Glenn's latest post on Obama's embrace and extension of Bush II's anti-terror policies, as usual on this topic, is depressingly accurate. In particular, at stake is the claim that the President can, at will, assassinate anyone suspected of being a terrorist -- and, by extension, that the President can literally have anyone on the planet murdered, detained, tortured, or anything else he feels like.

I'm starting to wonder whether a case can be made that liberals should support the Republican nominee for President in 2012.

Crazy? Probably. Let's see some objections.

"No matter how bad Obama is, the Republican nominee will undoubtedly be worse." True!

"Obama has been a pretty solid president on most issues." True!

So why the angst over this one issue? In the first place, because it's not just one issue; it's the key question of ... well, of whether we are actually a free people. Overstatement? Maybe! But think about the implications of the doctrine that the President can unilaterally kill anyone on the planet, at will, by invoking the word "terrorist."

(1) The term "terrorist" is deeply ambiguous and can be applied to a range of people.

(1a) Because the President is doing the application, by his own judgment and subject to no external check, the word can extend well beyond its current meaning (which is already pretty ambiguous).


(2) Think about what happens when the demonizing word of the day is no longer "terrorist." What if it goes back to being "Communist"?

(2a) Think about McCarthy for a moment -- for liberals, he's one of American history's greatest monsters, right? Did he ever advocate for the right to assassinate suspected Commuinsts? If you were a left-leaning filmmaker in the 1950's, would you rather be blackballed or murdered?
All of a sudden, Obama makes McCarthy look like a moderate. How depressing is that?

(2b) What if the demonization word becomes "bourgeois"? Or "counter-revolutionary"? Or, more generally, "enemy of the state"?

It seems to me that if this precedent stands, something absolutely fundamental about America has been destroyed. Arguments about the details of economic policy, say, seem distinctly secondary. We've survived crappy economic policy before; we'll survive it again. But we've never seen this radical Orwell-esque power grab by the government before.

Next objection: the Republicans, of all people, will never rescind this executive power grab.
Response: True. But at least somebody will be opposing them: the Democrats. Liberals. At least we will fight against it again. Republican rule will prove itself disastrous again, and we'll elect another Democrat. And when we do, we will make damned sure that he will end and repudiate these anti-terrorism policies.

Final objection: But Obama said he would fight against it, and then he embraced it. How will we know the next Democratic president will be any better?
Response: True, he did. And ... we won't know.

God, I'm depressed.

Sully links to this post by Rod Dreher and quotes this bit:

[M]y alarm goes off when [Anonymous Liberal] writes about "those [of] us left in the empirical world." Really? You really do think you live in the empirical world? Mind you, everybody believes that he sees the world as it really is, but I am struck by how confident people are that they can't possibly be missing something, that they and their tribe have all the answers, and don't have to consider how their own biases distort reality. Put another way, I'd be interested to know what counts for "empirical" in Anonymous Liberal's world.

Well, in the first place, on any possible meaning whatever "empirical" does not mean "seeing the world as it really is," let alone "hav[ing] all the answers" or not considering how "biases distort reality." That's just stupid.

But Sully should have known not to take Dreher's post seriously after sentence one:

There has been a lot of commentary on the political blogs around the concept of "epistemic closure," which is a fancy way of saying "closed-mindedness."

 As the originator of the phrase w/r/t this discussion, Julian Sanchez, has been very clear, "epistemic closure" precisely does not mean "closed-mindedness." It is something else entirely. I'll quote Sanchez. His most recent post:

What I had meant to describe specifically was the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem, which has been become more self-sufficient and self-contained as it’s become more interconnected.

 And his original post:

Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter.  If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation.

Dreher goes on to talk about Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of tradition-based rationality (although Dreher, for once, doesn't identify it as such within the confines of this post). But MacIntyre would agree with Sanchez here, not Dreher. In order to be rational, for MacIntyre, a tradition needs to consider the best arguments offered by other traditions. Not to get this ... to invoke MacIntyre in support of "everybody is closed-minded" (let alone everybody is epistemically closed) ... is simply pathetic. I wish there were a nicer way to say that.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/19/down-the-health-care-wormhole

This is just a bad post. It doesn't get into any of the specifics of the bill at all, or explain why they would be bad. It just consists of a bunch of hand-waving and 'boo government bad.' It's just dreadful.

For instance,

In the left-liberal imagination, health care reform means getting the greedy bad guys in private enterprise out of health care delivery and securing the “right” to health care with a “single payer” system. That euphemism, like most verbal obfuscations, is a tacit admission that there’s nothing remotely close to public consensus about changing health care delivery. In the free-market conservative imagination, reform would mean buying health care in the same way we purchase milk, whiskey, or a new Lexus, linking consideration of price to unlimited desire for stuff.

precisely misses Obama's concept, which is neither left nor right, by these definitions. This is not a single-payer bill, but it also doesn't succumb to the delusion that health care is a good like any other.

The author of this piece doesn't know the first thing about Obama's health care bill. The piece is an embarrassment.

Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage

Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed



Both highly recommended. I'm still recovering from the latter, which I just finished this afternoon. They remind me of each other.

Both books are emotionally powerful (painful!) meditations on the nature of embodiment (as our bodies, by going badly awry, break through our preferred notion of ourselves as self-possessed) ... and how the realization that self-possession is a lie affects our deepest relationships.

I cried at the end of Yglesias' book. I just said "Oof" at the end of Ferris'. I think maybe that means I like Yglesias' just a tiny bit better. But I'll have to let Ferris' book sit with me a while to be sure.

John Cleese gets it right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4

Cheney and Ratzinger

So this story charges that Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, and others knew that most of the detainees at Guantanamo were innocent. Yes, it's amazing that this story is not being significantly covered in the USA so far. One thing I haven't seen mentioned so far is this aspect:

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Looks to me like

Guantanamo : Bush Adminstration :: Molestation of children : Vatican

The same sick preference for the reputation of the institution over the real lives of actual humans. Absolutely disgusting.

The most disturbing thing you'll read today (I hope)

I don't think it's common knowledge just how long the Catholic Church has been teaching a thoroughly misguided view of sexuality. St. Thomas Aquinas is the most important theologian of the Middle Ages. He discusses sexuality (and pretty much every other question of theology and ethics) in his Summa Theologiae. The sex bits come at IIa.IIa3.Q94, or you can just follow the link here.

Go down to #11, where Aquinas talks about "the unnatural vice." There are 4 kinds of unnatural vice: homosexuality, bestiality, masturbation, and (if I'm reading him correctly) getting off in weird ways.

This may happen in several ways. First, by procuring pollution, without any copulation, for the sake of venereal pleasure: this pertains to the sin of "uncleanness" which some call "effeminacy." Secondly, by copulation with a thing of undue species, and this is called "bestiality." Thirdly, by copulation with an undue sex, male with male, or female with female, as the Apostle states (Romans 1:27): and this is called the "vice of sodomy." Fourthly, by not observing the natural manner of copulation, either as to undue means, or as to other monstrous and bestial manners of copulation.

Now go down to #12, "Whether the unnatural vice is the greatest sin among the species of lust?" Aquinas answers: Yes. Yes, it is. Homosexuality and masturbation are worse than adultery. Worse than incest. Worse than rape. Why?

Wherefore just as in speculative matters the most grievous and shameful error is that which is about things the knowledge of which is naturally bestowed on man, so in matters of action it is most grave and shameful to act against things as determined by nature. Therefore, since by the unnatural vices man transgresses that which has been determined by nature with regard to the use of venereal actions, it follows that in this matter this sin is gravest of all.

It's contrary to nature "with regard to the use of venereal actions," that's why! The penis isn't going where it's supposed to be going! Compared to the proper mutual arrangement of the genitals, matters such as the consent of the parties involved or the sacred bond of marriage are relatively minor matters.

If you read Objection 1 and then the reply to Objection 1 in #12, you'll see that Aquinas considers, and explicitly rejects, the notion that adultery and rape are worse than masturbation and homosexual behavior. His reply to the objection is that rape is only a sin against charity (love), while masturbation is a sin against nature, and hence a sin against God, "the author of nature" -- and sins against God are worse than sins against love. (Duh.)

The reasoning here is so clear and obvious! Once you take the premises as a given, it all follows. Being unnatural is worse than being unloving. And the definition of sexual nature is all about genital placement. All done!

It only falls apart if you step back and think for one second about your conclusion. And then, I suppose, it only falls apart if you have any experience whatever of what it means to be in a committed, loving, sexual relationship.

Imagine a priest who took this seriously. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I raped my daughter." "This is a very serious sin. But what about the important question: have you stopped masturbating?" And yet this is the official position of probably the single most important theologian (along with Augustine) who has shaped Catholic theology and ethics.

Ross Douthat takes a page from Dick Cheney's rhetorical playbook in his latest.

Has Benedict done enough to clean house and show contrition? Alas, no. Has his Vatican responded to the latest swirl of scandal with retrenchment, resentment, and an un-Christian dose of self-pity? Absolutely. Can this pontiff regain the kind of trust and admiration, for himself and for his office, that John Paul II enjoyed? Not a chance

There needs to be a word for this particular rhetorical strategy. You ask a series of questions that appear to be at least moderately difficult and probing, all the while dancing around the actual tough questions.

Let's try asking some tougher questions. Was Benedict directly responsible for covering up the rapes of children? Has he shown more concern for the reputation of the church than the lives of parishioners? Is there any evidence that he has learned from his mistakes and would do anything differently if he had it all to do over? If this had happened within any institution in the western world outside of the Catholic Church, would those who covered this up be facing criminal prosecution? On what charges? What would be the likely jail time, if convicted? Are we holding members of the Catholic hierarchy to a lower moral and legal standard than others?

I don't even care how you answer those questions. But ask them, please. Those are the questions that matter.

So, the Pope. Ratzinger. The latest story is a bit of a doozy. Check out Sullivan's wrap-up if you haven't already. (Andrew's having a tough time taking weekends off, isn't he?)

I don't even know what to say. There but for the grace of God? No, not really. I can't even imagine seeing a case like that and having my first thought be "We must protect the church."

"Nothing human is alien to me": those of us with pretensions to suavity or world-weariness would love to be able to say that. Well, Ratzinger's response to this case -- and the church's response to all these cases -- kicks that right out of me. A lot of types of evil make sense to me. This one, not so much.

Reading two books tonight. Both of them I got from the library after seeing them recommended by bloggers.

Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok (h/t to Crooked Timber I think it was) is a dryly written but fairly devastating takedown of what colleges achieve as a percentage of what they could achieve. To blame, first and foremost -- though Bok doesn't sum it up as such -- is the faculty's timidity and conservatism when it comes to learning how teaching actually works. When you're in a Ph.D. program, nobody tells you how to teach, and once you get your own classroom, it's yours, and you get awfully crabby if someone tries to tell you how to teach better. And so they don't, and so you never learn. Professors don't learn, either individually or as a faculty, whether students are actually learning how to write better, or to think more critically, or even to understand the fundamental ideas behind the subjects that are being taught. We all know that a big chunk of our students are passing the tests, or even acing them, by regurgitating material; we don't know, and honestly I think we don't want to know, how much they really understand, or how much they could apply what they have "learned" to other issues. When someone offers to tell us how to teach in such a way that students learn, we don't want to listen ... so people don't often offer. Very depressing. And yet at the same time, inspiring: the thought that current standards are so low means that really good teachers, or really successful faculties of like-minded teachers, could make a serious difference to their students' lives. Of course, making that happen -- let alone devising the institution structures to consistently reward making that happen -- is an insanely daunting task.

The other book has no relation whatever to the first, except that somebody blogged it. I don't even remember who, but I'm grateful to whoever it was. The book is called Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life. It's by a French dude (Roger-Pol Droit) and reminds me a bunch of what I recall as a typically "French" attitude toward philosophy -- a focus on destabilizing one's views about reality, mistrusting language, questioning one's relation to one's body, and so on. But throwing the word "French" at it is only good for placing it within a genre. The book is just flat out fun. I'm just starting it and reading through a few of the exercises, and I've actually done only two of them. Both were just a teensy bit mind-blowing, especially for how simple they were. I think I want to buy this book, and keep it around. Opening up my sense of what is possible: very important. It's almost the story of my life: I get bogged down in words words words words words and more words ... and forgetful of reality. I talk so much inside my head that I forget to listen to the world.

The Milwaukee Brewers are a .400 baseball team that used to be decent. Their final record will only be non-hideous because of that stretch where they went 21-5. They suck suck suck suck suck.

Final record will be (21 W + 5 L + (.400 x 136 remaining games)) ==> 75 - 87.

I realized some time ago that what I said about "Iron Man" can be said, in its broad outlines, about most superheroes. Certainly about Superman, for instance. The combination of power and goodness in one creation is unrealistic, not in the power, but in the goodness. Superman is a philosopher king just as Iron Man is. Spiderman, the same thing.

A ton of other comic book characters don't fit the mold, because their "goodness" is much more tenuous. Batman is often very dark. The characters in "Watchmen" are a much more obvious example. Not that I'm a huge comic book guy, to say the least.

Iron Man is more explicitly set in a political framework, compared to Superman / Spiderman, and so the comparision seems more relevant. But there's nothing special about Iron Man, the character, compared to a lot of other superheroes. And that bugs me about my conclusion. I really liked that post until I had that thought.

Oh, well.

David Simon, of course, is the guy behind The Wire. He started as a newspaper guy, and Season 5 is apparently all about the newspaper business. (I can't believe I still haven't watched Season 5.)

Anyway, he has a powerful and depressing editorial today about the impact of the collapse of the Baltimore newspaper and its impact on the Baltimore police. It's a must read.

Anyone who does numbers, finance, law, or pretty much anything else in or near the world of money for a living will (I predict) find this article absolutely fascinating, stunning, and horrifying all at the same time.

It's about the bubble and then meltdown in subprime mortgages, and especially the financial folks who made it happen.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

It's not easily summarized. But I learned quite a bit.

Reading Charles Hartshorne tonight. I resisted his appeal in graduate school, but now I have no interest in catching up on MacIntyre, or what people are saying about Yoder, or what Jeffrey Stout might be up to these days, let alone what new insights might be forthcoming in biblical studies about Jesus and politics, etc, etc. All of that seems very past.

Every time I get this stuff out, I re-learn that I really am an intellectual. It's a capacity that I have, and I enjoy it immensely. But it's difficult, like getting on a bike for the first time after not exercising very much for the past seven years. My balance and stamina and power are not what they were, not at all.

So, more about Hartshorne, less about me. I'll try, anyway.

The latest bit I'm reading in Hartshorne (Chapter 8 of The Zero Fallacy, titled "Minds and Bodies") is his attempt to explain why "mind" is everywhere. Everything that is, is (has a?) mind. He says, basically, there are only a few options for the mind/matter relationship. (1) everything is matter, and mind is just a special instance thereof; (2) everything is mind, and matter is just a special instance thereof; (3) pure dualism; (4) everything is a third, neutral substance, of which mind and matter are somehow related things.

He doesn't have much use for #4, or #3 either. This much I remember from the reading. But now I need to go back and re-read and try to really process what I have read.

OK. #4 doesn't work because the "neutral stuff" either has experiences, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then why not just call it "matter": and if it does, then why not just call it "mind." Really, this isn't so much an argument as an assertion that there's no good reason to believe in #4 without specifying what a #4 might be. This part is just ground-clearing for the more important discussion.

#3 he treats the same way: "the togetherness of mind and matter is mental, material, or neutral." Mind and matter are related, and how they are related has to be specified -- and the relation must somehow cover both terms. "Thus 'dualism' labels the problem, not the solution."

So the problem is how mind and matter relate. This is how I think about it: the most likely materialistic way of seeing the world basically relies on Darwin: in the beginning were things that were not minds, and the mind evolves or emerges from non-mind, or matter. So mind is a special property of matter, as organized in specific ways. "However, the concept of emergence does not necessarily overcome dualism. If, when mind has emerged, it is essentially feeling, remembering, desiring, and the like, rather than merely a special way of moving," then emergence is just a type of dualism, a dualism + chronology, that doesn't resolve the problem but only restates it a different way.

In this, it feels like Hartshorne is trying to solve a scientific problem with a philosophical argument. Which of course would be invalid. Or, no, maybe it's better to say that he's denying that a scientific conclusion leads to the philosophical position that most scientists presume that it does. This second one sounds more likely to be within the realm of philosophy's competence.

I guess the question is, when it is posited that "mind arises from matter" (wow my brain just remembered Godel Escher Bach... which feels apposite ... but I'm not sure if that's actually the same or not. Like I said my power of thinking feels far weaker and less disciplined than it used to be. Ugh.) ... does "mind" really, inherently, mean something that can never be described in material terms. There's the inside of being a person who thinks, and then there's the outside: from the outside, you can describe the patterns in which my neurons are moving, and all of that is "matter" -- but you can't describe what it's like to be on the inside of my head without being there.

All I've done so far is re-pose the question of matter and mind, not get any distance toward solving it, or even understanding or evaluating what Hartshorne is saying. So let's try again.

The emergent-minds hypothesis people are making a bet that, as far as I know, they are in no position to think will pan out: namely, that at some time in the past there will be a way of describing the world of the mind as it appears "from the inside" entirely in terms of the way things move on the outside. And not just as correlations: "you feel happy BECAUSE your brain just released some dopamine" -- but "your feeling of happiness IS the release of dopamine." Now obviously that second sentence is just 100% false and ludicrous. But the emergent mind hypothesis is banking on the theory that for "the relase of dopamine" in that second sentence, some equally objective phrase will be able to be substituted. And that just doesn't seem likely.

Hartshorne's insistence, which he argues for in all sorts of interesting ways, is that everything is already mind. Well, not everything, but every 'singular' thing, down to atoms. Most things we see in the world around us (chairs, microwave ovens, lamp-posts, etc.) are collections of atoms, and hence not singular items at all -- and hence such things do not have minds, any more than a collection of people (a city, say) has a mind. But the individual constituents of the chair do have "minds" in a very minimal sense, which is to say, they have freedom and the ability to choose, within an extremely limited sense. Hartshorne of course appeals to atomic theory here, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and so on: at the atomic level, pure determinism breaks down, every atom and even sub-particles of atoms do not behave deterministically. They have, he thinks, "creativity" and "freedom" in a minimal sense.

And it's all very interesting. Really, it is. Terrific stuff.

It's a way easier solution to the mind/matter problem. "Unfeeling" matter only exists at the level of collectives. Mind is already present in the world, always, even necessarily so. Nothing that exists is completely without mind.

Then the question becomes, why? Why should it be that this particular collection of atoms that combine into neurons should recapitulate and increase in power the same thing that was originally called "mind"? If there's already freedom and creativity on the atomic level, is the idea that freedom and creativity would be seen again and again, on higher levels, via evolution ... for some reason? I can't quite grasp the reason why it would have to do so, or be more likely to do so.

Ultimately, what rests on the claim that atoms / subatomic particles have "mind"? Or, for that matter, on the claim that they do not?

Kill Bill, Volume 1

I really, really didn't like "Kill Bill Vol. 1." Finally caught it a few days ago.

I remember enjoying both "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown" very much, so this surprised me.

Anyway, here's a few thoughts.

The movie starts out really well. I love the interruption of the fight scene by the little girl. Lovely stuff. There was nothing that even vaguely came to that same level again, the rest of the movie.

I understand Tarantino was showing off his genre abilities or whatever. So there's the "blaxpoitation" stuff in the first bit, which then switches to Japanese kung-fu movies or whatever. But putting a bunch of different genres in a film threatens to make the whole thing not hang together at all. And that's what happened here.

The huge fight scene between Uma and all of the minions of Lucy Liu's character could make sense, within the context of the particular type of movie that this section of the movie is shot in. It's a kung-fu movie, so within that context, it "makes sense" that: Uma has to take on all of the bad guys, in order; nobody is allowed to just get out a gun and shoot her in the back; the different minion types all take her on in order; the hero faces impossible odds made more impossible at every turn; Lucy Liu herself doesn't join in any of the attacks but waits until all the others have failed; etc. That's just the way the genre goes. If we're within a kung-fu movie, then fine, I could have let all that go. But we're not in a kung-fu movie. We're in a movie where guns do exist and are used to try to kill the heroine. We're in a movie where the heroine is raped (presumably multiple times) while she's in a hospital. There's some gritty / Tarantino-ish "realism" in those scenes. And having watched those scenes, and learned that I was in that kind of movie, I found the perpetual mayhem of the kung-fu scene just ... off. Wrong. And because of that, really boring. I honestly couldn't watch the whole big fight scene, I kept fast-forwarding in hopes that something else was going to happen. But nope, nothing but blood and killing and more blood and more killing.

And the blood and the killing made no sense within the context of the rest of the movie. Uma's character makes a lot of notions of justice, what people deserve, what's fair. She explains to the blaxploitation "Viper" that in order to get "square" in light of what's been done to Uma, Uma would have to kill her, her child, and her husband. And that she can never just let it go. It's like she thinks she has the right to do this, that morality or whatever is on her side. And then again, in order to get the awesome sword, she has to guilt the Japanese teacher, saying that he has a responsibility to help her kill Bill, because Bill is just so bad. OK, fine, whatever. But all of that moralizing doesn't fit at all with the kung fu movie part at all. How many dozens of innocent people have to be killed? Why doesn't she plan an attack on the Lucy Liu character that's more, I don't know, "assassin" like and less mayhem-filled. Yes, I know, it's because Tarantino wants to make a huge kung-fu fight scene, complete with all the cliches. But it doesn't work, because the parts don't fit together. The cliches of the "moralistic assassin out for revenge" movie just don't work with the cliches of the "uber-barroom brawl with kung-fu style antics" movie.

You could say this is all my problem. I just lack the cutting edge awesomeness of Tarantino, who split up the movie so that the parts "make sense" within their own worlds, but not with respect to the rest of the movie. The movie is schizophrenic, I guess, and I couldn't make myself schizophrenic enough to go with it.

Also, I could just not forget that I was watching Lucy Liu up there. I didn't buy her in her role for one second. But meh, whatever, that's never been the type of criticism of a movie that I think is much worth making, in general.

Not sure whether to bother watching "Volume 2" or not. The reviews are better for Volume 2 (says metacritic dot com), so maybe I'll give it a chance to get better.

Songs with something in common

The Kinks, "Come Dancing"
The Cranberries, "Animal Instinct"

I'll think of more later, I'm sure.

Iron Man: Philosopher King


WARNING: This is a post about the movie "Iron Man." It contains massive spoilers.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we don’t know that there is any such thing as a “superhero comic movie.” Let’s look at “Iron Man” as just a movie that is dealing with the real world, as best it can.

The movie opens with the protagonist (Stark) in a military convoy that gets ambushed. Flashback to explain how he got to this point, who he is, etc. Salient points: he’s a super-rich playboy / mechanical genius, the majority owner and controller of a major weapons manufacturer. He has no concerns whatever about the morality of his field, because he believes in a Reaganesque “peace through strength,” and that it’s important that the good guys have the weapons. But he is not a moral idiot, or someone to whom ethics, right and wrong, are unimportant; he has clearly thought about the issue.

So, back to the present. Stark is captured by bad guy Arabs. Later in the movie, we learn that Stark has been betrayed by another member of his company, and that the Arabs are being paid to capture him and parade him around in front of the cameras. However, the Arabs didn’t know just how rich and important he was; they demand more money, and some negotiations take place ... which takes time. During this time (or so I’m understanding the movie), while they’re waiting around to get paid, they figure, hey, we’ve got a mechanical super-genius who designs weapons; we’re minor warlord type figures who want more power; so why not see if we can’t get him to design us some weapons before we kill him. They provide Stark with raw materials for his work: weapons produced by Stark’s own company. Stark is horrified to see his weapons owned and used by the warlords.

So far, this story isn’t the most likely in the world, but there’s nothing impossible about it. There really are hosts of people out there in the world, especially the less developed parts of the world, who are desperate for power. In such places, power (in an important sense) really does flow out of the barrel of a gun. Warlords really do seek the biggest, best, and most technologically up to date guns, to increase their power. And weapons manufacturers really do sell their guns to whoever can pay for them. And this practice really is horrifying, to anyone with any moral sense at all.

Capturing one guy, putting him in a cave, and saying “Build us a gun!”: OK, that’s not so realistic an expectation for them to have. Let’s mark this as “Nonrealism Point 1" and move on.

Instead of designing the weapon they want, Stark designs the famous Iron Man costume, which turns him into a world-class weapon. Because this is the Beta version, cooked up in a cave, it doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s still pretty awesome. Stark blows through the bad guys and escapes. The new weapon is powered by a brand new power source that Stark invents in the cave. Mark these as “Nonrealism Points 2-4": (2) new power source never before realized; (3) brilliant new technology built in a cave on a short time-frame; (4) powerful outfit turns individual human into killing machine. We’ll return to these issues soon.

Now we’re back to realism. Stark returns home, and immediately announces that his company will no longer be manufacturing weapons. He’s driven by a purely moral imperative here: he’s horrified that his weapons are being used for evil. (Frankly, Stark’s outrage is well-founded.) The market responds realistically, by sending the stock price into a tailspin. Company insiders respond predictably: they try to force him off the board and gain control of Stark Industries so that they can continue to make weapons, and money. It’s the profit motive versus basic human decency, and in the real world, as in the movie, you’d be smart to bet on the profit motive.

Stark starts work on improving the Iron Man suit, to perfect the weapon. But he does so in secret, in his own home, quite apart from the company. In fact, due to his total focus on this project, he does start to lose control of the company. Nonrealistic elements come in again: Stark succeeds in the new weapon design, entirely on his own (with only the help of a few highly amusing robots), with no real bugs in the design, over what seems to be a short time-frame. But these aren’t really new elements of unrealism, just repetitions of points 3 and 4.

Stark becomes Iron Man, a self-contained weapon in the fight against evil. He then takes as his mission the destruction of all the weapons that his company has manufactured that have made their way into the wrong hands. Along the way, he stops a warlord or two from inflicting some ethnic cleansing / murder / rape / etc. on some local populations.

Soon after, our Hero is finally provided with a Villain to fight against: a formerly trusted founding member of his own company, who hijacks Stark’s own suit and builds a larger and stronger version, using the same miracle energy source that he also steals from Stark. (I don’t think any significant Unrealism points should be added here: the construction of amazing new technology under short time frames has already been covered.) They have a big fight and of course the good guy wins. End movie.

.....

In my view, “Iron Man” is a movie set in a totally realistic world. People’s motivations are recognizable. The world they live in is clearly our world. There are no invisible airplanes, no guys with unnatural powers that are rendered inoperable by Kryptonite, no radioactive spiders bestowing powers with a single bit. No made up countries or cities like Gotham. No supervillains with impossible abilities. In a word, nothing magical. Nothing impossible. Nothing that says “we’re clearly in a fantasy world.” Iron Man takes place entirely within the real world.

With the exception of the four highly unrealistic points.

What’s most interesting about “Iron Man,” to me, is that we learn the most by examining carefully the unrealistic moments. The moments of unrealism, the moments that turn the movie into a superhero-comic movie, show us more about the real world than do the realistic elements.

OK, what the hell do I mean by that?

Let’s imagine what it would take to make this movie fully realistic. We will keep all of the basic plot points, but get rid of all of the unrealistic elements.

To recap. Nonrealism point 1: the warlord thinks Stark can build him an awesome new weapon while Stark is in a cave. Nonrealism points 2 through 4: Stark creates the awesome new weapon, in the cave, in a very short period of time, using a new power source that he creates on the spot.

How to make all of that realistic?

Well, let’s take Stark out of the cave, give him a team of designers, an unlimited budget, and as much time as he needs. As for the new power source: hey, why not? There are advances in technology all the time. Someone has to be the first to come up with important technological advances. Nuclear power was brand new, once.

So, I propose some substitutions:

For Stark, substitute a huge team of scientists.
For the Iron Man suit, substitute a new and extremely powerful weapon, plus the military capability to use it.
For the short period of time, substitute a period of many years.
For the cave (and Stark’s individual laboratory), substitute a massive laboratory complex.

So the fully realistic version of the movie would go something like this. A team of scientists, working in a massive laboratory complex, designs a new weapon, over a period of many years.

(Pretty boring movie so far.)

They then put this weapon to its intended use. And that use is ... destroying other weapons that have fallen into the wrong hands. Those other weapons, of course, were presumably created by, um, teams of scientists, working over periods of many years, in massive laboratory complexes.

Now the movie has turned from boring to incoherent. How can the creation of weapons ... stop weapons from falling into the wrong hands? What’s to prevent the cycle from just spinning up one level, with the new weapons themselves falling into the wrong hands, requiring newer and better weapons to destroy them?

Answer #1, of course, is that this precise question is in fact a major theme in the movie. And it’s a point very well taken. One begins to think that the entire obsession with building better weapons so that peace may come may be a bad idea to start with. This is not exactly revolutionary, but it counts as a decently interesting point for a movie to be making, if you ask me.

But answer #2 is even more interesting.

Ask yourself this question: why did the movie make Stark an individual rather than a team of scientists? After all, it’s this move that makes the movie unrealistic, right? What is gained through this sacrifice of realism?

OK, yes, obviously, it makes it a more fun movie. More to the point, it turns it into a superhero movie, and superhero movies make a ton of money at the box office. But let’s not slide so quickly into the cynical explanations.

Let’s return to that scene where Iron Man jets into the warlords’ area, frees the civilians from the warlord, kills the warlord’s henchmen, and turns the warlord himself over to the civilians for justice. This is a scene that, to judge by the audience’s reaction, we all long to see. We would all love to save the innocent, and find a way to bring justice to the guilty. And there really are individual warlords out there, people with just enough power to bring rape, murder, and terror to the lives of others around them. There really are weapons manufacturers out there, selling their products to the highest bidder and making it easier for these things to happen.

We know that these evils exist. How can they be stopped in the real world? Well, it’s pretty easy to rewrite that one scene to make it realistic. Have a team of military guys come in and do all the things that Iron Man does with his suit. That wouldn’t be a superhero movie, but it would be pretty cool.

But in the real world, as “Iron Man” correctly notes, the military and corporations employing scientists are part of the problem, not the solution. Try to imagine a group of scientists plus a group of soldiers, working together in some institution that was truly committed to justice, unswayed by petty jealousies, vile political alliances, profit motives, etc. etc. ad nauseum. What you would have in that case would be a team of well-funded scientists that can develop the weapon, as well as a team of military people that will use the weapon... and that this whole, coordinated team has an unshakeable sense of justice and morality. Now try to imagine writing a movie about that outfit. A movie about a massive “scientific-military complex” that absolutely positively refuses to permit weapons to fall into the wrong hands, and that will take any action, at any cost, with no moral compromises, to prevent that from happening.

Talk about unrealistic!

.....

The world of “Iron Man” is entirely realistic in its portrayal of evil, its causes and supporting factors. And if you’re going to think realistically, seriously, about what it would take to actually improve the world, to stop the reality of ethnic cleansing and related atrocities ... you’re going to conclude: it’s going to take an Iron Man. It’s going to take something with both tremendous power and an incorruptible sense of justice, of right and wrong.

The deepest unrealism in the movie is not the fun new weapons or the gadgets. Those exist, as we all know all too well. Give the Pentagon enough time and money, and they’ll build you an Iron Man suit, or something very close to it. The unrealism is also not the individual person with a deep sense of morality who is willing to act on it. We know those exist, although they’re relatively rare. The unrealism comes with the pairing of the weaponry and the power with the morality, the clear and uncompromising sense of justice.

The person of Iron Man, in brief, is a gorgeous expression of Socrates’ Philosopher-King. And the movie “Iron Man” echoes Socrates’ insistence that the world requires such a creature. At the same time, the movie’s very unreality makes clear Socrates’ other conclusion, that the Philosopher-King is an impossible combination. The people who know the meaning of justice and are dedicated to it will never rule. The people with the power will never understand the nature of justice, let alone be unconditionally dedicated to it.

“Iron Man” is “unrealistic” because the problem is impossible. The movie posits a single, moral person with unbelievable powers: it takes the Philosopher as a given, and makes him a King. But to do the opposite would be even less believable: take the really existing Kings, and make them Philosophers.

But Socrates was right. Nothing less than this combination of Philosopher-King (a.k.a. Iron-Man) is adequate to respond to the (real) world’s (actual) evils.

Well, I know nobody reads this blog.

Google and Yahoo didn't even find it. I put in a string of words that I've typed on this blog, and they didn't find it. Tried a bunch of strings. No luck.

Technorati, ditto. I'm not sure if Technorati is supposed to find blogspot blogs ... it was the first time I've used their search function. If they are supposed to, that kinda sucks.

Ask.com found it though. Ask.com is my new hero and my new go-to search engine for obscure stuff.

Thanks ask.com!!

The truth is, I have a lot to say, a lot of the time. I'm just not sure that now is the time to be posting.

But I'm going to take a shot anyway.

.....

If you haven't read The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, and you know nothing about what it says or the arguments around it, then you don't know anything about the politics of Jesus.

In particular, I think it's worth stressing that Jesus was not a modern political liberal. Or conservative, for that matter -- I'm using "liberal" here in the broadest sense, to cover both liberals and conservatives. In particular, Jesus did not believe in the separation of church and state. When Jesus said "Render under Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's," he was not saying "religion and politics should be kept separate." There was no such words as religion available to Jesus. And everything that we know about Jesus and his time indicates that such a distinction would have been inconceivable to him. To paraphrase something that Martin Marty enjoys saying: "in the Christian tradition, God isn't much interested in religion.

I mention this for a reason. Some otherwise very smart folks seem to believe that Jesus really was a separation-of-church-and-state guy, and that "render unto Caesar" really is a proof-text for that position. Among bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and Brad DeLong may agree on little else, but they seem to agree on this.

I'll write more about Yoder another time. I have a whole book about Yoder inside me, waiting to come out.