invent the whole of the plot and story. Then a strange thing happens: the characters come to life under my hand, and I find I don’t have as much control over them as I thought: logic once again constrains the story. The characters act out the nature they have made for themselves. A bad character cannot suddenly and for no reason become a good character. To do that requires some sort of plot intervention, a deux ex machina, a miracle.
So in that sense, I believe about God much like what some on this thread have said about DNA molecules. From one point of view it determines the outcome, but not from another. The difference is, that no reorganization or addition of dead bits of matter in motion, all of which move according to prior impulses given them by other matter in motion, can ever be heaped up to create free will, any more than an infinity of two-dimensional shapes can protrude one inch into the third dimension. Planes have no volume, and cannot get volume. Free will belongs to an universe where final cause obtains.
Determinists posit a universe where only efficient cause obtains. In the real universe, of course, one can address either the final or the efficient cause of a motion. The suicide falls in the river because of gravity (efficient cause). The suicide falls in the river because he aims to kill himself (final cause). The claim of the determinist is that a study of brain atoms will eventually find a ‘kill myself’ toggle, which, in the ‘on’ position makes a an suicidal, and in the ‘off’ position makes him love life. This idea ignores the affect ideas have on thinking. It merely confuses the matter used to express ideas with the ideas themselves, which exist outside the human brain. (If ideas did not have objective existance, then twice two would not equal four, except for those who chose to think so).
Let us distinguish this idea (that free will is gross manifestation of what, on a fine level is determined) from the idea of Washington in the history book (he has free will from his own point of view, and from mine, he had free will, even if his capacity for it has expired).
The past and the present are two different points of view for the same thing, time. Free will and determinism are not two different points of view for the same things: they are incompatable categories of thought, one relating to inanimate matter, the other to human action.
I am not sure to what earlier Christians you refer. Calvin is certainly a determinist. St. Thomas avers both the omniscience of God and the faculty of free will.
My position is something similar to that of Boethius, or, for that matter, John Milton.
So will fall
He and his faithless progeny: Whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood, and them who fail’d;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do appear’d,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not me? they therefore, as to right belong’d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of fate,
Or aught by me immutably foreseen,
They trespass, authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge, and what they choose; for so
I form’d them free: and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d
Their freedom: they themselves ordain’d their fall.
I think God observes and anticipates without causing. Another choice is and would have been possible. I think God saw those possibilities also. It is not logically impossible for Man not to have fallen, merely (if I may invent the term) contingently impossible. Boethius holds God to be something for whom our human ideas of time and cause do not apply. We say He stands ‘outside of time’ which is (I admit) an awkward metaphore, but I can offer none better.
All of creation perhaps is simultaneous from His point of view, the way a writer might invent a book, first chapter to last, in one flash of artistic insight. To the characters in the book, there is a time-process. If a writer could actually make his characters come to life, if we had that power, we would do so, for we love our characters, even the villains. The mystery is why this story we are in now is a tragedy, rather than a happy comedy. The Christian faith is that this tragedy will have a happily-ever-after in the sequel volume. I suppose it would be easy to blame everything on the author (See Olaf Stabledon’s STAR MAKER). But sometimes the characters get away from an author and do not act as they ought. Ask any writer.
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Manifesto for a New Literary Movement in Speculative Fiction
Posted February 21, 2007 By John C WrightThe esteemed John Scalzi at http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004884.html has decided to write a non-literary manifesto, and to approach the writing of science fiction in a professional and even-headed fashion.
I’ve read OLD MAN’s WAR and can give it high praise for its readability—Mr. Scalzi knows the secret trick of making a reader turn pages—and for its likeable characters—I felt sorry for the main character by the end of three paragraphs, and I am something of a cold and standoffish man known for caning my inferiors. So, good for him.
I picked up the book because I saw Mr. Scalzi acting zany on YouTube, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ2eSH585Dk ) and I thought: “Funny! Me Laugh!” which is a sufficient recommendation for works of speculative literature created by the same artist as far as I am concerned.
I have some minor reservations about the book ( actually, two: 1. recreational sex in the co-ed military has no effect on unit cohesion, and all recruits indulge in the general orgy without thought, scruple, hesitation and without any personal attachments being formed 2. the technology of mind-transfer, immortality, and mind-creation has no impact on society. When a character breaks a leg, they don’t just switch him into a new body, and no nonhuman bodies are used: no fish-bodies donned for aquatic campaigns, for example), but my reservations would be pertinent only if one takes the book more seriously than I think the writer meant it. One reservation was that the plot threads were not wrapped up neatly: but since there is a sequel to the book out, THE GHOST BRIGADES, I may have to look at that to see if my reservations hold water. The book was good enough to make me want to read the sequel, so I am willing to give it a Harriet Klausner level of praise—four stars out of five.
Mr. Scalzi’s non-literary manifesto boils down to the idea of writing to allow novices ease of comprehension, what we economists call a low entry cost. It is an idea I think every writer should follow.
But me.
In that same spirit, I would like to announce my own literary movement and literary manifesto: THE NEW SPACE PRINCESS MOVEMENT.
The literary movement will follow two basic principles: first, science fiction stories should have space-princesses in them who are absurdly good looking. Second, The space princesses must be half-clad (if you are a pessimist. The optimist sees the space princess as half-naked). Third, dinosaurs are also way cool, as are ninjas. Dinosaur ninjas are best of all.
Looks like that’s three principles, no? Well, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “Mr. Wright, if you actually could tell what I was thinking, wouldn’t you be out somewhere using your mind-reading powers for the good of mankind?” The answer is, of course, no. If I had mind-reading powers, I would dress up in a black cloak and skull mask, and try to take over the world. I would be careful to speak of myself only in the third person, and describe my plans to my worthy adversary. Said plans should include dinosaurs, or ninjas, or dinosaur ninjas, and involve melting the polar ice cap with my space-based particle beam weapon. If I am lucky, my worthy adversary will be some bold consulting detective from England, with a name like Neyland or Sherlock, and he will have a doctor for a sidekick to write up the adventure. If I am unlucky, I will be thwarted by meddling teenagers and a talking dog. If I am very unlucky, my adversary will be The Shadow, who does not fool around. He knows; he laughs; he shoots. You frell with The Shadow, its not some comfy ride to Arkham Asylum for you, you just get a slug from a .45 blown through your ribs and lung tissue, and have an exit wound the size of a grapefruit. Even Shiwan Khan bought the farm, and he had MIND POWERS fer crissake. After surviving three encounters, The Golden Master gets locked in a golden coffin and dropped from a crumbing building into an inferno. If I am even more unlucky, I’ll get Richard Seaton as my adversary, which means the planet I am standing on, my entire race wherever situate in time and space, and maybe my galaxy might get wiped out by his seventh-order rays.
So you are probably wondering at this point: what about Space Princesses? Good question. The first thing to remember, in writing a scene with a space princess, is not to show her actually ordering her marine guards to drub the uppity peasants with the butts of their space-rifles. In fact, avoid mentioning that she is a monarchist at all. She can express concern for the common people to indicate her warmheartedness. Have her engaged in a political marriage to the odious Prince Blackworm of planet Doomshadow IV (or insert your own space-name here), but when she breaks off the engagement to wed and bed the hero, by no means have the space-kingdom lose the peace treaty on which the marriage, and all the hopes of her whole planet, depended. Indeed, no state marriage or alliance should ever be shown having any purpose or any consequences whatever. If the queen of Sparta runs off with Paris to the city of Troy, she is just being true to her own inner self: what possible bad consequences could come of it?
The second thing to remember: bare midriffs.
This is what science fiction is actually all about. Let no one tell you differently.
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I just LOVE Gordon van Gelder
Posted February 20, 2007 By John C Wright(Ahem!) In a strictly manly, platonic way, of course. By which I mean not the way Alcibiades loved the strictly manly Plato, but more like writers in penury love editors who buy stories.
I just sold the worthy Mr. van Gelder of F&SF a longish short story called One Bright Star, which I have trying to sell for years upon years. And he paid me a very healthy sum for it.
Sold, at last, hurrah!
So, Numphar! Do the dance of joy! Release the hydrogen-filled Zepplin of happiness! Release the caribou herd of happiness into the unexploded ordinance field of delight! Blow the horn and ring the bells and pinch the parlormaid and throw the taxcollector down a flight of crooked stairs! Let the festive antics commence!
This novella It is one of the favorite things of my own I have ever written. It asks the question of what happens to Pevensy children, or Wendy Darlings’ brothers when they grow up. (Assuming they survive train wrecks, of course. Dorothy Gale does not grow up: at the end of EMERALD CITY OF OZ, she and her kin are taken to fairyland to live forever, and nothing grows old in Oz, nor dies. Wendy we know has a child named Jane.)
My little woman, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, Mrs. Wright, who is the brains of the Wright gang, came up with a suggestion for a snappier ending: it took me only an hour to rewrite the last few paragraphs, and suddenly a no-sell story became something snapped up by the market on my first try. Mrs. Wright is also known in my house as The Muse of Good Advice. Half the ideas in my books are hers: I am confident anyone who likes my writing will like her novel when she comes out. (Look for it! CHILDREN OF PROSPERO by L. Jagi Lamplighter.)
There is a big advantage to being married to a woman smarter than you. When I approach her loveliness, so absolute she seems, and in herself complete, so well to know her own, that what she wills to do or say, seems wisest, virtuousest, discretest, best; all higher knowledge in her presence falls degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her loses, discount’nanc’d, and like folly shows.
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Respect for Atheists
Posted February 20, 2007 By John C WrightThe good Mr. Torbjørn takes me to task with these words:
“I don’t feel he has a lot of respect for people with different views from his own – I often feel he has no respect for the atheist viewpoint. He is entitled to voice his opinions, but I often feel that his reasoning is flawed – he’s more concerned with “lawyerly” logic than than with reason… He is “not at all interested in persuading the opposition,” and that’s what I don’t like about him.”
I am startled by the harshness of the judgment, for I thought I was being punctiliously polite to those who disagreed with me. Anyone who is interested can look back over my journal entries and count the times I have used the words, “I respectfully disagree” or “I respectfully demur” as opposed to “You ignorant fool! Quail before the immensity of my coffee-table-sized brain! Quail, I say!”
Such expressions of scorn are the rule rather than the exception on the Internet, where the anonymity of remark brings out the worst in people. (I even try to call people by their last names as a sign of respect, which is difficult in a nameless environment.)
So I regret that my journal has created a misleading impression to Mr. Torbjørn, for I have respect for the atheist viewpoint, even great respect.
Their world is one of cold, heroic stoicism. Atheists live in an unforgiving inanimate universe, haunted by no devils, plagued by no jealous gods, bowing to no authority save their own conscience, all alone and needing nothing but the lamp of reason to guide them: doomed to death and oblivion in a world where nothing is eternal save the reign of all-consuming entropy, and where all human history is to be swallowed up in endless cosmic nothingness, and yet the atheist stares into the abyss and is unafraid. All his friends and gullible neighbors see ghosts and hear voices, or believe in those who do, and he alone is immune from their dark fantasies and hallucinations. These are the creatures of Prometheus: what is not to admire?
I do however hold atheists to the standard of logic freethinkers must meet, if they are to be worthy of the name. One cannot be a thoughtless freethinker. It burns my spleen to see what should be logically airtight argument uttered instead as flabby screeds devoid of reasoning and riddled with ad Hominem.
I have no respect for unreason, either from theist or atheist: but I hold atheists to a higher standard, for the theist, by his own admission, lives in a mystical universe were some things stand outside the eyesight of human reason: the atheist cannot make this excuse. The Theist who believes in Christ for an unreasonable reason he cannot put into words is at least self-consistent, for Christian theology allows for intuition, inspiration, revelation. The atheist who disbelieves for an unreasonable reason has nothing to say.
Atheists who have not read Tom Pain and James Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand earn my displeasure. How does one expect to win a battle if one does not go to the arsenal? Atheists who do not know the history of Rome, or how the Empire became Christianized earned my displeasure, for then they make foolish historical errors that detract from the glory of their cause.
Atheists who cannot make a crushing argument against in the Watchmaker Argument, the Argument from First Cause, the Ontological Argument of Anselm, or point out the paradoxes of the Problem of Pain, have not done their homework.
An atheist should be able to score a touch on a theist in his first stroke, and put the believer on the defensive in one sentence: “Everyone in the world is an atheist to all gods but his own, O Christian, for you do not worship Zeus or Thor or Vishnu, or pay honors to Susa-no-O or Mumbo-Jumbo; therefore explain to me why I should not hold your God in the same disregard as you hold all these other gods? What means do you use to distinguish true claims of God from false?” Or “Explain the divine justice of sending a pagan from the antipodes to hellfire because he knows not Christ. If you do not believe in hell, tell me why Jesus did. If you think means of salvation other than through Jesus can be extended this or any man, then why did Jesus claimed otherwise?” Or “An omnipotent benevolent God cannot permit evil in the world, for if He permits it, He is not benevolent, and if it exists without His permission, He is not omnipotent.”
Instead of any sort of manly or bold argument, what I get from half the atheists I read is mere craven blather, paradox, pure nonsense.
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference…DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music”.
This from Richard Dawkins, a “famous” atheist. I should say rather, a famous humbug. This is a mere admission of non-thinking. If we dance to the music of DNA in a world without good and evil, on what grounds are we to treat this statement itself? If the statement is produced by a rational mind able to contemplate the laws of logic and the categories of a priori thought, then it is not true, for we have found a human activity, namely reasoning, not produced merely by a dance of DNA. If it is produced by a dance of DNA and not by a rational mind, the statement is neither true nor false, but as meaningless as the noises on a phonograph record running in a room where there is none to hear. A statement that there is no truth, if true, is false. A statement that there is no good or evil, no standards of honesty or dishonesty, if made honestly, is an admission of dishonesty. One almost needs a special terminology to refer to this brand of pure illogic: the self-impeaching statement.
I have more respect for the atheist viewpoint than most atheists do. If they cannot voice a rational argument to uphold the philosophy the Age of Reason, they are not showing respect for it.
The other half of atheists I read, of course, are just swell guys. I hope they fight the good fight. I did, when I was in their ranks.
As for persuading the opposition, there is no other honest way to do it but with logic. The rules of logic are the same for lawyers, philosophers, and all other fashion of rational beings.
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President’s Day
Posted February 19, 2007 By John C WrightHappy Washington’s Birthday! Of course, ‘President’s Day’ also celebrates Milliard Fillmore with equal honors as Washington and Lincoln.
Here are some quotes from Presidents honored today.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness-these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” – George Washington
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“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.” -Thomas Jefferson
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“[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.” – John Adams
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“And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.” – Abraham Lincoln
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“We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Where we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity.” – Franklin Roosevelt
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“Without God, there is no virtue, because there’s no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we’re mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” – Ronald Reagan
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Stewards of Creation
Posted February 19, 2007 By John C WrightIn re a recent entry posted here, we are asked: “Why are hippies and atheists and gay surfer artists more serious about the stewardship of Creation than the religious right?”
That is a very good question. Indeed, a damn fine question, and one which should trouble the conscience of any man who calls himself a Christian.
It is unfortunately only a question I can answer for myself, speaking for myself. The short answer is that a person can be a conservationist (which I am) without being an environmentalist (which I am not).
The state does not act outside its bounds by passing laws to preserve certain beasts for game or decoration, or preserve forests and fields in a wild state for the use and delight of future generations. Antipollution laws are much the same as laws about sewage or burning trash, and are justified if they meet minimum standards of fairness and nuetrality.
The long answer requires that we list the notorious frauds of the last few decades.
- DDT — Rachel Carson penned a famous book telling us DDT caused bird eggs to have thin shells. As it turned out, the chemical is not dangerous, but banning the chemical has led to countless deaths in Africa, since no other effective way was found to fight pestilential insects.
- Alar.
- Global Cooling.
- Overpopulation. This one is particularly noticeable to me, a SF fan, since all the scientifiction of my youth starred worlds crammed with overpopulated hordes. At the moment, in real life, we are suffering from underpopulation: birth rates in Russia, Spain, and Japan, for example, are below replacement rates.
- Shortages of Tin, Iron, Zinc, Coal, Oil, etc.–Julian Simon made a famous wager with enviro-scaremonger Paul Erlich about the decrease of certain unreplaceable natural resources. Simon won the bet.
- SST threat to ozone layer.
- Three Mile Island. The most famous disaster in history where no one died and no one got sick.
- Cellphones or powerlines causing cancer. A fraud.
- Irradiated foods. This method of preserving food, from all evidence, would have improved food safety, but it was scared off the market.
- Mercury in swordfish and tuna.
- Cyclamates banned for causing bladder cancer.
- Red dye #2.
- Pesticides aldrin and dieldrin, suspended in 1974. Chlordane and heptachlor. All banned in the 1970s because of belief that they cause tumors in mouse livers.
- Acid rain.
- Agent Orange (dioxin).
- Asbestos in schools and other buildings.
- Ethyl dibromide (EDB).
- Ozone hole. No connection found between thinner ozone layer and skin cancer.
- Nuclear Winter.
Need I to go on? The tactics and tone, the hysteria, the zelotry, used in all these public scares was the same as we now see behind the global warming ideology.
Why, one need look no further than the comment which sparked this thread: a fine fellow tells me that his backyard dryness proves that humans caused global warming; in the same breath he tells me he does not know or care what causes global warming, or even whether global warming exists or not, since the proposed remedy would be good for the environment.
There is no mention of the cost versus the outcome anticipated.
A textbook example of illogic could not be written: the argument is that A causes B and also that it does does not matter in the least whether A causes B or not. “Your honor, the defendant clearly committed the crime of which he is accused! But if he did not, the court should convict him anyway. I am sure he is guilty of something!”
Sorry, but I am a lawyer. To win a lawsuit against a party for negligence (which is basically what is being alleged here) one must prove 1. duty 2. breech of that duty 3. causation 4. damages.
The argument in the global warming case turns on cause. If sunspot activity is causing global warming, the case for human industrial activity causing it becomes harder to make. The question then become how much of the warming is caused by industry, and what are reasonable steps that could be taken that will have a noticeable effect? Spending a million dollars to lower the expected temperature by one degree in one hundred years is not the same as spending a billion for the same outcome.
Remedial measures to mitigate the part of the warming caused by human activity become open to the question of whether they will be effective: I notice, for example, that an outrageously expensive ban on chloroflourocarbons in aresol sprays decreased the amount in the atmosphere by some amount below detectable limits, and at the same time Mount Erebus in Antartica errupted, distributing countless tons of the same chemical in the atmosphere. If a case like that is present here, the action being urged upon us has no relation to the anticipated outcome: it is merely ritual behavior.
So, if the question involved here is one of cause and damages (including a sincere scientific question of whether global warming is exist at all outside of computer models) the question of duty, the question of whether the religious Right recognizes that we are stewards of God’s green Earth, is a separate question.
If any environmentalist out there became convinced that the only way to save the Earth was to cut down trees in order to increase the albedo of the planet and reflect more heat out into space, I would listen with grave attention to his argument. That argument, at least, would have indicia of honesty: it would be a statement against interest. Likewise, I would listen with attention if the environmentalist suggested igniting a few atom bombs in forest to produce smoke clouds: surely the nuclear winter would stop the global warming trend?
As it is, the only solutions ever suggested by any environmentalist are those aimed at industry. Whether the problem is global warming or global cooling, two opposite problems, the solution is the same: mug the free market.
Years of lies have raised the threshold of my skepticism above what it would be on other topics. Proof beyond reasonable doubt will be required to convince me. When a boy scout or a hunter tells me he wants to preserve wild areas for hunting or recreation, I do not suffer the same level of skepticism: these groups do not have histories of being carried away by fashionable hysteria.
Does that answer the question? The reason why (speaking for myself) I do not count myself an environmentalist, even though I am a conservationist, is that environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a religious movement, not a scientific study. I do not worship at your altars.
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Flash Gordon is mere escapism
Posted February 16, 2007 By John C WrightThe highly-regarded (I regard his opinion highly) Mr. Barbieri writes:
The original Flash Gordon, by Alex Raimond, was one of the worst-written comics in the history of comics. I have read it all, though in translation, and the writing stinks. Its importance was twofold: it unleashed the immense artistic genius of Raimond, and it opened to comics a whole new imaginative world – or rather worlds, because Mongo seems capable of becoming just about anything you want it to be. But being extremely badly written, it is also highly political. It is blindingly racist: Ming is the very incarnation of the Yellow Peril, Gordon is an Aryan superman (Gordon and all the good guys and girls come as close to nudity as was possible at the time, and there are several elements of sexual fantasy), and colonialism is a clear presence throughout the story. There are troops who wear the uniform of French Foreign Legion troopers, and primitive men with all the imbecility that racist fiction always bestows on primitive men. The great issue of American life, black people, is by-passed by never having a single one around – everyone is light-skinned, whether Eastern or Western in type; and this corresponds with the “benign neglect” with which the average American preferred to treat the racial question at the time – just forget that there were blacks in America. Military life and postures are taken for granted and are at the base of all values: everyone is a part of one fighting army or another, and people relate to each other as fighting men. Indeed, the worst sin of Ming is that he does not talk or think like a soldier: he is always treacherous, disloyal, plotting, underhanded. Althoughhe has the largest armies in Mongo, he prefers to get at his enemies by means of treachery (that is, if you look at it from another viewpoint, he prefers not to use war and violence). All these are political features, and I grant you that I represented them as much from an opposition side as I could (probably because I hate the writing in FG); but do not tell me that they are mere escapism.
I respectfully must disagree both with the assessment of Flash Gordon as an artistic work, and with the assessment of it as racist, Aryan, whatnot. Here your normal diamond clarity of insight into matter of comics and politics has simply failed you.
Come now: why does Ming look and sound vaguely oriental? Because things vaguely oriental have the air of the exotic about them: it is a shorthand comic book image to portray the idea of unexplored far places. A far planet is supposed to look exotic. It was exotic for the sake of exotic, not exotic for the sake of playing up white man’s fear of the yellow man. I can show you a picture of Ming dressed in a Roman outfit, complete with plume on a Hollywood version of a centurion’s helmet, if you like. Why does Ming dress like a Mandarin some times and a Roman other times? Because its neat.
For that matter, why is there a winged Viking from a flying city held aloft by atomic rays? Because Vikings are neat. Why is Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Lincoln Green on Mongo, namely Barin of Arboria? Because Robin Hood is neat. Why is Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed on the planet Mongo, this time reincarnated as Azura, Queen of Magic, complete with a memory of the reincarnation of Flash as Callicrates? Because everyone copied the idea of an immortal queen from H. Rider Haggard, because the idea was neat.
Flash is a blonde, blue-eyed hero, but his actions are the very opposite of anything preaching race-supremacy. His whole purpose in the story is to get the various warlike races of Mongo to cooperate against their mutual foe, the imperial Ming. His is the very voice and exemplar of racial toleration: a walking ad for the Melting Pot. He is more like William of Orange than like Goering.
I notice also that Dale is a trim brunette. Where is our blonde master race, suddenly? And Zarkov is Slavic. Aren’t these the untermenschen? I do not see how the political theory can explain him. The “It’s Neat” theory explains him rather neatly: Zarkov is Slavic because he is Nickolai Tessla, the eccentric inventor every ‘mad scientist’ in pulpdom is modeled after.
(Aha! Dale does turn into a blonde for the film serial version. Is this because of a sinister racist agenda, then? Or is it because all the girls in Hollywood were supposed to look like Jean Harlowe that season?)
Why is Thun the Lion-Man the sidekick? I am not sure where this fits in with the racist theory, which contorts itself to pretend a loyal and brave supporting characters is an insult to the character thus portrayed, but to me it looks like the artist wanted to give his hero for his native sidekick a Tarzan, or Conan the Barbarian, or Hiawatha.
I grant you that Ming is supposed to be Fu Manchu. This is because Fu Manchu is the most impressive bad guy of all pulpdom ever. I notice that Princess Aura is Mongo’s version of Fa So Loee, the daughter of Fu Manchu–but here the political/racist theme interpretation get strained.
Why, if she represents the female Yellow Peril, does Aura look like a fashion model from New York, rather than a Dragon Lady from Peking, and have a Greek name? I note that in the movie, she is played by the sultry Ornella Muti (from the exotic, romantic land of Italy, not of Cathay).
Why are the beast-men dressed like cavemen? Because cavemen are neat–see Edgar Rice Burroughs for confirmation of this. Why have a planet boasting both rayguns and dinosaurs, spacerockets and swordfights? Why else? Rockets and sword go together–ask Frank Herbert and Geo Lucas for confirmation of this.
The other evidence you give for a political slant to Flash Gordon is that the evil tyrant is treacherous and the hero fights honorably, with chivalry. If this is a political statement, it is one played out on every schoolyard where little boys get into fistfights. This is the code of every single boy’s adventure story ever written since the world began.
No, if your theory is to hold water, my dear sir, you have to explain, not merely one character of out many, but the whole theme and scope of the work. My theory is that Flash Gordon is every boy’s adventure story from TREASURE ISLAND to KING SOLOMON’S MINES all rolled up onto one: Fu Manchu is there, yes, but so is Robin Hood (Barin) and Tarzan (Thun) and Eric the Red (Vultan) and Ayesha (Azura) and Tessla (Zarkov). And I have not even mentioned Frigia and Tropica, or the undersea city (shades of Captain Nemo). None of these fits with your ‘Yellow Peril’ theory of Mongo.
I set you the following challenge: if FLASH GORDON is a political tract in disguise, tell me what is NOT a political tract in disguise? (Is The Shadow a Yellow Peril racist because his foe (one of many) is Shiwan Khan? Of course, by that logic he is a Luddite, too, because another foe (one of many) is an evil robot machine.) If FLASH GORDON is not pure escapism, what is?
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Neal Asher on Global Warming
Posted February 15, 2007 By John C Wrighthttp://theskinner.blogspot.com/2006/11/global-warming-worse-than-we-thought.html
Originally from Jerry Wright’s (no relation—I think) post on the Asimov board.
Human induced Global Warming is a worse problem than even Drs. Hansen and Mann have told us. Evidence is accumulating the effects extend solar system wide.
On Pluto: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warming_021009.html
On Triton: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980526052143data_trunc_sys.shtml
On Saturn: http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20061109-022035-4126r
On Jupiter: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_jr.html
On Mars: http://www.mos.org/cst-archive/article/80/9.html
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Political Activism in Fairy Stories: Part the Second
Posted February 15, 2007 By John C WrightI think, for example, there is a political overtone to Eddison’s Mercury It has dark echoes of Oswald Mosley’s absurd noble-worshipping; it’s not an accident that they are fruits of the same cultural tree. I’m not saying we have to cull Eddison from the herd because he is tainted with Wrong Ideas. But I think this is the kind of thing Mr. Bakker is struggling ineptly to suggest: that even fantastic dreams can have echo-forms of the dreamer’s waking life. Also, at least one trip across the river Styx leads us to a Paid Political Announcement by the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. This does not mean that Vergil’s Aeneid is a bad book, wholly formed by political imperatives (as some have foolishly claimed) but it does show that fantasy is connected to reality and that some (not all: I completely agree in your rejection of this absurd notion) of the connections may be political. I’d take this on a case by case basis rather than an all-or-nothing approach.
My own opinion was not given in the previous screed. Let me state it here: of all species of writing, the one least likely to contain a political overtone is fantasy. This does not mean fantasy is free from political overtones, especially when we use the word ‘politics’ to refer to any philosophy or opinion on any topic whatsoever, not merely the art of governning multitudes. This does not mean one cannot write UTOPIA or ISLANDIA or WIZARDS FIRST RULE, or pen a visit to the planet Vulcan or the island of the Houyhnhnms, ad use the episode to make some point about the controversies of the day. Clearly one can. One can do it awkwardly or craftily, openly or by stealth, and either augment the tale or ruin it.
There is, for example, a political overtone to my own dear book MISTS OF EVERNESS: the modern Americans are not prepared to accept the rule of the heir King Arthur when he arises, and a certain mockery of the administration in power when it was written was intended by your humble author. However, it has been read by at least one reader who took it as a mockery of the administration in power when it was published, with no diminishment of the enjoyment by that reader, at least. Mocking politicians is welcomed by every faction of every age. I admit the book would have been stronger if the political element here had been less obvious and less awkward–but one cannot win the Prometheus Award without offending the gun-grabbing collectivists, so I took the risk.
There is also a political overtone to Mark Twain’s A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT, making almost the same point with almost the same figures. But Twain does it gracefully.
If Mr. Bakker wanted to argue that all poets put in praises of their patrons, and that whoever pays the piper calls the tunes, he would have and could have made a stronger argument than the argument he made.
Both Ariosto and Virgil take the time to praise the ancestors of the patrons for whom they write. Oddly enough, Homer does not do this. Among ancient literature, it is rare to see a portrait drawn ‘warts and all.’ (The unknown Jewish author of the Book of Kings also has this gift.)
Of course, then he would have to explain the fantasy of Michael Moorcock, which has something of an anarchistic tone, which is at least critical of the age in which he lives, including the values upheld by those who publish and buy his books. But sometimes the patron, including the wide range of the buying public, is sick of flattery and wants to hear his own criticized.
The argument given here, however, was an all or nothing argument of just the kind you (and I) regard with suspicion.
The political theory behind LORD OF THE RINGS is that we should crown the divinely ordained son of the ancient line of Atlantis, and resist the Turk who is invading Constantinople? Such is my reading of the great man’s work.
One can see the merest hint of anti-communism in PRINCESS OF MARS: the Green Men do indeed own all property in common, and Deja Thoris upbraids them for it.
But the admiration of Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha and the other valiant fighting men of Mercury is a little harder to call political, unless that word embraces everything a poet thinks about vice and virtue. This is the admiration of warlike splendor for its own sake. I am sure the author would have been as pleased by the panoply and nobility of Athenian hoplites as of Spartan, despite the diametric differences in the politics of these two warlike city states, the world’s first democracy, and first totalitarianism.
By the time we get to PIRATES OF CALLISTO by Lin Carter or Lovecraft’s DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH that we are dealing with fairly pure fantasy for the sake of fantasy. I defy anyone to read THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER by Lord Dunsany and tell me, from this source alone, what that peer’s opinion was of woman’s suffrage, or the Boer War, or disestablishment. Robert E. Howard, which was he, Republican or Democrat? How would King Kull have voted?
Peter S. Beagle is still alive. Read THE LAST UNICORN and tell me his opinion of the New Deal, Nixon Administration, the Gulf War, the Oil Crisis, the Space Program, the reunification of Germany? All I can see in that book is his opinion of men who live their lives lying to themselves, blind to beauty, or consumed with covetousness.
Good heavens, I have written three stories across eight novels, and read the comments of reviewers and readers alike speculating about my politics and religion, and only one critic hit close to the bull’s-eye, and seven out of eight were not just wrong, but perfectly wrong, thinking the author’s opinions as the OPPOSITE of what they were. And I am hardly an opaque or riddle-loving writer.
Let me put it this way: people who have politics on the brain see politics in everything, the same way a Freudian sees everything as related to sex, and a Marxist sees everything as economics, a Hobbesian sees everything as a struggle for power. You can find hints of a writer’s politics in his writing, not because politics is everything, but because philosophy is everything, and a writer’s philosophy informs both how he votes and what he writes.
When you live in a corrupt age, where every issue whatsoever becomes something some busybody wants to make a law about, such as how couples get married, or who is allowed to spank his child, or how students should be educated, or whether the Party approves of the past or wishes it thrown down the Memory Hole, then anything written where the author expresses an opinion about love or children, discipline or education, or future or past, suddenly becomes a political issue.
When the law has escaped all bounds, and its tendrils touch everything from motherhood to the weather predictions for one hundred years from now, you cannot write a poem praising a tree without being read as a Green, or describe the dashing Robin Hood without being denounced as a Red.
If you put sound economics in your book, people will think you are a libertarian (which, if you think about it, is quite a compliment to libertarians); if you have a character, any character at all, believe in God and not commit murder with an axe, you will be denounced as a fundamentalist, even if you yourself are a lifelong atheist (which, if you think about it, is quite an insult to atheists—are they all to be dismissed as impure if not found shrieking at story-strangling Pullman levels of hatred?); if you have two characters get married, and they happen to be occupying bodies of the opposite sex at the time (two sexes of the seven or eight that exist on the planet you’ve invented), you will be denounced as a reactionary and perhaps a homophobe; if you mention China, you will be called a racist. I use these examples because they have all happened to me.
No, I have seen these interpreters of politics in action. They are about as accurate in their assessments of authors as the writers of medieval bestiaries were in their biology. Like them, they are really writing homilies.
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Political Activism in Fairy Stories
Posted February 15, 2007 By John C WrightThe well-regarded Jeff VanderMeer writes, with honest insight, that his youthful theory about writing, namely, that it should be free from reference to current events, free from political activism, was not bourn out in his growth as a writer.
He says that on a subconscious level, his fiction did not become vivid unless he wrote about the effects of dictatorship, war, colonialism, the erosion of personal liberty; all topics touching on politics. To eliminate politics entirely from his stories would have the effect of making them too stylized, mannered and artificial.
He concludes that politics has a place in fiction, including fantasy, but he stops short of saying a relevance to current politics is necessary for fiction. Art can still be done for art’s sake.
… I haven’t yet answered the question I posed before: Is it important for fantasy, or fiction generally, to be relevant in this way? The answer is a resounding, No, it isn’t. The instinctual idea I had as a teen and young adult about Art for Art’s sake, the idea that character and situation are paramount, that some truths transcend politics — that’s all valid.
R. Scott Bakker writes a rebuttal of this last sentence of Mr. VanderMeer, and says that an absence of politics shows a lack of curiosity, or perhaps a lack of insight.
I say perhaps because I cannot interpret him with certainty.
His means of expressing himself are droll, and so I here quote him at length. Make of this what you will:
… If every aspect of our lives is political in some way, and “truths” are one of those aspects, doesn’t that mean, contrary to VanderMeer’s resounding assertion, that no truths transcend politics? Isn’t VanderMeer trying to eat his cake and have it too?Sure he is. The important question to ask is why.When you teach something like Popular Culture, as I did not so very long ago, the first thing you need to overcome is the common intuition that most commercial cultural products are examples of a magical thing called “Entertainment Pure and Simple” — what is essentially the mass market version of “Art for Art’s Sake.” For instance, how could Professional Wrestling or Andromeda or Hockey or American Idol 5 possess a complicated political subtext? Surely these harmless pastimes are “simple,” unblemished by the political mire we see on the nightly News.Well, if you think anything is simple, you’re the victim of an out and out illusion… Everything is more complicated than it seems, trust me. The only thing that makes anything seem “simple” is the limitations of our particular perspective…That’s why we once thought the Earth was the motionless centre of the universe.
He goes on in like vein for a while, ending with
So why did VanderMeer pull his horse up short so close to the finish line? Why does a part of him remain stuck in his teenage perspective believing that some truths do transcend politics, that something, anything, can be for its own sake?He ran out of questions.
The esteemed Mr. VanderMeer, showing more courtesy and craft than I possess, met this criticism by penning an amusing bit of dialog with an Evil Monkey, who makes sufficient ridicule of the dumb pomposity of “He ran out of questions” that it would be painting the rose for me to add anything further.
But I cannot resist pointing out the logic: Mr. Bakker’s position contradicts itself in two ways.
First, the statement “everything is complex” is a statement of remarkable reduction. Basically, the whole cosmos in all its glory is reduced to one word—all is complex. It is, in fact, a simple statement, and, like most simple statements, simply wrong. Life is not as simple as simply saying “everything is complex.” Some things are complex, and some are simple.
His chosen example is a sufficient testimony for that. I need call no other witnesses to the stand: Ptolemy in his geocentric model of the universe scribbled over the seven concentric heavens with cycles and epicycles, the motions of the same and the other, triune, conjunction, opposition, and placed both the sphere of the fixed stars and an invisible prime mobile beyond that, which he describes in baffling sexigesimal computation. It was a complex system. Newton in his godlike brilliance reduced the model of Copernicus and Kepler to three simple laws, including both sublunar and superlunar bodies in one system. In other words, at least one thing complex at first glance turned out to be simple upon analysis.
It is simplistic indeed to dismiss all errors as being caused by a lack of curious attention to complexity. Ptolemy’s reasons for the geocentric model were due to the ease of calculation, the lack of visible parallax against the fixed stars, the absence of wind or other sensation of motion of diurnal rotation. He came to the conclusion supported by the available evidences of the time, before the invention of the telescope, before the discovery of the Galilean satellites. Since Ptolemy specifically discusses a heliocentric model in his appendix to the Almagest, one cannot say he did not raise the question. In the general case under discussion, Mr. Bakker’s argument, if reduced to a syllogism, would read as follows:
- Everything is complex; nothing is simple.
- Everything can be discovered to have an ulterior political motive and meaning, including allegedly innocent entertainment.
- Therefore everything is simply politics: everything is simple.
I cannot interpret this figure for you: the conclusion #3 simply does not follow from the major and minor premises. Unless the words have a different meaning in different sentences, #1 and #3 are about as stark a contradiction as one is likely to meet outside a logic textbook illustration of an error.
Mr. VanderMeer says that he discovered that his art cannot be restricted to merely non-political subjects. Of its own nature, his stories grow to encompass all the human condition, of which politics is a part. In other words, Mr. VanderMeer is saying something complex and insightful. Mr. Bakker upbraids him by saying the world is complex and that therefore everything is simply politics. A more simplistic analysis cannot be imagined: Mr. Bakker claims that everyone who disagrees with his judgment is dull or slothful of wit, unable or unwilling to be curious.
If Mr. Bakker is saying no more than that everything touching human relations of power and law has a political ramification, he may have a good point, provided either that one broadens the definition of ‘politics’ to include all aspects of human life dealing with power and law, and further provided that one ignores all aspect of human life unconcerned with power and law. Of course, as Mr. VanderMeer points out in redirect, once any term is so bloated as to encompass all meanings, it means nothing.
Perhaps I misread Mr. Bakker. Here is another quote:
Narratives are about human interaction, about people trying to solve the riddles of desire and obligation and circumstance that bedevil us all — just like politics. The choices the protagonist makes are always political choices, insofar as they turn on the same network of assumptions that underwrite our daily lives. And insofar as pretty much everything you do in your daily life possesses social origins and social consequences, nearly every choice you make is a political choice as well.
If put in syllogism form:
- Narratives are about solving the riddles of desire, obligation and circumstance
- Politics is about solving the riddles of desire, obligation and circumstance
- Ergo narratives are politics.
This is the formal logical fallacy known as the undistributed middle. All Englishmen are men; all Frenchmen are men; ergo all Englishmen are French.
We also get a glimpse of the Bakker definition of ‘politics’ in this passage: politics is whatever “turns on the same network of assumptions that underwrite our daily lives; every choice possessing social origins and social consequences.”
The dictionary gives the definition of politics as the art of governing a state. The word originally comes from the Greek word for city, polis. In general, politics deals with the constitution of civic affairs: laws and customs by which public order is maintained, the virtues by which the men triumph in war, the economy by which men prosper in peace. The other common meaning is “Intrigue or maneuvering within a group in order to gain power.”
Is this the whole of life? Maneuvering for power over one’s fellows, or using that power according to the art of administration? Are there no books save for law books, no words save for propaganda? If so, here is a cosmos as narrow as a coffin.
If you are going to reduce everything in life to one thing, at least make it an interesting thing. For Nietzsche, everything was will; for Hegel, everything was the Absolute; for the Theosophist, everything is god; for the Buddhist everything is nothing; for Parmenides, all is one; for Heraclitus, all is many. Robert Heinlein more than once announced that everything in life could be reduced to sex and sexual competition. If there is only going to be one god in the pantheon, Venus is more interesting than Caesar. (But even she becomes dull when she is inflated to include all the things she is not: witness the tedium of Mr. Heinlein’s later work.)
There is no way to reconcile this, the ordinary dictionary definition of the word, with Mr. Bakker’s broad definition “every choice possessing social origins and social consequences.” Is baking a loaf of bread a political choice? It is not something Robinson Crusoe does in isolation: it possesses social consequences, especially if I am social enough to share my bread with a needy neighbor, or break it and give thanks.
However, Mr. Bakker is clear enough to include a qualifier. ‘Nearly’ every choice you make is political. ‘Pretty much’ everything you do is political.
What, praytell, is excluded from this all-encompassing totality? He does not say.
The second contradiction in his stance, however, is admitted by this qualifier. If ‘nearly’ everything is politics, ergo there is at least one thing, however limited, which is not. If a writer (fantasy or not) writes about this one non-political thing, then he falls into the very exception that Mr. VanderMeer admits which Mr. Bakker denies.
Let us reflect on what falls outside the orbit of politics.
We can think of some well-known examples of what type of men seek solitude, and escape from the struggles in the courts of the potent and the markets of the wealthy: the dreamer, who seeks visions; the artist, who seeks beauty; the philosopher, who seeks truth; the saint, who seeks holiness. However, saints and philosophers and even storytellers often return from their lonely caves to preach and proclaim and perform in the agora, and set the multitudes to tumult. All but one: the fantasist. Of all works of words, the telling of tales that have no reality aside from what fantasy and imagine gives to it, are the tales least concerned with the mundane affairs of Earth.
Indeed, the point of fantasy is to have no earthly point: it is when we want refreshment from the dull iron struggles of Earth that we seek the haunted air of deathless isles, or pause in twilight beneath the silent pines and ache to hear the horns of the elfland blowing, or see the swan-sailed ships vanishing at the margins of the uncertain purple seas, adrift beneath opalescent crescent moons, seeking other worlds.
The point of fantasy is to break out of the sterile confines of the mundane world, which, for all its pomp and pleasure, is too small for us. Those who dream dreams are homesick for strange heavens, find ourselves oppressed by your narrow universe, and must seek beyond its shores to catch a breath of outside air, if in our imagination only.
If closing oneself up in a closet to invent the fictional wars of the demons and witches of the planet Mercury, or the hunt for the hidden god Surtur across the lands and seas of the satellite of the giant star Arcturus, can be called political, well, the word it is a grand enough and vague enough to include, not the government of the messy nations of men, but the promenades and reels of the sun and moon and stars, the fling of baleful comets whose beards shake pestilence across perplexed constellations, the doing of dragons in the core of the earth, the convulsions of timespace at the dawn of cosmos, the convocation of dying universes at the Eschaton, the dance of electrons about the atom, the twittering of pale ghosts by the river Styx, the sighs of lovers, the meditations of mathematicians, the laughter of children, the note of the nightingale all alone in a starlit cedar grove.
Is that all to be encompassed in a definition of politics? We are dealing then not with the politics of men but of the gods themselves, the arguments of Vishnu and Hades, Buddha and Christ over life and death and illusion and truth and everything between.
I note that this definition of politics touches on religion as well. Mr. Bakker informs us:
(And this, by the way, is why so many traditional belief systems tend to discourage questioning: certainty tends to depend on ignorance).
Uh huh. I counted about six hundred eleven questions in the SUMMA of Aquinas before I lost track. It is a writing meant only for beginners, meaning that there are more questions beyond this for the advanced students of this particular traditional belief system. The writings and commentaries of the Buddhists and Taoists and Mohammedans fill up libraries with recondite lore. I notice also that we are told here with much certainty that certainty depends on ignorance. Uh huh. It is not “In my opinion, and I could be wrong, I have noticed in my limited experience that often certainty tends to depend on ignorance.” He seems pretty sure of what the foundations of traditional belief systems are. So he is making a simplistic statement here as well.
In my opinion, and I could be wrong, I have noticed in my limited experience that often politics tends to depend on ignorance. To dishonor the king, to question the authority, to talk back to the master sergeant, to dishearten the team and to spread sedition and rumor, to oppose the will of the people, even when not outright crimes, are always frowned upon. To make questioning the motives and practices of the Ruling Party socially unacceptable, if not illegal, is the principle hallmark of politics. Politics is the art of government; to govern is to compel and persuade obedience. Obedience requires a unity a purpose: no team can win if everyone is a quarterback.
Every other field is life has a place for questions; not politics.
No nation can survive if the mass of the governed are brought into skepticism about the theory and practice of their rulers. Even a democracy, the system out of all possible systems requiring the smallest amount of obedience and civic discipline from the common man, cannot survive if every voter questions the wisdom, justice, honesty, and efficiency of democracy. Politics is based on faith. Politics, in the final analysis, is about political correctness: the submission to one set of unquestioned principles or another. The vehemence and vituperation of politics comes from this source: each side thinks the questions of the other not merely disquieting, but disloyal, and disloyalty is a danger to the union, health and life of the Leviathan.
Religion, on the other hand, is the result when the dismal questions of life and death and right and wrong, the meaning of life and the vanity of the world, are bravely faced: those very questions that Caesar and all other worldly rulers would forbid us to ask.
When someone talking about politics in fantasy pauses to make an irrelevant slight against religion, a certain suspicion is in order. We should suspect we are seeing a ritual behavior: the comment is genuflection toward the altar of this man’s particular little god. The man to whom politics is everything is (often, but not in all cases) a man to whom politics is his substitute for religion. It is his church and his fellowship and his idol.
And his idol is a jealous one, and will have no others before it, and so the normal people for whom religion is religion, and politics is politics–these normal must be dishonored, in order to honor the idol.
Likewise, the jealous god of the worshipper of politics will not allow art for art’s sake.
In the short space of Mr. Bakker’s article, there was room enough for him to tell us about his class in Popular Culture, but not room enough to give proofs to support his point: to tell us the politic ramifications of Tolkien and Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard and E.R. Eddison and Edgar Rice Burroughs without which those writers could not be properly understood. Come, tell me the political implications of PIRATES OF CALLISTO by Lin Carter, or VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay?
I doubt not that a fecund imagination could read a political meaning into every little thing: after all, do not the Green Men of Barsoom hold all property in common, like the Bolsheviks? Was not Frodo Baggins the very picture of English rural gentry? I am confident one could read the dream-quest of Randolph Carter to climb unknown Kadath or the dream-flight of Lessingham to Mercury on rainbow-winged hippogriff into some sort of allegory for or against bimetallism or the Caledonian war or the Temperance movement or the Whiskey Rebellion or whatever the newspaper topics of the day might be. All one need do is read the works with no interest in the works.
So the faithful of every religion can do. Medieval schoolmen in their bestiaries can read all sorts of figures and parables into the doings of fabulous beasts, from the charity of the pelican to the resurrection of the phoenix.
Bestiaries are not written as biology, but as homily. As a homily, it might have been bracing for the true believers of Mr. Bakker’s school of thought to hear a real sermon on the homophobia of Hobbits, the imperialism of Earthsea, racism in Oz, or the Nazism of Nehwon; for we skeptics it would have been entertaining, at least, to see the mental gymnastics of the effort that might go into rendering an interpretation. It certainly would have been insightful to see the matter proved, rather than assumed by an undefined definition.
But all we get instead is the informal logical error of Ad Hominem: Anyone not of my opinion lacks curiosity or honesty, and has run out of questions. This is not a proof, or even a considered judgment; it is a sneer.
Defining definitions–and the futility of calling it futile
Posted February 13, 2007 By John C WrightAn interesting comment in my comments box
1. Euclid’s definitions of line, point and plane are not formal definitions. They go back on itself – you ultimately need a conception of line to define a line etc. They serve to show what he means, but they don’t define. Check any modern geometry handbook.
2. Euclid defines both straight and curved line. His definitions are not very good, because he doesn’t want to formally define, but merely show what he means. Here formal definitions can be constructed.
3. Formal definition is something very specific. You can use the definition instead of the term defined. The defined term is merely a verbal shorthand, without any additional meaning.
4. We, despite appearances to the contrary, are substantially agreed. You wrote: “And where the bold philosopher does fail, and the term cannot be defined, use an analogy, quote a poem, say something so the listener knows you are talking about THIS rather than THAT.” I agree wholeheartedly.
5. As I wrote before, at each level of reality (physics, biology, psychology, sociology) there are primitive vel basic terms vel concepts. They cannot be defined without introducing a vicious circle. Any definition will prove to be inadequate – that is, always something which should be inside will be outside, or vice versa. We can show something, or we can explain it, or try to refer to the concept our listener already has. We must do everything possible to make our concept as precise as possible – but definition sometimes will not help.
This is a very important and very difficult point. Think of it in that way – each term is a way to connect a formal system of language with reality. Each important term brings some additional meaning (connotation) into the formal system. But a formal definition brings nothing new, it only serves to combine already present terms.
6.You gave two different definitions of “good”: “pleasure-causing” and “duty-fulfilling”. Any argument when one party uses one definition, and the other another will be pointless, that’s true. But any argument using any of those definitions will be pointless – because they are both false, as any definition of good must be.
7. To define good as “pleasure-causing” is to commit a deliberate fraud. The good, as commonly used, is nearly opposite to pleasure-causing. But to define good as “duty-fulfilling” is not very much better. To follow duty is good, certainly, but the obverse is not true. Here the error is much more subtle, and therefore in long term even more pernicious.
8. It is a favourite fraud of XIX century charlatans, like Marx, to define a thing which has commonly understood meaning as something different, and thereafter use sometimes the common meaning, and sometimes their own definition. But not many understand that to attempt to define things which are undefiniable is necessarily to commit that kind of fraud. That is the main thing which Chesterton opposes.
9. That is why Socrates never taught, but only asked questions (maieutic method), and why Platon, the greatest writer of antiquity, refused to wrote down his most important teachings and left them orally to his students. There are things which cannot be defined, but which most of us knows already. They must be learned by experience, and then clarified and purified by discussion. Cf neural nets – they are taught by repeatedly showing them something and correcting wrong answers, not by giving them algorithms. Brain works a bit like this.
9. Lack of understanding of this point is one of the reason of mushrooming of legal acts and regulations. The lawgiver wants to precisely define something in order to stop any arbitrariness of judges. But when he does that, he sees that his definition is inadequate, that he created a hole which is used to circumvent his regulation, and at the same time he affects some accidental people which shouldn’t be affected. So he makes his definition even more precise, at great length, he adds additional regulations for every case – and it works worse and worse.
With which I find I cannot agree.
First, you and I must be friends, whoever you are: anyone who called Marx a fraud and quotes Chesterton wins both my heart and my admiration.
Nonetheless, I respectfully disagree with most of your points. One defines unknown terms by means of known term. You and the person to whom you speak must have at least one term in common, otherwise you would not be speaking at all.
1. I have read both modern geometry and Euclid, thank you. The modern geometry textbook tells me on page one it cannot define its terms, and I know at that point it is humbug, written by someone who has studied geometry and has not studied philosophy. Euclid’s definitions are formal enough for his purposes. By your own argument, nothing meets the standard of pure formality you set for it: you have defined the word ‘definition’ to mean something that no one ever does and no one ever can: an empty set. If not, give me a single contrary example?
All that is happening is that these modern textbook writers are falling prey to the fallacy that absorbed Russell and Whitehead, who thought a definition was not a definition if it merely told you what the speaker was talking about, but did not meet a formal criterion of set theory.
Modern scientists make the same mistake modern geometers do, which is, they assume the metaphysical underpinnings of their particular objects of study do not exist because those underpinnings are philosophical rather than member of the set of object they study. (This nonsense was started with Hume, who adopted an a priori axiom that all knowledge was empirical, itself a statement not affirmed by any possible sense impression.)
No, my dear sir: you made the outrageous claim that a point is not defined, and I quoted the definition that geometers have used for two thousand years. You are the one making the claim: what is your evidence? I do not take the modern geometer as an authority over Euclid, particularly since I think I know where the moderns went wrong.
2. & 3. As above. Formality is useful only within the context of a given system; axioms are ulterior to the system to which they are axioms.
4. I am glad we agree.
5. In the context that started this thread, someone was asking me to define (by which he meant point to) the artistic qualities Homer has that comic books lack. He was not asking me for a formal definition of the type you describe here.
Basically, we can distinguish between honest requests for definitions, and dishonest. An honest request means a man is not sure what you mean by a word, he does not really know what you are talking about. You have to help him out, otherwise unneeded confusion grows. A dishonest request is a debate tactic, where a debater attempts to drive you back to your axioms, and then, when he discovers that the axioms are axioms, announces (illogically) that you are being arbitrary. Or, if you cannot define your axioms, he announces (illogically) that you cannot support your position. I am proof from either tactic, having been canny and fell in debate for some decades now, and not likely to caught napping.
Come now: let us be serious with each other. If actually do not know what a point is, I can tell you: a line can always be cut into two smaller parts, but a point cannot be, because it is not composed of smaller parts. A point has no part. It is a simple and obvious definition. I have not heard any real arguments against it, only windy statements by men like Wittgenstein, who I do not account to be a philosopher, but a poseur.
When you say a formal definition ‘brings nothing new’ you are falling into the modernist trap. From Euclid’s five definitions and ten common notions and axioms, I can construct a dodecahedron. A modern philosopher might say I have added nothing new to what was not logically implicitly present to begin with: this is true but trivial, because all our modern philosopher has done is define the word ‘new’ to mean something that does not exist: synthetic a priori knowledge. It is a humbug.
6. “But any argument using any of those definitions will be pointless…”
I am not sure how to apply this. Would not, by your own logic, this argument likewise be pointless, and all arguments? I wonder if you are defining the word “pointless” too broadly. It seems to encompass everything that a common men does when he thinks about good and evil.
When lawyers debate in a court of law to convince a jury that it is either proven or not proven that the defendant is guilty, the question of good and evil, duty and negligence, law and breech, is not pointless: a man’s life and limb depend on the outcome of the debate. Pointless?
When parents tell and teach their children right from wrong, the question of whether good consists of duty or of pleasure only will determine every aspect of the teaching. The child’s wellbeing depends on the outcome. Pointless?
This standard you erect is one no one, not even the modern philosophers who invented it, use for any purpose. Perhaps I misunderstand you here. Please clarify.
8. The quote you took from Chesterton does not support this point. Obviously I (and every honest man) agree with the idea that a person using a definition must not commit an ambiguity. But that was not what was being asked: to remind you of the context, I was being asked to define the difference between Homer and a comic book. Come, sir. If I cannot tell someone the difference between the greatest poet of mankind and dime-novel funnybook, I should garrote myself with my own tongue for shame.
9. Who has told you that Socrates never taught? The Academy would be surprised. You are confusing his means with his ends.
Nonetheless, I agree that some things are learned through experience, but not everything falls into this category: geometry, for example, is a priori. Law, for example, is learned by reading for the bar, not by committing crimes.
9. I beg to differ. The excesses of modern legislation is not caused by definitions but by the lack thereof: can any here tell me precisely what is meant by “conspiracy in restraint of trade”? I assure you I can tell you exactly what is meant by “unlawful killing of a human being without mitigation or justification.” That is why the antitrust laws are absurd and unenforceable, and the law against homicide is clear.
The other excess of modern legislation is caused by the intrusion of the law into private matters, where no standard of right and wrong can be defined, even by the wisdom of Solomon. I used to sit in on hearings of the Planning and Zoning board. They had no standards, no guidelines, no nothing. No definitions. This is not the fault of the act of defining one’s terms, but the fault of using the law where it (by its nature) is the wrong instrument.
Besides, without proper definitions, a reasonable man cannot conform his conduct to the standards of the law.
Having said that, your general point I agree with and with all my heart. Where modern juries and modern activist judges lack all sense of proportion and justice, frantic legislators attempt to amend such wayward and wanton abuses of the law with stricter and more exact regulation, which, as you correctly say, is no substitute.
And I agree with your basic point: formal definitions cannot replace wisdom! A person without a certain level of understanding cannot be reasoned with. At that point talk fails, and only emotion is left.
My vehement objection is that you are suggesting that I surrender before that point. There is no need–if one’s audience lacks wisdom and understanding, that point is reached all too soon.
There is no need to tempt one’s pride by pretending so lofty an understanding that another man cannot grasp one’s meaning. If a man asks you an honest question, answer it honestly and humbly, or otherwise do not call yourself a philosopher.
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Steve Wilson over at “My elves are different”…
Posted February 13, 2007 By John C WrightHas an importent contribution to make to the discussion here.
And also, and adroit remark concerning Mr. Sawyer’s thoughts on science fiction.
And by all means look here and here as well. It is funny because it is true.
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