While not really straying into "trekkie" levels, having never dressed up or gone to a con, I consider myself a fan (and would choose it over Star Wars, given that particular false dilemma).
So of course the latest Star Trek movie has been on my radar for a while, and having seen it this weekend, I've been thinking about how it relates to the rest of the Trek universe. I appreciate that they've set the reboot in an alternate timeline - it does give them the freedom to make some nice mirror-moments relative to the original, though it also invites plenty of comparison (which may end up being dangerous for the reboot, as I'll try to explain). Slight spoilers follow.
First off, a bit about the Star Trek shows, for the uninitiated: it was a pretty unique show back when The Original Series aired in 1966-68, and while The Next Generation was a bit more conservative, Deep Space Nine was darker, Voyager and Enterprise only slightly less silly than TOS - the Trek series have always been a good exploration of everything from lofty ideas about what makes one "human," to holodeck mishaps. TOS is famous for having the first interracial kiss on TV, TNG had androgynous relationships, DS9 had gender-bending symbiotes, and of course Voyager had the first female captain (as well as the first holographic Doctor, hehe). The Star Treks have all tried to emphasize the good sides of humanity - peaceful exploration, ingenuity, diversity, and strong senses of independence and justice, but also community and mercy.
Each series incarnation has had its own strengths and weaknesses, of course. So it makes sense to look at the J.J. Abrams reboot on its own merits. And the two movies aren't bad relative to movies in general, of course. My thesis then, is that they have erred towards opposite extremes than the series, and that (in my opinion) the change in priorities that this represents makes them worse movies, and worse Trek movies in particular. The reboot movies tend to succeed in places where they go back to themes in the Star Trek shows, and fail in the places they've tried to over-correct for the shows' weak points.
Good points first: the themes of friendship, self-sacrifice, and peaceful responses to acts of violence are all classic Star Trek, and the reboot movies are great in this regard. Kirk and crew are shown as "Neutral Good" - valuing the rule of law only insofar as it lets them avoid violence and loss of life. They're never the first ones to fire phasers, and even when faced with evil they don't respond to it with further evil.
Some of the differences, though, between the reboot and classic Trek are things I'm sad to see go - diversity, for instance, has kinda gone out the airlock in the reboots. Sure, Uhura is still there, and Sulu, but aside from a couple of very minor roles, there's not much representation of minorities. Green-skinned Orions or Kirk's latest bit-of-tails don't count, of course, since we're talking diversity *within* humanity. I think it has to do with larger trends in Hollywood of not wanting to seem like they're just putting in "token" characters or making the brown guys the villains... but when the result is making all the main characters white (even ones who had been Latino in an earlier version, say, cough cough), that's straying towards the area of going against Trek's own values. TOS may have had token ethnicities represented... but at least they were there, which was already very controversial for the time, and making valuable contributions as all part of the same crew. In the reboots, the female characters are barely given chances to contribute and the minority characters are basically (sometimes literally) benchwarmers. (Personally, I was really hoping for some backstory on the butch black woman who took over Ops, she seemed cool - she got a line, at least, thankfully). [Spoilers/]If they had put in just *one* more line in which Uhura succeeds with the Klingons, and *then* Cumberbatch attacked, it would have felt like she actually had a moment. As is, though... well, she'd be right to be pissed about being interrupted.[/Spoilers]
Another big difference is in the area of ingenuity - Kirk has always been a just-punch-'em kind of hero, but his most memorable moments are those in which he's wound up outsmarting the foe, whether it's Khan and his 2-D tactics, the Corbomite Maneuver, or building a cannon out of random crap (using the power of Chemistry!). The reboots are willing to get a tiny bit intellectual with their discussion on the coincidentally contemporary issues around drone strikes and responses to terror attacks, but even some of the sketchier technobabble in the TV shows has been dumbed down to just "it's out of alignment and needs to get kicked back into alignment." Shatner's Kirk had plenty of flaws, but at least he knew the ins-and-outs of shield codes.
The last big difference I've seen that is too bad is, ironically, the special effects. I know they've got 3D to play around with now, but some of the stuff is pretty gratuitous in the latest movie. And rather than make flying through space a little more realistic (see also: BSG), or more majestic (as in the original Star Trek movie, or WALL-E), or even more tactical (as in the Star Wars trilogy), here, it's just more hectic and oriented in ways such that the 3D comes into play more. They pause on the Enterprise maybe once in the movie, and only briefly - if it weren't for a certain top-down silhouette, I might not have even noticed the funny close-together-nacelles in the new design. (I'm surprised the people doing the drawing had time to see it, hehe.)
Anyhow, they're not bad movies, as I said. They hold some of the Star Trek values very loosely, tending towards less representation, less bookishness, and less respect for their audience - and these make for inferior movies (though perhaps about average for movies based on Star Trek). They could have been much more - where the first Star Trek II pulled heavily from Tale of Two Cities, the reboot settles for pulling heavily from previous Trek movies, and its strengths are merely in how it plays with being a very loose remake. Imagine even the following minor improvements (in my humble opinion) [Spoilers/]Chris Pine faces off with Antonio Banderas, who's blown up an archive housing military secrets he'd helped develop, stopping work on the Dreadnought. Adm. Marcus sends Carol along with Pike to fetch "John Harrison" from the Klingon homeworld, where he's been apprehended. Pike sends Kirk down to the planet, Uhura negotiates with the Klingons when they get stopped, and Khan has a master plan of escaping from the Klingons that he dupes Kirk into helping him with. He gets Kirk to thaw out a few of his crew from the torpedoes he'd loaded on the Enterprise, then kills Pike in some drawn out earworm-like fashion, and sets a final goal of vengeance on Marcus using the Dreadnought, destroying San Francisco in the process. He keeps Scotty and Sulu around to help fix and pilot it. Kirk, having gone from jailer to jailed, finds some way to escape out into space with Carol and majestically swoop over to the Dreadnought. Fighting ensues, Spock retakes Enterprise, Carol disables Khan's weapons temporarily, John Cho and Antonio Banderas fence, etc., Enterprise escapes to beneath the SF Bay, and Kirk disables the Dreadnought much in the manner he fixed the Enterprise in the actual movie. Khan and his people wind up exiled on the Botany Bay II. Kirk keeps the tribble as a memento and jokes about using it as a toupee. ;-) [/Spoilers]
Well, it's no instant classic. But sadly, the actual movie isn't really one, either.
Monday, May 20
Monday, May 13
on "natural" - abridged
A summary of the post below, from conversation with C-.
"Morality is not determined by what is natural."
So a big theme from the blog posts below is me applying "how things are (or were) is not necessarily how things ought to be" to issues involving tradition, convention, and nature. What is newer is not necessarily better, but nor is what is older. Let us instead look at what is good and beneficial.
"Morality is not determined by what is natural."
So a big theme from the blog posts below is me applying "how things are (or were) is not necessarily how things ought to be" to issues involving tradition, convention, and nature. What is newer is not necessarily better, but nor is what is older. Let us instead look at what is good and beneficial.
Wednesday, May 8
on "natural"
Okay, this is going to be a long one, and may need to be broken into multiple posts. But I swear it's all on one big theme, so bear with me.
First, consider: the world is changing, faster than ever before, and not just in terms of technology but also culture. Much that goes on would have been unthinkable just a hundred years before - much as back then, what was happening was almost inconceivable, really, to all but the most visionary a hundred years before that. Some aspects of modern life are unnatural for humans, and we should strive for a more natural existence instead, more like how things used to be.
Or so we hear, usually in regard to urban/suburban housing, processed food, electronic communication, sexual ethics, and parenting. To wit: agrarianism, paleo/organic diets, opposition to facebook/google/computers, purity/anti-gay/"Biblical manhood and womanhood" movements, and of course "granola" or "crunchy" mamas. All are pretty hot-button topics and so I'll try my best not to step on any toes... but my overall thesis here might not let me succeed in that very easily:
"The natural way" is mostly B.S.
Humans have been doing unnatural things since the day that black monolith first appeared and we started hitting each other with bones. In all seriousness, we're an adaptable species and we've made it our specialty to be generalists. We're omnivores; we're social creatures yet very independent, we have a near-uncountable number of languages, and we've managed to rig it so we can travel almost anywhere on the earth and even to the moon. Our role in the ecosystem is that of "outsider" - we have brains that devise ways for us to stay warm when it's cold out, stay cool when it's hot out, and bend our surroundings to our own purposes. We've (mostly) exempted ourselves from being anything's prey, and we long ago simplified our own hunting and gathering to require a minimum of risk.
In regards to urbanization, then: you might as well say that farms themselves are unnatural. Sure, hundreds of years ago, a greater percentage of people had to be farmers. But nothing about getting up before dawn to milk cows, or plowing a field to plant tomatoes, say, is truly "natural." You might feel more earthy, doing it, and end the day covered in more dirt. But people were living in tribes long before farming had been invented - and they'd been dividing the labor, even then, so that some fraction of them didn't have to work on getting their own food.
Now, suburban life is indeed full of negatives: commuting stinks, energy use per capita is hugely unsustainable, and it can seem very ordinary and dull. But it's not unnatural, and it doesn't have to suck your soul energy. Quite the contrary - it's perfectly possible for humans to thrive in those circumstances as we have in so many others. And we've been pursuing the middle class existence as a species for a long time.
Which perhaps brings us to diet: nothing about what we were eating as cave-men is inherently better for us. In fact, poor diet was a big factor in the low life-expectancy and relatively malnourished state of ancient humans. As aforementioned, we're omnivores, meant to be eating... whatever's around. Of course I'm not advocating for unhealthy or gluttonous eating, but merely pointing out that there is potentially a huge difference between "it is scientifically proven to be more nutritious" and "it's more like what a hunter-gatherer ate."
You can see where this is going for the other topics, surely. The development of electronic communication has just been one more change for humans to adapt to, whether you start counting from telegraphs or texting. And we've done a pretty good job adapting (except for the whole texting-and-driving thing, though there is evolutionary pressure on us to stop that particular combination of activities). Communication is communication, whether it is by clay tablet or iPad - somebody had something to say and wanted you to understand it. Being able to read it within seconds instead of days or weeks is all gravy. And miscommunications definitely existed before autocorrect.
The amount of time people spend on computers is unprecedented, to be sure. And it can be unhealthy, of course. But it turns out that the way you are on the internet is the way you'd be off the internet - how's that for a little self-knowledge? Computers are just a tool; personally I find the benefits far outweigh the alternatives of spending my days behind a plow or on an assembly line, and computers are no more or less "unnatural" than either of those.
And it's funny, since privacy concerns are a big part of the anti-social-media movement, but I think it's the internet that helped create the illusion of privacy in the first place. Commenting and file-sharing were never truly anonymous... but once they found out otherwise, people felt they should be. Living in some small village in the 1500s, you might have had no privacy whatsoever, with everyone in the village knowing where you lived, everywhere you went, and all your business (and suspecting you of witchery). Sure, large-scale data acquisition and improved algorithms are part of the privacy problem... but if you're truly afraid of a pogrom, the answer is not going to lie in getting a better VPN. I think the internet has shown us a little bit of what secular society always had in the back of its mind as an ideal: a place where information is shared freely, everyone is judged for their contributions but not their skin color or gender, and people can be regarded as equals, whether they live in India or Indiana. Hopefully we can keep working on that both on- and off-line.
Anyhow, onwards to the good stuff: sexual ethics and "unnatural" behaviour. The idea of pressuring people to live up to a natural order is, to me, a holdover from the Greek philosophers and the "Great Chain of Being," which described a natural hierarchy to the world, with God at one end and rocks at the other, and kings, nobles, men, women, and children in the middle. It's especially odd that these ideas wound up folded into Christianity, where social distinctions and taboos were steamrollered by Jesus in a radical redefinition of what makes a person "holy," "pure," or "justified." But now, of course, we have remade Jesus into a conservative gun-loving gay-hating capitalist, so go figure.
For example, is gayness "unnatural"? Nope, it's definitely found in other species, and they don't seem to make a big deal out of it. (I suppose that IS one way in which our society is behaving unnaturally.) How about in other areas - gender roles, for instance? Far from being constrained by our genetics like the angler fish, all the theories about how supposed masculine traits (such as propensities for violence, wandering, liking big butts, etc.) have come about are fraught with handwaving and easily-observed counterexamples. The same goes for supposed feminine traits such as docility and love of flowers. Preacher-types with a desire to mold others into old-school roles will often invoke the word "unnatural!" in this toxic brew of nigh-heretical evo-psych mumbo-jumbo, tradition, Great Chain of Being stuff stolen from Aristotle, and rhetorical appeals to emotion. Even so, for the Christians out there, being a "Godly" man or woman shouldn't be that hard - according to Paul, you get married because you feel the need and desire to get married, you work on becoming united, and it's no more or less sinful than staying single. That's about it. But still, what is "natural" for humans? I'd say that, from observation, our capacity for variation (and that dratted free will) seem to be the only natural constants in how gender is expressed.
Whereas with gender roles, stereotypes from nature are promoted as law, with purity (virginity and abstinence) religious conservatives freely admit that these are "unnatural," and in fact go completely against humanity's fallen nature (the struggle against that nature being part of their (still kinda heretical when examined closely) spirituality). Sure, sleeping around is discouraged in the Bible (for both men and women, I'll note) but so is taking pride in any supposed extra purity you've achieved. All that stuff counts for less than garbage before God. So anyhow, I think we've covered the major ways "unnatural" gets used by some to try to look down on others' sexual ethics, and my advice is definitely for everyone to quit using that word in the hopes of someday having a productive discussion about all this.
Anyhow, the last topic is perhaps the one I dread most: baby-raising. Yes, I'm male, and thus inherently unqualified to comment. But I include "natural" vs. "unnatural" approaches to babies on this list because, while I recognize that every mom wants the best for her child, not every mom seems to also recognize that about other moms. And babies, like the rest of the species, are very adaptable, and very individual. Humans have grown up in almost every situation imaginable, and the vast majority end up as relatively well-adjusted adults. My main point in bringing it up, then, is twofold: first, that moms should cut themselves and each other some slack if they've had to "compromise" and not given their child an absolutely idyllic experience, and second, that maybe, just maybe, the ways that modern birthing and child-rearing (with diapers and iPods and vaccines) differ from the "natural" ways, may in fact be, if not better, then at least less traumatic and easier on all involved, which should count for something, right?
So there are my thoughts on the big "natural" movements. Perhaps in some way, I am part of them - my desire here is merely for greater harmony, health, and peace between people and the rest of the environment. It's just that I fear those fall as easily under the category of "unnatural" human behaviour. So let's all try to be more accepting, regardless, in the knowledge that there's very little certainty about the absolute best way to do these things, and our individuality and adaptability are among our species' strengths.
First, consider: the world is changing, faster than ever before, and not just in terms of technology but also culture. Much that goes on would have been unthinkable just a hundred years before - much as back then, what was happening was almost inconceivable, really, to all but the most visionary a hundred years before that. Some aspects of modern life are unnatural for humans, and we should strive for a more natural existence instead, more like how things used to be.
Or so we hear, usually in regard to urban/suburban housing, processed food, electronic communication, sexual ethics, and parenting. To wit: agrarianism, paleo/organic diets, opposition to facebook/google/computers, purity/anti-gay/"Biblical manhood and womanhood" movements, and of course "granola" or "crunchy" mamas. All are pretty hot-button topics and so I'll try my best not to step on any toes... but my overall thesis here might not let me succeed in that very easily:
"The natural way" is mostly B.S.
Humans have been doing unnatural things since the day that black monolith first appeared and we started hitting each other with bones. In all seriousness, we're an adaptable species and we've made it our specialty to be generalists. We're omnivores; we're social creatures yet very independent, we have a near-uncountable number of languages, and we've managed to rig it so we can travel almost anywhere on the earth and even to the moon. Our role in the ecosystem is that of "outsider" - we have brains that devise ways for us to stay warm when it's cold out, stay cool when it's hot out, and bend our surroundings to our own purposes. We've (mostly) exempted ourselves from being anything's prey, and we long ago simplified our own hunting and gathering to require a minimum of risk.
In regards to urbanization, then: you might as well say that farms themselves are unnatural. Sure, hundreds of years ago, a greater percentage of people had to be farmers. But nothing about getting up before dawn to milk cows, or plowing a field to plant tomatoes, say, is truly "natural." You might feel more earthy, doing it, and end the day covered in more dirt. But people were living in tribes long before farming had been invented - and they'd been dividing the labor, even then, so that some fraction of them didn't have to work on getting their own food.
Now, suburban life is indeed full of negatives: commuting stinks, energy use per capita is hugely unsustainable, and it can seem very ordinary and dull. But it's not unnatural, and it doesn't have to suck your soul energy. Quite the contrary - it's perfectly possible for humans to thrive in those circumstances as we have in so many others. And we've been pursuing the middle class existence as a species for a long time.
Which perhaps brings us to diet: nothing about what we were eating as cave-men is inherently better for us. In fact, poor diet was a big factor in the low life-expectancy and relatively malnourished state of ancient humans. As aforementioned, we're omnivores, meant to be eating... whatever's around. Of course I'm not advocating for unhealthy or gluttonous eating, but merely pointing out that there is potentially a huge difference between "it is scientifically proven to be more nutritious" and "it's more like what a hunter-gatherer ate."
You can see where this is going for the other topics, surely. The development of electronic communication has just been one more change for humans to adapt to, whether you start counting from telegraphs or texting. And we've done a pretty good job adapting (except for the whole texting-and-driving thing, though there is evolutionary pressure on us to stop that particular combination of activities). Communication is communication, whether it is by clay tablet or iPad - somebody had something to say and wanted you to understand it. Being able to read it within seconds instead of days or weeks is all gravy. And miscommunications definitely existed before autocorrect.
The amount of time people spend on computers is unprecedented, to be sure. And it can be unhealthy, of course. But it turns out that the way you are on the internet is the way you'd be off the internet - how's that for a little self-knowledge? Computers are just a tool; personally I find the benefits far outweigh the alternatives of spending my days behind a plow or on an assembly line, and computers are no more or less "unnatural" than either of those.
And it's funny, since privacy concerns are a big part of the anti-social-media movement, but I think it's the internet that helped create the illusion of privacy in the first place. Commenting and file-sharing were never truly anonymous... but once they found out otherwise, people felt they should be. Living in some small village in the 1500s, you might have had no privacy whatsoever, with everyone in the village knowing where you lived, everywhere you went, and all your business (and suspecting you of witchery). Sure, large-scale data acquisition and improved algorithms are part of the privacy problem... but if you're truly afraid of a pogrom, the answer is not going to lie in getting a better VPN. I think the internet has shown us a little bit of what secular society always had in the back of its mind as an ideal: a place where information is shared freely, everyone is judged for their contributions but not their skin color or gender, and people can be regarded as equals, whether they live in India or Indiana. Hopefully we can keep working on that both on- and off-line.
Anyhow, onwards to the good stuff: sexual ethics and "unnatural" behaviour. The idea of pressuring people to live up to a natural order is, to me, a holdover from the Greek philosophers and the "Great Chain of Being," which described a natural hierarchy to the world, with God at one end and rocks at the other, and kings, nobles, men, women, and children in the middle. It's especially odd that these ideas wound up folded into Christianity, where social distinctions and taboos were steamrollered by Jesus in a radical redefinition of what makes a person "holy," "pure," or "justified." But now, of course, we have remade Jesus into a conservative gun-loving gay-hating capitalist, so go figure.
For example, is gayness "unnatural"? Nope, it's definitely found in other species, and they don't seem to make a big deal out of it. (I suppose that IS one way in which our society is behaving unnaturally.) How about in other areas - gender roles, for instance? Far from being constrained by our genetics like the angler fish, all the theories about how supposed masculine traits (such as propensities for violence, wandering, liking big butts, etc.) have come about are fraught with handwaving and easily-observed counterexamples. The same goes for supposed feminine traits such as docility and love of flowers. Preacher-types with a desire to mold others into old-school roles will often invoke the word "unnatural!" in this toxic brew of nigh-heretical evo-psych mumbo-jumbo, tradition, Great Chain of Being stuff stolen from Aristotle, and rhetorical appeals to emotion. Even so, for the Christians out there, being a "Godly" man or woman shouldn't be that hard - according to Paul, you get married because you feel the need and desire to get married, you work on becoming united, and it's no more or less sinful than staying single. That's about it. But still, what is "natural" for humans? I'd say that, from observation, our capacity for variation (and that dratted free will) seem to be the only natural constants in how gender is expressed.
Whereas with gender roles, stereotypes from nature are promoted as law, with purity (virginity and abstinence) religious conservatives freely admit that these are "unnatural," and in fact go completely against humanity's fallen nature (the struggle against that nature being part of their (still kinda heretical when examined closely) spirituality). Sure, sleeping around is discouraged in the Bible (for both men and women, I'll note) but so is taking pride in any supposed extra purity you've achieved. All that stuff counts for less than garbage before God. So anyhow, I think we've covered the major ways "unnatural" gets used by some to try to look down on others' sexual ethics, and my advice is definitely for everyone to quit using that word in the hopes of someday having a productive discussion about all this.
Anyhow, the last topic is perhaps the one I dread most: baby-raising. Yes, I'm male, and thus inherently unqualified to comment. But I include "natural" vs. "unnatural" approaches to babies on this list because, while I recognize that every mom wants the best for her child, not every mom seems to also recognize that about other moms. And babies, like the rest of the species, are very adaptable, and very individual. Humans have grown up in almost every situation imaginable, and the vast majority end up as relatively well-adjusted adults. My main point in bringing it up, then, is twofold: first, that moms should cut themselves and each other some slack if they've had to "compromise" and not given their child an absolutely idyllic experience, and second, that maybe, just maybe, the ways that modern birthing and child-rearing (with diapers and iPods and vaccines) differ from the "natural" ways, may in fact be, if not better, then at least less traumatic and easier on all involved, which should count for something, right?
So there are my thoughts on the big "natural" movements. Perhaps in some way, I am part of them - my desire here is merely for greater harmony, health, and peace between people and the rest of the environment. It's just that I fear those fall as easily under the category of "unnatural" human behaviour. So let's all try to be more accepting, regardless, in the knowledge that there's very little certainty about the absolute best way to do these things, and our individuality and adaptability are among our species' strengths.
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