There is a feature article on Richard Dawkins in the September 2005 issue of Discover magazine, by Stephen S. Hall, Darwin’s Rottweiler. It isn’t in the archives yet – only the first few paragraphs are on line. Hall credits the title of his article to Alister McGrath, in his book Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. It plays on the nickname for Thomas Henry Huxley – Darwin’s bulldog. It also plays on one of the nicknames – God’s Rottweiler – given to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) by the media for his ferocious defences of Catholic orthodoxy during his tenure as prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It implies that Dawkins is dogmatic and intolerant. Hall presents an overview of Dawkins’ work, with some attention to his limitations as a communicator. He is a good writer, and presents science to the general public in clear, accessible and poetic language. He is a well-recognized celebrity intellectual. Hall reports on Dawkins’ appearance in a panel discussion on the usual issue – how scientific views of evolution and religiously based views of a divinely created world should be presented in public schools. He reports on Dawkins’ turning on people who agree with him that Creation science and Intelligent design are phony, because they say they have religious beliefs and can reconcile scientific theories with their own religious belief. He seems to alienate them, and parts of a a friendly audience. Dawkins seems to have earned the Rottweiler nickname honestly. In spite of his charm, intelligence, and verbal skills, his social and political judgment seems to be impaired. This has allowed religious writers like McGrath to marginalize him as a fanatic, and to discredit his arguments.
Ruse on Evolution
In May, the Boston Globe (online) published an interview of zoologist, philosopher of science and popular writer Michael Ruse discussing his new book The Evolution-Creation Struggle. More recently, the American Scientist Online published another interview. The book expands on the arguments made in an article Is Evolution a Secular Religion, published in Science Magazine in March 2003.
I noticed a preliminary review of Ruse’s book and commented on it in an entry called Atheists, Darwinists.
Moaning about MT
I have been committed to Movable Type, but I have had some problems with it. When friends like Randy with history and good connections in blogging talked about changing to WordPress, I tried to compare the products. I think SixApart and MT will lose ground if SixApart doesn’t address some problems. I don’t want to spend time on importing entries and writing new stylesheets and templates for a WordPress blog. For the time being, the balance of convenience favours staying with MT and hoping for improvement.
The Conquest of Happiness
The English writer, mathemetician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness in 1930. It was written for a general audience. It has aged well.
Essay on Anti-Semitism
This essay – The Anti-Semitic Disease – by historian Paul Johnson, published in Commentary is certainly interesting. It has some good information about the history of anti-semitism in the West and in the Arab World, but it takes an odd spin.
Crash
Crash – the 2004 movie written and directed by Paul Haggis – is excellent. I missed it in its first theatrical release, but it is still playing in the second run theaters in Winnipeg. Haggis is a Canadian who made it in LA, writing for TV. I liked his work on Due South. He made a move to feature films a few years ago and his screenplay for Million-Dollar Baby has been highly praised.
His membership in the Church of Scientology was in the news when he left it in 2009.
Crash follows several sets of unrelated characters as they run into each other, over the course of couple of days. Two young black men jack the District Attorney’s car, freaking out his wife – Sandra Bulloch is brilliant as a self-centered, privileged bitch, proving that she can act outside the box. When they get home, she had her husband change the locks, then complains loudly that she does not trust the Hispanic locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena). Daniel absorbs the abuse quietly, goes home and finds his daughther hiding under the bed. He has moved his family to a safe neighbourhood, but she was frightened by the sound of distant gunfire. He gives her a magic inpenetrable cloak, in a beautiful scene of parental love. Farhad (Shaun Toub), the owner of small convenience store, middle-aged, Iranian, fearful, paranoid, buys a snub-nosed revolver from a racist gun store owner. Two cops pull over a black producer and his white wife – their car is a Navigator like the DA’s car, although the licence plate doesn’t match. The senior cop, Sgt. Ryan (Matt Dillon) harasses and abuses the couple. He is a racist, grieving and angry about his father’s health, carrying a grudge against affirmative action programs which drove his father out of business and into poverty. Don Cheadle, playing a homicide investigator, is drawn into the DA’s orbit when he investigates shooting of a black, off-duty police officer shot by a white police officer. The DA and his sleazy political operative want him to spin the investigation and suppress evidence make sure a white man gets charged because the DA is worried about the black vote. Cheadle’s character is navigating grief and shame – a drug addicted mother who wants him to save his younger brother, missing, and a criminal. He is having an affair with his partner Rea (Jennifer Esposito) but keeping his distance, wounding her with racial remarks about Hispanics.
The acting is brilliant, characters are engaging, the mood and pace of the film are maintained well, the story drives forward. It is an emotionally engaging, intellectually challenging story of conflict and ethics.
For the first half hour, every character except the locksmith Daniel is angry and self-absorbed, unattractive, unworthy of any sympathy from the audience. Some are fearful, some have more power, some feel oppressed, some feel screwed. No one trusts anyone. Everyone thinks he or she is alone, unsupported and vulnerable. Enemies and threats are identified by logical but stereotyped profiles. Everyone lashes out verbally. Racial conflict runs through everything. The metaphor isn’t as much urban jungle or state of nature as human atoms colliding randomly, with terrible energy.
I won’t spoil it. There is violence, and people die. There are moments of redemption – heroism, random acts of kindness, arcs of anger and violence suddenly failing by chance, moments of grace.
Brilliant.
Crap in the Forest
Forests of the Night by James W. Hall is to be avoided. I picked it up at the library, hoping for a good story to fill in the long weekend. Hall is an experienced writer with many books to his credit, in the suspense and mystery genre. The quotes on the jacket were positive – but I should have been tipped by the fact that most of them related to his work in general, not to this book.
Video Game Theories
Journalist and writer Steven Johnson (Steven Berlin Johnson) has been riding a wave. His latest book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter presents a defence of video games. Before he became the leading apologist for the video game industry, he wrote an emerging technology column in Discover and had written a few books on technology, communication and popular culture. His writing supports and justifies the role of new toys in popular culture. Sometimes a hint of mystical reverence for the power of change and progress creeps in.
Last Friday (July 29) the Winnipeg Free Press published Getting Too Serious about Play, credited to Johnson and the Los Angeles Times. I found this short opinion piece published by the LA Times on July 27 – Hillary vs. The XBox which made the basic points, although it seemed to be shorter than what I read in the Free Press. He also has a feature article in the July issue of Discover Magazine titled Your Brain on Video Games. He was interviewed by the Washington Post in June.
Law and Literary Criticism
An essay – Gone Fishing – by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.
The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish’s ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish’s relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.
Some of Fish’s ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader’s response to the story depends on the reader’s way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.
Fish’s suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons – rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.
Back to the Cuckoo’s Nest
Theodore Dalrymple’s essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession’s ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.
His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient’s capacity, and not on whether the patient’s decisions correspond to a psychiatrist’s assessment of what is a patient’s best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.
His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault’s argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments – bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn’t help to identify or answer Foucault’s critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.