Television that Keeps Me Watching TV

I’ve been very impressed by the new season of Doctor Who, especially Matt Smith, who embodies the role of the Doctor in a way that implies gravitas, joy, and strangeness, sometimes all at once. I find him much less self-consciously pop than David Tennant, which endears him to me, though perhaps not to all the casual fans of the show. Steven Moffatt’s ability to craft such an involved and complex story arc is quite a selling point as well. For all I admire what Russell T Davies was able to do resurrecting the show in the first place, his season arcs were usually a little too simple, amounting to little more than teasers for the finale. This year, the Doctor is discovering clue after clue about the nature of the mysterious cracks and silences in the universe that seem centred around new companion Amy Pond and the oddly insular town of Leadworth.

Treme has been remarkably engaging television for me too. I particularly like the show’s favourite asshole, Steve Zahn’s Davis. Davis is a pompous musician and radio DJ whose uncompromising exuberance and total inability to tell how people will react to his actions before he does them combine, little by little, to ruin his life. In the second episode, he got fired from his radio job after letting a local musician sacrifice a chicken live in studio. By the end of that episode, he got his second job as a desk jockey at a hotel on Bourbon street, but lost it after directing a group of twentysomethings in New Orleans with a church group cleanup crew to a bar outside the hotel’s designated comfort zone. It didn’t help Davis that they didn’t make it back to the hotel for two days.

As a Spaced fan, one of the happiest things we experienced was that the US remake of the beloved show was never picked up. However, I realized this week that there is an American Spaced, and it’s called Community. It’s not just because of the inter-generational unlikely friendships in an eccentric environment, though the nuanced and self-aware characterizations of the protagonists and Greendale College residents is key to its charm. Edgar Wright is a rare director, in that he knows how a camera movement can tell a joke. And the creators of Community understand this as well. One recent episode saw the campus collapse into a paintball war zone, and the climactic last battle of Jeff and Britta with their deranged Spanish teacher Señor Chang would have just looked kind of silly and lame if it had been filmed with an ordinary series of camera shots. But the slow motion of Chang’s entrace, the low angles at which the diminutive teacher was shot, and the kinetic flow of Britta’s attacks and Jeff’s escape heightened the surreality of the moment. It’s still a very revolutionary, and very difficult technique for a camera to be made so pivotal to the humour of a scene. But Spaced and Community have successfully achieved that.

A Selection of Thoughts and Random Happenstance

Every so often, I think to myself that I should sit down and write a blog entry. But between my thesis work, fiction writing, publishing ventures that show increasing promise, I haven’t actually sat down and written anything. So this week, I’ve written several short entries at once, and scheduled them to appear on the blog as a series of short cuts: weird things that have received cursory treatment in my facebook statuses and tweets, but that haven’t quite merited the sustained attention of a full blog entry. Maybe some unity can be made from the madness. That unity would be my life.
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Terrifying Bestial Gyrations Apparently Sell Hockey Tickets. Monday morning, I went to the market to buy food, which is a pretty normal thing to do. However, at the intersection where my supermarket is, there was a nine foot tall bipedal bulldog epileptically rocking back and forth with a sign advertizing that there was a Hamilton Bulldogs minor league hockey game that night. The weird thing was that the bulldog was just rocking back and forth, and his enormous head was tottering like a bobblehead. It looked to me as if he was ejaculating in his pants over and over again.

Finding Philosophy With a Mad German

So a couple of months ago, I had an insane idea. I’m working on my doctoral thesis right now, a philosophy of ecology. It’s a way of thinking about nature that focusses on the contingency of human existence, and the continuity of humanity with nature, understanding humanity and its technology as a natural creation. All this involves re-thinking concepts of nature, subjectivity, life, and existence. Even though I won’t start actually writing this for another four or five months, and don’t expect to finish for a year and a half, I’m already thinking of the sequel.

The doctoral thesis, which I hope to publish as a book of philosophy, will work as a framework for an ecological ethics. And I want to approach ethical problems differently than the tradition of philosophy tells me I should. The traditional approach to ethics is to look for universal and wide-ranging normative principles that can be applied to particular situations. The problem is that I expect that my concept of existence won’t be amenable to such a dualist ethical thinking.

Instead, I’m thinking that an ethics based on characters would work better. In an ethics based on normative principles, one meets a situation and asks what universal imperatives apply here. In an ethics based on character, one asks what kind of person would you become by acting in different ways. Now think about working in a framework of ecology, thinking about problems of ecological destruction. The kind of person you would become in dealing adequately with these problems would be a human whose existence and personality included all the creatures and ecosystems around you. You would think about yourself less as an isolated human body, and more as a field of interconnected activities. The question now remains: How does one learn to think in this way?

My suspicion that most people would consider insane is that I can find the answer by engaging with art. In particular, I intend to work with the art of Werner Herzog. I’ve always been aware of his giving animals, architecture, landscapes, and forests prominent roles in his films. Sometimes, the actions of these elements are key expressions of the aesthetic structures of the entire films. Herzog’s films themselves are bodies that include non-human actors among their most important constituents. They are bodies where multiples species and ways of being intersect in clear and creative ways.

His protagonists often become other than human over the course of the story. Sometimes they journey among forms before returning to a similar shape to that as which they began. Sometimes, they try to impose their rigid human shapes on worlds alien to them, like the jungle, or the Antarctic, with mixed results. There is nothing necessary about the success or failure of conformity to non-human forms, or trying to force a non-human form to conform to one’s own. There is no universal principle to be found: success or failure of a plan of differentiating or imposition depends on the situation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of contingent features beyond the actor’s control, dumb luck. Sometimes, it’s the protagonist successfully anticipating contingencies.

These ethics do not deal with rules and applications. They deal with characters and situations. I’m not sure how successful my own philosophical project here will be, but I am hopeful that I’m onto a very productive path.

My Kind of Waking Life

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a very interesting movie called After.Life. It’s an intriguing premise that apparently resulted in a wretched film. Christina Ricci is a woman (a spoiled, horrid, difficult, self-absorbed, idiotic woman) who is in a car accident and wakes up on Liam Neeson the undertaker’s slab. Apparently, Ricci is a spirit who hasn’t been able to understand that she’s dead, and Neeson has the power to convince her to accept her fate. As their conversations continue, she gains an increasingly deathly pallor, her body catching up to her actual situation of being dead.

This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’

After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?

That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.

I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.

A Better Expression of My Views on Sports Than I Could Write

It’s difficult sometimes for me to explain my hatred for the New York Yankees. It’s one of those principles that seems utter nonsense unless you already understand it. So it’s impossible to make anyone understand it. However, Joe Queenan of the New York Times does a very good job.

It all revolves around the smugness of the franchise: everyone hopes to win, but the Yankees (like the Dallas Cowboys, Duke University basketball, the LA Lakers, and Manchester United) expect to win. A team can go on a years-long winning streak, like the Green Bay Packers, or Chicago Bulls, and not necessarily have this smugness, the presumption of victory. Everyone has to work for victory, but these teams are still conscious of having to work for it, and that consciousness in a Bulls fan, Packers fan, or Blue Jays fan prevents smugness from developing.

Developing legions of insincere fans from all over the world also helps build that smugness. The Montreal Canadiens won almost every hockey game they ever played for decades (and even a few games that they weren’t even playing at all). But the paradigmatic Canadiens fan was still a Quebecois. But there is nothing more insufferable than a dedicated Yankees fan from Arizona or Paris.

Being a Canadian who likes baseball, we all converge morally on Toronto, because the Blue Jays are all we’ve got. Even when the Montreal Expos still existed, Toronto was really all we had. Being ten years old during the second world series victory in a row helped imprint the Blue Jays on my personality as something to which warm, fuzzy thoughts and feelings apply.

The most difficult thing about being a Blue Jays fan is that they’re in the toughest division in the entire sport. Every Blue Jays victory has to come with a Yankees, Red Sox, or Tampa Bay Rays loss. You shouldn’t count the Baltimore Orioles as a team, however, because a 1-11 record this season disqualifies them from that status. So not only have the Blue Jays become my only untainted expression of patriotism, but they are also my weapon against the itching smugness of the Yankees. They’re down to third in the division right now, but a 7-6 record is still good in the first two weeks of the season. The Jays keep above .500 win percentage, and maybe this could be the year we knock the Yankees out.

Lessons from History, Or When Not to Read Too Closely

I was reflecting on last Tuesday’s John Ralston Saul talk at McMaster this weekend, and another idea occurred to me. The actual subject of his talk was understanding Canada as a Métis nation, a life grown of pluralism that was founded in the historical situation in the country for many years, where the indigenous peoples and the English and French settlers were on a level playing field. This shifted, he said, in the nineteenth century, as European philosophies of racial nationhood took hold. But he said that Canada had a very special essence in this founding atmosphere of pluralism and multiple identities.

I found Saul’s talk very intriguing and useful. But my social scientist, cultural theorist, and historian friends thought differently. They raised questions and commented to me that Saul’s theory was naive. They raised the valid point that his romanticizing the early indigenous-settler relationships as a creative multiplicity of identity and lifestyle (and it was quite romanticized) papered over the genuine terrifying harm that settler-descended people had done to the indigenous. They argued that history was much messier than Saul’s simple story, and I agreed with them.

But I hold firm that Saul’s talk was intriguing and useful - as philosophy. As history, it missed major complications that made a mockery of his account of the Canadian story. Of course, the complications of history as it actually occurred always make a mockery of any simple story. The point of a simple story is not to be an accurate retelling of events, and anyone who thinks that is the point doesn’t understand the messy muddiness of how history works.

A story like Saul’s is told not to recount the past, but to create the future. A plural Canada whose people embrace contradiction and multiplicity in their national and personal identity is a Canada where I would love to live. Saul told a just-so story to explain his philosophy of identity (because that’s what it was, not a genuine historical account). Such a philosophy is connected with Canadian history to give its audience an anchor in their own lives, a tool to apply the concept to their own lives, taking it out of the abstract and into actual application.

The problem with just-so stories that are delivered as interpretations of historical events is that they gloss over the events that don’t jive with the story. So those in the audience with a better mind for history than philosophy will dismiss the concept as poor history and leave it at that. It’s a long-standing problem for creative philosophers to find ways to articulate their concepts in a manner that people can latch onto them and incorporate them into their own lives. It can be tough to get our ideas out of the abstract.

Philosophy as Critic and Creator

Again, Brian Leiter’s blog has informed me of an intriguing essay and a sticky problem that contemporary philosophers face: the perception among many in wider society that the problems of philosophy are irrelevant. This essay by Jason Stanley describes a typical philosopher’s problem of trying to make the issues around which his discipline revolves matter. Stanley describes philosophy as the target of a prevailing attitude in the humanities today that understanding the particularities of cultures are most important for human civilization. Philosophy concentrates on the ancient problems such as whether there is free will, the nature of rational agency, what constitutes evidence, what is the truth of existence? These are the eternal questions, the questions that would appear to make mere gossip of what Stanley calls “the anthropology of the other.”

Yet philosophy, as it is traditionally understood, is devalued by its fellow humanities disciplines precisely because it does not engage in this anthropology. Stanley describes philosophers who seek ways of writing that escape the traditional eternal questions (Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, in my opinion John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein also) as anti-philosophers. Stanley sees a role for philosophy in this new environment as one in its ancient Western tradition: the critic.

Often, people find themselves slipping into the dogmas of their cultural upbringings, their colloquial traditions, that which seems so obvious that it would never be questioned. Where this happens, the critical voice of philosopher turns, showing people by reasoned argument that they are straying from the truth through their mere anthropology. The job of the philosopher is to stand up for what is right and true, defending universal justice in the face of those who would say, “Ah, that’s not how we do things here,” sneaking abuse and violence under the banner of tolerant relativism. This relativism ends all discourse over right and wrong, which the philosopher, with his eye on the truth, can restore.

But I want to take this further. Stanley is mistaken to build an antagonism, an opposition, between the philosophy of the traditional eternal questions and the traditional critics of philosophy that tend to align with cultural studies and anthropology. The ideas they represent are only anti-philosophy insofar as ‘philosophy’ is understood as investigating the eternal, projects above merely cultural traditions, matters of absolute truth, unpolluted by facts of simple practicality.

To understand philosophy as a cultural tradition is not anti-philosophical, it is anti-necessitarian. I agree with Stanley about the importance of philosophical thinking as a critical, subversive activity. The biggest problem philosophy faces, I think, is its tendency to believe itself to have this priviledged role as the only path to reasoned certainty; its tendency to believe that the truth is unified, absolute, more pure than the cultural collisions described in mere anthropology.

John Ralston Saul gave a talk at McMaster University today on understanding Canada as having an important cultural tradition of embracing hybrids, multiple mutually inconsistent identities, continuing negotiation among neighbouring communities, and adaptation to changing conditions of life. He contrasted this attitude (which he associated with the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Canada and its first immigrants who implicitly picked up their ideas) with the European attitude that unity of identity, science, politics, ethnicity, territory, and truth is the only good way to run society.

From the very beginning of one’s education in philosophy, one is taught to unify one’s thinking, that inconsistency is a major problem in one’s thinking and identity, that you cannot be two things at once. Such inconsistencies and multiplicities are against the very nature of reason and truth itself. This is the kind of thinking that is dangerous, that brings adaptiveness and flexibility to an end. Convinced that what is true now is true at all times, one will run into severe problems when the nature of the world changes.

One rhetorical point Saul made was to bring up the condescending point about the technology of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian shield. “If these people were so intelligent, said the intelligensia of Europe, then why didn’t they develop such a simple technology as the wheel? Have you ever tried to use a wheeled vehicle of the nineteenth century to get through the wilderness of the Shield? You’d end up with a lot of broken wood very quickly.”

The point is that what is right and true for one land, region, culture, people, civilization, may not be right and true for another. This is not relativism, but adaptation. One can defend those abused by the powers of a foreign land, but not because you have access to an eternal ethical truth that holds sway over the contingent culture. The abused themselves know that they are abused, and if they ask for help, it must be given. A violent man may say that this is what we do here, but not for long once those to which violence is done rise up.

The philosophy that most intrigues me is the creation of new concepts and new ways of life for changing times, and the changing problems that come along with time. Philosophy is the branch of the humanities that deals with thought at its most abstract, but this is not superior because of the purity of the abstract. There is no absolute purity, only purity of some quality, abstractness being only one such quality. Thought at its most abstract is least restrained by our habits of daily thought, what we have become used to thinking is possible and impossible.

Maximizing freedom of thought in philosophical creativity lets us build ideas that can take us to weird, alien places. The world may change in an utterly unpredictable way one day. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the better we can approximate in our thinking and planning the strange new world where we now find ourselves. Philosophy can be our first foothold in a contingent, dangerous world.

The Dangerous World of an Elite Philosophy

The follow up arguments to these posts have been on Brian Leiter’s blog for over a week now, but I only just got around to watching it. Last week, Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober had an hour-long argument on bloggingheads.tv about the subject matter of Fodor’s new book, co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini, What Darwin Got Wrong. In the book and the conversation, Fodor argues that natural selection is not actually a scientific theory, despite the popular conviction that it is the theory of natural selection. The argument is provocative, but in my view considerably dangerous politically, but I think understanding this argument can show how dangerous and reckless philosophy can be when it’s done without reference to the role it can play, whether faithful to the purposes of its writers or not, in the formation and battles of ideologies.



People familiar with Fodor’s writings will find it rather strange that I’d call him reckless. Fodor is a writer who spends literally decades perfecting his arguments. Last year, I read his previous book, Language of Thought II, the main thrust of which was his argument for the modularity of mind and nativism of concepts. This argument he first formulated in the original Language of Thought, which was published in 1975. Since then, the argument has changed in its particular derivations, and how it connects one concept with another, but the basic structure and goal has remained the same. Essentially, Fodor’s writings on philosophy of mind have continually revised a single argument for thirty-five years.

How could a writer this meticulous about the creation of his argument be called reckless? Keep this question in mind as I walk through the argument between Fodor and Sober. I’ve embedded the full video a couple of paragraphs ago, but here’s Fodor’s basic point. A scientific theory, says Fodor, is a set of universally generalizable statements about what can and cannot happen, about how a system can behave. Such statements are the sole content of any scientific theory. By Fodor’s standards, if natural selection was genuinely a scientific theory, then it would be able to make universally generalizable statements about whether some trait is adaptive: for all occurrences of trait x, trait x is adaptive.

The natural selection principle cannot do this, because it can only tell you about what traits are adaptive in some particular situation. The predictions of natural selection as a theory can only be made in some particular context: Some of the particular contexts Fodor and Sober discuss are predator-prey relationships, sex distribution ratio in some particular ecology. Evolutionary biologists reproduce these contexts in mathematical models to make predictions about the development of these ecologies. According to Fodor, these concepts are mere particulars, which he dismisses as gossip, stories granny tells about lions and zebras, turtles, fungi, etc. No specific predictions can be made about what THE adaptive traits are.

But here is what Fodor doesn’t understand about evolutionary biology: no trait is adaptive in all situations. That fact is why species evolve in the first place: a trait is adaptive to an ecological context. The statement “Trait x is adaptive,” said without specifying an ecological context, is neither true nor false. Without an ecological context, such a statement is meaningless. Trait x is always an adaptation-to, and natural selection is always a selection-for. A statement in evolutionary biology is contingent, dependent on the particular ecology in which the organisms and traits in question exist. It cannot make universally generalizable statements about what traits are adaptive, because adaptation is not a universally general process: it is contingent and singular in its articulation and its situation.

If you share Fodor’s definition of ‘scientific theory,’ then you will agree with him that natural selection is no scientific theory. And perhaps as a corollary, you will believe that evolutionary biology is no science. This is Fodor on top of his game: he builds ironclad arguments based on premises that sound entirely plausible in the abstract. But as soon as those abstract premises and arguments are applied to real-world situations, then we end up assenting to what we never would have otherwise. Has Fodor convinced us of a truth of which we were previously ignorant? Or has something more dangerous happened?

Here is where we see the recklessness of Fodor’s method. Just put his argument into the contingent context in which he makes it. You could flippantly (or Frippantly; see Fripp, Robert) say we’re now working in an evolutionary ecology of ideas. Fodor and Sober spend their hour long conversation arguing over what is properly a definition of a scientific theory, about what kinds of propositions should properly be called theoretical and what should properly be called empirical field research (or gossip, in Fodor’s terms).

As a side note, I have never liked Fodor’s dismissive attitude towards philosophies he holds to be wrong. His contemptuous and insulting words I find rude and spiteful, no matter the calm and apologetic tones in which he may say them in conversation.

Now imagine how a fundamentalist religious campaigner may take Fodor’s words and twist them to his agenda. A respectable, scientific philosopher appreciated throughout his field for the rigor and care with which he crafts his arguments, is saying that natural selection, the key principle of evolution, is no theory. It doesn’t matter that Fodor is arguing over the definition of the word ‘theory’ and whether natural selection fits his definition.

Fodor is just trying to isolate his argument over definitions from the context of education and science programs and support in the rest of the world. Such political debates would, according to such a philosopher interested only in truths discovered through dispassionate (yet so very rude) argument, be mere gossip, grannies bickering at each other. Yet these debates craft the structure of our culture itself. One cannot understand the thought of Charles Darwin without reference to how he developed it. And one cannot understand this development without reference to the religious, social, and political climate in which Darwin worked and wrote. His ideas had a social power that may not be inherent in the propositions themselves, but constituted a profound revolution when placed in an ecology of Victorian Europe and North America.

Ideas themselves are developed in a contingent context, and while some may consist of universally generalizable propositions, the propositions alone cannot tell us how an idea will be put to work in the world. A philosopher who sees his discipline as above this riff-raff of mere politics, partisan gossip, and bickering grannies, may craft ideas that those grannies can take from him and pervert into a form the philosopher might find ethically repugnant. A genuinely mindful philosopher will keep her eye on the world in which her ideas are taken up, and think so as to help create the world where she wants to live. From riff-raff we are born, in riff-raff we live, and to riff-raff we will return. The highest philosophy is not the most abstract and distant from the distasteful, but the most powerful in transforming taste.