New Binding of Isaac Game: Akedah for Mac and PC

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Abraham, Akedah, bekorot, Binding of Isaac, Chad Sapieha, child sacrifice, Edmund McMillen, firstborn, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Genesis 22, Globe and Mail, Indie Game, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice, Sarah, Seder Olam Rabbah

The Binding of Isaac: The Akedah crossed with The Legend of Zelda

As I was perusing The Globe and Mail, this game review sort of leapt out at me:

In playing The Binding of Isaac, the latest effort from Super Meat Boy mastermind Edmund McMillen, one can’t help but wonder whether the award-winning game designer wasn’t somehow using his creation to cathartically deal with some serious mommy and religion issues.

This inexpensive downloadable game, which is currently available for $5 for Macs and PCs through Steam, begins with a boy named Isaac and his mother enjoying their lives together in their home. Then the mom, a fan of “Christian broadcasts,” begins hearing the voice of God, who commands her to strip Isaac of his possessions (including his GameBoy and pants), lock him in his room, and, eventually, to kill him. Isaac discovers his mom is coming to murder him and flees through a hatch into the cellar. This is where players take control.

… The Binding of Isaac is a creepy, gory, and challenging play that’s as much an homage to games of years past as it is a distinctly modern experience. It’s also an overt indictment of mindless religious zealotry (see: the story in the Hebrew Bible from which the game takes its name) and the impact it may have on children raised by those who practice it. Indeed, poor little Isaac turns one of the most sympathetic video game characters in recent years.

It is, in short, an essential play for fans of avant-garde interactive entertainment, and perhaps the best downloadable indie game of 2011.

– Chad Sapieha, “Review: Avant-garde indie game The Binding of Isaac inspired by Zelda, the Bible”, Globe and Mail Blog, 14 October 2011

The version of the Akedah (“Binding” of Isaac) in Genesis 22, of course has Isaac’s father Abraham hearing divine voices, whereas Isaac’s mother (Sarah) doesn’t have a very prominent role. The to-be-Israelite god, Yahweh commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, which he obediently proceeds to do, until Yahweh stops him on the grounds it was just a test. Sarah has more of a role in Seder Olam Rabbah, where Satan tells her that Isaac had actually been sacrificed by Abraham, and the news of it kills her. But, Sarah doesn’t take an active part in trying to sacrifice Isaac, as in Edmund McMillen’s game version of the Akedah.

As Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores in her book, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical distortions of historical realities (2004), child sacrifice was once a regular part of the worship of Yahweh in Judah, and is still a “live issue” in the writing of the biblical texts in the Persian period. After all, if your god guarantees you will produce many children, only for the sacrifice of a single firstborn child, then it’s a good deal, right? And yet, child sacrifice gets such a bad rap.

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Rugby and Moral Relativism

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1987, 2011, Brian Malley, Constantine, divine command theory, ethical relativism, Ethics, Massey Presbyterian Church, Matthew Flannagan, Michael Jones, rugby, Rugby World Cup, Sabbath, Sunday, Theodosius, West Auckland

Michael Jones and Michael Jones

At the very first Rugby World Cup tournament, in 1987, the first person to score a try was New Zealander, Michael Jones. In the 1980s and 1990s, the boy from West Auckland was not only famous for his canny abilities at flanker, but for his refusal to play rugby on Sundays. From the days of the early Christians, Sunday was commemorated as the day on which they believed that Jesus resurrected from the dead. By the fourth century, the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, placed restrictions on the activities able to be carried out on Sundays. These restrictions were extended later that century, under the Emperor Theodosius, making it illegal to conduct business, attend sports, or attend the theatre on every seventh day. In essence, Christians applied the Jewish laws concerning rest on the Sabbath to the new “Christian Sabbath”. Generations of Christians, including All Black Michael Jones, believed that rest on “The Lord’s Day” was the proper ethical stance for Christians to take.

Roll on 2011 and there is another Rugby World Cup. But things have changed in West Auckland churches. Within a couple of decades or so, the Christian attitude to Sunday which reigned in Christian parts of the world for a millennium and half has dramatically changed. If you attend Massey Presbyterian Church, for example, once the evening sermon by Matthew Flannagan is complete, you can remain in your pew and then watch the rugby match between New Zealand and Argentina.

As with all societies, cultures, and subcultures, the churches are continually changing and adapting their moral stances. They might not think that they do, and some might even claim to follow “objective divine commands”. Yet, on examination, churches are just as subject to the winds of moral change as any. No doubt Christians had good reasons in 1987 to stand up for not playing rugby on Sundays and equally good reasons in 2011 for showing rugby in church on Sundays. Ethical reasoning is often like that. There is no “fundamental” or “objective” reason for any set of ethics which a community adopts. Any set of ethics is completely subjective, merely the result of a community’s adoption of certain rules of behaviour. But once ethics are adopted, humans do tend to produce no end of rationalisations for doing what they currently do.

Much the same is the case for Christian communities. One difference, of course, is that Christian communities claim that they take ethical stances – e.g. on sex, war, global warming, stem-cell research, single mothers, etc – based on divine authority. However, “divine authority” is frequently a placeholder for whatever is the latest ethical trend. As Brian Malley says:

In my lifetime I have seen, among evangelical Christians, a new emphasis on environmental awareness, on physical fitness, on community formation, and changes in gender ideology. All of these changes reflected trends in the larger cultural environment, but all were incorporated into evangelical Christians’ authoritative discourse by being expounded from the Bible, as what the Bible had always said.

– Brian Malley, “Understanding the Bible’s Influence,” pages 194-204 in James S. Bielo, ed., The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (Rutgers, 2009), 202-203.

And what is the topic of the sermon at Massey Presbyterian Church, before they take down the sermon powerpoints and show the rugby game? The sermon is railing against … “ethical relativism“.

They couldn’t possibly be more ironic if they had tried!

Logorama: An Amusingly Bleak View of a World of Commodities

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Academy Awards, commodification, Francois Alaux, Herve de Crece, Logorama, Slavoj Žižek

There is something deeply disturbing – if wildly entertaining – about the 2010 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film, Logorama, by Francois Alaux and Herve de Crece (the whole thing is available in a number of places [legally, I hope], including over at TwitchFilm, an excellent source for news of film projects from outside of the United States mainstream).  The official site for the film can be found here.

An image from Logorama

The film is a short, sweet little action adventure that takes place in a fictional(?) Los Angeles where everything, the people included, are corporate logos.  There are a number of ways to look at this slice of visual genius; we can view this as nothing more than a laugh, but there is more to the film’s central conceit than this; there is something chillingly plausible about this world, which looks more than a little like some parts of the United States today. In a world where so many people are willing to shell out extra money to buy a T-shirt with a corporate logo on it, and a world where kids on the other side of the world dress and act as if they were in an American hip-hop video (all the time talking about how they are ‘keeping it real,’ of course), this degree of commodification seems just around the corner, even as the financial edifice that such a commodification has helped to build crumbles around us.  This leads to a question that may seem to be defeatist, but which is worth taking seriously: is this  ever more dominant aspect of the world entirely immune to criticism?

‘At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism”: we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful … This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of ’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters’.[1]

That the companies whose logos are put to use here have not blocked the release of the film is surprising, or perhaps  merely an indication of how comfortable they all are with the current state of things, and how frustratingly little such small acts of protest really are.  I am reminded here of Starbucks’ cooperation in allowing their products to feature in the early scenes of David Fincher’s visionary Fight Club, as scathing a critique of contemporary consumer culture as Hollywood has produced in the decade since its first release.

‘The pressure “to do something” here is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence.  Are not our acts often such gestures?  The old saying “Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the most stupid things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense’.[2]

Logorama is strong, subversive stuff, or at least it should be.  That it may be prevented by the structure and the ubiquity of that which it critiques from being received as anything other than its glossy surface and its pitch-perfect homage to Pulp Fiction is  a deeply troubling thought.

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[1] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009): 52-54.

[2] Žižek, Tragedy, 11.

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Sigmund Freud and the Animal Farm School of Intellectual Inquiry

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Animal Farm, Animal Farm Tendency, George Orwell, Sigmund Freud

Deane, having been back from a trip to Australia for about three hours, has already at least doubled the number of words posted to this record that I managed to post in the entire two weeks he was gone.  I am well and truly shamed and must endeavour to do better …

In the very appropriate spirit of shame, a few thoughts on reading Sigmund Freud, which I am doing in preparation for teaching a class on religion and modernity in which the poor students will have to take Freud seriously.  In his 1927 book on religion, The Future of an Illusion, as translated by James Strachey in The Complete Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), Freud writes,

Sigmund Freud in The Hague in 1920

If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgments, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort,  If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility.  The proceedings of the spiritualists meet us at this point; they are convinced of the survival of the individual soul to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine.  Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity. They have called up the spirits of the greatest men and of the most eminent thinkers, but all the pronouncements and information which they have received from them have been so foolish and so wretchedly meaningless that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up.

I must now mention two attempts that have been made – both of which convey the impressions of being desperate efforts – to evade the problem.  One, of a violent nature, is ancient; the other is subtle and modern.  The first is the ‘Credo quia absurdum‘ of the early Father of the Church [Tertullian].  It maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason – are above reason.  Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended.  But this Credo is only of interest as a self-confession.  As an authoritative statement it has no binding force.  Am I obliged to believe every absurdity?  And if not, why this one in particular?  There is no appeal to a court above that of reason.  If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what one to do about the many people who do not this rare experience?  One may require every man to use the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.  If one man has gained an unshakable conviction of the true reality of religious deoctrones from a state of exstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others? (pp. 27-28).

That I find myself in more or less absolute agreement with most of Freud writes here is disturbing on a personal level, as I find Freud to be a load of destructive nonsense and antinomian conjecture; however, on closer inspection, there is something glaringly off about this passage in light of Freud’s larger project.  This is an instance of what I want to call the ‘Animal Farm Tendency’ within intellectual inquiry.  Recalling the bitter climax of George Orwell’s masterpiece Animal Farm, first published in the UK in 1945 as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, the modification of the original credo of ‘all animal are equal’ to ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others‘, this tendency, endemic within many fields of academic inquiry, is the tendency to be blind to the lapses in reason in every system of thought but one’s own.

The cover of the first British edition

For example, Freud’s entire system of thought, impressively involved as it is, is instantly undermined by the simple fact that Freud is as indebted as any Christian to the acceptance of certain assertions based less on reason than on other factors.  If one rejects as rank assertion Freud’s sacred trinity of Mother, Father, and Child (and all of the implicit sexual tension within this trinity) and the whole apparatus of his symbolic interpretation of dreams, the whole of the Freudian structure of though becomes largely untenable.  This is especially glaring given his arrogance and his pretensions towards science.  After all, he did write that many of the things plaguing humanity, religion among them, would eventually be ‘destroyed by psychoanalysis’ (31).

Freud is not alone in this sort of thinking.  We need think only of any of the predestinarian theologies, which assert a standard of evidence that neccessarily excludes those who are disinclined to believe in such theology.  This is even more true among the many theologians who have adopted a putatively – but poorly understood and lazily formulated – postmodernism.  Here we need only think of someone like Jean-Luc Marion, who uses the language of open inquiry to mask what is in reality a simple assertion of the truth of Christian Revelation.  John W. Cooper gives us another example:

In response to modernist claims of rational autonomy, some Reformed apologists have so strongly emphasized the relativity of reason to true faith and uniquely Christian presuppositions that the universal availability of any truth whatsoever has in effect been denied. What results is a kind of religious relativism. Truth is admitted to be completely system-relative, but only (Reformed?) Christians are acknowledged to have the right system.

The logic, undoubtedly given a boost by the language of the postmodern movement, goes something like this: ‘in a relativistic world, there is no such thing as thought free from presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others’.  Fair enough.  As far as this goes, we are still within the relatively respectable territory of ‘all animals are equal’.  However, the next step within the Animal Farm Tendency is to add a further phrase: ‘there is no such thing as thought without presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others; therefore, we are justified in claiming that our presuppositions are superior (or more equal)’ to those of others.

Animal Farm illustration by Jim Conte

Other scholars in many disciplines, biblical studies and broader religious studies among them, have used a similarly uncritical relativism to support absolutist claims or to simply and without reflection claim the truth of a given set of presuppositions. Much as it may pain me to say this, there are many examples of the Animal Farm Tendency within contemporary Marxist thought; in fact, anyone relying uncritically on Marx’s materialist meta-narrative of history is guilty of walking on two legs after denouncing walking on two legs.

Such thinking, whether it aimed at religious, historical, ethnic, or scientific ends, reminds at least this reader unavoidably of the immortal Leninist slogan delivered the pig Napoleon at the end of  Animal Farm.

Let’s have some more examples, this time from the audience …

Kristeva’s Incredible Need to Believe

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adolescence, Fundamentalism, Julia Kristeva, nihilism, Psychoanalysis, secularism, This Incredible Need to Believe

I picked up a copy of Julia Kristeva’s recent little book on faith, This Incredible Need to Believe (October 2009) at Melbourne’s wonderful bookstore, Readings (on Lygon Street). Through the lens of psychoanalysis, she attempts to answer that gargantuan yet pressing question of how a secular society can justifiably defend religious or moral foundations, without being trapped into either an adolescent fundamentalism or equally adolescent nihilism.

“This annihilation of divine authority and, along with it, any other authority, state or political, does not necessarily lead to nihilism. Nor to its symmetrical opposite, which is fundamentalism up in arms against impiety: in making the divine a value, even the “supreme value,” the transcendentalists link up with nihilistic utilitarianism. But how to know this today without deluding oneself with a narrowly rationalist humanism or a romantic spirituality?”

Indeed, how to know this without deluding oneself? Kristeva’s essential answer is that understanding ourselves – in particular our basic psychic makeup, as revealed by psychoanalysis – reveals  necessary psychic beliefs and morality. So with recourse to these psychic needs, secular society can defend morality while avoiding a return to the irrationality of religion (“very often in bastardized (sects) or fundamentalist… forms”) or the emptiness of nihilism.

But a problem seems to remain with her ‘solution’ . For, at most – and if we accept her psychoanalytical reasoning for a moment – if we have psychic needs which underpin faith and morality, this only leads to the conclusion that there is a psychological necessity for some form of morality. But the ‘problem’ faced is rather different: secularity is unable to provide an ultimate basis for any particular moral standpoint. And this particular ‘problem’ cannot be overcome by any psychic necessity. This involves the illicit progression from a descriptive to a prescriptive. More concretely, Kristeva’s solution does not allow us to judge between the ethical standpoints of Wahhabism, Nazism, or the new humanism which she herself expounds. It is no wonder, then, that liberal humanism only flourishes in police states, where violent force rather than psychic necessity dictates the acceptable form of ethics.

Although her main thesis fails, it is an interesting read; for example, check her discussion of adolescence, some of which is available in this excerpt:

“The Judeo-Christian paradise is an adolescent creation: the adolescent takes pleasure in the syndrome of paradise, which may also become a source of suffering, if absolute ideality takes a turn toward cruel persecution. Since he believes that the other, surpassing the parental other, not only exists but that he/she gives him total satisfaction, the adolescent believes that the Great Other exists, which is bliss [jouissance] itself. The least disappointment in this syndrome of ideality hurls him into paradise’s ruins, in the form of punitive behavior… The innocence of the child gives way to necessarily sadomasochistic satisfactions that draw their violence from the very strictures of the ideality syndrome, which command the adolescent: ‘Your pleasure shall have no bounds!'”

I read This Incredible Need to Believe on the long plane trip back to Dunedin from Melbourne, along with a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega.

I’m wondering how Kristeva distinguishes the “bastardized” religious sects from the more legitimate (and presumably pure) religions…

– Deane Galbraith

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

Tags

Apple, Barack Obaom, George Orwell, IPad, Nineteen Eighty-Four

First British edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In his visionary 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the science fiction pioneer George Orwell lays out a vision of a terrifying dystopian future where everything, even thought, ispoliced and monitored by Big Brother, an oppressive and virtually omniscient government.  The diegetic world of the novel is dominated by Newspeak, a new propaganda language in which everything has at least two meanings and which uses language to obscure rather that communicate meaning and truth.  Living in a world increasingly dominated by meaningless Managmentspeak – ‘going forward’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘consultation’, etc., etc. – and by an equally meaningless and equally damaging antinomian Therapyspeak – ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘happiness’, ‘ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, ‘life goals’, etc., etc. – it is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe.

A few examples of very real Newspeak from contemporary history: 1) An American president dedicated to continuing the aggressive, imperialistic campaigns against the Middle East launched by his much-hated predecessor is given the world’s highest honour for peace.

2) A new piece of technology that is simply a new way of doing the same old tasks is marketed and received as both a magical and a revolutionary device – the image below is from the official Apple website.  The special irony (and equating pure functionality with enchantment is indeed a fine irony) here is that Apple made a famed advertisement that aired in 1984 which claimed that arrival of the personal computer would be the reason that ‘1984 won’t be like Nineteen eighty-Four‘ (the ad is available here).  Anyone who says that the world is fully disenchanted world has obviously never really looked at contemporary advertising practices, which enchant the world for the mercenary aim of profit.

I’d be happy to have any other examples of Newspeak from out there if you know of any …

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

Shocking News of the Day: Hollywood Makes a Decent Film About Islam

Tags

2012, Avatar, Hollywood, Islam, Morality, Traitor, Violence

International Poster for Traitor

‘I’m a free man?  This doesn’t feel like freedom to me …’

In what is easily the most surprising piece of cinematic news I’ve heard in a while, and the most comforting (especially given that James Cameron has just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture for the racist Orientalist manifesto Avatar), I’ve just stumbled on Traitor, an American film from 2008 that treats Islam, Muslims, and political violence with sympathy and a  remarkable level of respect for moral ambiguity and religious difference.  Not only is the film a taut, decent little thriller, but it manages also to give a morally nuanced and complex portrayal of a Muslim protagonist.  This in itself is, sadly, still extremely rare, as Muslims are still dominantly represented as violent, backwards, and misogynist Arabs (though only 20% of the world’s Muslims are Arabs).

That the film manages to do this in a narrative that grapples with violence, patriotism, economic oppression, and serious questions about the ethics of sacrifice in the modern world is nothing short of revolutionary.  In the film, the viewer gets to see Islam as a part of everyday life for people in all walks of life in many parts of the world, not as a monolithic and misguided irrationalism held over from the Middle Ages (incidentally, this persistent stereotype about Islam ignores the crucial role that Muslim scholars played in helping Europe itself escape from the religious and cultural torpor of its medieval period).  More importantly, the film addresses the often-ignored fact that there are many different kinds of Islam, that not all Muslims believe the same things about their faith and what it demands of them as moral agents.

It’s a shame that the film was given a fairly modest release and limited advertising in 2008 (did this ever play in Dunedin?), as opposed to the gigantic wave of publicity that accompanies bottom-feeding dreck like 2012, but tonight I’ll take solace in the simple fact that Traitor exists in the first place.  So, cheers to writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Paramount Vantage – the short-lived ‘independent’ arm of Paramount Studios – and anyone else who got this film made.

In the film, a devout Sudanese-born American Muslim named Samir – beautifully played by Don Cheadle – plays a dangerous game with a group of Islamist extremists.  Other than that, I will say nothing else about the film so as not to spoil it.  So, strike a blow for intelligent cinema and for more reasonable representations of Islam and track down a copy of Traitor.  And while you’re down at the video shop, strike another blow for sense and steal or destroy a copy of Navy Seals, True Lies, or any of the countless Hollywood films that perpetuate anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

At the end of Traitor, we even get to see that Samir is wrestling with the consequences of his own actions, and wrestling with them honestly from within the structure of his own complex understanding of his faith.  As Zamir and an American FBI agent part at the very end of the film, the agent wishes Zamir salaam and Zamir delivers what is possibly the best last line in recent cinematic memory, one that many people still need to hear:

‘And you shouldstart the conversation with that’.

The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity

Tags

Omer Bartov, rationalisation, Reenchantment, Shoah, Siegfried Krakauer

A Poster for Resnais' Classic Documentary

While doing some research for a lecture on Holocaust films (which included a minor Holocaust film festival at my house, including Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, without a doubt one of the toughest 31 minutes in the history of cinema), I’ve been pondering the question as to why people still insist that the Holocaust is so impossible to understand, when on so many levels, it is a fully explicable episode in the history of modern Europe, a history that remains haunted by it past and by the irrationality and brutality that all our talk of progress has failed to eliminate from the cultural landscape.

Omer Bartov, in his excellent study Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), gets to the heart of the reasons for this disconnect, when he argues, if implicitly, that we are still beholden to the myth of progress, still blinded by the view of history that insists on seeing an ongoing process of growth and development (both moral and scientific) rather than embracing the chaos that is the hallmark of all authentic human history.  What Bartov argues so clearly here that the Holocaust was a part and parcel of rationalisation and modernity, not an anomalous eruption of the irrational, bur a simple surfacing of fact that modernisation and rationalisation have no necessary moral value, either good or evil.  A few excerpts:

War, slaughter, and genocide, are of course as old as human civilization itself.  Industrial killing, however, is a much newer phenomenon, not only in that its main precondition was the industrialization of human society, but also in the sense that this process of industrialization came to be associated with progress and improvement, hope and optimism, liberty and democracy, science and the rule of law.  Industrial killing was not the dark side of modernity, some aberration of a generally salutary process, rather it was and is inherent to it, a perpetual potential of precisely the same energies and ideas, technologies and ideologies, that have brought about the ‘great transformation’ of humanity.  But precisely because modernity means to many of us progress and improvement, we cannot easily come to terms with the idea that it also means mass annihilation.  We see genocide as a throwback to another, premodern, barbarous past, a perversion, an error, an accident.  All evidence to the contrary, we repeatedly believe that this time, in this war, it will finally be stamped out and eradicated, never to reappear again. (p. 4)

It would seem that our main difficulty in confronting the Holocaust is due not only to the immense scale of the killing, nor even the manner in which it was carried out, but also to the way in which it combined the most primitive human brutality, hatred, and prejudice, with the most modern achievements in science, technology, organization, and administration.  It is not the brutal SS man with his truncheon whom we cannot comprehend; we have seen likes throughout history.  It is the commander of a killing squad with a Ph.D. in law from a distinguished university in charge of organizing mass shootings of naked women and children whose figure frightens us.  It is not the disease and famine in the ghettos, reminiscent perhaps of ancient sieges, but the systematic transportation, selection, dispossession, killing, and distribution of requisitioned personal effects that leaves us uncomprehending, not of the facts but their implications for our own society and for human psychology.  Not only the ‘scientific’ killing and its bureaucratic administration; not only the sadism; but rather that incredible mixture of detachment and brutality, distance and cruelty, pleasure and indifference.  Hence the genocide of the Jews, its causes, and its context, must be seen as part and parcel of a phase in European civilization that blended modernity and premodernity into an often dangerously explosive mixture (though, of course, also a highly creative one, not only in the science of murder) (p. 67).

The Holocaust can therefore be seen as the culmination (but neither the beginning nor the end) of a process begun the late eighteenth century and still continuing, whose first paroxysm of violence was the Great War, and whose subsequent repercussions can be seen among the millions of victims of the post-1945 era.  It is characterized by the missile-wielding religious fanatic, or the cool-headed scientist directing a slave colony of rocket builders, the brutal guard with a given quota of bodies to be disposed of on a daily basis, and the official busy with his schedule of trains bringing anonymous masses of passengers to destinations from which they never return.  It is also characterized by two types of professionals essential to the fabric of modernity – the physician and the lawyer (67).

Oddly enough, Bartov makes a point similar to one I’ve made elsewhere about the ways in which we react to suicide bombing in the contemporary world – not that suicide bombings are on any level equivalent to the Holocaust.  It is not too much to suggest that the horror that people feel when faced with modern violence is perhaps largely due to a simple and sustained failure to grasp the fact that modernity is not morally on the side of the angels (at least not necessarily).  Additionally, like so many before him, Bartov makes the failures of representing the Holocaust into a moral issue:

Western representations of the Holocaust fail to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation.  In other words, we can note a powerful reluctance to admit that industrial killing is very much a product of modernity … while the Holocaust belongs both its past and its future – our present – and can therefore not be marginalized as an aberration representative only of itself, at the same time, it must not be contextualised to the extent that it becomes part of a general history of progress or degeneration, heroism or atrocity.  The centrality of the Holocaust for the human experience of modernity has been recognized even by those who seek to deny that it had ever happened … There may perhaps not be any lessons to be learned from the genocide of the Jews; but, all the same, we must know that killing goes on, and even if we are safe from it today, we may become its victims tomorrow.  This is not a memory, not even a history, for the murder is in our midst and our passivity will be our nemesis (pp. 9-11).

Others have made a similar point, though too many of them insist that the proper response to the Holocaust is a reverential silence.  Siegfried Krakauer, in his classic book The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), argues that the cinema, whose relationship to reality he perceives is more chemical than interpretive – something that many critics Bazin among them, have long insisted – is a mirror for the realities of human history:

The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves.  As such, they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.  In experiencing the … litter of tortured human bodies in the film made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination.  And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo.  Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.  And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster? (p. 206)

So what does all of this mean?  It remains an open question, though we must not neglect the fact that so many of the things that shock us about the modern, rationalised world should not be, in the end, all that surprising.

Hans-Georg Moeller defends Amorality

Tags

amorality, Hans-Georg Moeller

“Imagine a family in which moral values dominate everything else, including the affection the family members feel for each other: life in such a family will probably be quite miserable and thus somewhat “sick.” In short, I argue that a high degree of moral language and a highly moral mindset is not an indicator of the “health” of a person or a society, but, to the contrary, a worrisome symptom of tension and uneasiness.”

“It seems to me that ethical communication has almost reached a pathological level in our society, bringing about, in Hegel’s words, a certain “frenzy of self-conceit.””

“Interestingly enough, there have always been a number of philosophers who were highly suspicious of ethics; Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, for example. I follow these thinkers rather than the likes of Kant or contemporary ethical theorists who believe that they are able to identify what is “really” good. The attempt to define criteria for moral goodness has often ended in grotesque failures. I cite a number of examples of “shocking” or ridiculous ethical demands by some of the great heroes of today’s academic ethics, such as Kant’s moral defense of murdering “illegitimate” children or Bentham’s “scientific” suggestion of measuring weightlifting abilities in order to establish people’s strength for tolerating pain so that the moral quality of certain policies that might inflict pain on them could be objectively assessed. I argue that the history of “philosophical” ethics accounts for not much more than a series of unwarranted academic presumptions.”

(Hans-Georg Moeller, author of The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality)

Have you read this? What do you reckon?

Cinema as Exorcism (four): Avatar as European Orientalist Fantasy

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Avatar, colonialism, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, James Cameron, noble savage, Orientalism, Racism

Continuing my series on cinema and/as exorcism (see more here, here, and here), some thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the worst Orientalist fantasies in recent memory (though I don’t want to waste many thoughts on such a facile and deluded piece of rubbish) …

Poster for Avatar showing Jake as both colonised and coloniser

I would give a synopsis of the plot, but I don’t need to if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, Glory, Seven Years in Tibet, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, The Children of Huang Shi, or any other film where a white European character stumbles into a culture of noble but blinkered primitives and then proceeds to save them not only from his (and it is always his) fellow Europeans, but also from themselves.  In Avatar, the protagonist is an ex Marine named Jake, who is sent to a lush planet called Pandora to help run the Na’vi people (essentially three metre tall humanoids with better abs) off of their sacred land so a nameless company can harvest the minerals that lie beneath it. This is that same story, again, though done without any of the subversive gestures that distinguished the recent District 9, which shares a good few plot elements with all of these films but manages to be something other than the standard Orientalist bullshit.  From the opening generic tribal drumming, Avatar confirms every last sentence of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.

Argument one: Avatar is the most astonishingly racist film since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, perhaps worse even than 300.  The film’s noble savages, the Na’vi – many of whom, though they are computer generated motion captures of real actors, are played by non-white actors – are an amalgam of all the noble savage clichés dating back centuries.  They are in touch with nature.  They believe, in fact, that their planet, Pandora, is one he living organism (Pandora’s bookshops must sell a lot of James Lovelock).  They are violent but admirable.  They like to hold hands and dance.  They are sexually ambiguous. but still sexually appealing.  They are superstitious and reliant on magic and all sorts of often brutal rites of passage.  These may be noble savages in the film, but they are still savages and the film treats them as savages, as lesser people.

From the costume and character design, the Na’vi are evidently supposed to represent a smattering of oppressed indigenous peoples on Earth, from New Zealand Maori to the Navajo of the American southwest, but in blending all of these cultures into one, the film is guilty of doing exactly what it thinks it is condemning.  That each of the cultures that Cameron borrows from the create the Na’vi are vibrant and complete in their own right simply does not matter.  What matters is that they aren’t European and thus are an open resource to plunder when trying to define Europe over and against what it is not.  This is Orientalism par excellence.

In a final insult, the Na’vi’s beliefs about their planet being a living organism are given endorsement in the film only when these beliefs are proven scientifically.  This is the evolutionary narrative of history – out of darkness and into light, ironically, an idea that is deeply rooted in Christianity – in a nutshell.  The Na’vi religion is nothing more than primitive science, an accident of insight that needs European systems of valuation for its legitimacy.  This is, at the very best, a backhanded compliment and at worst an absolute repudiation of what the film intends.  Final thought: if the humans – as one of the generic corporate faces notes – have nothing to offer the Na’vi, then why does Jake, the sympathetic white human Marine, become the long-awaited saviour of the Na’vi?  Why tell the story from his standpoint at all?  Why not make Neytiri, the main Na’vi figure, the film’s centre?  Why not allow the Na’vi to fulfill their own prophecies?  Why not allow them to save themselves?  Why force them to end the film in a cold-hearted fashion, sending most of the humans home ‘to a dying world’?  Why not grant them the courage of their own ecological convictions and allow them to take a hand in saving the Earth?

Argument two: to say that Avatar is ideologically inconsistent is to make a molehill out of a mountain.  This is the perfect film for our times, when Barack Obama can make a speech defending a policy of perpetual war while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, when there is endlessly debate about climate change that touches on everything except the actual problems behind the crisis (the market is not the solution, people; it is the problem).  This is a film that appears to want to be an endorsement of peace but that ends in a fierce and very bloody battle for territory  and resources that the audience is supposed to  get behind.  In a similar fashion, Avatar makes every gesture possible towards valuing nature and the Na’vi are shown – over and over and over again – being ecologically minded and treating Pandora’s animal life with respect; however, in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.

This is a major Hollywood studio film – and I do know that Cameron is actually Canadian – that is trying hard to say something genuine about ecology and capitalism but doesn’t know how to say anything that hasn’t been said for the last four or five hundred years.  Perhaps, more worryingly, it cannot, given that it is also one of the most expensive films ever made and it will need to recoup its costs largely in the international market, and thus cannot do anything but pander to the lowest worldwide common denominator.  This is a deeply confused film that reflects in every surface the convoluted and confused nature of our culture.  It is everything that it believes that it is not.  We deserve this film, though I wish I could say with any confidence that we deserve better.

Argument three: Avatar is the ultimate in Orientalist fantasy.  When Jake opens his eyes at the end of the film, having defeated the Europeans and sent them packing and having fully, literally become one of the Na’vi, he is living out the dreams of every white neo-pagan, Druid, or Wiccan out there who wants to truly recover a past that is, for the most part, a Romantic fantasy that has no roots in history.  Unlike Wikus in District 9, who also becomes an oppressed alien but takes up arms against the oppressors because he is a selfish git largely concerned with saving his own ass (a fact that the film is smart enough to admit), Jake is a classic Hollywood hero who is able to be both coloniser and colonised at once.   He is a coloniser without the need for guilt or any serious reflection on what he has done (he is instrumental in destroying the Na’vi’s village) but he is also colonised in that he can take part in a fantasy culture where everything is sunshine, simplicity, and sacredness.  Jake is liberal guilt made flesh.  In all of this, Cameron is  ideologically at least the equal of the great Orientalist novelists, from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad, though these two have the distinct advantage of having been able to actually write.

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri.

The film, on a technological level, is a game-changer, as they like to say.  As a narrative and as an example of the colonial gaze, there is nothing in Avatar that is any different, or any better, than eighteenth-century missionary and colonial writings about Egypt or India.  This does nothing to exorcise the demons of colonialism or imperialism; indeed, it is a wholehearted embrace of both of these things cloaked in the shell of a protest against them.

To be fair, I’ll throw in a few positives: everything in the film from the production design to the intricately imagined and convincingly rendered worlds, looks amazing (even in two dimensions, as we down here at the ends of the Earth still don’t have a 3-D theatre) and the climactic battle is a stunning achievement in editing, effects, and pacing.  Finally, Zoe Saldana as a nine-foot tall Smurf?  Still hot as all hell.

Cyborg, Hauntology, Spectrality and the Bible

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blacks, chimpanzees, Chop Chop Chang, cyborgs, Donna Haraway, Ham, hauntology, Holloman Aero-Medical laboratory, Jacques Derrida, modernity, NASA, Nazi German, Racism, science, Space Chimps, Specters of Marx, Spectrality, Tyler, U.S. Space Program

The Bible does not exist as such. In opposition to the question, “Why drag the Bible in on a subject [Cyborgs, Hauntology, and Spectrality] with which it has absolutely no concern?”, I could ask, “What makes you think the Bible exists – except as hauntology – as that which haunts some current discourse, being both repetition and first time, thing and simulacrum?”

There are so many such current discourses from which to choose an illustrative example. But here is one concerning a chimpanzee, or more precisely, the naming of a chimpanzee.

In an expedition which is frighteningly reminiscent of the New World’s slave-trading past, in the 1950s, the U.S. Space Program sent an expedition to Cameroon, Africa to obtain baby chimps to train as the first astronauts to be sent into orbit. According to some reports, their chimpanzee mothers were slaughtered to obtain their babies. The chimps themselves, of course, were chosen because they were considered dispensible, less than people. And many of them died in space or in training.

What did they name the first African chimp to be sent into space? Ham. Officially, “Ham” is just an innocent name, merely the acronym of the Holloman Aero-Medical laboratory in which the chimps received their training to be astronauts. So there would be no equation of the African monkey with the ancestor of the cursed race of (Black) people of Christian tradition. But the apparent innocence of the acronym is shown to be haunted by centuries of racism when we consider that the name given to the second chimp in space was also chosen from our primeval ancestors. His name was Enos (the Hebrew term for “man”).

So here – at the pinnacle of human achievement, among the most scientific of men, and barely a decade after those previous most scientific men of Nazi German had achieved their scientific acme – is the spectre of a racist and biblical  past. It is also a racism thoroughly integrated with science. The implied progression from chimp to black to man (that is, white man) is inherent in the names used within the U.S. Space Program, just as it was among the early evolutionists and anthropologists. The three steps could easily have been derived from Edward Tyler’s own text-book. The pattern is already there in the Table of Nations, dividing the world into three parts, and providing a foundation myth to naturalize the inferiority and servitude of thousands upon thousands of other peoples. Modernity added the scientific nature of the racism, but the teleological ideology of science also has its traces in biblical apocalyptic.

Donna Haraway (she of Cyborg fame) identifies the link between space-chimp and biblical tradition:

“HAM’s name inevitably recalls Noah’s youngest and only black son.”

(The Haraway Reader, By Donna Jeanne Haraway, Published by Routledge, 2004: 92.)

Haraway understands the deep influence of the Bible in Western society. In this regard, she also notes that another chimpanzee in the U.S. Space Program, Chimp #65 was given the delightful name of Chop Chop Chang, “recalling the stunning racism in which the other primates have been made to participate” (94).

Today, as urgently as ever, we must speak with ghosts – engage in a spectral discourse – in order to identify injustices and in particular to identify the unfolding role of the Bible in creating injustice. In Jacques Derrida’s own, now spectral, words:

“No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.”

(Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994: xix.)

For if scholars refuse to recall ghosts, then the work may be left to others with much less critical memories, such as the memory-producing machine that is Hollywood. In the 2008 animation, Space Chimps, Ham III (the grandson of Ham) is picked by NASA for a space mission in which a group of chimpanzees must overcome the evil dictator Zartog on an Earth-like planet on the other side of the galaxy. Evil has been transferred to the other side of the galaxy, many light years from any association with NASA itself, who now appear on the side of intergalactic peace. That is one big transference of guilt! It need not be said that there is no explanation of the pejorative origins of Ham’s name and no appearance by Chop Chop Chang III the grandson of Chop Chop Chang. The institutional racism of NASA and of U.S. scientists has been forgotten and erased, purified and written out of the script. Wonder why? Perhaps somebody asked, “Why drag the Bible in on a subject with which it has absolutely no concern?”

Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and So-called ‘Counter-examples’

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Matthew Flannagan, moral relativism

Matthew Flannagan

Back to Matt Flannagan’s tirade against moral relativism – that producer of such moral outrages as equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution, and all those other things that cause your average member of a conservative think-tank to worry about all night in bed.

Later on in his presentation, Matt announces that he is going to produce ‘counterexamples’ to moral relativism. Now, usually a ‘counterexample’ would demonstrate the illogical or absurd nature of moral relativism. So does Matt produce this type of ’counterexample’? Does any one of his examples demonstrate the illogical or absurd nature of moral relativism? In fact… none of them do.

Matt makes the following confused suggestions about moral relativism:

– If a society considered wife-bashing to be morally acceptable, it would not be ‘right’ for a feminist or a moral relativist to object to it;

– In an Islamic society which believed that conversion to another religion was a capital offense, it would be morally required to execute converts;

– In countries in which racism is widely practiced, then racism is acceptable;

– An individual who thinks it is right to rape, torture, kill or ‘chop up’ women would be morally right under individual relativism, and nobody could impose their views on them.

Matt adds, “If you accept cultural relativism, essentially the norms of your society become infallible. They can’t be wrong. Because right and wrong just is what your society says it is.” As Matt concludes that is it implausible that societies can be morally infallible in their judgments, he concludes that moral relativism is not true.

Matt’s reference to ‘infalliblity’ here is interesting. For infallibility is a normal trait of divine commands. Once again, it seems that Matt is assuming that moral relativism must have the characteristics of moral objectivism. He just cannot appreciate how moral relativism works. For moral relativism is not some monolithic system across society, but a variety of different views, some coalescing together, some in conflict to some degree or another. Moral relativism is not some stationary edifice, as Matt pretends, but is always developing, always reacting to material circumstances and prior ideologies. Once one removes the imaginary characteristics of divine command theory – infallibility, immutability, universality, etc – from the description of moral relativism, then Matt’s conclusions are exposed as unsound.

For moral rules are always sites of dispute. A society that approves of wife-bashing, like most of New Zealand did only about 50-or-so years ago, can certainly renegotiate the moral rightness or wrongness of such behaviour. And such disputes need not only occur within a society. Our learned (not objective) disgust at certain behaviour might prompt us to attempt to alter the behaviour of other societies (and it often has, for better or for worse, relatively speaking). So there is no illogic in the system, once relativism is properly viewed as a fluid process, rather than as the artificial imaginary associated with Matt’s divine command theory.

Moreover, there is no absurdity in the fact that a person or sector of society with very unusual morals might consider their behaviour to be morally good. To the contrary, if morality depends on cultural norms, the examples he provides are exactly as we would expect. Only a few people would openly claim moral rectitude for really weird or kinky behaviour. For if everybody openly claimed it was morally good, then – culturally – it wouldn’t be considered weird or kinky in the first place! When Matt fantasizes about some weird behaviour (and his favourite suggestion, for some reason, is a person who rapes, tortures and ‘chops up’ women, which places Matt in the position of patriarchal protector of women), the very fact that this behaviour is culturally abnormal is consistent with the claims of moral relativism. Moral relativism in fact claims that morally weird behaviour will usually correspond to culturally abnormal behaviour. Morality follows cultural norms. Just as we would expect from moral relativism.

So Matt’s so-called ‘counterexamples’ are nothing of the sort. Instead, these examples have all backfired on him. Matt’s examples are entirely consistent with the truth of moral relativism.

Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and Hidden Objectivist Assumptions

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Matthew Flannagan, moral relativism

Matthew Flannagan

Matt Flannagan, who blogs with his wife Madeleine at MandM, contributes to a New Zealand-based conservative think-tank called Thinking Matters. These ‘conservative think-tanks’ crop up from place to place and the term is usually a euphemism for frustrated and atavistic reactionists who want to take away rights from women, homosexuals, and other minorities and restore power to the patriarchy. Some of the members of Thinking Matters don’t appear to be noticeably different in this regard.

In a talk available on YouTube, Matt Flannagan attempts to argue against that phantom nemesis of all conservative think-tanks, what they term ’moral relativism’. (Everybody together now: ‘Oooooh, yucky!’) His arguments are a mish-mash of illogical nonsense and rhetorical scaremongering. There is much to take issue with in his presentation, so there is no need to dwell on his sleight of hand in presenting obviously unsound arguments for relativism and then (marvelously!) disproving them to his captive evangelical audience – which he does for more than half of his talk.

One thing which is worth thinking about is that, at one point in his talk (Part 4; 5:00ff), Matt’s criticism reveals that he has failed to appreciate what a thoroughgoing moral relativism would look like. He just doesn’t get it. He cannot conceive of moral duties that are not objective. I suspect that this is an all-too-frequent barrier for moral objectivists. Their commitment to moral objectivism is such that they fail to properly conceive of a world in which every moral duty is simply the result of cultural norms. They can’t do it. And as a result, their protests already – circularly – assume moral objectivism.

Matt makes his circular argument when he adduces the following as a premise which he claims is held by some moral relativists:

Now, indulging Matt for a while, let’s ask this question: if a moral relativist did happen to hold to this premise, what would be the nature of the ‘duty’? Too obvious, you say? Well yes, the answer would seem to be too obvious. The  ’duty’ would clearly be relative for a moral relativist.

But Matt doesn’t get it:

“And notice too that the second premise is making a what? An objective moral statement. It’s saying that all people have a duty to be tolerant. But according to relativism there are no objective moral statements.”

Matt falsely attributes moral objectivism to a moral relativist, because he just cannot grasp the concept of moral relativism. However, in moral relativism, a duty, even if applicable to everybody in a particular society, would by definition be morally relative. A prevalent problem with moral objectivists such as Matt is that they haven’t ever grasped what a purely subjective morality looks like, how it operates. They keep trying to sneak back in assumptions of moral objectivity – the very thing that moral relativists deny. And so their attempt to raise an argument against it – by assuming the objectivity of morality – is revealed as a piece of illogical and circular nonsense.