Non-negotiable

There’s an utterly fascinating (and extremely difficult) exchange about the nature of comparative virtues going on at What’s Wrong With the World.  It has expanded from the original post, which condemns consequentialist ethics through a recounting of the story of Sir Bors and the lady in the tower, and is covering a heck of a lot of ground as the comments unfold.

The basic problem proposed is this:

Person X (in this case a ravishingly beautiful woman) has told you (in this case a stalwart knight) that, unless you sleep with her – committing the mortal sin of fornication – she will die.  It gradually unfolds that this is a sort of curse/mania that will see her fling herself from the tower if her wishes are not fulfilled, but still, the consequences remain the same: she will die if you don’t sleep with her.

Sir Bors, knowing full well that it’s a terrible thing to let oneself be held hostage by another’s evil intentions, declares that he’s very sorry, but he can’t, in fact, oblige her.

But the lady ups the ante.  So desperate is she to have her way that she declares – quite truthfully so far as Sir Bors knows – that, if he does not do as she says, she will drag twelve other (so far) innocent ladies off the tower with her.  Well then; what does he say to that?

There we have the question: thirteen lives saved at the cost of one man’s personal sin.  What should the virtuous man do?

There are two schools of thought manifesting themselves in the comments, and, while I am quite sure about what the true answer to this question is, it’s a mark of the eloquence of those involved that to read those comments is to experience something of the see-saw motion that I thought I had left behind forever on the schoolyards of yore.  Both sides make compelling points, and it’s a pleasure – if often a harrowing one – to see this thing treated with such high seriousness.

On the one hand, we find the firm resolution to commit no sin, if it can be avoided; the only souls for which we are entirely responsible are our own, and, while we are bidden to save lives and help people whenever it is possible, we are not given sanction to commit evil acts in our attempts to do so.  There is no assurance at all that sleeping with the woman will save her life or prevent her from murdering the other twelve, for both curses and manipulative murderesses are notoriously untrustworthy.

On the other hand, it is true that we are a fallen race, of which “none is righteous – no, not one.”  What right have we to privilege our own perceived (yet essentially non-existent) sanctity or righteousness over the lives of others?  What if all thirteen of those ladies – the voracious one and the victims both – would later come to a full repentance, but our unwillingness to save their lives through one easily-repented sin sent them to perdition before their time?  How might we account for that before the Throne?

Now, I don’t really subscribe to some of the rhetoric (on both sides) declaring that the souls of the other are clearly forfeit because of their positions, but I do think one side is demonstrably wrong.  I subscribe to the “let her jump” position in this debate, and, while I respect the motives of the “save them all” side, I think there’s a sort of sentimentalism at play in it that will lead to far greater problems than it immediately solves.

It has long been the position of certain hawkish theorists that one “should under no circumstances negotiate with terrorists.”  However hubristic and boastful it may be in the cases of one given hawk or another, it is, in the end, a sensible – if often heartbreaking – approach to the problem; indeed, the only response to it that has any chance of ending the tactic rather than just the situation.  To show a willingness to be swayed by threats of this type is simply to invite them again and again in the future, and in a constantly escalating fashion.

One pleasingly long comment in particular lays this out very well; a theologically-oriented passage from it follows:

I can imagine the exchange going on between God, the Father, and the Devil when Jesus hung on the Cross:

Devil: If you do just this one thing for me, I’ll let your Son live.

God: [Silence]

Devil: Do you want to see your only-begotten Son suffer? Surely, doing this one little thing for me isn’t so bad. Think of all of the lives he could touch if he lived. Think of how much he would impress the people. I can see the headline, now:

Man Comes Down off of Cross….the People Taunted, He Proved Them Wrong

Don’t you see the hope this would give millions of others hanging on their crosses.  Maybe they might be another lucky one.  How can you be so cruel?

God: [Silence]

Devil: I see you’re a hard one to please. Look, I’ll even spare his twelve apostles. You know they will all die horrible deaths, otherwise.

God: [Silence]

Devil: Okay, have it your way, but I’m not the one letting your Son die, you are.

God: [Silence and a smile]

As charged as this example is (and the rest of his comment is much more down-to-earth, so to speak), the implications of it should be inescapable: when once we allow our will – especially our will to virtue – to be guided by those who are specifically threatening us or others with harm, it’s only a matter of time before our deliberate subordination to them becomes the norm rather than a one-time exception born of circumstance.  Sure, we may only have to do X to prevent Y, the first time; but the next time it’s X+1, and then X+2, and so on, and so on, until we make a holocaust of the world to save the things we love the most.  It’s similar to the question of omens, in a way; we may at first look for signs in a neutral sort of manner, hoping for the good and fearing the bad, but the practical consequence really is that we’ll see bad omens everywhere.  Our efforts to cheat virtue and find the easy way out of our troubles always lead to greater troubles in the end.

Now, I said above that the only souls for which we’re entirely responsible are our own, but that doesn’t mean that this is the only responsibility we bear.  We are bidden by scripture not to provide occasions of sin for others, even if we can’t absolutely save their souls by our own effort; the one without scruples should give way to the one who has them.  It would be both cruel and dangerous to drink ostentatiously in the company of a recovering alcoholic, or to exhibit match-tricks to a struggling pyromaniac, or to speak lightly of property rights to a kleptomaniac, or to casually nibble upon a man before a cannibalistic psychopath (this latter is rather extreme, I’ll grant).  The point is that we should be careful not to knowingly provide opportunities for the people we meet to stumble into sins that particularly afflict them, whatever the rights our personal liberty guarantees may or may not be.  I have a right to drink whenever and wherever I like, arguably, but I should restrain myself before the alcoholic out of courtesy to his condition and regard for his soul.

In the same way, succumbing to the demands of the terrorist – whether he be a bomb-wielding man or a sex-wielding woman – only provokes future indulgences in his or her particular sin.  The knowledge that he can exact policy changes by threatening to blow up a landmark has emboldened many a man, and closed his eyes to virtue; the knowledge that she can get sexual satisfaction from whomever she wants by threatening murder might embolden the woman in question, and pull her still farther from a repentance and a reconciliation that admittedly seem very far away indeed.  “It was so easy,” each of them might think; “what else can I get?”

It is a hard thing to say that you would let the woman – and her twelve hapless victims – perish to preserve your own virtue, but it isn’t just your own virtue that’s at stake.  It’s souls, and Virtue as an incarnate concept – yours, hers, everyone’s – and she would be more likely to be damned by the sin of willful fornication than she would be by unwilling suicide.

But seriously, it’s not easy.  Almost exactly a year ago (minus two weeks), I candidly affirmed the exact opposite position:

For my own part, shameful as it is, I would probably murder the man and save the billions, thereafter spending the rest of my life in repentence.

This might, then, be a very interesting moment in the history of our awareness of hypocrisy and its nature.  I affirm entirely the position I’ve spent the last 1500 words presenting, but I also recognize that – if it were to come down to the practical business – I’d probably be just as bad as anyone.

Take from all this what you will.

Syllabub

My day has been mostly occupied by finalizing the syllabus for the course I’ll begin teaching in a couple of weeks, so no other writing has been possible, under the circumstances.  Still, it’s done, now, and submitted, so other things may follow in a while.  My evening is looking to be a busy one (work on an article due on Monday, work on the site for the course, at least one appointment to keep), but we’ll see.

In the meantime, continue being who you are – or, better yet, try to improve upon that condition.

Tempestuous

I really don’t know what to think of Jule Taymor’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Her work is always at least interesting, even when it’s monstrous (Titus) or narratively-limp (Across the Universe), and I’m always pleased to see new engagements with Shakespeare, but there’s something about turning the play’s elderly male sorcerer into a woman – played by Helen Mirren – that seems so easy.  It’s the kind of mock-profundity that one would expect of the Neil Gaiman school on a bad day, and the fact that it was apparently Mirren’s own idea makes this seem like a vanity piece.  Still, it will assuredly be worth seeing, and I’m sure you’ll hear all about it when it finally comes out.

In the meantime, you’ll have to be content with this admittedly pretty cool poster:

The Tempest opens Dec. 10th, 2010.

Incidentally, the cast list on the film’s IMDB page doesn’t list an entry for Sycorax, the witch who controlled the island before Prospero arrived and defeated her.  That’s fine, to be sure; she isn’t actually in the play, either.  I’ve just always sort of hoped for a production that includes that bit in some fashion.

High art in low places

In a wholly unexpected development, I’ve just discovered my new favourite blog.

At the London Review of Breakfasts you will find thorough, highly enticing reviews of breakfasts enjoyed in that fair city and elsewhere.  Whether the spoon be greasy or silver, this intrepid stable of literary breakfast-eaters always give it the depth and seriousness that such an important meal deserves.

It’s marvelous prose, too; consider this, from the most recent review (Benjys Restaurant in Earls Court):

Our food arrives in short order. The sausages are close to perfection – neither soggy nor dry, their unidentifiable contents pleasantly coating the mouth in greasy goodness and sliding effortlessly down the gullet. The same sadly cannot be said about the bacon, which has been incinerated almost into nonexistence and then, bizarrely, hidden *in between* the egg (on top) and the beans (underneath) as though the chef was rightly ashamed of his endeavour. The egg itself is uninspiring – not badly cooked, but one presumes produced by a chicken with little interest in life; and the beans are as beans are as beans always are – the great ubiquitous invariant of the breakfast plate.

Why are you still reading this blog?  Get going.

The trouble with Robin Hood

The story so far…

I recently outlined a number of complaints about the quality of Ridley Scott’s 2010 adaptation of the Robin Hood story.  It had all of the problems you’d expect from a big-budget Hollywood take on the medieval era – the same problems, in fact, that you’ll find in Scott’s earlier foray into the same field, Kingdom of Heaven – and I was prepared to declare it, if not the worst, then at least the most annoying attempt at telling that story to date.

Well, I hadn’t figured on the BBC.

Robin Hood, a basically successful series that first began in 2006 (running for three seasons – so far), tells the old familiar story, more or less; Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, returns from the Crusades to find his lands under the governance of Sir Guy of Gisborne, this having been made possible by the installation of a new and rapacious Sheriff of Nottingham.  Finding himself on the wrong side of the law for his attempts to help the poor, Robin foreswears his rank and privileges, takes to the forest, and there, with a band of merry outlaws, wages a guerrilla war against the oppressors until such time as King Richard shall return, unseat his villainous brother – Prince John – and restore peace and justice to the land.  As stories go it’s pretty excellent.  However, as with the Ridley Scott film, apparently it just wasn’t good enough.

I’ve only seen the first season of this series, I should say at once; while I don’t know if I’ll watch the next two, I don’t imagine things get much better.  As it is, here are some of the things to which you can reasonably look forward (very modest spoilers may be included):

Endless joking and wise-cracking sarcasm from everybody.  The very series seems to wear a smirk.

A Sheriff of Nottingham (Keith Allen) who’s basically insufferable.  While there are a few moments of appropriately serious menace from it, he spends most of his time on screen mincing around in an “I Heart Evil” t-shirt, cackling, wringing his hands, all but stroking his long, drooping moustache (he doesn’t actually have one, fortunately).  He is camp incarnate, and it’s freaking maddening.  The serial nature of the series takes all the danger out of him, too, no matter how gleefully cruel he is; he just gets beaten, again and again, every week, and everything goes back to how it was.  At least Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) provides a more sober, sometimes conflicted counterpoint.

What was that?  What about Maid Marian?  Oh, she’s here, all right.  Lucy Griffiths is right for the role, and the scenes in which Marian is actually doing courtly things are typically just fine.  Of course, in the standard modern concession, she’s also an enlightened feminist, a firm democrat, a warrior princess, and pretty much the only smart person in the entire world, apparently, at least until…

…the arrival of your standard cynical, worldly, devout-but-humanist, utterly competent Muslim (Anjali Jay).  She (she!) is a skilled surgeon and chemist and knows everything about everything.  She makes the rest of the outlaws (and certainly all of the Nottingham hierarchy) look like brawling infants.  I’m not sure when this trend began exactly (was it Costner’s film in the 90s?), but why is it that medieval Europeans – and Robin Hood in particular – can never be good at their jobs without it being because they learned everything they know from some convenient Moor or Saracen or something?  They take it a bit farther in Robin Hood, actually, explaining some of Robin’s effectiveness with a bow as being a consequence of him using a double-bent Saracen bow instead of the standard English variety.  The scimitar is also his sword of choice.

While we’re talking about this sort of thing, there’s the religious issue.  I’m not even sure where to begin, actually; it’s messed up.  In the world this series proposes, there apparently exist no meaningfully devout Christians at all.  There are some token Christian-ish types thrown in, occasionally, but they’re more superstitious than anything else and show no sign of being aware of anything the Church teaches, much less being moved by it.  Robin merrily quotes the Qu’Ran, naturally, but that’s about all we get.  Well, not all: no devout Christians, but the Muslim superwoman is entirely devout and her devotion is treated as a simply marvelous thing.  Hers is the only uncomplicated religious expression in the whole series, so far.

There are churches in some of the towns, but nobody is ever seen going into them.  The only time a church has meaningfully featured in the series so far was when a deranged ex-Crusader (suffering from “Crusader sickness,” a sort of proto-PTSD) tried to burn it down, prompting the villagers to start bellowing “kill the heretic!,” as if burning down a building was necessarily a matter of heresy.   To the extent that religious issues are ever discussed on the show (again, so far), it’s almost always in the context of the Crusades and how irredeemably awful they are.

With a few modest exceptions, there are essentially no clergy present in the series (so far) whatsoever.  A fake priest in the first episode tries to save some men from hanging by pretending to ordain them, but that hardly counts.  A seemingly orthodox (and pretty awesome) abbess turns out to be a fraud, a thief and a seductress.  She’s also a Moor, which fact attracts not the slightest attention from anyone.  Incidentally, there’s even a Moorish officer in the Sheriff’s retinue, early on; nobody cares.  There are Moors all over the place (except when they’re Turks, who are still treated as though they’re exotic) and it’s just… regular.  But I digress.  The only actual non-fraudulent cleric in the whole series appears exactly once, to officiate a marriage (admittedly a bad marriage under false pretenses, but it’s not clear that he’s aware of that).  I’m sure we’ll later discover that he’s embezzling or that he’s conspiring to commit mail fraud or something, but there was nothing in the 30 seconds he spent on screen to suggest it yet.

As you may have already guessed, a byproduct of this “no clergy” state of affairs is that there is no Friar Tuck.  I don’t know if they’re planning to introduce him later, or what, but he isn’t here so far and his absence is noteworthy.

I would not recommend the series on the whole, though it’s entertaining enough as sometimes-lighthearted, sometimes-serious action/adventure.  It’s with that in mind that I’ll probably push on with the rest of it, if only to see what actually ends up happening.  If it improves (or descends yet deeper), I will let you know.

The triumph so far

There’s a sort of long-winded miracle occurring in Chile as we speak.  You can find news about it anywhere you like.  I’m not going to provide some definitive link.

A mine collapsed over two weeks ago.  The men inside were presumed dead.  The efforts of those on the surface in the meantime have instead focused on sending down automated probes to find evidence of what caused the collapse, the location of bodies, the state of commonly-used passages, and so on.

This sort of data has not been forthcoming, but what has been turned up is astounding: a piece of notepaper, tied to the deepest of the probes (over 2200 feet), that bears a note declaring that all thirty-three of the men in the mine at the time are quite alive, thank you very much, and in reasonably high spirits.  They made it to one of the mine’s disaster shelters – about the size of a living room – and have been subsisting off emergency rations under the light provided by the battery of a nearby truck.  They are very hungry, and very tired, but they utterly refuse to surrender to the stresses of their situation.

The nation of Chile is in a state of widespread, all-encompassing jubilation at this hour as video contact has been made with the miners and the first supply packages have been delivered down the probe shaft.  The most imminent priorty – beyond sending food and water – is the establishment of regular communications with the noble thirty-three, and this seems to be on the verge of happening.  The probe’s shaft is wide enough for communications, food, and more.

Still, it is not wide enough for escape.

The precarious nature of the mine’s collapse – along with the sheer amount of time it takes to drill a 2200-foot shaft wide enough to admit a man – means that it will be about four months before these defiant gentlemen will stride beneath the light of the blazing sun again.  They seem reconciled to this inevitability, and every effort is being made on the surface to ensure that they maintain their sanity for the next 120 days in what will shortly become a crushing and complete darkness.  Truck batteries do not last forever.  I hope they find a way of giving them light.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a coalition of private (and nerdy) citizens in Belgium has finally completed the largest homemade rocket ever constructed.  They’ve strapped it to a pontooned floating platform, which will be towed into the ocean by a badass submarine that they also invented.  Once at the desired location – roughly a week from now – the rocket will be launched.  It will put a man in space without government funding, apparently.

These are things we can do.  The surly bonds of earth, whether your elevation is positive or negative, are apparently not all they’re cracked up to be.

An astounding disconnect

In the latest round of frivolous outrage, there are calls in the UK to ban an upcoming entry in the popular Medal of Honor video game franchise.  The game is the first in the series to depart from its World War II roots and is instead following the successful transition to the modern era that has been the mark of the similar Call of Duty franchise.

Part of this new game deals with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, though filtered through a fictionalized lens; while players cannot “be” the Taliban during the course of the game itself (just as they could not fight for the Nazi cause in the previous games in the series), the nature of the non-story-mode multiplayer element of the game demands that opposing teams be able to distinguish themselves from one another, so it is possible to be on the Taliban “side” in that context (just as you could indeed by a Wehrmacht trooper etc.).

This is apparently too much for British Defence Secretary Liam Fox, who is convinced that the game glorifies the murder of British soldiers by the Taliban and allows players to indulge in doing that very thing.  There are no British troops in the entire game, in multiplayer or otherwise, and their murder certainly would not be glorified even if there were.  It’s sometimes a crap shoot which side you’re even on when the match is starting; there’s no broad Taliban campaign being served in multiplayer, and you certainly couldn’t willingly or consistently subscribe to it even if there were.

The worst part, though, is this impassioned statement of outrage:

“At the hands of the Taliban, children have lost fathers and wives have lost husbands,” he said.

The forces of the Coalition, by comparison, have been waging an entirely bloodless campaign.

Is it too much to ask that a Defence Secretary actually know something about war and how it works?

A poetical interlude

Hilaire Belloc on two of his favourite animals:

The Yak

As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.
The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet
(A desolate region of snow)
Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,
And surely the Tartar should know!
Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature – or else he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)

The Llama

The Llama is a wooly sort of fleecy hairy goat,
With an indolent expression and an undulating throat
Like an unsuccessful literary man.
And I know the place he lives in (or at least – I think I do)
It is Ecuador, Brazil or Chili – possibly Peru;
You must find it in the Atlas if you can.
The Llama of the Pampasses you never should confound
(In spite of a deceptive similarity of sound)
With the Lhama who is Lord of Turkestan.
For the former is a beautiful and valuable beast,
But the latter is not lovable nor useful in the least;
And the Ruminant is preferable surely to the Priest
Who battens on the woeful superstitions of the East,
The Mongol of the Monastery of Shan.

If it’s not Mordor, why is there a Mount Doom?

The Foreign Policy magazine has an in-depth and seriously fascinating interview with one Patrick Chovanec, a man lucky(?) enough to have visited the bewildering nation of North Korea on a number of occasions and returned to tell the tale.  He emphasizes that “it’s not Mordor,” but rather a real place in which real people are forced to live their lives, however unusually.

The highlight of the thing for me, alas, is this:

Everywhere you go in Pyongyang, the skyline is dominated by a huge 105-story concrete pyramid, the Ryugyong Hotel, which looms over the city like the pyramid-shaped Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984. It was intended to be the world’s tallest hotel, but it turned out to be structurally unsound, so it was never completed. It’s been standing there, abandoned, since 1992. It doesn’t appear on any official maps, and nobody ever talks about it, because it’s such a horrendous embarrassment.

This is the edifice in question:

Hmm.

Dirty doings at Harvard

One of that venerable school’s most celebrated professors has been placed on suspension while charges of academic fraud are being investigated, and things seem to be taking a turn for the serious:

The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn’t talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and director of Harvard’s Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” He has been voted one of the university’s most popular professors.

Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the university “has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.” So far, Harvard officials haven’t provided details about the problems with those papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser’s lab…

Click through for the full story.  I’ll give you a hint, though; the misconduct involved monkeying about with research data… research involving monkeys.