Have We No Right to Our Sort of Protest Songs?

It took me three weeks instead of one, but I’ve assembled my ideas about the problems of the affluent white person’s gesture of protest. It’s going to sound very cynical, but I actually consider my perspective on this quite optimistic, in a strange sort of way. All will, I hope, become clear by the end of the analysis.

So my loyal readers (or anyone who scrolls down to October 5) will know that I first began this stream of blogging with a saddening critique of an internet-based breast cancer awareness meme. People could put a joke in their statuses, mildly amusing at best, that would raise awareness of breast cancer among those who have already had this very opaque gesture explained to them. Here is the first, and in my view, the most superficial problem with the protest gestures of affluent white people. Quite a few of the things we get angry about – global poverty, disasters, disease, religious extremism, wars – are easily understood. And when people hang out in a public square holding signs that describe how much they hate war and cluster bombs, that’s easily understood. I look at a person with a sign that reads, “Stop the War in Iraq!” and I assume correctly that they very much want to stop that war in Iraq I’ve heard so much about. This is an effective protest because people, while they may not agree with you, will know what you’re talking about.

But some gestures of protest are very symbolic, and difficult to understand at first glance. In my breast cancer example from earlier this month, I found it very hard to understand. Cancer is a terrible disease, and we should raise money to research to cure cancers cheaply and effectively, and encourage people to self-examine and be mindful of their bodies, in case they develop tumours. A great way to spread awareness of this among your facebook friends is to post a status update like, “It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month!” and embed a link to a reputable research charity or a web guide to self-exams. You could sponsor someone in a fundraising marathon, or some other kind of pledge drive. This would be an easily understood way of voicing your opinion and productively aiding the cause through the infrastructures that exist.

A terrible way to achieve a goal like this is to make your status an ambiguous joke about sex, writing “Athena Peterson likes it on the kitchen counter!” Really, you’re talking about ‘where you lay your purse when you come home,’ and in a long, elaborately detailed private message from the friend who’s been spreading this 21st century chain letter, explaining the symbolism that connects women’s sexual exploration, the attention that a kinky-sounding status garners, and the eroticization of the female breast to genuine concern about breast cancer. None of this deep and complicated meaning was at all present in the initial joke, which is the only part of this gesture that 95% of your friends will see! To them, your cause is lost in confusion and opaque symbolism.

I think this kind of protest is dreamt up by well-meaning people who simply have too much time on their hands, so they can ponder oblique connections between gestures, jokes, and political issues, then assemble a convincing pitch for their protest idea. Patton Oswalt has some wonderful jokes about this, his old routines about why hippies annoy him so much. But this kind of protest that defeats itself through its own opacity is the symptom of a much deeper problem with being a socially progressive affluent white person. Most of us in protest movements are affluent enough that we don’t have to work for a living. We do this because we’re bored.

Now, I don’t want to disparage the good intentions of many people, and I certainly don’t want to describe all progressive activists in my country as ivory tower academic types and trust fund kids who haven’t even seen poor people before. Most of the people I’ve known in activist communities have been on student loans, have staggering debt, and worked one or two wretched part-time jobs (fast food, gas stations, tour guides), to put themselves through school. But they could go to school, and university. They’re functionally literate. They have opportunities. They lived in decent neighbourhoods where you couldn’t just walk to the corner one block down to buy coke, meth, oxy, and heroin. They weren’t physically abused or molested. Their families usually had enough money to feed everyone and make the mortgage payments.

The people who actually understand from experience what it means to be poor, are poor, and they stay poor. Not by choice, but because poor people have to stay poor if capitalism is going to work. And communism only works for four or five decades before collapsing from the absurd weight of a bureaucracy big enough to plan (with minimal effectiveness, if that) an economy for an entire nation. We middle class liberals have the time to protest because we don’t have to worry much where our next meal is coming from. But because we aren’t poor, we can easily lose touch with the people we’re trying to help.

This is why moronically opaque, over-intellectual protest events happen: we have enough leisure time to come up with them, but actual poor people are too busy trying to survive to care. An affluent white person lives at a disconnect that the power of conscience alone can’t always bridge. That disconnect makes such a person a cartoon, and it makes the objects of their charity regard them with contempt and resentment. A poor person can legitimately say to the affluent white person who wants to help them, “You are an ignorant fool who understands nothing of my life. My life is hard and I work hard. I don’t need your fucking pity.”

Now for the most profound part of my analysis of the affluent white conscience: expand this scenario to the entire globe. Now colonialism is part of the picture, a massive system of economic exploitation that spread over the entire Earth and lasted centuries. We affluent white people exist because of the enormous effort our ancestors put into creating the massively unequal share of wealth among humanity today. If you think the resentment of a Canadian poor person toward a rich person who doesn’t understand their life can be powerful, imagine how someone who lives on the equivalent of a few Canadian coins each day would feel.

Even if affluent Western governments actually donated all the money in their foreign aid budgets to actual foreign aid, it is still an utter pittance. We live as we do today because for hundreds of years, our ancestors destroyed the economies of entire continents for their own gain. Today, we feel guilty about it. So we pity the poor of the world, and send some pocket change to them so they can buy an extra chicken and we can feel better. But it’s nothing more than our pity, which demeans and dehumanizes the people who are pitied. If an affluent Western person thinks they can restore the world to peace, harmony, and brotherhood with a few gestures of contrition about our society having reduced their societies to mud, she’s in for a rough surprise.

The global economy is an enormous crime against humanity. And I’m not even talking about the ecological destruction. That’s another post, and my PhD thesis.

There’s a beautiful and terrifying film that expresses the emptiness of the affluent’s contrition very succinctly. It’s called Cobra Verde, and it’s about the last gasp of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1880s. There’s a scene, included in the trailer, where Klaus Kinski, playing Cobra Verde, the head of the slave trading port, takes a visitor to choose a slave woman to screw that evening. The women live in cramped quarters, in an underground hole. The chosen woman climbs out of a ladder. The visitor asks who these woman are, and Cobra Verde responds, with clear understanding of everything he’s done, “Our future murderers.”



Kinski plays a slave trader who understands exactly the horrifying criminal nature of the slave trade. He does it anyway because he is a criminal. He doesn’t pity his slaves either. He knows that one day the slave trade will end, and those who are oppressed now will take a place of dominance. He doesn’t call the slave woman an avenger, someone who will bring justice. He calls her a murderer. In this way, he understands that the only way to escape a system built on terror and injustice is not charity or contrition, but destruction.

But that’s not how the movie ends. The movie ends with a song by an African choir of young girls, singing in Akan, dancing in their own style, wearing their own clothes, and smiling. It’s an act of creation and celebration of life. The resentment engendered by pity, the confusion of a desperate conscience, the never-ending guilt of restitution, the ridiculous charity of affluent boredom; these are all forgotten. The scales of justice are thrown away, and we are left with dancing and laughter.

Gastronomical Exploration: I Search for Bacon and Cheese Congeals

Tonight, my good friend Jeremy and I ate KFC Double Downs. We will never do so again. But we do know that if we ever have grandchildren, and live long enough to interact with them (having sworn off KFC Double Downs, this is much more likely), we will be able to tell them that we grappled with the most legendary product the fast food industry produced in the early years of this century.

With the amount of hype – no, mythology – already surrounding the Double Down, it was impossible for one aggregate of meat to live up to it. A healthy aura of comedy does surround this edible matter, however. Indeed, aside from the fact that there is protein in chicken, the Double Down is not healthy in any way at all. It is a creation of pure grease, metaphorically speaking. So why am I typing this blog post and not in an ambulance getting my stomach pumped?

Actually, it really isn’t that bad. The entire product was quite hot when it was first delivered. I let it sit in its box for a moment while I ate a few fries. Of course, the grease sticking to the paper wrapper made me very glad to have as many moist towlettes as I did. The chicken itself had a mild spice reminiscent of peppercorn. The bacon, while crisp, was barely noticeable, overpowered by the surrounding chicken. The bacon was too thin, while the chicken was too thick. The something-like-mayonnaise left much to be desired, reacting with the swiftly melting cheese to create an orange-yellow gloop that congealed quickly, and much to my distaste, as the sandwich cooled in my hands. I think the Double Down could be greatly improved if this something-like-mayonnaise sauce was switched for a simple chipotle, or perhaps ranch dressing, if you want it to be even more blatantly unhealthy.

I left one small fragment of the Double Down uneaten. It was a large, rectangular crumb consisting of equal parts, chicken, chicken batter, and congealed cheese. Probably the only unappetizing part of the Double Down was the cheese after it had congealed with the something-like-mayonnaise. If they used a better quality cheese, a different sauce, or had an option for not having cheese at all, the Double Down could be a much better dining experience.

I don’t want my readers to think that the KFC Double Down is an entirely negative experience. It definitely has its flaws, but the chicken itself tastes good, and the cheese is quite pleasurable while it’s in that perfect middle period of melting, when it has melted just enough to liquify onto the surface of the chicken, but before it cools into a congealed gel.

The only genuinely negative aspect of the KFC Double Down arrives long after one eats it. I am not a man with a weak stomach, but as I type, I am taking breaks to pop a couple of antacids, make some tea, and otherwise keep my stomach in proper working order. I am extremely glad that my class schedule this year allows me to take Tuesdays off, because I will likely need to spend the day making sure the Double Down works its way out of my digestive tract without increased discomfort. And I do predict some measure of increased discomfort. If you already have stomach problems, this is assuredly not for you.

I will readily admit that the best part of the KFC Double Down is its inherent ridiculousness. As Jeremy and I were waiting for our food at the neighbourhood KFC, the kitchen employee was preparing three of them in a row on the stove. As she laid them in their cardboard boxes, she clearly spat out the words, “This is fucking ridiculous.” I was eating a bacon, cheese, and something-like-mayonnaise sandwich, with fried chicken instead of bread. And I paid money for this. I paid an extra dollar to an anti-poverty charity. None of this makes any sense.

One of Patton Oswalt’s most legendary comedy routines revolves around the KFC Famous Bowl: chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, fries, and a breadstick piled artlessly into a bowl that you can shovel indiscriminately into your mouth. The creative minds at KFC don’t just inspire utterly unhealthy food that will shorten the collective lifespan of the American people by at least a decade. They also unintentionally inspire some of the greatest comedy of the new century. I’m looking forward to a polished and perfected routine of Patton’s take on this infamous and hilarious sandwich.*

*I should clarify that the KFC Double Down is very much more like a cordon bleu than a sandwich proper.

Cover Without a Mother

I had a very curious idea about songwriting that I might eventually turn into some kind of academic article, though at this point, I have no idea how to do that. I may eventually ask my cousin, who is now a tenure-track professor of jazz performance at University of Victoria’s music school. The story of how I came to this idea is just as interesting, or at least funnier, than the idea itself.

Last weekend, I went with several close friends to Oktoberfest in Kitchener, the largest Oktoberfest outside Germany. I was told to expect utter ridiculousness, and I was not disappointed. After an hour of far too rapid pre-drinking, we took a short taxi ride to the auditorium where our Oktoberfest tickets were. Yes, it was an auditorium, with the hockey ice removed and a series of long red tables cris-crossing the cement floor. The auditorium was ringed with drink ticket booths, bars selling mediocre mass-produced beer (Molson Canadian was the lesser of the two evils), and pretzel and sausage stands. I knew my stomach was unable to handle giant sausages at that point in the night, but I spent $3.50 on the best pretzel I have ever eaten in my life.

At the centre of all this ridiculous insanity was a stage where, about an hour after we arrived, a band started to play. The band was composed of middle aged men, some of whom wore the hairstyles of 1980s hair metal bands whose hairspray was confiscated at customs as deadly weapons. The first song they played was Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and as they worked their way through a variety of songs that night, I realized that they were all radio rock from the 1980s, and with few exceptions they were all Bon Jovi songs. I was at an Oktoberfest in Ontario where the best beer was Molson Canadian and the headlining act was a Bon Jovi cover band. I think I spent about a total of almost two hours laughing hysterically.

I’ll forgo the morning after and the car ride back, during which my travelling companions rediscovered their inner Robert Downey Jr circa 1997. The philosophical insight came to me a few days later, as I walked home on a productive evening of thinking. A mediocre song, like most of the songs in the Bon Jovi catalogue, almost always sounds even worse when a cover band plays it. But most Beatles songs still sound excellent when a cover band plays them. As long as they’re competent with their instruments and can sing reasonably well, a genuinely great song will always be covered well. A song that always sounds so good has a greater likelihood of being played by other people, because the quality doesn’t typically degrade, as in Bon Jovi or KISS covers.

Before the invention and mass production of recording technology, almost every song anyone ever heard was a cover song: someone playing a song that somebody else wrote, sometimes decades or even centuries ago. Today, when someone plays a cover song, we think of it as the player’s version of the writer’s song. And we can refer back to a definitive version of that song to compare the writer’s and the player’s: the album track.

But there isn’t really anything essentially different from the album track and a live reproduction and a cover version. The instrumentation may change, the quality of play may be different, but every iteration of that song is the same song. We’ve come to fetishize the recording to the point that the recorded version is often understood as the essence of the song. The album version is the theme, and all live performances and covers are variations. But by the 17th century, someone playing a song from the 16th century has no idea how it might have originally sounded. Without some definitive recorded version, that musician only has the basic structure of the song and his own skill to play it. There’s no battle between some new version of the song and its pure original.

It made me consider the idea that this understanding of the record as the essential version of the song is a kind of mistake. The musicians can be much more meticulous about the creation of a song in the studio, add effects or instrumentations that are only possible in the studio, and then rearrange everything in order to play the song live. Sometimes, the live version will be completely different from the recorded version.

Coroner ran into this problem a lot, because they created songs with gigantic numbers of guitar tracks all integrated with incredible complexity. But they only ever played live as a three-piece: the guitarist could never, with his single instrument, capture the same power and complexity as a studio version with twenty or more tracks. Their live performances lacked the necessary power that the studio could give them. Meanwhile, KISS only really broke through with their live album: the studio was too clinical an environment to produce the spontaneous, party-like energy of their live performances. KISS thrived on that energy of the concert, and they could never bring that energy to the meticulous construction of the studio.

The studio is just one set of ways of producing the song. It’s a very different set of tools than live performance, so there are very different things you can do. But the studio version is just one more iteration of the song itself, one more variation without a theme. It’s just that the studio version, being the one on record, is most easily referred back to. It’s the version of the song that most people will hear. They can play it at their leisure. They’ll hear it first, they’ll hear it most often, and they’ll probably hear it exclusively. So they think of this version that they hear most often, the most likely become ubiquitous in one’s experience of the song, as the essence of that song, and all other versions judged in reference to it. But the studio is one way among many of organizing musicians and instruments.

The song itself is the organizing principle of all its performances, whether that performance happens in a studio with the instruments recorded weeks apart and assembled on a mixing board, in the middle of an arena stage, or on an acoustic guitar half-drunk at a party.

I Like It When People Feel Good About Themselves By Hitting Keyboards

In the past week or so, I’ve seen facebook statuses of some of my female friends that have confused me. “I like it in the closet.” “I like it on the back of my chair.” And so on. I knew there was some new meme creeping around, and when I did eventually discover what it was, I was even more disappointed than I had expected to be. I found out through this article, which I also discovered through a friend’s facebook link.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means there are going to be commercials and memes telling me that breast cancer exists, and that it is a problem. I, and the vast majority of people, have known this for some time. But in the “I like it” meme, women are asked to change their status to say where they like to ‘leave their purse’ when they come home. The use of pronouns lets them feel naughty, as if they were talking about sexual intercourse (but not really, because that would be weird, wouldn’t it?). They send a message to a few of their friends explaining it, and the meme spreads, making lots of people aware of breast cancer.

Just when I think Christine O’Donnell or Bill Maher are the most disappointing features of Western humanity, this happens. As Stephanie Fusco explains in the linked article above, the only person who knows that the “I like it” status is actually about breast cancer is the writer of the status update. They have fallen for an increasingly common delusion of affluent Westerners with high-speed internet: thinking they can bring genuine social and political change with a status update or a tweet. They are deluded about their own significance in the world.

Before I go off on my major rant, Fusco mentions another terrible aspect of this meme: reinforcing moronic sexual mores. She, and her friend Amanda quoted in the article, say it better than I can.

“The whole idea that putting something so ‘provocative’ in your Facebook status will gain attention relies on the notion that women speaking openly about sex is both slutty and shocking. This may come across as feminist drivel, and I may be accused of having too many feelings, but it’s true. As my super-star feminist friend Amanda Judd explained, ‘This whole thing was really an exercise in using the associated shame of sluttiness to supposedly draw attention to a good cause. It wouldn’t have been provocative if slut shaming weren’t so big. So it was slutty, it was totally meant to be. Women were supposed to sacrifice their reputation for a moment to grab the attention of others.’”

Congratulations ladies, for your trip back to 1953.

And now for my own major point. I have long had a suspicion, which has since become a conclusion, that the most contemptible kind of activist today is the affluent white person who thinks they can make a difference to those worse off than they are. Isn’t this the basic principle of charity? Yes. Yes it is. But I’m talking about a very specific version of the principle of charity, which I think is perfectly exemplified by this “I like it” meme. An affluent person with no real problems in her life wants to make a difference to people who actually do have problems. She feels affinity with breast cancer as a cause because she’s a woman, and breast cancer is the most stereotypically feminized cancer in the world. Its ribbon is even a stereotypically feminized colour, pink. She is told about this meme with a message explaining it to her, feels slightly giddy because it’s also a sex joke, and posts the status.

Now she feels like she’s done something to help those less fortunate. Of course, she hasn’t. She’s just put a cryptic sex joke in her facebook status. But she knows exactly what the status update means. So, as her reasoning goes, ‘If I understand it, then its meaning was obvious.’ Of course, the meaning is only obvious to her because she was told explicitly what it means. To anyone, like myself, who hasn’t heard this explanation, this is just another confusing meme travelling around the internet. But the people updating their status this way get to feel good about themselves. They’ve done a good thing! Now pat yourself on the back, affluent little white person, while actual cancer research and treatment continues unhelped and unhindered by your complete lack of a contribution.

So much time and effort is wasted in the affluent West on protest campaigns like this that achieve nothing. The only thing that’s accomplished is that someone who normally does nothing to improve the world feels slightly better about themselves. Some of the people I know who joined the “I like it” meme are genuinely politically involved people, and actually work to correct injustices in the world. But I’ve seen many protests like this that exist solely to assuage the guilt of the affluent.

Another post will follow in the next week or so where I discuss what I think are the larger political and social trends revolving around the guilty feelings of the affluent and the decline of Europe and North America relative to China, India, and Brazil.

Screw the Tea Party, Join the New Peronistas

I was listening to some old Rage Against the Machine songs, and thinking back to my more naive younger days when I dismissed them as moronic radicals without noticing how awesome their songs were. I went through a rebellious conservative phase as a teenager.

But I’ve actually been thinking about conservative revolutions, because I’ve been paying attention to politics in the United States lately. I’ve also been studying the political and social ideas of Martin Heidegger and the conservative intellectual scene in Germany in the 1920s. And I saw an Argentine movie a while ago called El Secrete de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), which took place under the Isabel Peron presidency, and dealt with the devastating effects the Peronista death squads had on that society. And I saw a movie at the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s film festival called Politist (Police, Adjective) with a very chilling subtext about a policeman’s duty to follow the law without reference to his conscience or moral sensibilities. And I’ve been thinking about the popular support throughout Iran of the Ahmedinejad regime.

I think Canadians, and Westerners in general, have associated radical thinking and emotionally driven politics with the left, as if conservative politicians were about preserving status quo, too rational, out of touch with their own moral sensibilities. But a conservative revolution can inspire the same powerful feelings as a leftist one. When I started listening to Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics again, I realized how little political content was actually there. You know their sensibilities because they’re famous, but most of their lyrics are poetic exhortations. So I thought that a good exercise in political philosophy was to make a Rage song pro-fascist, changing as few lines as possible.

Ughh!
Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack...ughh!
Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack...yeah!
It goes a-1, 2, 3...

Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack
And suckas be thinkin' that they can fade this
But I'm gonna drop it at a higher level
'Cause I'm inclined to stoop down
Hand out some beat-downs
Cold runna train on punk ho's that
Think they run the game

But I learned to burn that bridge and delete
Those who compete...at a level that's obsolete
Instead I warm my hands upon the flames of their flag (was “the flag”)
As I recall their downfall (was “our downfall”)
And the business that burned us all
See through the news and the views that twist reality

Enough
I call the bluff
Fuck moral humility! (was “Fuck Manifest Destiny”)

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

With the thoughts from a militant mind
Hardline, hardline after hardline

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn (ad infinitum)

It goes a-1, 2, 3
Another funky radical bombtrack
Started as a sketch in my notebook
And now dope hooks make punks take another look
My thoughts ya hear and ya begin to fear
That ya card will get pulled if ya interfere

With the thoughts from a militant mind
Hardline, hardline after hardline

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn (ad infinitum)

And it would still be just as good a song. So now, students, you understand the moral indifference of art and emotion.

Freedom Is Doing What You Never Even Knew You Could Have Done

I had one of those minor philosophical epiphanies that I probably won’t do anything with professionally, at least not directly. In order to produce publishable (in academic journals) material around this epiphany, I’d have to read at least the last twenty years of evolutionary philosophy and psychology, and the freedom vs determinism debate going back at least twice as far, and then well into the seventeenth century. I really don’t have time for an extra project that long, so I’m going to blog about it. There’s a few steps in this, so it’ll take a few paragraphs to spell out.

Why are the opponents of evolution so frightened by the prospect? It has to do with what exactly that prospect is. The more theatrical anti-evolutionists have made rhetoric of jokes about an orangutan being their uncles or aunts. But the weirdness of existing on a continuum with other species is only evoked to disgust people. Conceptually, a deeper meaning underlies it.

The way humans have understood themselves morally is as free agents. Human morality and the complex societies that produce these moral systems are typically seen as exceptions to the natural order. We humans are artificial. That which is natural is governed by deterministic linear causality, the most advanced form of which is instinct. But humans are not purely instinctual: we are moral. Morality is an exception to instinct, animal behaviour not subject to linear causality.

But evolution is a natural process. If humans are the product of a natural process, then our moral systems do not constitute an exception to the deterministic natural order. This produces a contradiction in which morality loses, in those people who think of the deterministic natural order in a particular (but very popular) way. Actions which are not freely chosen cannot require the moral responsibility of their actors. If morality is a natural process, then it is a complex evolution of instinct, an entire determined process. So we have moral concepts by which we attribute responsibility, but no actual responsibility because we are not an exception to the deterministic natural order.

The greatest fear underlying opposition to evolution is the fear that there is no genuine moral responsibility.

I laid out this chain of reasoning, but I don’t believe in it, because I think several of the premises according to which this makes sense are not actually the case about the universe. It hinges on a metaphysical point. I used the term deterministic linear causality above, and I did that on purpose. Causality in general is an underdetermined process: an event can have a huge number of conditions and causes, and very complex relations among them. The image of one snooker ball hitting another snooker ball is an example that oversimplifies an amazingly complex universe. Determinism is similarly underdetermined: an event can have a huge number of different effects, can change a system in a wide variety of highly complex ways, and each of these effects interfere with each other apart from the event that was their genesis.

Here’s where the word ‘linear’ comes in. Precisely because of these underdeterminations in how events actually interact and cause each other, very few relations of causality are actually linear, like the snooker balls. The world we live in is enormously complex, and even though the mathematics that describe these complex systems that are our world are deterministic, there are enormous possibilities within the deterministic development of a system. One event does not cause a single set of effect events. One event sets off an enormous chain of interrelated events with millions of possibilities that its constituent bodies can choose from. That choice among possibilities is especially open to creatures with highly complex perceptual and reasoning skills who can analyze situations with an eye towards all that can be, not simply what there is.

Instinct is a reactive response to stimulus, a pattern that an organism follows according to what is there. The ability to conceive of possibility, either through colloquial reasoning, or highly complex phase space chaos mathematics, is a step far beyond instinct. This way of thinking about the metaphysics of the universe and causality takes us out of the trap by which moral responsibility disappears. Freedom, the capacity to understand and act on what can be rather than simply on what there is, is an evolved trait.

The natural order itself constitutes creatures that are more free than any creature before, so free that they can imagine themselves to be unnatural, and believe their dreams.

The Future of Television - Lost. In Space

I thought of an excellent idea for a new science fiction television show that would follow a similar pattern of Battlestar Galactica, at least as far as revamping seriously a laughably camp old sci-fi hit from the 1970s. I’m thinking about Lost in Space. Consider the basic premise of the show: An exploration ship is sabotaged and crash-lands on an unknown world, the crew being forced to work with the very saboteur who caused the mess in the first place. Of course, apart from the first and last episodes, the original series executed this premise as if it was Gilligan’s Island in space (with a comparable budget). But with a few tropes lifted from recent critically acclaimed hit sci-fi programs, and a few ideas of my own, I think I have a pretty good pitch. It could be worth developing further, at least.

The Ship and Its Crew.

The setup of the original show was too simple: The Robinson family of scientists and their best friend are the crew of the ship, and the only foreign entity in the crew is the villain-turned-walking-joke Dr Smith. What we’ve learned from shows like Lost and Stargate: Universe is that a larger, more diverse cast can constitute more complex storylines simply by their being stuck together. A large ensemble cast of singular characters with diverse histories and many different reasons for being on the ship provides a comparatively large potential for different character arcs as individual stories are developed, and different people come into different kinds of conflict as they try to survive on an alien world.

How to Travel in Space.

I only thought of the idea this afternoon walking back from the market, so I haven’t yet considered all the details of how this technology would work. I’m imagining some kind of wormhole creation and manipulation technology. This is partly why they’re stranded so hopelessly for quite some time into the series. Only ships carrying a wormhole generator can travel faster than light; signals can’t. So they can’t send a decent distress signal at all, because they’re too far away from human worlds, and can only signal them at light speed.

Key to the narrative is that humanity didn’t invent the wormhole technology - they discovered and reverse-engineered it on a sublight expedition several centuries ago. So a major narrative arc of the series would be that the cast slowly discovers evidence that they are wrecked on the homeworld of the beings who invented the wormhole technology.

The Villain.

I’m a pretty big Doctor Who fan, as regular readers will have discovered by now. And one of the Doctor’s favourite aliases, especially when he was stuck on Earth working for a planetary defence task force, was Dr John Smith. So I thought of making the central villain, the saboteur, a remixed version of our favourite Time Lord. The Dr Smith of the regenerated Lost in Space would be a manipulator of the rest of the characters, with his own nefarious ends regarding the planet's mysteries.

No one, not even the audience, would know he sabotaged the ship, and engineered it to crash on the Mystery Planet. Dr Smith would be a brilliant, eccentric, manipulative asshole. He would, effectively, be the charming rogue scientist at the centre of the show, using his considerably wide-ranging expertise to take at least partial charge of the cast.

There would probably be some other characters who would take charge of the day-to-day problems of survival for the cast on an alien world. And those characters would drive ongoing power struggles with Smith because they’re more obviously helping the cast survive on the planet. The cast also grows more suspicious of Smith over time, as they become conscious of his manipulating them, and his investigations into the planet’s mysterious nature.

One idea I had for the character is that he would be an older man, with some echoes of the Hartnell and Pertwee versions of The Doctor. And a story arc for the first couple of years would involve him discovering technology on the island to build an android body that would eventually resemble a young man, and eventually copy his own personality into it, cloning himself into a practically immortal body. This brings me to my favourite idea for the new Lost in Space.

The Android (or, Danger Will Robinson My Ass!)

At the 24 Hour Art Marathon in St John’s this summer, I wrote a short story about a future society that has invented a race of android servants and companions, whose brains were powerful computers and scanners based on chaos mathematics. Their long lifespans and incredibly fast learning curves make them intellectually and perceptually superior to humans. Because the intellectually successful androids were built as companions, they were basically T800 style robots with flesh that repaired itself by absorbing ultraviolet light, and couldn’t eat or drink, because the light would recharge their power plants as well. Pretty much every power source built to work in terrestrial environments, of course, would be solar or wind based by this point in human civilization, androids included.

By the time of Lost in Space 2.0, the androids will have long ago won their rights to self-determination, integrated into society, and to some degree have been forgotten. The android character from my story, Alice Chesterton, would be on the ship. A major narrative arc for her would be the crew’s eventually discovering that she is an android. Her immensely powerful brain would cast her as a rival to Dr Smith, and his envy and conflict with her would be partially what drives him to create his android replica.

Probably the most important element of Alice that the writers would have to keep in mind throughout the show is that Alice’s intelligence and learning speed is beyond the greatest of human geniuses. All androids are this way. Probably a very fascinating part of the Lost in Space 2.0 mythology is discovering the history of how the prominence of androids in society would have disappeared over the previous centuries. They are intellectually and physically superior to humans in every way. So one of the great mysteries about human history in this universe would be how and why the androids disguised themselves, or hid themselves away. Perhaps there's a secret society of androids somewhere in the human worlds, something like the Freemason conspiracies.

After Dr Smith created his android replica, he would have to be written with the same caveats as Alice. After that point, both Alice and Dr Smith can perceive all the possibilities of every object they see, giving them a fantastically fast learning curve. But Alice, unlike Dr Smith, is already centuries old, and was built by a corporation that became massively successful building high quality android companions. Android Smith, however, would not be built by such experts, and would be hampered by mechanical problems.

One of these would be impotence, because Alice was originally designed as a sexual companion for a professor on Earth, and so the physical processes for sexual activity would be an integral part of her brain. Her sexual relationships with other members of the cast would be excellent narrative fodder as well. Dr Smith's android would be something of a patch job. This would just add to the conflict between them, even as Android Smith begins to sympathize with Alice more than the human crew as he learns to exercise the immense potential of his brain. Alice has always been an android, so comes from a much more enlightened ethical perspective. Smith built his android self for egocentric human reasons, like envy of Alice and yearning for immortality. The breakdowns of his mechanical body would be quite ironic, given his advanced age as a human in the first two seasons of the show.

The Planet.

This is where the direct analogue to Lost comes into my idea. A mandatory feature in the hypothetical show’s bible would be that nothing like the God-ish aspects of Abrams and Lindelof’s island would ever come into play in Lost in Space 2.0. It’s a standard trope that most stories about stranded people take place in some jungle environment, but I’d prefer to set the crash site on a steppe near a mountain range, the kind of environment that would make shooting in British Columbia or California fairly easy.

All the long-range arcs of the story, again riffing from Lost, would have to do with the mysteries of the planet where they’re wrecked. Over the course of the first series, the cast, particularly those more loyal to Alice, would discover that human expeditions have visited the planet before, and evidence of these prior investigations (and perhaps some of their sticky, violent ends).

The steppe-mountain setting departs from the tradition of stranded stories, and would give the writers extra flexibility in setting. Some episodes would take place on the steppe, some at a nearby lake, and some exploring the mountains. Another narrative arc of the show would be a quest by some characters to discover the sea on the other side of the mountains, and that would probably integrate with the reveal of the indigenous species, described a bit later.

Most important about the planet’s mythology is that there is an alien race that lives there, the descendents of the inventors of the wormhole technology. And I would have them be as absolutely unlike humanity in every way possible. Perhaps they’d be a species something like amphibious cephalopods. The most important scientific consultant on the show would be the biologists who would brainstorm ways that intelligent amphibious cephalopods could evolve and become the dominant technological species on a planet.

The cephalopod culture would have to be immensely detailed as well, because the major narrative of the show would be the cast discovering their technology, culture, and mysteries, eventually learning to communicate with them. This would probably be the most difficult part of designing Lost in Space 2.0, even more than having one (and later two) major characters who are advanced android geniuses. At least androids and humans share a common history. The cephalopod culture would have nothing at all in common with Earth, but with a history just as detailed, and ethically complex, as humanity's.

There could also be conflicts because some of the humans (probably Smith and his cronies) would catch small cephalopods to eat at the beginning of the series. But because androids can perceive all the possible states of an object as well as its current actual state, Alice would stop the cast from eating them, and provoking the adult intelligent cephalopods. The human-cephalopod misunderstandings and conflicts would be another central story arc of the show.

I think this show sounds like a really cool idea. Let me know if you have any character ideas for anyone other than Alice and Dr Smith, because they’re the only people I’ve thought of so far. I don’t really want to see anyone who is too much like a character from Lost or BSG. If this whole academic career doesn’t work out, or it turns out that I can make more money as a tv producer, I know I at least have a good idea I can attach my name to.

How to Read Philosophy, and Be a Philosopher

In the course of preparing a presentation I’ve been invited to give at a conference at University of St Gallen in Switzerland later this Fall, an intriguing idea came to me about the history of philosophy. It’s too complex to fit into the space I have for the presentation, but it’s promising enough that I think I can work with it for a while. It’s also connected to a conversation I had Friday evening about how philosophy is taught at the introductory and undergraduate level.

My friend has begun to find it ridiculous that we are teaching undergraduates philosophy by having them argue against or otherwise try to attack the works and ideas of the giants of our fields. If a philosophical work or corpus has survived with a prominent role in the history of ideas for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems absurd that we would teach people by demanding that they refute Aristotle at age 19. It trivializes a work of monumental scope and power. It demeans the concepts that have revolutionized thinking over the millennia. I didn’t recall being taught that way.

My first philosophy instructor was (and still is) an old Cambridge man, who waxed to me this summer about the old way of teaching philosophy, where you truly know your history, can genuinely understand the thoughts and social milieux that shaped the thinkers you’re studying. You can’t start refuting all over the house until you know why every word is just the way it is. This is philosophy as serious scholarship, the meticulous investigation into a way of life that in most cases no longer exists, so that one can understand most deeply how a great piece of work was produced, and how it was meant to affect its own time, its own readers.

However, there is a different way to read philosophy which I consider equally legitimate as serious scholarship, but is easier in some respects, but far more difficult in others. Werner Herzog talks about how the meaning of his films, particularly Aguirre The Wrath of God, changes depending on who is watching them. The work is no less great, even though the people who receive it transform its meaning significantly and radically. In fact, it’s greater because it can have all these different meanings in different contexts of culture and history. Philosophy has such a long tradition that its great works have undergone similar transformations. It is easier than scholarship because it doesn’t require so much historical and contextual work. But inspirational readings are more difficult because the work stands out as even more alien when it is transplanted into a new context.

It’s difficult to read philosophy well, or indeed any great work, when you are part of the community. Every filmmaker, the Hollywood hacks, commercial directors, no-budget indie directors with a stolen digital camera, is in the same community as Kubrick, Murnau, and Herzog. Writers are in the same community as Eliot, Joyce, and Cervantes. Philosophers are in the same community as Plato, Russell, Deleuze, and Kant. The danger of the trivializing attitude of refutation being your only engagement with a work is that you make a mockery of the giants of your field. The scholarly attitude becomes dangerous when it becomes worship, and you sterilize your own creativity in a terrible inferiority complex.

The inspirational attitude is to pick up a work and a philosopher as if you are talking to an old, strange friend. This friend will shock and terrify you, and also mystify you completely. But if you can engage your alien friend in a respectful conversation, a productive dialogue, then you can become a great figure yourself.