C is For Cookie and Sharks are For Loving

 I never, ever expected Joseph Bottum of all people to write a post like this of all things in a magazine like First Things (scroll to the bottom; it's just above the "In addition to which:" part) even if it's in its blog and not its magazine. 

I mean, I’ve always liked First Things, and I admire Joseph Bottum for the he way he can talk so knowledgably about so many different things. But him giving a thumbs up to this spit-out-the-milk-in-your-mouth-funny take-off on the Commandments is sort of like Orson Welles talking about cookies or Cookie Monster starring on Masterpiece Theater. I always thought he was kind of a snob— definitely too much to appreciate stuff like this.

 Well, I was wrong— he isn’t and he does. Of course, I'd bet that Peter Benchley would like the Must Love Jaws trailer better than the actual movie based on his book, since he seems to like sharks more than people these days.

Anyway, Dr. Bottum is right about movies, or at least movie trailers, too. The trailers keep getting cheesier and more predictable.  For instance, the trailers for suspense dramas or action movies all start with some ominous music; at the trailer’s end, the drum beat speeds up and you and a ton of scenes flash by at super-speed and finally the movie’s title appears. Trailers used to be the most reliably fun part of going to the movie theater, emphasis on “used to be”.  

Thor– no one can outfight him and no one can outtalk him

 

This guy Dave has a great post at the link below— I wish Marvel would hire him to write Thor. The only thing he's wrong about is his mistaken idea that Hercules is a B-List character. Hercules, just by being Hercules, is an A-list character now matter how few people have read his cosmically awesome s*it talking or seen him give.. The GIFT!*

 http://daveslongbox.blogspot.com/2006/04/thor-smack-talker.html

*Check out both the kick ass Bob Layton Hercules limited series if you don't know what this is. 

“Dude, It’s Just a Book, Dude”: Assorted Da Vinci Crap

Ace of Spades has a good review of the Da Vinci Code here. Not the movie— the book. One thing I hear about both of them quite a bit is that the book wouldn’t have been such a success if not the outcry against it, just as the movie wouldn’t have been such a blockbuster for the attention brought to it by the public outcry to boycott the movie. Well, maybe so, in the case of the book. But as far as the movie, I doubt public criticism had much to do with it. And the idea that “it’s just a FICTIONAL movie or book so people should lighten up” is a pile of crap.

Whether or not YOU think the Da Vinci Code is stupid fluff and shouldn't be taken seriously, hundreds of thousands of people do take it seriously. It's sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and I can tell you from experience in my classes that it is taken very, very seriously by tons of college students, especially female college students. This movie was a blockbuster waiting to happen, as the Left Behind books might also have been had they received the hype, production values and talent behind the Da Vinci movie. True, the book sucks. It was still very popular– nobody should be surprised that a movie based on it is very popular as well. And anyone who takes even a brief look at the book knows that at the beginning it claims that all the historical facts about Christ, all the historical facts about Da Vinci, all the historical facts put forth in the novel are TRUE, period, no equivocation on Mr. Brown's part.

I'm sure your teachers taught you the difference between science fiction, historical fiction and so on. The belief that a book cannot serve or be intended to serve as an argument for a certain position simply because it is a work of fiction is completely unwarranted on at least two grounds. First, the idea that a work of fiction cannot be intended to move people into holding a certain position makes no sense. There is nothing about the definition of the term "fiction" that would suggest that it is incapable of doing so. Second, throughout history, works of fiction have purposefully and successfully been used to do exactly that.

The dialogues of Plato, Galileo and Hume are fiction. Each contributed to creating the intellectual atmosphere in which we breath today. Ayn Rand's novels are fictional… But I'm sure you've noticed that, like Dan Brown's novels, they are also polemical. So is Michael Crichton's novel on environmentalist fanaticism, The State of Fear. So was Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln with just a bit of exaggeration claimed set off the Civil War. Fiction can be as powerful as, if not more so than, any other medium. This has been recognized since virtually the beginning of written history– Plato advocated censorship of poets in the Republic for exactly this reason.

Maybe some are making too big a deal out of this movie and maybe it'll be blown out of the water by X-Men: Last Stand when it comes out. But the "it's just fiction so chill out" fallacy is pure drivel in any case.

British Philosopher Trashes America; in other News, Dog Bites Man

Fredric Smoler in American Heritage has a thoughtful review of A.C. Grayling's new book, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Dr. Grayling was born after World War II, in 1949… But I'm not sure even being alive during the Blitz would have made him appreciate its real significance. After all, his sort of presumptuous, ungrateful, just-short-of-pacifism- emasculated caricature of Just War theory has a long pedigree in analytic philosophy. The philosopher G.E. Anscombe similarly protested against Oxford's granting of an honorary degree to President Truman in 1956, who in her eyes was a "mass murderer".  

Before John Rawls wrote his  Theory of Justice analytic philosophers stayed largely aloof from actual, real life policy disputes, generally adopting a vague, leftism when they did so enter. The tone was still often aloof and theoretical– one example that comes to mind is Bertrand Russell's calling for the U.S. to bomb the Soviet Union out of existence with nukes, then later calling for the U.S. to totally eliminate its own nuclear stockpile. Anscombe herself was in many ways a great philosopher who made virtue ethics respectable again within analytic philosophy. But she failed to heed the lessons of the founder of virtue ethics in this case.

Aristotle refused to give moral rules as absolutes for any given situation, because he recognized what Kant did not– that at some point, one might have to lie– for instance, to save an Anne Frank, the whereabouts of whom are being asked about by Nazis. Instead, Aristotle said that one must inculcate instincts based upon the great and small virtues as best as one can and then act upon those instincts. After Rawls published his opus, some of the Olympian Ivory tower attitude of analytic philosophy started to fade as philosophers became "applied philosophers"— people who tried to use philosophy to solve real-life problems and became advisors in the government and even the private sector at times and therefore had to have a more realistic take than Mrs. Anscombe had. However, much of it still obviously remains and A.C. Grayling is proof of that. In fact, his reflexive leftism appears to have been strengthened by experiences such as being a Davos World Economic fellow.

A typical conclusion from Grayling would and does go something like this: "European capitalism is much more efficient than the Anglo-American model, if you look at the larger, fuller picture"– a conclusion he is able to establish only by looking at a much more narrow, smaller picture than exists. In short, he is an academic peacock, driven by what he wishes were so rather than reality. What else is new?

Scruton on Freud

Roger Scruton has an article in the National Post about Sigmund Freud (hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily) celebrating the latter’s birthday, one hundred and fifty years ago. Well, maybe not celebrating. According to Scruton,

Freud suffered from the "charm of disenchantment." Like Marx he was irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world view upside down — or set it, as Marx insisted, "on its feet." This is apparent in Freud's theory of the "incest taboo," which begins from a characteristic gesture of astonishment. Why is it that incest is not just avoided but forbidden?

All right, why?

Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great… A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don't.

I think Scruton is correct here; in fact, I think he is so obviously correct that, but for the influence of Freud, it would hardly be worth writing. So then why would anyone buy into Freud’s explanation in the first place— and why do so many people continue to do so? Scruton has an explanation for that, too:  

The Freudian story is a fiction, believed not because of its explanatory power but because of its charm. We are thrilled by disenchantment, which seems to set us free from social norms. We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to Earth. After this Gotterdammerung, we imagine, there will be a bleak but permissive dawn.

Okay, that explains someone like Alfred Kinsey who apparently wanted what was theretofore had been deemed perverse to be seen as normal so that he would be deemed normal. But Freud, as Scruton notes, did not think repression, sexual or otherwise, was intrinsically harmful. So that leaves me still mystified as to why Freud would be “irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world view upside down”? The question interests me because what some, to paraphrase the late, great Raymond Aron, would call the opium of the intellectuals has been “secular humanism”. Whether it was Nietzsche or Dewey or Aron, the great secular humanists of the late 19^th and 20^th  centuries saw something (at least potentially) great about humanity— or at least some humans. Yet today, the intellectual mainstream of what passes for modern secular humanism— whether in the form of the “Copernican Principle” imbibed by Carl Sagan or Peter Singer and Tom Regan’s pet notion of “speciesism” would deride the old Deweyian sort of view as a quaint, if dangerous, chauvinism.So this is my question. Why? I suppose the simplest explantion would be that such thinkers are simply assessing the facts of the matter as best as they can, which seem to them, as they did to Bertrand Russell,

that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms… that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.  

and then, like Russell, bravely looking into the abyss of the moral implications of those facts. But so many of their facts are, if not beyond all certainty wrong, certainly nearly so certainly wrong as to be ridiculous. I mean, the best evidence as of right now plainly points to the Earth being unusual for obvious reasons; human beings are different than other animals for even more obvious reasons. So the notion that neither humans nor the Earth are special can’t be primarily motivated by the facts.What charm, other than in those cases in which it serves to rationalize behavior, does the “charm of disenchantment” hold? Could it be as simple as wanting to be smarter than everyone else (or at least the masses)?