THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
01/06/06 -- Vol. 24, No. 28, Whole Number 1316
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Fantasy World Faux Pas (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Religion, Ethics, and Genetics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Feeding the Birds (letter of comment by Charles S. Harris)
UBIK (letters of comment by Charles S. Harris and
Joseph T. Major)
GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
MUNICH (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading ("A Logic Named Joe" and BOOKNOTES)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Fantasy World Faux Pas (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I thought I was getting along all right with Mr. Beaver, in spite
of the fact he clearly did not like the huge fur coat I was
wearing. He made clear that beavers did not like to see people
wearing fur coats, and I really couldn't blame him. Still overall
he was the friendliest talking animal I had found since I came
through the back of the wardrobe. But I quickly discovered there
were certain subjects *not* to bring up. I asked him what line of
work he was in when he wasn't fighting for Aslan's return. He
looked perturbed and was quiet for an instant. Then he turned on
me with a sneer on his lips, He snarled, "Narnia dam business."
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Religion, Ethics, and Genetics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
In the 07/23/04 issue of the MT VOID, I made a rather flip and
whimsically-intended comment: "When we see the world enflamed in
fighting in the name of religion, it is easy to forget that
religion's original intent was to save the world from the moral
evil of atheism." It is an irony that has more recently and
expressed by other people is currently the center of some
controversy.
The standard Sunday school view of history is that the natural
state of humanity is evil and degradation, or at the very least
naughtiness. Frequently the concept of Original Sin is involved.
People have a view that religion came into the world to redeem
humanity and bring them to God's Will and His Grace. Humans
without God are programmed for evil. Some define virtue as doing
God's Will even if the actions otherwise seem immoral. There
also is the belief that nobody would be virtuous without a fear
of God's post-mortem judgement, that this is the only motive we
have for morality. The belief is that atheists must be immoral
because they do not believe in God's judgement, so have no reason
to be virtuous. Dostoyevsky said, "iIf God does not exist than
everything is permissible." Some believe that just not believing
in God is in itself immoral.
In any case we have a very Cecil B. DeMille-like image of people
without the enlightenment of religion falling, sometimes almost
immediately, into bestial orgies of sin, perversion, and other
pagan depravity. The moment people abandon the true religion, as
the Israelites in DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, they
degenerate, and it is only the word of God that brings them back
to decency and right. And that really seems to be the prevalent
belief of how it was, particularly when cultures clashed in
Biblical times. We have the view of all the sinning that was
being done in the time Noah or the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorra. Much of the American population believes that most of
ethical belief has its root in religious rules.
Today most religious people feel that the Israelites had a moral
superiority over the believers of pagan religions. The Sunday
school viewpoint is that the Israelites brought a wave of
morality sweeping into the ancient Near East. We like to think
that believers in Dagon and Baal were terrible and degraded
people. It is easy to believe that. None of them are around to
defend their creed, so we do not really know. When Christianity
spread to places like Hawaii in better documented times, the
morality of that action is easier to question. It is not as easy
to say that the pre-Christian Polynesian religions were morally
or ethically inferior to the religions brought to them by
missionaries.
Some philosophers, notably Rousseau, believed instead that humans
were born virtuous. I would like to consider the possibility
that ethics do not necessarily come from religion. In my opinion
there actually may be a genetic basis for ethics and morality.
It may well be that humans have some instinct for morality and
ethics without having to be given these concepts by religions.
It may well be that our ethics are programmed into us
genetically, not necessarily taught to us by religions.
The question one might ask is whether any ideology--and a belief
in morality is an ideology--can have a genetic basis. Do genes
have the possibility to inspire thought patterns along a certain
line? I think that they could, and what convinced me they could
is what I have heard of canine behavior.
So do I believe dogs have an ideology? In a way they do. They
decide that certain behaviors are a good idea. Somehow retriever
puppies all get the same idea that it is a really great game to
have someone throw them a stick, to find it, and to bring it
back. It is a behavior that seems very natural to retriever
puppies and they all get the same idea. This does not seem to be
passed to them culturally from other dogs. They get the idea on
their own. Terriers somehow similarly get the idea that it is
great fun to dig in the ground. Husky puppies will on their own
decide that it is fun to pull things. These are not what we
consider full-blown ideologies, but they are ideas. The concept
of instinct, I think, comes and goes from favor in the scientific
community, but a much of animal behavior is hard to explain if
behavior and belief is not part of their genetic programming.
Over the last few years there has been discussion as to whether
spirituality might be part of some people's genetic make-up.
Dean H. Hamer published a book, THE GOD GENE: HOW FAITH IS
HARDWIRED INTO OUR GENES. People have been talking about this
thing called "the God Gene." This gene would make people more
susceptible to feelings of having mystical experiences and make
people more willing to believe that these feelings are divinely
inspired. In a sense these people with this hypothetical gene
may be programmed for religious faith. It is not too much more
of a stretch to believe people could be hardwired for ethical
behavior.
Certainly many aspects of even human behavior are hard to explain
if one entirely rejects the ideas of genetic hardwiring and
instinct. There seems to be a sort of genetically programmed
ideology even in humans. There is even a mechanism for
explaining why some ideas may be in the gene. Richard Dawkins
suggests in THE SELFISH GENE that much of human behavior can be
explained as subconscious (or deeper) and implicit survival
strategies for preserving not oneself necessarily but copies of
one's genes. Why are people attracted to the opposite sex? It
also happens to be a good strategy for getting genes into the
next generation. Nobody thinks explicitly that preserving his
genes is important, but if some set of genes do pre-dispose their
owner to pass on his genes, those genes are more likely to get
into the next generation.
Ethical behavior might be quite likely to have a genetic basis.
People who are highly unethical create conflicts that they can
easily lose. There would be positive survival value to having
genetic programming that makes people greedy enough to fight for
their own survival, yet not so greedy that they endanger others'
survival. There could be genetic programming to co-exist and to
even to team up to help others in society keeps the gene pool
large enough so that it does not lead to in-breeding. This could
well be a genetic survival strategy. Nature may actually select
for programming that leads to ethical behavior. Humans may well
have an instinct for morality. And the answer to the religious
question of what motive is there for morality if not rewarded by
God is that morality may increase the probability for survival.
Some religions would like very much to be associated with ethics.
They would like to be seen as the only path to an ethical and
moral life. A co-worker who was known for his religious
fundamentalist viewpoint debated me on the subject of religion at
one point, trying to convert me to his viewpoint. He asked me if
the reason I resisted was that I was afraid of the high moral
requirements of his religion. He made what is a standard
assumption that other fundamentalists have made that he was on
what we both assumed was a higher moral plane than I was because
he was his religion and I was not. And from his point of view
and in the view of his religion that was true. Earlier in the
argument we had discussed the ethical treatment of animals. I
considered it very important and he just dismissed it with the
statement that the Bible says that man was given dominion over
animals. He assumed there was no ethical reason for better
treatment for animals because he knew from his book that it was
not required. His religion had high moral standards because he
did not accept the validity of any moral standard not espoused by
his religion.
I have always been skeptical of the association of religions and
ethics. I have frequently wondered if certain religions were not
over-stressing belief and faith and even music, but were not
strongly acting as moral compasses for their members. At least
if they were they were not moral compasses that agreed with my
own.
I think religions would want to take credit for a strong ethical
basis that frequently is imaginary. Religions frequently take
credit for things that may have nothing to do with them. If a
church member gets sick, it is bad luck. If the member gets
well, it is God who gets the credit. It is just good business
for the church to give God credit for ethical impulses.
The best way to see if ethics are really possible without
religion would be to look at atheist societies and see if they
devolve into immorality. Certainly in the 20th century some
atheistic governments were highly immoral. Dictators like Josef
Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot have been responsible for mass
murder and even genocide. It would be a mistake to ignore them.
But there are several largely-atheist societies today that are
much more ethical (e.g., Scandinavia). I would say that if a
dictator has control of a country and is bent on very unethical
acts, those societies frequently become extremely evil. It is
the powerful dictator, not the people, who lack the moral resolve
to know right.
Certainly if one reads the headlines of a newspaper, a great deal
of the violence in the world today has a religious basis. And
wherever it happens it seems it is people who have no doubt that
what they are doing is God's will. They may delegate their
consciences to a book or a religious leader. Ironically some
societies in which religions play less of a role seem to be
functioning considerably better. I recently read the article,
"My Heroes Are Driven By God, But I'm Glad My Society Isn't" by
George Monbiot that appeared in "The Guardian"
(http://tinyurl.com/cdrjn). In this article Monbiot presents the
idea that secular democracies seem to function better than
religious ones. He quotes the following by Gregory Paul writing
in the Journal of Religion and Society:
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator
correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult
mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion . .
. . None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies
is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction." Within
the United States, "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south
and midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth
pregnancy, marital and related problems than the north-east where
. . . secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach
European norms".
The original article with the formidable title "Cross-National
Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular
Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" by
Gregory Paul, can be found at
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
Now a correlation does not show cause and effect, but the
correlation certainly does not seem out of line based on
experience. It certainly does show that religion is not doing a
very good job in limiting crime and extending morality. People
with a strong faith that their actions can always be squared with
God are very likely to associate that with license.
I suspect that humans are born with conflicting urges, both
having their origins in their genetics. One urge is for the
social order that will provide their genes with a stable gene
pool. The other is aggression, which protects genes more
directly. I think that humans, as thinking beings, generally can
balance these two urges and that the urge for social order does a
reasonable, though not perfect, job of holding the aggression in
check. The young learn early to check their aggressive
tendencies. Some of the social democracies of Europe are
examples of this.
Religion is one of the ideologies that can come along and
override the genetic urge for social order. It frequently says
that the intuitive morality is a false one and that the true
morality comes from only God. As soon as it offers a substitute
morality, the conflict between aggression and morality finds an
entirely new balance. Morality can come to mean aggressively
enforcing some human's interpretation of God's rules. It offers
those who would want it what is de facto a licensed exemption
from common morality in the name of God. It can bear a message
that what is claimed to be the "real" morality allows and may
even require aggression against non-believers. Historically the
result has been burning at the stake, stoning, and religious wars
at the extreme end, but can also include intolerance for non-
conformity and rigorous enforcement of tradition. The religion
offers some a licensed exemption from common decency and even a
moral compass that points in the direction of aggression.
If one looks at the greatest man-made ills of the 20th Century,
perhaps all history, they mainly come from ideologies--religious
or secular--that offer a higher cause than intuitive morality.
They offer a supposed superior morality that allows aggression to
be done in a cause superior to common decency. That cause can be
nationalism, socialism, racial superiority, or frequently
religion. In short, religions are extremely unreliable
authorities on morality. [-mrl]
[For science fiction treatments of the "God gene" and similar
ideas, see Robert J. Sawyer's HYBRIDS and Greg Egan's
"Oceanic". [-ecl]]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Feeding the Birds (letter of comment by Charles S. Harris)
In response to Mark's comment in the 12/30/05 issue of the MT
VOID ("[F]eeding wild birds may actually change their migration
plans. They may stick to an area where someone is feeding them
well now, but will not be in this future."), Charles Harris
responds, "Ah yes, but assuredly someone will be feeding them well
in *some* future--very likely in an infinite number of them,
according to some of my cosmologist friends. The birds just have
to figure out which timeline they're on." [-csh]
===================================================================
TOPIC: UBIK (letters of comment by Charles S. Harris and Joseph
T. Major)
Evelyn wrote in the 12/30/05 issue, "Our science fiction
discussion group read UBIK by Philip K. Dick ..., a novel that we
all agreed was fairly incomprehensible the first time through."
Charles Harris points out, "This leaves a misleading impression,
by not mentioning that at least two people chose to re-read UBIK
at least twice, and found it more comprehensible and more
enjoyable each time. (One person didn't like it at all--ditto for
MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE--and one other's judgment was--and still
is--hard to discern.)" [-csh]
And Joseph Major writes, "There is one factor that, I think,
makes UBIK so hard to comprehend the first time around, and that
is the change-of-pace in mid-novel. At first, the book is
a--shall we say --"psi-thriller", about the government's war
against the evil psis. Tom Clancy writing for John W. Campbell
in the Fifties, in the height of JWC's psi mania, could have done
something like that. Then Dick takes the book on one of his
reality trips. [-jtm]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Familiar monsters are attacking major international
cities. Toho again bids farewell to their Godzilla series. This
final film offers a lot of sound and fury and weaves fourteen
copyright Toho monsters into one plot, but the film offers
nothing that is both new and of interest. The plot is a re-tread
of that of DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. There is a lot of action and
some nostalgia, but it is one of the worst Godzilla plots in
years. Rating: low 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
Toho could have called this film SAYONARA KAIJU as they make what
is claimed to be their last Godzilla film and probably their last
kaiju (or giant monster) film. They clearly wanted to go out on
a spectacular note, even if not a very intelligent one. Well,
this is a spectacle as Toho's monster films go. It offers
martial arts fighting, motorcycle chases, a new alien race
threatening Earth, fourteen monsters from previous films, the
Tri-Star version of Godzilla, the submarine from ATRAGON (though
here it has been re-dubbed Gotengo), and some MATRIX-style
imagery. It would be offering a lot if the plot were
interesting. It is instead a weak re-tread of DESTROY ALL
MONSTERS.
The countries of the world are tired of being prey to kaiju and
have built an Earth Defense Force (isn't that the translation of
the original Japanese title for THE MYSTERIANS?). They are a
team of special martial artists. (I guess you never know when
you will get a chance to use kung fu on 200-foot lizard.) They
also carry huge guns the size of tree logs like the ones from MEN
IN BLACK. Oh, I should mention that they are all mutants. Their
DNA has in addition to the five bases: adenine (A), guanine (G),
cytosine (C) and thymine (T), they also have a fifth base called
the M-factor. The M-base is never specified. Technically you
can't have five bases in DNA because they pair up. A and T pair
up; C and G pair up. The M-base is left sitting the dance out
(unless maybe it pairs with itself?). But nobody at Toho seems
to have thought out the science. They are too busy setting up
motorcycle chases.
The strange genetic base has something to do with an alien race
called the Xilians, (pronounced "Zillions" by the Japanese and
"Zailians" by the American submarine commander). Gigan also
shares the base. He is the aliens' primary cats-paw, though they
do seem to control almost all of the monsters in the Toho
catalog. (Sorry, no MechaGodzilla and no Kong, but the Toho
Godzilla does get a chance to lambaste the Tri-Star Godzilla.)
Most get a short time on screen with the big G before getting
trounced. They could have left out the monsters that are not
very interesting like Gigan and King Caesar (or Seesar) who looks
like a giant version of a Flash Gordon Lion Man. The monsters do
behave in ways I have not seen before. The Anguilus, for
example, can roll up into a flying ball of spikes, looking not
unlike an airborne sea urchin. (Or rather what a sea urchin
would look like if it was somehow airborne.) Rodan flies at
super-speeds thanks to the partial compromise from man-in-suit
monsters to CGI renderings.
The style is way too hyper-kinetic. For the fans at least there
is use of some of the classic monster calls. Anguilus has his
original call from GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. Rodan has his monstrous
version of a bird call. Disappointingly, I don't think we get
the original Godzilla voice until the end of the end credits.
The film has an unpleasant rock and roll score, and the best
music is reused from previous films. There is some self-
indulgent scene composition, like posing Godzilla dramatically in
front of Mount Fuji. And there are numerous product placements.
For a final film I think that Toho was too anxious to please and
threw in everything any of the kids in the audience might want.
That includes a lot more bullets and violence than I remember
from previous chapters. The result is decent only if you want to
see a lot of the old monsters one last time. Otherwise it is a
mess and rates only a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MUNICH (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Following the terrorist murder of eleven Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, an Israeli Mossad officer
is asked to lead a five-member counter-assassination squad to
track down the Munich terrorists and eliminate them. Eric Bana
leads a cast of familiar actors in a tense but realistic looks at
the dirty business of undercover work. Rating: high +2 (-4 to
+4) or 8/10
I came to this film more or less expecting a dramatization of the
1972 terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. Somewhat to my
surprise after the first ten minutes it appeared that the account
of the incident was over. Although there are two sequences later
in the film in which the main character imagines how it must have
been during the massacre, the film is not really about the events
in Munich. Instead it is about a five-man team of agents for
Israeli intelligence that is sent out to track down the PLO
perpetrators and kill them. I immediately suspected the film was
going to be very much like the 1986 HBO movie SWORD OF GIDEON. I
did not realize until later that both films are adaptations of
VENGEANCE: THE TRUE STORY OF AN ISRAELI COUNTER-TERRORIST TEAM by
George Jonas.
The five men are a hand-picked team, though none seems to have
had much experience at precisely this kind of work. They are
essentially talented amateurs. Eric Bana (of BLACK HAWK DOWN and
HULK) plays Avner who was basically an air marshal when he was
asked to head the team. He finds himself a denizen of the shadow
world of agents and killing with none of his team having the kind
of experience or knowledge they would inevitably need. Among the
team members are Steve (Daniel Craig, soon to be the new James
Bond, here with an Australian accent) and the urbane Carl (Ciarán
Hinds who recently play Julius Caesar in HBO's ROME.) This is a
humorless account of the serious and dangerous business of
assassination. The men find it difficult to make themselves
killers or even to accept that that is their occupation. As they
go from country to country--Italy, France, Britain, Holland,
Lebanon--they have to learn and be comfortable in a world where
they are both hunters and quarry, only slowly learning to be
either.
This is a nerve-twisting drama of fairly ordinary people dropped
into a world in which one never knows his friends from his
enemies. In the fog of war one never knows for certain who might
be working for whom. One is never sure if at the last moment
fate may put someone innocent at the wrong place and time. A
high priority is to not injure the innocent. They are both proud
and ashamed of their work.
At the center of the story is the question of the morality of
murdering murderers. As Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) says "Every
civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its
own values." And there is the danger that they will find
themselves compromising so far that they justify the actions of
the other side. And even if their killings are justifiable, do
they actually do any good in killing people who will quickly be
replaced by others just as bad?
People think that Spielberg's films are light and insubstantial.
Yet his MUNICH shows the effects of resisting evil. His
SCHINDLER'S LIST shows the result of not resisting enough.
Between them they give a bleak outlook. And the best we can do,
as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN suggests, is to respect and honor the
people who battle in our name to resist such an enemy.
Most of the color is drained from the photography so that it has
a chilling and bloodless effect. This film takes place in a
world devoid of warmth. The story has the feel of authenticity,
though the events of the book it was based on have not been and
cannot be confirmed. Still, the story is as intriguing and tense
as anything written by John le Carre. I rate MUNICH a high +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster (available in NESFA
Press's FIRST CONTACTS: THE ESSENTIAL MURRAY LEINSTER, ISBN
0-915-36867-6) was recommended to Mark as very prescient. A home
computer realizes it can tap the network of such computers (which
Leinster calls "Logics") to help humanity in ways that had not
been realized before. "Announcing new and improved Logics
service! Your Logic is now equipped to give you not only
consultative but directive service. If you want to do something
and don't know how to do it--Ask your Logic!" So people start
asking, "How can I get rid of my wife?" and "How can I keep my
wife from finding out I've been drinking?" And they get useful
answers. I tried these with "Ask Jeeves", the only search engine
I know of that claims to take straight English-language
questions; it did not give me anything useful. But the idea that
someone could query the network for information about how to
obtain a poison or build a bomb is very topical, and possible.
Given that Leinster wrote "A Logic Named Joe" in 1946, or sixty
years ago, that's pretty impressive. (KIRKUS REVIEWS calls it
"the first computer-paranoia yarn.")
BOOKNOTES: AMERICA'S FINEST AUTHORS ON READING, WRITING, AND THE
POWER OF IDEAS edited by Brian Lamb (ISBN 0-812-93029-0) is a
collection of brief extracts from the C-SPAN interview show of
the same name. Each is only four to six pages, just enough time
to get some information of the author, the subject, and the book.
In the interview with Shelby Foote, for example, we learn that he
took twenty years to write the three books of his Civil War
history. 1,500,000 words in all. By hand. With a dip pen. And
African-American Literary and art critic Albert Murray came to
New York in 1962 not for Harlem, but for the Strand and the
Gotham Book Mart. British historian Simon Schama responds to a
review that said, "Schama stoops to low journalistic devices in
order to arrest the attention of his readers," by saying, "That
was a very wicked thing to do. How dare I? I'm trying to arrest
the attention of my readers--it's much better if they fall
asleep." And Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer James Thomas
Flexner does not believe in word processors: "I think they make
books much too long." (Of course, given that Foote wrote 1.5
million words with a dip pen, I'm not sure one can *entirely*
blame word processors for this.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The real object of education is to have a man
in the condition of continually asking questions.
-- Bishop Creighton