Up the River with a Paddle and Generous Supplies: How Interstellar Fails to Deliver

[This post contains unabashed spoilers for both Interstellar and Europa Report.  Consider yourself warned]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last several months you’ve probably heard that this past Friday Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster Interstellar hit theaters.  The publicity campaign put the movie forward as a 2001 for our time, a rousing and deeply scientific exploration of, well, exploration.  The plot centers on the exploration and supposed colonization of other worlds for human habitation, and the movie as a whole does an excellent job of being the kind of wholesome, pro-science, pro-knowledge advocacy piece that the world can always use more of.  That being said, I found several key elements of the plot severely disappointing and worthy of address.

Specifically, the movie’s whole explanation for how humans find a habitable world is that “five-dimensional” humans from the future save the “present” humans by building a wormhole and also a device that lets Cooper move things across time in his daughter’s bedroom.  Oh yes, there’s also some sympathetic mush about love being a quantifiable force that acts across time, space and dimensions.  All in all, I have a very simple problem with Interstellar as a film:

No one has actually accomplished anything by the end of the film.

To be certain, a great deal has been done, and the circumstances of the human race at the start and at the end of the film are very different.  But the two real, hard questions the plot poses, how to travel to distant galaxies and how to solve the quantum mystery of gravity, are outsourced to beneficent future beings.  Cooper doesn’t figure out how to travel to a different galaxy – he’s handed a wormhole he can use for that purpose.  His daughter doesn’t figure out how to solve her complicated equations, she has the answers fed to her through her Dad, who himself has the data fed to him by the same kindly future beings.

I can’t help but feel reminded of the scene in the ungodly Transformers 4, when Mark Wahlberg’s character picks up an alien rifle and suddenly finds himself at an advantage.  He hasn’t done the work of building and inventing and striving to create the rifle, it’s just gifted to him by circumstance and thenceforth used as his tool.

Pro-tip, if your high-minded, intellectual, sci-fi thriller even comes close to reminding a casual viewer of Transformers 4, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Again, the problem here is that, while the characters make extraordinary use of the resources made available to them, in a movie like Interstellar that plays with questions of time travel, space colonization, and the future destiny of the human race, realism is important.  These are real issues that do face us now, that our children, grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren will have to stare in the face, and if we’re going to explore the question of if and/or when we’ll ever leave the Earth, as we will likely have to do at some point, we should make the hard questions hard.

A stable wormhole leading to a habitable star system is not going to appear within our reach, or at least we would be fools to bank on that as a real possibility.  The first astronauts we send into the stars to settle planets will, near indubitably, die trying, and never see home or anyone they love ever again.  That’s not an uplifting idea, but it’s the kind of reality that sci-fi can uniquely explore, for which sci-fi is uniquely suited to prepare us.

As nice as it is to see Matthew McConaughey reunite with his family after an exile among the stars at the end of a grueling 3 hours of film, movies like this that purport to explore the hard science behind ideas like space travel should remain as committed to the mortal reality of what space travel will mean as they are to the nifty minutia of time passage at the speed of light.

In this sense, a much less “big” film from about year ago, Europa Report, far exceeds Interstellar.

How to do it right.

The great thing about Europa Report as a film is that it does not flinch from the realities of space travel, either the good or the bad.  Throughout the movie’s run of about two hours, characters seem to die in an order approximating most to least likable, and by the end we are left with an entire crew dead, but scientific progress made.  There is no savior in this movie, there is no wormhole from the future or an inter-dimensional confluence of young girls’ bedrooms.  There are people who get on a spaceship, launch themselves into the black unknown and die in the search for more and better knowledge.

I will not spoil the details of the film, because it actually is excellent and well worth the time of anyone interested in space travel as a subject, but it makes a much better “tent-pole” kind of film for the real advancement of science and knowledge than any other science fiction I can ever remember having seen.

Here, we see exemplified that the kind of work imagined is hard, and long, and slow.  We see hour after dreadful hour of persons sitting and waiting – a cruel reality of what space travel will most likely be.  We see death for simple mistakes, and most importantly we see, at least fictionally, that real, scientific knowledge is advanced slowly and at great cost, even in space.

The Black Beyond

Of course Interstellar is not alone in its leaning on external catalysts for human achievement.  Mass Effect posits “element zero” and “mass effect fields” to get away with hard science.  2001 has obelisks that seem to advance evolution at frightening paces.  All manner of sci-fi stories have all manner of throwaway explanations for things like truly long-distance travel, time travel, and all kinds of subjects and questions that we and our children will and must consider.

But can we please not be mistaken?  Science doesn’t come from a savior, and even the greatest of breakthroughs must be tempered and measured against a thousand variables before they may be safely implemented.  So for now, I’ll remain firm in my stance that science fiction is always better when it refuses to cede the greatest of our conceivable achievements to throwaway explanations and things we can not possibly rely on happening.  For all we know, all that lies beyond our atmosphere is, mostly at least, a gigantic, black void that does not care for us, or our hopes, or our dreams.

Maybe we’d be healthier if we started doing what we can with the knowledge we do have, instead of imagining magic McGuffins to get us out of our bind.

Permission, Property, Propriety, and Personhood: Hands, and the Question of Asking for them in Marriage

I am sure that it's a difficult, confusing thing to be a woman in the 21^st century. I know this because even from a place of white, male, upper-middle class privilege, I find the landscape of rights, wrongs, rebuttals, and retributions incredibly confusing. As a white man raised in a politically conservative, protestant, Christian, economically safe, and emotionally supportive environment, I find almost any interaction with anyone to be a complicated maneuver of trying recognize and avoid stereotyping, systematic disrespect, and personal disrespect, while trying to remain affable, practical, and avoiding the "guilty white man" personality. I do my best to respect all kinds of persons in all kinds of contexts, and while I think I do a reasonably good job of it, I know it's hard, and often there are times when one simply cannot have one's cake and eat it too.

Case and point: Asking a woman's dad for her hand in marriage.

This is a complicated issue that I think deserves careful consideration from persons in all walks of life, of both sexes. The matter touches on important notions of filial respect, maturity, feminism, humanism, pragmatism, and of course tradition. Lately, I have given a great deal of thought to the matter, consulted the best sources available to me, and I'd like to present my thoughts here.

Why Not?
The understandable impulse of the traditional person inside all of us is to throw up the hands and ask in exasperation, "Why do we even need to talk about this?" After all, the tradition as it stands accomplishes a number of worthwhile aims.

First and foremost, its very concept unequivocally acknowledges the important truth that even adult persons with fully formed rational, autonomous capacities are the product of particular circumstances, more specifically of their parents, and the way those parents have chosen to raise the individual in question. Whether a person responds affirmatively or negatively to the way their parents raise them, initiating a marital commitment "from the top down" does an excellent job of acknowledging the parents of one's beloved as the most influential figure(s) in that person's life.

Furthermore, it begins the crucial relationship between a spouse and their in-laws on a basis of mutual respect and recognition. Despite what movies would have us believe, however they may seem in-laws are a crucial part of any family, on a meta-level if not on an immediate level, and beginning one's relationship with in-laws on a firm, mutual basis of respect is unquestionably good.

Finally, in correlation with the previous two points, asking to become a part of a family acknowledges in a very healthy way that even a newly married couple is not a new family, but that they live in multiple spheres of influence which form the most intimate, meaningful relationships of our lives. Just as a contract should be read and considered by both parties before being signed, it is important to realize and to recognize that marrying a person is not an isolated act, and the "ritual" of asking for a woman's hand in marriages accomplishes this goal very well.

All the same, there are a number of flaws, some of them particularly disquieting, which are more or less inherent to the practice.

Indecent Proposals
Prima facie, I think the first objection to the tradition of a suitor asking a father for a woman's hand in marriage is also the most potent objection. Though the choice to marry or not to marry still ultimately lies with the woman in question in our cultural arrangement, the practice finds its roots (and most of its history) in a deeply entrenched, misogynist tradition that did not and in many places still does not leave the ultimate choice up to the woman in question. At first glance, the agreement still looks uncomfortably like two men agreeing on the fate of a woman as if she were a piece of property. No amount of ultimate female autonomy can erase the firm appearance of misogyny in the tradition.

Furthermore, it strikes me that any adult relationship which has progressed to the point of intimacy at which two individuals are ready to marry is beyond the reasonable jurisdiction of a parent in the 21^st century. To first ask a woman's dad for permission to ask her to marry is ultimately to disrespect the primacy of her decision-making authority in her own relational arrangements. In addition, what couple in the 21^st century, genuinely ready to marry one another, would actually heed the prohibition of a parent? It may be that I am a vain, disrespectful person (it probably is) but I cannot imagine that failing to secure permission from a woman's father would really prevent me from asking her to marry me, and I think that I am nowhere near alone in that sentiment.

Thirdly, if the gender roles in the equation are switched, the tradition seems strange. Disregarding for a moment our problematic notion that only a man should propose, even then it would seem vaguely strange and out of place for a woman to ask a man's mom for permission to marry him. Why then does a switch to the traditional arrangement make the tradition justified? Because of its longstanding base in patriarchal gender-power dynamics? As in the same ones that still to this day create innumerable problems for women all over the world?

Yes. Those ones.

Finally, while the tradition does accomplish a number of admirable aims, by its very nature it undermines itself by cutting off most of the parties involved in the formation of a new family. Surely, a suitor and a woman's father should both have one another's perspective on a prospective marriage. But shouldn't he also have the perspective of his lover's mom? Shouldn't SHE have the perspective of her parents on the matter? What about the man's parents, would not his parents also have important, helpful contributions to make both to their son and the woman he plans to marry? The tradition as it stands turns what could, what should be a meaningful opportunity for six different people to openly offer advice and insight to one another into a private conference between only two persons.

All the same, the benefits of seeking parental wisdom are unquestionable for any young couple, and completely discarding the whole concept seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so next week I will try to piece together what I think a more coherent, helpful model for engagement as an institution would be.

Until then, please feel free to comment and share your thoughts on the matter.

9 Things That Only People Like Me Will Understand Because We Are So Special and Unique Like Precious Snowflakes

1.  How much everyone else sucks at everything because they are not like us.

  

For real though, why do they even try?

2.  How petty and pathetic and silly and totally not problems everyone else's "problems" are.

  

FOR SERIAL! Do they even know how pathetic they sound?

3.  How little everyone else understands how unique our particular challenges are.

  

They have no idea because they are different than we are and also stupid.

4.  How amazingly difficult our lives are in totally unique ways.

  

Like, really! No one else understands because they just haven't been there, you know?

5.  How fucking amazingly, overwhelmingly genius-tastic we are.

  

They should totally step aside and let us do all the things we want to and do all of the things we don't want to.

6.  How amazing we are. Like, seriously, we rock so hard and everyone else doesn't even understand.

  

Dance party for how awesomer we are than everyone else!

7.  How special we are in ways that other people are not, unless they are like us.

  

Because we know we rock and are totally different from everyone else in every way that is really important.  They're all so pedestrian they would've used "The Rock" clapping here.

8.  How we are totally special snowflakes who are certainly not seeking every piece of substandard uniqueness to firmly grasp as we inexorably drift toward death and the fact that history will inevitably forget us and render our lives essentially meaningless in the wide swath of the human race, much less so the vast span of natural life, which is itself mostly imperceptible in the great cosmic flurry of the universe.

  

Move along Debbie Downer! No denial here!

9.  How we totally don't engage in meta-criticism of cultural phenomenon that we find vapid for the sole purpose of staving off and ignoring our own casual engorgement in and of consumer media, thereby providing a smug, momentary solace from the terrifying fact we are also a part of the problem.

Totes not the case.

Joseph Schwarz - Prologue: From the Heart of a Dying Star to the Hand of a Dying Man

It was the least fortuitous glass of water that Joseph Schwartz would ever encounter.  Not that he knew it at the time of course; one never knows that the axe has been raised in the first place until its hideous momentum has carried the blade too far.  Then and only then, and even then only with a small sense of vulnerability and the faint notion of something moving above us, do we ever sense our imminent demise.

It began like most glasses of water do.  Some great time ago in a galaxy probably very close to our own the atoms began huddling around one another, convinced that if only they shared themselves enough they could keep the black abyss before them at bay.  And that warmth was good, and comfortable, if not peaceful.  Closer and closer they drew to one another, convinced like cattle that if they moved away from that dangerous blackness behind them; if they just moved away to a space where they could be closer together, they could be safe.  Of course we all know how this ends.

Eventually they came to share their innermost parts with one another, a bond that would quite literally burst forth into glorious day, and all was well for a time.  This bonding and sharing and becoming went on for quite some time, until the relationships between the parts became quite unstable.  This part would not and could not interact with the other, and so on and so forth until it seemed perhaps that the joining and the struggling and the huddling together might have all been a terrible idea to start with.  All the same there could be no return, for no matter how bad things were on the inside, on the outside there was still the terrible abyss, the fear of which had really been the start of the whole enterprise.

Nonetheless, despite the great fear and the certainty that whatever course was best, it was certainly not returning to that primordial chaos, tensions rose.  The stress rose and rose and rose, the differences became irreconcilable, and anyone looking in from the outside could’ve seen it coming years ahead of time.

The system broke.

Parts that had once held such close accord with one another, plasmic tufts of oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and helium, once intimate and warm, were flung out into that great, black abyss from whence they came.  They drifted away, floating on the currents of discord into reaches so unfathomably greater than their own size that even we can barely understand, and found themselves all, once more, alone.

Still though, notwithstanding the failure of the previous endeavor, several entities once more seemed to feel almost pulled toward one another, inevitably and indefatigably drawn away from the solitude that was their peace.  Thus it came to pass that new endeavors were brought forth, new clusters and opportunities, hopeful and shining examples of just how productive that cooperation could be.  And all of these came to pass as failures of one sort or another, as do all things.

As this cycle ebbed and flowed, toward the beginning of a particular endeavor around a particular warm community, a number of entities began to cluster away from the center, thinking it was perhaps a good idea to cooperate, but that whole business of everyone going in on it all at once was just exhausting.  Besides, some of these entities, the old and overweight, simply didn’t want to move all those several millions of miles when they felt so comfortable here.  These communities ended up being so comfortable that other, lighter elements were convinced to join in as well, though in their youthful spirits they insisted on staying near the fringe of the community where at least they might catch a warm glimpse of the greater project going on nearby.  Well this idea really caught on, and soon enough stars all over the place were forming little outposts for their more elderly members and the hangers on that attended them.

So then, around 9.2 billion years after everyone had initially decided that the first arrangement was unacceptable, some strident groups of hydrogen decided to shack up with some tamer, but still energetic oxygen communities and form all kinds of parties and celebrations on the surface of the Earth.  For quite some time this remained an energetic if predictable affair, until on one strident morning life happened on the Earth.  

Exactly how and why this happened, whether there was any agency in the matter and, if there was, whose, have all been matters of dispute for all of the parties involved ever since.  But so far it really hasn’t amounted to all that much, so it hardly seems worth going over here.

Anyway, as it happened and as you all know these dihydrogen-monoxide things were preposterously useful for maintaining life, which was a project life seemed very well set on, and the water at least didn’t mind all that much.  This particular group of “waters” had really come from all over, different stars, different systems, and then all over the world.  Some of them had been a point of the Indian Ocean once, and had made their way up and back down through the cycle into tap water when a very rude businessman on a flight back from India had unfortuitously drank a bottle of water.  They all came from very different places, dying stars and crashing nebulas, India and Oxford and Seattle, but on the morning of October first they had all made their way through the tap and into Joseph Schwartz’ morning cup of water.

With the fuzzy carefulness of a man who would’ve rather stayed in bed, Joseph plopped in a few cubes of ice, poured the water into the cup, and made his way to the computer to see if anyone had done anything drastic overnight.  To his disappointed sigh, no one seemed to have taken a strong social media interest in that amazing guitar cover he posted late last night, and it seemed from the general lack of shock that so far the world wasn’t on fire yet.  So, unaware of the dreadful consequences of his actions, Joseph reached for the glass, meaning to take a last drink and pop of the door for work.  He got his hands around the glass, but as he went to lift it, the condensation from the ice, along with the downtrodden force of gravity, drove the left edge of the glass to simply slip from his fingers.  In the half moment afforded him, Joseph tried all that he could to stop his death.  Unfortunately, all that he could do to stop his death mostly entailed a kind of pathetic twitch and a childish, loud noise.

The water had spilled, quickly seeping in under the keys and into the laptop, where no sounds were audible, but a sudden flickering and general discombobulation of the screen made it clear that this was not a small matter.  The damage was done, the water was spilled, and Joseph Schwartz was a dead man walking.

There should be another chapter of this next Sunday.  No promises

Change, Belief, and Communication: An Introduction to a Series

"You never step in the same river twice." - Heraclitus

As an army brat, change has always been something of a favorite concept of mine.  Change has been the defining feature of my life in a way that exceeds the experience of most people, and it's always been a kind of obsession for me.  What is change, and if it is as constant as all evidence suggests, and if it is, as the saying goes, "the only constant," why do we regard it as change to start with, when it would seem that stasis is the abnormality?

These are questions too big for a blog post, and not really my purpose here.

What I'm about here is a project, perhaps in a sense at once the simplest and the most ambitious I've ever undertaken:

I want to tell you what I believe.  Or, at least, what I believe now.

Before I went to college, I was a politically conservative, theologically conservative Southern Baptist.  Some time, somewhere in there, I became a Free Methodist, then a Catholic.  Then I unbecame a Roman Catholic.  I'm not sure how, when, or by what degrees, but I became what most would call a "bleeding heart liberal."

Now, as a political liberal and a man who finds himself awash in a sea of perspectives, at once holding, bemoaning, mocking, and worshiping perspectives that are a mix of functionally identical, mutually exclusive, outright irrational, reductionist, pretentious and over all, angst-ridden, I feel it may be a good idea for myself and for those who know me and interact with me if I make a project of saying, in clear terms, just what I believe on a number of important matters.  Mostly, these will encompass theology, philosophy, politics and what little I know about economics.

I do not promise that they will be presented in that order, nor that they will be sequentially organized in a way that seems rational to anyone other than myself.  Nor can I ever hope to provide truly comprehensive perspectives on anything that you read here.  When one is talking about matters like the basis of morality (and, for that matter, if morality is a concept worth talking about,) the existence of God, the minutia of apologetics and the arrangement of labor systems, a man without a Ph.D cannot even begin to hope that he might be comprehensive in his presentation.

I do promise that I will be honest and unapologetic, and that as much as possible I will try to write what I do believe, not what I'd like to believe, and that I will try to provide at least a brief sketch of why I believe those things.

My perspectives will change over time, and it's possible that mere months from now I will believe that the positions I hold now are idiotic, but for here and for now, for those who read this and for myself when I look back on this, I will do my best to be clear and to tell you clearly, What I Believe.

What I Believe: Speaking the Words

There really is something about getting an opinion out there.  The formation of the words that we will use, and the way we implement those words can help us cement in our own minds just what it is that we mean to say.  Of course, the act of expression is a kind of intentional vulnerability, an instance in which we give up a piece of what we call our 'interior' and expose it to the reactions of others, whether positive or negative.  My friends can never laugh at my opinion, or point out its flaws, or de-contextualize and misappropriate parts of it, if I do not express it.

By way of contrast, the moment of communication is a moment of surrender, a point at which we remove ourselves from the calm interior where we hold our ideas like a warm blanket, in which we throw open the doors of our hovels and surrender whatever pieces we will allow the the possible mockery and derision of those to whom we have opened the doors.

As such, the act of communicating, the crucial moment in which we open the door and invite the light of criticism, is not self-contained.

If we are careful, we will tidy up our hovels, straightening a line here, dusting off a panel there and making sure that the air is light and airy or dark and heavy as is appropriate to the context in which we find ourselves.  Much like a host, we clean our interior before we present it, we clear the things we do not like and we refine our space until we can present it as, waht seems to us at first, what it really is, the way that we want to see it.

After the communication we are open to criticism, or to a lack thereof, but there is a sense in which this is irrelevant, or relevant only insofar as it informs the process of communication.
I write this, and I am trying to tell you wat I believe, because I believe that the only way I can understand what I believe is to try to put it together in such a way that others can see it, feel it, digest it and accept or reject it.

Until I allow another in, until I at least try to present my ideas at their best, I may not know what they really are, or worse yet, I may allow them to persist in a state of decay or disrepair.
So, come on in.  Enjoy the hovel and mind the warm blanket.  I am telling you this so I can tell myself this.

Tomorrow: What I Believe about believing