A: The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god — that there’s a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn’t want you to do and you’ll burn for a long time if you do them — and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species.
I love it. Private property is “at the core of our failure as a species,” Carlin says, as we humans continue to dominate the planet. As opposed to what, one wonders? When in human history did this alleged choice to have private property arise, and what would’ve happened if we’d have chosen differently?
Aw, stuff it, I don’t actually think there was a choice. Granted, I think there’s a lot of room for debate about how absolute a political definition of private property we should have. But the concept of “this is mine” is not something that we’ve ever had a choice about. Nor, I think, does any individuated species have a choice about it. Ownership is a necessary consequence of any individuated social existence - end of story. It isn’t “at the core of our [alleged] failure as a species” because neither is it unique to our species, nor is it even avoidable. I suppose Carlin could come back and say that actually what he means is that any species with an individuated social existence is doomed to failure, which is an opinion some biologists probably share with him, so fair enough. But then we’re really pulling against mammals period - in favor of the ants and the bees, really. Which is to say, in favor of something so radically NOT HUMAN that it’s not even worth talking about, really.
No, private property has been with us as long as prostitution, and it’s here to stay. There have been many attempts to live without it, and they’ve all been about as successful as attempts to live without food. To understand why, just consider Carlin’s own routines. What’s it he’s famous for again? Well, lots of things - so let’s go with one of my personal favorites: frisbeetarianism, his “religion” - which states that when a person dies, “his soul gets flung on a roof and just stays there.” See - that’s some funny shit, right? So, if you wanted to hear more funny shit, it might matter to you who came up with that. And you might, say, prefer to go to his concerts rather than those of someone totally unfunny like Bob Sagett. But what if George Carlin doesn’t want to tell you jokes? Well, that’s his right, isn’t it? You could go to him and say “look, Geroge, that shit about frisbeetarianism was really funny, tell me another one.” And he could tell you to fuck off. And then what? Well, you’d have to do it, because George Carlin doesn’t work for you. Or maybe you could beat it out of him - but that’s a hugely inefficient way of going about getting what you want. He’ll just escape when you’re not looking, or he’ll refuse and you’ll end up having to kill him, or you’ll have to put all kinds of effort into imprisoning him somehow, which will include keeping him alive and basically healthy, under guard, etc. And all this for someone who’s not gonna be too pleased with the arrangement and therefore highly unlikely to give you his best. It’s much cheaper just to offer him something he needs in exchange, like a tomato he can eat, say. But whether you’re coercing Carlin into performing for you or brib…I mean paying him to, there’s some kind of an exchange going on, an exchange which is meaningless if each party doesn’t, in some sense, have exclusive rights to what’s being traded. Carlin’s comedic talent is just sorta intrinsic to him, and no amount of dreaming about a world free of private property is going to change that. There’s no other source for his particular brand of jokes, so you’ll have to go through him to get them.
But what about the tomato you’re trading him? Surely anyone can grow a tomato, so those can be public property, right? Well, sort of. Insofar as any old boob can grow a tomato, then tomatoes are destined to be cheap, right - and they can potentially be so cheap that people stop consciously thinking of them as property, also right. But the bottom line is that someone still needs to grow them - or at least locate them - in order for tomatoes to be around to give to George Carlin in exchange for one of his performances. If no one is interested then guess what? No tomatoes. So “cheap” is never the same thing as “free,” in other words. Unsurprisingly, the same principle applies to producing tomatoes that applies to getting George Carlin to tell jokes. If you want a tomato, you have two choices, really. You can either (a) put in the effort required to get one yourself or (b) make it worth someone else’s while to do so. What you can’t do is just sit around and expect that there will be tomatoes. Someone has to provide them, and no one’s going to do that without reason, really. If I go to the trouble to get you a tomato, I expect something in return. Maybe we’re friends and I can trust that you’ll do me a favor later, but if we’re not, then I bloody well consider the tomato mine if I picked it (and especially if I grew it!), and I’m unwilling to get you more tomatoes if you just take it arguing that “private property is a mistake” and give me nothing in return. Again, you could force me to hand it over, but that’s really more effort than a tomato is worth. As the market develops and gets more sophisticated, you will find that it’s easier just to pay someone to get you tomatoes rather than risking a fight each time, or having to maintain a force of slaves and watchers, etc.
I guess this isn’t iron-clad proof, but I really don’t see how any individuated species could fail to develop a system of private property given these considerations. And scaling up to the nation-state level, it seems equally reasonable to assume what experience has already taught us: that those nations with the strongest support for property rights will also be the most humane and prosperous. Private property isn’t just the law, in other words, it’s also a good idea.
So really, from where I sit, I think it’s ironically more likely to be our resistance to private property systems that turns out to be our biggest failing as a species. If there’s something that’s stand-out stupid about humanity in my book, it’s that it keeps trying these socialist experiments even though it knows their success rate is exactly ZERO. If you want to see something that makes you wonder whether humanity is going to survive, have a look not at Wall Street but at Venezuela, where the local strongman is even now advocating a “new concept of property” whereby the “community” owns things. See, Chavez uses “new” roughly the same way that Obama uses “change.” You know, good ol’ Barack Obama who’s so dedicated to campaign finance reform that he decided to scuttle the whole system. And good ol’ Barack Obama who’s so innovative about education that he outright rejects vouchers in favor of the current system. And good ol’ Barack Obama who’s so dedicated to entitlement reform that he wants not to change Social Security but to give it even more money. So yeah, Obama’s all about “change” if it means something roughly akin to “keep on keepin’ on.” And I guess maybe there are translation issues here, but generally when Chavez says “new” what he means is “tried several times before with no success.”
So sorry, George, but no cigar. Private property is not only unavoidable for any individuated species that wants to survive, it’s also, as it turns out, the bedrock of individual liberty. We can well debate over how far laws should go in protecting it, but there’s really no issue as to whether it should be here. It is here, it will always be here, and the only way to get rid of it is for all of us to become hive-minded insects of some kind. I’ll stick with the status quo.
Apparently, an organization called FARE (Football Against Racism in Europe) has gotten permission to play a short anti-racist PSA before and after each Euro2008 event. It’s called “Different Languages - One Goal: No to Racism” and runs 30seconds long.
30 seconds to change the world. Yeah, right guys. With an atom bomb, maybe, but a video? A particularly mundane video, at that. Apparently what it shows is - hold your breath, kids - the emotions of fans of various backgrounds before a goal is scored, culminating in wild celebrations all for the purpose of showing (yes, this is an actual quote from the director) “the word ‘goal’ to be universal.” Wow - who knew? So you’re saying … give me a second, this is a difficult concept for me … that people of ALL RACES are happy when their home team scores a goal? It’s like a revelation.
Even more ridiculous is their interpretation of “different backgrounds.”
The casting process was swift but ensured a true ‘mix’ of people, both trained actors and raw hopefuls were used and a range of backgrounds represented. Buche explained: “Everything in the film is symbolic. Romanian actors represented eastern Europe, we used Dutch actors as a reference to colonial times, and Turkish actors were involved to signify their omnipresence throughout many parts of Europe at this point in time.”
So out of all of Europe’s many national and ethnic groups, we managed to get a whopping … three of them … to put in an appearance. Better still, Romania of all places is meant to represent Eastern Europe, even though it considers itself Latin rather than Slavic, The Netherlands represents colonialism, even though it’s France that regularly raids its former colonies for national team players, and Turkey, which isn’t even in Europe, is featured but mysteriously doesn’t represent colonialism, even though it too was a colonial power (and once colonized Romania, one hastens to add). Guess I’ll have to just trust them that this is “representative.”
What I’m more interested in is where I can find even a single person who thinks that people from different backgrounds experience different emotions on seeing their team score? Is Europe really this goofy? Surely the fact that all these countries bother to participate in EuroCup in the first place is evidence enough that they’re basically similar when it comes to soccer?
If there’s anything that should concern us it’s how they’re similar rather than that they’re similar. Without seeing the team each group is cheering for on the screen, we somehow know that the Turks are for Turkey, the Dutch are for Holland, the Romanians for Romania, etc. The great unifying thing about “football” is that it brings out everyone’s inner tribesman. Sure, some of the more dedicated fans can appreciate good play no matter which team it’s coming from, but the overwhelming majority of the cheering spectators know just enough about the rules to recognize when it’s time to wave their flag. If you want to fight racism in soccer, maybe what you should be doing instead is reminding everyone that it’s just a game - that Turkey is still a shitty place to live even if exactly 11 of its citizens manage to kick a regulation ball through a regulation net under regulation specifications more times than 11 citizens of an “opposing” country.
The truth is that the whole premise behind Euro is nationalistic. If it were really all about watching soccer, then Euro would just be the Champions League. The fact that there are national teams and citizenship requirements on players makes the whole affair unavoidably “racist,” or at least tribal. No 30-second ad makes up for that.
My question is, so what if it’s nationalistic? I thought the whole point of these events was to give people a safe outlet for flag-waving? Better to do it over a soccer ball than on a battle field - wasn’t that the idea? Better to fight over something like soccer that has nothing to do with reality than for real stakes, right? In some important sense it defeats the whole purpose of EuroCup to complain about racism. If you’re that dedicated to making sure everyone knows we all bleed red, as it were, then why not campaign against the very idea of national teams?
Indeed, the fact that they’re not doing just that demonstrates to me that the people behind this video know that Euro is harmless. Perhaps they have their own racist and nationalist demons to overcome, but most soccer fans don’t. There’s a tribal gene in all of us, Euro is a fun way to let it out, but humans are complex creatures, and for the most part we know which instincts are appropriate to indulge when. Euro is a time for indulging my atavistic tribal leanings (Go Germany!), and as long as I keep it confined to the pitch, no harm no foul. What Euro is NOT a time for is sanctimonious, empty preaching about invented issues. So pack up your PC bullshit and take it home and let me watch soccer in peace.
My favorite part of the article, though, is the assertion that this video is “making a huge impact.” By what measure, one wonders? The giant “Raceometer” in Brussels that measures tolerance was hovering at 7.5 until the video aired, at which point it shot up to 7.7 in under 30 seconds? Give me a goram break. There is no evidence anywhere that this video is doing anything other than annoying people. If it serves any purpose whatever, it’s probably just as a nice buffer zone for bartenders to get their tabbooks in order before the main event starts. That’s something we accomplished just as nicely with the national anthem in the past…
I’ve been a big supporter of the “re-imagining” of Battlestar Galactica. Granted, I had my doubts about SciFi’s ability to pull it off - what with it being the casting catastrophe network and all. And on hearing that Starbuck was to be a woman I admit my PC alarms went off. But the miniseries put paid to any misgivings. The miniseries plus the first two episodes of the series regular rank as among the best hours in TV history in my book. And even though the series has been a huge disappointment since then (starting, roughly, with season 2.5), it’s indisputably better than the original.
I don’t think a remake Blakes 7 would meet with similar success. True, the shows date from the same time, and true that they serve roughly analogous social functions in their respective nations (as allegories for the role of the US and UK in the Cold War at a time with both nations were dispirited), true that they both self-consciously emulated westerns, and true that - at least on paper - both had dystopian premises - but that’s about where the similarities end. Where Battlestar was ripe for a remake, I think Blake should be left alone.
As I’ve said before, I think if ever there was a show that deserved a second chance, it was the original Battlestar: Galactica. It was a good idea with a poor execution, and there really wasn’t a good explanation for why it failed so spectacularly. Certainly ABC funded it well enough. And it had a good timeslot. And the premise - a ragtag fugitive fleet of humans fleeing from a race of cyborgs of inscrutable motive after a near-brush with extinction - was nothing if not ripe with potential. And with Lorne Greene as Adama, coupled with the conscious aping of TV westerns, it had a readymade target demographic. But despite the solid foundation, everything went wrong. The show was poorly planned, the actors weren’t very good in their roles, the late-70s insistence on “family friendliness” was supremely annoying (not to mention out of step with the dystopian premise), the writing proved to be sub-par. 1970s Battlestar was a gooey, sentimentalist bomb. A few standout episodes notwithstanding, it can’t have been much of a loss for TV scifi that the show saw an early cancellation after only one season.
The point here is that Battlestar failed in spite of everyone’s best efforts. The money and network support were there - the trouble is that no one took the time to think it through. Campy attempts at “alien culture” - like calling minutes “centons” - were as embarrassing as they were inadequate. The stereotyped characters - ESPECIALLY the much-lamented Starbuck - simply lacked dimension. And the plot JUST. DIDN’T. WORK. Baltar’s self-conscious betrayal had no good explanation, and it strained credulity to think that the kind of by-the-book bait-n-switch the Cylons pulled would actually succeed. Worst of all, there was a real timidity to the show. The show’s premise was a thematic goldmine - all it needed was a writer willing to explore it. But none were forthcoming. Instead of the thoughtful series the premise should have supported, we got a run-of-the-mill live-action cartoon with clear good guys and bad guys. Eminently forgetable.
The remake fixed all that. The Cylons are more interesting now. The writers don’t shy away from difficult themes. The characters are flawed, human, real. In particular, Baltar is believable, as is the success of the Cylon sneak attack. Granted - there were problems from the outset. The show was definitely once bitten twice shy on the “alien culture” motiff. Caprica is so much like Earth they’re practically carbon copies. And it’s pretty clear that no one really thought through the technology. It’s hard to believe, for example, that a culture that has long-range teleport for ships also uses cassette tapes for sound recordings. And sure, this show ultimately went off the rails plotwise too - but at least this time it wasn’t for lack of trying. No - all told, the re-imaginging of Battlestar is light years better than the original. I’m glad it happened.
But all these are good reasons why I really think a revival of Blake won’t work. If the original Battlestar was a good idea that failed in spite of everything, then Blake is something like the opposite of that. We know that its premise is something Terry Nation just kind of farted out of his brain at a program planning meeting. Nation is the first to admit that he was just running off at the mouth - had no idea what he was talking about. And unlike Battlestar, 70s Blake was underfunded. It looked terrible, even by BBC standards at the time - which takes some doing. Some of the actors - notably Blake himself - weren’t really satisfied with their roles - and Terry Nation, for his part, wasn’t really satisfied with the actors. In spite of its popularity, the show was constantly plagued by threats of cancellation, meaning that it was difficult to stick to any kind of coherent plan.
And yet, somehow in spite of it all, Blakes 7 really worked. Even ueber-skeptic Gareth Thomas (who played Blake) did a standout job in his role. The actors turned out to be really good - and while there were definitely some duds in the writing department (Horizon stands out for me as an unalloyed piece of crap), for the most part the episodes were superbly written as well. Despite a lack of initial direction or planning, the show’s story arcs worked. And the treatment of the show’s themes had an admirable subtlety - one that arguably has yet to be equaled by another science fiction show. It may have been an accident, but Blakes 7 came off.
And that’s the trouble, really. You can’t expect lightning to strike twice. If it’s something of a miracle that Blakes 7 worked in the first place, then you’re playing with fire trying to make it happen again. In particular, who’s EVER going to do as good a job as Paul Darrow playing Avon?
Here is a(n admittedly impromtu) list of things I expect to go wrong with the remake.
(1) Overplanning. Blakes 7 is famous for its moral ambiguity, and there will be a lot of pressure to recreate that. I think this will result in a lot of contrived situations. The moral ambiguity has to be an ambient thing - it can’t be something that you set out consciously to do. It should be something that naturally comes out of the world and the characters. But it won’t be. The temptation to “go Dark Angel” and make snarky, superficial, predictable political points in the name of being “edgy” will be too great for modern TV writers. What we’ll get in place of Blakes sardonic thoughtfulness will be a preachy, politically correct sledgehammer.
(2) Who’s going to play Avon? Sorry - but it’s a point that bears repeating. The major appeal of the original show was that fascinating character. As a reviewer on Amazon UK amusingly puts it:
[Paul Darrow's autobiography] is a must for anyone who remembers the BBC’s sci-fi series “Blake’s 7″ and spent the late ’70s and early ’80s wanting to a) be Kerr Avon or b) sleep with Kerr Avon.
Right. It was a show about Avon, and Paul Darrow was Avon. Any actor who touches that role does so at his extreme peril, and any conceivable “re-imagining” of Blake without Avon just isn’t Blakes 7.
(3) Atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine Blakes 7 being made any other time than the late 1970s. We’re just not this depressed anymore, and I don’t see how any modern show is going to be able to recreate the sardonic atmosphere. What, in particular, will be missed in any attempt to recreate the atmosphere is the feeling of “soldiering through.” Back in those days there was a sense of “detached involvement” that has been completely lost in modern times.
(4) Shocking ending? Most importantly of all, how are they going to redo that ending now that everyone knows what happened? (And not just the finale - but all through the series it pushed the envelope of acceptable plot developments.) That series ending has got to be the ballsiest note a show has ever gone out on, and I just don’t know what they’re going to do to top it. In particular, it’s the kind of thing that can’t be done intentionally. What happened on Gauda Prime was all there - latent in who the characters were and what kind of goals they were pursuing. To consciously try to top it is to impose something on the show that might not be there naturally.
All of which is to say that Blakes 7 is just fine the way it is, thank you very much. It succeeded in spite of itself; trying it twice seems like a bad idea.
What might be a good idea instead is to do something very loosely based on Blake. I mean, the show’s basic premise is generic enough that it can safely be redone - with some modern brushing up of course. And certainly I’m all in favor of another morally ambiguous show with an ensemble cast of complex characters. There are things in Blake that can be reused, no doubt about it. In fact, I’m one of the first to agree that Blake is a show that hasn’t been imitated enough, that wasn’t as influential as it probably should have been. And I’m enthusiastic about any show that exist to break Star Trek’s hegemony. So there’s no real problem using it as a shoving off point. It’s stamping anything with the brand name that seems doomed to fail. Blakes 7 was one of a kind, and recycling the moniker will either (a) bury the original show or (b) invite comparisons that are unlikely to cast the new show in a flattering light. So fine, “redo” it. But keep the “remake” far enough away from the original that you have room to maneuver. By which I mean, none of the original characters or even any plot connections to the original please. A similar show, set in a totally different universe with an otherwise clean slate to write on, in other words.
Silly? Sure. But hey, who knows where this kind of nostalgia comes from? I have only vague memories of us having a rotary phone in the late 70s, but that doesn’t stop me “missing” them.
For the past year I’ve been slowly going through the criminally underappreciated BBC cult space opera Blakes 7 on YouTube, and it’s been thrilling. Granted, it takes an iron stomach for bad special effects to appreciate this one - even by BBC standards - but as fan of the Beeb from a young age, I’m a veteran.
Last night I saw the turning-point series two cliffhanger Star One, and it was better than I expected, even after reading all the praise it gets online. Of the episodes I’ve seen so far, this one is second only to series finale Blake, which is probably impossible to top anyway.
What’s so good about Star One? Hard to say, really. It was enjoyable all the way through, but there was something about the last couple of lines that triggered the idea that this was one of the greats. The interesting thing is that in isolation they’re the most medicore of stock space opera dialogue:
AVON Stand by to fire.
VILA Avon, this is stupid!
AVON When did that ever stop us? [pause] Fire!
Roll credits…
Yeah, see what I mean? Taken by itself, it’s standard sub-par Joss Whedon jokiness. But in context it works really well. Why?
Damned if I know. But here’s my stab at an idea.
The cliche about Blakes 7 is that it’s “the anti-Trek“ - a kind of calculated inversion of Star Trek, particularly of all the “goody two-shoes” moralizing. And the cliche about that cliche is that while it’s mostly right, we do Blakes 7 a disservice reducing it to merely a response. I wholeheartedly agree. But whether or not Blakes 7 set out to deliberately invert Star Trek, it’s frequently at its best when doing so - and this is one of “those episodes.”
The Hollywood cliche that’s being turned on its head in Star One is “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (And in that sense, maybe it’s really Star Wars they’re throwing for a loop here.) The plot, in a nutshell, is this. Blake has discovered the “best-kept secret in the galaxy,” the location of the computer nerve center known as “Star One.” This is a network of computers that runs literally everything in the Federation - including even the climate control systems on most inner planets. Obviously disrupting it would cause an economic catastrophe, leaving the Federation unable to govern itself and paving the way for a new order. Partly for this reason, and partly to keep anyone from holding it hostage, the Federation locked the door on Star One and threw away the key. Not even Supreme Commander Servalan knows where it is.
Of course, someone had to build it, and those people had to be silenced. So the Federation had all of their memories wiped. One problem: the doctor who did the wiping disappeared, and he himself may know where Star One is. (As it turns out, he doesn’t, but he knows someone who knows.) Both Blake and Travis learn this secret, and both go there, it (ironically) turns out, with the same intention: to blow it up.
Which is the first twist, really. In a standard space opera, the arch-villain Travis would be going to Star One to - what else? - hold the Federation hostage. But in this case, he’s gone there to destroy the defense grid that Star One is also charged with maintaining - a kind of interstellar minefield to fend off a possible invasion from an alien species heard from once long ago. These aliens are back, and Travis is going to disable the defense grid for them. It’s revenge on humanity he wants, rather than power. Star One hasn’t corrupted him at all.
So who has it corrupted? Because this is Blakes 7, it’s naturally corrupted Blake, the hero. And because this is Blakes 7, you can be equally sure that it hasn’t corrupted him in the standard way. Blake isn’t tempted to palm Star One for himself and reorder the Federation along popular rule lines. No - he’s going to blow it up, which is an interesting choice for an “idealist” considering that it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to speculate that blowing up Star One would herald the start of a new Dark Age as Federation civilization failed to maintain itself. Notice the subtlety of the twist. It’s a radical rejection of power that’s corrupted Blake - sent him over the line from liberator to terrorist.
As usual, Avon is the one who keeps his head. More on him in a minute, but he is the one character completely unimpressed by Star One or what it can do. Avon doesn’t flinch: he wants what he’s always wanted - for Blake to score some kind of decisive goal so that Blake can make good on his deal to hand Liberator over to Avon. If that means helping Blake blow up the Federation, fine. Avon’s only real contribution to the discussion is to taunt Blake with the knowledge that Blake could use Star One to rule the galaxy himself - but half-heartedly. Avon knows Blake, and he knows Blake could never entertain such a goal, and all he’s really doing here is amusing himself one last time at Blake’s sentimentality. Obviously using Star One to seize the reigns of power and reorder society is the saner goal, but Blake is too well-trained in the slogans of heroism. On All Those Other Shows where the hero is in a position to take power, he always resists the temptation, just as Blake is doing here. And the viewer always wonders what would happen if the hero did actually stick his neck out and use the proffered power for “good” (whatever that means). And the writers always soothe this cognitive dissonance by throwing a contrived situation our way that will allow us to maintain our belief that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In the quiet of our own minds, though, we all suspect that’s not true. We all suspect that power doesn’t affect a person’s character one way or the other - it merely magnifies it. The causality actually works the other way ’round: power attracts already corrupt people to it, meaning that honest people only ever get it by accident. Notice that it’s no accident that Blake is here. Blake has been actively seeking Star One, and it’s a good thing too, as it turns out. Without Blake’s determination, no one would’ve been around to stop Travis (more specifically, Avon wouldn’t have been). But that doesn’t make what Blake’s trying to do “good.” Blake does the right thing in spite of himself. Or, rather, Blake has been doing the wrong thing up to now because he’s stuck in a pattern - but then circumstances change, suddenly things are bigger than him again, and being the good person he is, he reacts properly (ultimately deciding to save Star One).
Even more interesting still is how he got here. In most shows of the genre, characters’ “extreme” actions are explained by formative experiences. Our normally humanitarian character wants to kill Klingons because “they killed my son”, etc. But more often than not, real life seems to work like a negative image of that. Rather than being easily traceable to formative experiences, I think a lot of “extreme” behavior in real life is just an attempt to make sense of a pattern that one finds himself in, to find a larger meaning in it. Which is what’s going on with Blake here. Blake wants to blow up Star One not because anything that’s happened to him has made him particularly angry. Rather, it’s that he’s frustrated by the fact that his rebellion is going nowhere, and he doesn’t want it all to have been for nothing.
BLAKE Well, do we look for Star One?
JENNA We’ll finish what we set out to do. Nothing else is settled.
CALLY Are we fanatics?
BLAKE Does it matter?
CALLY Many, many people will die without Star One.
BLAKE I know.
CALLY Are you sure that what we’re going to do is justified?
BLAKE It has to be. Don’t you see, Cally? If we stop now then all we have done is senseless killing and destruction. Without purpose, without reason. We have to win. It’s the only way I can be sure that I was right.
CALLY That you were right?
Call it a rebel’s midlife crisis - but do so with a straight face because we’ve all been here. You stick with a holding pattern because you lack the guts to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere, and you do increasingly desperate things to make sure it’s all been worthwhile. That’s the story of everyone’s life.
So what about power and its supposedly-corrupting influence? One can argue that at least one character is actually redeemed by power here - and that’s Avon. It’s interesting that Avon is largely outside of the main action. Blake and Cally walk into the lion’s den, but Avon manages to hover just outside. Consequently, he’s in a position to save Blake’s life when Travis fires on him. Blake is wounded, and Avon suddenly steps into the center. He’s right where he’s always wanted to be: in charge of the Liberator in an incapacitated Blake’s place, with the opportunity to cut and run if he likes. But he won’t.
AVON I gave him my word.
VILA To fight off that fleet until the Federation get here?
AVON That is what I promised.
JENNA Why, Avon?
AVON Why not?
A brilliant line. Avon doesn’t know exactly why he’s doing it either. It seems to be out of character, but anyone who’s been paying attention knows that it isn’t really. Avon isn’t actually as cold and selfish as he likes to think he is, and putting him in the command seat makes that clear(er). You can kid yourself about who you really are until it matters - and now it finally matters. Given power, Avon surprisingly (or not, depending on your point of view) does the right thing.
Contrast this with earlier, when Avon briefly captures Travis at the entrance to Star One:
TRAVIS Put the gun down, Avon, it’s too late to stop it now.
AVON Convince me.
TRAVIS Be polite and I may let you live.
AVON Be informative and I may let you die. You’ll want that after I’ve shot off an arm and a leg or two.
TRAVIS I thought you were supposed to be the one with brains?
AVON Brains but no heart. Now talk or scream, Travis, the choice is yours.
If Avon’s threat here sounds contrived, that’s almost certainly by design. Two things about this exchange stand out for me. First, notice that the conversation is about Avon’s reputation, rather than how he actually is. Travis is making an appeal to Avon’s vanity. “…you were supposed to be the one with brains.” And when Avon says that he has brains but no heart, it isn’t an assertion about how he is in reality. Rather, he’s simply reminding Travis what his reputation is.
The point here surely is that once Avon’s in the hotseat, he can’t really afford the luxury of his “cold, calculating” persona quite as much as he can when it’s just him holding a gun to Travis. That isn’t to say he isn’t cold and calculating, of course, just that it’s at least partly exaggerated, and to the extent that it’s exaggerated things are different when there’s more on the line than just Avon. More than that, though - notice how it’s Avon who’s now trapped in a pattern. He knows that Vila’s right that it’s “stupid” - by his professed standards, anyway - to hold off the invasion until the Federation shows up, so why is he doing just that? Tellingly, his answer is because that’s what they’ve always done (”When did [being stupid] ever stop us?”). All other things being equal, maybe Avon would like to reconsider. But things aren’t equal, and there isn’t time, and right now he doesn’t know what else to do. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. Even more ironic than Avon getting power and and having some of his corruption cured by it is the fact that power turns out not to really be all that, erm, powerful. Even in the hotseat, your options are limited.
The question we never ask out loud while busily suspending our disbelief during a James Bond flick is something like “So what if Blofeld gets his hands on the raygun and dominates the world? What, exactly, is he going to do with it once he’s got it?” That point is never specified, because there’s never an answer. Blakes 7 is the first show in this genre to really tackle that. Travis isn’t interested in holding the Federation hostage because … well, to what end? Revenge is a much more workable motive. And while it seems out of character for Servalan to be acting to keep Star One’s location secret, what else would she really do? Gaining the nerve center would make her more powerful and more vulnerable all at once. No - much better that Star One continue to do its good work in secret, and she continue clawing her way to the top of the existing power structure. She wants to be top dog, sure, but not to actually be in a position to radically reorder things. Total power isn’t so much frightening as absurd. And so this episode takes place all around it. It looms there in the background rather than actively being in the story.
While Avon is busy turning to fight, Blake shows up on the bridge, and Avon orders him back to sickbay, making clear, albeit unintentionally, that he actually does value Blake’s trust.
AVON [to Blake] Why didn’t you stay in the medical unit? Couldn’t you bring yourself to trust me just this once?
BLAKE I thought I might be able to help.
AVON In that condition?
BLAKE All right I’ll go back.
AVON Can you manage, alone?
BLAKE Yes. Avon, for what it is worth, I have always trusted you, from the very beginning.
And the interesting thing is that we totally believe him. Blake probably didn’t come on the bridge to “help out,” but neither did he really doubt that Avon would be doing exactly what he promised he would do. Avon’s not evil, and he isn’t really a criminal, and it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that even someone as occasionally naive as Blake would know that.
Does power corrupt? I guess we don’t really know, since no one ever actually sought or gained it in this episode. The point seems to be that power’s just “kinda there.” It looms in the background, but it doesn’t change the human equations much. Just when you think you’re standing on top of the hill (in this case, on the nerve center of the galactic economy), you see the mountain on the horizon (there’s another galaxy out there that just might be planning an invasion). It’s all relative, and mostly people just go on being who they are. If power plays a role in the development of people at all, it isn’t a corrupting so much as a clarifying role: when there are real consequences to your actions, you are truer to yourself.
As for formative experiences… To the extent that they shape one’s character, it isn’t so much that something happened to you that you’re trying to set right. It’s more that circumstances put you in a position to take an action, and you took it, and you spend the time after that filling it into your scheme of things, to render it meaningful.
So damned if I know why those closing lines seemed so right. But that’s my guess. Because they draw all these threads together. Avon’s finally in control, but to what end? There’s really only one option available to him. Sure, maybe with some calm reflection he might decide differently, but there isn’t time for that. He opts to follow the pattern, to do what’s expected, and it doesn’t really have the character of a choice. Like everyone else, he’ll have to fit this “choice” into his scheme of things when he has time to reflect, and as those of us who have seen the rest of the series know, that means to some extent taking on aspects of Blake - becoming at least partly devoted to a cause that he never intended on joining. It all starts at Star One.
Now, instead of cluttering up the room with the real thing, you can play with virtual legos. The link goes to an application - apparently from Lego itself - that allows you to build virtual things with virtual legos in a virtual environment. Call it “Lego: The Video Game.”
My first response was “cool!” - since that’s pretty much my first response to any item of technology I stumble on. But that was quickly followed by the feeling that virtual legos are sort of at odds with the purpose somehow. The fun of legos is building more than designing, right? Which is to say, having something physical there when you’re done.
So today Guus Hiddink, who is Dutch, is leading the Russian Team against - who else? - the Dutch in Euro 2008. Here’s some related fantasizing about rewriting the rules so that national coaches have to be citizens of the countries they coach.
For my part, I’ll say it does seem sort of contradictory to enforce this requirement on players but not coaches. Of course we could be consistent by loosening the requirements for players, which are arguably being circumvented anyway. But that’s obviously out of the question: the concept of a national team is meaningless is the players aren’t nationals of the country they represent.
So why doesn’t this apply to managers? Well, actually, in my experience it does. I watched a lot of dampened enthusiasm for England in World Cup 2002 owing to good ol’ Sven. He was a good coach, he fit the team well and clearly helped them, but you always got the impression from the England fans that they would rather have seen one of their own at the helm. Hiddink himself was an easy target in Korea leading up to that tournament. Sure, that all changed after that first victory dance (the first in the video) got spalshed all over Korean TV. Hiddink became a national hero, and enjoys, if I’m not mistaken, free flights on Korean Air and Koreana, and free taxi rides in Seoul for the rest of his life as a result. It’s telling, I think, that Hiddink is the first foreigner to be offered honorary South Korean citizenship (who would touch THAT with a ten-foot pole, I wonder?). See, victory is sweet and all, but it’s just not the same if it’s not one of your own behind the wheel. If Hiddink isn’t Korean, we’ll make him Korean … kind of thing.
The question, of course, it whether it should be made official for managers. I’m agnostic. On the one hand, there’s everything I just said. National teams in soccer lose their meaning the more they’re not national but inter-national. We’d hit a reductio ad absurdum if we let players be from whereever without holding citizenship, obviously, but there’s a price in fan loyalty to be paid for a foreign coach as well. What works OK for football nobodies like Australia and South Korea (and arguably not really in South Korea - see the discussion of Hiddink’s citizenship offer above) would be a disaster for a country like Germany (which has never had a foreign manager), I’m sure. On the other hand, coaches have a tougher time of it than players. There’s plenty of spots for players to qualify for, but being a national team coach is a much more demanding hurdle. There’s really only the one position per country, after all. More than that, it seems we’d be missing something without the “Hiddink factor” in places like South Korea. They had it in them for that 4th place finish - but absolutely no one in the world knew it until Hiddink showed up and whipped them into shape. It’s one thing to have good players, but I fear that a lot of potentially good teams might not really get to show their colors without the right man at the helm, and we the soccer fans would miss out on a lot of good games as a result. International soccer would suffer for it.
So I don’t really care. I suppose I take a “good for thee, not for me” attitude. Let the rules stay as they are, but I want only American coaches coaching the US team if we can help it. Yeah, yeah, I know we’ve had a LOT of foreigners on our roster in the past, but Soccer is only now finding its niche in this country. Like many US fans, I date it from the Arena era, giving us a clean record here - at least in my fantasy world. Let’s keep it that way.
In a Sociolinguistics class this semester, our professor - a gender equality advocate (well, have YOU ever met a Sociolinguist who wasn’t?) - asked the class for examples of systematic discrimination against men. The answer she was looking for, as it turns out, was that men are hugely less likely to get equal custody (or custody at all) of their children in divorce cases. But I raised my hand to give a different answer: there is discrimination against men in public health concerns. To quote the most obvious example - men are disproportionately (1.5 times) likely to die of heart disease, and yet there is a national campaign to stamp out breast cancer and comparatively little concern about hearts. The American Heart Association’s take on this? See for yourself:
Coronary heart disease age-adjusted death rates for women have dropped 26.9 percent since 1999. But, age-adjusted stroke death rates among women are down by only 23.7 percent, lower than the overall age-adjusted stroke death rate reduction and the age-adjusted stoke death rate reduction for men, which is 25.8 percent.
No one at the AHA seems to consider it relevant that male rates have much more room to fall than female rates, since they remain higher overall. And this is symptomatic of the trend in general. Everywhere you look, there is more concern for women’s health than men’s - odd, considering that men in general are less healthy and die earlier than women.
My particular gripe in class had to do with eating disorders. Nearly every time you switch on the television, there is some talk show on some channel somewhere lamenting all the damage women do to themselves trying to look good for men. What no one considers is that men probably do more damage to themselves trying to look good for women. Indeed, a new book by Dr. Marianne Legato - who has made explaining the discrepancy in the male-female death rates a professional focus - concludes that a good portion of the difference owes to the fact that men are trained to “suck it up” and ignore their health problems, missing out on the ounce of prevention that would save them from a pound of cure.
For Dr Legato, part of the solution is that men need to live more like women. “Men are told from an early age to ’suck it up’,” she says. “They are socialised to get on with it and it is left to women to urge them to go to the doctor, usually ineffectively.”
It is extraordinary, as the opening sentence of her book says, that in a society where health is an obsession, we are not investigating in more detail the most fundamental question of all - why one sex should die before the other.
The reason, put simply, is that people do not care. For all the talk of liberation coming out of feminists, the truth is that they are only interested in “liberating” themselves from those aspects of the old system that they find inconvenient. Consider, for example, that US Vital Statistics show that men are 2.2 times as likely to die from accidents and injuries and 4.1 times as likely to kill themselves. Granted that some of these injuries have to do with a general male preference for physically demanding recreational activities as compared to women. Rockclimbing and soccer are more dangerous than knitting and shopping. But I’m equally certain that a lot of these fatal injuries are sustained on the job. It’s telling where feminists are most concerned about “equality.” They want it for scientists and CEOs. I have never heard a feminist complaining that there are not more female electric linemen, or oil rig workers, or highrise window washers. The closest they come to advocating for dangerous jobs for women involves affording them equal status in the military - but of course they draw the line at including women in the Selective Services Registry, and are as likely as not to object to trivia like hair regulations and workout routines once women do muscle their way in. All of which is consistent with a middle-class princess entitlement mentality. Men take these kinds of dangerous and dirty jobs mostly because they have to - because finding a working woman to support them is generally not an option - certainly not socially. And as for suicide - one can chalk that up to hormones if one likes, but at least some of that discrepancy owes to the fact that men are generally under more pressure than women.
Men have it hard. Period. Women may complain more loudly - but then, that is the whole problem. The stoicism that is trained into men from birth, and which is absolutely necessary to attracting a suitable mate, is every bit as harmful to us as extreme diets are to women. Listening to talk shows, you would think that women spent all their waking moments torturing themselves just to get a glance from largely indifferent men. But nothing could be further from the truth. Men do just as much - nay, probably more - damage to themselves cultivating the rugged self-sufficiency that is a sine qua non to getting the best chicks as women do watching their waistlines.
I don’t have any solutions to offer, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m part of the problem. I strongly dislike going to to the doctor and being dependent on people. I like meat rather a lot, and for that reason eat a lot more fat than I probably should. My primary form of exercise is running, which is bad on the joints and back. And I drink WAY too much black tea. I’m aware that a lot of my need for self-sufficiency comes from societal expectations of how men should behave, but what can I say? I like being this way and would consider it weak to change. My point here is simply that … well, I read the Legato article linked above and thought I would mention it. For all the talk of the oppression of women, I think it’s fair to say that there is an equally good case that the system was always biased against men too, if in different and more subtle ways.
John Scalzi seems to have a bee in his bonnet about people who oppose gay marriage. No real objections there - but I did find this a bit offensive. Writing about the proposed amendment to California’s State Constitution annulling gay marriages:
What this means is that if the initiative passes, then likely thousands of legal, actual, state-recognized and sanctioned marriages will disappear overnight. Thousands of loving couples will be forcibly removed from the legal state of marriage, not because they have chosen to do so, but because others have decided that they shouldn’t allowed to be recognized as having a marriage. I imagine it will be single largest forced annulment action between married couples in the history of the United States.
Um - this and not the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862? Yeah - see, that one was a federal law that not only annulled tens of thousands of existing marriages, but actually criminalized them with jail sentences and fines. Whatever the case for gay marriage on anti-discrimination grounds, it must surely be conceded that the State has never carried out a mass military style-raid on an entire community of gays simply for their marriage practices, nor has any state ever, to the best of my knowledge, ever threatened to criminalize any gay man or woman’s public claim that they are married to their partner. It has done this - not once but several times - against Mormons.
I find this discrepancy in the rhetoric of gay marriage advocates as disturbing as it is offensive. To be fair to Scalzi, I have no idea what his opinions on polygamy are, and I don’t want to tar him with a wide brush for this simple oversight. He may be for laws of free conscience on marriage for all I know, and if so I salute him. Be all that as it may, the fact that Scalzi is either ignorant of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act or unwilling to discuss it where it is clearly relevant is indicative of a deeply disturbing trend among gay marriage advocates. It’s “rights for me, not for thee.” Somehow, we the public are supposed to feel sorry for all the gay people whose marriages the state refuses to recognize but turn a blind eye to the Mormons, Muslims, and handful of Jewish groups that practice a form of marriage that has existed at one time or another in 78% of the world’s cultures (indeed, if this infographic is to be believed, it is more common as a social convnention than monogamy). Polygamy isn’t merely against federal law in the United States. It’s a felony, meaning that convictions can result in having one’s right to vote, serve on juries, and hold political office if elected rescinded. Banning it is actually a condition for statehood. Not only that, but some states (Arizona and Utah) have been placed under federal supervision to ensure that attempts to reinstate polygamy do not succeed. Certainly there have been egregious violations the right to self-determination of gay individuals in the past - but nothing honestly on this scale. And while gays can freely immigrate to the United States and become citizens, polygamists cannot.
Of the two groups, polygamists therefore clearly have the greater claim to our sympathies when trying to gain legal recognition for their lifestyles. And the legal hypocrisy of existing arrangements on the subject is clearer with them as well. Consider that it is perfectly legal for people to father children by several women and raise them all in the same house if they do not actually try to get legally married. Meaning - in short - that the law is cool with the arrangement so long as the women have no real legal recourse of the kind women in monogamous relationships have for keeping the relationship stable. All of this is most emphatically NOT to say that gays do not have a right to enter into personal and property arrangements of their choosing. Ideally, this would be a matter for private contracts and not for the government - federal or otherwise. It is a right of all individuals - and that is why it is hugely hypocritical, not to mention historically ignorant, to defend gay marriage while denying (or ignoring) the claims of polygamists. I hope that is not what Scalzi is up to.
Even if he is not, the omission of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy and Edmunds Acts from his claim that the proposed amendment to California’s State Constitution will result in the most egregious rewriting of the marriage rolls in this nation’s history is in a tradition of wilfull ignorance on this point on the part of gay rights activists. It’s excusable in an individual like Scalzi who may simply not be familiar with the history, but if he is unfamiliar with the history then that is in part because the gay rights movement hasn’t gone to any trouble to bring it to light. I’m fed up with it. Gay rights activists need to start practicing what they preach about human rights. Either all people have a right to legal recognition for marriages they conscienciously enter into, or no one does. If the basis of gay marriage is to be that loving people have made a decision society must recognize, then I do not see any cogent grounds for excluding polygamists from the arrangement. Indeed, if gay rights activists are serious about what they say, the last thing they should want to do is emulate the bigoted practices of the majority.
This is just great. Now, in addition to “homophobia,” we have as a proposal that there be “theophobia” too.
I suppose the author thinks himself clever for “reclaiming” a technique of the PC crowd. But if “homophobia” is drivel, then so too, obviously, is “theophobia.”
The word “homophobia” is language manipulation, no two ways about it. It’s what George Lakoff would call “framing.” Gay rights activists have “framed” the debate in such a way that disliking their lifestyle is passed off as an irrational fear. But in many cases it is neither irrational nor even a fear. Certainly it’s true that there are some irrational gay-bashers in the world, but the majority of us dislike homosexuality because we’re disgusted by it. It’s the same reason they do it, actually. If there’s a gene - or even a formative life experience - that renders one attracted to members of the opposite sex, then is it really such a stretch to imagine that there’s a gene - or a formative experience - that renders people sexually repulsed by the idea of intercourse between members of the same sex? Honestly, psychologists understand little to nothing about what homosexuality is or where it comes from; I think it’s a bit premature to dismiss opposition to it as a “phobia.”
Now, apparently, religious people are playing the same card. Simple opposition to religion is no longer to be tolerated. If you express a strong distaste for someone’s religious affiliation, you’re “theophobic.” It can apparently never be the case that simple reasoning led one to the conclusion that atheism was the way to go - rather, being an atheist is an “irrational fear.”
Here’s the definition from the article:
I have more frequently encountered less intense versions of what I will call “Theophobia” - the academic’s irrational fear of, or intense discomfort around, theist and, in particular, Christian, beliefs.
And what effects this meditation?
Just a few days ago, I was discussing a mutual friend with a former colleague. The latter was astonished by our mutual friend’s Christianity: “What’s up with that?!” he exclaimed, expressing bewilderment and even nervousness at the thought that a well-regarded - indeed, by academic standards, famous - professor could believe in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God.
Why not, I wonder? I fail to see anything “phobic” about this. Granted, I wasn’t there, so perhaps the friend went on to say some ridiculous things about Christians. But if he did the author doesn’t quote them, and in any case there’s obviously nothing wrong with being put off by anyone’s religious beliefs.
I think that even from a believer’s point of view, it must be conceded that non-believers will find religion offputting as a general rule. Consider where we’re coming from. True, we don’t understand everything about the world, but we’re aware that our generation understands a lot more than generations past. We take the sensible position that we can only speak to those entities that we’ve either (a) encountered ourselves in some meaningful sense or (b) have reason to believe in as a means of explaining the existence of things we have encountered ourselves in some meaningful sense. Point (b) addresses our belief in the existence of things like quarks. True that no one’s ever seen one, but there is a replicable process of reasoning over experiments that leads scientists to hypothesize their existence. No doubt there are entities in the world we’re unaware of at present, and granted that God could be one of them, but we don’t speak to those entities because there is no basis for dealing with things we have no reason to believe in.
There is simply no rational process that leads one to certain belief in God. God is not obviously manifest in the world - as should be clear from the fact that even religious people report struggles with their faith and the need to lean on fellow believers for encouragement. If God were obviously manifest in the world, witnesses to His Presence would hardly be necessary, after all. And yet, no shortage of major religions feel the need to proselytize. Ask a religious person how they know God is real, and they will invariably tell you either about some sort of supernatural encounter they had, or else they will talk about their feelings. In no cases in my life has any religionist ever offered me an objective reason to believe in God’s existence (at least, not one without numerous and obvious flaws).
In other words, belief in God is almost without exception predicated on experiences or feelings that are both extraordinary and subjective - hidden from the mass public. Surely in such a case the burden of proof is on those who believe? It’s worse than that, even. It’s that believers believe in things that flat-out contradict their daily experience of how the world works. It’s not like believing in quarks, which are observable (if only indirectly) and quantifiable, and affect the things we can see in predictable ways. No - religionists believe in a dimension of experience that is radically at odds with they way the world seems to work.
So again, just like with homo-”phobia,” we’re labeling something as a “phobia” that is neither irrational nor even a fear. As real as God and All That may be to believers, to the rest of us it’s superstitious nonsense. It’s a disconnected series of fantasies at absolute odds with how we observe the universe to work. If they want to believe in such stuff, then that is obviously their right, but nothing about exercising one’s rights means that anyone else need be comfortable with it.
An academic is someone generally employed to do critical thinking, not to simply take things at face value, or to believe everything he’s told. There are obvious psychological reasons why ordinary people may choose to believe in religion (or, what I suspect is much more common, not to question it). But for someone whose job it is to question things, it is a bit incongruous to cordon off a special set of patently irrational beliefs and leave them outside of one’s critical realm, no? In short, I should think that this fellow’s reaction is the normal and predictable reaction of an atheist academic to hearing the news that a fellow critical thinker holds religious beliefs. If this reaction is more potent in the case of Christians than other religions, then that is simply because the person so reacting probably grew up Christian himself and finds it even more difficult to accept that someone in his very situation can have failed to question the ambient religion. He knows considerably less about the experiences of adherents of other faiths is all.
Indeed, it’s probably a good time to point out that this is a contradiction in the article as written. On the one hand, the author wants to define “theophobia” as being particularly virulent in the case of Christian beliefs, but then he turns around and “explains” it by saying that
It seems to driven by unfamiliarity with anything except the crudest caricature of the object of horror, derived from distant rumors of bizarre and violent behavior in a strange faraway place (for homophobes, say, the Castro; for theophobes, perhaps Lubbock, TX or Colorado Springs, CO). Secular academics typically do not know many religious believers — especially not many overly devout Christians — and their isolation leads to the most naively lurid fantasies about what religious belief entails.
Actually, most academics in the US are likely to have encountered overly devout Christians on occasions too numerous to count. It’s overly devout Muslims and Hindus they’re unlikely to have met here, and so by this theory it should be those groups that are the special objects of “fear.” Oops!
And indeed, there’s a lot of dishonestly going on in this article.
Suppose one takes God to subsist rather than exist, as an intellectual construct akin to pi or imaginary numbers? What harm can come from guiding one’s life by the supposed judgments of the being that Adam Smith called “the impartial spectator” - a perfectly wise judge with perfectly accurate information about your motives and actions? I can think of worse heuristics.
The harm, as the author surely is aware, is that this “heuristic” is based on something that the believer has no reason to believe is real. Substitute “God” for “astrology” or “magic 8ball” and this point would hardly need to be made. Believers in tarot cards, after all, seem to think that shuffling a deck of these pretty pictures (and ONLY these pretty pictures) is somehow revelatory of the state of the universe - so this is the same kind of “heuristic,” no? And yet we don’t hesitate to react to this with bemusement because we can’t see any good reason why it should be the case that shuffling a deck of highly specific pictures should mean anything over and above that their order in the deck has changed! So it is with God. You can well pray to Him for advice till you’re blue in the face, but if He’s simply not there, then it’s all a silly waste of time. There’s nothing “phobic” about saying so.
I say that theophobia is irrational, because there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that religious belief as such has any more harmful consequences than lack thereof. True, religious believers have done some horrible things in the name of God. But there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that the body count attributable to religious belief is higher than the death toll from whatever ideology one wishes to ascribe to Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hutu Nationalists, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, or any number of other despots motivated by secular ideologies
True, but this isn’t the point. Something doesn’t become automatically acceptable for being “better than Hitler.” The fact that Hitler has killed more people than the Catholic Church surely doesn’t let the Vatican off the hook for its crimes? I should have thought that any belief system that has demonstrably led to a lot of irrational killing was suspect?
(Yes, I know Hitchens & Co. disputes that this string of despots killed for the sake of secular ideologies, mostly by gerry-rigging the definition of religion to include beliefs like Nazism. But, using the same looseness of definition, I can claim Stoics, Epicureans, even diehard Rawlsians — yes, there are such people — among the religious believers).
Fine, so claim Stoics and Epicureans as religious for all I care. Hitchens’ objection isn’t to the label “religion” per se, but rather to the irrational assertion that something is true which not only cannot be observed or verified but which is, indeed, at odds with daily experience. That Stoics and Epicureans do not fit his description should be obvious. But even if we concede that they do, I’m sure Hitchens would be the first to admit that there are levels to religion, and that some religious beliefs are more repulsive than others. Just as we can obviously admit that Clement Atlee was sincere and well-intentioned while Stalin was not and all the while deplore Socialism in general.
I do not wish to enter into the tired controversy about whether atheism or theism is more conducive to ethical behavior.
Good, then don’t - because that’s not the issue that’s under discussion here. I myself despise religion and yet am perfectly happy to admit that some of the kindest, most ethical people I have met are religious. Religion clearly motivates a certain number of people to do very good things, but so what? That which isn’t real isn’t real - and as I have also met kind and ethical people who are atheists I am none too worried about which avenue is more likely to lead to ethical behavior. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever asserted that atheists are incapable of morally degenerate self-delusion. Just as no one has, to the best of my knowledge, ever asserted that atheism automatically leads to moral superiority.
I want only to suggest that this controversy is tired precisely because there is no obvious answer to the question inspiring it. One can wrangle forever about the relative merits of theism and atheism without reaching any firm conclusion, which is precisely why it is irrationally phobic to have an intense fear of theism on this score.
Fine - but as far as I know, no one has any “intense fear of theism on this score.” This is a non-issue, so why are we talking about it?
How widespread is theophobia among academics? I cannot say for sure …
Fortunately, I can: it’s virtually nonexistent. I have never met anyone who I would characterize as having an “irrational fear” of religion. They object to it is all - and on sensible grounds that they are happy to explain to anyone who asks. It isn’t irrational, and it isn’t a fear - it’s simple bemusement that anyone intelligent would go around believing in a great sky bully no one has ever seen and whose existence, indeed, would require a radical revision of reality as we currently understand it. So thanks for playing, but this “theophobia” category is wholly unconvincing. Indeed, it’s pretty transparently a crudely manipulative attempt at deck-stacking. At least homosexuals have an excuse for trying this play: there were times in the recent past when they indeed suffered from a frightening and all-too-often violent level of discrimination. Religionists have primarily suffered such discrimination from believers in - what else? - rival religious factions. There’s a lesson there…
