I had a thought this morning, so I thought I’d share it with you. I was thinking about how I don’t want to get murdered, because if someone murders me, then my life is over. You probably are concerned with getting murdered, as well, so we have that as common ground on which to build a conversation.
Movie Death
I was thinking about this because last year I watched 150 Westerns for a future project. I was thinking about the difference between the reality of death and its depiction in my favorite western, Once Upon a Time in the West
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=86-K8BJlh9M
As you can see, there are a lot of guns in this film. They go off regularly. And when they go off, people die. Now, in real life, death is the ultimate end of experience. Once it befalls you, you’re snuffed out. You’ve gone off to join the choir invisible. You are no more, etc.
But the western has a different take on death. Yes, people die. But they also are not dead. They come back in another movie to get killed again. This is what differentiates art from life. No one comes back from being killed in real life (except if you believe in the miracle of Jesus Christ, but that is a matter of faith because you weren’t there). In art, we can experience the impact of a person’s death without actually experiencing death itself.
This give the depiction of death in the movies a different meaning than it has for us in real life. In the movies, we are following a hero on his path to his final destination. Those who get shot or blasted or wounded or maimed of crippled or mutilated in any way are simply the necessary casualties of the process of culling the weak from the strong. Those who survive the ordeal to the end are heroes.
And this is why American movies are so unbelievably violent. Just as in Yeat’s ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ the artists who perform their tragic play are secretly gay. An artist like Quentin Tarantino is also gay. He knows that his art of violence will not destroy the whole world in a holocaust of death, but only cleanse the world of his carefully-selected targets of his moral ire. The gimp people in Pulp Fiction
This moral calculus exemplifies the approach taken to death by art and artists.
Thoughts on Moral Calculus of Movie Death
In the moral calculus, even the horrific death of a child serves a larger moral purpose, as here in one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, where Frank (played by a blue-eyed Henry Fonda) comes out of the bushes, having killed a whole family. A young boy walks out of the house, sees his dead family, grips some water over his heart, and looks quizzically at the villain. Henry/Frank smiles at the young innocent for a moment, and we believe there is a shred of humanity in him…until one of his henchmen asks him ‘What are we going to do with this one, Frank?’ His smile goes away after he has been named, but it comes back to his blue-eyed face again before…well, I’ll let the film speak for itself:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy52xEUsrvU
So the Kid is dead, and that’s okay, because his death serves a purpose. It set the moral boundaries of Henry/Frank. He is evil.
Sources of and Obstacles to the Moral Calculus
In the heroic configuration of the universe, the art of Sergio Leone follows the thought of Rousseau, who believed that nature had created all things equal, and it was the work of artifice that had distorted things from their natural balance through the unequal division of wealth and property. All we have to do to restore balance is to go to war with the people who are for protecting their individual property at the expense of the collective.
But this is only true if Rousseau was correct about his initial premise that nature is indeed equitable in the distribution of his gifts. But there is a competing position, that of Pareto, who says that the gifts of nature are bunched up among the upper 20% who have 80% of all Italian land. Pareto wanted to redistribute the land more equitably, and the Italians (elected?) the fascist dictator Mussolini to redistribute wealth more equitably according to the ‘natural’ principles laid out by Rousseau.
However, this may have put Mussolini on the wrong side of equation. The question was whether Pareto’s observations or Rousseau’s observation about the world was correct. Both cannot be exclusively true, although both could be partially true.
I tend to side with Pareto over Rousseau on the equation of the intentions of nature because of an observation that Pareto himself makes about the lowly pea plant. 20% of pea plants yield 80% of the pea crop. This is nature’s way of sorting out winners and losers in the battle for survival in a hostile universe. Those who flower most have the most offspring; those who flower least die.
This puts people like Mussolini at a disadvantage, because they are convinced that nature wants to distribute her resources equitably and it is within the power of human being to do so. All he had to do was to object to the capitalist pigs who had taken so many of the resources of civilization for themselves. He and his squadristi went to war with nature under the mistaken impression that they were restoring nature to its rightful place at the center of Italian nationalism.
But if Mussolini was wrong in his estimation of nature, then he would be fighting against the tide of nature. He would have to keep ramping up his perceived enemies in order to maintain discipline at home. ‘It’s the evil Americans or the evil capitalists who are working against our fairer system,’ he might have said. ‘Direct your anger towards them.’ This, in fact, is what happened. Eventually he broke faith with his people by siding with Hitler, who was also a fascist and who also ended up as the poster child for EVIL that artists like Tarantino could rally their troops around in a good old-fashioned blood romp.
Mussolini and Hitler were wrong about what nature wanted. In the struggle for power in the 20th century world, Mussolini lost out to the better prepared allies, not because they sent in troops to take 100 or more scalps from 100 or more Germans, but because the Americans had a better system of survival in a competitive world. That is no to say that because America won the last war that we are a unique or in any way exceptional civilization. But it does mean that on a relative scale that we were better than or enemies, whose eyes bit of more than their stomachs could digest. After the fall the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Soviet communism itself in 1991, the Chinese were wise enough to have learned the lesson that the world had changed; capitalism was the way forward.
And it doesn’t mean that because the Germans lost the war that they are evil. Some were, but the majority of Germans had bought into a false premise. That is why it’s so important to check your reasoning, not against your own very secure premises, but against wider nature, and why it’s important that you be as close to right as you can be. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, you must make allowances for being wrong, for no one is ever completely right about what nature wants. No one is absolutely right. He who makes less mistakes in an environment in which everyone is making mistakes is the winner. That is how I explain America’s victory over the Axis and not on account of any sort of permanent advantage. We were more right about our view of the universe than older thinkers like Marx, Lenin, Malatesta, or Mussolini.
Wikipedia references for each
My Fictional Universe in Relation to the Thought of Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken
It is in the realm of human nature to follow nature, but between ‘the truth’ of nature comes a veil of fiction. It is our response to the veil of fiction that defines our relationship to nature.
Think of an atom. We cannot see it, but we can imagine it nevertheless. We use analogies when we do. My analogy is of the solar system, as is (I’m guessing by using my imagination; I could be wrong) yours. So between our analogy of an atom and its ‘reality’ comes imagination. My beef with those who believe that they are in possession of ‘the truth’ is not that they haven’t grasped the truth of nature but that they make no allowances for the ‘fiction’ which comes in the form of analogies about ‘the truth.’
When Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are discussing their possession of ‘the truth,’ both are correct. But both are using a different set of analogies about the universe they are observing. It is therefore not the possession of ‘the truth’ that matters but the possession of the correct analogy that matters. And this is why people like Limbaugh, who believes that Darwin is one of the two worst thinkers of all time, beat out smarter men like Franken or Michael Moore. Limbaugh has a much better sense of market forces than Moore, who wants to redistribute wealth equally to all, or Franken, who is rich enough that he doesn’t mind paying more taxes for (to my mind very inefficient) services.
No one in the debate between conservatives and liberals is wholly right. The question of who is more right in regards to the specific issue of money becomes very clear. Rush Limbaugh signed a contract for $400 million dollars, while Air America went broke. This is not in spite of but because of Air America’s hosts’ reliance on truth. (I could not find a story on Google News about Franken having laughed at Limbaugh’s shilling for products on his show, but I remember it distinctly), but because Limbaugh is more comfortable with what he has to do to find and maintain an audience. Franken is more skittish.
My point is not to reduce all value to monetary terms. My point is that, simply because Al Franken has rejected monetary value doesn’t mean that he has correctly determined the correct value of money and monetary value in the world. Money matters more than Al Franken thinks it does. His business is supported by it, and he should give it its proper due. On the other hand, money matters rather less than Limbaugh, who occasionally talks about his fabulous wealth and ability to travel on his private jet to any location in the world, thinks. He still got addicted to pain killers precisely because money is not the central ingredient in your happiness.
Rush is more right on that subject than Al Franken, who ‘still thinks of himself as a comedian’ and who fled from advertising to a less capitalistic model of the truth. Unlike NPR, which forces people to pay for a service that they may or may not use, Air America relies on a model of goodwill participation of those (20%?) of those who really listen, rather than the broad reach of Limbaugh into the marketplace. Limbaugh must be entertaining if his listeners are not going to be turned off when he goes to commercial.
My point is that Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken
Back to the Moral Calculus
The moral calculus of the Western demands that we give ourselves up to believing what we are seeing on screen and succumb to the fictional portrayal of events. Actors who die are not really dead, anymore than poets who travel to a separate world out of time have not really traveled to a separate world out of time. The veil of fiction prevails in our quest for ‘the truth,’ and those who believe too much go from being (perhaps callous) observers of artwork (like me) to true believers, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And no one wants that, so it’s important that we don’t forget the veil of fiction that lies between our analogous minds and the world ‘as it is.’
Directors in the 60s and early 70s thought that they were experiencing for the first time ‘in all of Christian minstrelsy‘ the revelation of ‘the truth,’ which had been hidden the parents of the Pepsi Generation only by their parent’s reliance of traditions which could be thrown off once someone realized that we don’t have to follow the path that our parents took. This tradition itself has a long tail, going back to the Enlightenment and even father back to Plato. But, immediately (10 years, which is immediately in historical terms) filmmakers like Louis Male realized that their picture of the universe was not all it was cracked up to be. Gustav Björnstrand starts talking about leaving the planet for a (completely fictional) planet where everything’s going to be put right again. (Hmm, I ask myself; should I follow him there?)
The Role of Art in a World of Violence
Art in the modern world is like the films of Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah. They value only heroes; other can be dispensed with (with relish) if they do not serve the ultimate purpose of art. Peckinpah believes his own press. He is one of the chosen people who is also on the outside looking into a (completely fictional) world of the now-fading West. He is still willing to do those things that other (middle class bourgeois men) are unwilling to do. He seeks the few other heroes, and dispenses with those who are not worthy.
This has its roots in Rousseau and Nietzsche, who also thought that the only thing standing in their way was the loss of a more beautiful past in which money and monetary value had less of a role and to which only the hero could return. But it turns out that this configuration of life divides the hero from other men in an (at least) 20/80 divide. This makes me question whether Rousseau was correct in his initial view of nature’s equitable balance, or whether or Nietzsche was correct in traveling outward to the ‘ends’ of experience to be among the supermen.
The cost of such an error in our estimation of the role of nature is immense in a country in which men based their whole philosophy on Jefferson’s declaration that we are guaranteed ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ by the social contract. This causes Americans to judge things on the basis of how close or far we are from the natural ideal. But, if Pareto was correct in his estimation of nature as picking winners and losers, then those who democratize too much, as I am inclined to do, are fighting against nature, not aligning ourselves with a long forgotten nature that only a select few of us can access.
The problem with this view of the world are legion. The chief problem with the heroic view of the world is that it denies the humanity of all for the select few who know the truth. But it turns out that ‘the truth’ is unknowable as it is, and in the hands of a Peckinpah it is based on a fairly unreasonable view of the world as it is.
As fiction, I love Peckinpah’s universe. As an account of ‘fact,’ I have to wonder about the man who actually believes what Peckinpah is writing. I don’t actually believe that Peckinpah believed what he was writing. But I also think that he wanted to bring his vision of the idealized view of the past to life. This is my problem with the work of purveyors of heroic literature in general: they look at the universe, decide something’s missing, and continue to pursue it anyway.
Two Perspectives on Reality of Your Death
The reality our situation is very very different from its portrayal in the movies. In reality, nature may in fact kill us all, but we rage against the dying of the light, because each of us thinks of ourselves as infinitely valuable in the universe. We hold the metaphysical key to life, and when we are snuffed out, our metaphysical worldview is snuffed out completely and permanently. We do not therefore put any monetary value on our lives. They are infinitely valuable to us; their loss means loss of everything.
This is the basis of Kant’s categorical imperative, which says ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ This is a foundational principle in the Jeffersonian secular Enlightenment universe, but it an optative wish, not an enforceable law. Moreover, it ignores the reality of experience, which is that others are not compelled by the wishes of the bourgeois, law-biding, middle class followers of the categorical imperative. Heroes don’t follow man made laws; they follow a higher law, and they are (always) validated because they are (always) right.
When it to the perspective that others take on our lives, we must allow for them to place a value on our lives. We can enforce through law the proscription against murder, but some men will decide that the $10 dollars in our wallet is more important than the cost of letting us live. So they shoot us, robbing us of our most valuable asset (our very life) over something so mean as an Alexander Hamilton. By ignoring the value aspect of life and retreating back to the stars where the earth can be viewed serenely, liberals like Al Franken and Michael Moore are ignoring some significant features of the world as it is. But when we travel back down from our adventure in the skies (or worse don’t even broaden our experience through space travel to imaginary places that exist only in the mind) we need to understand why the perspective of Rush Limbaugh, which places too much emphasis on wealth, is not entirely correct, either.
My Take on Fiction
The solution is not in fact to withdraw from the world to a higher perspective, but to educate yourself against the possibilities of being murdered by wrong-minded gunslingers who rely on an unacknowledged fiction. This requires a different sort of fiction than the heroic blood romps of a Tarantino, Leone, or Peckinpah or the work of Rousseau or Nietzsche. I have read and have enjoyed the works of these and many authors in the modern vein, but enjoyment is not all in the universe of knowledge; one hopes that the famous authors who know more than we know what they are talking about and are not people like the other Birkin who stands in for Hermione’s own lack of knowledge and then declares that the world can only be perfected if every human is killed. That’s the sort of thinking that led (though on a smaller scale) to the Holocaust.
This is what I was trying to accomplish in my fiction, which focuses, not on the hero who is guaranteed from the beginning of the tale to make it to the end unharmed but who must separate himself from the collective society, but on the kid who dies in the middle of Leone’s film. That kid must have a sense that his life is infinitely valuable, and that is why he stands frozen before Frank/Henry shoots him dead. But the kid is holding a bottle of water to his chest. That may be valuable to sustain life, but it has no economic value (scroll down to ‘The Meaning of Value‘ on this page). Frank has a gun and gets to call the shots in the universe of exchange.
My Kid is not at the end of a poker game. Instead, he’s in the middle of the game and is constantly trying to orient himself correctly to the larger poker world. However, he has dropped out of school, and this foretells (for the careful reader) all of his failings.
Within the poker world, my Kid must educate himself as closely as possible to the possibilities for the cards that he holds (whose value he knows) and his opponent’s cards (whose value he doesn’t), rather than relying on hero’s journey alone in the wilderness. This is the medieval universe of The Wanderer as well as the heroic journey of Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Leone’s fairy tale Once Upon a Time in the West. It may well be the price of participation in the world available to the few, but I would much prefer the middle and unheroic world of family, friends, and society available to the many.