Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
SplendorQuest: Phenomenology



I love the movie Phenomenon. I thinks it's about as close to perfect as Hollywood can get. The main players--John Travolta, Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker and Robert Duvall--are amazingly well cast, and they all give amazing performances. But the look and feel of the film is also perfect, as is the score and the writing and the story itself.

It's a Flowers for Algernon yarn, but the idea of a man becoming increasingly more intelligent is more plausible because Travolta's George Malley starts out as a very normal, very likeable man. I love Whitaker's portrayal of Nate Pope, a completely rural black farmer with no connection at all to the black subculture. Sedgwick plays Lace Pennamin, and her hurt and fear and compassion give her a very winsome verisimilitude. Robert Duvall plays Robert Duvall, but he's perfect, as always. The film is marred in some of the lesser roles, cast from bad television dramas. But the decision to hire David Gallagher and Ashley Buccille as the Pennamin children, Al and Glory, was inspired.

The story follows George Malley as he becomes progressively, amazingly more intelligent. It is inspiriting because he also becomes more loving and more loveable. I hate the miraculous or mysterious in art, but as implausible as all this sounds, writer Gerald DiPego provides a plausibly realistic explanation. To reinforce this, Director Jon Turtletaub continuously calls our attention back to the world of real experience. It all works beautifully, the script, the acting, the visual storytelling and the music. In the most amazingly romantic scene ever committed to film, Aaron Neville sings Crazy Love as Lace cuts George's hair and then shaves his beard.

The whole film is truly phenomenal. Near the end, George equates quantum physics with the Holy Eucharist. Soon after, Judas Iscariot--FBI Agent Jack Hatch played by Bruce Young--declines to deliver the fatal kiss. The face acting at that moment is worth the price of the DVD by itself.

This is a movie worth owning and treasuring, and I say that because I think Hollywood is going to do its best to destroy it. Tonight on ABC, a film called Phenomenon II premiered. The cheesy look and feel of real TV movie, with the predictable cheesy acting. The writing--again by Gerald DiPego--was TV movie awful, also, which makes me wonder how much dialogue was rewritten on the set of the first of these Phenomena.

In any case, the obvious purpose of the film is to launch a television series. To that end, the first half was devoted to back-story, retelling the original story on horseback, with some significant changes. The ending of the original Phenomenon precluded sequelization and serialization, so some inconvenient details had to be written away. Sadly, all the actors are second rate, and the Nate Pope character is now white and serves mainly as a reaction-take foil, just another Goober, which is sad. George Malley's extraordinary mental powers are improved beyond plausibility, also: He can premonitor future events and perceive by super-sensory means.

The second half of the film is the TV series pilot. Newly-minted genius George Malley escapes the nefarious FBI/NSA/DoD nexus and becomes an itinerant healer of battered souls. It's The Fugitive meets Touched By An Angel meets Hack, the insipid CBS drama about a vigilante cab-driver.

I hate the whole idea of Superman fiction, but what I hate most about it is that becoming Superman requires the victim of super powers to become a Super Socialist, devoting himself to the selfless service of other people. The George Malley of the original Phenomenon was admirable in no small part because all he wanted to do with his intelligence was live his own life, pursuing his own interests, loving his wife and becoming a worthy father to her children. The George Malley of the TV series, if it is picked up, will waste his life poking his nose into other people's intimate business, then will effect a miraculous deus ex machina cure of all their problems by the fifty-third minute. Blech!

Even if it is optioned, the TV series won't last. I mourn for DiPego, who had such a beautiful original idea and is now pissing all over it, but it won't last. And the DVD of Phenomenon, the only true Phenomenon, will be out there forever.
posted by Greg Swann at 11:57 PM

 
A letter to a friend in Baghdad...

Hey, Cowboy,

Busier than hell as we prepare to roll out our new business model--which you can't see much of without the Internet. But I wanted to take a moment to address the questions from your letter.

I think the War on Terror is a good thing. The war in Vietnam was a cynical geopolitical Chess game, a matter of keeping an opponent from capturing territory, rather than a crusade to rescue the millions of innocents imprisoned and slaughtered by Communism. There were Americans who opposed Communism for principled reasons. I was one of them, and Communism was ultimately destroyed by another--Ronald Reagan. But the overall U.S. policy from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter was a cynical equivocation among paired and polarized evils.

This is not the case with the War on Terror. I attribute political goals to U.S. policy beyond the immediately obvious--but I freely concede that I could be wrong. Either way, the immediate objectives are incontestably good: The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the institution of a stable representative government in the midst of the random tyrannies of the Middle East. The immediate goal of saving the lives of Iraqi innocents in good, and the long-term potential of saving Americans, Europeans and Israelis from terrorist acts is good.

I don't approve of governments or taxes, and these are meta-evils that we must address at some point. But the emergency posed by terrorism is immediate, and government and taxes are the ways Americans have right now of responding to this emergency. And where before foreign policy was a game played by kings, and disputes arose when a king abused another king, not when a king abused his own subjects, President Bush has brought us to a brand new kind of foreign policy in which the king's abuse of his citizens is the issue at contest. Bush argues, in effect, that just as you have the right--but not necessarily the duty--to intercede in behalf of the victim of a mugging, so too does the United States have the right to intercede in behalf of the victims of mass slaughter. I don't think governments can claim to have rights, but surely the mass slaughter is the greater crime.

Teasing at a hornet's nest brings out the worst in the hornets, and that seems to be a mid-range objective of the war: To draw every Islamic hothead on the planet to Iraq to pursue Jihad, dead or alive. This puts your skinny ass at risk, and I hate that. But terrorism against armed, organized, well-trained forces is politically more palatable, in the long run, than airplanes crashing into skyscrapers. So if you're telling me you are only willing to commit your allegiance to non-cynical politicians, you have a wait ahead of you.

From my point of view, here in the sun and safety of Phoenix, President Bush has a chance to save the world from another Dark Age, a pandemic religious tyranny from which true civilization might never again emerge. This seems like a worthy goal to me. No man is perfect, and governments are cynical and corrupt by their very nature. But doing nothing promises, at the least, more terrorism and more slaughter of innocents by tyrants. And at the worst, the worst of the Islamists will conquer the globe, inch by inch, country by country, and the fire of the illimitable human mind will be forevermore extinguished from the Earth. This is a fate thoughtful people could make an effort to avoid, I think.

Either way, Andy, any way--you're committed. I hate the risk you're taking, but I'm very proud of you for taking it. Keep your head down and bring yourself home alive. We'll continue to send you every bit of fattening junk food we can find at Costco, but nothing compares to the treats at the Paradise Valley Mall, so come home and get some.

Very Best,

Greg
posted by Greg Swann at 12:40 PM

 
Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold

By Townes Van Zandt

when the wicked king of clubs awoke
it was to his queen he turned,
his lips were laughin' as they spoke.
his eyes like bullets burned.
"the sun's upon a gamblin' day."
his queen smiled low and blissfully.
"let's make some wretched fool to pay."
and plain it was she did agree.

he sent his deuce down into diamond,
his four to heart, and his trey to spade.
three kings with their legions come
and preparations soon were made.
they voted club the day's commander.
give him an army, face, and number.
all but the outlaw jack of diamonds
and the aces in the sky.

well, he give his sevens first instruction:
"spirit me a game of stud.
stakes unscarred by limitation
'tween a man named gold and a man named mudd."
and club filled gold with greedy vapors
'till his long green eyes did glow.
mudd was left with the sighs and trembles,
watchin' his hard earned money go.

flushes fell on gold like water.
tens they paired and paired again.
but the aces only flew through heaven
and the diamond jack called no man friend.
the diamond queen saw mudd's ordeal.
began to think of her long lost son.
fell to her knees with a mother's mercy.
prayed to the angels, everyone.

the diamond queen, she prayed and prayed,
and the diamond angel filled mudd's hole.
then the wicked king of clubs himself
fell face down in front of gold.
now three kings come to club's command,
but the angels from the sky did ride.
three kings up on the streets of gold.
three fireballs on the muddy side.

the club queen heard her husband's call,
but lord, that queen of diamond's joy
when the outlaw in the heavenly hall
turned out to be her wanderin' boy.
now mudd, he checked, and gold bet all.
mudd he raised, and gold did call.
and his smile just melted off his face
when mudd turned over that diamond ace.

now here's what this story's told:
you feel like mudd, you'll end up gold.
feel like lost, you'll end up found.
so amigo, lay them raises down.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:33 PM

 
Unmigratory birds...

It's coming on Winter in the Sonoran desert, an idyllic time when the temperatures rarely break out of the mid-80s (yes, you read that right). It's nippy at night, of course, since we have so little water in the air to retain the heat of the day. And it's nippy enough by now that the migratory birds have started their daily conferencing, at dawn and dusk, to see if it's time to fly South for the Winter.

I remember this warmly from my youth in downstate Illinois. I have fond memories of the harvest time generally, and I wrote about this in Cinderella's memories of the zoo, one of my favorites of the Willie stories. I had a newspaper route when I was a kid, and at this time of year the birds would gather in an enormous Oak tree at dawn and at dusk to confer. Thousands of birds, all of them chattering all at once. It was a beautiful kind of cacophony, and I would time my deliveries to be there when they were there. I don't like anthropomorphism, so I won't invent a dialogue for them, but then and now I could imagine their discussion. The would meet every day, dawn and dusk, until one day they would be gone. All of them, all at once, all flown away for the Winter as their tree grew icicles where the birds had once stood.

They do it here, too, every day, dawn and dusk. You have to know where to go to find them, since they only pick special trees, immense enough to accommodate them all. As the nights start to get cold in the desert, they congregate every morning and every evening to have their debate. Every day, day after day, all Winter long. For as cold as it might get on particular nights, it never gets cold enough for long enough for the birds to come to their decision. They meet every dawn and every dusk and never, ever migrate. Soon enough the Spring comes and the nights warm up, and the birds stop congregating, never having determined to fly South, never needing to. Until the enterally mild Winter comes again to the Sonoran. Then they do it all over again, every day, dawn and dusk, all Winter long...
posted by Greg Swann at 10:45 PM

 
Odysseus and willful agency



When I adopted this goofy dog, I didn't know how much I would grow to love him. He's with me much of my day and night, and I rejoice that we're coming on to the six-week-long Sonoran winter, so that he can go on car trips with me. I have written lovingly about my dogs Shyly and Desdemona, but Odysseus is by far my favorite. I admire him so much that I'm building my entire business around him!

But as with Desdemona, he's smart enough to create epistemological problems for me. Like Ayn Rand, I am a materialist, and like Ayn Rand, this creates a real problem for me with respect to will, volition, free moral agency. Rand got around it by waving her hand and raving about axioms. Most thoughtful Objectivists get around it by saying "compatibilism", which to me looks like hand-waving wrapped in a fig leaf. My friend Jim Klein makes an arresting argument, half of which has had me stopped for some few years now.

The other half of Jim's argument is a rationale for compatibilism, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. But the first half is perfectly consonant with materialism--and with physics as we understand it for now--and that's the creepy part. If the physicists are correct, not only is there no need for a referent called "will" to describe human behavior, the investment we make in the word "behavior" is also wasted. Looked at in a timelike fashion, "duration" might non-starter.

Please understand, I believe in free will. But I recognize that all the evidence of physics--that we have so far, an important caveat--is with the physicists. The evidence I have for free moral agency is introspective and observational--essentially anecdotal. There was a time in my son Cameron's young life when he would play with coin-operated video games in their demo mode, never once suspecting that none of his mad moves with the joystick had the slightest effect on the activity on the screen. He did something. The screen changed. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, after this, therefore because of this. Yes, the young are easily fooled, but, sad to say, most of us are young forever. I may yet turn out to be one of the eternally youthful, cranking away at my videogame demo, unalterable in se, convinced that my frantic action is affecting the outcome.

But I watch my dogs, and my son and my wife, and I don't believe it. I said this to Jim just over a year ago:

The claim, here defended only by observational evidence, is that the motivated actions of a living organism are predicated upon a motivating cause, unique to organisms, that is not itself the inevitable consequence of an existing causal chain. When we say that organisms are self- or autonomously- or internally-motivated, this is what we actually mean. This is what I mean by the cause in organisms, as distinguished from the purely physical cause. A higher form of the cause in organisms is volition, the ability to choose among perceived alternatives, which is evident in mammals and perhaps other higher animals. A still higher form is volitional conceptuality, which occurs in human beings--genetic homo sapiens who have been raised by human beings.

It is important to understand that if the (attestedly) motivated actions of organisms are in fact nothing other than the inevitable consequence(s) of existing causal chain(s), then any argument for free moral agency must fail.

As science, this is heresy of the first water. When you say something like this, the physics geeks start sputtering, "G-g-ghost in the machine!" It's true enough. Those little paragraphs argue that the motivated actions of organisms are causes ab initio, not inevitable effects of prior causes, themselves the inevitable effects of still earlier prior causes. It's not that important with respect to yeast in a cask of wine, I suppose. But it matters a good deal when you stop to think of the cask and the wine, which were either caused by the will of the winemaker or were, instead, causally foreordained and utterly unavoidable in the very germ of the universe.

Jim likes the idea of a compatibilist kind of free will in humans, but he truly hates the idea of volition or anything like it in other organisms. I think the second half of his argument contradicts the first half. But as well-supported as the first half is by physical evidence, I think the conclusions it leads to so strain credulity as to render it ludicrous. When the present universe was just a gleam in the last universe's eye (or whatever), it was causally foreordained not only that my wife Cathy would buy honey cake one year for Rosh Hashanah--this predicated by zillions of prior unavoidable causes, including Judaism, for heaven's sake!--but that our dog Desdemona would be so much smarter than an ordinary dog that she would figure out how to steal and eat that honey cake--this again predicated by zillions of prior unavoidable causes--even though all of "figuring out" is attested to be off limits to dogs.

I wrote this to Jim at about the same time last year:

When I open the Arcadia door, two of the four dogs will go bounding outside, and Desdemona will follow them when ordered to do so. Shyly, our other bitch, will always choose to stay inside. Her constant preference is to remain with me, so she only goes outside voluntarily when I do. This is will. This is choice. It's not free will, chosen after a process of deliberation. She cannot conceptualize: She always turns three times and scratches the tile before she lays down, because she cannot conceive that since there never have been snakes in the tile, there never will be snakes in the tile. But much of her behavior is willed, and this is true of all normal mammals. It is conceivable to me that volition is what it mammal brain does.

I can think of dozens of other examples, but it's important to take this no farther than it goes. Animals cannot reason, nor can they recollect in any organized fashion. The dogs have their second feeding at nine o'clock at night, and by an incredible feat of pattern-matching, Desdemona always "knows" when it's nine o'clock; she's never wrong by more than four minutes. But I have all the dogs snowballed into "believing" that they cannot be fed without first going outside, and so they dutifully go outside in order to "cause" me to feed them. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, after this, therefore because of this.

That leads us to this: In the morning when I wake up, eventually I will feed the dogs. But first I might go to my office to check my email, or do some other errand. Odysseus has taken to "directing" my movements with his snout. Where the other dogs follow from the front, the way dogs do, waiting at the junctures to see where I'm headed, Odysseus has taken to staying behind me and then nudging me at each turn in the direction he wants me to take. Nudging me toward his breakfast.

This is volitionality. This is an organized series of actions motivated by the pursuit of a goal. It is not conceptual volitionality. Epistemologically it is borne of simple pattern matching, and it is "defended" by the post hoc fallacy, as all the "conclusions" of animals must be. Arguably, Odysseus is engaged in a dog-analog of "persuasion"--in effect "acknowledging" not only his own volitionality but also mine.

The argument I make in Shyly's delight is the one that matters to me. I can attend to Jim's case or dozens of others, superficially different but all ultimately absurd. But when I look at my son or my wife or myself--my self--I know that good behavior is chosen and bad behavior is chosen and choosing to behave always wisely, always well, is neither unavoidable nor accidental.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:54 PM

SplendorQuests