John C. Wright's Blog, page 138

One Child = Selective Abortion, Female Infanticide, Abandoning Baby Girls

Hat tip to All Girls Allowed via the lovely and talented Mrs Wright at Dreams of Arhyelon. The following article is from the China Post:

China to ban 'nasty' family planning slogans

SHANGHAI — China is ordering local officials to stop using threatening slogans to enforce its strict "one-child" policy, state media has reported.

The government wants to ban slogans like: "Kill all your family members if you don't follow the rule" and "We would rather scrape your womb than allow you to have a second child," the Shanghai Daily said at the weekend.

China, the world's most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people, introduced the "one-child" policy in 1979.

Despite calls for relaxation, Chinese officials say the policy is still needed, claiming over-population threatens the country's development.

But the National Population and Family Planning Commission aims to prevent zealous local authorities from offending the public or worsening social tensions with "nasty" slogans, the newspaper said.

Several referred to forced sterilization — one slogan said: "If you don't have your tubes tied, your house will be demolished."

"Once you are captured, your tubes will be tied. Should you escape, we'll hunt you down. If you attempt suicide, we'll offer you either the rope or a bottle of poison," read another.

The newspaper gave no indication of where the slogans were used.

China, under a 1980 policy designed to control its population, permits most couples to have only one child, an approach critics charge is backed with forced sterilizations and abortions.

Some experts say the "one-child" policy has turned into a demographic time bomb as the population ages, storing up huge economic and social problems for the country as well as fostering a gender imbalance.

Given the traditional preference for sons, sex-specific abortions occur and female infanticide and the abandoning of baby girls have also been reported. [emphasis mine]

New slogans which have received the government's nod of approval include: "Caring for a girl means caring for the future of the nation," the newspaper said, in an effort to encourage families to raise daughters.

My comment: knowing that an evil exists and actually seeing and feeling it are two different things, as different as book-learning from life-experience. While in China, I spoke with my friendly and intelligent tour guide, and he explained how, when he went to go get his marriage license, the workings of the One Child Policy were revealed to him: he was ushered into a back room with a wrinkled gray old granny, who told him he must take a sacred oath to support the policy, in writing, and he would be denied both government work and his government run health care forever after if he broke his word.

Since, at that time, both he and his wife were living in government run dormitories, and only meeting on the weekends, it was no great hardship. Later, when the dorms were privatized and sold (as part of China's ongoing but doomed attempt to reap the benefits of a free market without having a free society)  he moved in with his wife. In the course of time, they applied for permission to have a child: but the old granny in the back room told him that the quota for that district was filled for that year, and they could apply for permission next year. In his innocence, he asked what he and his wife were to do in the meanwhile. Granny, speaking on behalf of the dictatorship of the proletariat, told him he should send his wife back home to live with her mother, so that he would not be tempted during the year intervening.

In due course of time, he had a little girl, which means his family name will not be carried on. He himself, being the only child and the son of an only child, had neither uncles nor cousins nor any of the family relationships which figure so predominantly in the writings of Confucius. He expressed sorrow that his daughter had no siblings to play with.

Since this was a tour guide who works every day with Americans and Europeans visiting to adopt Chinese children, I asked him why the Chinese cannot adopt the Chinese, to spare the children the effort, at least, of learning a new language? He just shook his head and explained the law did not allow.

I have since heard that the number of girls put up for adoption, girls like my own daughter, have dropped significantly, now that ultrasound technology allows the couple to know the sex of the child before birth, and kill the child in the womb if she is a girl. The feminists who urge the killing of children in the womb is rightful and liberating for females do not extend their concern to unborn females.

I was appalled beyond words. I had read many a science fiction dystopia where humans are treated like ants in an ant farm. Seeing a man who was forbidden by the state from having sexual relations with his own wife is a different matter.

An epilogue: I was once invited to the house of a prominent science fiction author. One of the guests there, when the topic came up, expressed his approval of the One Child Policy of China. I regret not punching him in the face hard enough to knock him down, and to this day think of myself as less than a man for allowing such a thing to be said to me unchallenged. I tell myself that peacefulness is civilized, nay, divine, but I fear it was merely cravenness.

What is to be done? The pro-aborts cannot be reasoned with. Or do you think someone willing to inveigle a  mother to kill her own precious baby is so honest and honorable that when shown logical reasons why his entire ideology supporting a zillion-dollar-a-year baby-killing industry offends natural morality, he will repent?

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Briggs on Academics Uriging Infanticide

In the book AN EVIL GUEST Gene Wolfe sardonically predicts a culture where 'post-natal abortions' that is, killing the baby after he is born, would be commonplace.

As it turns out this science fiction writer, attempting to imagine the lower deep of depravity to which future civilization might fall was merely a year or two ahead of his time, not decades or generations.

William Briggs has an article titled Academics—Who Else?—Call For The Killing Of Babies. It is a criticism, nay, an autopsy of a peer reviewed paper issued by bioethicists in Australia defending the infanticide of weak, crippled, inconvenient or otherwise useless and unwanted babies.

If you recall, the field of 'bioethics' is the field, made necessary after the Nazi experiments in World War Two, to invent new and shiny excuses for medical crimes against humanity aside from those the National Socialists used. The favored excuse is utilitarianism, combined with a breathtaking pretense of ignorance of the basics of biology.

Apparently, in Cloudcuckooland, homo sapiens give birth to a transitional form of life which is non-human, but which becomes human either at the age of seven years, or when when the skull clears the birth canal, or when the mother or a judicial body bestows whatever Linnaean taxonomic classification on the organism whim sees fit: I do not see why a mother, if it is she who decided if her baby is homo sapiens, cannot with equal godlike authority declare him to be a spaniel or a goldfish instead. This makes us the only known species who does not reproduce itself directly, but instead engages another species, creatures called fetuses, to produce us.

Ah! But we who know grammar-school biology, we are the mystics and nutbags cruelly attempting to tyrannize the mother, and rob her of her rightful magic powers to decree that humans are livestock, babies are parasites, A is not A.

Briggs lists the claims and with a manful reticence to use the type of withering sarcasm and flaming rage such nakedly evil claims should provoke, he list the logical fallacies involved in the claim.

It is to be noted that this gem appears in his comments box:

With respect, your focus on a single event to act as a threshold of a right to life is, at best, sidetracking. They already clearly acknowledge the lack of a solution to the threshold problem. The moment of conception is also imperfect as it is not clear to the non-religious why this cell should have an absolute right to life and arguably the religious texts do not give clear guidance either. "My threshold is best" is not an infallible line of attack, especially if you already accept is as a prior due to your religious convictions.

Obviously there are non-religious reasons for defining human life as human, if one wishes to rely on erring human reason rather than on inerrant divine commandment. But it is interesting to note that Mr Briggs does not mention or even allude to religion anywhere in his critique: he merely points out lapses of logic.

Interesting, because this commenter, rallying to the flag of the infanticides, immediately points his barrage against the Church, as if she were the main, or the only, enemy or obstacle to the Culture of Death.

This gives away the whole game, the motives, the final causes.

The pro-death camp, or, excuse me, the pro-choosing-death-for-babies camp are attempting to defend, promote, and (with ideas such as this) expand the right of the strong to betray and kill the weak for their own comfort and convenience. In each case they use necessity, what Milton called 'the tyrant's plea' to excuse the crime, specifically that it is necessary for the innocent baby to die so that society will not have to go to the expense and effort of raising and caring for him, and effort which is (in a summary fashion) labeled 'unbearable' in this article.

Now it is possible that some intellectuals are merely sociopaths, and unable to make the simplest moral judgments about whether there is or is not something wrong with killing babies, Negroes, Jews and rape victims to achieve momentary pleasure or temporary convenience.

It is possible that they worship Moloch, and to see babies sacrificed to the dim and bloody gods of remote pre-history gives them a drunken thrill in their jaded lives, a sense of power, and soothes their terror of the devils and trolls they think rule the chaos they opine the cosmos to be. Since they are moderns, one might assume they are as unaware of their own motives as they are of simple moral principles.

The other possibility is that some or all of them are haunted by the tiny ghosts, crying for mommy, of babies never born, which number in the millions, and can be heard weeping along the moors on moonless midnights; and therefore the intellectuals seek to silence the voice of conscience which forms the only ears by which mortal hear the voices of ghosts. In their minds, the conscience means the Church, and so that point their weapons against her.

In other words, the opposition here, or one of them, has admitted both that the Church is the bulwark and guardian of the conscience in this fallen world, and that he knows the acts he and his promote are evil.

Read the Briggs' article here, http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5304 and savor the adroit and sardonic yet elementary logic against which the intellectuals, allegedly our moral and mental superiors, flounder fecklessly.

I regret seeing such an article, so shamelessly promoting the worship of Moloch. It is like hearing a fire alarm, but not hearing the sirens of the approaching fire truck. Our mansion, the heritage of the West, as already ablaze, and the arsonists cannot be reasoned with.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Hitchens spits his last breath at Chesterton

In the climax of MOBY DICK, Captain Ahab utters these dying words: "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

Grimly enough, Ahab's harpoon with which he hoped to spear the great sea beast tangles its line with his leg, and Ahab is pulled into the sea and drawn after the whale literally which he had been drawn after psychologically all this time.

Those of you with a sci fi bent might recall these same words breathed out with his dying breath by the genetic superhuman Khan Noonean Singh against Captain Kirk before he attempts to blow up the Enterprise with one last superweapon.

In both cases the White Whale and the famous starship emerge unharmed from the assault.

The Catholic Thing reports that Christopher Hitchens has written a final article before he passed away, his last publication. Oddly, and to my mind, sadly, he chose to drive his harpoon against the vast bulk and vaster spirit of GK Chesterton.

Foolishly, Hitchens titled an article — I assume it was Hitchens' title since he uses the word throughout — about the lifelong arch-anti-aristocrat anti-Imperialist anti-Capitalist pro-Irish Chesterton 'The Reactionary.' The man who coined the brilliantly exaggerated caricatures of Hudge and Gudge when discussing the dismal state of British politics can be called many things, but 'Reactionary' is hardly one of them.

I recommend only that those who regard Mr Chesterton as a 'Reactionary' (which means a reflexive and thoughtless defender of the status quo, that is, of industrial capitalism, if has any meaning at all) please read his EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS, wherein Chesterton (in a lapse of his normal wisdom and lucidity) describes Capitalism as 'a corrupt prison' where the rich somehow have the power deliberately to create and maintain the poverty of the poor in order to force an unwilling workforce to toil for starvation wages in their dark, satanic mills.

The article is not worth reading, as the insight into Chesterton is on a par with that wildly wide-o'-the-mark envenomed dart. It consists of Hitchens listing some famous paradoxes or insights of Chesterton's, sneering at them in an airy albeit leaden fashion without addressing them, as if this showed Chesterton, rather than Hitchens, to be arid. It quotes some of his poetry without saying anything about its literary merit or place in history, aside from a dismissive snort that Chesterton was Catholic. The article touches on the claims the Chesterton, who was nearly a Zionist, was an anti-semite, as if this were the crucial point in the man's life. Next it tries to link Distributism to Nazism by a sort of Hitchensian free association.

Speaking as a yellow journalist, I submit that, even by the standards of yellow journalism, the article is crap.

You would be more edified to seek out an eleven year old and solicit his opinions on Goddard's versus Tsiolovsky's contribution to rocket science. You might run across a Boy Scout with a merit badge in rocketry, and be pleasantly surprised that the child knew whereof he spoke.

Like many Christians, I had been praying for an eleventh hour conversion by Mr Hitchens.

Exactly such circumstances as this wonderfully focused my own mind on the issue of my atheism, its hopelessness and its inadequacy as a moral, metaphysical, mental or physical model to the cosmos, or guide to navigate life. My own experience makes me unable to see either the harshness or the ghoulishness of using the deathbed as an instrument to jar the blinded soul awake. To me, using the threat of death to reach a lost soul seems no more than benevolent common sense.

And yet, it seems, Mr Hitchens was not reached. We know not for sure, but it looks like he died in his sins, and fell into the outer darkness.

At times like this, I wish I were a Calvanist, who thinks that Christ's salvation was only meant for those who, by the high command of overarching predestination, had been foreknown and foreordained for salvation, and the good Lord meant and intended a dying man should not repent; for then at least I would have the cold comfort of thinking this was God's Will.

But I am, for better or worse, for fairer or fouler, wedded to a gentler and more rational mother Church. I believe the inscrutable purposes of God leaves free men's will to seek their own damnation, if men freely choose pride and hell over humility and heaven. So I believe the Blessed Virgin weeps to see a child of God cast into the dark inferno, and all the saints with her.

My prayers for Mr Hitchens seem not to have been heard. Neither seemed our Lord's in the garden of Gethsemane: the cup He prayed to pass Him by He drained to the lees.

Instead we have the heathen raging impotently against the apostle of Common Sense, our own beloved GK Chesterton, a pygmy against a titan.  I doubt the reputation of Chesterton is marred, any more than the reputation of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

One of the first things that led me to doubt the crystalline logical purity of my atheist was antics like this from public atheist figures. Hitchens, who has never once washed the wounds of a leprous beggar from Calcutta, spent his reputation mocking the saintly Mother Theresa.

Mr Hitchens is more on his own level attempting to belittle a fellow man of letters like Chesterton, but even here poor little Chris is over his head. Chesterton was something of a polymath, writing everything from Father Brown mysteries, to MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH to biographies of George Bernard Shaw or Saint Thomas Aquinas to epic poems about the battles of Alfred the Great to quasi-science fictional flights of fancy to apologetics to eugenics to all the topics of his day. Is the bitter and witty Mr Hitchens prepared to match wits against the corpulent and jovial inventor of Innocence Smith?

Was that the best thing Mr Hitchens could find to do in his last days, with the shadow of the Grim Reaper's sickle already falling across his pages?

We are all of us, for all we know, in our last days, and all the dead who ever were, great and small, were once as we are now. Let the sad example of Mr Hitchens serve as a remainder that our time on this hither shore is but brief.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Blessed Mary and Mary Poppins

A perfectly wonderful, albeit over-the-top, attempt to draw out Marian symbology from the movie MARY POPPINS can be found here:

https://vestalmorons.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/mary-poppins-and-the-blessed-virgin-mary/

Let me admit, first, that this is one of my favorite movies of all time, and displays Disney at his peak of genius, creativity, whimsy, solid story-telling, and fun. Usually when a movie is made from a book, the movie is grossly inferior. This is one of the two stand out exceptions (the other is THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, which ironically is the weakest book of L Frank Baum's series). I read the book in my youth; the movie is better.

My wife once worked at a bookstore which, to sell movies, would run the television continually. During an eight hour shift she would see the same movie running four times in a row, and then again the next day and so on. There are few or no movies one can stand seeing and still enjoy on so many repeated viewings. This is one of the two stand out exceptions. (The other was STAR WARS, the real version where Han shot first, but, alas, the bookstore sold it.)

Let me finally say that while I enjoyed this article enough to recommend it, I hope the writers are being slightly tongue-in-cheek with finding these farfetched analogies.

One disadvantage of a background in literature is the ability to find symbolic parallels from anything to anything, and a consequent inability to take such parallels seriously. At times the writer is merely attributing to Mary things true of all mothers, or even of all authority figures maternal or paternal, or finding a Marian symbolism in a magic which is true of all magic.

I myself do not think Disney or PL Travers or anyone else had this parallelism in mind. On the other hand, I do think all good drama, in order to be good drama, must reflect the Christian world view, with its odd blend of pragmatism and supernaturalism, which neither materialists (like Mr Banks) nor ideologues (like Mrs Banks) understand.

I will say, though, that the English have always had a special relationship with Mary, and, after the break between Henry VIII and Rome, with Marian figures, Virgin Queens, and the like. The English seem more easily able to take a female as an authority, for example, than other European powers: Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II, and, for that matter, Margaret Thatcher have few parallels or none in European history. I don't recall any reigning monarch or Prime Minister of Spain or France or Germany or Italy who was from the distaff side. Perhaps the loss the English suffered when their island fell away from the religion of the continent (and the oecumene) has lingered in the shadows of their national spirit.

Here is the opening of the essay:

There are several notable characteristics that both Mary's share (more or less):

Heavenliness

Both Poppins and Our Lady have their homes above the earth.  Our Lady is Queen of Heaven.  Poppins similarly sits "enthroned" on the clouds.  Both exist far above all other creatures but nonetheless "come down" to aid those in need.

 

Motherhood

Both Poppins and Our Lady have maternal roles.  However, neither one is literally the biological mother of their respective children but nonetheless adopt them like their own.  Since Our Lady is the Mother of Jesus, Mary spiritually becomes our mother when we get adopted into God's family as Christians.  Similarly, Poppins is a nanny, which is a sort of "spiritual mother" aiming at fostering children in virtue.  It also seems that Poppins has done this for a very long time and has got her motherly tactics down to a flawless science, something Our Lady shares too, no doubt.  She knows just what to say at just the right moment in order to move people in the right direction, even if it involves employing tricks of reverse psychology.  Her songs may seem shallow and silly at first but, upon closer inspection, prove to communicate deep and profound truths about supernatural realities (as I shall demonstrate later).  Furthermore, the lessons she instills do not only apply to children but eventually effect everyone in the movie, something that resembles Our Lady's universal care of souls.

Virginity

One of the only roles an unmarried woman could occupy in Edwardian England respectfully was that of a nanny.  Hence, many governesses lived as virgins throughout their lives.  This relates to Our Lady's perpetual virginity, as both their roles somewhat paradoxically also involve being a kind of mother as well (something normally involving the loss of virginity … which goes without saying).

Miraculousness

Though Our Lady perhaps didn't perform miracles during her earthly life, she most certainly did after her assumption into heaven.  Poppins, too, performs miracles left and right.  In fact, all the supernatural events that happen seem to be connected to her (an allusion perhaps to Our Lady being the "Mediatrix of All Blessings").  Sure, you could say Poppins is a "witch," but I think this claim is adequately dispelled after Michael says, "Maybe she's a witch" to which Jane says, "Of course not, witches have brooms."  It's a pretty solid argument.

Sinlessness

That magic tape-measure which "reads people's souls" also shows us that Poppins herself is "Practically Perfect in Every Way," an allusion, I would say, to … that's right … the Immaculate Conception (i.e. Our Lady was conceived without original sin, thus not possessing the sinful inclinations that the rest of humanity shares).  One may raise the objection, however, that Our Lady was perfect in every way, not just practically.  However, to use precise theological terminology, Our Lady didn't possess complete ontological perfection (only God has that … like the perfection of having omnipotence).  Hence, even Our Lady was not perfect in every way.  What Our Lady did have was complete moral perfection, that is, her will never wavered from God.  Hence, it can be said that Our Lady's actions were always perfect … that is, she was perfect in practice … or … practically perfect in every way.

Queenliness

Although there's actually no sufficient evidence that Mary Poppins is an actual "Queen," she does, I would say, have an air of royalty about her.  At the very least, she seems to possess higher power than any other creature and is subservient to no one (except one thing which I shall point out), and even Mr. Banks, who hired her, when he tries to order her around ends up effectively doing whatever she wishes.  She takes command of every situation, as one would expect a Queen would amongst her subjects.  This may strike some as "proud," but I do not think she ever goes that far.  In fact, if one grants she may be of some royal background, she starts to appear quite humble.  She has come to serve rather than be served.  When she is assigned her room, she says, "Well, it's not exactly Buckingham Palace" (as if that's her usual surrounding) but says with a smile, "Still, it's clean … yes, I think it will be quite quite suitable" just as Our Lady is content in dwelling in the pure of heart, regardless of its simplicity … even though she deserves more.

This view of Poppins as Queen (or at least, some kind of "leader"), helps dispel the quasi-popular notion that Poppins is "unloving."  She says about herself, "I am kind, but extremely stern."  This theme runs throughout the whole movie.  Mary indeed loves those to whom she is entrusted, but she is forever wary about defending them from emotional excesses that might arise from her showing too much explicit love.  The Church's rules and regulations operate in a similar way, for as G.K. Chesterton says, "Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground."  The Church with all its rules can appear cold, but the result of following her rules is joy.  Our Lady, I think, should be viewed this way as well.  She is a General, who trains and leads her Legion of spiritual soldiers against the darkness.  Doing such things must involve tough love, and you will not always feel loved in this undertaking.  However, all things have been carefully designed for our betterment to the last detail.

Gracefulness

Related to Our Lady's lack of moral evil is her fullness of grace.  In common speech, "grace" means "simple elegance or refinement of movement" or "courteous goodwill."  In a similar way, "divine grace" makes our soul act in a way pleasing to God.    Poppins, being a most elegant and refined creature thus is a reflection of the divine perfection of Our Lady.  This even includes her applying makeup, which is something, if done in the right spirit, that simply is used to please others.  This connection between "divine grace" and "attractively polite manners of behaving" seems to echo Archbishop Fulton Sheen's words when he said, "Politeness is charity, charity is love, and love is God."

Some people would say, on the other hand, that Mary Poppins is guilty of vanity, which is excessive pride and admiration in one's own appearance.  Is there proof that Poppins is guilty of this?  She indeed looks in a mirror a couple of times, which is ample evidence to condemn her in some people's minds.  But I would argue that such offenses are not offenses in themselves.

If Our Lady is full of grace, higher than all the angels, and her soul magnifies the Lord, then it is reasonable to speculate that Our Lady could legitimately enjoy her own reflection … because she reflects God Himself.  She is, of course, a limited reflection of God.  That principle also applies to any reflection of her.  What I'm trying to get at is that any representation of God's mother, such as in religious icons, never accurately captures the Mother of God with adequate reverence.  No painting, no matter how divine, does satisfaction to her ineffable glory.  I am reminded of this, curious enough, when Poppins' reflection in the mirror takes on a life of its own and begins singing (first in harmony and then flamboyantly by itself) to which Poppins exclaims, "Cheeky!"  That is how I view most Catholic art about Mary.  All of it seems cheeky.  In fact, the character of Mary Poppins, despite how representative she may be of the Mother of God, is nonetheless, cheeky.  All things considered, though, she's not that bad of a likeness.

But, when all is said and done, if you point out that Mary Poppins falls short of perfectly portraying the Mother of God, I will, unfortunately, agree with you.

(At the very least, the movie toned down Poppins' apparent vanity from the books, so much so that the author complained.)

George Banks is a Materialist

Mr. Banks is a materialist insofar as he puts excessive emphasis on worldly goods and scorns things that reek of the supernatural.  He regards his job as a money-grubbing banker as the most important thing in his life.  He takes it as a model for everything, as when he says, "A British bank is run with precision.  A British home requires nothing less."  He disapproves of the nature-defying tales told to him about Poppins, like having tea parties on the ceiling.  When things happen that transcend his simplistic views, he becomes bewildered and rancorous, thinking he is in control, but Poppins proves otherwise and shows that this "wise man" is actually quite a fool.  He wants things that are "fraught with purpose, yes, and practicality" but he isn't clear what the ultimate purpose is for any action.  He wants to make money, but for what?  He preaches about the importance of having "heirs to his dominion," but he neglects spending time with his family.  He demands following some hand-picked customs and rules but doesn't care what they help preserve (except that they vaguely prevent "a ghastly mess").  He regards himself with god-like importance but fails to show what actual good he has done in his superficial existence.  When he sits down at a piano, he wants it to be tuned, but he doesn't even know how to play.   In short, he wants things he doesn't need (or has no consistent reason for needing).  This is, you could say, the essence of materialism.  And some results are vain pride and a troubled family.

Winifred Banks is a Feminist (i.e. extreme, secular feminism)

The machismo bred by the materialist thinking of certain men eventually may attach itself to the female mind as well.  As men focus more on themselves (now that they no longer focus on God), their attention turns away from women too.  This can incline women to be more masculine, for they see men in love with themselves … and so by assuming more masculine qualities, a woman may hope to be what men seem to want.  There is, of course, the added motivation for a woman to do this in order to try and provide for herself things which men no longer give.  Consequently, women rightly resent this male self-preoccupation, but it paradoxically impels them to masculinize themselves a similar way.  This, of course, doesn't work.  Men actually don't like manly women, and thus it fails to have the intended effect.  Upon realizing this, such women are confused and live the muddled role of both genders, trying to remain feminine to be lovable, while trying to be masculine to be noticed (and to try to give themselves what men no longer provide).

Read the whole thing: https://vestalmorons.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/mary-poppins-and-the-blessed-virgin-mary/

Hat tip to Mark Shea at Catholic and Enjoying It.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Cowboys and Martians

Pierce O writes:

I'm afraid your skepticism of Hollywood's ability to do a proper John Carter

film has been confirmed: http://latino-review.com/2012/02/16/readers-review-john-carter/. It looks like they've managed to destroy everything about the characters that made them great:  John Carter isn't a selfless, clean limbed, fighting man; Red Martians attempt to broker peace through an arranged marriage; Tal Hajus is the one who wants to challenge Tars Tarkas; etc., etc., ad nauseam. Meh. Perhaps I'll go see it as a form of Lenten penance.

Hmm. Reading the article over at Latin-review, I see that John Carter does not, in the opening scene of the epic, ride to save his friend butchered by savage Apaches, make a suicidally brave assault on the camp, and get chased into a cave where the Apaches fear to follow. No, instead, an anonymous correspondent described what can only be called a politically corrected scene:

"… American Civil War veteran Carter is prospecting in Arizona. Being that

they are deep in Apache territory, an Army Colonel (played by an almost

unrecognizable Bryan Cranston) takes Carter into custody with the intent of

forcing him to join their fight against the Native Americans [sic]. After a series of fairly humorous escape attempts, Carter finally makes a real jail break and flees into the mountains on horseback, where he's forced to save the Colonel's life after the man and his pursuing soldiers have a run in with a tribe of natives. Seeking refuge in a cave the natives mysteriously fear, Carter has an encounter with a strange bald robed figure that causes him to be teleported to the red planet."

Wow. That is just … amazingly stupid.  John Carter is chased by US Cavalry because he refuses to help the evil White Man make war on the Indians. I am gob-stoppered.

Do the modern movie makers think a modern audience will not consider Apaches to be dangerous? They had to make the US Cavalry a la DANCES WITH WOLVES into the bad guys? I recall a time when having the Cavalry arrive was the salvation of the settlers and a cause for celebration in a film.

As for the rest, it sound like the movie makers introduced a stupid McGuffin of a superweapon to move the plot along, and turned Deja Thoris into Xena Warrior Princess — but since, according to the book, all Red Martian princess go armed at all times, that by itself might not be so obnoxious.

So I still have some hope for this film, but I also know that, in the same way Jackson could not portray Aragorn and Faramir in a LOTR film, Disney cannot portray John Carter. Political Correctness is focuses on two main thoughts: undermining authority and emasculating masculinity. The storybook hero, since roughly the time of Mallory, has always had two characteristics: he was both humble and ferocious. That is the paradox of chivalry: a man obedient to the authority of country, king, and God, and all the noble principles of fair play, who is also a very devil in combat, laughing as he slays. There is no humility in PC, because there is no authority aside from the ego, and there is no laughter in PC, except for mocking laughter such as imps laugh when they see fair and fine things fail, and they have no joy in battle.

I wish the Japanese had made this film. I do not know how many anime I have seen where the cartoon princes and warriors and knights behave in a perfectly chivalrous and honorable fashion, as the men of warlike societies do and must. They do not repent their past, but cherish it. When did we stop being able to make Cowboys and Indians movies, even when set on Mars, as Cowboys and Martians?

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

A Princess of Mars and a Messiah of Mars

In honor of Leap Day, I thought I should write a post in honor of the most famous long-leaper of all, the clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia, John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

I have recently been rereading the 'Barsoom' novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs to my boys, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my memory of them as trivial boy's adventure tales was an underestimation.

They are honest-to-goodness science fiction, written with at least as much speculative thought and speculative wonder as anything by, say, Robert Heinlein, but with this difference: Burroughs was more a Victorian writer than a modern one, and did not buy into the conceit, so prevalent in modern writers, that assumes that man's nature, nay, manhood itself, is a by-product of environment.

An examination of these two writers, one who portrayed a man named Carter on Mars, and the other, a Martian named Smith on Earth, is instructive.

Robert Heinlein is called the 'Dean of Science Fiction' because of his role as a  pillar of Hard SF from the John W. Campbell Jr. stable of writers, and one of the writers defining Hard SF.  He is clearly in the 'Man is what upbringing molds him to be' camp.

Allow me by way of illustrative example to quote a passage from Robert Heinlein's most famous work, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, which concerns an orphaned child, Michael Valentine Smith, raised from infancy by Martians.  Captain van Tromp is the chief officer of the second expedition to Mars, who recovers the now-grown Smith from Mars and returns him to Earth. At a hearing, he explains to the typically Heinleinian dunderhead (whose only purpose in the plot is to contrast the truth and clarity of the author's viewpoint) the nature of Smith:

Captain van Tromp decided that it was time to throw a tantrum. "This man Smith–This 'man!' Can't you see that he is not?"

"Eh?"

"Smith . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . man."

"Huh? Explain yourself, Captain."

"Smith is an intelligent creature with the ancestry of a man, but he is more Martian than man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a man. He thinks like a Martian, feels like a Martian. He's been brought up by a race which has nothing in common with us–they don't even have sex. He's a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment. . . "

The jest of the novel is that Smith is a reverse Mowgli or anti-Tarzan, raised by beings to whom we Earthlings, with our monogamy and monotheism, are but savages.

More to the point, Smith is the anti-John Carter.  That first and famous human visitor to Mars showed the savage and remorseless inhabitants of that warlike and dying planet the advantages of compassion toward lower animals and the romance of marriage.

As I said, It is often overlooked that the seminal space adventure novel A PRINCESS OF MARS was actually a legitimate science fiction story. The scientific conceit, which was indeed consonant with the science of the time, was that Mars an older planet than Earth, webbed with canals to draw water from the arctic regions by a shrinking but highly advanced civilization to extend their few remaining years on the dry and dying planet as far as possible.

Edgar Rice Burroughs further hypothesized that the Green Men of Mars were egg-layers who practiced remorseless eugenics and held all property in common, and hence raised their children communally, with no custom of courtship or marriage, no institution of motherhood or fatherhood. Consequently, the Green Martians are cruel and savage and dour to the point of insanity, having never known family or love.

John Carter is the only man on Mars who shows compassion to the monstrous domesticated animals of that globe. Woola the ghastly Martian hound-dog is one of the best loved characters of the piece. The blood brother and companion in arms of Carter is  Tars Tarkas is the only Martian who ever loved his wife and knows the identity of his child.

It is significant to me that Burroughs always speaks of John Carter's "advent" on Mars, a word that, to me, has religious overtones, even if not so intended by the author. John Carter perhaps is not a messiah, but he does save the planet from an global atmospheric disaster, he does overthrow the corrupt pagan religion of the South Polar regions, and he eventually becomes Warlord of the entire globe, the Jeddak of Jeddaks even if he is not the King of King and Lord of Lords.

As befits a scientific romance of the Victorian Age, John Carter shoulders the 'White Man's Burden' mentioned by Kipling, of bringing notions of compassion and civility to a society both older and more barbaric than our own, albeit (since this is a Victorian romance) a society which retains the military virtues and sense of honor our own has lost.

Romantics of the Victorian Age were constantly admiring the native peoples their armies were so adroitly conquering, and suffered the haunting sense that industrial civilization was unsuitable for man (and idea common to this day, and still found in science fiction yarns: Cameron's AVATAR springs to mind as an example).

A cynical Victorian man is likely to recoil from the romantic notion of noble savages on the grounds that savages are not noble; a ideologically correct modern girl is likely to recoil from the romantic notion of noble savages on the grounds that savages are not savage, and that it is judgmental, if not an insult, to think them so. John Carter, I am happy to say, is neither cynical nor ideologically correct. He is simply a gentleman of Virginia, with both the compassion and the valor that that implies.

But whether Burroughs intended it or not, there is a slight messianic overtone to John Carter's advent on Mars, where he uses his strength and talents to win the admiration and love of the natives, and bring a measure of civilization and civility to that cruel world of war.

By bringing human compassion to Mars, John Carter revolutionizes the planet, restoring what the ancient Martians of a greener world once knew, then lost.

Heinlein's Martians, perhaps by no coincidence, have a asexual communal child-rearing strategy similar to the Green Men of Barsoom. The young in their larval form, as nymphs, are left to fend for themselves in the arid and cold Martian wilderness. Heinlein likewise has his 'Martian' named Smith scorn family life in favor of free love, and scorn monotheism in favor of a particularly sterile and juvenile heresy called Gnosticism, which preaches all humans are gods, or at least free of obedience to the Ten Commandments.

In the course of the novel, Smith fornicates freely if sterily (no child ever comes of his many sexual encounters), commits acts of cannibalism (and the Heinlein yammerhead brought on stage for that purpose is decreed to be a bigot for objecting to it) and murder (but only of policemen doing their duty and convicts lawfully imprisoned and also of a religious leader who was, of course, merely a con-man) and is stoned to death, whereupon he is wafted to a oddly godless heaven, wearing comic-opera wings and halo.

He feeds no hungry, cures no sick, raises no dead, and preaches nothing to the poor. The mission of the poor, as best I can tell, is to be weeded out.

But he has begun the 'Church of Nine Worlds' (Pluto was a planet in those better days of long ago, if you recall) which will convert the elite of mankind to superbeings with Way Cool Mind Powers, who will live in sexual orgies and share all property in common, adoring themselves as the only self-aware gods on the planet.

By bringing Martian dispassion to Earth, Smith likewise revolutionizes the planet, abandoning what ancient Humans have always known.

The most touching and memorable scene in A PRINCESS OF MARS is when John Carter learns the story of Sola, the only woman of the Green Martian race capable of compassion. She was, in defiance of Martian custom, raised by her own mother, and loved by her real father, for for the two met and loved without the eugenic rape necessitated by remorseless eugenics. Since her parents knew and loved each other, the birth was secret, and Sola's egg was not placed in the communal incubator by her mother. The mother is discovered visiting the child in secret to raise it, and for this forbidden display of maternal love, the mother is seized by the tribal chieftain, and tormented cruelly to death. The father, who was away at the wars during the tragedy, returns, conceals his rage, and waits many long Martian years for his revenge against his own chieftain. He is motivated by a passion, romantic love and fatherly compassion for his own daughter, which is unknown to the barren souls of the Green Men of that barren world.

The most grotesque scene in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is the scene where Mike the Martian (who in addition to being raised by Martians is the genius child of two genius astronauts of the first ill-fated expedition to Mars)becomes a carney, a Carnival showman, and comes to understand that the great majority of man are "chumps." His immortal words are "I grok that they are chumps."

("Grokking" is Martian meditative unity, in this case meaning "full understanding.")

This means that we rubes exist only to be mulcted of their pay by the cheap showmanship, lurid showgirls, and fake danger of the sideshow. When, at the zoo, Mike the Martian sees a big monkey beat a smaller monkey (who, in displaced rage rushes off to beat an even smaller) he erupts into the laughter his Martian heritage had hitherto denied him, and announces that he now understands mankind.  We are all stinking apes and bullies and cowards and victims. And chumps.

Oh, did you think Mike the Martian mean that everyone else aside from you was the chump? Ah! That was the way I also read the book when I was young, and a chump, and I was played for a chump by this flimsy and coarse make-believe cynicism. You see, if we actually were nothing but smelly apes and cowards and bullies, we would not laugh about it. To take joy from the sorrows of the world is a work of angels.

For that matter, to take simple and rustic joy from the antics of a carnival is neither despicable, nor it is a matter, as the Martian sees it, of the cunning exploiting the stupid. If a farmer pays to see a wire walker perform was is admitted a useless albeit difficult antic, or let his children watch the tumbling of slapstick clowns, where is there room for contempt in this? Would the wire-walker rather do farm work, and leave the farmer with no break in the monotony of his long days? The contempt that Mike the Martian has for common people is quite intoxicating and quite subtle: you do not notice yourself jeering at honest men and women along with him.

(As a man in the entertainment field myself — and I assure all and sundry that clown-acrobatics for a traveling circus is a more difficult and honorable profession than my own– I am grateful for every last one of them, because I know there are other and better things they can do with their book-buying dollar. I do not grok that my patrons and employers and beloved readers are 'chumps'.  I grok that I should be grateful.)

In a later scene, the last before his martyrdom, Mike the Martian confesses to his mentor, the Heinlein stand-in for Heinlein, Jubal Hershaw, that the teaching of Way Cool Gnosticism to the elite, which somehow cures original sin and makes all the cool kids live together in perfect harmony, may have a bad side effect of hindering Darwinian evolution:

"I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely — that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves… simply to have that weeding out that every race must have."

The poor messiah is sweating as if blood in his Gethsemane of his despair because there may not be enough death and destruction to cull the chumps from the herd and usher in the glorious birth of the superhuman like himself! Jubal Harshaw, his teacher and mentor, hurries to assure him:

"If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them — and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth. Whenever that is — a thousand years from now, or ten thousand — will be plenty soon enough to worry about whether some new hurdle is necessary to make them jump higher. But don't go getting faint-hearted because only a handful have turned into angels overnight. Personally, I never expected any of them to manage it. "

I would like you to pause and grok, water brothers, the truly dismal and hateful nature of Jubal Hershaw's philosophy, and, I presume, Mr Heinlein's.  He is saying here that you and I, the chumps and apes of life, ought and shall and will die off to make room for the superman, who in turn will die off when challenges proportionate to their existence rear their heads. Only through killing the weak does the Master Race evolve!

Ironically, this is also a notion as Victorian as the 'White Man's Burden' of Kipling; it comes straight from the pen of Nietzsche, who somehow misreads Darwin to be a primer on moral ethics rather than an hypothesis on how new species arise. Part and parcel of the pseudo-Darwinist notion  is that there is no such thing as human nature. If species evolve from one to the next, there is no fixed standard against which to judge whether or not an individual is acting properly or not for his species. Any aberrant behavior which is self destructive in one environment might by blind chance be the exact thing needed to insure the survival of many children in the next environment.

It is to be noted, of course, that STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is a satire after the fashion of Jonathon Swift or James Branch Cabell, and is not meant to be anything other than that. Satires are like lemonade: they are meant to leave a sour taste in the mouth. A PRINCESS OF MARS is an adventure story. They are red meat stories. Such a tale is meant to nourish souls who hunger for adventure, and perhaps even to tell young men how to behave with the courage and chivalry demanded of Christians, or at least the courage and honor demanded of Pagans.

I am not criticizing a satire for being satirical, but I am proposing that the cream of the jest requires a belief that man is not man, that he has no fixed form or guiding spirit, no purpose in life other than to seek orgies and fight wars and father babies, preferably for other men to raise. It is an odd mix of Darwinism, lofty individualism, and rank hedonism.

On the other hand, for the adventure yarn to be an adventure, the image of man must be a heroic one. Indeed, the greatest adventure of all is begun when one recognizes that the image of man is the image and likeness of God.

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Nightfall and Night Lamp

Science Fiction is a particularly adroit tool for examining human nature, more adroit than, say, the allegedly realistic modern novel, because it allows the author to introduce the changes society is likely to suffer as various technologies, speculative or fantastic to us now, make their advent on Earth. Only the least thoughtful of science fiction writers can introduce such staples of the genre as the superhuman, the robotic or artificial intelligence, the non-human alien, and not lay bare his own foundational assumptions about what it means to be human.

Such unthoughtful science fiction writers will treat, for example, robots merely as comedy relief characters, with all the same foibles and follies as a Bob Hope. The comedy-bot might be shown quaking at the threat of having an apelike alien rip his arms off if he fails to throw a game of holographic chess, but a thoughtful science fiction fan might wonder why a machine would fear the loss of a limb any more than an automobile would fear a tire change. The more thoughtful science fiction fan might wonder why the robot was programmed by his software designer to be craven. An even more thoughtful science fiction fan might conclude that the robot manufacturers and owners receive a cheap yet hollow pleasure from bullying servants designed to cringe. (The most thoughtful science fiction fan of all will notice that the robot being threatened is shaped like a Hoover vacuum cleaner, and has no arms to rip off in the first place.)

Because science fiction allows the extraterrestrial or artificial human or superhuman onstage, it more easily asks and answers the question what it means to be a man, because a contrast between human and nonhuman forces the question to the fore.  The science fiction writer almost has no choice but to betray his view of human nature.  The thoughtful science fiction writer makes it even more clear.

In this essay, let me discuss two of the more thoughtful, Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance.  The contrast is informative, since Asimov can aptly be taken to represent the views of John W. Campbell Jr., whose ANALOG was one of the most influential magazines in the genre; Jack Vance along with Cordwainer Smith appeared in the pages of GALAXY magazine under the editorial hand of Frederick Pohl, and owes more to the fantasies of Clarke Ashton Smith or Lord Dunsany than to the technophilia of Gernsbeck or can-do optimism of Campbell.

If Isaac Asimov champions the world view common to 'Hard SF', Jack Vance can serve if unwillingly as the champion of the world view of 'Soft SF', and, contrary to the terminology, I propose to show that Soft SF is more realistic than Hard, at least as far as human characters are concerned.

I have never been convinced of the view of human nature which comes across as the central conceit of Isaac Asimov's novels and stories. Asimov's CAVES OF STEEL proposes that living in overpopulated warrens would make men agoraphobic; in THE NAKED SUN, he proposes likewise that living in robot-run hermitages would make men phobic of being in the same room with another human being. The most famous of these is 'Nightfall' were men raised in a world whose many suns shed eternal sunshine go mad at the first dusk in a thousand years.

On the other hand, I have heard reviewers and critics and commentators say, either with a chortle of delight or with a moue of scorn, that the societies depicted in Jack Vance tales, such as NIGHT LAMP or EMPHYRIO or CITY OF THE CHASCH, are overcomplicated, delicate, ridiculous, as fantastical as a Faberge Egg—and I have heard it so frequently, that I cannot bring a single contrary comment to mind.  The most famous of these is 'The Last Castle' which concerns a society of aristocrats so haughty and settled in their ways that they cannot bring themselves, even at the expense of their own survival, to do the necessary, sober, and dirty work of defending themselves from a revolt among their slave-creatures.

It has always struck me that Jack Vance's fantastic societies, and the odd ways of the odd men of the odd worlds he has shown us, are not any more fabulous or unusual than real tribes and nations and civilizations which have lived here on Earth, and that his view of man is, at the root, realistic to the point of cynicism. Only the vocabulary he uses to express it is fantastical, and this is the root of his humor, acrid and dry as it is. Jack Vance has mastered the technique of having his characters utter the most selfish and vicious of sentiments in tones of lofty erudition.

It has always struck me that Isaac Asimov is portraying a view of man so mechanically puppet-like and so unrealistic as to be little more than an intellectual exercise. His human beings operate according to simple and unbreakable laws, as obvious and mechanical as his famous Three Laws of Robotics.

There is a famous story, at least, famous among science fiction readers, that Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall' , one of the most often reprinted short stories in SF, had it origin this way: According to Asimov, John W Campbell Jr prompted Asimov to write the story after discussing a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

Campbell's contrariwise opinion was: "I think men would go mad."

And the rest is history. Asimov did as credible job with the idea, and added or invented as much scientific sounding nonsense as he needed to make Campbell's ridiculous conceit seem sound. The short story is well constructed, even masterful, as the various scientists begin to uncover an appalling truth about their civilization on a world in a multiple star system that has never known night. By the time the gripping final paragraphs arrive, the spell is complete, and many a reader, even years later, is convinced that people actually would go mad at their first sight of stars.

Of course the conceit is ridiculous and is meant to be. Campbell was being a contrarian, and he meant to be.

Campbell is not just twisting the nose of Emerson or biting his thumb at the divine hand who designed the stars. The whole point of good SF is to create that sensation which Copernicus must have felt when he realized that the Ptolemaic model was wrong, and that the stable earth was spinning and careening around a heliocentric solar system, or the sensation many readers still feel reading Einstein for the first time: a paradigm shift.

Campbell's paradigm shift was the opinion of Freud and BF Skinner and other gentlemen sometimes called scientists, whose speculations in recent years have finally begin to come into well deserved derision, namely, that man is merely a bag of chemicals whose contents are programmed by heredity and environment.

By this modern if not postmodern theory, there is no reason why the stars look sublime to us. It is an accident of genetics, or a blind by-product of cultural or natural forces, or arbitrary. The theory is, if you change the environment, such as to place man on a world with no nightfall, the stars if seen once each thousand years would be as horrific to them as the rising the cryptical and primordial R'Lyeh one each thousand years is to us.

But, of course, men in real life don't act this way. When Leeuwenhoek first looked in a microscope and discovered that tiny animalcules, too small to see, swarmed and multipled in every drop of water, every grain and sand, he did not go gloriously mad, and rage through the rainstorm screaming to his neighbors that the living creatures were everywhere, in everything. When Cardinal Bellamy in a famous (and utterly fictional) event, refused to look through the telescope of Galileo, it was not because Galileo, seeing the four satellites of Jupiter, realized that the skies were not the comfortable perfect spheres of Ptolemy, but instead were vastnesses filled with thronging bodies, asteroids and alien earths. Galileo went shrieking and gibbering from house to house, warning that the skies were horrific voids, and Cardinal Bellamy, wisely avoiding the sanity-shattering truth, recoiled in terror from the telescope. That is exactly what never happened.

In both cases, men were fascinated by the intricacy, glory and beauty of creation, revealed to their awe inspired eyes by science. The men of Venus would feel the same way when the clouds parted, or the men of Asimov's fictional world whose nightfall was only once in a thousand years. Despite what you may have heard about the Renaissance Church, the Vatican continued to support the astronomical sciences before and during and after Galileo, and does so to this day.

Now, one might object that the natives of Asimov's fictional world of Lagash were not human beings but aliens, and therefore they well might have the quirk of psychology aforementioned. Maybe so, but if so, the tale lacks all emotional impact, and means as little to us as a tale of some beach-dwelling aliens on a world with a dozen large moons, who once in a thousand years see the tides go out, and, upon viewing the shipwrecks and sunken cities and beached whales and coral stands of the sea-bottom, due to their psychopathological fear of sea-mud, all go suddenly mad.

We earthmen think the stars are sublime, almost too beautiful to be described. That is a fact of human nature. 'Nightfall' only has that Copernican sense of disorienting paradigm shift if we agree with the unspoken premise that we earthmen think the stars are sublime because and only because of our environment.

Asimov wrote a short story along similar lines to 'Nightfall' called 'Strikebreaker' , in which a visitor from Earth to an asteroid colony Elsevere discovers that the family in charge of the waste recycling has gone on strike, which threatens the ecology and the life support of the colony. The visitor understands that the recycling officer and his family are shunned, not permitted physical contact with any other colonist due to the irrational custom of the colonists. The officer is on strike to overturn this cruel law. Nonetheless, the visitor descends into the forbidden recycling area, operates the controls, recycles the sewage, and saves the colony. In a grotesque display of ingratitude, the colonials inform him by message that he must exile himself forthwith without seeing or touching anyone else, since he is now untouchable and ritually unclean.

Asimov himself, in an introduction to this tale that he penned for an anthology, wonders why this story dropped without a ripple into the public readership when 'Nightfall' had made such a splash. My own theory is that 'Strikebreaker' lacks the central element of the vertigo of Copernicus which is the emotional core of 'Nightfall' : the message that the beauty of the stars is merely an arbitrary preference, like driving on the right rather than the left side of the highway, and would be horror rather than sublimity when sees through other eyes. By way of contrast, 'Strikebreaker' has nothing like that. The prejudice against the sewer worker is nothing extraordinary, since it is modeled on the rules against the Dalits or Untouchables of India, and, more to the point, and more offensively to American tastes, the prejudice wins and the visitor from Earth is merely a chump.

But please note that, as in other Asimov stories, the prejudice in 'Strikebreaker' is treated in a mechanical fashion, as if it were one of the Three Laws of Robotics. The visitor from Earth is not a member of the shunned caste of waste workers, and has formed no human relationships, no friendship and no romance and no guest-host relationship any one of which would create a natural conflict with the carrying out of the rule, nor is he extended any professional courtesy due to his status, nor is there any concern for any reaction, retaliation, or sour of the relations between Earth and the colony. It is simply a given, as bland and simple as a clue in a logic puzzle: anyone who operates the sewer controls is shunned. End of story.

The story is clever but shallow, like most stories of its type. The characters are simply machines, and any prejudices implanted by their environment are part of their programming. No one from the colony questions the wisdom of the bias against untouchables any more than any Asimovian robot ever questions the wisdom of their prime directive against harming human beings. Robots simply go insane when presented with simple moral choices, such as whether it is allowable to amputate a man's arm to save his life, or shoot a sniper before he shoots, or even arrest a drunk.

NAKED SUN and CAVES OF STEEL and other tales of Asimov have a similar mechanical view of human nature. Standards and norms and the definition of sanity (so runs this view) are all the product of environment. Change the environment, and human nature changes.

Ironically, the Asimovian attitude of mankind portrays man as particularly unsuited for scientific endeavors. If sanity is a by-product of environment, to land Man on the Moon or float him in freefall is paramount to blasting his sanity. All colonists of alien worlds would be mad things to us. This is hardly an argument for space exploration.

Let us contrast this with Jack Vance, whose societies, at first blush, seem much more baroque and rococo, too intricate and absurd to exist.

Here is Mr. Vance's account of the origin of his Nebula Award winning 'The Last Castle', taken from the preface to that tale in BEST OF JACK VANCE:

The germ of this story was contained in an article dealing with Japanese social interactions. As is well known, Japanese society is highly formalized—much more thoroughly so in the past than during the relatively egalitarian times since the last war.

During the nineteenth century, when a samurai deigned to converse with a person of lower rank, each used markedly different vocabularies, with honorifics precisely calculated to the difference in status. When the person of lower degree discussed the samurai's activities or intentions, he used a special convention. Never would he pose a simple question such as: "Will your lordship go boar-hunting tomorrow?" This would impute to his lordship a coarse and undignified fervor, a sweating, earnest, lip-licking zeal, which his lordship would have found offensively below his dignity. Instead the underling might ask: "Will your lordship tomorrow amuse himself by trifling at the hunting of a boar?"

In short, the aristocrat was conceded sensibilities of such exquisite nicety, competences of such awful grandeur, that he need only toy with all ordinary activities, in a mood of whimsy or caprice, in order to achieve dazzling successes.

So, "The Last Castle" concerns a society of somewhat similar folk, and examines their behavior when the society is subjected to great stress.

We will see the same stratified and over-refined society again in such works as 'The Moon Moth' and NIGHT LAMP.

What is interesting, if not alarming, about reading of such societies, civilizations where form counts for more than content, were practical matters of life and death are subordinated to ritualized or stereotyped responses or ceremony, is that such portrayals are not unrealistic. One need only crack open a history book to read of periods of decay and collapse, or unfold a newspaper to see the warning signs of similar corruption in the current world.

Now, not every Jack Vance story takes place in the midst of polities ossified to the point of collapse. The tale NIGHT LAMP, one of his later novels, does indeed end on a world of antiquated aristocrats living in somnolent splendor on a world outside the galaxy, so that the blazing spiral of the Milky Way shines down on their untended arbors and empty mansions in an otherwise starless sky; but it begins on a world of solidly middle-class sentiment, but whose obsession with microscopically nuanced distinctions of elevation between rival social clubs leads to brutality.

The point here is that the natural human tendency for hierarchy and subordination will not be abolished by the presence of technical competence. It is common feature of stories in the tradition of Campbell to assume that scientific progress equates to social enlightenment or egalitarianism. Vancean stories make no such unrealistic assumption.

You see, dear reader, the Vancean assumption is the opposite of the Asimovian. The assumption is this: Despite the changes of technology and environment and culture, human nature will not change.

Allow me by way of illustration to pull a single paragraph, curiously memorable, out the voluminous work of Jack Vance to make my point.

The book CITY OF THE CHASCH concerns one Adam Reith, stranding on the far world Tschai orbiting Carina 4269 after his space vessel is shot down by missiles issuing from an unknown source. Here he finds a world inhabited by four technologically sophisticated but inhuman species, each in continual hostility with the other three, and each of which has bred and mutated human beings as servant races, and humans have adopted, insofar as they can, the outlook and psychology of the aliens. The plains and steppes of islands of Tschai are occupied with various independent cities and tribes of men who exist somewhere between the Bronze Age to Victorian Age levels of technology, but no advance beyond early railways or simple radio is permitted by the space-travelling aliens.  Hence we have a planetary romance of the Edgar Rice Burrough style, but with a more reasonable conceit than most for having high tech energy weapons alongside rapiers and cutlasses, or having galleons and cogs and caravels plying the winedark sea beneath the silent antigravity platforms of air-rafts and stratospheric craft.

The peculiar genius of Jack Vance is showing servant-races of man, cruelly adapted to the purposes of their nonhuman masters, and reacting with the typical human psychological trick of making their own subservience a matter of ceremony, cult, and cant. The Chaschmen, for example, despite the physiological improbability of the event, regard themselves as the larval stage of the Chasch, and wear false craniums to better to resemble their thickset and pangolin-scaled alien masters. The Chasch, to better aid the humans in the convenient self-deception, plant their eggs in the corpses of newly dead human slaves, and claim to be the reincarnations or evolutions of each specific dead man. (The Dirdirmen have a different myth to explain their subservience to the Dirdir, claiming the two species to have evolved from the two halves of a primal egg on the Dirdir homeworld of Sibol; the Wankhmen may have a more clear-eyed view of their own circumstance.)

In this scene, Adam Reith has disguised himself as a Chaschman, and enters their city to reconnoiter. When he is discovered, he desperately eludes pursuit, and while seeking escape through the humbler quarters of the wield alien metropolis, chances upon the following:

His attention was attracted by a tavern in the basement of a tall building. From the low windows came flickering red and yellow light, hoarse conversation, an occasional gust of bellowing laughter. Three Chaschmen came lurching forth; Reith turned his back and looked through the window down into a murky taproom, lit by firelight and the ubiquitous yellow lamps. A dozen Chaschmen, faces pinched and twisted under the grotesque false crania, sat hunched over stone pots of liquor, exchanging lewd banter with a small group of Chaschwomen. These wore gowns of black and green; bits of tinsel and ribbon bedizened their false scalps; their pug-noses were painted bright red. A dismal scene, thought Reith; still, it pointed up the essential humanity of the Chaschmen. Here were the universal ingredients of celebration: invigorating drink, gay women, camaraderie.

There is simply nothing parallel to this in anything in Isaac Asimov that I have read, and I have all of his published science fiction works. Asimov shows no twinge of awareness that the claustrophobic human beings of CAVES OF STEEL nor the hermetically isolated hermits of THE NAKED SUN would quaff gin and rum toddy in their hours of relaxation, or seek the company of fair coquettes, or play the lute, or dream great dreams, even if those dreams are shaped by the psychoses of their insane societies.

Again, contrast is key. Isaac Asimov more than other Hard SF authors regarded mankind as a machine open to a technical fix. It is telling that the peoples of his worlds of Lagash and Elsevere talk and act like 1950 middle class Americans, except for the one change in their psychology caused by the one crucial counterfactual which forms the hook of the story. There the contrast is used for the opposite purpose and drives toward the opposite result as in a Vance yarn: against the bland off-white hue of a culture no different from those of the readers of the time, the one jarring stroke of the social insanity or social inanity gleams like a comet.

Jack Vance paints vivid landscapes of ornate and odd civilizations, with costumes as strange to us as those of Tibet, and whether he means to or not, shows the essential similarity of human nature across cultural divides. To be sure, Vance is a master of the fine and ancient art of exaggeration, and the dry drollery of such exaggeration is part of the appeal. The Brahmins of Boston live in rigid conformity to artificial customs, as those of India, but none so rigid and so artificial as those of the worlds of NIGHT LAMP and 'The Last Castle'.

But the art of fiction is the art of exaggeration. If you want to read carefully balanced accounts giving each side due proportion, then read a newspaper (preferably an old-time newspaper from the days before newspapers became addicted to exaggeration and hence became fictional themselves). Exaggeration is unrealistic, but it is not unreal.

It is to be noted that Jack Vancean heroes are often understated, even to the point of being laconic. Against the multicolored landscape and roaring spectacle of strange or eerie absurdity, the wry but competent Vancean hero does his work without drawing attention to himself. Rarely does the protagonist voice or advance philosophy or world view alien to that of his readers, or, if he does, he will preach pragmatism, this-worldiness, a desire to avoid excess.

For my taste, the ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance is the very definition of adventure and romance.

The concept that ordinary men are as they are, and ordinary virtues a common man is called upon to exhibit in extraordinary times, merely because they were so programmed by the arbitrary or unintentional mechanics of their environment is the very definition of the unadventurous and unromantic.

Aside from the initial sugar-rush of that vertigo of Copernicus, the tale the tells men that they are machines, all their adventures and romances mere illusion and folly, all their deepest beliefs absurd, is a tale that holds no drama, offers no insight, attracts no fascination, rewards no rereading, drains joy, strangles laughter, and gathers darkness.

One can imagine a young man first tasting deeply of the wine of poetry reading the words of Emerson which opened this essay, and walking out of doors at night in some place far from the lights and noise of the city, gazing at the dark high dome of the stars with fresh awe and an awakened sense of spirit, and the greatness of the architect who placed them there, suns mightier than our own, immensely far away, numberless, bright, almost appalling in their transcendent beauty.Such a man could stare at the sky for a lifetime, and still not see all there was.

One can likewise imagine a young man first reading this tale by Isaac Asimov, looking up at the stars he once thought divinely beautiful, and seeing neither hope nor meaning in them, merely something which, if some twist of matter in his brain had been connected by blind change to other molecules, would drive him mad. There would nothing further for him to see.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Argument Against Materialism

In case anyone who is interested has not understood the basic argument against materialism, let me give it in a syllogism.

My argument is that anything which cannot even theoretically under any conditions whatsoever in this universe or any other be described in literal material terms, using words that only refer to material properties, is not material.

The mind (or, for that matter, words as opposed to ink marks in the book) cannot even theoretically under any conditions whatsoever in this universe or any other be described in literal material terms, using words that only refer to material properties.

Therefore the mind is not material.

(And even if it were, since we cannot refer to it (therefore not think about it) in words except those which tacitly treat the mind as immaterial (words like "form" or "pattern" or "intent" or "meaning" or "embed" or "refer to" or "involved with" or "logic gate" or "either-or") we would still have to talk and think about mental thinks using the categories and terms of final cause and formal cause, that is, as if it were non-material.)

That is my argument. It is in modes ponens. So far, no one has actually made an argument against it.To make an argument against it, it is not enough to state an opinion that the conclusion is false; one must challenge, that is, give evidence that the major or the minor premise is false, or, at least, not sufficiently clear as to compel belief.

All they have done is made the assertion that thoughts are material, and this is done, always and without exception, by describing thoughts in material metaphors, saying that thoughts are little balls or sparks of energy pushed by other balls or sparks of energy — and then, always, always, always, adding some word that refers to non-physical reality, like 'symbol' or 'refers to' or 'embed' or 'pattern' or refers to non-physical abstractions such as logical or mathematical objects.

I've been arguing this for years, decades, and I have yet to hear an argument which does not rest on a subtly or transparently ambiguous definition conflating mental and physical properties, such as using the word "brain" to refer both to the mind and the brain, or using the word "word" to refer both to the ink marks on the page (the physical aspect of the word) and to the meaning of the word (the mental aspect).

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Quote of the Day

Mark Shea over at Catholic and Enjoying It quotes the great Macauley

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Mark Shea adds: Since this was penned by Macauley, the British Empire has gone to pieces, Europe has committed suicide in two global wars, the Soviet Empire has come and gone, the Japanese Empire likewise, the Chinese Communist experiment is daily menaced by a growing Church, and the thousand year Reich vanished like a mayfly in 12 years. Don't over-estimate the odds that our fantastically ephemeral cult of celebrity, hedonism and imperialism is likely to inflict lasting damage on the Church.

My comment: The Church lasted so long because each generation that was threatened willing offered up witnesses and martyrs to the divine truth we uphold. Fortunately, in this country, our 'prosecution' will probably amount to no more than people posting images of flying spaghetti monsters on Facebook, or fines, or jail time if we don't pay the fines. Only in the Middle East and Africa are they actively burning churches and slaughtering Christians. Compared to that, what are we being asked?

We are being asked to resist the Tyrant.

Resist the Tyrant. Merely because Mr Obama (aided both by a compliant media and by those who are his alleged opponants) by one slow step at a time has reached the point where he feels it within his powers to nationalize automobile industries, health care industries, banks and mortgage industries, not to mention the student loan industry, and he feels it within his powers to murder American citizen suspected by an unknown government body of terrorism, and also feels it within his powers to appoint officers without the advice and consent of the Senate, and also feels it within his powers to define to the Catholic Church was is and is not permissible exercise of our freedom of religion, at that point there is nothing, economic nor military nor judicial nor theological, beyond his grasp, or to serve as a check on his power.

At that point, he is a tyrant. We might as well call him one.

And now for a word from Al Kresta:

As many of you already know, Ave Maria Radio launched StopHHS.com two weeks ago to provide a comprehensive source for news on thje HHS Mandate. The reason I'm sending this to you today is that we have worked together in promoting the faith in the past, and I know you would be interested in at least being

approached about cooperating with us on this issue as well.

I'm asking you to click here to download the banner and post it on your blog / site / social media, and, if appropriate, send it to your e-mail lists. This is the most significant Church / State conflict in our lifetimes. Let's make a stand. Thanks much and God bless your efforts for the Kingdom.

- Al Kresta

Request:

1. Please add the LOGO of StopHHS to your website home page & link it to www.StopHHS.com

2. Please email / Facebook / & Twitter your contacts to state you are now "Endorsing StopHHS.com"

3. Then send a print screen of your website with the StopHHS.com logo to endorsements@stophhs.com

StopHHS.com will check endorsements@stophhs.com each day and add your endorsement to the list of national endorsers as they come in. Your SEO will be improved when we load the name of your webite, the URL, and hyper link back to your site.

For more information contact Nick Thomm: 734-277-0693 or nthomm@avemariaradio.net

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Parable of the Adding Machine

I suppose we science fiction writers are to blame for the modern phenomenon of people who think computers think, that adding machines add, and so on. I have never seen a version of Pinocchio done where the puppet was never brought to life by the fairy, but Geppetto merely was convinced by BF Skinner or Karl Marx or Lucretius that the puppet was alive 0n the grounds that it moved when it strings were pulled.

Like this crazy version of Geppetto, there are some men these days who are convinced that since computers move numbers around, therefore they think, therefore humans (who think) are nothing but computers.

But even if the logic were sound, the premise is wrong. A computer does not literally move numbers around. That expression is merely a metaphor.

What it the computer is literally doing is moving around (in an adding machine) gears (and in an electronic calculator) electrons. The numbers are symbols whose meaning we assign to them.

Suppose I were to make a simple adding machine that only performed one operation. If I write a straight line on one face or cog of a wheel, and do this again for a second wheel and for a third, and I moreover cunningly place a fourth wheel next to them connected by linkages so that turning the first three wheels to the straight line pulls the fourth wheel so that the face or cog showing a symbol that looks like a sideways trident is showing, why, then, I have a "calculator" that can perform one operation: 1+1+1=3.

But there is no number "one" anywhere in the wheels. That number is something I contemplate with my mind and which I (and everyone else who decides to use Arabic numerals) assign or attribute to the straight line. Again, the numeral III is one that I (and everyone else) assign to the trident-looking squiggle.

Please note that there is no addition sign nor equals sign in my example. The man using the simple adding machine assigns those things to the positions of the wheels, using 'position' as a symbol or sign the same way the squiggles are symbols or signs.

Now, again, suppose I take a second set of wheels, cunningly interconnected to turn another face or cog when the faces of the first set is moved into certain positions, and so perform a second operation; suppose again that I make a third set of wheels, or as many wheels as there are entries in a multiplication table. Provided my wheels do not slip any gears, I have an adding machine which can help me calculate.

If I am particularly ambitious, I can add hooks or pins or punch cards to the faces of my machine of many wheels, and have the wheels act like the tumblers of a lock, so that certain combinations of wheel turnings will set in motion other appliances connected to the machine, such as alarm clocks, photographs, typewriters, telegraphs, telephones, gramophones, whistles and bells and even the post box. But no matter how elaborate, the thing is still a clockwork. For reasons of saving space, I can do that exact same thing with a cellphone, using electrons rather than wheels and gears: but the nature of the machine is the same.

Now before we wax poetical about how machines think and it is only a matter of a technical tactic to get them to have free will, let us contemplate that a computer is something more complex but otherwise no different than my simple calculation machine of four wheels. Let us not pretending the four wheels understand the abstractions we call numbers, or know their values, or add the values together to deduce the answer.

Nothing like that is going on. Having a dozen four-wheeled machines, or a million, or a googleplex will not change the nature of the process, which is a mechanical motion unrelated to thinking in any way.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.