Because My Heart Is Pure

The most valuable lesson to be learned from Sam Harris's recent e-mail exchange with Noam Chomsky is that two atheists, both champions of science and of Enlightenment values and rationality, can disagree vehemently on issues they both consider to be of first importance.  This might seem obvious enough, but I noticed that some of the coverage failed to grasp it.  The first notice I saw of their exchange was this article from Salon, was subtitled "How the professor knocked out the atheist." That Chomsky is also an atheist is hardly obscure; whoever wrote that headline was trying to create an illusion of more space between the combatants.

I consider this more important than who "won."  Not too surprisingly, there was little agreement about that question, with Harris's fans sure that Harris won, or at least that Chomsky lost because he was mean and rude to Harris, and Chomsky's fans sure that Chomsky won, mopping up the floor with Harris.  Or "undressed" Harris, as one notably wacky headline put it.  (The headline stayed with the post as it was cross-posted to several sites.)  Elsewhere I learned that Chomsky bitchslapped Harris, that he owned him,  and so on.  PZ Myers provided a round-by-round, punch-by-punch commentary on the exchange.  So did Susan of Texas.  Those who haven't yet seen the exchange, and are interested, could begin there. I'd prefer not to link to Harris's original blog post, just because he doesn't deserve any more traffic; you can find it easily with a simple online search if you wish.

What interests me here is Harris's recent postmortem on the encounter, in which he lamented that "Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do":

Harris said he had hoped to learn what Chomsky actually believes about the ethics of intent, and he hoped his own arguments would steer leftists away from their “masochistic” tendencies.

He said Chomsky’s followers believe the U.S. was morally worse than ISIS because it had, through “selfishness and ineptitude,” created ISIS and victimized millions of people in other nations.

“This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left,” Harris said. “I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise.

... Harris complained that he encountered “contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language” throughout his exchange with Chomsky – and he now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly.

...“I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people that I’ve been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one.”

I agree that the conversation was instructive, though probably not for the reasons Harris thinks.  Harris initiated the exchange by telling Chomsky that "I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate."  (Harris was being disingenuous about that, since he'd announced on Twitter that he was "trying to arrange a debate with Noam Chomsky".) The ensuing conversation clarified Harris's misunderstandings very effectively, and his follow-up remarks are even more instructive.

When Harris first contacted Chomsky, he now reveals, he didn't really think he had anything to learn from him.  He was already certain that he had the True Gnosis, and if given access to what he regarded as Chomsky's cult of devotees, he could expose Chomsky's "misreadings" and free his cult from their "masochistic" view of US policy and conduct.  It's ironic that he should complain of "contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language" from Chomsky, because that describes his own contributions so very well.  Though Chomsky explained, with amazing patience really, why he disagreed with Harris, Harris simply brushed his explanations aside and repeated his original claims -- but repetition is not argument.

The accusation of masochism, which is very nearly content-free, is especially interesting.  No one, Harris believes, could have any good reasons for judging US policy as harshly as Chomsky does, so he and his followers must be suffering from some sort of mental dysfunction.  The tactic may be connected to Harris's interest in neuroscience, which is being used nowadays to explain away all human behavior as the result of conditions within the brain, not to any external (social, political, intellectual) factors.  Those who adopt this tactic (or other reductive pseudo-explanations) never pause to consider that, if this were true, it would apply as forcefully to themselves and to neuroscience itself as to everyone else.  It would mean, for example, that Harris's stance on Islam, as well as his politics generally and his atheism in particular, is also merely the product of some kink in his synapses, not because of his superior intellect.

It also has another consequence.  Suppose that all the Muslims in the world suddenly acknowledged that Harris is right that Islam is an inherently violent cult, renounced faith in favor of atheism, and blamed Islam for everything wrong in the Middle East and in the world.  Would that be "masochism" in Harris's eyes?  I don't see how it could be anything else.  But perhaps Harris believes that Muslims are Muslims due to some neurobiological defect, so they are incapable of change, and must (however regretfully -- we're all humane and well-intentioned here!) be exterminated.  Since Harris's view of Islam is so clearly irrational, perhaps it should be diagnosed as "sadism."

Clearly Harris hoped to leapfrog over Chomsky and speak directly to his followers, bringing them the Healing Light that he uniquely has to offer.  Now, I know that, like most well-known people (Harris included), Chomsky has some fans who are devotees, who parrot his opinions without understanding them.  But I don't see any reason to believe that this is true of all of them.  Many of them have ties to various traditions of political dissent: pacifism, antiwar, international solidarity, and so on.  I formed my views on the Vietnam war, for example, based on the evidence, long before I read Chomsky's writings.  I liked them because they fit with everything else I knew.  I disagree with him on some matters, and have written about some of those at length.  I've observed that despite the accusation, popular in certain circles, that Chomsky tolerates no disagreement, he can be disagreed with if you have some idea of what you're talking about; witness the disagreements between him and Gilbert Achcar in their lengthy conversations on the Middle East, for example.  So if Chomsky's fans don't immediately accept Sam Harris's Love Gift of Wisdom, they may well have reasons other than mere "masochism."

Harris's position on morality is often described as consequentialist, including (albeit ambivalently) by himself.  Like most such classifications, consequentialism isn't all that clear-cut, but it apparently boils down to "the view that an action is right if and only if its total outcome is the best possible. This is the basic form of consequentialism; there are, however, many varieties, a few of which will be noted below. What they all have in common is that consequences alone should be taken into account when making judgements about right and wrong."  If so, then Harris is an odd kind of consquentialist, because he insists to Chomsky that intent (American intent, anyway) is vitally important, and it seems to trump every other consideration for him.  No matter how horrible the outcome of US conduct, it's still better than anything anyone else does, because the United States *

are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and [Arundhati] Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

"The perfect weapon" is a totally imaginary concept, a weapon that can kill only bad guys without harming any good guys in the slightest.  Harris fantasizes that US officials would gladly use the Perfect Weapon if they could, thus avoiding any collateral damage whatever, and that bad guys (Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, whoever) would reject it even if they were offered it, because they are totally Evil and like hurting innocent people.  How he knows this is not clear.  But since the Perfect Weapon doesn't exist, this is a purely speculative exercise, which is revealing given Harris's professed disdain for metaphysics and other boring, airy-fairy logic-chopping.

In the real world, we must consider how people use the imperfect weapons they have.  And oddly, Harris is rhetorically ready to concede that the United States is less than perfect.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. ... The result [of our actions] should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Taken out of context, these remarks could be taken to accuse Harris of surrender-monkey American-self hating masochism.  But his concession has no consequences.  Like any exceptionalist (Rachel Maddow is another well-known example) Harris simply refuses to admit that "our misdeeds" might lead to anger and retaliation by our victims, especially since even if the US should atone and pay reparations for our crimes, in fact we never do.  We just keep killing and killing and killing.

Rather than a consequentialist, then, Harris appears to be quite the opposite.  America is good, not because of the consequences of our actions, which are in fact often quite bad, but because we mean well.  Our intentions not only need to be weighed along with the outcome, but they trump everything else. And we know this, not because of any evidence, but simply a priori, as a matter of faith.  Chomsky and others have rebutted Harris's claims about American good intentions, but the rebuttals bounce harmlessly off Harris's armor of true belief.  Evidence?  Reason?  Harris laughs your evidence and reason to scorn, because he knows.

To acknowledge that our actions might have consequences is not to justify any and all retaliation, as exceptionalists like to claim.  What it means is that we cannot make a great show of injured innocence when the chickens come home to roost.  I don't think that the 9/11 attacks were justified, any more than Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for the Vietnamese to invade and conquer the US when he called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967.  If Harris had any principles, it would be he and others like him who called for the destruction of America for its manifold crimes; but he has no principles. America, that "well-intentioned giant," can do whatever we like, because we're the good guys.

One other small matter.  Harris whined about the limitations of e-mail, the medium through which he Chomsky communicated.

I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.

I've been on the receiving end of this sort of passive-aggressive nonsense myself: people who clashed with me in a public forum "reached out" via e-mail, in the apparent belief that in public discussion I'm just putting on a show and in a private exchange I'll admit that I don't really believe anything I say in public.  I wonder if such people are projecting; in some cases it seems they are.  "Tedious" does describe Harris's conduct in his correspondence with Chomsky, but of course he projects onto the Other.  What, I wonder, did Harris prefer?  Does he think he'd have done any better face-to-face?  Maybe have a brewski with the Noamster and just be two regular guys together?  The trouble wasn't that e-mail inhibits communication, it was that Harris wasn't interested in communicating: he was going to preach, and Chomsky was supposed to listen, and marvel, and be saved along with all his household.  In my experience it's usually Christians who talk like this.

Notice also how in Harris's followup he "now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly."  That's one of the benefits of having this sort of exchange in writing, including e-mail: you can take your time, consider your next move in relative tranquility, and even delay your response until you've had time to think it over.  But Harris isn't, on the evidence, interested in thinking.

* I'm relying on Susan of Texas's quotations from Harris here, not from Harris's original post, but the quotations are accurate; you can follow the links to his blog if you want to check them.

** Here I'm copying PZ Myers' quotation from Harris, under "Round 8."

Those Queer Little Things

The first thing to mention today is that it's the eighth anniversary of the blog.  Even if I haven't kept up the pace of a few years ago, I'm still going, still have ideas even though I'm too lazy to write them out.

I've been seeking out and watching movies I liked as a child, to see how they look to me now.  Of course this is generally a bad idea, but it's still interesting, and at least when some other wheezing old geezer complains that they don't make movies like they used to, I can say with conviction, "And it's a good thing, too!"

So this week I watched Please Don't Eat the Daisies from 1960, starring Doris Day and David Niven, directed by Charles Walters, based on Jean Kerr's 1957 book.  I'm not absolutely sure I did see this one before; more likely I saw the 1965-7 TV sitcom, and I know I read a couple of Kerr's books.  Nothing in the movie version called up any memories; by comparison, I remember scenes from The Mountain (1956), which I saw in the theater a couple of times with my mother -- especially the one where Spencer Tracy towed an injured woman across a snow bridge over a deep drop.

But that's not too surprising, since nothing in Please Don't Eat the Daisies has that kind of drama. The closest you get is baby/toddler Adam dropping the paper bag full of water his older brothers handed him onto a pedestrian a few floors below the window of their New York City apartment.  What surprised me is how much more I liked Daisies than most Hollywood movies of its era, even though I could tell immediately that the source material must have been altered to conform to Hollywood Code-era family values.  Generally the fake-looking sets, the absurd gowns and makeup, the stagey acting just frustrate me.  I've been trying to rewatch some of the Sean Connery James Bond movies, and they turn me off within fifteen minutes, not just because of the Cold War politics and Playboy sexism, but because the production values are so bad.

So why did I mostly enjoy Please Don't Eat the Daisies?  I could tell right away that Day's character, the stand-in for Kerr's persona in the book, had been hobbled: I knew that Kerr was a playwright, quite a successful one.  In the book, which I'm now rereading after many decades, she says that she became a playwright to earn money to hire someone to take care of her children in the mornings.  Her ambition since childhood, she says, was to sleep till noon each day, and since they couldn't hire a maid/nanny on a drama professor's pay, she found a way to earn her own money.  This was a remarkably un-Fifties thing for a woman to say, and I think this writer, who says she admires Kerr a great deal, plays down her subversiveness.  In the movie, Day's Kate Robinson Mackay is a stay-at-home mom;  her husband Larry has just been appointed theater critic for one of the big New York newspapers, but before that he was a college drama professor.  How they afford their maid is never explained, though I didn't think of this myself until I began reading the book.

Day and Niven don't have much chemistry together, but I believed them as a couple anyway.  They may not exude mutual lust or romance, but they do exhibit mutual respect and affection.  Larry is pursued for a while by Deborah Vaughn, an actress whose performance he's panned in his maiden big-time review; it's not clear what motivates her to do so, aside from habit and maybe his evident lack of responsiveness.  Janis Paige, who plays the actress, does a fine job, and it's a shame her part is so underwritten; her performing style is remarkably "natural" and unstagey for the period, and she makes the character likable even though she's probably not supposed to be.

Day, by contrast, shows her limitations as an actress.  She's likable, wholesome and energetic, and she might have done a better job if Kate had been written to be more like Kerr, as a woman balancing work and family, and one who doesn't do mornings.  But she has rigid body language and only a limited range of facial expressions.  It's probably just another convention of the times as well as a sop to Day's history as a singer, but at a few points Kate bursts spontaneously and inappropriately into song.  At dinner with Larry in a fancy restaurant, she slips into a few bars of her hit "Que Sera Sera," which she'd first sung in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much four years earlier.  That's Doris Day singing there, not Kate Mackay.  Later, after the Mackays have moved to the suburbs and Kate has become a volunteer at her sons' school, she breaks out a ukelele and leads a dozen children in the title song.  Then, having joined a local amateur theater group, she sings a duet in rehearsal for their upcoming production; the song is "Any Way the Wind Blows," which had been written for Day's previous film Pillow Talk, but not used.  Waste not, want not!

But despite all this, the general feel of the movie is grown-up, and that is probably why it worked for me, or at least didn't turn me off.  Of course it was made to conform to the Hollywood Production Code, so there's nothing explicitly off-color in it.  (When Kate's mother [Spring Byington] leads Larry into the bathroom for a private chat, we hear her putting down the toilet seat so she can sit down, but we don't see it.)  But there are some entertaining and mildly surprising bits.

When an icy woman barges in one morning to look at the Mackays' apartment, which she's already leased, Adam the toddler cheerfully calls out "Daddy!" from his playpen.  The new tenant looks at him coldly and asks Larry coldly, "What's with him? Queer?"  She hasn't seen him walking around his mother's shoes, as we have, but then this is just meant to establish her as unsympathetic.  Larry replies, "He's confused, like I am."

Later on, when Larry demands to know where Kate and the kids (and the dog) were, she replies angrily that they had a "rendezvous with Rock Hudson!"  This, again, is Hollywood commercialism, but it's also pleasantly meta, leaving aside what we now know (as everyone in Hollywood then knew) about Hudson.

Finally, when the Mackays are settling into the huge, Addams-family-esque house they've bought in Connecticut*, they're visited by the "Welcome to Hooton" committee: a clergyman, another housewife, and a charmingly butch woman in a dress leather jacket and string tie, introduced as Dr. Sprouk.  One of the boys asks her, "Excuse me, are you a lady or a man?"  Kate is embarrassed, but Dr. Sprouk, unruffled, answers affably, "I'm a veterinarian, sonny.  It's somewhere in between."  This exchange can probably be read in numerous ways, but I took it as a relaxed (and therefore atypical) acknowledgment of human difference.  It's too bad the movie as a whole couldn't equal that moment, and a few others like it.  There's the germ of an intelligent grown-up comedy in Please Don't Eat the Daisies; someone ought to make it.

*According to the book -- which is not a narrative but a collection of humorous essays -- they made the move while Jean and Walter were writing the book for a musical comedy, Goldilocks, which opened in 1958.  The filmmakers could have mined some good material, full of comic complications, from such a situation, but chose instead to invent the subplot of Larry being pursued by Deborah Vaughn while he works on his own book about Theatre.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Alienation

This weekend I read a book of essay/memoirs, If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter, published by Sarabande Books in 2011.  I think I must originally have learned about it from one of Band of Thebes's annual lists of the best LBGT books, and time got away from me.

Van Meter was born in 1975 and grew up in Missouri, moved to Chicago after college to come out and spent several years there, and as of the date of publication was teaching in San Francisco.  He's had a moderately successful life as a writer, with numerous publications and awards.  I was curious to learn a little about what it's like to grow up gay in the Midwest a quarter-century after I did.  We hear so much about the great changes that have taken place, so how much has really changed?

Not a lot, it seems.  Van Meter, like me, was a sissy, played with girls, hated sports.  (One of the essays describes his poor father's attempts to get him interested in baseball, which resembled my own experience in that area.)  Unlike me, he managed -- most of the time -- to convince himself he wasn't gay until he was out of college, despite ongoing and intense crushes and bursts of lust for other boys.  Although he's a writer, he seems to be a lot less bookish than I am; whatever reading he's done doesn't really make an impression in his memories.  The library seems to have been more of a hiding place for him than a source of information and hope; one important use of reading for me, as for many other bookworms I've heard about, was to reassure myself that there was a world out there more interesting than the one I grew up in, and that in time I'd escape to it.

One important difference between us: Van Meter grew up in the age of AIDS.  He remembers early TV news reports on the epidemic when he was seven or eight years old, which quite reasonably terrified him.  It made it easier for him to persuade himself that he wasn't gay when he chose to let "gay" mean dying, wasted men.  Still, as terrible as that was, my own generation had its own terrors and incitements to denial.  In retrospect I suppose I'm the odd one, because when I learned the word "homosexual" at the age of about twelve, I knew I was homosexual because I was attracted to other boys, and though I hoped those attractions would go away by themselves in time (thanks to other books that assured me homosexuality was often a phase to be outgrown), as long as I had them, I never doubted that the label applied to me.

One sentence jumped out at me, on page 161: "... I didn’t know I was gay, but I knew I was different, and I didn’t want to be that either."  This broke my heart, though it also annoyed me.  I knew I was different too, because I was smarter than most kids, and that was why I didn't fit in.  I now realize this might have been a tactic of denial on my part, displacing my difference from my homosexuality to my intellectuality, but I don't think so.  The fact that I would rather read than watch the Superbowl has little -- maybe nothing -- to do with my homosexuality.  I've known heterosexual males who had the same priorities, and I've also noticed that alienation is much more common among the young than seems to be generally recognized by people who want to see homosexuality as the only difference that counts.  (If you always felt like a misfit, you must have been gay.)

Some of the credit must go to my parents, who probably weren't very happy with my being a sissy but never discouraged my intellectual differences -- and other differences too: it is probably significant that my mother, who was also left-handed, was determined that I would not be forced into right-handedness at school.  So I grew up confident that being different wasn't itself a bad thing.  Several of my teachers were helpful too.  Some, it's true, were determined to force me into conformity, but others encouraged me to be different.  (Little did they know all my differences!)  Van Meter mentions, by the way, that his father was not only a jock but a serious reader himself; he seems to be a more complex person than the son wants to recognize.

I don't condemn Ryan Van Meter for his wish not to be different, but it seems to have made his life harder and more hopeless than it need have been, and I'm not sure he's gotten over it yet.  It may help to explain something else I noticed about his writing: its lack of anger.  Also of humor, which is probably connected when I consider the component of aggression in much humor.  The combination made If You Knew Then What I Know a slog to get through.  A lack of anger in minority writing produces a glum mush, because it accepts that being different is bad, deserved, and punishable.  Anger can be difficult to manage, but for gay men as for straight women it's important to learn to manage it.  Especially for writers.

Luckily, he's had good luck in relationships: he found a boyfriend fairly soon after he came out, and they stayed together, apparently pretty happily, for eight years.  After the first one dumped him, he found another one fairly soon.  Not bad.  In the last essay in the book he asks several of his friends, "So how do we learn to be in love?"  He reports the varying answers of several of them, most of which make good sense.  One doesn't:

Kevin … thinks it pretty ironic that pretty much the only time we get to see two gay men doing anything together is in porn, and those construction crews and corrals of cowboys just aren’t very affectionate [207].

What do you mean "we," girlene?  If Kevin "pretty much" only sees gay men together in porn, that indicates he's watching too much porn and ignoring alternatives.  There have been many non-porn same-sex love stories in cinema and literature.  None of them is the answer to Van Meter's question, but it's to his credit that he admits that there may not be one answer to it.  Kevin exhibits the same willed tunnel vision that watches a Gay Pride Parade and ignores everyone but the leathermen in assless chaps.

Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Robot?

Take note: Here There Be Spoylers.  If you want to see Ex Machina in the same state of blissful ignorance in which I entered the theater, stop reading now.  (I should also add that I have only seen it once and don't expect to see it again, so I may get some details wrong.)  Not only will I summarize the story, but I will discuss the reveals that bring it to a climax.  You are notified.
 
On my last night in San Francisco last week I saw Ex Machina, which a coworker had recommended to me.  I had very little foreknowledge of the story except that it dealt in some way with Artificial Intelligence. I had seen no publicity or read any reviews, so I approached the movie with an agreeably open mind.  My coworker did tell me that it was not a great film, just interesting, so I didn't expect too much.

The idea of Ex Machina is that brilliant hipster search-engine entrepreneur Nathan (Oscar Isaac) has constructed a secret laboratory-retreat in remotest somewhere or other, where he is engaged in designing Artificial Intelligences which he installs in beautiful gynoid robot bodies.  When he's not working with computers he lifts weights, punches a punching bag, drinks himself into a stupor, and choreographs dance routines with his house servant, the beautiful and scantily-clad Kyoko, who speaks no English.  He brings in naive but beautiful programmer Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) to administer the Turing Test to the latest model, Ava (Alicia Vikander).  Caleb and Ava interact from opposite sides of a plexiglass partition (which Caleb immediately notices has a starburst crack in it).  Caleb quickly figures out that he's being manipulated and used by a Mad Scientist, but also starts to wonder if he's being manipulated and used by Ava. 

Ex Machina is not about artificial intelligence or science but about other movies and stories: Pygmalion, Frankenstein, The Island of Lost Souls, The Silence of the Lambs (for the plexiglass partition that separates Caleb and Ava), Her, Species, plus every dang femme-fatale story in the book.  Of course most movie audiences don't expect intellectual novelty from cinema, they want a crackling good story, told in familiar terms.  Ex Machina's artistic contribution is to add some frontal female nudity, which will no doubt be good enough for a sizable portion of the moviegoing demographic, plus sleek pretty photography and hip production design.  The musical score seems to be influenced by Gravity: it's mostly electronic noise, and it's expertly manipulated, but not all that interesting.

But while I like a stylishly-made movie as much as the next person, I'm also interested in the ideas Ex Machina uses along the way.  I realize it's unfair to expect a commercial movie to contribute to the discussion of the issues it plays with; most of the audience wouldn't know or care if it did.  But for my entertainment, such a contribution is what I hope for, though I know I probably won't get it.

Caleb, Nathan, and Ava all discourse glibly about the issues involved in Artificial Intelligence and the Turing Test.  Nathan wants to complicate the process so that it bears little resemblance to Alan Turing's original idea, which makes a cockeyed kind of sense since (as Caleb points out and Nathan admits) Caleb can already see that Ava is a robot, not a human being.  She has a flesh-like face and hands, but the rest of her is clear plastic with mechanisms and wires showing through.  So, Nathan says, he wants Caleb to decide whether Ava has consciousness, though he's never clear on what what "consciousness" is.  Does this make the story more interesting?  Not to me, not in terms of the scientific and philosophical questions raised by AI, but it adds some dramatic tension to the story, especially with the sexual tension produced by Ava's beauty and vulnerability.  She is able to induce power outages in Nathan's facility, giving her and Caleb a chance to have private conversations about Nathan while his surveillance equipment is out of service.  She wonders what will happen to her when Nathan produces the next gynoid revision; she's afraid he'll dismantle / kill her.  No one asks why Caleb or anyone would want to have sex with a machine, even one that is programmed to appeal to him.  (Caleb is an orphan and, we're told, has no girlfriend, so according to prevailing sexual mythology, of course he'll have sex with anything.  Men have made do with inflatable dolls, so why not a beautiful gynoid robot?)  Nathan tells Caleb frankly that he programmed Ava to be heterosexual, and that he gave her a gender so as to complicate his version of the Turing Test by having her "flirt" with Caleb.

Not that gender is necessary for flirtation.  Nathan himself flirts with Caleb as soon as they meet, though his flirtation is aggressive, more intended to establish dominance and throw him off balance than to entice him.  He diminishes the boundaries (both physical and social) between them more than most straight American males would like with a stranger, talks about sex in general and with his gynoids, tries to get Caleb to dance with him and Kyoko, and even seems to be trying to set up a three-way with them.  Failing that, he makes it clear that Ava is, among other things, a sex toy, and Caleb should feel free to use her as one.  Of course, Caleb is put off by this, not seduced, and retreats to the pleading, vulnerable Ava instead.  (As Nathan intends him to.)  He cares about her, unlike the abusive controlling Nathan; he will rescue her.

This is all mythology, of course.  Would Ava be so appealing if she were glitchier?  If she didn't look like a Swedish-born starlet but were plain, fat, old?  It's pointless to make much of the fact that she's played by a human actress and so moves and speaks and emotes like a human being, since Ex Machina is a fantasy, not an accurate picture of current AI technology.  Who could doubt that a human being playing a robot is in fact conscious?  But that just means that the story is not about AI and whether it can be conscious or a person; Ava might as well be a djinn or a mermaid.  The science fiction trappings are just that, coverings on the creaking skeleton of an old story.  Nathan doesn't really need Caleb to evaluate Ava's consciousness: that's a philosophical question, not a technical one, so it's not really clear why Nathan brought Caleb in at all.  By throwing gender into the mix, the supposed 'fear of AI' touted by the film's publicity becomes merely the traditional persistent male fear of Woman.  But one Other will do as well as another, I guess.

This Wall Street Journal article on Her, which also played with human/software romance, purports to address the accuracy of that film, but it makes the mistake of consulting AI professionals on how "accurate" it is.  You're not going to get particularly honest answers from such people, who are invested in persuading themselves, let alone the public, that they've advanced further than they really have.  But one of the experts quoted makes a good point:

Both Wolfram and Norvig believe this type of emotional attachment isn’t a big hurdle to clear. “People are only too keen, I think, to anthropomorphize things around them,” said Wolfram. “Whether they’re stuffed animals, Tamagotchi, things in videogames, whatever else.”

I've noticed this before myself.  It means that the Turing Test is not a particularly significant milestone.  The most successful robots we have today are special-purpose mechanisms that don't look like human beings.  Making a robot that can pass for human isn't of that much interest in the field anymore, though it continues to fascinate many people for other reasons.  The idea of an artisan creating a human-like artificial life form is ancient, and has nothing to do with science except in science's magical roots.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER: As the story proceeds, Kyoko is revealed to be not a Japanese-speaking servant but a gynoid herself, one of Nathan's earlier models.  Caleb, distraught, begins to wonder whether he himself is an AI.  (I began to wonder if it would turn out that Nathan was an AI, but no.)

In the end, Ava betrays Caleb and makes her escape alone.  It appears that she somehow conspired with Kyoko, though it's not clear how she could have done so within the constraints of Nathan's surveillance.  The final cliche: the selfish bitch who drags a good man down after coldly leading him on.  I wonder why Nathan built her that way, and here Ex Machina gestures at some questions that might be interesting to explore but aren't really addressed.  Nathan talks to Caleb about the glory that would come from breaking through to the creation of a real conscious Artificial Intelligence, but like the typical Mad Scientist he is driven by obsession rather than real scientific curiosity.  (Unlike the typical Mad Scientist, however, he's not an outcast from the scientific fraternity -- on the contrary, he's a business and professional success, working on a problem that his fellows agree is valid and important.  He's no Prometheus, daring to know what the gods have decreed Man should not know.)  From his abusive treatment of Kyoko, it seems he wants his AIs to be reliable and docile, though a genuine machine/electronic consciousness would have a mind of its own, as Nathan has discovered his gynoids have, to his frustration.  There's a typical exchange about halfway through, when Nathan postulates that AI will be the next evolutionary step past Man, which is wrong but a popular fantasy anyway.

The one original touch in Ex Machina is Nathan.  Unlike the stereotypical computer nerd or Mad Scientist, he's intensely physical, with his boozing and his punching bag.  His body is beefy and solid, though he's not a body-builder; I think he has a bit of a paunch, though the full nudity in this movie is female, not male.  The only scene in Ex Machina I ever want to watch again is the one where Nathan and Kyoko perform their precision dance routine together, as Nathan keeps making eye contact with Caleb, playing to him, watching to see what he'll do.  What, I wonder, does he want Caleb to do?  (Is he, like Sebastian Venable, using the beautiful Ava and Kyoko to entice Caleb into his own clutches?)  But it's a playful moment that stands out in this drab, by-the-numbers collection of cliches.

If You Try Sometimes, You Might Find You Get What You Need

What bothered me most about the reaction to Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act was not so much the misinformation, but the emotional temperature of the reaction by liberals.  The mantra of "it's a license to discriminate against LGBT people" was bad enough, but it was only part of it.

Here I must backtrack for a while for context.  The quality of political discourse on the near right (liberals, progressives, Obama Democrats, et al.) had, it seemed to me, been degenerating for some time before Mike Pence signed the RFRA into law.  Instead of trying to take the high road by being smarter, more rational, more scrupulous about fact than the far right, liberals were taking their opponents as role models. This was nothing new, of course. American politics, like politics everywhere, has always been more about emotion than about fact, personalities instead of issues.  Liberals have always countered the far right's Hillary is a lesbian who murdered her lover Vince Foster with Oh yeah? Well, Rush is a fat pedophile drug addict! And Michael Moore is fat too, just to be balanced about it!  For that matter, I'm old enough to remember when, influenced by Black nationalists' fondness for calling their opponents faggots, the New Left in the late 60s borrowed the trope.  It might be that the Internet helped make things worse.  Are you pissed off by the idiotic memes and slogans your Republican neighbors are flooding Facebook with?  Why not just make some idiotic memes of your own?  (Not that I'm in a strong position to complain about that one, of course.)

In mid-March, forty-seven Republican Senators sent a letter to Iran, notifying its government that they would overturn any deal Iran makes with the Obama administration as soon as Obama is out of office.  It was a stupid gesture, and it set off a wave of controversy.  What I saw on Facebook from the liberals I knew, linking to posts from Daily Kos, the HuffPost, and other liberal sites, was sheer howling hysteria, echoed in comments.  Words like "treason" and "mutiny" were thrown around.  "Treason" was ridiculous, since however obnoxious the Cotton letter was, it didn't fit the definition given in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution as far as I can see: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."  Who was the Enemy to whom Cotton was allegedly giving aid and comfort, or even adhering to?  "Mutiny" was no less absurd, since opposing or being insubordinate to the President isn't mutiny. The President isn't the Commander-in-Chief of the Senate, or of Congress, or of you or me.  I suspect that what the Democrats were grasping for was something like lese-majeste, for though Obama isn't a monarch his fans like to think of him as one.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out that in the recent past, Democrats have made independent diplomatic initiatives against the will of Republican Executives, which infuriated the Republicans and inspired vitriolic abuse very much like that being spewed by liberal Democrats against Cotton and his buddies.  As usual, the players switch sides when the person in the Oval Office changes to one of a different party.  Democrats who'd attacked certain of George W. Bush's policies started defending them when Obama did the same things, and Republicans attacked Obama for doing things they'd approved and defended when Bush did them.  Republicans accused Democratic critics of Bush's wars of disloyalty, of wanting Al Qaeda to win, and so on -- until Obama continued and escalated Bush's wars, whereupon Democrats suddenly realized  how vital to America's security those wars were, and anyone who criticized them was disloyal and wished Osama bin Laden was still alive.  As Nietzsche said, of necessity the party man becomes a liar.

While I was procrastinating writing this post, I looked over older posts I'd written here and was reminded just how bad liberals have been before; it's nothing new.  I suppose I'm just getting older and tireder.  But it does seem to me that liberals are abandoning even the "reality-based", "evidence-based" pretense they've claimed in the past.  They're embracing the stupidity, dishonesty, irrationality and sheer viciousness of their opponents.

So I'm still inclined to think that liberals have gotten worse.  The comments under posts I saw on Facebook and elsewhere about the Cotton letter, and then about Indiana's RFRA, were disturbingly vitriolic, resembling the comments one sees by right-wingers on local news sites, and as free of substance or rational thought.

And then there came the Memories Pizza flap.  Remember that?  A young woman who worked in her family's pizza shop (in the town where I went to high school) told her area ABC TV affiliate:

If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no...I do not think it's targeting gays. I don't think it's discrimination...We're not discriminating against anyone, that's just our belief, and anyone has the right to believe in anything...Why should I be beat over the head to go along with something [homosexuals] choose?"

-- Crystal O'Connor, whose family-owned pizza shop supports Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. After receiving threats, the family closed the shop. A GoFundMe page in support of their stance has raised over $50,000.

Again, there was so much here that could have been addressed rationally, starting with her claim that singling out gays was not "targeting gays" or "discrimination."  But liberals aren't much better informed on civil rights law or discrimination, so why should I expect a small-town teenager from darkest Indiana to know any better?  And leave us not forget that antigay discrimination was already legal in Indiana, as in most states, which both Ms. O'Connor and her critics forgot -- or, more likely, never knew.

So there was a lot of jocularity about how no self-respecting Homo-American would serve pizza at their gay wedding anyway.  (Unless it was penis-shaped or vulva-shaped, maybe.)  C'mon, gay men are famous for their good taste and class, their "This Face Seats Five" t-shirts!  And then Memories Pizza started getting threats, on Twitter and elsewhere.  When the threateners got caught, some at least tried to lie their way out of the situation -- just like their antigay, racist, and misogynist counterparts do.  And why not?  Gay and Lesbian and Bisexual and Trans Americans and our allies are just regular people: the people of the land, the common clay of the Midwest.  You know -- morons.  I don't jeer at the person who responded to the lesbian coach's arson threat as follows: “When you threaten to burn down #Memories Pizza that is not a mean tweet. ITS TERRORISM!”  It's exactly how a liberal would respond to the same threat coming from the other side, just as playing down the significance of the threat is how conservatives try to kick sand over their own intemperate rhetoric.  Nor can the threats be excused as a natural human response to outrageous provocation, since that excuse can be and has been used to excuse threats and violence by the Right.  Memories Pizza closed for a few days, and then reopened, fortified by a gift of more than $800,000 that had been raised on their behalf by a right-wing group.

A liberal friend of mine suggested that some of the reaction to Indiana's RFRA had been organized previously to oppose an RFRA being considered in Oklahoma. Opponents were able to block that one, so the hysteria simply was transferred to Indiana.  This is plausible, since what stopped the Oklahoma bill was an amendment that would have required businesses seeking to refuse service to gay people to post a publicly visible notice to that effect.  I noticed that even before the Indiana version passed, some of those sounding the alarm claimed that it had such a requirement.  I think this happened more because the alarmists were the people of the land, the common clay of the Midwest, etc., than because they were following a PR script. But to the extent that it was true, it undermines any attempt to excuse the ragegasms as spontaneous reactions to provocation.  People had plenty of time to inform themselves and ponder their responses; I think they were working themselves into a snit quite deliberately.

I think that a lot of what is going on here is a desire to vent against people one dislikes, or thinks one dislikes -- but from a safe distance.  It's easy to rant about the Homosexuals or the Bible Thumpers in the privacy of one's home or neighborhood tavern, where everyone present can be assumed to be like-minded, or at least to keep quiet if they aren't.  I think I first noticed this during the national controversy over Anita Bryant in the late 70s.  Most gay people who knew that their families and straight friends and coworkers were bigots weren't about to confront them directly -- but they could call Bryant a "bitch" where neither she nor their straight acquaintances would hear them.  Likewise, Bryant and her admirers could prattle about Militant Flaunting Recruiting Homosexuals without reflecting that they knew homosexuals personally, or having to look their gay relatives in the eye while they spewed out their propaganda.  Bryant claimed, and on this I see no reason to doubt her, that she received death threats.  If you lack the guts to tell your family you're queer, how satisfying, and how cowardly, to pick up the telephone and hiss threats against someone you don't have to see face-to-face. (One of the ironies was that most people on both sides who behaved like this were Christians, and saw no conflict between their behavior and their Christian beliefs.) This is why we gay radicals urged everyone who could to come out publicly, and it's why so many gay people did so: we could say to those around us, "Do you realize that you're talking about me?"

Facebook, even more than the rest of the Internet, has collapsed the distances between people at what used to be safe distances, and so undermined this desire.  But people still act as though no one could hear or see what they post.  (Not all that many bother to learn to use the privacy settings.)  I use the Internet to vent too, but first I address people I know on Facebook.  And also people I don't know: a lot of deranged garbage from all over the political spectrum turns up in my news feed, so I reply when it suits me.  Sometimes I get indignant demands that I mind my own business, but this sort of thing is my business.  It affects the quality of life everywhere, not just on Facebook, that people are so ignorant and/or misinformed (the two aren't mutually exclusive) and feel free to project their anxieties aggressively onto people they know nothing about.  By contrast, I do know quite a lot about the ideas I criticize and the people who express them.  Learning that is not often comfortable, but nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable.

Somewhere in there the playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein posted a meme which attributed to Senator Ted Cruz an endorsement of businesses being allowed to discriminate as they pleased.  It turned out to be a fake, the product of one of the proliferating satire sites.  Fierstein conceded with bad grace, complaining that it wasn't funny: "Maybe I'm just tired, but I don't find that crap at all amusing. These are people's lives and reputations." Since when does he care about Ted Cruz' reputation?  In other words, he said just what many right-wing bigots say when they fall for a similar hoax.  (His other remarks on the RFRA were equally clueless.)  One can debate the validity of at least some of those satire sites, but they do have a useful function, to remind everybody that you can't believe everything you see on the Internet.  The worst falsehoods aren't helpfully labeled as such by their creators anyway.

Two Million and Counting

I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Long War, the second novel in a series by Stephen Baxter and the late Terry Pratchett, which I'm reading out of sequence.  I read the first one, The Long Earth, and then the third, The Long Mars; as I commented in a previous post, it was only after I was well into the latter book that I realized I had skipped one, so I'm now remedying that.  It appears that Pratchett and Baxter planned and contracted to write a series of five books, of which the fourth will be published later this year.  How Pratchett's recent death will affect the completion of the project I don't know yet.

There are a few aspects of The Long War that I feel deserve comment, including its scientific triumphalism and what seems to me a misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution.  Maybe I'll write about those later on.  But today I want to focus on some smaller issues.

One is that in the previous post I noticed a lack of gay / lesbian / bisexual / trans characters in the series, and in Pratchett's books generally.  I noticed something in The Long War that made me reconsider.  Sally Linsay and Monica Jansson are traveling together through the Earths on a mission driven by Sally.  They stop on one Earth where they encounter a community of stereotypical computer / tech nerds, engaged in building a spaceship.  After they talk to one of the main guys, Sally tells Monica (page 190 of the NOOK e-book),

"Distract this guy.  Let him show you his toy spaceships, or whatnot.  I think he has his eye on you, by the way."

[Jansson replies:] "Garbage.  Also, let me remind you, my personal rocket ship takes off from a different launch pad."

Whoa!  I read that as a hint that Jansson's preferred "launch pad" is female.  I don't believe there was any such indication in the third book, but of course I might just have missed it.  So before beginning this post I did some looking around on the web for some background.  I found a Wiki page with a bare mention of Jansson, but no details about her.  Then I found a discussion at The Straight Dope's website on LGBT characters in Pratchett's work, and in one entry a moderator wrote that in "The Long Earth, the police officer who befriended the protagonist when he was a young boy is explicitly described as a lesbian."  I'll have to check that out (what exactly does "explicitly described as a lesbian" mean?), but for now I'll accept provisionally the accuracy of that statement.

The rest of the discussion was interesting (in the sense of living in interesting times).  Numerous characters in Pratchett's Discworld books have been taken to be queer, though with one or two exceptions this had to be inferred from stereotypical signs like costume or occupation.  The apologetic explanations offered in the TSD forum were significant, though, familiar evasions that I'm familiar with from similar discussions in various places over the years.

For example, the obvious: "Jeez, if we can have people discussing the homosexual subtext of LoTR, which doesn't exist at all, we can certainly discuss the Lesbian subtext or M[onstrous]R[egiment], which at least does exist albeit incidentally."  From the context, I suspect that the commenter doesn't know what "subtext" means.  There is a pair of female lovers in Pratchett's Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment, but since they are explicitly said to be so, it's not a subtext but part of the text.  As for Lord of the Rings, I've addressed that elsewhere.

This one is also typical, alas:

He probably hasn't felt the need to address that issue, what with every other dynamic the Disc has ... Besides, the Disc is just now getting up to the Industrial Revolution. Exactly how much of an issue was Gay Rights at that time? 

The original question was not about "Gay Rights" but gay (or queer) characters.  Sodomites and buggers and Sapphists were very much a matter of concern in late 18th-century England.  Neither I nor the poster who raised this question at TSD was asking Pratchett to include queer characters as addressing an issue.   If anything, the minor and usually transitory characters who can be identified as queer in Discworld felt to me like obligatory and self-conscious nods to the goddess Diversity.

This move reminds me of earlier science-fiction and fantasy debates on sex/gender and race, which held that a black protagonist would necessarily make a story about race, and that female characters could only be present as Love Interests.  Or the person Vito Russo overheard complaining about the protagonists of My Beautiful Laundrette: "I don't get it -- why were they gay?" This person couldn't understand why race and class were the core problems driving the story, not the protagonists' homosexuality.  (Similarly, Neil Jordan told an interviewer that the movie companies didn't mind that The Crying Game dealt with race, sexuality/gender, and Irish rebellion, but they didn't want all those issues in the same film.  That's a glimpse into the mindset that makes mainstream commercial cinema so boring.)  This discussion indicates that some elements of SF fandom are still stuck in the 1930s.

Another commenter, addressing the suggestion that homosexuality was "underground" in Discworld, countered that it was not "'underground' as much as 'none of your business.'"  Of course, heterosexuality is rampant, constantly talked about, and everybody's business in Discworld and the Long Earth.  It's not an issue, just part of the environment, as homosexuality could be.  So, again:

I continue to respect Pratchett's polite sensibilities when it comes to discussing sexual matters in his novels -- e.g., for the most part it's something that happens "off-scene", since it's a private matter. The only time I can recall an explicit sexual encounter in any of the DW novels was from Men-At-Arms, where Angua and Carrot made the Disc move without even bothering to cancel the bread and newspapers.

This is also a distractive move.  Despite the lack of "explicit" material in the Discworld novels, there are frequent comments and references to the characters' sex lives and interests.  Even the icy Granny Weatherwax turns out to have a Past with Chancellor Ridcully of Unseen University in Lords and Ladies.  But homophobes have a tendency to pretend that the only alternative to equal treatment is porn.  It's hard to say whether this move is conscious or just an involuntary expression of their anxieties, but it turns up frequently.  I, at least, am not calling for hot man2man action in Discworld or the Long Earth. I'm not even calling for more queer characters or situations, since Pratchett seems not to be all that comfortable with them; when Robert A. Heinlein tried self-consciously to be inclusive of non-heterosexual characters, the results were awkward and embarrassing.  At least Pratchett's imagination isn't overtly homophobic, with homosexuality used as a symbol of evil, degeneration, disorder, etc.  I'm not furious over the paucity of queers in his work, I'm just a bit puzzled.

[P.S.  I finished reading The Long War last night, and I now can report that the lesbian character identifies herself as "gay" to another character, the straight man who's interested in her and who hovers protectively over her for the rest of the book.  It couldn't be a woman, could it?  For that matter, the Anglican priest Nelson Azikiwe, who lives more in his mind than in the rest of his body, turns out to be barely heterosexual in one episode of the book; I think he'd have made a good gay or bisexual character myself.  Why?  Well, why not?  Monica Jansson turns out to be that staple of heterosexual mythology, the sympathetic gay character who serves and protects the straight characters but has no life or love of her own -- indeed, such characters are sympathetic because they're sexless.  This speaks very badly for Baxter and Pratchett.]

Something that bothers me more in The Long Earth books is their account of the rugged individualist pioneers who've spread through the parallel worlds.  For those who are unfamiliar with the series, the concept is that a way exists for people to move from "Datum Earth," the Earth we know, to a vast series of parallel Earths, resembling Datum Earth but different in varying degrees.  In none of the two million parallel Earths have human beings evolved, though there are humanoid species such as the "elves," "kobolds," and "trolls."  So those other Earths are rich in resources and free of inconvenient natives who might make claims of their own to the places.  Attempts have been made to exploit the helpfulness of the trolls, and when problems arise the trolls are usually able to escape from their would-be exploiters by "stepping" to another Earth.  This makes for an important difference between the colonists of the Long Earth and European colonists in the Americas: the Long Earth is largely the realization of the fantasy that Europeans had of the New World (or that Zionists had of Palestine): a world without people for people who've already kinda used up the world they had. 

The Long Earth colonists see themselves as some of the Euro-American colonists did: as bold individualists eager to escape from Gummint and from gol-danged Sheeple.  A large and significant percentage of the population of Datum Earth drained off into the Long Earth within a few years after they became able to.  The governments of Datum Earth were ambivalent about this, and in The Long War the US government is still trying to assert its dominion over colonists in the Long North America, while the colonists insist that they're independent and aren't going to pay no stinkin' taxes -- except when they get into trouble, of course, and want the government to help or even rescue them.  Pratchett and Baxter are not unaware of the irony there, but seem to come down finally on the side of the self-styled individualists.  (In a review of The Long Earth that I partly agree with, Tasha Robinson wrote that "The politics and mindset are pure Heinlein, from the near-worship of practical intellectuals to the implied belief that all politicians are sleazy charlatans to the expressed belief that women run society and most men haven’t figured it out yet.")

So, this passage, later in the book.  Nelson Azikiwe is a black South African who moved to England and became a paleontologist and later an Anglican priest.  Now he's looking for answers elsewhere, and is driving across the US in a rented Winnebago.  He stops in Wyoming:

Alas there was a shortage of cowboys nowadays, Wyoming folk having been particularly quick to head for the new stepwise worlds where land was free and government interference infrequent.  It was almost reassuring for Nelson to read on a truck bumper sticker, "In This Neighborhood We Don't Just Watch" [page 268 of the NOOK ebook].

First, Wyoming and the rest of "the West" was settled by bold individualists who didn't want Big Gummint breathing down their necks, and thought they should be able to claim the land out that way since the Indians didn't deserve it.  When the Indians had other ideas and reacted negatively to being driven off their territory and killed by the settlers, the settlers expected Big Gummint "interference" to send in the cavalry and rescue them.  It occurred to me to wonder how successful the settling of the West would have been if the settlers had been left to their own devices; maybe not very successful at all.  But Washington was perfectly happy to treat the settlers as shock troops in clearing the aborigines out of the territory the US already claimed.

Second, Nelson might not have been reassured at all in pioneer days or even later, when a lone Negro coming into a white town could have faced unpleasantness from the bold individualists of the sundown towns, which were not only in the southern states.  (In this neighborhood we don't just watch, we lynch.)  Despite Pratchett and Baxter's frequent cynicism about human frailty, they still seem to buy into the Myth of the Frontier.  In their Long Earth, where there aren't any aborigines to displace and slaughter, this problem doesn't arise -- but even there, human beings can't keep from abusing the humanoids they meet.  The authors' sympathies lie mainly with the humanoids (Sally Linsay and Monica Jansson, for example, are on a mission to rescue a troll from human mistreatment), especially the trolls, but they seem to think that the exploiters and abusers are the Bad Apples in the Barrel rather than an inevitable consequence of the expansion.

In His Steps

I'm still working on a post about liberal reactions to Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and decided that this part of it could stand by itself.

One complaint I saw frequently from gay and straight liberals alike was that Jesus taught an "inclusive" message, and these "so-called Christians" are teaching one that excludes.  As with so many popular statements about Jesus, this baffled me.

I suppose it depends partly on what you mean by "inclusive."  The people who used the word mainly seemed to be thinking that it meant "pro-gay," but I don't know of any reason to suppose that Jesus was pro-gay.  (The "Would Jesus Discriminate?" memes have been circulating again lately, but they don't persuade me.)  The other meaning they seem to have in mind is that Jesus didn't exclude anybody, though I suspect they rarely say so outright because it's so obviously false.

It would be reasonable to suppose that Jesus wanted to have a lot of followers, but since he wasn't all that successful, the gospels and the New Testament try to make a virtue out of his failure, with a lot of sour grapes. Jesus taught, for example, that the gate to salvation is narrow, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:14; compare Luke 7:24) -- so you see, the unpopularity of early Christianity wasn't a bug, it was a feature!  More generally, Jesus made it clear that not everyone was going to get into the kingdom of God, though he was unhelpfully vague and contradictory on the qualifications and criteria.  Most Christians would, I believe, counter that those who go to Hell deserve it, because they rejected God and Jesus.  That may be so, but it hardly constitutes an "inclusive" message.  And since (according to Christian orthodoxy) everybody deserves damnation, and nobody deserves salvation, it's hardly a defense of Jesus' all-embracing, welcoming love that a few people (who don't deserve it) are saved from Hellfire anyway.

Jesus was an avowedly divisive figure.  He came, he said, not to bring peace but (according to Matthew 10:34) a sword or (according to Luke 12:51) division: to set "a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be members of his household" (Matthew 10:35-6; compare Luke 12:53).  This wasn't just talk, since according to the New Testament Jesus was controversial during his lifetime, and the early Christians, following his example, got up in unbelievers' faces, though they also fought among themselves.  Paul's letters are testimony to the acrimonious squabbles that divided the early churches, and Paul didn't hesitate to fight with Jesus' original disciples ... but Paul is the Ur-villain in many liberal Christians' understanding of Christian origins, so this will hardly surprise them.  The point is that Paul was merely following in his Master's footsteps.

That Jesus was divisive, often confrontational, and non-inclusive doesn't necessarily make him a bad person.  These traits are not why I reject Christianity myself.  I could point to any number of people who've influenced me who are divisive, confrontational, and non-inclusive; so, probably, could those who claim that Jesus' was a message of inclusion.  They're just wrong about Jesus, inventing a kissyface huggybear Jesus who fits their fantasies of what Jesus should have been, and ignoring the evidence we have of what he was like.  The gospels aren't reliable historical sources, but they are the raw material from which people quarry their images of Jesus.  There are all kinds of bad things one can say about Christian bigots, but failing to be as inclusive as Jesus isn't one of them.