Justice Broadens the Mind, Jamming, 17/11/2015

Before my weekend organizing the Syria Film Festival, I was looking forward to writing a post celebrating the optimism and the movement for peace and acceptance that brought so many people from so many different arts and charitable agencies together.*

* I also had to catch up on Doctor Who, and I did that first.

SYFF was an enormous success, better than any of us among the organizers had thought we’d do. But the weekend tasted bitter to me, because of da’esh suicide bombings in Paris and Beirut. 

The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where more than
200,000 people live, who'd prefer to be in a community
with more than a bare subsistence economy. Like
Toronto, so they can live in relative dignity.

Monday morning, I got even angrier at the news when I heard about the arson at the only mosque in Peterborough. Many Canadians were having the worst possible reaction to the news of the Paris attacks. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall joined the chorus of American state governors announcing that he'd allow no Syrians to settle in his province.

But I ended Monday and began writing this post with feelings of hope. It wasn’t just because within just over a day, the crowdfunding project to repair the Peterborough mosque had collected nearly $110,000, more than enough to repair and refurbish it. Though that was nice.

I was thinking about how the different sides of the dispute over refugees in the West unfolded. It makes me suspect that the mind guided by progress and justice is epistemically superior to the mind guided by fear, conservatism, and hatred.

It has to do with adaptability. Let me explain.

Living in a contingent world, strength and resilience is a matter of adaptation. We have to adjust to a changing world, changing circumstances. The habits and traditions that have been useful and benefit to us in the past won't be so forever. Eventually, the world will change in a way that our traditions harm us.

This is the centrepiece of my Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The habits of consumption and thought that enable our ecological destructiveness are finally biting us in the ass, and if we want to survive as a civilization and a species, we'll have to change.

The same holds for our politics. We can no longer afford to live in a world where we distrust people who are different. Our weapons have, for the last hundred years at least, been too destructive for us to split into tribes (or ethnicities or nations) and wage war on people who are different than we are.

Justice isn’t only the most ethical path. It’s the path that best enables human survival. The arc of justice requires change.

When I listen to conservative arguments after the Paris attacks, they repeat the same ideas they have for decades. We must defend ourselves from our enemies. We must close ranks and ostracize the foreign and other. This mentality doesn't change. It’s frozen.

I could criticize such people about this. They’ll say that what’s right doesn’t change, that the true is universal and true for all time. I’ll say it isn’t. We'll call each other deluded. 

They'll drown as the oceans rise and burn in a nuclear explosion, all the time saying that the world is as it should be. I’ll desperately try to save us from catastrophic climate shifts and global war. Well, not just me. I don't have time for all that myself.

But the progressive reaction to successive terror events has shown, well, progress in its thinking. The peace-minded evaluation of the situation changes. Our collective intelligence develops new insights.

When the current ongoing catastrophe of the Middle East began, with George W Bush's invasion of Iraq, the general opposition reaction focussed on how the invasion would only fuel the radicalism that generated the Sept 11 attacks in the first place. The pro-invasion side focussed on revenge, self-defence from violent radicals, and othering Muslim people.

Nearly 13 years later, the progressive reaction to the Paris attacks evaluated da’esh’s motives. We understand immediately how turning Westerners against refugees plays into da’esh’s hands. 

We know that virtually all of Syria's refugees are fleeing a brutal war and Assad's Stalinist government. If we turn them away from our borders, they’ll have no future. Cast adrift, more poor refugees will be consumed with resentment against the West that turned them away when they fled barrel bombs and the secret police. 

Da’esh will have a whole new generation of radicals, both among the Arabs and Europeans & Americans, ready to kill each other and push humanity toward their ultimate goal of an apocalyptic war.

Our understanding of the situation has adapted to the new world. When your mind is on justice, your concern is to figure out how to help those who need it. So you’re able to understand how the world has changed, what’s gone wrong and what has to change for it to go right.

If you close your mind to everyone, they won't be able to call you to pay attention to the world beyond your own thoughts, and the like-minded. The mind is never challenged, so it atrophies. You forget how to learn the nuances of a world that's different from your own, or a world that changes.

Justice keeps the mind limber.

Storytelling As a Weapon, Doctor Who: Sleep No More, Reviews, 16/11/2015

When I started watching Sleep No More, I thought it was reasonable enough. Mark Gatiss is known for writing the more middle-of-the-road Doctor Who stories. When he's good, like The Unquiet Dead or The Crimson Horror, he’s pretty alright. When he's bad, like Victory of the Daleks or The Idiot's Lantern, it’s pretty meh.

Rasmussen: the most powerful villain in Doctor Who.
Follow my story, and I'll show you how.

That's what makes Gatiss such a dependable Doctor Who writer. When everything comes together and he fires on all cylinders with an intriguing story concept, cool imagery, and snappy dialogue, you get a solid episode. When production falls short of that, the episode isn't great, but it's still okay.

After watching his Doctor Who stories for a decade, I figured he'd never produce a classic. But he's probably the most dependable Doctor Who writer in the current stable.

I’ve said something similar about Toby Whithouse, that he’s dependable enough at producing reasonably competent scripts to keep in the stable. But Gatiss is superior to Whithouse in many ways. 

Take the remarkable, innovative direction out of The God Complex and you have a story no better than this season's biggest disappointment, Under the Lake and Before the Flood. Whithouse can write a competent action sci-fi story, but there’s nothing to it except the action. 

He regurgitates tired themes about anti-heroic male angst, and without that, he really just has a story of the most boring action beats imaginable, and antagonists so painfully generic as to be literal wastes.

Gatiss, however, is a marvellously ambitious writer. He loves Doctor Who for how you can throw so many ideas into a story that a 45-minute episode becomes a dizzying conceptual maze. 

The freakish lighting scheme and jittering camera of Sleep
No More makes the dust monsters even more twisted
and shapeless than they already are. They're a brilliantly
Lovecraftian creation.

And because he has a powerful nostalgia for classic Doctor Who driving his creativity, callbacks to the past are a pleasant frisson on his work. In Sleep No More, the Doctor even says Patrick Troughton’s classic line, "When I say run, run!” 

It’s quite appropriate for a story that recalls so much of the Troughton era: unambiguously evil, destructive monsters, the base-under-siege format, a cookie-cutter supporting cast, and a dark lighting scheme that made what was happening to individual characters in a particularly tense moment uncertain.

That atmosphere was a direct lift of a technique from The Web of Fear, but it was also innovative, using an otherwise tired found-footage technique for a fascinating purpose in the story. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Elements of Sleep No More come from Gatiss’ other favourite era, the Hinchcliffe years when the Doctor was Tom Baker. The episode’s tone of claustrophobia recalls The Ark in Space on a contemporary budget. The nature of the Sandmen are very much in the tradition of that story’s monsters, the Wirrn.

They’re an infection that overtakes your body and personality by literally consuming you. The horror of The Ark in Space lay in watching Commander Noah be eaten alive as he continued to walk and talk, fully conscious of what was happening to him. Even when he’s just got green bubble wrap around his hand, Noah's performance sells the horror of his experience.

Phil Sandifer, whose analyses are linked throughout, is
a major proponent of the importance of meta-fiction to
Doctor Who. So I'm in debt to him for this post. He
also described a phenomenon that I think is happening
to Clara this season: the show's fabric changing so that
she has no place in it. His analysis of Tom Baker's
last season described the same thing happening to him.

The bizarre political setting of the story – a catastrophic rearrangement of Earth's plates have physically merged India and Japan by the 38th century – recalls the similarly weird human society of The Ark in Space. 

In that story, the extreme technocratic societies of Golden Age sci-fi are pushed to their limit, with people’s whole identities determined by their role as assigned by a universally militarized government. The supporting cast succeeded by rebelling against these roles.

The Wirrn expected the humans to act something like they did, with total uniformity. That's why they infested their commander first. The Wirrn believed that humans would follow their chain of command, so never break from their commander’s orders. When the Doctor encouraged them to turn against Noah, they were able to fight the invaders off. 

This image of the human future, and the vulnerabilities of a thoroughly hierarchical society, expressed a fear of total state control that was a powerful presence in Western culture of the 1970s, thanks to the ongoing Cold War against the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Sleep No More similarly engages the politics of its time, in a way so important to the plot that I have to stop talking about the history of Doctor Who and warn you of 

SPOILERS

Gatiss imagines a human society so driven to maximize labour productivity that people have begun buying Morpheus pods, chambers that condense all the rejuvenation of the sleep cycle into a few minutes. 

The Doctor tries to stare out of a screen, how he signals
that he's taking control of a story. But this only seems to
work when the crew controls the story. In Sleep No More,
a character in the story controls the cameras. You can
see Clara pushed to the edges. I think I'll have more to
say about her role this season next week.

The episode even shows a corporate hologram message explaining all the benefits of having to sleep only five minutes every month. The conceptual villain of the story is that the drive to force people to work without rest just to make a living – essentially our modern economy – creates machines that produce all-consuming monsters that feed on human flesh.

In the last, meta-fictional, element of classic series influence, Reece Shearsmith plays Rasmussen, the villain of the story. Shearsmith himself played Patrick Troughton in Adventures in Space and Time, the TV movie Gatiss wrote about the origin of Doctor Who for the anniversary celebration in 2013.

The meta-fiction aspects of the story make Sleep No More the most fundamentally radical and pessimistic Doctor Who story that I think has ever been written. It goes like this.

Since the Troughton era, the Doctor's awareness that he was part of a narrative was a central part of his power. The Doctor defeated evil forces by taking control of the story, creating conditions where the villains couldn’t possibly win. Manipulating the field of battle is the core of his non-violent style of fighting. 

Troughton and many Doctors after him would signal their control of the narrative by staring through television screens, sometimes at the viewer and sometimes at other characters. 

Here, everyone stares through the camera at the viewer, because we see the story through footage collected from the sentient dust particles that the Morpheus machines create. The first and last person to stare through the screen at the viewer in Sleep No More is Rasmussen.

Mark Gatiss' purest moment of meta-fiction, at least up to
this point, was inserting Matt Smith's contemporary
Doctor into a story about the real-world origin of
Doctor Who, as a vision of William Hartnell, whose
Doctor was the only one without any meta-fictional
powers.

The Morpheus machines create an electronic signal, which condenses sleep in an individual. The Mark II Morpheus machines induce a sleep so powerful that they create the dust monsters. Their inception begins with an electromagnetic signal interacting with a human mind.

If you’re going to keep a human's attention on any electromagnetic signal, you weave a pattern with it that creates a story. In other words, you edit footage into a coherent, gripping narrative. We can't look away from a good story. 

Rasmussen edits the footage from Morpheus-infected people and the dust motes clinging to them into an exciting adventure mystery: the Doctor Who episode Sleep No More. 

At the end of the story, Rasmussen reveals that the signal transmitting this episode carries the wave that infects each viewer with the process that turns them into dust creatures. The episode ends with Rasmussen, himself entirely transformed into a dust monster, revealing that the viewer is infected, and that he’s transmitted the episode throughout the Sol system.

But the Doctor never stopped this from happening. He, Clara, and the last survivor of the human supporting cast fled to the TARDIS, where the Doctor removed the infection from Clara and our guest cast. But the last time we see him, he's running away from the camera and inside the TARDIS.

The last face the viewer sees on her television screen is Rasmussen’s. He’s taken control of the story. The Doctor signals that he’s taking control of the story by looking through the camera, through his awareness that he's in a story. 

When Mark Gatiss writes straight Doctor Who stories,
the result is a mixed bag. But when he assembles a
story meta-fictionally, it sings.

No matter how many times the Doctor stared through the screen, Rasmussen was always the one operating the cameras. The Doctor’s most powerful weapon on his own show – his metafictionality – has been stolen from him.

The first time this happened was a Troughton story, The Enemy of the World. The villain, the dictator Salamander, tried to steal Doctor Who by taking control of its story and shifting its genre from futuristic spy-fi to apocalyptic dystopia. 

He could do this because he had a special relationship with the Doctor that allowed him the same non-violent power: to change the genre and context of the narrative so that only he could win. This special relationship was meta-fictional: Salamander was also played by Patrick Troughton.

In Sleep No More, Rasmussen has control of the story from the start: he's the cinematographer, editor, and developed the story concept. The Doctor is only ever an interloper in Rasmussen's story.

And Rasmussen is, meta-fictionally, also the Doctor: Reece Shearsmith also played the first meta-fictional Doctor, Patrick Troughton, in Mark Gatiss’ openly meta-fictional film about the origin of Doctor Who. Like Salamander, he's an evil reflection of Patrick Troughton's Doctor. Reflected through many more lenses, but still a reflection.

In The Enemy of the World, Salamander was only ever defeated because he tried to take control of the TARDIS. It's the most meta-fictional element of Doctor Who, the vehicle that can take Doctor Who to every kind of story that can be written. 

Rasmussen has learned his lesson. He's triumphed in his story because he never tries to attack the TARDIS. He instead forces the Doctor and Doctor Who out of his story, the story of humanity's destruction by a terrifying infection.

With Rasmussen the Sandman, Mark Gatiss has made a unique achievement so far among Doctor Who writers. He's created a villain that defeats the Doctor more thoroughly than any other, both within the story and meta-fictionally, through the same power to control the story.

The next challenge of Doctor Who's writers will be figuring out how the Doctor can defeat a villain with even greater meta-fictional powers than his own. Who wants to step up to that?

Cinema Is Life, Advocate, 13/11/2015

The Syria Film Festival opens today at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It's the culmination of the internship I've worked since the end of July, a project that's been incredibly fulfilling to me in what has otherwise been an incredibly stressful time in my life. 

There has never been such a film festival in Canada before, celebrating artistic voices throughout the Syrian diaspora.* It even includes a short film called Diaspora. The films of SYFF are about Syria, produced by or in collaboration with Syrians, and the organizers aim for the film festival to express the voices of ordinary Syrians. 

* Well, there was a Syria Film Festival organized in Toronto in 1995, but that was on behalf of Hafez Assad, not the people of Syria.

Word that the Trudeau government will facilitate 25,000 refugees from the war in Syria and Iraq to land in Canada in the next few months is wonderful. I wish that was all we needed, and all the people of Syria needed. 

It makes sense for Canadians to consider this good news, a sign of the country embracing its humanitarian traditions after the casual universal cruelty of the Harper years. But there’s still a lot of work to do if we want to build firm trust between the Syrian refugee community and the wider Canadian population. 

Some already fear that refugees are liars. I've come across this in the rapidly deleted comments of racist abuse that the SYFF Facebook page receives every now and then. Twitter feeds like EU Militia Watch stoke public fears that every new arrival from a war zone is a militant terrorist, a violent radical coming to Canada solely to infiltrate, kill, and destroy.

The Syria Film Festival is an antidote to that fear and hostility. One of our slogans is, “Hear the stories behind the numbers.” We all hear reports of 12-million internally displaced, 9-million having fled outside Syria, 150,000 asylum-seekers in the EU. But those reports of statistics are easy to dismiss, because numbers rarely tell who these people actually are.

They are fathers, children, grandmothers, young professionals. Maybe they were part of the uprising against Assad. Maybe not, and they’re simply fleeing bombs and rockets. 

When we want to describe someone’s character, the best way is to tell a story about them. Art reminds us of another’s humanity. The Syria Film Festival offers its audience several such stories.

There’s the story of a young woman who feels herself compelled, against her and her family’s own better judgment, to join the street protests against Assad. That’s Morning Fears, Night Chants.

There’s the animated story of the Civil Defence Volunteers, the brigades of volunteer paramedics who are the first to rush into buildings where missiles and barrel bombs have just fallen. That’s Goal to Syria.

There’s the 40-minute documentary 50 Feet From Syria, following two weeks of Syrian-American doctor Hisham Bismar’s time at a field hospital just over the Turkish side of the border. It is unsparing in its details of the suffering and horrifying injuries that the Syrian war visits on its people. 

Syria Film Festival is also proud to be the Canadian premiere of this Oscar-shortlisted documentary short.

These are just a few films at the festival. While our full program is fantastic, it’s still nowhere near a complete picture of the human stories that emerge from the crucible of this Third World War. That would take millions of stories. But it’s a start.

What Haunts Us III: We Could Each Become Evil, A History Boy, 12/11/2015

The libertarian ethos is one face of a social phenomenon with many different aspects. If they have a common theme, it’s reactionary conservative movements understanding themselves in the language of freedom, even as they suppress the ability of others to free themselves.

For instance, take the screenshot on the right. It was a comment on a LinkedIn Pulse article I read yesterday morning about the recent protests against racist action and administration indifference at University of Missouri.

I tweeted this yesterday. I have no problem signal boosting this racist.

Look past the obviously racist slurs and you’ll see one sort-of-positive idea. If they didn't like how they were treated at University of Missouri, they could quit and go to school somewhere else.

That's the freedom of the pure marketplace. If you don't like the service at one place, take your business somewhere else. The principle sounds fine on its own, but it simply isn’t suitable for the material realities of many of the people who suffer in discriminatory social systems. 

Maybe you can't physically reach an alternative business to provide some essential service that bars you or creates an unwelcoming atmosphere for you. Like if you need an abortion but must travel hundreds of miles, and can’t afford to take time off work.

If you don’t get a satisfactory arrangement from your employer, says this advocate of freedom, simply quit and get another job. But what if there's an economic recession or depression, and there are no other jobs. 

Or job scarcity turns work-seekers into supplicants to potential employers. The sanctified new liberal value of work is the equality of two people who form a contract as employer and employee. 

Libertarians, influenced by Hayek’s writing, see that equality as undermined by the mob rules and thuggery of labour unions. Workers ganging up on employers to intimidate them. But employers hold power when jobs are scarce and they can turn away applicants on a whim. 

Robert Nozick was actually a very kind man, but his
philosophical ideas inspire people to act with terrible
cruelty. This is an actual, genuine quote from Nozick
sincerely saying taxation is forced labour. It's a
philosophical centrepiece of the libertarian / new
liberal right wing's desire to defund all government.

This is our economy. It has been for some time, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Its inequities fall more sharply, macro-economically speaking, on women. And those new liberal arguments are always trotted out, their presumptions of equal starting positions making perfect sense until you consider how real people actually live.

The argument for total free speech, quite often made on social media battlegrounds, work the same way: a presumption of material equality, when equality is abstract at best.

This is the presumption behind the defence of men who gang up on women on social media, hounding her with insults and abuse, then complain that she’s silencing them by blocking or reporting them. The presumption that we're all already equal, and that my democratic right to say whatever I want trumps my responsibility not to abuse people.

Remember that a member of Reddit's Libertarian forum once told me that moral obligations toward other people oppressed his freedom. This is in Robert Nozick's writing, his radio show example. The excerpt philosophy undergrads rarely receive in their textbooks. 

It’s a repugnant state of mind, this toxic masculinity. But why do I say it haunts me? Instead of just plain disgusting me? 

Because I could very easily have become one of these people who thinks women’s empowerment, even in the act of speaking out, is a violent act toward me as a man. I know how close I came to being a man who hates women.

A lot of the most aggressive members of Gamergate and the Rabid Puppies are young men with social anxiety or awkwardness. Maybe in some contexts, some conversations, they can appear confident. But under that bluster is a very uncertain person. 

They feel uncertain about how they’re supposed to approach women. Maybe they develop feelings for a woman in their circle of friends, but they're too nervous to say anything. And if they overcome their nerves, maybe they're still awkward, strange, and come off creepy. 

Maybe that rejection inspires obsessiveness. Maybe instead of nursing some sadness before moving on, they instead foster resentment. Or else talk themselves into deeper infatuation. 

I credit Penny's writing with helping to raise my own
consciousness and understanding of my attitudes and
actions. That's what philosophy is supposed to do.

Men are supposed to be strong, confident, and impressive. Whether it’s with our words, appearance, or some other talent. Why do you think so many men take up music to attract women? We’re taught that we have to act a particular way, and we can win what we're entitled to. Women. Or even a particular woman.

It wasn’t until I read Laurie Penny’s account of toxic masculinity that I fully understood the conundrum that defined my personality through most of my 20s. I thought I had to act in an aggressive, confrontational, showboating way to win the affection of women I wanted, whose affection I felt entitled to only because I wanted it. Even when I'd get so nervous, I couldn't express it.

I thought I should act according to the rules of what I now know is toxic masculinity. But I was really bad at it. And when I tried to act that way, I'd become monstrous. 

I broke that cycle of thought maybe only three or four years ago. Some never do. Some blame the women who reject them for their own loneliness, and become more resentful and enraged. Some think that a woman choosing who she wants to be with, or even just speaking her mind, is an act of aggression toward men and themselves. 

The worst of these men are Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine. But the same tendency is in so many men who remain twisted by toxic cultures of violent, aggressive, possessive masculinity. Masculinities of control and authority, that see being in authority as freedom.

I could very easily have been one of those people. That’s what haunts me about the modern phenomenon of men hating women. Because when I think about a young woman like Rehtaeh, I don’t just think about the tragedy, the horror, and the cruelty.

I think about how – if my reaction to a few situations leaned just a little bit more one way than the other – I could have become just like her tormentors. Someone who thought she deserved it.

That potential for evil is in me. It’s in many, if not all, of us. And it haunts me to my core.

What Haunts Us II: Ghosts of an Imagined Freedom, Composing, 11/11/2015

Continued from previous . . . You see, this Utopias manuscript I’m working on, which I spend a lot of blog space writing about the research for, is fundamentally about freedom. That’s the political message of any utopia worth calling such, this declaration, “When we achieve this, we shall at long last be free!”

And the project is basically exploring what that means. Part of what it does – in the early bits that I haven’t been researching or posting much about recently – is challenge the approach that academic philosophy takes to the problem of freedom.

Unfortunately, one of the most successful popular images
of science is the one the encouraged us to think of
everything science described as the gears of a clock
fitting precisely together and moving with perfect
regimentation. It turned out totally wrong, but it caught
on so easily that too many still think of science this way.

Those early chapters will tear down how the mainstream of respectable academic philosophy treats the problem of freedom. That respectable vision of the freedom problem is the either-or of freedom and determinism (or mechanism). 

The notion survives in strange forms in political contexts. Remember what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when I was reading Leo Strauss denounce social science. Social science, he said, presumed to seek the mechanisms behind political action. 

In other words, he thought that a scientific understanding of society and politics would necessarily imply that the political doesn’t unfold through the free action of men.* The realm of human action to secure our freedom would itself not be free.

* And with a perspective like Strauss’, it is always men.

That metaphysical exploration of what we think freedom is, what it actually is, and what it could be, leads to a confrontation with the modern West’s strongest voice for freedom above all else. Libertarianism.

Our politics has many progressive movements whose goal is freedom: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and modern feminism. They have the advantage of using social science and sociological philosophy to build the core concepts to understand the systemic oppression they target.

But the modern era has a curious paradox at the heart of these liberation movements. A powerful reactionary force against them is the libertarian movement. These are people whose political philosophy is the most thorough individualism conceivable. 

Hayek's influence similarly lies with his popular
impact, through the Readers' Digest serialized
version of his Road to Serfdom, how it was first
released in the United States shortly after the
end of the Second World War.

That individualism inherited the right-wing hostility to social science. It's a hostility toward any way of understanding the world that accepts the reality of causes bigger than individuals’ choices and actions. 

That perspective sees any organized community action as collectivist, collapsing the unique desires of each individual to a single political program, universal to anyone. Put like that, it sounds reasonable. But what about when I say the key example Friedrich Hayek had in mind of community action becoming totalitarian was a trade union?

It's an individualism whose refusal to see causes beyond each person’s own choice even blinds them to racism. Not the racism of the self-consciously hurled insult. I mean systemic racism, the responsibility we have for our unconscious presumptions about people, or the disproportionate impacts of institutions.

Here’s an example from some libertarian friends of mine. Because George Zimmerman was afraid for his life at the moment he pulled the trigger, his killing of Trayvon Martin couldn’t have been influenced by racist beliefs.

Those beliefs, and the social atmosphere that makes young black men a presumptive object of suspicion, conditioned the shooting. But a libertarian couldn’t see that, only the beliefs that motivated that precise choice.

At least, two libertarians couldn’t see that. The famous C & G. When they broke their friendship with me, my post about it blew up. It still has more pageviews than any other post I’ve written. 

The main reason that post blew up was because I stuck a link on Reddit, in its Libertarian forum.

They were living examples of the right-wing tendencies in libertarian thinking that helped solidify my analysis. They were very ordinary, quite doctrinaire libertarians. And even though they made a show of their liberal-minded openness to different ideas, the break in our friendships came when they realized that I couldn’t be converted. 

A moment from the terrible Atlas Shrugged movie series.
A common joke was that the films' libertarian funders
contradicted their own principles in bankrolling the full
project. The first film was a colossal financial flop, so a
true liberal capitalist would never have financed a
second film. But the producers were more interested
in demagoguery than living by their principles. Says a
lot about Ayn Rand too.

I was no longer worth talking to after that. It demonstrated the hypocrisy of the modern right in miniature. They cared a great deal about protecting freedom of speech, but had no tolerance for the notion that others were right. 

I’m not about to judge much from the example of two libertarians among a political identity that includes millions across North America. But my friendship with C & G was a year-long case study in libertarian thinking and discourse styles. 

More than a research case, they were also friendships that broke after two years, a long time to talk to someone pretty much every week. I never agreed with them, and never did, but when I see libertarian arguments in video or writing, I hear their voices, even though they never spoke with me face to face.

They’ve become characters, as distinct as any that Virginia Woolf or Mordecai Richler might draw. Characters that stick close to me as I research the philosophy of the modern right. Haunting me.

Real Revolution Is With Thought, A History Boy, 10/11/2015

SPOILERS

first and foremost, as I’m leaping into some discussion of the last Doctor Who storyline to make a point about my own political philosophy.

When I wrote yesterday’s review of The Zygon Inver(a)sion, I felt like it didn’t quite reach a point that it should have. It never got to what Bonnie the Zygon actually did when she turned away from revolution and became a new Osgood. 

Bonnie never turned away from revolution to stand her rebellion down and become a peacemaker. The words of the Doctor made it clear: the real revolution is turning away from violence and retribution as a go-to response to injustice. 

Osgood started as a joke character for the 50th Anniversary
episode in 2013, but Peter Harness made her one of the
most philosophically interesting characters of the whole
Peter Capaldi era. She embodies progress, newness, and
divergence in so many ways. She's beyond conventional
concepts of identity, species, individuality, politics, and
ethics. Quite impressive.

Bonnie started The Zygon Inva(er)sion as just another fighter. She ended The Zygon Inver(a)sion as a true revolutionary because she fundamentally changed her values. 

Yesterday, I spoke about the message of peace in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, how the leader of a violent rebellion can be forgiven. She was violent without a doubt, a radical in every sense of the word. 

She led a retaliatory massacre of all the humans in her new hometown in America, killed several UNIT troopers and kidnapped enough to infiltrate the organization with duplicates, and worst of all, victimized an innocent Zygon who wanted nothing to do with her insurgency to make him a catalyst for spreading fear and violence between humans and Zygons.

Any peace settlement would require her punishment. Bonnie even says at one point that she can’t endorse peace, because she’d never be allowed to live if she surrendered. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if people call for the death of an insurgent leader who acted with such brutality. It’s a popular idea in the West to execute terrorist leaders without trial, including even their families in drone bombings. 

It’s similarly popular to imprison terrorists without trial and torture them. Even with a trial, they’re usually put in solitary confinement for life, tortured for decades by locking them away from any human contact. 

It’s a popular law in my country of Canada to strip those who’ve been convicted of terrorist crimes of their Canadian citizenship, and deport them to whatever country still holds their alternative citizenship. Even if they’ve served their time. 

Though Justin Trudeau won his majority government
with the banner and hashtag of #RealChange, he and
his party embody a politics of draping the imagery of
progress over the status quo and pandering to the
worst instincts of Canada's population.

When Saad Gaya is released from prison, as the law still stands, he’ll be stripped of Canadian citizenship and deported to Pakistan, a country where he’s never lived. No matter how much he may genuinely regret and renounce his actions as a terrorist plotter. The Harper government wrote this law; the current Trudeau government was critical of this when they were in opposition, but supported many other invasive and dangerous anti-terror laws.

We kill, maim, torture, and imprison terrorists, their families, and their supporters because we believe it is right to punish people for their crimes. We think it’s appropriate, moral, and just to bring equal or greater violence on the perpetrators of violence. Retribution is the most popular model of justice in the world.

It’s wrong. That simple. Retribution is wrong.

It perpetuates the cycle of violence that the Doctor denounces in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, but humanity’s desire for retribution also does much worse to humanity itself. It makes us think that it’s moral to bring violence on people. 

We often think of morality as a set of rules endorsed by authority. This is the vision of morality in most mainstream religions. God is the ultimate authority who polices us with divine punishment through the afterlife or karmic misfortune. God’s rules for our action are morality, for no other reason than the authority of God.

This is what lies behind the popular belief that atheists can have no moral centre. This is why people hate atheists: they believe that because an atheist doesn’t believe in a God who will punish them for breaking moral rules, they’ll do whatever violence they can get away with because they don’t believe in moral right or wrong at all.

Part of what I've come to love in
Doctor Who since understanding this
idea is that the Doctor's ethics
largely correspond to the progressive
conception of Nietzsche's thought.

There are atheists who believe this, but not many. They aren’t real atheists at all; they’re nihilists, believing that without the traditional ground of authority, there’s no motivation to be moral.

But being ethical has nothing to do with morality. This is the fundamental insight of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a further expression of Doctor Who’s Nietzschean character. Bonnie has given up her moral values that would answer violence with greater violence. Having sincerely done that, she’s forgiven.

That forgiveness of her crimes gives her the space to become a peacemaker, managing and negotiating conflicts that arise among her people and between her people and their majority community, humanity. 

The real revolution was this ethical transformation: she’s changed the whole mission of her life. The immediate metaphor was in changing her form to become a twin Osgood. But her transformation was ethical. She changed her entire purpose in life from revenge, retribution, and punishment to repair, healing, and peace-building.

Any revolutionary movement that doesn’t have this model doesn’t deserve the name.

You Can Just Put the Guns Down, Doctor Who: The Zygon Inversion, Reviews, 09/11/2015

Not only was this an incredibly well-made story – the direction, the acting, writing, the beautiful weirdness of imagery like Clara’s dream and that poor shopkeeper trapped in his Zygon form – it was also a perfect expression of all the idealism and hope that Doctor Who can inspire.

Probably Peter Capaldi's best moment of raw Doctor
performance that he'll get throughout his tenure. It's
a little uncomfortable that he included so many insults
in his rant, calling Bonnie's grievances childish.

As far as following on from last week’s post, there isn’t much philosophically there beyond what was introduced in The Zygon Invasion. But 

SPOILERS

will be necessary if I’m going to talk about how the core ethical and political ideas are developed in The Zygon Inver(a)sion as a whole. And there is still plenty to work with.

The Zygon Inver(a)sion is the clearest pro-peace statement the show has ever made. Living in the middle of the Third World War, while its refugees are being turned away with racialized scorn, we need to hear this message of peace. It’s the message that the ultimate lesson of any war is that war is too terrible to wage. 

But there’s also more than that. It’s the remarkably unrealistic conclusion that, no matter the depth of blood that’s accumulated through the conflict, forgiveness and progress is always possible. Well, I say unrealistic. Really, it just sounds that way to ears that aren’t accustomed to listening to it.

In a way, it’s a lesson that British people are (or at least can be) especially accustomed to listening to. You can say all you want about the British history of empire, conquest, cultural genocide, actual hardcore genocide. I certainly would if you let me.

But that insult wasn't directed at Bonnie's grievance. It
was about how she chose to deal with it: war. Jenna
Coleman did a wonderful performance as Bonnie, you
can tell watching it how much she loves playing such
a villainous character.

You can also say all you want about Tony Blair in particular, and I’ll join you in quite loudly denouncing him for helping to create the conditions for the Third World War, leading the invasion of Iraq with George W Bush. In that regard, Blair is one of the key political figures responsible for the deaths of millions in Iraq and Syria.

But Blair also oversaw a movement for peace that was utterly unbelievable for many generations of people wrapped up in an earlier conflict that had gone on for decades. The Good Friday Accords of 1998.

After nearly a whole century of the most wretched and vile sectarian violence, the leaders of the Irish Republican movement and the Ulster Unionist organization sat down and talked. And when they were finished, the weapons were on the ground. A war, including a substantial terrorist component, ended. Not with a massacre, but with forgiveness.

The Osgoods are the living embodiment of that forgiveness, as they walk away from the dematerializing TARDIS, one in her Peter Davison collar and the other in her Sylvester McCoy scarf and overcoat. 

Their empathetic friendship is the union of enemies in love. The Zygon leader who had been committed to victory or death has embraced friendship and peace. Because it’s not as though this is a straight return to the status quo. 

As good an actress as Jenna Coleman is, she seems to have
explored all of Clara as a character that she could. As
much as I love Clara on the show, it's time for her to go.
Coleman's best story as Clara was last season, in her
tragic relationship with Danny. This year, apart from
some standout performances in individual stories
like this, she's on the sidelines.

Look at what Bonnie wanted when her finger was on the trigger: all Zygons fixed in their current human form, or all Zygons forcibly reverting to their natural squid-like selves. A situation where they would either no longer be themselves, or there would be outright war and the likely genocide of her own people. 

Either way, Zygon-kind would no longer exist. There could be no victory. Unless you, like da’esh, really do embrace total self-destruction as a reasonable political path forward.

Bonnie was in total desperation, and a viewer should remember where that desperation came from. The humans in New Mexico who reacted to the sight of a natural-form Zygon with terror, who began massacring them. Osgood turned down the Doctor’s offer to travel for a while in the TARDIS because they had a peace to maintain, and that meant she and Osgood had to figure out how to solve that problem.

They’d work it out as friends. 

Because that really is the only answer to situations like this. Friends investigating what went wrong in a horrible problem and figuring out together how to avoid it happening in the future. The Osgoods have a lot of hard work cut out for them.

But they will have an easier time than you may first think because most of the Zygons on Earth only want peace. Probably the morally worst thing Bonnie did in this story was choose this random Zygon shopkeeper to force back into squid-ish form.

He didn’t want to be part of this uprising or the war Bonnie wanted to come from it. But she chose him and made him a weapon in her war, for no other apparent reason than that he was convenient. His suicide, from the despondence of being crippled in the name of her vision, is on her conscience. He only wanted to run his shop in peace.

Every violent movement hides the same secret: most of
its people don't want war. They might not be happy with
things as they are, but they want a resolution to what
conflicts do arise that doesn't revolve around violence.
Like this Zygon shopkeeper who was happy in his
new home, and called that dingy corner of London
his home.

That act of cruelty will haunt her, even as she’s decided to stop being cruel. That’s what repentance does: it’s admitting your own wrongdoing to yourself, and letting it haunt you.

That’s essentially what the Doctor admits to feeling most of the time about his own past. One further thing I like about this episode is how it handles the Doctor’s character. While the greatest trauma on the Doctor – the destruction of Gallifrey – is gone, he still carries the snowballing cruelty of the Time War in his heart.

Peter Harness, in this climactic monologue scene, writes The Doctor as a war veteran turned peace activist. He’s traumatized, but he doesn’t let that trauma consume him, as was the danger from 2005-2013 when the harshest moments of the Time War still weight on him.

For Bonnie-become-Osgood, that trauma is now part of what she channels into her new life as a Zygon-human peacekeeper. My prediction from last week* was that the radical empathy of a shared mind would undo the Zygon terror movement.

* Not that Kate would have shot her attacker first and then pretended to be a Zygon in her form, which was a trivial guess for me because it fits Kate’s character perfectly and Queen Elizabeth I had done it already in the anniversary special.

Bonnie’s common psychic space with Clara was certainly part of that, and it was a chilling sequence to see them battle through the window of a bio-receptacle. A line of the Doctor indicated the good influence that can come from Clara being in your head.

But ultimately the answer came in a form that humans are more capable of doing, even though it often seems impossible. They were able to forgive each other, and bit by bit work through their problems as friends together. That’s ultimately what every peace is.