I saw this movie last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is reputed to have an anti-religious theme, and while the book may, the film need not be taken that way. The film contrasts the power of truth with the power of authority. Virtues, such as courage and loyalty, confront one another on both sides. Thus, when truth and authority are divorced from one another, conflict is inevitable.
The chief protagonist is a young girl who can read the Golden Compass, an instrument that tells her the truth. It would be convenient to have something like that but, alas, noone else does. Hence, the young girl, who is able to divine the truth and her colleagues, who cannot, reflect the value of freedom in a world in which no authority can tell us with certainty what is true.
It's also a great adventure story with brutal violence and beautiful women. Can't beat that.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
In Search of a Theory
Here's another link to a story about Romney being truthiness-challenged:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/ap_on_el_pr/romney_candor
I don't mean to pick on Romney; it's just so easy to do. He illustrates something much more important than he is: we tolerate and even allow ourselves to be governed by people who believe in nothing and have no souls. Why? I have no idea. Plato, in The Laws, has an interlocutor suggest that the punishment for people who pay insufficient attention to public affairs is to be governed by evil men. Maybe that's it. After all, there are plenty of worthwhile things to do rather than pay attention to the cesspool that is American politics and government. I'm still in search of a theory to explain this phenomenon.
In any event, consider the following. It is not possible to make a rational choice among a slate of candidates who don't believe in anything. If you participate in elections to select candidates who will seek to obtain certain policy outcomes, you cannot predict what a candidate who believes in nothing will do if elected. So, for example, it is not possible to know what a President Romney would do in any particular kind of circumstance. Thus one could vote for Romney for some other reason, i.e., his hair. But then, how would you choose between Romney and Democrat Edwards? Both have great hair.
So, you could support a candidate who has some meaningless but unique quality, such as Her Highness Hillary (because she is a woman) or Barack Obama (because he is a black man). It is clear that Hillary believes in nothing, but you could still choose between her and Romney over the hair versus woman issue. This year's campaign is so utterly vacuous that I cannot tell whether Obama believes in anything or not.
Ultimately, it may be that campaigns are so centered on television that they must be devoid of content. Obama, for example, may actually believe something, but there is no way to determine what that is because the "first tier" candidates' campaigns and reporting about them is solely about the zingers they throw at each other that have no information in them.
Another alternative (mine) is to support a candidate that actually believes in something (more or less what I believe) and has zero chance of winning. This is satisfying but unsatisfactory. We live in a critical time in human history. Mankind's destructive power is greater than ever before. We have seen the enemy and he is us. We are truly at a historical crossroads. I well remember the Cold War. It is behind us, but we face new threats from abroad and threats of new kinds altogether, such as environmental change. It is important for America's political leadership to be the product of as rational a choice as possible made by its people, and right now there is simply no way to rationally choose a political leadership. We stumble blindly into the new millenium.
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
-t.s. eliot, The Wasteland
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/ap_on_el_pr/romney_candor
I don't mean to pick on Romney; it's just so easy to do. He illustrates something much more important than he is: we tolerate and even allow ourselves to be governed by people who believe in nothing and have no souls. Why? I have no idea. Plato, in The Laws, has an interlocutor suggest that the punishment for people who pay insufficient attention to public affairs is to be governed by evil men. Maybe that's it. After all, there are plenty of worthwhile things to do rather than pay attention to the cesspool that is American politics and government. I'm still in search of a theory to explain this phenomenon.
In any event, consider the following. It is not possible to make a rational choice among a slate of candidates who don't believe in anything. If you participate in elections to select candidates who will seek to obtain certain policy outcomes, you cannot predict what a candidate who believes in nothing will do if elected. So, for example, it is not possible to know what a President Romney would do in any particular kind of circumstance. Thus one could vote for Romney for some other reason, i.e., his hair. But then, how would you choose between Romney and Democrat Edwards? Both have great hair.
So, you could support a candidate who has some meaningless but unique quality, such as Her Highness Hillary (because she is a woman) or Barack Obama (because he is a black man). It is clear that Hillary believes in nothing, but you could still choose between her and Romney over the hair versus woman issue. This year's campaign is so utterly vacuous that I cannot tell whether Obama believes in anything or not.
Ultimately, it may be that campaigns are so centered on television that they must be devoid of content. Obama, for example, may actually believe something, but there is no way to determine what that is because the "first tier" candidates' campaigns and reporting about them is solely about the zingers they throw at each other that have no information in them.
Another alternative (mine) is to support a candidate that actually believes in something (more or less what I believe) and has zero chance of winning. This is satisfying but unsatisfactory. We live in a critical time in human history. Mankind's destructive power is greater than ever before. We have seen the enemy and he is us. We are truly at a historical crossroads. I well remember the Cold War. It is behind us, but we face new threats from abroad and threats of new kinds altogether, such as environmental change. It is important for America's political leadership to be the product of as rational a choice as possible made by its people, and right now there is simply no way to rationally choose a political leadership. We stumble blindly into the new millenium.
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
-t.s. eliot, The Wasteland
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