A Terrifying Universe, Class: For Tonight We Might Die, Reviews, 25/10/2016

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Media studies is easier. That’s the last of many lampshaded moments in the first episode of Class. But it’s probably the most important one. 

That line follows a conversation among the teenage regulars where they drop the names of all the television shows that have guided them on how to handle a weird spacetime wormhole under a high school. From Buffy onward. Though discussing those references will constitute 

Rachel is a sadly textbook case of a refrigerator character. All she does
in this episode is look lovingly at Ram, remind him of what a kind
person he is under his footballer douche self-image, then get brutally
killed by a Shadowkin right in front of him.

SPOILERS!!

But it isn’t enough to know the rules that govern your show. That’s the message from the Doctor, the most metafictionally complicated character in television today – probably in the whole history of television. You can throw in as many references as you want – like Tanya’s joke about the Bechdel Test – it won’t be enough to save you from actual invading aliens from a wormhole in the depths of your high school.

That said, this kind of trope awareness is needed. If only to highlight that the viewer should be wary when characters like Rachel are so clearly fridged to provide motivation for our footballer-with-a-good-heart Ram.

The real meat of “For Tonight We Might Die” lies in two issues. One is the nature of sacrifice – asking what you’re willing to give up to save another or (at the scale of the conflicts in Class), to save your entire civilization and world. The other is an extremely sticky engagement with the nature of genocide.

The Strength to Give It Away

I have a distinct feeling that I’ll be returning to questions of sacrifice throughout my reviews of this series. It seems to be the major philosophical theme of April’s long-term character arc. Consider that she’s been tapped as the heart of resilience in the Coal Hill team from the end of “For Tonight We Might Die.”

Rachel's death scene even sprays Ram with her blood in a moment
that I think was a riff on the mass shooting flashback sequence in
The Fisher King.

Consider how we understand her family background. Raised by her mother, seemingly without a father figure, April describes her family’s situation to Charlie as the grounding she has for dealing with the immensely dangerous life she’ll lead from here on. Paralyzed in a car accident she never should have survived in the first place, April’s mother continued on, raising her daughter alone.

Likewise, April now carries a burden and a duty in the face of a physical disability. She has the weirdest heart condition in Britain, as it disappears in and out of phase with our reality whenever Corakinus the leader of the Shadowkin appears in our world. 

Knowing her fatal link to this monstrous invader, she’s actually prepared to stab herself in the heart to stop him. The ethical strength to take that drastic step upon yourself is at the heart of April as a character in this show. 

And I think we’ll see that strength as a narrative of conflict and growth with Ms Quill. April’s willingness to give of herself to save another is a stark contrast with Quill, whose first act in the show was to trick another student into sacrificing himself without any knowledge of what he was about to do.

Yes, she defended herself and the school from a Shadowkin invader, but the weapon that destroyed it also destroys the one who fires it. That lack of scruples to dispose of another person as a weapon to defend yourself is the real crime that the Doctor is right to label her with.

April and Tanya's first scene in Class, in which a conversation about
decorating for prom turns to April's question about how
available Charlie is. So Tanya delivers the show's first piece of
media studies. April doesn't get it.

Quill was a freedom fighter for her people on the Rhodian homeworld, leading a failed guerrilla campaign against the monarchist government, represented by Prince Charlie. When the Doctor first refers to her punishment, her reflex is to defend herself as a freedom fighter. 

But the Doctor is well-accustomed to overthrowing monarchies – If they had met years earlier on Rhodia, he probably would have helped her in the fight for her minority’s freedom. And Charlie would have been a sympathetic villain instead of a hero with secrets. But the only crime of hers that the Doctor cares about is having tricked that student into his own death in that first scene of the whole show.

Her willingness to give up another’s life for her own without transparency is Quill’s weakness, while April’s openness to give of herself for others is her strength.

To Deserve Genocide

That’s a horrifying concept for most humans – whether anything actually deserves its genocide. We rightfully consider genocide the ultimate evil humans could commit. Even the planetary destruction of a full-on nuclear war would be less evil than a genocide. 

At least in a nuclear war, the perpetrators are just as dead as the victims. In a genuine genocide, there are survivors to profit from the remnants of the dead. Just think about all the Russians, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, and other folks who moved into those fertile farming communities along the old Pale of Settlement in the late 1940s.

Once you know their backstories, you can better appreciate how much
Quill relishes their cover identities, since her job as a math teacher lets
her boss around Charlie, the prince who's essentially her slavemaster.

The original owners were never coming back. They were all dust, ash, worm food, and lampshades. 

So genocide would be the ultimate moral horror. The Shadowkin are monstrous because – as we see from what they do to Rhodia and the casual way they commit violence at the Autumn prom – they literally live by genocide. They stalk entire civilizations interdimensionally, nesting in their shadows until they strike. In a single day, every individual member of the entire civilization is killed.

It’s the Shadowkin’s essence to be the most effective genocide machines in the universe. Speaking in the context of Doctor Who’s monster gallery, they’re more efficient killers than the Daleks. Daleks at least enjoy torturing other creatures enough that they let you live long enough that you might manage to escape or fight back.

The Shadowkin seem beyond pleasure. They are driven by a desire to kill without exception. They are less a sentient or sapient species and more a disease. 

And yet Shadowkin are sapient. They have individual identities like Corakinus, and presumably a society – horrifying though it is. A society of individuals that is simultaneously a plague of fire and smoke. Given the inherently destructive nature of the Shadowkin, would we call their total destruction genocide? Or disease control?

I also can't help but think that Charlie's name is another meta joke,
this time throwing some UK history into the show.

Given their relentlessness, a clear case can be made that their total destruction would be an act of self-defence on the part of your entire civilization. And an act of defence on behalf of all other civilizations in the universe, whose lives are threatened by the mere existence of Shadowkin. If they’re alive, then any of us could very well be next.

We have no guilt about wiping out smallpox or polio. So why the Shadowkin? Charlie explicitly says that he won’t answer a genocide with another genocide, that he won’t take on the burden of destroying the Shadowkin out of revenge for his own people.

Yet if they are more destructive than smallpox, it would be a great good to destroy the Shadowkin. So what makes their death genocide?

I can only conclude – from the narrative evidence I have, at least from the first episode – that it’s because of their self-consciousness. You can destroy an entire species of virus, bacteria, or fungus if their existence threatens your own because it’s the basic civilizational self-defence of disease control.

Yet despite genocidal propaganda, destroying a whole community or species of self-conscious individuals would not be mere pest control. It would be mass murder on the most horrifying scale. It would be genocide. 

Can even a Shadowkin's face summon you to an ethical confrontation?

In the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, he identifies the experience of the stare of another person – particularly another face – as the foundation of ethics itself. The face is itself a plea for recognition, its living presence a call for consideration and an absolute demand on you. 

Experiencing a face, you meet a force that limits your own action by its very existence. Reaching out to it humanizes you as much as the face itself imposes its humanity on you in that first encounter. And to harm or destroy that face is an ethical ruination. The face accuses you as it dies.

To destroy all faces of a particular kind is a genocide – even of something like the ontological plague of the Shadowkin – because they can accuse you as they die.

Kind of heavy stuff for a teenaged-aimed show. See you in a few days with my review of “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo,” and I’ll see you tomorrow with some more thoughts about Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of radical democracy.

A Change So Small But It Feels Like Paradise, Composing, 02/02/2016

Sometimes, my girlfriend, friends, and I will comment to each other that no one ever seems to talk to anyone anymore. This sounds like a stereotype of nostalgia (“Well, back in my day . . . !”), but I feel confident saying we’re in a cultural moment where people feel isolated from each other.

When our generation's art openly reflects the tenor of the
time, it describes the destructive power of an egotistical
individualist run rampant.

Like community links are fragile, fraying, being torn apart by social, political, and economic forces. More than this, I feel as though there are ideological factors as well. Individualism has become such an ever-present idea in our society, that it defines even our ethics.

I see this notion throughout the business world, especially now that I work in marketing and business communications for my income now. Management philosophies are designed around putting workers in competition with each other, to push each one to the highest performance for the sake of their career’s survival.

The career guide for women to succeed in business is about training yourself never to need to rely on anyone to help you. Reliance on others has become a form of surrender. If you make yourself vulnerable to someone, we tend to believe and are taught that this will expose you to sabotage.

I talked yesterday about some of the benefits of the new liberalism: how it liberated us from oppressive bureaucracies, how it offered us a moral framework that validated non-conformity and anti-authoritarian attitudes. 

In that way, neoliberalism was more democratic than the disciplinary political norms that existed even in the enlightened welfare state. But the new individualism has left us with even more intractable problems. 

I've usually talked about Donald Trump in this context,
but to "celebrate" his win of the Republican Iowa
caucuses last night, I'll mention Ted Cruz. Cruz has,
through his own route, built his career channelling
people's resentment, hatred, and fear into a politics
whose principles and movement engines openly
deride sympathy and empathy for different people
from yourself as both dangerous and repugnant.

Yesterday, I mentioned how individualist moralities of business leave many of us open to employment exploitation. Their social problems are worse. Individualist moralities isolate us from each other, teach us that sympathy and empathy are weaknesses, and that our own personal advancement and achievement is the most important of your affects in the world.

Don't think I’m declaring these statements as absolute universals. I’m talking about a tendency, a predominance and inclination to holding yourself back from connecting with all the sloppy messiness of your friends’ and neighbours’ humanity.

And I’m not about to launch into some “Get off my lawn!” rant about social media interactions. Online social networking media enable many connections among people that would otherwise have frayed away much faster thanks to distance and conflicting schedules. And that’s important. 

But you can have a deep conversation with someone through writing, for instance. Epistolary relationships have a long and noble history in society and literature. Now, our letters move faster than ever.

And a video chat is more intimate than a phone call, and can be carried out across the planet – often without even having to pay long-distance charges if your broadband packages are good enough. 

Yet if the people involved are suppressed their sympathy and empathy in the name of a morality of individualism in politics, business, and daily life? Degrading those habits of sympathy and the strength to deal with intense emotional connections is more fundamental. 

Levinas experienced the insights at the heart of his
philosophy of ethics in real life. After the Second World
War, he was an employee of the French government
processing refugee claims from families displaced by
the war and Holocaust victims. It was his job to sit
and hear the pleas of Europe's most desperate people,
and evaluate them according to a list of criteria.
Understanding what was so repugnant about this
is at the basis of his philosophy.

Social media is a scapegoat for this, largely in articles written by or for people of an older generation who doesn’t know how it actually works. Our destructive individualism is an ideology, much more fundamental to the character of our society than a media platform.

Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the foundation of ethics is our singular encounter with the face of another human, the plead for help and love, and our sympathetic response. Every such encounter between people is open to an intense engagement of our sympathy, the bonds of solidarity, friendship, and love between people.

We can train ourselves to become better at handling these encounters and responding to them. We can also let that power atrophy. And we’re more likely to do it if we believe that asking for help and being vulnerable to the love of another is an expression of weakness.

That, I think, is at the heart of the progressive political movements that I take part in. At least, it’s my motivating philosophy. I want to do my part to restore to society that capacity to build community, friendship, and love that I think the moralities of mercenary individualism have atrophied.

I’m no radical.

The Ethics of It All, Assignment: Earth VII Story Generator, Jamming 02/11/2013

Leonard Nimoy’s Gary Seven is the star of the television show Assignment: Earth. His character supplies the central arc of the show, the man whose messy involvements with human relationships lead him to rebel against the easy answers and simple plans of his masters. Diana Muldaur’s Isis is his familiar, embodying the tension of the mission itself with the sympathetic protagonist Gary. But Barbara Feldon’s Roberta Lincoln is the heart of the show in a literal sense. 

Roberta is the conscience of Assignment: Earth. Gary Seven began to doubt the authority and knowledge of the Aegis when he befriended Roberta. Indeed, it begins when Gary first makes friends among humans, lets them into an intimate circle. Even in the backdoor pilot Gene Roddenberry first produced at the end of the second season of his predecessor program Star Trek, Gary only becomes sympathetic, or at least understandable, when he makes friends with Roberta and the crew of the Enterprise. Although the Enterprise would disappear into the depths of obscurity in television history, Roberta Lincoln would become the ethical centre of one of the most revolutionary television shows in American science-fiction. 

It's a principle inspired by an idea of David Hume.
Knowledge of justice, right, and other moral and
political concepts of their sort imply no motivation
to apply them to anyone but yourself. Reason can't
drive you to care for others. Only empathy can.

If I could return to the real world for a moment, this conception of the power of friendship is at the centre of my own moral philosophy. Justice, right, and good are abstract concepts. In the discipline of philosophy, we treat these as powerful concepts, and they underlie all political activity. Yet they don’t have worldly power; these concepts alone can’t motivate people to action. Hell, even among philosophers, we’re less often driven to action in the name of these concepts as we’re driven to arguments over their nature and content. What motivates people to political action is when they see and empathize with an injustice, a wrong, or a harm, that befalls some actual person. The motive of authentic politics (not just jockeying among state and corporate institutions for personal power) is this face-to-face connection.* That empathetic connection is the generation of friendship.

* Anyone with a little background can see the influence Emmanuel Levinas has had on me as a political, moral, and ethical thinker.

Roberta was Gary’s first friend, the first time in many, many years that an Aegis operative has truly made a friend on Earth. The empathy and sympathy for the people of Earth that uniquely characterizes Gary among all the operatives began with Roberta. That was the importance of the arc involving the Robinson family in season three. Roberta’s friendship had introduced Gary, for a start, to the injustices suffered by women in the middle class. His friendship with the Robinson family introduced Gary to the injustices and harm done by racism institutionalized in government, culture, and economics. The involvement of Isis in the lives of the Robinson family similarly started friendships that opened her to the everyday economic injustice of racism and gang crime. Some of the season three episodes focussed on the Robinson family would be action-comedies with Isis in the comedic role, stuck getting to know the Robinson family matriarch, Johnny’s mother Joelle, while Gary and Roberta did a lot of the action television work. It would be a change of pace, as the role of Roberta in seasons one and two would often be comic relief while Gary and Isis took care of the action work. Joelle would periodically appear around season four, usually approaching Isis first. 

Central to Assignment: Earth, and to my own conception of effective politics, is the power of friendship to enact social change. Simply getting to know and care for individuals who are different than you, who face different problems in their lives than you, opens you to political action. The abstract concepts of more usual moral and political philosophy are tools in our arsenals once our friendships have motivated us to political action. 

That’s why the fourth season finale of Assignment: Earth begins when Francis Eight and Morrigan confront Roberta Lincoln with what she did. They understand the power of what friendship can do, and contrary to suspicions sown throughout the season, they are still loyal to the Aegis, and will do whatever they think necessary to safeguard their plan for humanity’s development. In fact, they are a little too loyal, because their plan threatens to tear the television show Assignment: Earth apart. Their goal is to destroy the friendship between Roberta and Gary Seven, severing his sympathetic link with humanity, and allowing him to be the brutally impartial agent that is required. They risk going farther into immorality than any operative has before.