Capitalism Forever
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Posts posted by Capitalism Forever
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That depends on how much further the representation of God goes beyond being merely the characteristic of a "real person". That also depends on whether you can define the concept God at all. In your hypothetical, what are all of the characteristics of the God you are talking about, and what are all the characteristics of the "real person" representing him in the movie? Come, fill out some context for me. Cameron gave me about 2 1/2 hours of context to go by, you are only giving me one sentence.
OK, here goes...
We are in the year 2110. The world is divided into two great cultures, the Alphas and the Omegas. The Alphas are pretty much like today's Americans but are 100% secular and capitalist. The Omegas live in tribes and do not have much material wealth, but are shown as having a happy and idyllic existence. They spend much of their waking time performing an activity known as "submitting," which consists of looking toward a certain point in the sky and waving their hands in circles. It is explained that this allows them to connect to entities known as the Shapes, which give them various benefits.
By submitting to the Shape of Health, for example, the Omegas can keep their bodies fit and cure their diseases. By submitting to the Shape of Plenty, they can dispel their hunger. By sumitting to the Shape of Art, they learn to hear the Song of the Trees and to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings. By submitting to the Shape of Knowledge, they gain wisdom about the world and come to understand things in a way that the Alphas have yet to learn ... And so on, with a number of other Shapes.
All these Shapes are themselves said to submit to the Shape of Love, which is the highest of the Shapes and the one from which all the other Shapes derive their powers.
The Alphas fly many space missions, and one of them happens to be in the direction in which the Omegas always look when submitting. When approaching a planet, the crew of this mission detects a great amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted from the planet towards Earth. (Why they didn't detect the radiation on Earth in the first place is left as a plot hole.) When they land, they are greeted by a female figure who introduces herself as the Shape of Romance. They subsequently meet many other Shapes on the planet, but cavalierly dismiss any possibility that they might have anything to do with what they consider to be the Omegas' superstition. The Shapes have a human form but are about ten times as tall as the Alphas and are always depicted in brilliant colors.
Eventually, the crew members get to enter the headquarters of the Shapes, where they see the Shape of Love sitting in a large control room and giving orders to other Shapes. The Shape of Love is a hundred times as tall as the Alphas and has a booming voice; he is so bright that the Alphas can only look at him in tinted glasses. The control room has millions of monitors in it, and the Alphas are surprised to find that each of them displays a live feed of what a human on Earth is doing. The monitors showing Alphas are black-and-white while the monitors showing Omegas are color. There are also a number of buttons, switches, and joysticks in the control room, with labels such as "Thunder," "Flood," and "Earthquake."
Alpha scientists on Earth subsequently establish clear correlations between the electromagnetic waves coming from this planet and the hormone, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc. levels of Omega individuals, but nearly all the Alphas continue to laugh off the Omegas' culture as stupid and primitive. Only a handful of Alphas switch sides, led by a guy named Paul Apostle, who was a crew member of the space mission and fell in love with the Shape of Romance.
The plot culminates in an armed conflict between the Alphas and the Omegas (how and by whom it is started is irrelevant to my point). Thanks to their vastly superior technology, the Alphas are easily winning, and the Omegas seem to be hopelessly doomed. Paul Apostle tries to get help by submitting to the Shape of Love, but the Omegas tell him that it is no use because the Shape of Love never takes sides. However, the fortunes of the battle soon change and the Omegas start winning; they discover that the Shapes are now on their side, and resoundingly defeat the Alphas by means of submitting.
If this kind of a movie was made by a director who was widely known to be an ardent Platonist, would you agree that the plot was obviously meant as an allegory of the Platonic supernatural dimension, with the Shape of Love intended as a symbol of God? Would you say that the attempt fails because the Shapes are real persons on a real planet and there is a real observable data flow from that planet to Earth? Aren't these elements precisely there for the purpose of suggesting that "God is real" and that "prayer works" ?
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"Either you pay for the product or you're not getting it."
"That's brutality! That's blackmail!!"
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You clearly haven't bought gas (petrol) in the US then. Some pumps you have to answer 5 questions (only one of which is selecting the grade of gasoline) before you can finally pump the damned gas. Five questions when you have three choices!!
1. Hi, how are you?
2. What grade?
3. How much?
4. How will you pay?
5. Wanna date me?
Seems like 5 perfectly reasonable questions.
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BTW, have you guys read The Night of January 16?
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literary analysis that conflicts with that identification is either evidence of a faulty analysis or a faulty story. Here the story is at fault not the analysis.
Agreed, and well put.
So I can't follow your willingness to disregard the status of the Na'vi as persons because I cannot negate the immediacy and necessity of my inductive conclusion, my recognition, that the Na'vi are persons.They are portrayed as persons in order to make us sympathize with them, but that portrayal is a lie.
Cameron is saying two contradictory things: on the one hand, he's saying that the Na'vi are persons; on the other hand, he's saying that they are anti-rational beings. The question is: which of the two is what he really wants them to be and which one is only there for propaganda purposes?
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We must have seen different movies then, the purported biological connection was immensely obvious in the movie I saw. The bible analogy does not work.
So you're saying, in effect, "Cameron wanted to make a movie about nature-worshippers, but he failed because his characters had a real connection to nature" ? Isn't that a bit like saying that somebody wanted to make a movie about God but failed because the character meant to represent God was a real person in the movie?
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Asking the Na'vi to give up their connection to their home tree is analogous to me asking you to give up your biological ability to expel waste from your body. Somehow I think you would decline.
That is correct, of course, and it would be quite wrong to conclude from this that I define myself as a "waste-expelling animal" rather than a rational one.
But it would be a slightly different case, wouldn't it, if I refused to part with my Bible at any price, saying that it was my means of bonding with Jesus. Scientists could measure changes in my hormone levels and brain activity when I held the Bible--but would this really be proof that I was "biologically connected" to it? (Don't worry, I would still have rights in this scenario and you couldn't just take the Bible from me; the point is simply that the purported biological connection does not exist.)
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I'm a bit confused as to why refusing to trade a particular item indicates a lack of rational faculty.
It doesn't. Also, note that I am not saying the Na'vi necessarily lacked a rational faculty. The vicious thing about the movie is precisely that it shows the Na'vi as beings that had (or used to have) the potential for rationality, but threw it away in order to be "environmentally-friendly animals" rather than rational ones.
I maintain that the Na'vi did not just happen to refuse the particular offers they were made, but rejected all trade on principle. Now, why do I think this is the case?
Since the movie does not show the offers being made and the Na'vis' reaction, this is one area where we entirely have to rely on inference from what we know about what the Na'vi were intended to concretize.
The Na'vi were intended to concretize the enviromentalist ideal of "homo sapiens rejoining Nature." Nature is the sum of the metaphysically given: all that which is not a result of man using his conceptual faculty. "Rejoining" nature means renouncing your conceptual faculty, and rejecting the use of any products created by it. They had to reject anything the humans had to offer if they were to fulfill their function as poster children of the environmentalist movement.
It is often remarked that the movie's plot was totally predictable. The part where one of the characters explains that the Na'vi have been made all sorts of offers but turned down all of them is a prime example of this predictability; I found myself thinking, "Yes, it figures that they would turn down the offers--what else would you expect the heroes of a viro wet dream to do?"
Based on the above, this:
the value they placed on their home was higher than anything the humans could offer.is true as stated, but less than the whole truth. The whole truth is that they valued the principle behind the home tree over the principle behind the things the humans offered. The principle behind the home tree is a mystical communion with nature and an elimination of one's "footprint" qua rational being; the principle behind the humans' offers is life qua man, by means of reason and the technology that it makes possible.
Is there any trade that you would accept for, say, your heart? Or your brain?One thing I definitely wouldn't sell is my mind.
That would be literally like selling myself, since it is my identifying characteristic, the thing that "makes me me." If I give up my mind, I have given up my life.In the case of the Na'vi, it appears that the home tree, and the way of life that it is part of, plays the role of their identifying characteristic. What does that say about them?
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Rather, what I should have taken from your specific position is that since you don't think they are rational beings, [...] the humans can just take whatever they want and be morally clean.
Yes, that is much more like it. (Whether or not their action is moral in the end depends on a number of other things, as there is a lot more to ethics than not initiating force, but if there are no rational animals to use force against, then it is clear that no use of force is taking place.)
offering to trade itself implies some recognition of ownership on the part of the other party, recognition of some right to compensation and voluntary agreementOffering to trade was a part of the process of discovering the nature of the Na'vi. When they arrived on the planet, they didn't know whether or not the Na'vi were rational beings. In order to find out, they tried treating them like rational beings to see if they reacted like rational beings. If they did, they would have recognized them as persons having rights. But if they didn't (as was the case in the movie, IMO), then the humans would conclude that there was no property owner there to take the offer.
It's a bit like asking "Is there anybody home?" Asking the question does not imply that you think there is somebody to answer, only that you find it possible that someone might be there to answer.
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What disheartens me is exactly what Maximus alluded to in an earlier post. The position of the opposition here appears to be easily summed up as "technological might makes right".
Wow. And I thought I was confused about your position! Of course I don't believe that technological might makes right. Which of my posts was it that made you think so?
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That isn't at all what I said.
Which part of it is wrong? The one about Cameron wanting to create an anti-man propaganda movie, or about it ending up being good art? I am honestly confused as to your position.
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http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...st&p=240933
... and a few posts following that as well.
Thanks. (It is easy to lose sight of people's posts in a thread of this length.
) So your take is basically that he wanted to create an anti-man propaganda movie, but it ended up being a fine work of art--sort of like the Internationale ended up being "the first beautiful thing about the revolution" ? -
Vern, could you please state your evaluation of the movie and the reasoning behind it?
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They (Na'vi) were depicted as hunter-gatherers, not "tree-huggers." From the standpoint of their means of survival, it would have been foolish to want to destroy that which ensured said survival (their environment).
So what was their means of survival, reason or "the environment" ? Make up your mind.
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I am not sure whether this precise point has been made yet, but I think one important issue here is that one should not automatically grant all of the premises of a work of propaganda. In other words, when we see the Na'vi using language and simple tools, we should not automatically conclude that they are rational, and therefore possessed of rights.
I agree about not granting the premises, but it wasn't even a premise in this movie that the Na'vi were rational. The premise was exactly the opposite: they were the ANTI-rational animal.
One premise that the movie did have, though, and one that we should definitely not grant, is its pro-mysticism stance. The connections to the animals and the deity Eywa were, on the one hand, clearly intended as representations of human superstitions and religion, but on the other hand were shown to be scientifically observable and to have causal efficacy. This is clearly a contradiction, and we should not accept it: something is EITHER supernatural and therefore only exists in men's imagination OR it is real and available to sense perception and therefore secular.
Cameron attempts to place the plot in a setting where what I've called "environmental theology" is true: a place where Gaia-worshippers have a real Gaia to worship and where tree-hugging is a real profession. The posters here have accepted that premise and argue, in effect: "Those guys were working hard hugging trees, so didn't they have a right to the fruits of their labor?" No, they were not working hard hugging trees, because that's a contradiction, and you cannot have a hypothetical scenario based on "A is not A." If we want to make a rational assessment of the movie, they were just hugging trees and that's it.
(Or alternatively, it could be "They were just working hard and that's it," but that's not the kind of movie Cameron has ever made.)
Suppose someone were to write a story about a peaceful, prosperous nation, called "Commutopia", in which every citizen is hard-working, benevolent, and absolutely loyal to the wise ruling party. Commutopia is then attacked by an army of ruthless killers with dollar signs painted on their uniforms, who wander around burning things, impaling infants, and comitting other atrocities, for no particular reason which is ever explained.I agree that this would be an obvious smear on America and bad enough as such, but it is worth noting that in Avatar, the humans are not brutal monsters who have some non-essential resemblance to Americans, but are in fact as American as apple pie--and that is what Cameron holds against them. Far from committing atrocities for no reason, they
- go to the planet as part of an immensely productive business venture,
- go out of their way to try and deal with the Na'vi as rational beings, by trade, and only give up when it becomes clear that the Na'vi reject all trade on principle,
- then remove the tree without any intention to hurt the Na'vi,
- and after that, they are ready to go on with their business and leave the Na'vi alone; it is only when the Na'vi declare war on them that they begin to target them.
The only mistake the leaders make is to trust Sully not to go native.
The movie represents a new low in that the humans are, as far as a dispassionate rational analysis reveals, completely virtuous, and it is only on the emotional level that we are made to see them as evil. It is a concretization of the good along with the injunction to hate it for being that.
- go to the planet as part of an immensely productive business venture,
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You know what, guys? Let me hypothetically grant you all your premises. Let me imagine that one or more Na'vi individuals had an objective property claim on the tree and the humans were guilty of violating it. Even in that case, the humans would be admirable producers who made one out-of-character misstep, while the Na'vi would still be pathetic losers who only won as a result of divine intervention. The message would still be anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-man, and anti-reason; the movie would still stink, and I would still see the producers as the true heroes in it. Instead of the black versus white that it actually is, it would have a somewhat diminished contrast--but it would still be easy to tell the brighter side from the darker one.
The intention of the director, however, was NOT to make a naturalistic movie. He did NOT want to paint in shades of gray, but to concretize the two sides of a fundemental choice. One of the species stood for the choice to live qua man, by reason and the technology that reason makes possible, while the other represented the choice to give up reason and "rejoin nature."
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False. They made tools and used those tools to hunt.
OK, let's move on to your response to what I wrote about the tools:
That's quite a stretch - but the Na'vi were also engaged in some types of negotiations with the humans. There had been a school established for the Na'vi as I recall, so the Na'vi were still using their reason in some facility.Calling something a stretch is not what I would call an ironclad refutation, and "as I recall" doesn't sound quite convincing either.
If you have to dig for it in your memory, chances are it's not the most relevant feature that they had.The fundamental thing about the Na'vi was that they were the opposite of a technological civilization: not just a primitive society that had yet to rise to a higher level, but one that identified with and stood for a brutish form of existence and would not progress. The purpose of Avatar was to attack technology and the virtues that make it possible--first and foremost among them, rationality. The Na'vi were the concretization of the author's ideal: the anti-rational animal. The animal that could live by reason if it wanted to, but didn't want to because it was opposed to reason. The movie had to include a few elements of potential or actual rationality to show that the species could have been like man, but these were either:
- instances of them having a choice to be rational and choosing not to;
- remnants of rationality that would eventually atrophy in reality; or
- necessary for the plot but contradicting the fundamental characteristic, which means they could not exist in reality.
You need to prove that the Na'vi were the equivalent of beavers before I'll continue to humor this line of discussion.I wasn't going to continue this line of discussion, but then you said that all sentient beings owned where they lived. Beavers are sentient beings.
- instances of them having a choice to be rational and choosing not to;
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On what basis presented in the movie do you claim that the Na'vi were not beings capable of volitional rationality?
You are confusing the fact that they did not always apply their rational capacity and taking that to mean that they were not capable of reason, but to maintain that claim, you must willfully disregard all other evidence that shows their ability to reason. You are committing a blank-out, diminishing your own credibility.
You might be interested in this post of mine. And in case you missed them, I referred back to and elaborated on it in these three posts.
When you have a group of sentient beings living in a location, whether you know the particulars of their particular method of managing property rights is unimportant - they live there, they're using it, the proper assumption barring any other evidence is that they own it.(bold mine)
A rather broad interpretation of the concept of ownership, but okay, I'll go along, in a sense the beavers can be said to "own" their dam. But I still don't see why it is in the corporation owner's rational self-interest to stop building the bridge just because the beavers are there.
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The Home Tree was analogous to a village, town or small city. I do not own my city, does that give you the right to blow it up and take the minerals?
You own your house, don't you? The reason I cannot blow up the city is because the city is made up of houses and the houses are owned by individuals.
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So because they lived in the tree collectively they had no rights?
Greebo, there is no such thing as a collective. You cannot "live in a tree collectively" ; all you can do is be an individual and live in the tree with a number of other individuals. And you certainly cannot have collective rights--there are only individual rights.
The Na'vi, if they had been rational beings, would have had rights as individuals. But they still would have no basis to say, "This tree belongs to all Na'vi tribes, not to the humans." One of them, or a group of them, could say, "This is my tree," or "This tree is jointly owned by me and my wife and my uncle Joe." But no such claims were attempted in the movie; their supposed moral claim to it was precisely that they lived as one big collective that included the Na'vi tribes, the plants and animals, and the whole planet.
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No. The behavior of animals is given to them as part of their identity not as a reasoned response to the environment. The Na'vi are shown to exist in several different tribes in different parts of their world learning to live in different environments by coming up with different solutions to the problems of survival. But even if Pandora was a jungle planet and the entire world was the same there would be ample evidence to conclude the Na'vi survival skills are the product of thinking, learning, and teaching and not some form of innate knowledge or genetically based patterned behavior.You seem to be granting the Na'vi a lot more than the director did. Cameron made it a point to portray the Na'vi as guided by their emotions and their mystical beliefs and living "in harmony with nature."So?
So they are not rational animals. As I have already explained and already referred back to twice.
Also, you mentioned that the Indians had rights as individuals, with the implication being, I trust, that they did not have rights as a collective. Now tell me: which individual among the Na'vi was the owner of the home tree, and how did he earn his claim?It is not necessary to sort that out to arrive at the conclusion that blowing up the whole tree and driving all of the Na'vi away would violate that Na'vi's rights.But you still have to show that such a Na'vi exists. (Or alternatively, show that a nonexistent entity can have rights...)
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Also, you mentioned that the Indians had rights as individuals, with the implication being, I trust, that they did not have rights as a collective. Now tell me: which individual among the Na'vi was the owner of the home tree, and how did he earn his claim?
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No. The behavior of animals is given to them as part of their identity not as a reasoned response to the environment. The Na'vi are shown to exist in several different tribes in different parts of their world learning to live in different environments by coming up with different solutions to the problems of survival. But even if Pandora was a jungle planet and the entire world was the same there would be ample evidence to conclude the Na'vi survival skills are the product of thinking, learning, and teaching and not some form of innate knowledge or genetically based patterned behavior.
You seem to be granting the Na'vi a lot more than the director did.
Cameron made it a point to portray the Na'vi as guided by their emotions and their mystical beliefs and living "in harmony with nature." They were meant to represent everything that was un-rational. They were a concretization of how man could be and should be--according to the viros. The few feeble signs of reason that they showed were the minimum set required for the plot, and--as I have already explained and already referred back to once--could only exist in reality as vestiges of an earlier age when the species was still relying on its rational faculty as its primary means of survival. As soon as a species reaches the (hypothetical) ecological nirvana and "learns to live in harmony with nature," it has no more use for new knowledge gained by reason (which would only break the "harmony") and only uses words as a means of transfering the little already-existing knowledge involved in their existence (arrows, etc.) from one generation to the next.Rationality and stagnation are antithetical, and the Na'vi were, as intended by the movie's director, the epitome of stagnation.
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Greebo, analogies are not meant to be exact parallels.
Avatar
in Movies, Shows, and Theatre
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Plato's World of Forms, of course. The Shapes are the equivalent of Plato's Forms, with the Shape of Love being the equivalent of the Form of Good, i.e. God.
I think he wanted a symbol for capitalism and a symbol for Gaia, and he wanted to depict Gaia as being real and superior to capitalism. And sure, he did all of that.
Let me give you another analogy: Suppose that a director makes a movie where Americans fight against a fictional enemy that has a striking resemblance to Nazi Germany, including an allegorical equivalent of the Fuhrer, the Swastika, the Mein Kampf, etc., up to and including the concentration camps, but where the Americans are made out to be the aggressors, and the equivalents of the concentration camps are eventually discovered to be hospitals where they treat the victims of the Americans. In a nutshell, the movie creates a symbol for the Holocaust, then denies it. Can we really say that, even though the movie was clearly intended as Holocaust-denying propaganda, it has failed in this intent because the author has created a context in which the camps serve a very different purpose than they did in the Third Reich?