I Can Now See The Moon: A Reflection on Thankfulness

"My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon."   Japanese poet Masahide

Being thankful involves more than our emotions or feelings. Sometimes it is just that - when the sun is shining in a cloudless northern Michigan sky over freshly painted barns, it's easy to love life. But being thankful is often a decision, a perspective, a commitment to finding that which is good even when the skies are grey and the passing storms bring lightning that levels the buildings we love. "And yet will I praise him," wrote the Psalmist after reciting a litany of reasons why praise should be the last thing on his mind. Paul reminded the church in Thessalonica to give thanks in all circumstances. I don't know how your life has been, but that's a tall order for me.

As I look back over my life this Thanksgiving, I can see a number of  gaps where barns once stood. Yes, I will face more and greater losses. Yes, I have been blessed with the life I have. I just don't want to forget that when the smoke clears, the moon (or perhaps the Son) faithfully brings light to even the charred corners of the world. So, here's my attempt to see the beauty in the ashes.  Feel free to add your own!

The World's End: A Review

As far as apocalyptic movies in 2013, The World’s End has been even more popular than This Is The End ( the most recent numbers posted at Rotten Tomatoes show an 89% critic and 77% audience approval). It's the last film in a clever, entertaining trilogy begun by Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Simon Pegg is a great comic actor, and this movie highlights his talent. I really wanted to like it - and parts of it were hilarious - but I kept getting distracted by the increasing incoherence of the worldview and message.

The main plot is simple. Gary King (Pegg) gathers some high school buddies twenty years after their graduation for another shot at the Golden Mile, a pub crawl that finishes at The World's End. Unfortunately, the town is being taken over by aliens. Chaos ensues.

This Is The End: A Review

I like apocalyptic entertainment. From sci/fi horror (28 Days Later, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead, The Terminator) to natural disasters (Melancholia, Deep Impact, 2012, ) to war (The Road, Book of Eli) to aliens (War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Ender's Game), there's nothing like the end of the world as we know it to bring out the best - or worst - in people.

 This Is The End drew quite a bit of critical and audience acclaim this past year. It received a 83% critic and 75% audience rating atRotten Tomatoes. I'm not sure why. By about thirty minutes in to the movie, I was thinking that "Please Make It End!" would have been a better title.

Every character falls on a sliding scale of shallow, self-centered, egomaniacal people. They are so self-deluded that when Hell arrives on earth, they are the only ones surprised they don’t get raptured. Yes, the movie is a self-referential commentary on the Hollywood crowd featuring ironic self-debasement (Channing Tatum), stereotype-busting character twists (Emma Watson) and a hyperbolic - and perhaps even cautionary - presentation of what life is like in Hollywood.  I get it. I doubt the audience in general took that mesmerizing point away from the film by the time the credits rolled.

The Drowned Cities

To help us enter into and better understand the entertainment shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review of books effecting a primarily YA audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as look at the worldview in the story.

This review will look at Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities.  In addition to numerous awards for other books, The Drowned Cities has received the 2012 Kirkus Reviews Best of YA Books, a 2012 VOYA Perfect Ten Book, 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, and  Junior Library Guild Selection.

Mr. Baigalupi writes what he calls 'accidental futures', where "human beings are selfish, short-sighted, and stupid, and thereby create worlds that everyone can agree are hell — but that no one can fix anymore." That's the world of The Drowned Cities. But even in the midst of this watery hell, a compelling story of honor, horror and hope emerges.

In the wake of a worldwide flooding, America's waterlogged cities became knows as the Drowned Cities, places where chaos and death await around every corner. Civil war decimates the land. Peacekeepers from China attempt to do for America what America has attempted to do for so many other nations. They fail. Now, the Deepwater Christians, Rust Saint devotees, Army of God, Freedom Militia, and United Patriot Front use politics and religion as an excuse to fight brutally  for power and land.

The Problem of Peeta (The Hunger Games and Philosophy)

In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.*

In "Who is Peeta Mellark? The Problem of Identity in Panem," Nicolas Michaud uses Peeta's post-torture persona to look at the problem of personal identity.

Consider Katniss's dilemma. Peeta returns from the torture of the Capitol a different man than she knew previously. In a physical sense, he is clearly still himself. In terms of character, attitude, and beliefs, he is quite different. So is Katniss reaching out to the Peeta she knew or is she creating a relationship with someone new? It may sound like an odd question, but consider some scenarios Mr. Michaud offers to help us think through this identity crisis.

If Peeta is simply his body, then as long as his body doesn't change, Peeta remains. Whatever is true of Peeta is true of his body and vice versa. But if Peeta had come back from the Capitol dead, Katniss would not have rejoiced that Peeta had returned. Clearly, Peeta is more than simply a body. His body may be necessary for him to exist as a human, but it is not sufficient to explain who he is as a person.

Darwin and the Hunger Games (The Hunger Games and Philosophy)

In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.

The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; the second one looked at the intersection of luck and choice in understanding morality. This post will build from Abigail Mann's “Competition and Kindness: The Darwinian World of the Hunger Games” to look more closely at how this series looks when viewed through the lens of Darwinian theory.*

The Hunger Games themselves seem to epitomize Darwin’s concept of how the evolutionary process works: competition, adaptation, survivability, and a little bit of luck. The Games manage to involve three of evolution’s famous Four F’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and, uh reproducing. It’s pretty basic, really. Survival of the fittest as entertainment.

In the evolutionary process, all processes of selection bring the strong to the top blindly and haphazardly rather than purposefully. No situation is right or wrong or good or bad. Life just happens. As it happens, nature in essence "selects" that which is most fit in a given set of complex circumstances either through blind luck of superior adaptability. The only thing this blind process accomplishes ruthlessly is survival through reproduction. Some would say it is the 'goal' of evolution, but that's a hard claim to make in a system with no goals. As Dawkins has written,

"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all." 

If survival lacks vision or foresight, it’s important that the odds swing your way. When we meet the contestants in the Hunger Games, most of them are favored with a social or physical strength which increases their odds of surviving.  Their fitness quotient, however, will vary depending on the type of environment – once again depending on chance. So we see many candidates who are favored with certain skills, but whose fitness may not be enhanced in the chosen environment of the Games.

The Importance of Being Ender: A Closer Look at Orson Scott Card's Modern Classic

If the awards given to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game are any indication, he has written a novel that may well become part of the canon of science fiction:

• Nebula Award for best novel in 1985
• Hugo Award for best novel in 1986
• Nominated for a Locus Award in 1986
• American Library Association's "100 Best Books for Teens."
• Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2008

It’s been translated into thirty-three languages, ranked #59 on the reader's list of Modern Library100 Best Novels in 1999, and included on the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. Oh, and the movie (starring Harrison Ford) is opening in just a few weeks. 

If you enjoy analyzing stories such as Ender’s Game, there are a lot of excellent commentaries online.*  Rather than replicating their content, I would like to offer some thoughts on why I believe this story is so compelling. 

After the climatic battle that ends the Game, Ender discovers the Hive Queen has survived his accidental genocide. She communicates the story of her and her people to him, and in this knowledge Ender finds truth, empathy, and a path toward a form of redemption. As he records her story for all to know, he becomes the first of many Speakers of the Dead, people who speak the truth of a person’s life at their funeral.

Ender's story continues in Speaker of the Dead. He begins what will be (thanks to the quirks of space travel) centuries of searching to find the Hive Queen a new home, a new place to begin rebuilding the civilization he once destroyed. Meanwhile, he continues to "speak" the lives of those who have died as sort of a prophet in a new religion that seeks to bring truth, peace and honor to life in all its forms.

Ender's Game was the first novel in the Ender saga, but Speaker of the Dead was always meant to be the heart of the story. Card explains in the introduction to SOTD why this aspect of Ender's life is so important to him:

“I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived…To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only true story worth telling.”

Speaking for the dead wasn’t always pretty, but it was always powerful. Ender becomes passionate about telling “what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in.”

Not until I read Speaker did I begin to understand what I found so compelling about Ender's Game. The heart of the story of how a deceived, brainwashed, abused child accidentally becomes the bane of the universe became clear only in light of Card’s previously cited explanation about Ender himself. The only story worth telling cannot show merely what Ender meant to do, it must show what he actually did. 

What If The Odds Are Against You? (The Hunger Games and Philosophy)

In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.

The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; this one will draw from George A. Dunn's “The Odds Have Not Been Very Dependable of Late" to look more closely at the ethical implications of the influence of luck vs. the importance of intention in The Hunger Games.*
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What role does luck play in the world? More importantly, if luck is a force to be reckoned with, what does that do to the notion of choice and the possibility of meaningful moral actions?

Many of the events in Katniss’s life would never have happened were it not for luck, both good and bad. Her sister was chosen against the odds; Peeta was chosen against the odds; Katniss and Peeta got a particular team and not another against the odds. When Katniss slept in a tree with tracker jackers and wore a mockingjay pin that just so happened to feature a bird that Rue loves, the odds were very much in her favor.

So, to what degree are luck and choice intertwined? It would seem that the more our lives are shaped by luck, the less culpability we have for our actions. The less luck, the more we deserve praise or blame for the choices we make. Thomas Nagel (who seems pretty good at generating controversy) has attempted to bring some clarity to the discussion by discussing four kinds of moral luck.