The Only Winning Move

Listening on the way to the office today was Philosophy Bites’ interview with Alex Neill on the Paradox of Tragedy. Basically the problem is this: if pity and fear are unpleasant emotions, then why do people write and watch/read tragedies? The answer, perhaps predictably, is that it isn’t really the pity and sorrow and all that that we enjoy (though we can appreciate, on a different level, how well they’re staged), it’s the insight into the human condition that keeps us interested. Art as search for truth.

Neill admits, however, that this theory runs into a bit of a problem with the horror genre. Take any angle on it you might, ‘profound’ isn’t really a word that springs to mind. Surely if people enjoy horror movies it’s gotta be because at some level they really do enjoy watching people suffer.

Well, maaaayyybe, is Neill’s response. More likely, he thinks, it’s just a visceral thrill on the level of riding a roller coaster. It’s a very physical explanation: we like the adrenaline rush that being afraid gives us, and horror movies are a way to get that without the accompanying danger. So the comparison between horror and tragedy isn’t entirely apt … seems to be the answer.

As for me, I buy this and I don’t. I mean, clearly there’s something to what he says. Certainly, to use his example, we don’t watch King Lear because it’s pleasant. And there are few, if any, people who honestly enjoy watching Lear get his eyes plucked out just for the sake of seeing someone suffer like that. No, what’s attractive about Lear is probably just what Neill says: dramatization of the human condition - a chance to examine from the outside.

That said, I think Lear is not unlike a horror movie in a lot of ways, I think there IS more to horror movies than just a visceral thrill, and I think tragedy and horror are not as different as he supposes.

For one thing, though I admit I’ve never read Aristotle’s Poetics, I was given the gist of it by my high school Literature teacher in class lectures, and Neill is leaving out an important part. It’s true enough that Aristotle talks about “the pleasure” of watching pain and suffering, and that he sort of leaves that paradox open for the reader to ponder. But on the whole Aristotle gives a bit more of an explanation than we’re led to believe here. Specifically, the enjoyment of pain and suffering comes at realizing - at the end of the production - that none of it was real, what Aristotle calls “catharsis.” The whole point of tragedy is thus meant to be that you are watching something more horrible than real life, and leave with the comfort that real life doesn’t actually get that bad - at least not that often. Tragedy therefore has to walk a very fine line: it has to be believable enough to suck us in, but exaggerated enough that we get to have our catharsis at the end.

That seems to me a pretty good summary of what goes on in horror as well. Now, don’t get me wrong. Clearly there are horror movies that operate at exactly the level that Neill suggests. These would be your basic C-level slashers - essentially any of the Friday the 13th series save possibly the first one. You know, the movies that only ever work when things are jumping out at you or getting killed in splattery ways. But good horror movies operate on a level that’s a bit closer to what Aristotle was talking about. As I’ve blogged here before, I think the functional mechanism in good horror movies is delayed realization. A skillful horror movie will litter the first 80% of its screentime with increasingly less subtle hints that something truly horrible is going on, but it always stops just short of forcing you to give up on the rational explanation. The climax comes in a revelatory moment where the protagonist is forced to face the reality that all her (it’s usually a “her”) wildest fears are true. That impossible thing, whatever it is, is real, and every bit as horrible as she’d supposed, maybe even worse.

After that, a good horror movie will wind quickly to a close. Because just like a good tragedy, it has to walk a really fine line keeping things just barely on the other side of believable. They have to be familiar enough that we can rationalize right with the hero(ine) up to the big moment, and the approach to that moment has to be slow enough that we don’t shoot our wad too soon. Because once it’s out in the open that the author isn’t playing by the normal laws of Physics, the clock starts counting down. It’s only a matter of time at that point before the viewer stops believing and the tension pops like a baloon.

Seen in that light - the mechanism is largely the same. There’s something useful in reminding ourselves just how scary the world can be. Who, honestly, hasn’t felt himself in a situation that was well beyond his control, worse than he originally thought, and yet with the sinking feeling that he knew all along? That’s all of us at work who’ve been backstabbed by a colleague, who’ve found out our girlfriend was cheating on us with our best friend, and … yes, those unlucky few who find out that the next door neighbor chopped their kid up into bits and baked him into a souffle. Hey, it happens, but I digress: it’s that whole unsettling feeling of “I saw it coming, but not clearly enough to do anything about it.” That’s the fundamental fear that good horror plays on, that feeling of not-quite-helplessness. And I think we enjoy it on the same level that we enjoy the relief of waking up from a really bad nightmare only to realize it was all just a dream. If Aristotle is right, that’s what motivates us to watch tragedy - and I think horror works on much the same level, albeit with a different emotion.

Horror, I should add, need not lack profundity. It’s true that most of it isn’t terribly profound, but I’m right with Stephen King in thinking that most memorable horror has a very real subtext. King famously analyzed The Amityville Horror (which I’ve never seen, but have heard is really silly and am therefore not in any great hurry to see) as a veiled allegory for home ownership. The Money Pit as morality tale, maybe. The idea is that people can quickly get financially overwhelmed by a new home - especially given that (especially today) most people buy more than they can really afford at the time anyway. King thinks Amityville speaks to that very ordinary fear in an allegorical, exaggerated way, and I see no good reason to disagree with him. And if he’s right about this, and if this kind of analysis holds up for other horror “classics” (again, can’t say I’m too comfortable with using Amityville here, but whatever), then there’s really not much distance between horror and tragedy at all. It’s just academic snobbery that grants the one “high literature” status and casts the other as “mere entertainment.”

I have to admit to being a bit annoyed at Neill through the interview, actually. For example, I think he’s simply wrong in saying that one of the “points” of King Lear is Gloucester’s observation that “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport.” That’s hardly the point of the play. The point of the play has more to do with Lear’s being “more sinned against than sinning.” The thing that makes the line between Lear and horror a particularly fine one for tragedies, in fact, is that Lear’s punishment is so obviously out of all proportion to his crime. But that, of course, is also the cathartic mechanism at the end. Yes, of course it’s within the realm of possibility that such things can happen to a person, but we take comfort at the end in equal parts because it’s all so exaggerated as to seem unlikely to ever happen to us, and because we know, as Lear comes to know, that he should have seen it coming. The point isn’t really so simple as “shit happens,” in other words. Indeed, I think one of Lear’s failures as a tragedy - why it doesn’t have Hamlet or Othello status - is that it pushes things a bit too far. Remember, push it too far and you break the spell; the entire craft depends on getting that delicate balance just right - keeping it just over the line of believable, but not so far over that we can’t get sucked in. King Lear is probably just a bit further beyond the line of believability than is good for it. Which is to say, no one really believes that his life is so tragic that it’s just a tale of gods toying with him like a fly. Gloucester’s speech, I think most people agree, actually serves to undermine the play a bit.

But alright, I’m picking nits. The point is just that I don’t think horror should be written off so easily. The mechanics of it as a genre are not really so different from what makes tragedy work. It’s true that there are considerably more “great” tragedies than there are “great” works of horror, but I’m not so sure that’s a necessary consequence of what the genres appeal to. Quite the contrary - I think it is possible to write “great” or “classic” horror. I think it just tends to happen less often partly because of the relative novelty of the genre, partly because of scientific prejudice, partly because of literary prejudice, and probably most of all just because what sorts of images evoke feelings of dread are really culture- and time-dependent. Vampires were scarier in Victorian England than they are in modern Seattle - a fact that psychologists are better-equipped to explain than writers, but a fact notwithstanding. Because tragedy operates on a less imagistic level - the much more rational/universal level of moral wrong - I think it’s easier to pull of one that passes as universal. But just because it’s easier to write great tragedy than great horror doesn’t mean great horror can’t be done.

I wonder if there is a name for the rhetorical trick whereby you take your opponent’s basic accusation and cite it as evidence of a basic personality flaw - intended to make you look good by comparison. I guess this counts as a subspecies of the ad hominem (”playing the man and not the ball”), but it’s particular and galling enough that I hope someone has seen fit to give it a name.

One example I came across early in thinking about these things was in the “scholarly” Japanese response to Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Her 1997 book was only published in Japan last year, its publication having been stalled by nationalists who insisted on including “corrections” in the text. They got their way by intimidating the family members of serious historical scholars hired to review the book, and what eventually happened was that their refutation was published, but not the primary text. I purchased a copy of the refutation on its release in 1999 - which I still have and which I assume the image-conscious in Japan were hoping had disappeard entirely - and it’s replete with instances of this tactic in action. One of the ones that stands out is a response to a caption over a picture of a decapitated Chinese head resting on a military barrier. He has something in his mouth, which Change reports as a cigarette. That’s certainly what it looks like, though the photo is a bit blurry and it’s hard to be sure. The refutation notes that the “cigarette, if cigarette it is, was obviously placed in the man’s mouth by the American photographer as a joke.” The implication is that if Americans are callous enough to consider it a “joke” to place a cigarette in a decapitated man’s mouth, they have no standing to criticise the Japanese for whatever attrocities supposedly took place in Nanking in 1938. Well - fair enough that we don’t know how the “cigarette” got in the man’s mouth. What struck me about this is how it attempts to dodge the question of what the decapitated head is doing on the military barricade in the first place. It stretches credulity that the Chinese locals just found one lying about and decided to put in on a Japanese military bariacde. To what purpose? More to the point, to what purpose that would’ve been worth getting shot at? The Chinese at this point were hardly fighting a propaganda war. Neither, for that matter, were the Americans, who were mostly ignorant of the incident. The most likely explanation for the head being on the barricade is as a sick warning to the locals by the occupying Japanese forces. Of course, since we don’t know the circumstances of how the head got there (or really even who took its picture), it’s probably unfair of Chang to cite it as “evidence” that a massacre took place. All the same, the implication as to how it came to be there given in her book is much more plausible than whatever the Japanese scholars have in mind as a counterstory (they don’t say). Realizing this, they seek to sidestep the issue by using the rhetorical trick in question: using the very accusation that Japanese soldiers put it there as the basis of an unfounded ad hominem response. The photographer, who might have been American (but we don’t know), probably put the cigarette there as a “joke” (but again, we don’t know), and the fact that even one (alleged) American can think of this as a “joke” where we Japanese scholars are scandalized by such a suggestion means in turn that Americans as a whole are more callous than Japanese, ergo the Nanking Massacre never happened. It certainly goes down in history as one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard - but the fact of its not being stated explicitly lends it an effectiveness in the original text it does not deserve.

I came across a similar example today in Dinesh D’Souza’s latest column Why Bill Maher Made Me Laugh. It’s about Bill Maher’s film Religulous, in which Mr. Maher goes all Michael Moore on religious fanatics, with, I suspect, largely disappointing results. D’Souza is probably right when he says that “It is only in the company of obvious charlatans and simpletons that Maher comes off as the bright guy,” and that’s exactly why I don’t really have any interest in seeing his movie. It isn’t hard to find religious crackpots (they advertise themselves, usually), and picking on the mentally feeble is neither entertaining nor informative.

But D’Souza’s taking a cheap shot of his own, and that does interest me.

At times he says he is an agnostic, who simply holds the rational position that he doesn’t know what comes after death. But if you don’t know whether there is an afterlife, and even if you have no reason to believe in one, it hardly makes sense to attack those who hold a different view. After all, you yourself are in the dark and they might very well be right.

Well, that’s part of it. It’s true enough that Agnostics admit that they are “in the dark” about what happens after death, but that leaves unaddressed the more obvious issue of on what basis it is, exactly, that religious people claim to know what happens after death. To a cursory glance, after all, it seems inherently unknowable. Just because you yourself don’t know something doesn’t obligate you to respect anyone else’s best guess as to what the answer might be. Tie goes to the Agnostic, in other words - because the burden of proof is on the person making the claim of knowledge.

Now here’s where it really goes off the rails:

By way of analogy, I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns. Maher’s agnosticism is clearly a pose. Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God. And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

Here it is again. Neither of us really know how the head got on the fence, but since your assumptions are a lot more plausible than mine, what I’ll do instead of addressing the issue is try to turn the fact that you bring it up at all into a moral indictment.

So let’s deal with this. First of all, as if it needed pointing out, the reason that no one makes documentaries denouncing unicorns is that the handful of people in the world who actually do believe in them grow out of it by age 18 as a general rule and never, ever seek to control anyone’s behavior as a consequence of their beliefs. To the best of my knowledge, there is currently as many as NO ONE advocating that we rewrite science textbooks to include reference to the possibility that unicorns might have evolved, possibly all of ZERO people setting off bombs in the name of unicorns, and the number of people pestering homosexuals for going against the Will of Unicorns is as high as NONE AT ALL. D’Souza is right that mere nonbelief in something does not motivate someone to write a book denouncing it, but then, Dawkins and Hitchens et al have never claimed to be writing these books just because they don’t believe in God.

Second, while it might be true that D’Souza doesn’t write books (though that point is debatable) or make documentaries denouncing Atheism, he certainly writes enough columns that qualify as denounciations. One of the more extreme is Atheism and Child Murder, in which he strongly implies, on the basis that Peter Singer believes in legal infanticide, that anyone who carries “Atheism” (as though it were a coherent belief system rather than a simple rejection of an unproven assertion) to its logical conclusion will end up believing in legal infanticide, as though Peter Singer were some kind of patron saint of Atheism. Whatever its logical shortcomings, it is nothing if not a brazen attack on Atheism which has, as its purpose, the hope of frightening off the curious. And even if we’re feeling generous and willing to let D’Souza off the hook on the technicality that his columns don’t fall into either of the categories book or documentary, there is no shortage of such material from other Christian apologists. The one making the rounds in the book category at the momentis Frank Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, and in the documentary category it is of course Ben Stein’s Expelled. And these are merely the most current in a long list of prominent examples stretching back decades in the case of documentaries and centuries in the case of books. It isn’t as though Hitchens and Dawkins are operating in a vacuum here. They’re not exactly turning the other cheek, but then they’re not the ones claiming that as a moral virtue.

Third, the fact that “God has rules that interfere with his sex life” is a perfectly valid reason for a non-believer to oppose widespread belief in something the existence of which has never been proven. In fact, I can think of few better reasons. It is much the same reason that D’Souza doesn’t waste his time opposing belief in unicorns, to put a fine point on it. If believers in unicorns existed in large numbers and sought to control something as fundamental to D’Souza’s happiness and self-actualization potential as his sexual behavior, he might not think he could afford the luxury of just letting them be. This is by far the most galling of all the religious intrusions into people’s lives - believers and otherwise. They act as though it is childish and self-serving to enjoy a fulfilling sex life tailored to one’s own needs, but the only basis for this attitude that I can see rests on their as-yet-unproven claims that (a) there is this unseen, unknowable cosmic entity who cares how people have sex and (b) they know what this entity wants. Of course, logically speaking I cannot completely rule out the possibility that these claims are true. But I am not obligated, nor should anyone feel obligated, to take these claims seriously if no proof is offered for them. In short - if D’Souza thinks he is in a position to restrict Bill Maher’s sex life, then I’m right with Bill Maher in thinking that he owes Maher a bit more of an explanation than he’s giving. Certainly it is disingenuous to talk as though it were just obvious that Maher’s sex life needs modulating on the basis that some undocumented Sky Bully said so.

The trick D’Souza is attempting to pull it this: he’s sidestepping Maher’s main point (that religious fanatics won’t leave him alone) by trying to paint him as hypocritical as concerns his Agnosticism and the stated aims of his film. Perhaps Maher is hypocritical about his Agnosticism. Not having seen the movie, I don’t really know, but I would point out that if Maher devotes most of his film time to spoofing Christians then that is certainly consistent with the idea that he’s motivated more by a desire to be left alone than he is by Agnostic Evangelism, whatever that would mean. Perhaps Maher didn’t make that point clearly enough for D’Souza, but I doubt he would deny it in an interview if asked directly.

The point is this: certainly I can agree that if you not only believe in the Sky Bully but also that He wants you to go out into the world and convert everyone, that you might feel some sort of moral obligation to pester people to think like you. But surely the burden of proof is on you. In fact, nothing in Matthew 28:19 seems to suggest otherwise. The Bible doesn’t say “go out into the world and throw a temper tantrum every time someone fails to be persuaded.” Nor does it say “if anyone finds you unconvincing, immediately launch a character assasination against that person.” The way I read it - admittedly with an unbeliever’s bias - is that it says what anyone versed in logic already knows: that the burden of proof is on the person advancing the theory, never on the person who has reason to reject it.

As an Atheist myself (I take it a step further than Maher: I am an Atheist about unicorns, and I am an Atheist about God … and about everything else that seems unlikely, carries no explanatory power, and is in any case not reliably attested, for that matter), I can say without hesitation that I am generally willing to leave religious people alone to do whatever it is they do. As D’Souza says, I do not know what happens after death, and they might. So fine - they are free to lead their lives in accordance of whatever knowledge they believe themselves to have. What they may NOT do is put the onus on me to accept their knowledge (and the lifestyle they derive from it) without making a convincing case. I do not seek to change them; it is they who seek to change me. That puts the ball in their court, and I’m really getting tired of hearing them whine that not every serve we deliver sets them up for a slam.

The head is on the fence. Someone put it there. It seems a lot more likely that that someone was Japanese soldiers than Chinese civilians. But I’m willing to drop it if you are, since neither of us really knows. What I’m not willing to do is accept, on the basis of my challenge to your frankly disingenuous attempts to pretend that there was no massacre in Nanking when there patently was, that I’M somehow the more deceptive and hypocritical of the two. And so it goes with religion. You guys started it by passing blue laws, and trying to put Creationism in school textbooks, and banning sodomy even between consenting adults, and All that Other Stuff that amounts to nothing other than attempts to control people’s behavior based on a theory for which you have been unable, for 2000 years running, to produce any evidence. If we raise a gun to defend ourselves against being mugged at gunpoint, it is hardly becomming to point to our gun as evidence of any inherently violent nature on our parts.

Yes, for what it’s worth, I agree that people like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins (and especially the odious PZ Myers) are behaving childishly. It would be far better for Atheists to just ignore Christians. After all, we’re not the ones with a burden of proof to meet, and releasing books and movies like Dawkins’ and Maher’s sort of draws and artifical line to hold when none is really there. More importantly, Atheism is not even a creed, let alone one that needs to be evangelized, and Dawkins and Maher muddy that point for everyone. But I do object to attempts like D’Souza’s to put us on moral equivalence. We are not morally equivalent. We are not the ones who tell you how to live, and we are not the ones who need to justify our beliefs to you. The burden of being convincing is on you. So start meeting it already if you really do have a basis for your beliefs, and stop with the ad hominem distractions. If you don’t want to explain how the head got on the fence, fine. But you’re going to have to at least address the issue of the massacre that took place nearby that is the most likely explanation for its being there.

I’ve never seen Sex and the City, and I have no plans to see the movie. But it’s a cultural phenomenon, and so I have been reading articles about it here and there. In one by Kathryn Lopez, I stumbled across what may be one of the best, most concise statements of my complaints with the current dating culture.

The movie, like the series, is an important cultural contribution. It’s a mirror. And you don’t have to be promiscuous or crass like Carrie and Samantha and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) tend to be to see a reflection. There is a real focus on men, and on what women do to men: Women don’t forgive men. Women don’t think about men and their feelings. For as sensitive as the modern man is supposed to be to a women’s feelings and as sensitive as a man is supposed to look, he’s not really supposed to register an opinion. Or slip up. Or be honest.

Indeed. That’s a nice summary of frustrations I’ve had in a large number of my relationships. In particular, I think, the bit about forgiveness. People screw up - and that means the woman as well as the man. When I forgive a girlfriend, even for “major” violations like cheating, she gets a clean slate. There may be some teasing here and there afterward, granted, but “I forgive you” means “we’re starting over.” It means she doesn’t have any hoops to jump through; it means there are no grudges; it means that I don’t emotionally blackmail her by constant petty reminders of things she’s done. I agree to share some of the burden and do some of the work, even though it’s not technically my fault or responsibility. That’s what forgiveness is.

Another supposed “girls’ show” (though I’m starting to have my doubts just how feminist it really is) - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - comes to mind here. In particular, the episode I Only Have Eyes for You - a second season bit which deals with forgiveness. If you haven’t seen it I won’t ruin it, only to say that the plot is a contrivance by which the character having difficulty understanding forgiveness ends up in the shoes of someone who needs it. Notable dialogue is Giles, explaining the concept to Buffy:

To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It’s not done because people deserve it, it’s done because they need it.

Right. Forgiveness is not fair or just, and it’s most emphatically not about evening the score. There’s forgiveness for the same reason there’s charity. Yes, ideally everyone carries their own weight and is never a burden on anyone else. But here in the real world, people frequently make mistakes, get things wrong, and end up relying on others for things they have no right to ask for. We keep the whole messy thing going by occasionally “writing off debts,” if I may speak that way about relationships. If you go into a relationship honestly, with open eyes, then you know that your partner is going to screw up eventually - because everyone always does. If you really care about the person, you accept that, and you accept the mistake, and you move on.

Naturally, there are limits. You can’t forgive someone who has no serious desire to reform, for example. People screw up once, twice, maybe even three times if they’re weak (and we’re all weak in our ways). If you find yourself forgiving too often in short time span, however, it may be that the other person isn’t really devoted to you, or is starting to take you for granted - and in that case it’s time to seriously consider leaving, naturally. Relationships can’t be carried by only one partner.

And that’s exactly my complaint with a lot of the women I’ve dated. By this definition of forgiveness, I really wonder whether any woman has ever actually forgiven me for the times I’ve screwed up. When I think back to my dating history, I can think of one genunine example. That’s not a very good track record for the fairer sex.

I’ve frequently been in situations where I’ve been told I’m forgiven, of course. But it never seems to be actually true. First, to even get to the point where you’re (nominally) “forgiven,” you have to go through the whole weepy confessional conversation, which doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose except to have you repeat endlessly that you’re the one in the wrong. What generally comes next is rarely a simple “I forgive you.” Instead, we have to plan out how we’re going to build our relationship back up, which invariably includes enumerating all the things that are going to be different now that trust has been injured, or whatever. And then, forever after, whenever there’s an opportunity to bring it up in a not-so-veiled hint, that opportunity is virtually never wasted. Calling this kind of behavior “forgiveness” is Orwellian, really, as it’s nothing of the kind.

I’ve never understood the point of all this. It’s damaging, it’s NOT “commitment,” and it’s certainly not a path to happiness - for either partner. More than that, it’s simply unrealistic. People are not perfect, and I think the danger of shows like Sex in the City is that they teach people to make a sport out of finding fault. Things have improved from times past, to be sure. Girls these days know that Prince Charming isn’t coming to make everything better for them, and that’s a step. But they still act as though they deserve Prince Charming, and that’s a problem.

Giving up on finding the perfect mate isn’t selling yourself short - because there’s still plenty of room to be choosy from among the pool that’s available. And let’s be clear about this - people SHOULD be choosy. No self-respecting person wants less for themselves than the best they can get. It’s demeaning both for you and your partner if you settle. But the “best you can get” - that goal that you strive for - should still be something that actually exists.

Fantasy can be useful if channeled properly. Indeed, the human ability to imagine - to see things not as they are but as they should be - is probably one of our greater adaptive assets. But like anything, too much of a good thing can really come back to bite you in the ass. Forgiveness is a constructive channeling of fantasy, I think. Once the dastardly deed, whatever it may be, is done, it’s done; there’s no way to undo it or to completely forget it. So we do the next best thing: we summon an act of will and pretend it never happened. I don’t mean “pretend” in the sense of rewriting the facts in our memories, of course, but in the sense that we choose to act as if it never happened, to hold expectations as though it never happened, to carry on as though it never happened, etc. A destructive channelling of fantasy is when you endlessly blame people for not being exactly what you wish they were, or what you’d hoped they would be, or what you were imagining they’d be. If someone isn’t what you want, then leave them and go find someone else. If someone is what you want but made a mistake, forgive them. And if you only want things you know you’ll never find, then I’m sorry for you.