The Ark and The Dove

The Big Bang?

I was recently given a copy of The Big Bang season 1.

My parents have been gushing about the show for a year now, but I pretty much never watch sitcoms...so this was my first encounter with the program.

Isabel and I watched the pilot last night and were a little confused. Are the main characters PhD's or grad students? They talked like they had already earned their degrees, but we couldn't understand why two scientists would be sharing an apartment in a nigh-condemned apartment building. Are they teaching at a community college and making peanuts or are they supposed to be someplace where rent is so steep that even science professors can't afford a house? Also, I don't understand why they are so poor that the show opens with them attempting to donate sperm so that they can afford better Internet connections. Actually, the bigger question is why...if their connections are so slow...they aren't either sitting in a coffeeshop using WiFi or IN THEIR LABS!!!! What young, single scientist is wasting time goofing off with his roommate and neighbors when he should be in his multi-million dollar government subsidized lab trying to get tenured or promoted???

If they were graduate students, I would almost sort of get it...although then I'd be alarmed by the amount of work they seem to actually get done in their apartment.

Also, the pilot seemed to fall flat with its gross gender stereotypes. Four scientists, and they are all men? The only girl in the pilot is a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory?

Worse yet, the only "chemistry" between the guys and the girl is that she is a girl. It's just sex...although I suppose that's only appropriate since the show is entitled The Big Bang.

Of course, this was just the pilot...and pilots are often shaky starts. That being said, Isabel and I have a theory that The Big Bang started as an American attempt to import Spaced the same way the Office was imported. In my imaginary realm, the shirts at the production company just didn't get Spaced and reduced it to geeky pop cultural references. (This theory was reinforced somewhat when we find out that the neighbor was recently dumped and has aspirations to be a writer.)

Thoughts?

Taxonomy of Faith

Just for fun, I thought I'd try to list various methods or types (species if you will) of faith. Feel free to play along in the comments. I'm just making these categories up as I go along, although I'm sure wiser men have already mapped this terrain.

"Blind" Faith: By blind faith, I will assert that species of faith which is unquestioning of the source of information. It takes all statements by a subject as revelation of truth or fact. Within this category of faith, there would seem to be at least two subspecies: unlimited and limited. Unlimited blind faith would accept all statements as individually true facts, even to the point of accepting obvious or direct contradictions. This seems the least plausible faith to sustain in the real world by a mature, competent adult. By "limited" blind faith, I would assert a species of faith that limits what it accepts as true to a particular authority or individual. This seems a more plausible form of blind faith and perhaps represents the type of faith exhibited by radicals and/or cult members. It rejects contradictions or employs reason when information is presented from sources outside of the authority, but it might still accept contradictory statements from the authority itself.

Skepticism: My understanding is that classical skepticism is defined not so much by its affinity for empiricism as it is by a philosophical realization that all knowledge is based on faculties that are subject to distortion and therefore liable to error. Modern skepticism, at least in layman's terms, seems focused instead on only accepting as fact that which can be visibly observed, demonstrated, and/or reproduced. Like blind faith, I assume that very few people are actually true skeptics in this sense. It's simply too irrational. Rather, most people probably refer to being skeptics only when it comes to matters of the supernatural or cryptozoological.

Semiotic-Rationalism: There seem to be hybrids between skeptics and blind believers that dismiss with supernatural and yet still want to cling to a certain "truth" behind statements of the supernatural. These are the types of people who reject supernatural reality of New Testament miracles by abusing Augustine's discussion of figurative language in the Bible. For these people, it is not simply the uncharitable portions of the Bible that must be read allegorically or metaphorically. They would advance that anything that sounds implausible according to our understanding of modern science must also be reduced to a metaphorical description of an event (e.g. Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes, he simply guilt-tripped his followers into sharing food; Jesus didn't physically rise from the dead...but the spreading of his message was a kind of resurrection).

Synthetic-Rationalism: Synthetic-rational faith would be that faith which does employ reason to question the consistency of matters of faith with its own internal logic as well as external ideologies. This kind of faith is necessary to the belief in miracles--it accepts as historical facts events that it accepts cannot have happened under any known natural means. It is also the kind of faith that is necessary to conduct higher order theological and moral discussions within a religion itself. This is the kind of faith that prevents an institution like the Catholic Church from reducing itself to limited blind faith to the pope, and it is what prevents popes from becoming all-out Antichrists. It is also why the Church takes great care before pronouncing on matters of faith and morals. The Church recognizes that it has an obligation not to present contradictions to the faithful--and that the faithful have the capacity to recognize those contradictions. I suppose it is also this kind of faith that enables one to believe in the Eucharist--allowing me to accept the physical accidents of the bread and wine without merely rationalizing it to mere symbolism as a figure (metaphor) for Christ's body. One would also like to imagine that it is this approach to faith that leads to conversion into one's Church...but that idea would, of course, also be subject to personal bias.

I would go so far as to say that synthetic-rational faith is the most mature of the four forms listed above since it seems to demand an awareness and even acceptance of all of the preceding forms at some level. Blind faith and skepticism seem immature modes of faith due to their absolutism. They are all-or-nothing approaches that seem the product of underdeveloped imaginations. Semiotic-rationalism seems to merely ape maturity. While it is imaginatively clever in its supposed ability to read between the lines, it seems trapped to forever ride an ultimately sterile one-trick pony. The synthetic-rationalist, trapped between two seemingly contradicting ideologies, seems to occupy that abundantly fertile space of intersection.

I'm not sure, though, that I would say that a synthetic-rational faith is necessarily the best or happiest mode of faith. One might say that "limited blind faith" is the most pure form of faith. A limited blind faith renders the believer extremely vulnerable to exploitation and can lead one to become an accomplice to evil. However, a limited blind faith attached to a true and benevolent authority probably yields the greatest form of happiness. The synthetic-rationalist is always in danger of slipping too far towards extremes--giving up the project in favor of a simpler, more temptingly comfortable worldview--of either denouncing the supernatural or too aggressively (defensively) asserting it out of his own repeating doubts.

Sometimes Iceland Really is Icy

I finally got around to watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

A small glimmer of hope still stuck in the back of my mind that maybe, just maybe, the movie wasn't really as bad as everyone said it was. Perhaps it was a conspiracy of critics...

Alas, the critics were all too honest and all to right. It was one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

That being said, there was a brief moment where the movie had potential. A White House liaison in the employ of Pres. Obama has been sent to the Autobot-assisted U.S. military base to assess the effectiveness of their operations. Later in the movie, he announces that the President has decided that the Autobots are in fact causing the Decepticons to violently attack civilians. This seemed a thinly veiled allegory on the perverse arguments that the presence of the U.S. military in the middle east makes it somehow responsible for the acts by terrorists in those regions. Even more provocative, there is a scene in which the Decepticons threaten global terrorism unless the U.S. government hands over one of its citizens. The movie makes it clear that Obama wants to initiate diplomatic negotiations with the Decepticons and keep the Autobots (and the military) out of the picture. That was probably the funniest and most entertaining part of the whole movie.

Everything before and after that sequence pretty much devolved to robot fart jokes, gonad jokes, gratuitous cutaway shots to Megan Fox's rear-end, or slow-motion running shots of Megan Fox's bosoms.

Isabel asked me to explain the plot of the movie afterward, and I found myself completely incapable of doing so. Not only was I suffering from the now banal claim that the robots were all ugly and indistinguishable, I also found that the plot simply meandered. Various plot points seemed to trail off without resolution and without callback. I'm not even sure which characters survived and which ones died...and that doesn't even get me to the point where I start complaining about character inconsistencies.

Since when does Megatron report to a higher authority? He's Megatron. He's a tyrant by nature. He can't tolerate taking orders from a superior. That's one of his conflicts in the far more philosophically superior animated film from the 1980s. When Megatron becomes Unicron's slave (and is renamed Galvatron), he is driven practically mad by his compulsory servitude...

But I digress...

Visual Studies

A recent Breitbart article mentions how video is driving a current boom in Internet use.

Video overcomes barriers of language, local content and literacy, he [Robert Pepper, a vice president of Cisco] said, allowing users to interact more easily with the Internet.

My problem with this paraphrase (who knows what he actually said?) is that it lists literacy among "barriers."

Literacy is not a barrier. Illiteracy is the barrier.

Literacy is freedom. It is a pathway. A vehicle. A liberating force that gives power to its possessor.

Illiteracy is a fetter, a shackle, a limitation on human potential.

The rise of visual culture threatens to thrust us into a pre-verbal age. It poses as a pseudo-freedom of expression.

This isn't to say that the visual arts as such can't be beautiful, expressive, or informative. Plus, written text is, after all, a means of visual expression.

But there are ideas and thoughts that are too complex (or perhaps too important) to be adequately conveyed without the use of formal language.

Random Sunday Night Blogging

1. Useless Idea: Someone should open up an anti-health food chain called O.B. City. It would sell all high-fat, mega-carb foods, like oreos dipped in chocolate that have been deep-fried and dipped in chocolate again.

2. I had been teaching a lesson on Samuel Johnson (that's Johnson not Jackson) a few years back and one of my students said it reminded him of the Imaginationland Trilogy on South Park. I can't remember for the life of me what the relation was, but I remembered the student recommending that I watch it when I found the DVD in Five Below yesterday. I have a great ambivalence for South Park. I can't really recommend this video to anyone. It has one of the most obscene, vile, horrible subplots in any piece of entertainment I have ever witnessed. I don't even feel comfortable describing the subplot on the blog for fear of the traffic it will draw to the site. That being said, the subplot worked aesthetically for the main theme of the episode, and the overall moral of the Imaginationland episodes was a satirical point that needed to be raised--that the difference between a terrorist and a mad bomber is that terrorism intends to exploit our imaginative capabilities whereas a mad bomber just wants to blow stuff up. My assumption (or hope, perhaps) is that the crudeness and filth in South Park functions to draw on a Comedy Central demographic that needs to hear its satire but that would otherwise not be receptive to it. That being said, I might not be keeping the DVD in my collection for fear of what future generations might think of me if they found it in my possession. It would definitely be a blow to any attempt at canonization.

3. Dreams. So I woke up from this dream yesterday where my family's now-deceased dog escaped from our backyard and got run over by a truck. Keep in ming that this wasn't how he actually became deceased in real life, it's just something I was dreaming. Anyway, what I found particularly interesting about this dream was the sequence of the narrative. The dog got out of the yard, I became concerned he would get hit by a car, I saw the truck, and saw my dog get hit by the car. This is interesting to me because it would seem to imply that the dream was subconsciously scripted beforehand. I'm assuming that my brain isn't like some kind of 3D simulator where different characters or props are floating around a map and can accidentally bump into each other. It's not like an imaginary truck just happened to barrel down the driveway at the same time as my imaginary dog just happened to escape. The truck was there because I was having a dream about my dog getting hit by a car; my dog didn't get hit by a car because I imagined a truck coming down the road. So at what point was the dream scripted? And did it really unfold in my mind in a chronological sequence, or was it all one data-package that I merely perceived as a chronological sequence in my mind's eye?

4. Aliens. I had a thought today about the conference on astrobiology that the Vatican. It produced a kooky idea for a fundamentalist science fiction novel. What if the first "parents" weren't actually the first homo sapiens sapiens of our current iteration on our planet? What if an earlier generation of "human" were wiped out in some kind of planetary cataclysm, but that evolution ended up re-evolving them all over again--or maybe re-evolving "fallen" versions of the original model? What if we were something like God's Human 2.0? This would make either the exile from Paradise or the Flood some kind of allegory for life escaping the homeworld and seeding a new one. I'm talking speculative fiction here, folks, so don't cry heresy just yet. Now that I my idea typed out, I think I just managed to recreate Douglas Adams' script for the Dr. Who "City of Death" mini-series...so...uh...never mind.

"Among Other Things"

Drudge has linked to an article about the Vatican hosting a conference on astrobiology--the somewhat speculative field of science concerned with the possibility of extraterrestial life and, perhaps more significantly, the possibility that life arose on Earth as a result of being "seeded" by space rock. In the course of the AP article, a reference is made to Giordano Bruno who "was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited."

According to Wikipedia (I know, I know...but it's late at night, and I have homework to do...) the "other things" he was accused of include:

• Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
• Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass.
• Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
• Dealing in magics and divination.
• Denying the Virginity of Mary.

Just sayin'.

Teaching Shakespeare as a Foreign Language

Isabel and I are always tossing justification for our profession back and forth.
These kinds of conversations obviously pick up around this time of year -- job hunting season.
Why are we doing what we are doing? What's the point? Is it worth it?

From a practical standpoint, these questions take a secondary importance to me since my more immediate vocation (as I see it) is to provide for my wife and future kids. Ideology aside, I'm willing to teach this stuff so long as the pay is good. One must eat.

Still, one must question the means by which one eats. If I were to conclude someday that there was something sinister afoot in my profession, I would have a moral responsibility to subvert or leave it.
I don't think we're quite there yet.

Typically, people justify teaching English with arguments such as

it teaches critical thinking skills useful for the workplace

it makes people better writers in the workplace
it makes people better able to express themselves
it makes people better citizens by showing them points of view different from their own (usually the point of view of the disenfranchised lower classes)
it "humanizes" students (whatever that means anymore)
it makes like more livable

These are all well and good, but I can't confess that any of them seem sufficient reasons to pursue a career in this field...and none of them seem valid reasons to encourage a student to major in the stuff.

But watching my students struggle so painfully with merely comprehending the centuries-old forms of English that we read makes me think that there is perhaps another reason worth pursuing this field.

One of Chesterton's pithy sayings considers how the truly democratic mind considers not only the opinions of those alive but those dead as well, that the wisdom of those gone before us ought to be consulted alongside the opinions of today. I'm not suggesting that we read literature as part of this trans-temporal democracy, although that certainly seems one way to do it.

Rather, what I'm attracted to is the idea that I'm teaching students how to comprehend and understand a foreign, alien, different cultural artifact.

To what end?

Many who lived and wrote in the Renaissance would argue that the purpose of the exercise should be, ultimately, to learn virture -- to perfect nature through art -- to be led by entertainment towards a nobility of soul.

I find that last part to be tricky in this modern, secular age. I don't know that I trust myself, or my colleagues, to shape students' morality.

In which case, it seems as though my job points towards teaching students how to read literature in order that they might enjoy literature. It's really the job of the literature to nudge them one way or the other morally. You can't enjoy it, if you can't understand it...which leaves me in the awkward position of the man who is constantly trying to make people laugh not by telling jokes but by explaining them.

But Will it be a Movie Worth Protesting?

Ain't It Cool News...a cool geek culture website whose grammatical syntax I often find very difficult to parse...has a blog post on The Vatican Tapes.

It looks like this is supposed to be some kind of Blair Witch Project meets Paranormal Activity meets Dan Brown. The premise seems to be that the film pretends to be leaked footage of a botched exorcism (because, you know, exorcists video tape these things all the time so they can watch highlight reels later).

More Thoughts on Potter

Anti-Semitism rampant at Hogwarts:
I don't want to classify this as anti-semitism on Rowling's part, because it might just be the perception of her characters. Nevertheless, some anti-semitic character descriptions still seem to bubble up. In particular, this seems to be the case with Prof. Snape. Harry is convinced that Snape is a conniving, ambitious villain. Rowling describes him as "hook-nosed." He is seen as essentially engaging in nepotism regarding Slitherin House, and accused of trying to poison other professors. The latter is, I am sure, going to be debunked in the story, but the fact of the matter is that the kids see this guy and cast him as the typical medieval stage-Jew.

Anti-Catholicism at Hogwarts?:
On page 101 of Azkaban, a knight in a painting wanders off into another painting containing an image of "some sinister-looking monks." Now, she doesn't identify what kinds of monks these are. They could be pagan Druidic monks or Tibetan monks. However, one would think she would specify either of these two categories since they are probably not what the average person thinks of when they imagine a monk. At the very least, I think it's safe to say that Catholic readers are going to see the word monk, and imagine a Franciscan or Dominican...and be very put off with the description of them being sinister. I was.

Genetic Superiority:
On page 103, Prof. Trelawney asserts that only those with the Sight will be able to succeed in her class. The others will simply not be able to do it at all. Again, I'm completely sympathetic to the view that some people are naturally more talented and gifted than others...but I'd like to know from where Rowling thinks "the Sight" originates in her fantasy world.
That being said, this issue actually brings up the first interesting conflict in the novel so far. Hermione and another professor have been dismissing the Divination class as hogwash. This suggests that, finally, there is some place for rational skepticism in this world. Unfortunately, it becomes clear very quickly that Hermione's skepticism is derived from an immature jealousy, since she seems to lack "the Sight" and therefore will not be able to succeed in this class as she has in all her others. This renders skepticism a somewhat bogus ideological standpoint, although I suspect Rowling will redeem her text by falling somewhere in the middle. My suspicion is that Trelawney's premonition about Harry Potter is essentially accurate but that she has misinterpreted the signs. Thus, while skepticism of "the Sight" is unwarranted, one must still be skeptical of the interpretation of signs. This dismantles skepticism as a scientific tool, but preserves skepticism as deployed in the humanities. I predict (so to speak) that psychic phenomena occurs is not to be questioned in the novel but that the meaning of psychic visions is still subject to deconstruction.

Three other quick points:
1) Is Lycanthropy a stand-in for AIDS? (And, for that matter, is Lupin a werewolf because his name means "wolf," or is his name Lupin because he is a werewolf? And if you were a werewolf and didn't want anyone to know about your disease, and your name was Lupin, wouldn't you change your name? Or at least ask everyone to call you by a nickname? Or am I assuming too much...My guess is that the potions Snape is giving him to drink are supposed to suppress his AIDS...er...lycanthropy. And when Snape fills in for Lupin and teaches the course on protection against werewolves, is this some kind of AIDS prevention lecture?)

2) Do kids see this book as a commentary on school violence? The Dementors at every door become like surveillance cameras or metal-detectors. When the Fat Lady painting is attacked, Hogwarts essentially goes on lockdown. I wonder if this book was influenced by recent attacks on schools...

3) I want to start modelling my pedagogy after Snape's. I should start dividing my classes into houses and give them "points."