"You haven't alienated all your friends. You just haven't posted about Buffy enough."

I really had anticipated a wave of criticism from the barbaric hinterland of cyberspace following my attack on Harry Potter. Oh well. The same people who sent me the email last year about lobbying my MP on the sanctity of traditional marriage sent me another about the evils of Harry Potter. I was intrigued by the suggestion that Harry Potter was a force for moral relativism, and read a bit more widely, coming to the conclusion that the people who claimed this didn't really understand what moral relativism means. F'rinstance, this guy says it encourages moral relativism because the good characters sometimes do bad things. That's like, let's see, the soldiers in "Saving Private Ryan", or the quintessential moral relativist, George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life", or, let's go out on a limb, every character in every film ever made with the possible exception of the Flying Nun.
All the "Harry Potter: Innocent Anklebiter or Spawn of Satan?" sites also quote the bad guy on moral relativism, without ever making it clear that the so-called good guys, er, kind of disagree with him: "A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it..."

Now, Buffy: I've watched to the end of series seven now, and I am convinced that it really did all happen inside Buffy's head, which accounts for the strongly solipsistic flavour of the series. Of course I don't think it invalidates a story if it is 'only a story', it just means that we can talk about not two, but three levels of causation, which is fun:
(1) What does something mean within the Buffiverse?
(2) What does it mean in the universe where Buffy really lives?
(3) What did the creators mean by including it?
What clinched it for me was the treatment of the deaths of Anya and Spike vis-a-vis the death of Buffy's Mum in the final episode. Sure, there are good dramatic reasons within level (3) to downplay them, and not a lot of time left in the series, so it wouldn't be appropriate to devote three angsty episodes to them, but still... Xander's joke about the mall in the final minutes of the episode left me in no doubt that only characters who have an existence on level (2) are really real. Buffy knows it subconsciously: that is why she keeps them at arm's length. That is why there are no profound conversations: Buffy is incapable of profound conversation, and so are the projected fragments of her personality. That is why there is no science or religion in the universe: Buffy doesn't have any science or religion. Another clue is how, if Buffy can't have a love interest, neither can anybody else. The miserable love-lives of the other characters are the fault of Buffy, projecting her misery into the universe she has created.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da

It seems this is day 365 of the Accidental Blog. What trends can I remark on in the past year, beyond a marked deterioration in quality?

* It has been good fun talking to Marco again.
* I think I have been gradually moving from proclaiming my beliefs, through justifying them, to addressing the practical question, 'How do we get there from here?'
* People are still buying Harry Potter novels, the idiots.

No-one could call him a fussy man...

...but he does like a bit of empirical evidsence with his discourse. Dave is perfectly right, of course! I must admit that I haven't yet looked for any evidence one way or the other, being too busy playing World of Warcraft. I did see a lot of big shiny office buildings belonging to Islamic banks in the UAE, but I don't know whether they are actually profitable- and if they are, if it is just because of government subsidies and/or customers who patronise them purely as a religious duty. Unfortunately all the countries that have mandated a purely Islamic banking system have been corrupt basket-cases, war-ravaged wastelands, or targets of long-term international sanctions, so they probably don't make a very good sample set.

I am keen for Marco to reveal where he disagrees with the analysis, so I can see if it is my bits of the analysis or Elias Khachourian's. I suspect, from my reading of The Economist, that that magazine bears rather the same relationship to real economics as New Scientist does to real science- that is, basically okay, but a teensy-bit sexed-up and gee-whizzified. Hence, if we are going to appeal to authority, I would claim that an economist might well outrank The Economist. Hmm, and I also know that Marco is much more devoted to the cause of The Economist as a nigh-infallible source of information than to the idea (which I might have manufactured myself by misreading a few throwaway lines on his blog) that an Islamic economy is necessarily inferior to a Western one, so I have just derailed the discussion completely. Damn.

As much discussion of Islamic Banking as I could manage

Marco appears to have made the assumption in our discussion of a hypothetical future caliphate that such a state would be economically uncompetitive compared to states organised economically along Western lines. I don’t know that this would neccessarily be the case. It was manifestly not true twelve-hundred years ago, before Dar al-Islam broke up into feuding states. The trade of China and of West Africa was handled by merchants based in the caliphate. The hoards of silver that they keep digging up in Scandinavia are all Arab coins. Is there anything intrinsically inferior about an ‘Islamic’ economic system, or has it merely stagnated while continual developments have been made in the West?

Let us consider the options open to me with my superannuation fund. I can put my money in a low-risk, low-return fund based on usurious principles of traditional Western banking, or I can put it in a high-risk, high-return fund based on the principle of shared risk- that is, the provision of capital for entrepreneurial activities-much like the mudaraba contract of a traditional Islamic bank. Surely the fund with the higher rate of return is ensuring the more efficient use of capital? A modern banking system organised along Islamic lines should encourage the use of capital in productive ways, rather than for the purchase of static assets in the hope that they will appreciate in value. I have just been reading a book- “Islamic vs. Traditional Banking: Financial Innovation in Egypt”, by an economist with an armenian name based in Sweden- which is why I know that mudaraba word, which says there are clear theoretical advantages of Islamic banking, especially in developing countries:

(1) Riskier, longer-term investments are promoted, providing a greater incentive to adopt new technologies.

(2) The absence of a requirement for collateral increases the demand for investment capital.

Practically, the book concludes that Islamic banks in Egypt have performed poorly, but largely because they have not exercised their mandate to invest in long-term, higher-risk projects. In fact, they have not even been particularly Islamic in their investments, depositing most of their funds in traditional banks overseas.

In the tradition of "Swashbuckling and the Hegelian Dialectic"

On my way to work I pass a sign that says 'Gorges by Chopper'- advertising, of course, tourist helicopter flights in the nearby scenic gorges. The other morning I blearily read it as 'Borges by Chopper', which has given me the premise for the First Annual Accidental Blog Literary Competition. Given that the first anniversary of this blog is fast approaching, and that the very first post was more or less Jorge Luis Borges fanfic, it seems entirely appropriate to celebrate by calling upon my gentle readers to rewrite any passage from the works of Borges as though it was written by Mark 'Chopper' Read. Post a link here, or email to drclam@forgottenplanet.com.

Hmm, I will need to offer some sort of prize. The 'Swashbuckling and the Hegelian Dialectic' essay competition prize was something like a Candelabra 9000 Pulse-Vape Mobstopper laser cannon, which will be hard to match. Maybe I could offer a major role to the winner as an immortalised uploaded version of their 21st century selves in my upcoming Christmas story about giant robots, "A Christmas Story About Giant Robots". Maybe not. Er... I will think of something...

Next week I am on holiday, so watch this space for a turgid discussion of Islamic banking! Hurrah! :D

All I need to know I learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

One further attractive thing about 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' is how well its basic moral messages pander to my basically conservative prejudices:

*Messing with occult forces leads to tragedy and death.

*Smoking leads to tragedy and death. [Smokers are either (a) monsters, or (b) kids who go down the basement to smoke and are eaten by monsters.]

*Lying to your parents (or other authority figures) ends in tragedy and death.

*Premarital sex ends in tragedy and death.

*Underage drinking ends in tragedy and death.

*Staying out late ends in tragedy and death.

*Living in California ends in tragedy and death.

Almost, but not quite, another 'Film Forensics'

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. But it is a perfect illustration of the nightmare postmodernist universe where there is no absolute truth or absolute morality.

I came late to this particular bit of popular culture, since I never saw it when it was on TV, and have been watching the episodes straight through from the beginning on DVD with minimal preconceptions since the beginning of the year. We are now halfway through season six. One consequence of this is that whenever I see the name ‘Joss Whedon’ in the end credits, I immediately think of ‘Palmer Joss’ from Carl Sagan’s ‘Contact’. Again, because of the order in which I was exposed, I don’t immediately think of the Palmer Joss in the movie version, played by Matthew McMuahaha, but of Palmer Joss in the novel. While the movie version is vaguely religious in a New Agey way, the original Palmer Joss is overtly Christian, though in a relatively vague and undogmatic way. He is the rational religious character, as opposed to the irrational religious character whose name I forget, and while he is not particularly believable (he started out as a tattooed man in a circus and turned to the ministry after a near-death religious experience, for instance), he is a serious attempt by a non-religious author to create a sympathetic religious character, and he makes serious contributions to philosophical debates within the novel.

So, when I reach the end of an episode of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, I often find myself thinking, ‘what would this have been like, if it had been created by Palmer Joss, instead of Joss Whedon?’ This non-Film Forensics blog entry will discuss the interesting philosophical questions that are raised by aspects of the Buffy universe and then ignored (at least as far as the middle of season six), but probably wouldn’t be ignored if Palmer Joss were in charge. I should state that don’t know anything about Joss Whedon’s Weltanschauung, and I don’t particularly care; I will treat the Buffy universe as a ‘thing in itself’, which can be discussed without reference the qualities of its creator.

* The Buffy universe is as mutable as the virtual worlds of Greg Egan’s novels- no, more so. Entire people can be created by magic, and retroactively inserted into reality. Sunnydale can be converted into a Broadway musical by one demon or a chaotic mish-mash by the dreams of an eleven year old boy. The memories and personalities of the characters- and even the whole world- are trivially manipulated by magic. The postmodern guff about reality being a social construct is made flesh. Characters in a Greg Egan novel would be disturbed by this; they always work hard to maintain their personalities in a mutable universe. Characters in Buffy never talk about it at all. They worry about their trivial personal problems, but not about this nightmarish quality in their universe. Do they not notice it? They have no science and no religion. Perhaps they thought their reality was a social construct, even when it was like our reality? They ought to be self-aware enough to talk about this. Is the Buffy universe the collective dream of everyone? Is it a solipsistic universe, the dream of one person? Is it something like the dream of Brahman, with some underlying unimaginable reality? Or is it not really as mutable as it seems, but governed by yet undiscovered laws? I would certainly talk about these things if I was a character in the Buffy universe, and so would at least some of the characters if Palmer Joss had created it. This postmodern mutability is so much a part of the Buffiverse that I will not consider discarding it in this hypothetical. Although Palmer Joss does not believe in such a universe, it would be within his powers to postulate such a universe for the purposes of entertainment.

* At the very beginning of the series, the traditional religious weapons against vampires are used- crosses, holy water. It even looks like there is a container of consecrated hosts in Buffy’s war chest in the first episode. The camera keeps drawing our attention to the silver cross that Sad Puppy Vampire gives Buffy. These religious symbols are gradually forgotten and fade away as the series progresses. Later on- when Adam’s vampire minions attack the church- it is implied that their effects are purely psychological. The only overtly Christian character ever presented, the old lady who kept the orphanage that later became Finn’s residential college, is presented as thoroughly unpleasant, and her world view is denigrated. If Palmer Joss had created the Buffiverse, this efficacy of Christian symbols would not have faded away, and it would have had some internal consistency, even if it was never explained to us. And the characters ought to wonder what it is in holy water that makes it work.

* The afterlife in the Buffiverse is utterly terrifying. There is no salvation, through works, faith, or ritual. Everyone is apparently at the mercy of a variety of strange powers, whatever they do, to an even greater extent than they are in the pre-death universe. This is the animistic universe of some of the nastier primitive cultures, like the Bataks of Sumatra. Nobody ever sits down and talks about what happens after death. In Palmer Joss’ Buffiverse, they would.

* What are Vampires? Early on, Buffy says they are demons inhabiting human forms, sharing the memories of the original human, but not being human. Do they have demonic memories of a previous existence? They don’t seem to. Do they return to their own dimensions when their human shell dies? They don’t seem to, and when Adam is talking to his vampire minions their fear of death is mentioned. If human memories are the only memories vampires have, and they cannot return to their demon dimension, how are they not human? What makes them intrinsically evil and deserving of death? Their slayage is never questioned, even after Buffy gets to know the neutered vampire Spike quite well. He doesn’t have a ‘soul’- whatever that is- and yet is something other than intrinsically evil. Only his external behaviour is controlled by emasculating technology; he should remain a beast. But he is- imperfectly, fitfully- redeemed. At least up until the middle of season six. The implications of this for vampire slaying in general ought to bother Buffy. But they don’t.

The characters in the Buffiverse are flawed because none of them ever ponder the big philosophical, religious, and moral problems thrown up by their universe. In this they are much like characters in our universe, I suppose. In the long run, like a very very old character in a Greg Egan novel of the far future, their personalities are too mutable, too dependent on the whims of a chaotic universe, to hold my interest. If they talked about the big questions of their universe, they would remain interesting regardless. And they would, if Palmer Joss had created them.

On the road to the Emerald City...

Now, when you have the cosmic o’erweening arrogance of a Dr Clam, you naturally assume that anyone who disagrees with you has simply misunderstood your position. The venerable Marco has outlined our points of difference on abortion, but his statements of my positions on these points look so much like straw men that I think that I need to restate them again. I recognise that I have tended to muddle things up by making rash statements out of hubris- for example, on the separation of Church and State- and then defending them just to see if I can. Our two main points of difference on abortion are not of this kind, however. They are my grounds for optimism that this particular atrocity will come to an end, and hence my excuse for not doing anything about it.

I am not at all sanguine about ‘education’ as a grounds for optimism. ‘Education’ is a value-neutral thing; you can educate children to be good Nazis, or good disciples of the Squid God, or whatever. I do not yet see any trend in our educational institutions back towards absolute truth and absolute morality. Without these, we will continue to do what is most convenient for us, and no matter how educated we are our education will be inferior to that of a Pathan tribesman.

My hopefulness about the role of advancing technology for keeping the very young alive, which Marco summarises as ‘artificial wombs’ is based on their psychological impact, not on the assumption that they will necessarily be widely used.
Today, the only choice is between getting rid of something, or putting up with it at great personal cost. In the future, my argument is that the choice will in principle be between getting rid of something and killing it, or getting rid of something and letting it live. I think this has to make a difference. Like ultrasound, I see the role of ‘artificial wombs’ as primarily ‘educational’. To make an analogy: Our response to news of a new plague in Africa in the 21st century is qualitatively different from our response to news of a new plague in Africa in the 19th century because, in principle, we can now do something about it, whether or not we actually do. This technology might not make a difference, of course; since I first outlined my grounds for optimism, I have learned a lot about how non-self-evident the things I assumed to be self-evident were...

My hopefulness about demographic change would remain even if there was no immigration at all. I challenge Marco to look at all the people he knew in high school, and consider which ones now have children. It is not a matter of ‘Westerners’ not reproducing themselves and being replaced by righteous foreigners; it is a matter of ‘liberal’ people, wherever Western culture and technology spreads, not reproducing themselves and being replaced by more ‘conservative’ people. This is my core point about demography.

It is disingenuous to say that demographic change is unimportant, because immigrants from Islamo-catholic countries will be poor and hence necessarily have a high abortion rate. They probably will; but economics is not everything. I would argue that they will have a lower abortion rate than people of an equivalent socio-economic status raised without the benefit of absolute truth or absolute morality. I think this will make a difference. The ideals that we pay lip service to are important.

What to do next?

Marco’s conjuration of 1960s Italy reminds me of something I read in Scientific American some years ago about the effect of prohibition on abortion rates, which claimed the effect of prohibition was actually to increase the rate of abortion. Leaving aside for a moment how one collects accurate statistical data on an illegal procedure, the quoted figures dubiously compared countries in North America and Western Europe (no former Warsaw Pact countries) with Latin American countries (no Middle Eastern ones). So, what does this tell us? (1) As I said before with reference to Rwanda, the Catholic church is miserably ineffective. (2) Our aim should not necessarily be to make abortion illegal, so much as to reduce its incidence to as near zero as possible. I do not mind if it is legal up until the 48th trimester, so long as it hardly ever happens.

Now, as a Pirate King, there are several things I can do to bring about de facto prohibition that may or may not reduce the incidence of abortion. To drive someone out of business nowadays all you need to do is make them uninsurable, and a few high profile acts of piracy could probably achieve that in a small country like ours. I could also take out a few chests of doubloons and summon lawyers from the Deep, commanding them to go forth and litigate: disgruntled ex-patients are everywhere for every kind of medical professional, including the professional murderers, and all they need is cash and encouragement. I expect this is more likely to drive abortion, not underground, but into the public hospitals, where doctors do not need to be insured. Is this a bad thing? The principle of nihilism- not philosophical nihilism, which denies the existence of objective truth, and is ipso facto bosh, but political nihilism, as practiced by bomb-throwing wackoes in the late 19th century- is that the task of the dissident is not to mitigate the injustices of the system, but to exacerbate them, because only then will people have a big enough grievance against the system to rise up against it. As a Pirate King, I have a great attraction to nihilism as a political creed. Eris is my one true love. Forcing anti-abortion citizens to fund abortions through their taxes is something I approve of, for it will radicalise them and draw them into the struggle. All the conventional ‘practical’ activities of mainstream ‘pro-life’ organisations- lobbying against medicare-funded abortions and an earlier end to human hunting season are weak and kittenish activities, unsuitable to a Pirate King. In so far as they mitigate the injustices of the system and prolong its existence, they are to be deplored.

As a Pirate King, I am certain that a more robust Al-Zaqawi style campaign could bring about a de facto end to abortions in public hospitals as well... but this is hardly going to be a long-term solution, and is likely to lead to the introduction of Marco’s ‘home abortion kits’.

Thus, my goal both as Pirate King and as Pseudo-Intellectual Blogger is to bring about structural change in society. I have no real interest in simply changing any of its piddling laws and mucking about counting beans to see if the compliance costs are worthwhile. Like I said in the long ago, I believe the structural change I seek is inevitable, and it is driven by two things: (1) Improvements in technology that increase the chances of survival and decrease the cost of keeping alive those born at a very young age. (2) Demographic change, as the secular left-leaning population of the West fails to reproduce itself. In order to bring about my desired goal, no grand Pirate King gestures are really possible. I should try to convince people that abortion is a bad thing. I should support the kind of funding initiatives Marco mentions, into miscarriage research, and scientific and medical research in general. I should support all measures that lead to a vigorous and healthy economy capable of supporting such research. I should support high immigration from socially conservative countries. I should support the most socially conservative political parties I can find. I should support the rapid democratisation of the Middle East, as this will encourage Muslim groups in Europe and elsewhere to shift their lobbying from foreign to domestic policy. I should adopt a bipolar approach to my friends and acquaintances, attempting to convince the ones who disagree with me not to have children or go into teaching, while exhorting the ones who agree with me to do so. I should do lots of other things, but sadly there is nothing really significant that I can do by myself...

Trading Shoes

I will make the imaginative leap suggested by Marco, to trade shoes with him, and attempt to imagine that I no longer believe in an absolute morality. To help me I will consult the immortal 'Kasidah of Haji Bdu El-Yezdi", by Sir Richard Burton:

There is no Good, there is no Bad;
these be the whims of mortal will;
What works me weal that call I 'good';
what harms and hurts I hold as 'ill':

They change with place, they shift with race;
and in the veriest span of Time,
Each Vice has won a Virtue's crown;
all Good was banned as Sin or Crime:

and:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

All other life is living Death,
a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice,
a tinkling of the camel bell.

It now appears to me that my self-made laws require me to subject all lesser mortals to my will. Thus I will no longer dabble in the shallows of logical argument, but will use all means at my disposal to enforce my will. The cloak of pseudo-intellectual blogger falls away, and I find that I have become a Pirate King. Arr!

Eritis sicut deus, scientes bonum et malum

I will make one more attempt to explain what I mean by absolute morality, because I am still absolutely confused as to what Marco means by saying he rejects it.

There is only one question we ever need to ask ourselves, and that question is, ‘what do I do now?’

My assertion is that all possible answers to that question, at any particular spot in space-time were you ask it, can be ranked in order from best to worst in a unique way. I am not saying that order is something that you know, or anybody knows; I am asserting that you do not know it. I am not saying that in the case of someone else, faced with a similar array of possible answers, they will be ranked in the same order; I am asserting that in all probability they will be ranked in a similar order.

All of Marco’s examples seem to be examples of incomplete information, which are irrelevant to the question of how good/evil something is. Let us represent all the possible answers by cucumbers in a field, and say that instead of ranking actions in terms of goodness, we will rank cucumbers in terms of northness. Because we are standing in different positions in the field, close to some cucumbers and far away from others, and neither of us are exactly sure where north is, of course we will get different orders of northness. Of course both of our orders of northness are probably wrong. This does not mean that there is not a unique order of northness, or that our rankings are necessarily of equal validity, or that there is no such direction as north. If someone gets a particularly bad order of cucumbers because they have a dodgy compass, we can give them special consideration when we mark their Cucumber Location 101 assignment; we do not have to punish them. But if we say that their north was just as good as our north, we are throwing away a useful directional concept just to spare their feelings.