Friends of humanity?

Recently I have reason to comment on George Carlin in a couple posts, one about "rights" and another about environmentalism. I would now like to point out that, although Carlin is often taken for a hero among freethinkers, rationalists, and secularists, it is immensely ironic to consider Carlin a "humanist." In the previous post, about environmentalism, I discussed a clip of Carlin ridiculing eco-friendly worries, a clip in which he also rather gleefully ponders how planet Earth would rid itself of the human species. As his "poetic" AIDS-scenario indicates, as well as many other nihilist reflections, Carlin is profoundly misanthropic, perhaps even zealously anti-human. In his Life Is Worth Losing set, for example,––the set he headlined in Las Vegas until his abuse of the audience got him fired in 2005––, Carlin pontificates, "[W]hen nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse." If that's the case, on what grounds, I wonder, does Carlin fault God for not making life get better? This is Carlin the moralist wagging his finger at a fallen humanity and praying for a kind of hell on earth as cosmic retribution, a point not circumstantial to Carlin's biography. It is also another instance of the point I made in a post about "environmental eschatology", namely that all 'deep' humanist views of the world inevitably generate an eschatology, a final judgment, a kind of hubris allegedly unique to "religion."

But I digress.

The fundamental misanthropy of humanism is evident, albeit in a similarly anecdotal fashion, in a post by Volker the Fiddler arguing for an end to human reproduction. Precisely in order to ensure a happier future for humanity, Volker urges mankind to stop bearing children, a moratorium he himself endorses as far as the idea of having children repulses and fatigues him. The good of humanity, thus, lies in the suppression of the good making of humans.

A double irony lies in the alleged humanism of transhumanism, à la Ray Kurzweil's dreams of a better future for mankind by way of technological hybridization: "humanity as we now know it" is ridiculed and, indeed, scorned, rather like the bourgeoisie is loathed in Marxism, precisely because it is such a meager detriment to True Human Potential (there's that insidious ultimate finality again!). Anyone who would defend "traditional human values"––little things, like eating food, raising crops by hand, having sex with the genitals, aging well, growing through pain, dying with dignity––is not only laughably atavistic but also a threat, a threat to "the greater good" of "future generations." Humanity must be saved from itself by being "phased out" and "upgraded." Those, of course, who do not comply, will both be weeded out by natural selection and will be punished as dissidents against The Rise Of A Superior Race. Living for the birth of the Master Race hasn't sounded so noble since, well––let's not go there!

At least Christianity, and traditional moral religions, have the consistent audacity to say, not that people must be saved from "human existence," but from sin. The structures of "being human" are not inherently wrong––things like cities, courts, families, property, sports, nations, etc.––but they are mangled by being wielded without a proper relation to God, their source and judge. A Carlinist or a transhumanist says the human world as we know it is a sham and a disgrace and an outrage, which much be overcome (Hegel! Marx! Nietzsche!) either by sneering mockery or sleek technological "progress." Unfortunately, though, an atheist like Carlin––as well as a transhumanist, who by definition regards all human conditions and values as totally historicized, relative, and malleable––has no grounds on which to say any of the all-too-human foibles he lambastes are wrong or sinful; he can only say he finds such foibles stupid. Well, I learned as long ago as kindergarten that if all someone has against you is that they think you're stupid, just ignore them and keep doing what you're doing. I doubt I'm the only person who realizes that accusing something or someone of "rank stupidity" is a sign of ignorance on the part of the accuser. We fear what we don't know and we loathe what we don't understand, so I am most inclined to see the bulk of George Carlin's comedy as one long screed of ill-informed loathing for normal human existence which he, from his godlike position of moral superiority, finds both incomprehensible and despicably human. I have little to no doubt George Carlin spend much of his loathing the fact that he was a human just like the rest of the idiots he made a career of belittling. According to a Wikientry on Carlin, "Carlin openly communicated in his shows and in his interviews that his purpose for existence was entertainment, that he was "here for the show." As he himself said in his You Are All Diseased set, he pronounced, "I have always been willing to put myself at great personal risk for the sake of entertainment. And I've always been willing to put you at great personal risk, for the same reason!" Carlin sure sounds like a "funny" man. I imagine camping trips with him would have been heaven on earth. I don't know enough psychiatric jargon, but I'm pretty sure that compulsive obsession with the faults of anything and everything is its own kind of mental illness. Would it be too much to say that Carlin was a comedic sadist? Did he make a living out of having social Tourette's syndrome?

I want to add, as biographical proviso, that, despite how critical I seem to be of Carlin, I think he is a brilliant performer and sometimes dead-on in his social satire. His shakedown of the self-esteem ideology and the decreasing value of "being special" in a world where everyone is declared to be special is a wonderful thing to see! As with so many sharp minds, though, I think Carlin's Achilles' heel is that he was not profound enough, not critical enough. He was raised a Roman Catholic in "White Harlem," but he sloughed off his piety and sense of divine mercy without ever losing his Catholic sense of moral outrage. Sadly, this makes him a very funny American Pharisee. Had he pursued the obvious learning he enjoyed, I think he would not have been as satisfied with his "critical" outlook as his fans seem to be. As Francis Bacon said in "Of Atheism", "[A] little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." At the end of the day, and, sadly, at the end of his life, it was easier for George Carlin to grumble and whine than it was for him to say anything positive or really salvific about a world he only tolerated with scornful amusement.

Am I allowed to laugh now?

Whenever people say something like, "You know, Rowan Atkinson is actually quite intelligent," they are betraying at least one of two things.

Either they are perplexed, and not a little troubled, by the fact that someone "otherwise intelligent" would produce something like Mr. Bean. Citing Atkinson's actual intelligence is for them a way of legitimizing how silly, how pointless, Mr. Bean is. There's a method to his madness, you see, so, while they personally don't "get the joke," they can reassure themselves that Atkinson himself isn't really like that, doesn't really find it amusing.

Or they are anxious about the fact that they secretly love Mr. Bean and cling to Atkinson's actual intelligence as a way of justifying their own enjoyment. It's not simply mindless fun, and certainly not low humor, since, after all, the performer is actually quite intelligent.

This dynamic lies behind the frequent adulation "freethinkers" have for George Carlin, about whom I have written before. On the one hand, some fans might realize how arch and unreasoning Carlin's shtick often is, and so they advert to his obvious intelligence to buttress what they realize is little better than the ramblings of an angry drunk man. This is what Crude aptly calls "reverse strawmanning". On the other hand, perhaps fans really take all––or nearly all––of Carlin's pontifications to be rationally sound and compelling. When, however, someone begins to critique the logic, coherence, or relevance of what Carlin actually says on a particular topic, the fans advert to Carlin's actual intelligence––such as his love for physics––as a kind of blanket defense. The critic is allegedly missing the point, since, while Carlin may not have expressed himself flawlessly in this or that instance, "he's actually very intelligent," so his larger point of view holds. So there! Now shut up and laugh!

(As always, I want to go out of my way to say that I really do respect George Carlin as a comedian and rhetor, and, if his loyalty to his daughter is any indication, as a father. I don't deny for an instant that he makes me laugh, consistently, and pretty much always makes me at least grin. His delivery is one of the best in the business and he brings a great deal of insight into social foibles to the stage. When I disagree with Carlin, therefore, I do so either for intellectual or ethical reasons, as I have explained before. I have no axe to grind against Carlin, and I even pray for his soul.)

Some jokes can be denounced for intellectual reasons but I think we all know few if any jokes can be redeemed with an intellectual certification. A defense of a comedian which points more to his education than his material, more to his daily eloquence than his on-stage delivery, is just an elaborate form of "explaining the joke." Nearly all funny people are intelligent, but only a few intelligent people are funny.

Help me out here…

How can there be essential, universal human rights if there is no essential, universal human nature? To whom or what are the rights ascribed if there is no substance from which they derive?

I can call for universal Smurf rights but obviously those are pure fictions. Why, then, if "human nature" is just a historicized myth, are human rights no less fictional?

We grasp, however, that certain rights are universally valid––and that certain misdeeds against the bearers of those rights are universally wrong––, therefore essential human nature exists.

In the following video clip, George Carlin lampoons the very idea of "having rights":



Note a precious irony, however: In the very course of arguing against the reality of rights––by showing how useless "citizens' rights" were for Japanese-Americans in 1942 when they were arrested in interment camps––Carlin implies there is something wrong with imprisoning citizens in interment camps, which is to say, humans have a right to be treated better! Carlin is right (…) to say that Americans enjoy "privileges" as opposed to rights, if by that he refers to the historical fragility of human rights which renders them into mere privileges under a hostile regime. Otherwise, it is a fallacy of equivocation, since "rights" can mean both conventional and absolute proscriptions. Indeed, precisely because rights which are granted by human authority alone can be, and are, violated at a moment's notice, as Carlin is wont to note, we have a valid recourse to a superhuman authority in order to ground the very right to protest violations of our rights and those of others.

His argument, however, that "rights aren't [natural] rights if they can be taken away" is erroneous, in the same way that saying "abilities aren't [natural] abilities if they can be taken away." For while I naturally have the ability to speak, I can lose this ability, as, for example, how the "innocent Russian believer" in Andrei Rublev during the Tatar siege of Vladimir was deprived of his ability to speak and walk by being beaten, branded, bound in gauze and having molten brass (?) poured down his throat, just before being dragged to death by a horse (at the junction of parts 12 and 13 on Youtube). Does anyone have the "right" to do that to another human being? Does anyone have the "right" not to have that done to himself? I suspect Carlin would say no and yes, in that order, but only to make more stale anti-religious hay. After all, why else did Carlin rail against "bullshit" so often if not to defend his right and ours to the truth? If truth is merely a privilege, then lying is a privilege of equal ethical merit.

Love the Earth…

…or else!

At Just Thomism, Chastek made a comment about the recent BP oil snafu, which led me to ponder natural teleology. In response to a link to an article by Glenn Garvin, he said,

I’ve seen this too and been struck at how little is said in public about mother nature’s ability to recover. This is not to say that we should not be doing everything possible to fix the leak – just that we have to have confidence in the Earth’s ability to heal itself… another reason I don’t give much credence to the “danger” of man-made global warming. I get the impression that when Earth sort of feels like: “you wanna fight, punk? Bring. It. On.”

Before getting to my thoughts on teleology, I want to provide some commentary on the Macondo oil spill and ecological disasters in general.
In the article to which Chastek was replying, Garvin reports:

Thirty-one years since the worst oil spill in North American history blanketed 150 miles of Texas beach, tourists noisily splash in the surf and turtles drag themselves into the dunes to lay eggs.

"You look around and it's like the spill never happened,'' shrugs Tunnell, a marine biologist. "There's a lot of perplexity in it for many of us.

For Tunnell and others involved in the fight to contain the June 3, 1979, spill from Mexico's Ixtoc 1 offshore well in the Gulf of Campeche, the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico conjures an eerie sense of deja vu.

Like the BP spill, the Ixtoc disaster began with a burst of gas followed by an explosion and fire, followed by a relentless gush of oil that resisted all attempts to block it. Plugs of mud and debris, chemical dispersants, booms skimming the surface of the water: Mexico's Pemex oil company tried them all, but still the spill inexorably crept ashore, first in southeast Mexico, later in Texas.

But if the BP spill seems to be repeating one truth already demonstrated in the Ixtoc spill ... that human technology is no match for a high-pressure undersea oil blowout ... scientists are hoping that it may eventually confirm another: that the environment has a stunning capacity to heal itself from manmade insults.

"The environment is amazingly resilient, more so than most people understand," says Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist with advanced degrees from Florida State University and the University of Miami who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

"To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades ...But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again."

A couple weeks ago I read a similar essay by Elliott H. Gue, an investment consultant with a focus on energy development. Gue's article argues, first, that the earth has a profound ability to recover from ecological disasters, and, second, that an irrational Chicken-Little hysteria about the doom to be wrought by the BP leak will harm good investing and development down the line. Gue begins by placing the current Macondo oil snafu in rough parallel with the Ixtoc spill:

On June 3, 1979, workers aboard the Sedco 135-F semisubmersible drilling rig located in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche removed pipe from the Ixtoc-1 well to change the drill-bit.

During this routine process, oil and natural gas under tremendous geologic pressure overcame the weight of the drilling mud and the well blew out. The blowout preventer--a device designed to close the well in the event of a just such an emergency--activated but wasn’t powerful enough to shear through the thick pipe being pulled out of the well.

The result was devastating. Hydrocarbons gushing from the well ignited at the surface, and the 63 rig workers, some injured and burned, were rescued before the rig sank. Gas bubbling from the well continued to burn on the surface long after the rig went down.

In the late 1970s, the Bay of Campeche was still a relatively young hydrocarbon-producing region. The largest oilfield in this area is Cantarell, a giant field discovered in 1976 that produced more than 2 million barrels per day at peak production in 2003-04.

These young fields offered huge production rates because reservoir pressures were still high and oil flowed rather easily into wells. Although that was great news for the Mexican oil industry, it represented a significant problem for Ixtoc-1; the well gushed oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico for some time.

Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico’s national oil company, made several attempts to plug the Ixtoc well, including pumping drilling mud, scrap rubber and other debris into the well under high pressure--the infamous top-kill. PEMEX also installed a containment cap over Ixtoc in an effort to collect some of the hydrocarbons flowing from the field.

But all of these efforts failed, and the well continued to spill oil into the Gulf of Mexico until PEMEX completed two relief wells that intersected the blown-out well. At that point the company was able to pump mud and cement into the well to plug it permanently.

The bad news: It took PEMEX nearly 10 months to drill the two relief wells and stop the spill. Over 290 days, the well gushed oil at an uncontrolled rate. The Ixtoc spill is estimated at 3.3 million barrels (138.6 million gallons) of oil.

The Ixtoc disaster had a significant environmental impact. The oil flowing from the well drifted into US waters, and tar balls washed onto Texas beaches. Mexican beaches also were heavily oiled; the bird population suffered, and commercial fisheries had to be closed for a time after the spill. Studies showed that biomass--the quantity of animal life in the region--fell more than 50 percent for some species in the immediate aftermath.

But most marine biologists who studied the after-effects of the spill were surprised at how quickly the Gulf recovered. In the warm waters of the Gulf, oil degrades at a far faster pace than it does in colder conditions; the basic rule of thumb is that for every 10 degrees Celsius oil degrades at about twice the speed. Accordingly, the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska took much longer to break down than the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil and gas leaks into the Gulf and have occurred for thousands of years. Oil naturally seeps from subsea reservoirs all over the world; producers even look for natural seeps as an indicator of good regions for further exploration. Although the exact amount of oil seepage is unknown, estimates suggest that 1 to 1.5 million barrels of oil (42 to 63 million gallons) leak into the Gulf of Mexico each year.

He concludes this section of the essay by saying:

Mother Nature has a way of taking care of herself; the Gulf’s waters contain natural microorganisms that break down oil.

By most accounts, local fisheries had recovered to more or less normal levels within two to three years after the Ixtoc-1 spill. Some believe that fishing bans in the wake of the spill alleviated overfishing in the region and helped total population.
Gue then comments on the popular reception of Macondo:

Macondo is likely to be a smaller spill than Ixtoc, though the latter was technically a much easier spill to manage because the water was only 160 feet deep and the well could be accessed by divers and from the surface. Nevertheless, it took PEMEX 10 months to drill the relief wells and bring the gusher under control. It’s a testament to the improvements in oilfield technology that relief wells located in 5,000 feet of water take less than half the time to drill as they did in 1979.

And although PEMEX tried unsuccessfully to contain the spill under a dome, BP’s recent efforts to funnel oil to the surface appear to have worked--an impressive feat given that this particular containment system had to be installed remotely by robotic submarines 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea.

But the press has made scant mention of Ixtoc. Most prefer to call Macondo the largest spill in US history and compare it to the Exxon Valdez. Although this claim is likely true, the media neglects to mention that BP’s disaster isn’t the largest spill to impact the Gulf of Mexico.

Even assuming only modest success with containment and an August completion of relief wells, the Macondo spill is likely to be far smaller than Ixtoc.

Of course, differences between the two spills might increase the Macondo’s impact. That list includes the leak’s proximity to sensitive coastal wetlands and the fact that microorganisms that break down oil are likely more active in shallower waters.

My point is simple: Macondo is an environmental disaster, but investors must separate pre-election political rhetoric and sensationalist media coverage from reality and history. Odds are that Macondo will turn out to be far less of a disaster than BP’s most vocal critics suggest.

You can get a similar, more historically sober perspective on Macondo by reading Steve Harvey's article on California's Lakeview oil flood in 1910. Harvey opens by saying:

Horrific though the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been, its output is still short of what occurred a century ago in scrubby brush about 110 miles north of Los Angeles — site of the Lakeview gusher.

While some experts believe the well off Louisiana has spewed upwards of 60 million gallons of oil into the gulf, the Lakeview well rained about 378 million gallons over an area between the towns of Taft and Maricopa.

The spill following the April 20 oil rig explosion in the gulf is, of course, a much bigger environmental and economic disaster. But the two wells had one thing in common -- neither could be immediately capped.

Lakeview's geyser of crude, in fact, flowed for more than 17 months.

No one, and few plants or animals, lived in Lakeview at the time of the gusher, so it is hard to say how a viable ecosystem might have reacted to such a large spill. As it stands, though, Lakeview's ecology, spare as it might be, has returned to normal.

And then there is Mark Tutton's June 4th article on the 1991 Persian Gulf oil fiasco. He writes:

Between five and 10 million barrels of oil poured into the Persian Gulf in 1991 when Iraqi troops, retreating from their occupation of Kuwait, set fire to desert oil wells and opened the valves on oil rigs and pipelines.

The spill -- at least five times the most recent estimate of that spilled in the Gulf of Mexico -- devastated marine wildlife and coastal habitats in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Yet, against all the odds, the Persian Gulf appears to have shown amazing resilience in response to the ecological disaster.

Tutton goes on:

[A]ccording to researchers, in the years following the spill the Gulf's ecosystem began to make a remarkable comeback.

A 2008 joint German-Saudi research paper on the effects of oil pollution in the Persian Gulf stated that by 1994, fish and bird populations had returned to pre-spill levels. Whale, dolphin and turtle populations were largely unaffected, according to the same study. … 

The fishing industry was decimated after the oil spill and Iraqi mines made the Gulf a no-go area for Kuwaiti and Saudi fishermen. But, it too, had started to show signs of improvement by 1994, the same study shows, and is widely considered to have made a full recovery from the after effects of the spill today.

"What they found, and they've found in other places in the world, is that nature does recover," said Pilcher.

Although a colossal amount of oil was released into the Gulf, Pilcher said up to half may have simply disappeared from the water by a combination of evaporation and degradation by bacteria in the sea.

Tutton admits, however, that

…the oil spill has left the Gulf with some scars that have not yet healed. Ghadban said coral reefs have been damaged, particularly off the coast of Saudi Arabia.

And the heavier oil fractions, which don't evaporate or dissolve, have sunk into coastal sediments.

A 2003 U.S. study found huge quantities of oil in the sediment of salt marshes, mudflats and mangroves on the coast of Saudi Arabia.

Drawing comparisons between the Persian Gulf leak (petrastrophe?) and the Macondo leak, Tutton quotes Pilcher as saying:

"In terms of the clean up, I think some coastal habitats are just way too fragile to be touched.

"Some of those coastal marshes will probably be more damaged by clean-up activities than they would be if they were left to deal with the disaster on their own."

Now, as promised, here is some of what strikes about the concept of "ecological disaster" and the earth's "amazing resilience."

The imponderable vitality of the earth throws interesting light on the question of finality in nature at large. Not calling earth “Queen Gaia,” mind you, but it’s interesting how much of eco-anxiety presupposes a kind of terrestrial finality. As in, "Our pollution and consumption are hindering or crippling the earth from doing what it’s 'supposed to do'. damaging how it should function best."

I agree that AGW (“warmism”) is not only quite self-important (and anthropocentric) but also rife with teleology. Al Gore and other leaders in the environmental consciousness movement warn us that if we don’t respect Mother Earth, she will destroy for her own superior survival. The image of a splinter being extruded by a living organism, à la Tom Cruise’s redux of War of the Worlds, comes to mind. In his own inimitable way, George Carlin slings the same point across the room:



At about 5 minutes in, Carlin says this: "The planet will be here for a long, long, looong time, after we're gone. And it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, cuz that's what it does. It is a self-correcting system. The air and the water recover; the earth will be renewed…." Then at about 6 minutes, he says, "[T]he planet probably sees us as a mild threat, something to be dealt with. And I'm sure the planet will defend itself, in the manner of a large organism, like an ant colony or a beehive can muster a defense. I'm sure the planet will think of something." Whereupon follows a sinister reflection on how the earth has concocted viruses, and AIDS in particular, to destroy pesky humans.

Suddenly, Carlin shifts into his hippie persona––I could almost see "The Sixties" glint across his faintly tearful pupils––and offers a final mediation for the faithful. "Well," he concludes after his depiction of the earth creating viruses to humanity out, "that's a poetic note. And it's a start. And I can dream, can't I?" Carlin then adds that he doesn't worry about the little things––like endangered species or, presumably, AIDS––because, "I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. You know what I call it? The Big Electron. … It just is." This is Carlin's naturalist creed and the closest thing, as far as I know, he provides as an official, positive statement of his own worldview, rather than his customary negative ribbing of everything human, all-too-human. It is fascinating as always to see how finality––the self-protecting planet, the scheming earth, the ultimate unity of all things in The Big Electron––invariably finds its way into anything approaching metaphysics.

If the earth’s endurance can be seen as analogous form of biological teleology, it raises the question, How “high up” does teleology go on the ontological scale? To the moon-earth system? To the solar system itself? It’s hard to see what selective benefits the formation of the earth has over its non-formation. For a selectionist (I use the term to indicate post-Darwinist naturalisms which regard “natural selection” as the fundamental principle in nature), presumably, an organized terrestrial system is better able to harness otherwise dissipated energy (this is the line Alex Rosenberg takes in his controversial essay on “disenchanted naturalism” a few months ago), so over the aeons, our earth system was selectively produced. This of course begs the immense question why so few––or no other?––terrestrial systems exist as far as the known universe extends.

Your friend-approval certification is pending...

I caught wind of this NYT story by Hilary Stout, "A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding" (June 16, 2010), read these lines--

"We say he doesn’t need a best friend."

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. ... Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

--, and immediately thought of this clip (viewer discretion advised... it's George Carlin):



The counselors opposed to best friends must realize it's so much more sensible to promote gangs of cliquish friends over pairs of them! Next thing we'll see--or have we already seen it and I just haven't read the news yet?--is a proscription on having imaginary friends, since imagination is an irrational faculty unbounded by evidence. In this regard, one is reminded of Richard Dawkins's mawkish handwringing over children's fantasy literature:

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

Prof Hawkins [sic] said: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.

"I haven't read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children's author that one might mention and I love his books. I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales."

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards".

"I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know," he told More4 News.

The article goes on to quote Dawkins about labelling children:

"It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.

"It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn't want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it's as bad as many forms of physical abuse."

Let us note two acute ironies in Dawkins's priggish sermonizing. First, he grossly betrays the importance of imagination in scientific inquiry. Second, he commits his own worst sin, that of "labelling" children, and, moreover, actually promotes a kind of abuse arguably as "evil" as classical religious doctrine.

The first irony is easily conveyed by a quotation from Einstein, who was, from what little seems to have been written about him, no mean scientist: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." Likewise, in this video, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who authored a book on Einstein and clearly has an Einsteinian spirirt, argues that "imagination is the rocket fuel of science." So I believe Dawkins's ideological investments in "scientific rationalism" have him hoist by his own petard as far as censoring imagination in children goes. I can do no better than cite Chesterton at length on this point, from his magisterial fourth chapter in Orthodoxy, "The Ethics of Elfland":

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat -- exaltavit humiles. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and death and so on -- as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer.

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic. And, indeed, on this point I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance. We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

But though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration. It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin. The wonder has a positive element of praise. This is the next milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland. I shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual aspect, so far as they have one. Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

The second point is equally manifest, since, while Dawkins objects to labelling children, he himself would have no qualms about labelling a child an "atheist child" or a "rational child" or, more to the point, an "irrational child," if that latter child is also a "Christian child." The incoherence of Dawkins's schoolmarmish paternalism is a shrill as it is petty.

The other troubling aspect of his finger-wagging is however a bit more subtle. As I have written before, secular rationalism, especially in its "ecofriendly" forms, has just as much terrifying apocalypticism as its religious opponents. So it is arguable at best that repalcing "hell" with "ecological disaster" is more benign. Yet the harm of a totally finite world has on children runs far deeper than merely scaring them 'in roughly the same way' as Hell allegedly does. (How many Anglo-American people's sense and understanding of Hell began and ended with Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I wonder?) To deny Hell is to deny Heaven and to deny either is to deny the eternal value of human action. To indoctrinate children that no matter what they do in this life, it will not endure past this life, and certainly never endure past the life of this world, is to insinuate that all action is ultimately for naught. Proper human development requires giving people a sense that their actions have a lasting, positive impact on the world, and, by the same token, proper moral training requires admitting one's bad actions have lasting negative impacts on the world. If some actions are so weighty--either because of their intrinsic beauty or intrinsic heinousness--that they generate eternal effects, then people will for that reason take their actions all the more seriously. It is not hard to imagine that the reason Dawkins, and many others, dislike the torture of the idea of Hell is because they themselves loathe the idea of facing up to certain moral inadequacies borne by their conscience. I am forever thankful that I was raised to believe in the lasting importance of my life "here below" as it is invested in "life ever after," rather than being hypnotized and subjugated by the vapid finitism of Dawkinsian secularism.

My point is close that which David Bakan makes on page 119 of Body and Mind (ed. Rieber), "There is a particular disorder that plagues the contemporary world. That disorder is depression. It is very widespread and is characterized by the sufferer's belief that his mental acts can have no impact on the world. I would observe that the materialist and the depressive share the same belief…." As someone who has struggled on and off with depression, and as one intimate with those who have struggled much more with depression, I can attest to the soul-crushing effect it has on one to think, day after day, that you will never be able to accomplish even the simplest of your goals, and if you did, they wouldn't amount to anything "in the long run." make no mistake, the idea of being stuck in a world of no ultimate, transcendent moral significance, as depicted in Sartre's No Exit and Camus's The Starnger, or even Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, is just as terrifying for many as the doctrine of Hell is for some.

What the doctrine of no-hell amounts to is a prescription for futility of mind and spirit. If there is no such thing as Heaven and Hell, not only are we doomed from the outset never to impact the world in any lasting, positive way, but also we are deprived for all time of seeing justice vindicated after all. For if "in the end" villains get off the hook and victims never get compensation and healing, then the world truly is an awful place. Hell is the only doctrine which defends the ultimate integrity of justice; anything less than that kind of eternal moral gravity eviscerates justice into a mere notion à la the slogan, "There is no justice, there's just us." Hence, I agree with Fr. Schall in his essay, "The Brighter Side of Hell", that hell has gotten a bad name, and I encourage you to read his essay for elaborations of some points I have made here and other arguments besides.

Funny cuz it's true…

I watched Richard Brest's 1988 Midnight Run last night. What a hoot! I saw it a a few times in my teens and it's been one of my faves ever since. I bought a copy a few nights ago and I can say it remains as watchable and intelligent and hilarious as ever. And here's the funniest thing: Robert De Niro is actually really funny in it! His attempts at comedy in Analyze This (and That), Rocky and Bullwinkle (which, admittedly, he did for the sake of his then-young son), and A Shark's Tale convinced me of a hunch I've had for years: funny actors can be good actors, sometimes even great, but great actors just can't be funny. The harder "good actors" try to "be funny", the less funny they become. Just try to imagine Merryl Streep in a funny role. Try to imagine her actively seeking to evoke laughter through slapstick and one-liners. The mind shudders. Now try the same thing with Christian Bale. Could he be funny on-screen? I doubt it. I really doubt it, baby.

This does not, of course, mean that the roles played by great actors cannot make us laugh. That's my whole point about Midnight Run: De Niro's character, Jack Walsh, is truly funny at times, even though he is a characteristically gruff and cynical person. So, then, since De Niro can obviously "be funny" onscreen, what happened in his overtly comedic roles? I think it's all a case of "trying too hard." De Niro was not funny in his "funny" roles because he was too conscious of everyone watching him trying so hard to be funny that he came across as huffy and frustrated––to wit, not funny. But when he focused on just being Jack Walsh, he could let his own charisma as Robert De Niro shine through Walsh's charisma.

This paradox––call it The Mystery of Unfunny Great Actors––is part of a larger theory I have about art, comedy, creativity, imagination, empathy, and human psychology, but I'll try to keep it brief: Comedy is all about being able to look "difocally" at life. I say difocally, as opposed to bifocally, since bifocals bring two lens-captures into a single optical picture, whereas, let us say, "difocals" keep both lens-captures separate, and thereby require the viewer to view one situation simultaneously under two aspects. Through one lens––call it the empathy lens––the comedic actor must be able to "feel" how a serious, normal situation is just that: normal, serious, unfunny. If he can't "get" the normalcy of the scene, he can't produce believable responses as the character in that situation. Through the other lens, however, the comedic actor must be able to step back and view any normal, even grim, situation as somehow funny, off, unexpected, shocking, ironic, etc. If he can't see how the situation in which he's acting is also funny under a different aspect, he can't produce believable comedic energy. How sad, or at least telling, is it that De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver––a lonely, schizophrenic sociopath––is funnier than his Paul Vitti in Analyze This? Most of the humor in Analyze This comes from knowing, nudge nudge, that we're really just seeing one of De Niro's harder criminal roles absurdly transplanted into "a comedy." (Pretty funny, right! Never thought you'd see that, eh!) De Niro, I'm sorry to say, doesn't generate the comedy. Rather, the script, and the incongruous viewing experience itself, generates comedic energy around him, like rushing water creates a hydraulic around a large, immobile boulder in a river. Consdier, by contrast, the tremendous pathos Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason created in Nothing in Common. How can two "funny men" make us cry but, say, two "great actors" can't make us laugh from the belly?

It's not only De Niro's problem. The problem that great actors in general have with funny roles, is that they focus too much on being the character in a situation, and thus lose the difocal tension that comedy requires. Poor actors remain unifocal––flat, wooden, cliched, rehearsed––but great actors jut as easily succumb to a bifocal vision of the scene, and thus dissolve the comedic pole into the normal aspect. The instant that serious actors start consciously trying to cleave their vision of the role into "authentic" and "comedic," they feel themselves slipping from their main goals, namely, to really be the person they are playing. It's hardly the case that they take themselves too seriously, as if they were skittish about having their serious reputation laughed. Rather, the problem is that they take their characters too seriously. This handicap is especially acute for method actors, who really do become their roles (Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Merryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, et al.). Interestingly, this analysis leads me to classify Matt Damon, despite his breakout fame in the ever-so-serious and cerebral Good Will Hunting, as a comedic actor. This is why he's able to toggle so impresisvely through very funny roles like Bob Tenor in Stuck on You and Lenny Pepperidge in Ocean's Thirteen and arch-dramatic roles like Jason Bourne in the Bourne films, Colin in The Departed, and Edward Wilson in The Good Shepherd. Same goes for Nicholas Cage. Even in his serious roles he can bring a grin to our face and make us laugh despite ourselves.

In light of the foregoing, therefore, I will try to tighten my claim about comedic actors: An actor that starts off doing funny (or at least "lighthearted") roles well can eventually blossom into a "serious actor," but the converse does not hold. As for Jack Nicholson, no matter how serious an actor he is, we have always known he is naturally nutty enough to play The Joker in Batman and Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets.

Again, I admit lots of great actors can have funny moments. But this is a collateral function of good scriptwriting, and of them allowing the inherent funniness of their characters to shine forth in certain obviously funny moments. But I reiterate my claim that any reputably "serious actor" that consciously tries to play a funny role, will look forced and unfunny. By contrast, consider how dark and gripping some comedic actors can be: Tom Hanks in Castaway, Robin Williams in One Hour Photo and Insomnia, Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, Peter Sellars in Being There, etc. Consider as well the more general phenomenon of melancholic, angry, or bitter comedians: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Steven Wright, Richard Lewis, Dennis Miller, et al. (I leave Bill Maher off the list, since one requirement for being an "angry funny man" is actually being funny.) Comedians have to be able to identify serious and dark material, otherwise their jokes will lack any psychic "traction" on their usually less eccentric audience. They have to know what issues will grab the normal, serious mind, and then they have to know how to yank that mind, once attentive to a "serious" trigger word, down a comedic rabbit hole. Comedy is all about showing us sides or dimensions of even the darkest issues that make us say, "I never thought about it like that." Comedy, to be blunt, is about making us laugh even when we know we aren't supposed. This is, after all, exactly what Arsenio Hall's "Things that make you go, 'Hmmmm…'" gag was all about: drawing farcical attention to real news. Thinking so closely about something mundane until you laugh. Laughing at what's not funny until you try not to laugh at it.

My advice? Put on your difocals next time you watch the news and see if anything tickles your funny bone (which we all know is really the uvula) until you upchuckle.