transparency

Yet another Tuesday night movie review.

Usually the Cinéma du Parc is relatively empty. Tonight it was full of old people.

Mark left the theatre with tears on his cheeks; I left unmoved but full of questions. My grasp of history is decidedly vague, and while I know the names of some of the major personalities I’ve never taken a modern history course of any description and have generally avoided war movies. So what I little I know about WWII is from sidebars in books and articles about other things.

Mark’s take: the movie was about the protestation of innocence, “Ich habe es nicht gewußt,” “I didn’t know.” What does that claim mean, when even Hitler’s personal secretary could make it – apparently believing herself? Mark is angry about Holland’s role in the war and particularly about the way the Netherlands like to portray themselves as good guys who helped Jews, when in fact they were as bad as Canada and refused to let Jews in. (No, no, those bits weren’t in the movie.) And he fully understands the German phenomenon of an older generation who say it wasn’t them, or who point out their own sufferings and demand to know who feels sorry for them? contrasted with a younger (our) generation fully prepared to take on the guilt and responsibility for all the horrors committed before they (we) were even conceived.

My first reaction was to wonder whether the war movies coming out these days that appear to have a certain resonance with current events is deliberate or my own projection.

Other musings: to the extent that the portrayal of the personalities was accurate, a point was made that you can’t really tell who’s on the wrong track by looking at them up close. You need to step back and take a broader look. For instance, Hitler was portrayed as a charismatic but lonely nutcase (looked like bipolar disorder to me, but so does a lot of stuff) who valued his friends. Which may have been true, but even so was not the most important thing about him. And this is how it makes sense that his secretary didn’t grasp what he was doing though Churchill did. (This I *think* was one of the points of the movie: I don’t think we were really supposed to feel sorry for him.) (But maybe we were? I did find that too many of the top brass were treated a little too sympathetically. Not that I expect all people who are a force for evil to be marked with large neon horns – but for someone supporting or actively waging war in a nationalist cause to appear uniformly kind and thoughtful seems just a little odd. Especially when you are not this person’s child but a cinema viewer with magic wall-fly powers.)

Anyway. Something I found quite delightful was libertarian-speak in the mouths of the Nazi generals. Ha! One quote I particularly enjoyed went something like this: “I have no compassion [for the young untrained German recruits who are being sent to fight against much greater numbers with no ammunition and who will die within hours or days in battles that the generals know perfectly well to be unwinnable]. They gave us the mandate to fight this war and now their little throats are being cut.” Among various speeches condemning weakness and promoting responsibility for consequences and protecting honour with guns.

I was also quite struck by the desperate busyness of the last days – issuing medals, hanging traitors – they knew they had lost so this was their last chance to take care of business before the Russians arrived – paralleling the stepped-up activity at the crematoria (not shown in the movie). It says something I recognise too well about human psychology that I should probably dwell on at length but frankly, I’d rather not.

Technically it was very well-acted and I think the sets were well done, but there wasn’t much else special about it. It was long and slow, paralleling the experience of Berliners waiting for the end. But that’s ok, not a reason not to go.

[originally transmtted by e-mail March 23, 2005]

Ok, let me be clear about my bias here: I am one of those people who believe in the body. (This is sneaky appropriation of feminst vocabulary.) The mean way to describe me would be “biological determinist” except that all I think that biology determines is what an individual can bring to the table. Outcomes are up for grabs.

Old-style (Victorian?) ideas about the body were that it determined outcomes: women were inherently feeble, Jews were inherently sneaky, the lower classes were destined to fail. No matter how you raised someone, breeding would out. (See “Wuthering Heights.”)

John Locke, then Freud, then Skinner proposed a radically liberating view: that we come into the world prepared to learn, and who we are is the sum total of what we have discovered and what we have been taught. We bring no agendas of our own to the table. In the 1970s this translated into a lot of talk about “conditioning” and the hope that we could raise a nonviolent, gender-free generation.

The problem with using “conditioning” to explain away everything you don’t want is that to condition a lab animal you use a system of rewards and punishments. Rewarding with food works best when the animal is starved for three days first. So you can’t get away from the body: what the animal finds rewarding or aversive. At the very least, we determine our own rewards and punishments.

*** *** ***
Now to the present and what I am finding problematic. It’s not the articles about Leroi’s book in particular, it’s a sneaky sort of return to Victorian smugness I am seeing generally, the new emphasis on genetic science providing convenient camouflage.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 17, 2005]

Yesterday I read a New York Times article by Armand Marie Leroi about racial genetics:

Then my mother forwarded me a transcript of an interview with him:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge156.html

Bio of Mr. Leroi from edge.org :
“ARMAND MARIE LEROI was born in Wellington, New Zealand. A Dutch citizen, his youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He was awarded a Bsc. by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Ph.D. by the University of California, Irvine in 1993. His doctoral work was supervised by Michael Rose and concerned the genetics of ageing in fruit flies. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, in Scott Emmons’s laboratory. Here he began to work on growth in the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, and its relatives. In 1996 he was appointed Lecturer at Imperial College London; in 2001, Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. He lives in London.

He is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, winner of The Guardian First Book Award, 2004. ”

He is careful to say that racism is a bad thing, and that the genetic bases for racial differences is simply a fascinating scientific question. He also says, “these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that’s a fine thing. But I suggest that it’s time that we grew up.”

What, he thinks that being careful about the consequences of your ideas is a sign of immaturity? I can’t say I agree.

I’m a little worried about the pickup his book has had: people seem to be saying finally, permission to talk about race! A practical use for the human genome project: scientific vocabulary for discussing race in polite company! Whee-haw!

Why? Sure, we are meat machines and our genes affect everything we do. (At a very basic level, a human can’t learn to do anything that humans can’t do. Fly, for instance.) Variations in our genes can be reasonably expected to have effects on the various things we do as humans.

But so what? We are learning animals. We sacrifice years to learning basic things like walking that other animals are programmed to do within minutes of birth. This enables us to adapt to all kinds of different physical and social environments. We can learn to live in the arctic or in deserts; as hunter-gatherers or accountants; we can learn to button our shirts with our toes if we happen to be born without hands; we can learn trust and pacifism or fear and war. Sure, some of us learn some of these things more easily than others. That’s what makes us so successful as a species: in any group there will be someone who can get the hang of a new situation and lead the way.

But what is the social value in emphasising the genetic basis for variation?

One of the big things now is pharmaceuticals which work better in some genetic groups than others. But calling this race is kind of strange in countries (like the Americas) where most individuals come from a genetically mixed background. If the pharmaceutical companies know why drugs work better in some people than others – a variation in Cytochrome P, for instance – then test for that. Because while the group might have a statistically raised frequency of a particular genetic variation, the individual taking the drug either has it or they don’t.

Another thing that people eager to talk about race bring up is the variation in disease rates among different population groups. Typically the greater rates of high blood pressure in Americans of African descent. Well, until the social reasons for this variation are controlled for, why bother looking at the genetic reasons? Because it’s simply not true that all people of African descent everywhere in the world have high blood pressure.

Anyway, I was supposed to be at work half an hour ago. So I’m going to stop now. I haven’t read Mr. Leroi’s book, but in his interviews his science seems to be very shaky. I could go on and explain why, but maybe later. Now I have to go.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 16, 2005]

Appropriate or not, I’ve just arrived home from a screening of Inside Deep Throat.

(Worth a look anyway. The major thesis is that Deep Throat was a significant sort of cultural nexus because so many different people had so many different things to say about it. The minor thesis is that old people get lumps in their throats looking back on when they were young and beautiful and thought the world was going to open up for them.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 8, 2005]

Attended a Donna Haraway http://humwww.ucsc.edu/histcon/faculty_haraway.htm lecture a few weeks back entitled “We have never been human – companion species in naturecultures.” Being totally out of the academic circuit I had never heard of Dr Haraway before but apparently she is a very popular academic thinker. I can certainly understand that she’s a popular speaker, being droll and animated. In her presentation she followed up some links in human/canine relationships across time, geography and politics establishing that we are connected through our dogs to everything that our dogs are connected to, and that our dogs are connected to us through their integral roles in our histories and ways of constructing ourselves.

Later in question period she pointed out that you could do the same thing with a mass-produced commercial object. So it wasn’t clear that the deliberate cultivation of webby thinking the way she illustrated it would necessarily lead to a commitment to the ethical treatment of animals; she just chose to present it that way. Which was confusing, because she initially seemed to be saying something specific about the relationships between dogs and people, but when she explained what she was saying it was no, she was saying something about people, that when you look at our connections in a webby way we have more in common than we might like to think.

Which seems to be a very old notion. One that has more to do with adulthood and becoming one’s parents and looking fondly at people who are young and leaving their parents than it does to do with dogs or cyborgs or naturecultures.

But given that I don’t know what a natureculture is, is not for me to say.

What disappointed me was her reply to someone asking how to apply her philosophy in such a way as to convince evil profit-centred capitalists of the necessity for veganism. She said that thinking of meat-eaters as concerned with profit did them a disservice, and that while it might be unfortunate that the entire planet wasn’t vegan at least there were active movements to improve the treatment of domestic animals, such as cage-free rearing of chickens and that we should think about these and be optimistic.

When sharing a planet with six to seven billion other people who are continuing to multiply, when many of them are simultaneously going to increase their abilities to consume, when the vision of the future is an increase in people increasingly competing for increasingly limited resources, when what we know of true poverty is that it breeds a philosophy of “life sucks and then you die,” what the **** does the niceness of cage-free rearing of chickens have to do with anything?

But I get the impression that I might simply not have understood any of the lecture at all. Like my mother says: “Sometimes you can’t tell whether you don’t get the joke or whether you just don’t care.”

Anyway. Went to something presented with much smaller words on Thursday, and even illustrated. With moving pictures. I’m pretty sure I understood it. “Turtles Can Fly,” a fictional movie about children in wartime in Kurdistan acted by war-injured children. I almost walked out in the middle of it. The experience recalled visiting television-owning friends in 1985 at the height of famine in Ethiopia. They would be watching the news and I would be desperately ordering them to Turn that thing off! “Why? What’s the problem? Aren’t you interested in international news?” That’s not the point! Maybe you can invite starving children into your living room to die in front of you while you don’t lift a finger to help them. Maybe you think that’s interesting. But I can’t do it and I don’t want to know how you can. Turn that thing off!

Am still a little shaken.

Hugs to all, dogs and children especially but chickens and academics too.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 5, 2005]