An old post on 'Watchmen'

When the movie Watchmen came out some time back, some friends found the movie distastefully violent and unpleasant. I responded with a stream-of-consciousness rant that I figured should finally go up on my blog, given how long it turned out to be. I've made a few edits here and there, but nothing substantial. To maintain privacy, I've removed any indicators from the body of my post that would reveal anything about my friends or about the context in which I originally wrote the email.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the comic yet, there are spoilers ahead. I would recommend watching the movie first, and then reading the comic to see everything that the movie misses, and then finally reading and critiquing my post :D

As a hardcore (no pun intended) fan of the original graphic (no pun intended) novel who was a little disappointed by the movie but pleased overall, I feel compelled to respond. I understand that aesthetic opinions are subjective and that a work of art which does not present its rationale thoroughly enough is arguably not well made enough, but in this case the original work is just so dense and sophisticated in its presentation of its ideas that I doubted (rightly) that enough of it could be successfully translated to the screen. Is there gratuitous sex and violence in the film? There is a lot of brutal violence, and there is a fairly explicit sex scene, but I argue that it is not "gratuitous" because there is an extremely good reason for it being depicted in this manner. (People may disagree, but that's what debate is about.)

"Watchmen" is simultaneously a sophisticated critique of an overmilitarized Cold War society and a hardheaded deconstruction of comic books and superheroes, all encapsulated within a bleak, cynical, sardonic view of the world. It strips the superhero naked (literally and figuratively) and tries to study the motivations behind an individual's decision to don a mask and prowl the streets of an alternative crime-ridden, poverty-wracked Manhattan. Read the graffiti on the streets? It says "Who will watch the watchmen?" Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A quotation from Juvenal, with the idea taken from Plato. Who truly controls those who control? What do we do if those who are supposed to maintain order take liberties with it? What happens when the gods go berserk?

Every single person in the book is seriously messed up, and in one way or the other takes to the life of a costumed vigilante as a way to escape from their personal demons. One person, the narrator Rorschach, is a sociopath with a deeply messed up childhood and an utterly Manichaean view of the world, who believes that his true face is his mask, and who is ready to inflict horrible violence in order to restore order. Another guy has trust issues with his father and lacks in self-confidence (in many ways) without his leather suit. Is there a sex scene in the movie? Yes, but it is a sex scene that is meant to parody the hypermasculine image of the superhero, and designed to illustrate the connections among sex, violence, and leather suits. These "heroes" are alienated from society through their constant exposure to the lowest, crudest elements of humanity, and through the horrifying orchestras of violence and brutality that they witness and compose. Which one of us would remain completely sane after witnessing first hand the animality that lurks under the veneer of civilization?

There is a great deal of violence in the movie, but there is a purpose to it. It strips away the surgical cleanliness imposed by censorship on superhero comic books and movies—when the Hulk tears through an armored regiment or when Superman brings down a few buildings, do you really think nobody gets hurt? The violence is not meant to titillate but to shock; anybody who enjoyed the depiction of violence in the movie should be in a mental institution. The violence is as brutal as anything in Saving Private Ryan but more shocking, perhaps because of its immediacy; regardless, the goal is not to glorify blood but to depict the seamier side of superheroes, to show us that their violence actually has consequences that would be considered animalistic in real life, and also to show us the blowback that such violence has on the 'heroes' themselves.

And that brings me to one other thing about the movie that has been noted by many, and criticized by some, movie critics: a few scenes of male nudity on the part of Dr Manhattan, the only real superhero in the film with powers that are essentially godlike. I find these criticisms juvenile and think they utterly miss the point. Dr Manhattan is, in some ways, a cynical version of Superman: a being who exists on a plane far beyond anything even remotely human. But unlike our kryptonite-allergic friend (again a foolish comic book invention that utterly turns me off from Superman, and which is also parodied in the film), Dr Manhattan acknowledges that from his exalted superhero position, human beings have no more meaning than termites. If so, why wear clothes? They are a foolish human convention after all. Greek sculptures celebrating the beauty and perfection of the human form aren't exactly clothed; it is modern Western society that seems to be afraid of human nakedness and sexuality, but really how would these matter to a being who can manipulate the structure of time itself? For what it's worth though, the movie and novel suggest (through the awesome scene of the shattering of the crystalline "Manhattan on Mars") that it's still worth it for us termites to continue living and feeling our emotions and struggling with the vicissitudes of our lives, and that the meaning of human life is not reducible to quantum mechanics.

I've blabbed on for too long, but I wanted to make my point that the sex and violence in Watchmen serves an important artistic and, yes, moral purpose. Which inevitably leads me to my objections to censorship of art in all its forms: I strongly believe that it misses the point, it mars the artistic goals of the work, and, most reprehensibly, it treats us like children who don't know what's good for them. Of course, that's a much bigger question not directly connected to Watchmen, and I will refrain from saying anything more on the topic for fear of lengthening an already overlong, undercooked, incoherent diatribe.

A lesson in perspective

A wonderful image from Wikipedia that shows us how utterly insignificant we actually are.

For those of us who care about numbers, VY Canis Majoris, the very last star in that sequence, has a radius that may be 2,600 times that of our sun. The sun is approximately 109 times the radius of the earth. In other words, it would take approximately ( (2,600 x 109) ^ 3 =) 2.28 x 10^16, or 22.8 quadrillion, earths to fill this star's volume. If I remember my high school physics lessons, the earth's mean radius is around 6,400 km. This would give VY Canis Majoris a circumference of (2 * pi * 2,600 * 109 * 6,400 =) 11.4 billion km (if you ignore equatorial bulging due to rotation and whatnot). Very, very roughly put, it would take a beam of light (12 * 10^9 / 3 * 10^5 =) 40,000 seconds, or over 11 hours, to travel around the star.

Does the Coase Theorem apply to Cameron's "Avatar"?

I first came across the Coase Theorem in a class on international relations, where it was used to explain the difficulties that states face in fixing problems that do not respect political boundaries (things like pollution or conservation). (Crudely put, the Coase Theorem states that in those cases when one agent's actions impose a cost on another agent, then it is possible for the two to come to a Pareto efficient outcome even in the absence of regulatory powers, only if the transaction costs are non-existent / negligible.) That class argued that the Coase Theorem did not apply in these cases because the transaction costs were far too high, and hence the only way out was to create international organizations to tackle these problems.

This article by David Friedman, on the other hand, has some really interesting points to make about the application of the Coase Theorem, and about the manner in which it was adopted, sometimes grudgingly, by economists. His point, as far as I understand it, is this: the problem is between two agents and is not merely the result of one party (which may be true economically), and it is entirely possible that an external regulatory authority may impose economically inefficient penalties on the wrong party by misunderstanding the situation. His suggestion is that we think of property rights in ways that minimize transaction costs, which make it easier for the two parties to negotiate a compromise without the need for an external regulatory authority.

What I'm trying to work through, though, is a possible application of the theorem: Could the Coase Theorem apply to the planet Pandora in James Cameron's Avatar flick? More to come when I actually have something interesting to say on the topic / know a little more about the Coase Theorem.

On the mysteries of consciousness: an interlude

A friend recently sent me this story called "Article of Faith" by Michael Resnick. It's the first overtly Christian-themed science fiction short story I've read in a while, and asks some provocative questions about theology, consciousness, and social customs.

My comments on the story are largely going to be restricted to its themes. This is not because I believe sci-fi / fantasy is an inferior branch of literature—there are poorly written sci-fi stories just as there are poorly written romances or detective stories, but that does not mean all science fiction is poorly written. For evidence, look to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (hard science, thorough areographical analysis, compelling characters, and thought-provoking plots), to Dan Simmon's Shrike series (some truly amazing writing here, never mind the foreign settings), to the classic Asimov Foundation series. Science fiction and fantasy novels choose their own settings and rules, which allows them to examine particular facets of humanity that may otherwise go unexplored. When you think about it, how different is this, really, from reading an epistolary novel set in eighteenth-century Paris? It is an illusion that a novel written to describe the author's contemporary setting is more real and hence more authentic than a novel written to describe an entirely imaginary setting. To me, what matter are the relations of the characters to one another and to their setting; if a certain setting highlights certain relations more transparently than others, so be it! (It goes without saying that the quality of the writing has a major role to play in the presentation of the relations.) But in the case of this story, I'm interested in the philosophical-themes-masquerading-as-relations, and not the narrative styles.

So, what about this story? It is tempting to read this story, the quest of a robot for redemption in God, as an allegory. The fact that the author repeatedly connects the economic travails of the narrator's parish to the increasing use of robots suggests a striking parallel to the US economy, as immigrants displace Americans from jobs and disrupt existing social and economic patterns, while simultaneously trying to assimilate into American culture in both appearance and thought. How many immigrants have tried to adapt to and adopt new customs and been rudely brushed away by the locals who are fearful and resentful of change? And how many age-old ways of life have been rudely brushed away by technological or political or social transformation?

But to read the story as allegory is to gloss over one of its core questions: just what is the soul? This question gives rise to many related questions: How does consciousness relate to the soul? How is a particular conception of God or non-God related to the soul? How do we humans decide when some entity can be deemed to possess a soul? And how, in our opinion, will a supreme God relate to a creature that may not have a soul and yet desires redemption? Is it even possible to not have a soul and yet desire redemption? Is it possible to have a soul and not desire redemption?

If I had answers to these questions, I wouldn't be here writing a blog post! Still, it's always worth taking a crack at what the story seems to be saying. For starters, the narrator-pastor introduces the concept of God to the robot through a child's version of the usual argument from effects (just as, in our experience, artifacts are always created by agents, so too must this entire universe be an artifact created by an Agent), and then introduces the Bible to the robot. Later he becomes greatly troubled at two levels: that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God, and that a man of God like him could be so troubled that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God. The narrator is also willing to let his parish decide the matter for themselves, but is then so profoundly disturbed by their decision (or perhaps by the manner in which this decision is attained) that he abandons the church entirely.

There are a number of issues to be examined here:

1) Leaving aside the means by which a self-reflective robot could have been programmed, how natural is it for an obviously created being to assume that the entire universe must, in fact, be created? Is it any easier for the robot to accept this view than it is for us humans, who are born through a natural process that does not have an obvious agent? (Our mothers are better seen as instruments, their bodies working through biological and unconscious processes to create babies.) Not being a robot (at least as far as I know), I cannot tell.

2) Is a religious text like the Bible even amenable to a reading by non-humans? I've always thought that core religious texts are particularly conducive to a variety of readings that allow the adherents of the tradition to reshape the meaning of the text (usually by means of methods sanctified by the tradition itself) to suit their contexts. How, then, is a creature that the narrator claims cannot even understand a human smile supposed to understand a text as complicated as the Bible? The narrator argues that the robot understood the Bible literally—just as some of his parishioners did—but how is that reconciled with the fact that a literal reading of the Bible poses logical puzzles (if not contradictions)?

3) I know very little about Christian theology, particularly about Christian ideas of the soul. But the fact that the pastor is willing to teach the robot a Christian worldview while denying it the right to join the congregation because it lacks a soul suggests that for the narrator, a soul is distinct both from a purely rational faculty (which was presumably programmed into the robot) and from the combined rational-emotional faculty that we normally call consciousness (some semblance of which was either programmed into the robot, or which emerged over the course of the robot's time with the narrator). This issue is deeply problematic, for it denies the most obvious criterion human beings could use to determine what sorts of creatures have a soul. We can usually tell if something is alive (it has faculties for sustenance and reproduction, at the very least), and we can identify different levels of cognitive capability, although not precisely enough (are dolphins sentient? are chimpanzees? ant-hills?). The robot challenges our first conception of being alive, but it certainly passes the Turing test of consciousness. But if we still cannot tell what has a soul, then what are we to do?

One option is to adopt the position of the classical Islamic Murji'a school, and to "defer" the question to God; in other words, to treat consciousness as a "good enough" indicator, but to let God decide whether the robot actually possesses a soul. After all, if God is omniscient, then God should know if the robot possesses a soul; indeed, God probably infused (or chose not to infuse) the robot with a soul in the first place. But this does not offer an answer to the narrator's (and the parishioners') question about the robot: does it have a soul? Indeed, it chooses not to ask precisely this question.

4) The narrator's decision to submit the question to his parish, and his parishioners' eventual decision, bring up the important issue that religion (perhaps in contrast with spirituality) is a deeply, maybe even inherently, a social phenomenon. Does that mean souls are social phenomena too? In other words, the robot lacks a soul because he is denied a soul? A cynic would observe that the church would have found some way to prove the existence of the robot's soul had it been to the church's advantage. But this does not address the ontological status of the soul, unless we concede that such things as souls are social constructs lacking independent existence. This may serve to distinguish it from consciousness ... but only if we decide that consciousness exists independently of society, which also seems problematic given the difficulties feral children face when re-integrating into human society.

5) Indeed, the narrator's decision to leave the church , and his terrible confusion afterwards, only serves to highlight the tremendous complexity of this issue. There just seem to be no clear answers, even though there are a number of different positions that can be defended.

For what it's worth, I'm okay with holding that consciousness is the same as possessing a soul; in other words, I find it hard to believe that a creature that has the capacity to decide for itself that it wants to follow a particular religious path for intellectual reasons is nevertheless disqualified from that path when there are clearly far less qualified individuals on that path.