Matthew C Harrison

Is WALL-E A Corporate Shill?

The New Republic's Ben Crair, in a short review of Pixar's latest film WALL-E, has this to say:

"There's nothing wrong with the film's anti-corporatism, which is just a variation of the anti-totalitarianism that's requisite to the genre. More troublesome is the film's complicity in the commodified culture it ostensibly critiques. This isn't about Disney, whose external merchandise and marketing are extraneous to the film's artistic vision. Within the movie itself, WALL-E betrays its true corporate overlord, and it isn't Mickey. It's Apple."

He goes on to suggest that the prevalence of references to Apple's products in the film are more than merely a collection of inside jokes, aspiring instead to "the small rebellions of a foster child longing for a former parent."  The new parents being Disney, of course, and the old Steve Jobs of Apple.  For Crair, these references compromise the film's anti-corporatist message.

But do they compromise the film?  Is it anti-corporatist?

The comments section is blighted by the "lighten up, it's just a movie" syndrome, where various posters employ various versions of the above refrain in defense of WALL-E.  Though not surprising, it is disheartening to see so many of TNR's readers resort to the "art is frivolous and not worthy of serious consideration" argument, often closely paired with the "I liked it and let's just leave it at that" perspective.  This unfortunately limits one of the more perceptive commentators from following up his or her own point.  "jdk" asks, in the fifth post:

"What about Eve's hair-trigger destructo response? She blasts away at anything that surprises her. Is that a comment on Apple the corporation?

Sadly, this insightful question was quickly followed by the "relax" variation, the fourth version of the "it's only a movie" refrain in five posts.  Nevertheless, I think it's clear the answer to the question is "Yes, it is a comment on Apple the corporation."  Moreover, it's a clever rebuttal to Crair's criticism.  All jdk needed to do was consider the ramifications of those three sentences to make it.

Rebuttal or no, Crair's criticism is interesting in it's exploration of the film's premise, which according to Andrew Stanton, WALL-E's writer and director, is "that irrational love defeats life's programming, and that the most robotic beings I've met are us."  Crair ends his article by saying suggesting that WALL-E is a symptom of a future dystopia, rather than a description of one.  While I agree with Crair that the references to Apple in the film rise to the level of subtext, I don't agree with his view of it, and reject the idea that those references constitute a compromise in the film's anti-corporatist position.  In fact, I'm not really sure it is anti-corporatist.

I readily believe, however, that the popular appeal of the "it's just a movie" defense is indeed a symptom of a future dystopia.

(I have added a follow up to jdk's comments which should appears in TNR's Talkback section,  at comment 16.)

Freedom, Tolerance, and Truth

In his address in Sydney for World Youth Day, Pope Benedict has made some interesting comments.

Read about it here.

From the article:

"Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this – in truth, in goodness, and in beauty – that we find happiness and joy."

Pope Benedict also tackled the dangers of materialism, exhorting the youth, "Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth."

"Christ offers more! Indeed he offers everything! Only he who is the Truth can be the Way and hence also the Life," Benedict encouraged.

I like that description of our all too consumerist culture - a failing which I continually fall prey to. I like this as well:

The Pope admitted that bearing witness to Jesus is not easy in modern society. He brought to mind how, "There are many today who claim that God should be left on the sidelines, and that religion and faith, while fine for individuals, should either be excluded from the public forum altogether or included only in the pursuit of limited pragmatic goals."

Although this worldview "presents itself as neutral, impartial and inclusive of everyone," Pope Benedict explained that, "in reality, like every ideology, secularism imposes a world-view."

I do get so tired of the false pretense that secularism, and its militant wing atheism, presents some kind of neutral value system. This is evident in the current mania for eschewing representations of religious belief, such as the Ten Commandments, in public spaces. I've heard it said that a haunting is not the presence of a ghost per se, but the absence of something missed, and yet unknown. I quite like that description, and think of it in terms of the atheist value system. It has been defined by the legacy of Judeo-Christianity, and yet they all too often forget this, and in turn are haunted by it. Perhaps this explains the militancy.

I do wonder, though, at the apparent conceptual conflict in the Pope's wish to replace subjectivism and relativism with faith and truth. Doesn't faith exist more harmoniously with subjectivism than with truth? Indeed, aren't truth and faith contradictory in concept, if not in terms?

This is an epistemological question about what we know, rather than an ontological question about what is.

I recently read "The Anti-Modernist Oath" which claimed "...that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world...and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated." While I realize this oath was rescinded, its description of the certainty of knowledge is quite positivist, an epistemological philosophy known to be without foundation since Aristotle, long before Karl Popper put the final nail in positivism's philosophical coffin.

It seems to me that the kind of capital "T" Truth, as described in The Anti-Modernist Oath, would make part of Pope Benedict's speech more coherent. That is, an incontrovertible truth known with certainty obviates the necessity for personal interpretation, and thus subjectivism, and thus relativism. But how does faith fit into this? More importantly, if this kind of positivist thinking undergirds Catholic theology, what answer has it found to the Problem of the First Principles?

The End of Science Writing

Chris Anderson, the Editor in Chief at Wired, closes his article "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete" with the following:

"The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?"

Anderson's essential point is that massive amounts of data have a quantity that is a quality all its own, which renders information pointless.  Having found his solution, he sets to finding the necessary problem, and for him it is science.  In his words:

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

So far from forgetting taxonomy, what Anderson is advocating here (though he himself doesn't seem to have grasped this) is replacing ontology and psychology with taxonomy.  Of course, taxonomy is an important part of modern psychology, for which countless books are filled describing, analyzing, and classifying behavior.  But prescription is just as important to psychology as description, and as any behaviorist will likely tell you, one can never know "why" people do what they do - the point is to know "how" to enable them to change their behavior.  A point about which taxonomy and data clouds cannot speak.

He goes to say of the scientific method, that:

"...this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on."

No point in discussing the debates the likes of Einstein once held with the likes of Bohr, as they are both wrong in Anderson's estimation.  The problem, obviously, is that they bothered at all with "models," fundamentally flawed, "no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality."

No doubt indeed.

Fortunately, Anderson has his own prescription for us:

"There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: 'Correlation is enough.' We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."

His evidence of this?  Venter's gene sequencing of the ocean and the atmosphere, in which "he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms."  These discoveries represent "a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species." That word must carries the entire load of the entire article's attempt at rational work.  As such, it marks the mind of a dogmatist: no question of input or analysis - the number is perfect, the data cloud flawless, and the computer the inerrant voice of the number.

Anderson betrays an all encompassing faith in abstract numbers that is almost Pythagorean in it's reverence.

In the same way he dismissed attempts at developing a super-theory of physics (the energies too high, the particle accelerators too expensive, "and so on"), he is dismissive of the "old way of doing science," such as going into the field to observe new species empirically.  For Anderson, if it is a statistical blip, it must be.

Finally, he wraps up his argument thus:

"The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all."

It's not clear exactly how these huge amounts of data become available, since his entire thesis rests simply on the existence of massive data clouds.  Their mere existence obviates the need for expensive particle accelerators, or empirical case work, or falsification without which science does not exist at all.

A friend and subscriber to Wired defended the magazine, saying it specialized in technology, not science.  This is true and clearly so, and all the more reason for it to cease writing about science until it's editor in chief appreciably deepens his understanding of what it is, and why it is important.

Some Comments About Obama's Latest Oratorical Masterpiece

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/03/21/thoughts-on-a-speech.aspx

http://www.slate.com/id/2187277

While Kirchick is thoughtful and restrained, Hitchens in characteristic style goes straight for the jugular.  Hitchens is a militant atheist, and while this is a profound source of disagreement between he and I, this does not mitigate the importance of what he says in his Slate article. Speaking of Wright's religio-political pathologies, he says:

"Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered 'the churches' and 'the pulpits,' you got both answers right."

One of my criticisms of Hitchens' atheism is what I view as his tendency to ascribe only to theists the zealotry of ignorant and hateful tribalism.  When he says religion poisons everything, he means religion is the source of poison, rather than it being itself poisoned with everything else.  He sees that religion, essentially, can be political, but not that politics can also be religious.  As can be science, and yes, atheism.

Yet Jeremiah Wright is making Hitchens' case for him, and Hitchens is right to say that he has incubated "hatred and tribalism and ignorance" from his church's pulpit.  This fact alone, as it raises the question of why Obama continued to receive his spiritual education from such an enfeebled mind as Wright's obviously is, leads one to wonder what could be so important about Wright and Trinity Church that Obama would refuse to disown him and continue to attend it despite what Hitchens called the "wicked and stupid and false" things Wright has claimed there.

In "Audacity of Hope" Obama explains his conversion at Trinity Church as being founded on "the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change."  In his Philadelphia speech, Obama describes his church as  embodying "the black community in its entirety...[it] contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America."  He suggests that Rev. Wright, like the church itself, possesses a character and has left a legacy which more than offsets the occasional angry outburst. 

Obama is fairly explicit about what he would have us believe regarding his experience at Trinity Church.  He rejects the "folly" (his term) of Biblical literalism, embraced his church because of it's social activism, and refuses to disown the Reverend or the church because it embodies the black community and, he would have us believe, he could therefore no more disown it than himself.  He  repudiates Wright's comments as "distorted," saying they have elevated "what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America," and that Wright's comments were "not only wrong but divisive."

All of this is a fairly straight forward distancing of himself from the racially charged demagoguery of Wright, while attempting to maintain his spiritual and social connections with the black community.  All of this is done in refreshingly hyperbole free, sophisticated rhetoric.  And, to the contrary of so much conservative criticism of him, there is real content here.  He has made a fundamental statement of faith - though not, I feel, in the existence of the supernatural, but in the ability of the church to positively affect society.  This is more than some artificial, preening attempt at identity politics however, because the spiritual confusion suggested by his emphasis on social activism through the church and de-emphasis of Biblical literalism (which may fool, but will not satisfy the more red-blooded church-goers he is reaching out to) is shared in political confusion as well.

Obama hints at this in his description of Wright's  perspective of the  Middle East as "a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."  To the extent that one could alternatively read that as a statement by Obama that the conflicts in the Middle East are rooted secondarily in the actions of allies like Israel, it is an illustration of Obama's rhetorical gift to manage the necessity to distance himself from the politically irresponsible as well as to maintain some sense of ideological integrity.  But if he finds ideological integrity in his tacit criticism of Israel, he can find none in his description of radical Islam and his views on the Iraq war.

His incoherency on this issue was usefully highlighted recently in McCain's comments about his policy proposals for Iraq.  McCain illustrated Obama's view that the occupation of Iraq and the fight against al Qaeda, both in Iraq and elsewhere, are separate goals with individual strategies.  In my view this was a mistaken, but nevertheless tenable view about the Iraq war prior to the surge, but the experience gained in the surge disproves it conclusively.  It was only by demonstrating it's commitment to establishing security in Iraq that Sunni tribal and religious leaders were able to side with the Coalition against al Qaeda.  Previously, as sectarian violence threatened to engulf Iraq, Sunni leaders were forced to rely upon and support al Qaeda, both through al Qaeda's attempts at subversion (such as killing uncooperative Sunni leaders) as well as the reprisals against Sunni by Shia. 

Thus, the gains made in Iraq against al Qaeda have been won by Coalition insistence to provide security for both Shia and Sunni against the militant wings of their own sects.  While al Qaeda was necessarily the first target on that list, now we see al Sadr's militias being reigned in.  In drawing attention to this, McCain demonstrated Obama's failure to understand the situation in Iraq.  If the US were to withdraw under the Obama administration as fast as they were logistically able, it would free the hands of the Shia militias (who have maintained their "truce" with the Coalition in the realization that any conflict with the US would reduce their effectiveness against the Sunni militias after the Coalition had withdrawn) and force further dependency on and cooperation with al Qaeda by the Sunni.

Obama's lame response to McCain's comments elide the fact that he intends to dismantle the very political accommodation that has won the greatest gains against al Qaeda in Iraq.  An often repeated criticism of the war in Iraq is that it only breeds terrorists.  While I don't agree with this I do believe that Obama's plan to kill al Qaeda fighters without helping to create the necessary political structure Iraqis require to govern themselves will accomplish exactly that.

Kirchick, in his comments at The New Republic's blog, wonders whether Obama agrees with Wright's comments not just equating  9/11 with the bombing of Hiroshima, but exceeding it.  I think one can reasonably expect more skillful weaving of political imperatives with ideological integrity on that count, yielding yet more confusion. 

Counterfactuals and the Importance of WMD

Kanan Makiya, in a round-table discussion of mistakes in the Iraq war, writes:

I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The nature of political action is that its consequences are unknowable. That is the source of the wonder, beauty, and ugliness that politics can bring into the world. Should I have let that unknowability determine the morality of the case for the overthrow of the regime in Iraq? Would we have had a moral war in 2003 if there had arisen an Iraqi version of Nelson Mandela, and are we now saddled with an immoral one because he did not appear? I cannot think like that. Perhaps it is incumbent upon those who now regret supporting regime change back in 2003 to tell us what the alternative moral course of action was. Was it to wait and watch until the time bomb that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq blew up in everyone's faces?

In an earlier debate at Lastsuperpower.net, the cost of the Iraq war as measured by the Lancet studies was raised.  A discussion followed about the uses to which such studies can be put in politics, culminating in a question about the war's worth.  I responded:

Owenss asks ~

"I am willing to accept the figure of 151,000 violent deaths as accurate. The question remains do you think that the benefits of the war have been worth the cost?"

But this isn't the question at all.

The question is, will the outcome of the Iraq war have been worth it's cost compared to the outcomes of other strategies?

The question of the cost of the war is nearly always, and always mendaciously, put in the context of the Lancet's propaganda about the war.  Asking the question this way is simply a means of avoiding any attempt at finding the true answer.

Niall Ferguson - no leftist true, but an able historian nonetheless - reminds us of the importance of this contextualization in his introduction to the book "Virtual History."  It is not enough to simply (and simple-mindedly) criticize historical decisions.  One must also demonstrate alternate possibilities, and analyze the probability for their success.

I point this out, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, to illustrate the continued poverty of debate on the subject. How can it be that, despite the permanent reversal of centuries of Sunni imperialism, the widespread embrace of democracy by Iraqis, and the destruction of a regime as vicious as any in modern history, Mr. Makiya must ask, of those "who now regret supporting regime change," what an alternative moral course of action was?

We'll find no such alternative with Richard Cohen, the respondent closest to policy-makers, excepting perhaps Mr. Makiya himself. What we do find are a few rambling and unrelated paragraphs on the anthrax attacks, contradictory certainty that "while Iraq once had a nuclear weapons program, it no longer did" together with the knowledge that biological and chemical weapons don't constitute a threat of "mass" destruction and unpreparedness for "the revelation that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever."

This is instructive of the general level of cognitive dissonance in his response since, to the extent that the WMD argument is important to the case for invasion, he seems to be suggesting surprise at not having found working nuclear weapons in Iraq - about which all intelligence agencies were confident he didn't have - and what else could have been "WMD" if we discount biological and chemical weapons? This is a profoundly misleading series of statements, and not just from the a-historical certainty that, prior to 2003, Iraq no longer had a nuclear weapons program. Are we to suppose the regime had simply forgotten what it had learned from the very real program we know it had engaged in prior to the first Iraq war?

As absurd as this sounds, this is precisely what one often reads about the regime's supposed WMD: that it had forsaken any real development, maintaing only the appearance of it through it's systematic subversion of UN sanctions and weapons inspections, in order to intimidate it's neighboring enemies. By pretending that the regime's knowledge of nuclear weapons had vanished permanently, those who maintain the "WMD for appearances only" position mistake a short term truth for a longer one.

The importance of this temporal elision becomes clear with the one lucid paragraph Cohen writes in his apologia:

One final argument appealed to me. It was quite clear that, over time, Saddam would slip the noose of U.N. sanctions, the United States would tire of its campaign to enforce the no-fly zone, the Europeans—so worldly, so repellently even-handed about Israel, so appalled by Saddam's excesses, and, finally, so full of shit—would do business with the regime, and Saddam would be free to use his oil wealth for weapons and war. If something were not done when it seemed that something could be done, then nothing would ever be done—until it was too late.

Europe - France and the Chirac government particularly - were well on their rhetorical way toward this in the years before the war. The caustic toll on society that Saddam's subversion of UN sanctions had wrought were increasingly being blamed on the UN itself, and particularly the champions of the sanctions, the US and Britain. Dominique de Villepin said of Chirac's government in 2001, that "[w]e believe, of course respecting the international legality, we should as fast as possible try to lift these sanctions." To an extent, the governments of the US and Britain were ready to go along with the French.

The best one can say about the motivations for statements such as made by de Villepin is that the removal of the sanctions was a necessary carrot in order to reinstate weapons inspections. But this suggests a misplaced faith in the inspections regime to do it's job effectively on the one hand, and on the other formalizes Saddam's strategy of increasing the suffering of his own citizens under the pretext of the effects of the very sanctions de Villepin wanted to lift! This puts the West in the position of simultaneously (and at least in part wrongly) accepting responsibility for the toll of sanctions and Saddam's subsequent actions, implicitly legitimizing his response to the sanctions, and thereby undermining the very tool it sought to re-establish the inspection regime with.

Thus, the specter of a reinvigorated Hussein regime appears; and having won a significant victory over it's Western enemies, it would have found it's field of play greatly increased. Economically, a revitalized regime would have been freer to develop those weapons even skeptics admit Hussein needed - so much so that he risked his regime merely on the basis of needing at the very least to appear to have them - and politically able to continue to subvert the inspections program. Add to this the failure of containment in North Korea and Iran, as well as an A.Q. Khan network that would have continued to work in secrecy, aided perhaps by the fact that West's the strategic options for containment had been significantly reduced. Taken together, these counter-factuals suggest a much more compelling reason to invade than Cohen's supposed surprise at not finding stockpiles of nuclear warheads would suggest. The issue with regard to WMD in Iraq was not the cartoon illustrated by Cohen, but the far more sophisticated picture painted by Rolf Ekeus, who described an industry being developed for WMD which remained hidden through classical counter-espionage practices as well as behind dual-use smoke screens and "just in time" production methodologies. This is now playing out in Iran, where the political efforts at containment by the West are inevitably proving useless, even counter-productive.

Ekeus maintained that the WMD threat from Saddam's regime lay not in the existence of " rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals" - the focus on which he called "bizarre," but rather with the longer term capability to produce those weapons during wartime.  This is precisely the argument Cohen seems to ignore in his Slate article.

Presumably then for those who supported the war primarily on the basis of Iraq's WMD, the goals of the war have either been achieved or "proven" a mistake by the absence of those rusting drums.  The continued presence of Coalition troops in Iraq must seem unnecessary, even counter-productive.  It is perhaps why so many on the so-called Left in American politics are so intent on removing US troops as soon as is logistically possible.  Never having been taken in by the Bush Administration's "lies," they see no need to continue to suffer military casualties, and have long since abandoned their more legalistic claims of the responsibility to secure Iraq, and caring little for the resultant chaos the Coalition departure will bring, or despairing much that little can be done to prevent it.

I think to the contrary that, while WMD and oil both are naturally vitally important aspects of the case for invasion, that this war was not "about" either one.  What the war is about, in my view, not only transcends the arguments about WMD and oil but explains the locus of the Bush Administration's response to 9/11 and the need for a continued Coalition presence in Iraq.