Superman, socialist. As the link notes, he's an illegal immigrant, too.

Monday!

* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether "Charlie Kaufman" is officially a genre yet.

* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.

* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren't a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.

* Also not useful: classifying "protests" as "low-level terrorism activity."

* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.

* What's wrong with the American essay? I'm not sure anything is, but certainly not this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.

It doesn't seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.

* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.

Another round: religion and politics.

* The U.N. has apparently passed a resolution banning the defamation of religion. In the U.S., at least, truth is absolute defense to defamation...

* Don't tell the U.N.: quantum theory may make omniscience mathematically impossible.

* Richard Nixon analyzes an episode of All in the Family. Those White House tapes are a national treasure.

* Truth commissions vs. prosecutions.

* A visitor's guide to Chinese conceptions of hell. Via MeFi.

* And are video games teaching kids the skills they need for the Apocalypse? The Onion reports.

Wikipedia and epistemology.

Tim has some nice thoughts on enmity and honesty in the context of Al Qaeda's supposed endorsement of McCain.

The point here is that the war on terror, in a historically novel way, abrogates the basic conditions of veracity that make politics a meaningful category of human discourse. If the possibility of a "terrorist" uttering a true statement is permanently witheld, there is no real enemy to fight at all--there is only our mirror image of who we are as a people. We are damned to perpetually dream up our own worst enemy--and fight ourselves to the death.

We didn't need additional proof that I was a much less sophisticated and much more juvenile thinker than Tim, but my first reference for this incredibly silly argument was the Sicilian in The Princess Bride:

But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me...

The sudden hyping this week of Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (see the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Colbert, just in terms of links I've seen this morning) usefully highlights a few important features of our current media environment. First, of course, is the advertising function of nearly all non-breaking-news coverage. Second is a bias that might well be called the glorified middle—all debates are presented as having two sides (roughly mapped across the center-Democrat-right-Republican axis) in which the position directly in the middle is always the truth. The Wall Street Journal column in particular foregrounds this tendency explicitly as a kind of natural law:

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel "worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

What I also love about this is the way the ever-shifting denialism (and, really, psychological denial) of the "anti-" side is misrepresented not only as a coherent position but as the rational, skeptical corrective to the-sky-is-falling "believers" in global warming.

I'm also amused by the way in which the need to binarize all disputes and then split the difference necessarily pushes the presentation of the global warming side further and further towards the apocalyptic fringe. Before a few years ago—and An Inconvenient Truth naturally played a huge part in this shift—the debate would have been between those who accepted the scientific evidence of climate change and those who didn't, with Bjorn Lomborg clearly falling on "our" side. Now that the reality of anthropogenic global warming is widely accepted, the "truth" of the argument (and thus the middle point of the line) has to shift left—and since the line is always the same length we wind up with a debate that is now presented as the wacky environmental fringe vs. everybody else.

The third bias, of course, is the consumerist bias that tells us that not only do we never, ever have to change anything about the way we live our lives but that to ever do so in even the slightest way would mean the utter extinction of every pleasure that makes life worth living. If Bjorn Lomborg says we can have our cake and eat it too, well, God bless him, now we're talking. Like the other biases, this one pollutes discourse in real life as well: it's the same reason I feel such intense social pressure to apologetically present my vegetarianism as some random personality quirk rather than sort-of-maybe-kind-of a good idea.

And the fourth tendency is the one Ryan highlighted in his much-discussed (at least by me) David Graeber post not too long ago: the lassoing of values discourse by the political right creates a situation in which Lomborg's suggestions to supplement or replace Kyoto-style protocols with alternative-energy and anti-poverty programs—an argument that more or less corresponds with what I think we can (and should) pragmatically do in response to climate change, by the way—can be taken up as "proof" against the global warming "side" in a political climate where none of those anti-poverty programs are ever going to be enacted, either, precisely because of the same political movement that doesn't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, that doesn't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Meanwhile, in actual science coverage, via those dirty hippies at Daily Kos, climate change threatens to turn the Mediterranean into another Dead Sea.

The postmodernist epistemological challenge to "the Enlightenment"—its attack on master narratives and its critique of truth—also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intellectual strata of Europe and North America. Consider, for example, the mandate of the Truth Commission formed at the end of the civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and making public the truth of the recent past—attributing responsibility to state officials for specific acts and in some cases exacting retribution—appears here as the ineluctable precondition for any democratic future. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable—on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that vilalge. Making public such truths is an exemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics, and the critique of it in these contexts could serve only to aid the mystifactory and repressive powers of the regime under attack.

In our present imperial word, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy.

This passage from Hardt and Negri's Empire really leapt out at me as perhaps the difference between 1999 and 2007: the Bush administration has again taught elite intellectuals the incomparable power of truth, of knowing and of being able to name. The "postmodernist epistemological challenge to the Enlightenment" we saw reach its apex in the 1990s is possible only in a moment in which politics is viewed as essentially inconsequential—now that we know that (surprise) history isn't actually over and (surprise) it's still possible for the forces of global capital to make human life much, much worse, those old master narratives don't seem quite so destructive or misleading anymore. There's something there worth rehabilitating.

This isn't to say that we must return to some epistemology of rationalist certainty, or that we already have—quite the opposite, any movement forward will need to synthesize positivism and relativism while moving past both—but merely that a politics of utter truthlessness has no ground on which to stake a claim, much less revolutionize anything. And this ground will never ultimately be anything but ethical-moral—the concept of justice, as in every resolution in every high school debate I ever did, remains our central value, the only rhetorical space worth claiming.

I think this notion of the irreducible supremacy of justice, and the inescapable claims it makes on us, is what Derrida is getting at from the other direction when he talks about fidelity to the spirit of Marx in chapter 3 of Specters of Marx, a book I really need to read again soon:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth...