Work In Progress

It's not much of a spoiler to say that in Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, Joey leaves Dawson in order to "find herself". More about that later, but it reminds me of an exchange from The Thin Blue Line:

"It's an alternative culture now, Sir. People are asking questions. They want to know who they are."

"Then they should damn well look at their passports."

To the idea that a person is trying to find themselves, there are several tempting responses:

1. Go look in a mirror. There you are.
2. Look around. You're right here.
3. Check your driver's license. It's supposed to have a current address.

There's some validity to the idea of a person needing to find themselves, in that a person can be in a situation so overbearing that no decision that the person makes is ever their own; it's highly dubious, though, that people ever really fall into this. There's an idea that some people have that they can be so much in love with someone else that they themselves disappear. If this were ever to really be true, I suspect the relationship between the people would be more like a dog and its master than a relationship between two people.

But even so, I don't know that the one person would be truly subsumed in the other. To use the names from Dawson's creek (since they sound better than "Person A" and "Person B"), if all of Joey's interests were actually Dawson's interests, it means that the energy to enjoy them came mainly from Dawson. (Interest, like all good things, always requires energy. As Chesterton observed, "There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.") The nature of friendship is to look together at something else; even if it starts by Dawson providing all of the energy, the friendship could never last if Joey couldn't look at them herself. In the worst case, she would gain an appreciation of Dawson's interests that she could share with someone else. The great thing about knowledge is that it doesn't lose anything by being borrowed.

Stories require conflict; it's more or less a truism that in order to have a plot you have to have some challenge facing the main character; your hero must be in danger. In order to come up with conflict, many (screen) writers go for the easy way out: they have their characters make stupid or immoral decisions, and the danger ends up being whether they're going to pay for their sins.

(Drama is a separate category, of course. Drama is supposed to be about the repercussions of immoral actions. In its Greek origins it was largely about people paying for their sins, or the gods sins, or someone's sins. Occasionally for the sins that they would later commit.)

But with a little more skill, I think that something far less morally offensive would be equally as interesting, and really more so, since it would leave you with characters who you could care whether they survive their danger. In particular, the danger can be whether the character gives in to temptation. I don't mean this in the morality-play sense, but rather in a realistic sense. Let me give an example:

Suppose that you have a happily married man who has a life, and so meets women. Being an actually healthy man, he'll become friends with some of them, some of them will be attractive women, and some of them will be attractive women that he makes friends with. You could have quite a series of plots of the man nearly falling for the women he meets, and nearly cheating on his wife. Some people will object that unless he occasionally cheats, people won't believe that the danger is real. These same people rarely suggest that the hero of an action series should die occasionally to show that the danger is real. And besides, fiction is all about getting caught up in the moment. Believing the danger isn't about how many times people have succumbed before, it's all about story telling. In Serenity, several main characters were killed off, but I never for a moment doubted whether River was going to be killed by the gang of Reavers she was fighting. When the door opened to reveal her standing, the only thing that I doubted was whether she was going to be standing there alone, or finishing off the last Reaver. The story wasn't crafted in a way that would make any sense if River didn't win the fight easily, so I never believed that anything else would happen. Making danger believable is about crafting a story that would make sense either if the hero avoid the trap or if the hero falls into the trap. If the story would make (artistic) sense with the bad ending, it will feel dangerous. If the story has only one conclusion in which the story isn't a steaming pile of crap, no one will expect the story to go anywhere else. If you craft a police drama in which nothing supernatural has happened for the first 15 seasons, and there's a character that the hero grows fond of who claims to have been abducted by aliens, it's true that the most likely explanation is that the character is crazy. But if you write the story so that it would make sense if the aliens really existed — if you really give it emotional reality and somewhere to go — the audience will wonder if the character really was abducted by aliens.

I pick the example of possible infidelity because it's an example where you can really dwell on the temptation. The temptation can be interesting, and in some sense shared. You can almost start to root for the character to do the wrong thing, and then share in the triumph when they don't. And to some degree in the regret, too; someone who is tempted will always be tempted to wonder what it might have been like if they had given in.

There are other possibilities, of course. Most other sins have fairly ugly or esoteric temptations, or the temptations are very short lived. If you show a person tempted to murder another, the immediate temptation of having both strong motive and opportunity are not likely to last long. Stealing would be very difficult to examine simply because the temptation is generally too petty or too pathetic. The damage done is also less obvious, since what is stolen can always be restored. Still, it might be possible to come up with a story about nearly stealing. At least a few good stories have been told about rehabilitated jewel thieves, now that I think of it. (To Catch a Thief.)

Having watched Season 1 and most of Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, and having read the episode synopses for the remaining 4 seasons, one of the things which really struck me is that a drama — written like Dawson's Creek — is fundamentally cruel. The same people need to be fodder for drama all the time, and so they must be constantly tormented. Everything given must eventually be taken back, and it often is before long.

This is the fundamental weakness of television — it can't tell love stories. Television doesn't end, so it can't have a "happily ever after"; it must go on, and it must be entertaining.

I think that dramatic series are fundamentally stronger when something good is permitted to last. I occasionally think that television is largely written by sadists who can't stand there to be anything good. It's very difficult to find a television show with an arc which isn't all about destruction. (Another thing which television suffers from is that actors often move on, making television character's lives even more unstable.)

The exception, I think, are comedies. The Nanny was about a romance between Miss Fine and Mr Sheffeild; eventually they were married. There are, surely, other examples of this, though they don't come to mind at the moment. The reason, if I'm correct about this trend, is that comedies get their primary material from the small things, whereas drama takes its main material from the big things. Thus comedies can have happy characters, whereas dramas are always mean to their characters.

In literature, characters are never interesting for their flaws. They're always interesting for their virtues.

Opinions to the contrary stem from the fact that when writing it's often easier to show a person's virtues by way of their flaws. Heroes don't need burning buildings, it's just easy to show them off as a hero when there is a burning building.

Incidentally, there's a really great song by The Mountain Goats, called "Love Love Love":

King Saul fell on his sword
when it all went wrong
and Joseph's brothers sold him down the river
for a song
and Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm
into his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskolnikov felt sick
but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

love love is gonna lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see things
as in a mirror dimly
then we shall see each other
face to face

way out in seattle
young Kurt Cobain
snuck out to the garden
put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet
rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
and some flare out with love love love

You really need to listen to the song. It's got a beautiful melody and the singer really sings it with a pretty voice. But the point is the singer/writer's explanation of the song:

the point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens thats not love...I don't know so much about that I don't know that the Greeks weren't right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everytihng, that it will destroy alot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing aot of what I percieve is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.

Love doesn't always mean romantic love. In English, love doesn't always even mean love. Sometimes it means desire. Sometimes it means need. Sometimes it means a gaping hole in a person's soul that they're desperately trying to fill. Sometimes it means slave-like devotion to some ideal gone mad because it was taken in isolation. In English, the word love can mean nearly anything at all.

You can show how much a character loves something by how willing they are to be immoral for the sake of their love. Most of the time*, writers use characters' flaws in order to show their love for something.

*When the flaws aren't simply a crutch to move the plot along, that is.

So, I'm watching Dawson's Creek, which is a drama full of, well, drama. Anyhow, one of the characters is writing a love story, and an ex-girlfriend of his offers him the advice not to give it a happy ending, because they're unrealistic. Now, this is largely supposed to be a highly cynical comment (the person saying it is drunk towards the end of a spiral out of control). Yet it actually contains a rather insightful metaphysical point, though it's in the words that the person said, rather than in the meaning that she had for them.

There are no happy endings, there are only happy middles.

Happiness comes from something real, something that is, something that has being. Endings are a transition from existence to nothing; when the end is over, there is nothing. (In the physical world in which we live, there are no complete endings; all endings are also beginnings. In the spiritual world there are, presumable, complete endings.) And nothing can never bring happiness.

Discussions of movies always muddy this, because the movie's ending is (if you take the fictional reality seriously) not an end to the events in the movie, but only an end to the viewer's glimpse into it. Movie endings are almost universally ambiguous: "And they lived happily ever after" doesn't mean that the characters were henceforth immortal. In most cases it means that nothing very remarkable happened to them. They did at some point die, and few deaths are completely without suffering. What "happily ever after" means is that the characters never again had the same sort of troubles that made them interesting to us. It doesn't mean that they were free from all human cares.

In the book C.S. Lewis at the breakfast table, Derek Brewer told of a compliment given to C.S. Lewis which has always struck me:

A very eminent Cambridge scientist, who had practically nothing in common with Lewis, once remarked to me — and it is one of the finest tributes to Lewis I have heard — that he met Lewis only once, at some evening occasion, and felt that he was a very good man, to whom goodness did not come easily.

As some people might know, Amanda Marcotte resigned from John Edwards campaign (for those who don't you can get some idea by starting here and following the links around; I couldn't easily find any good summary of it

For those who don't know her, Amanda Marcotte is an atheist/feminist/liberal who writes material which is highly offensive to anyone who disagrees with her. What really struck me, though, wasn't the degree to which her writing is impolite.

Politeness is only worth so much, especially politeness to people who aren't in the room. At the end of the day, those of us who disagree are all working at cross purposes and as far as we can all tell, everyone else is making the world a worse place because they're acting on bad information. There's only so nice you can be to people who are making the world worse, even if they're doing their best. I can respect people who think that I'm evil and say so, though of course I wouldn't be likely to invite them over to dinner. (I don't mean that they aren't fit subjects for charity; if they were naked I would give them clothing; I just mean that discussing how bad we are wouldn't be very entertaining.)

No, what gets me about Amanda Marcotte is how badly she misunderstands those she disagrees with. To whit, one of her famous posts:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

This is just plain stupid. Granted, it's more trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive than trying to be accurate, but it's on par with an anti-evolution joke about someone's mother evolving from a gold fish — the only way that you can say something this nonsensical is by either not caring at all what you're saying (which is probably the case here; she reads like an angry child trying to lash out at the grown-ups that it's far too small to hurt), or by not understanding what you're criticizing at all.

It doesn't make any sense to talk about Mary taking plan B, as she was explicitly given a choice as to whether she would become pregnant with God. This is, incidentally, why Catholics reverence her so much — if she had said no, Christianity would never have happened. Her choice, which she was free to make differently, saved the world.

More illustrative is this more recent one:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

Here Marcotte is actually trying to explain, and shows how thoroughly badly she misunderstands Christianity. At best she only somewhat misunderstands the manichaen heresy. Claiming that this is the Christian version of the virgin birth is simply ludicrous. How the God who created Mary's vagina would befoul himself through touching it, when it's his power which maintains its existence, needs some explaining. The entire point of the story of the virgin birth of Jesus is that God does not despise his creation; God humbled himself so far as to ask one of his creatures for permission to be born of her. And not just any creature, but a poor member of a group which was fairly well despised by the rich and powerful of the world. And not only was he born of her, he was born in a cave among the animals.

The entire point of the virgin birth of Christ is not only that God does not despise his creation, but that he positively cherishes the lowest of it. The point of the story is that the humble shall be exalted. The point is that God loves everything, even that which most people despise. Even when human beings avert their eyes in horror, God looks on the world and sees that it is good.

But it does occur to me that this mistake is a little more natural if you think that the point of sex is a penis in a vagina, and children are only a side-effect. If sex is first and foremost pleasant rubbing, then it's not so odd to ask why God bypassed it. It's only if you think that sex's purpose is procreation does the question of why God didn't use a penis to impregnate Mary make no sense.

Did you ever get the idea that God was telling you something?

If God is All powerful and infinitely good, why is there suffering in the world?

This question was called The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis in his book by that name in which he tried to answer it. He did a fairly good job answering some of the more common questions of this form, but unfortunately he also left some both unasked and unanswered. In trying to answer one such question, it occurred to me that the root of all these variants amount to one, simple question: why isn't this the best of all possible worlds?

All of the answers that I've seen amount to proving that this is the best of all possible worlds, given that it's infested with free-willed and sinful creatures. But is this really the best of all possible worlds? If God exists and is infinitely good, would he necessarily create the best of all possible worlds?

There are of course some of the more trite reasons why God might create a merely good world. Some people claim that you can't know good unless you also know evil. While this may sound unlikely, there is some suggestion of this in the book of Genesis: the forbidden tree in the garden is, after all, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's also possible that one can't tell the difference between a good man and a bad man until you've tempted him — it's possible that a free will is not actual until it's in a circumstance that forces it to make a decision. This might be something like quantum mechanics — that a thing isn't in a definite state until it's interacted with. If this were the case, even omniscience couldn't know whether a man was good or not until the man was tempted — even God would have to test people to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's also possible that there are some forms of goodness which can only exist in a partially evil world. There are soldiers who have been saints — the virtues of a swordsman or marksman seem likely to be only real when there's an imperfect world which makes their talents the lesser of two evils.

On the other hand, to say that God created a world which is not the best of all possible suggests something like the manichean heresy, which I have no desire to tread near. And perhaps the reasons for a mediocre world given above are actually just reasons why this might yet be the best of all possible worlds if one knows how to measure correctly.

And that, really, is the key. What is the right measure of goodness in the world?

I've been reading C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which is a rather interesting (though very short) book about education and teaching ethical systems. The discussion reminded me of how many people lead a life of practical atheism, and while virtuous, are unable to account for their virtue. It doesn't pose them any great problem in ordinary life, because in ordinary life people are not often called on to justify their virtue. Ordinary life for people who are not parents, that is.

Children are very interesting creatures, especially so because most children are philosophers. It's natural enough, since philosophy is the most practical way to start any task — when you need to go somewhere, your best bet is to start by asking where you're doing. If you've spent much time around people are about 4-5 years old (my memory is a little foggy on this point, so it might be 3-4 or 5-6), you'll find that they love to ask questions. Indeed, there's a common child's game which consists of asking "why?" to every answer an adult gives. Adult philosophers love this game too, but no adults will play it with them because they all know that the philosopher has better answers than they do. Children cannot be dismissed so easily because they really want to know.

And this is why, I suspect, so many people become religious when they have children. The series of questions have to end somewhere, and the only options are "because I said so", "because God said so", and "I don't know". There are a multitude of reasons why "because I said so" isn't a satisfactory answer, and "I don't know" is unsettling. People are homo sapiens, the wise man. It's hard to escape the feeling that they should know.

So that makes sense as one reason why people eventually often eventually return to their religion — having children brings people up against how inadaquate their non-philosophy is.

That does make for unfortunate implications for the growing trend of childlessness.

Just one of those casual observations of life, but I recently noticed that the process of starting with a 100 grit sandpaper and then going on to a 200 and then a 400 is very well founded — you get really nice results. I was doing this on a spinning wheel that my father-in-law and I built, and the wood became extremely smooth. I'm a convert.

Joss Whedon's Serenity was an interesting movie that suffered a few major flaws. In particular, it was a movie about a group of people having a major impact on the solar system, which was never what the group of people were about in the TV show.

More problematic, the movie was all about "Reavers", who are basically space-zombies on speed. Zombies are an interesting element of a fantasy setting, where they are magical creatures — the bodies of the dead animated by evil spirits who hate the living. In science fiction, zombies are inherently stupid. (Given whatever viruses, gases, or implants you want, the idea of a zombie human which ambles along without its circulatory system or other organs functioning makes as much sense as a zombie car which drives around despite its fuel lines being severed. If your premise is that a zombie is built entirely out of human machinery, it's silly to talk about completely breaking the machine and then having it work anyway. this objection doesn't apply to Reavers, who are alive, but the next one does.) If zombies are the manifestation of evil spirits, then it makes sense why they attack only the living; if zombies are mindless bodies which attack out of instinct, they should be constantly attacking each oher. Reavers are people who became insanely violent. There's no reason offered, nor any concievable, why they shouldn't attack each other. Yet their insatiable, coordinated violence is a sine qua non of the movie.

There were two things that I found extremely intruiging about Serenity, though. The first is an element of the backstory (which was probably in the TV show as well, but I have not yet watched much of it): Firefly and Serenity take place in a solarsystem populated by people who left earth and are completely out of contact with it. What happened to earth is left a complete mystery. It's a really interesting artistic idea, very distantly related to George Lucas's abssolutely brilliant, "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

The other moment which really struck me was towards the end. River, who's telepathic — there seems to be some law these days that you can't write science fiction without including telepathy — is talking with the captain. Malcom said, "You know what the first rule of flyin' is? Well I suppose you do, since you already know what I'm about to say." She responded, "I do. But I like to hear you say it."

I thought that that was an absolutely brilliant way to so succinctly demonstrate the problem that a telepath would have in society, and the solution to it. River doesn't need normal human interaction, which distances here from others. The solution is that she has to bridge the gap by forgoing those parts of herself that distance her, much in the same way that when we communicate with dogs we have to forgo the power and richness of the language which we can speak to each other. If we want to keep company with dogs, we must do it on their terms, since they can't do it on ours. It really is amazing. All of this, wrapped up into "... you already know what I'm about to say." "I do. But I like to hear you say it."

Here is an interesting page about various myths held about the mediaeval period. Aside from correcting various myths of the period, it's just interesting.

I recent saw Blade II and Blade Trinity. Like so many movies, they're not very well done, but they do have some interesting ideas in them. Blade Trinity had this somewhat interesting quote:

If you kill a man, you're a murderer. If you kill a million men, you're a king. If you kill them all, you're a god.

It does almost sound profound, if you read it quickly enough. While not certainly so, it sounds like a reference to Stalin's famous quote, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

I think that the writer of Blade Trinity took this in the wrong direction. He should have mixed in some Disraeli ("There are lies, damn lies, and statistics") and recast Stalin's quote like this:

If you kill a man, you're a murderer. If you kill a million men, you're a statistician.