Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris on Free Will

(Again, I'm republishing this from Talking Philosophy (2012).)

Jerry Coyne has an interesting article on free will in USA Today and a follow-up post at Why Evolution Is True. It all seems to be triggered by the publication of a new book about free will by Sam Harris.

Both Harris and Coyne point-blank deny that free will exists. The USA Today piece is well worth reading, but the passage quoted from the Sam Harris book, in the post at WEIT, doesn’t impress me. In particular, I disagree about the “changing the subject” claim as a way of dismissing compatibilism. Come on, Dr Harris, that is a rhetorical tactic to put down thoughtful and intellectually honest opponents, rather than trying to appreciate the real strength of what they are saying. (Of course, you may not have any choice as to whether or not you argue like this.)

It’s just not at all clear that the original “subject” was some spooky power to act contrary to our own desires and whatever physical substrate they supervene on. In fact, I doubt that any serious philosopher thinks of it quite like that, and I doubt that ordinary people do either – though the attempts by some libertarians (in the sense relevant to this debate) to preserve our motivations while giving us a radical power to act independently of the causes that shaped our personalities are, indeed, sometimes baffling. It seems that they want to have it both ways, which places them in danger of saying something incoherent. As for what ordinary people think about all this … well, it’s likely to be very confused.

I agree that there is no free will in any spooky libertarian sense. I don’t think the idea can be rendered coherent, whether physical determinism (at the level of the brain’s functioning, say) is true or not. But this is all a very modern way of thinking about it. It may be what’s bugging some people, but historically the questions were more along the lines of: “Am I a plaything of fate or destiny or necessity or mere chance or the will of the gods?” “Is it rational to deliberate about what I do, if the outcome is fated anyway (or, conversely, a matter of mere luck)?” “Are my attempts to shape my own life and to make a difference to the world all futile?” These are the questions that are at stake in the traditions of myth, literature, and even, to a large extent, philosophy.

Even now, much popular fiction involves themes of, “Can I overcome my destiny?” “Can I forge a better life for myself?” This kind of thing, arguably, is what gnaws at ordinary people outside of any formal theological or philosophical context. Do we have the power (or some power, at least) to shape our lives? It seems obvious that we do, or why bother making decisions at all (unless we simply can’t help it, right?). Why deliberate about what career to pursue, if it’s all controlled by God or the stars, anyway? But we do, ordinarily, think it’s worthwhile deliberating about what career to pursue, what skills to develop, etc. Deliberating certainly doesn’t seem irrational or futile.

This obvious appearance is challenged by various plausible-looking arguments, ranging from arguments about the foreknowledge of God, to arguments about physical determinism, to arguments about living in an Einsteinian block universe, to arguments based on the law of excluded middle (after all, all statements about the future are either true or false … aren’t they?). And doubtless many others. These arguments suggest that our sense of having some ability to shape our own lives is an illusion. That is exactly what Harris and Coyne think it is.

Well, perhaps one of those arguments works, but if you’re going to show why they probably don’t, and why the everyday appearance that we can make decisions, act on the world, and, to some extent, shape our own future lives, is not just an illusion after all … well of course you’re going to have to do what philosophers do. I.e. we make distinctions, try to clarify issues, etc. That isn’t arguing in a contrived or dishonest way, or “changing the subject”. It’s our job. It’s how we earn our supper.

When philosophers try to clarify, and perhaps dissolve, these concerns, showing, perhaps, that the concerns don’t make good sense on closer analysis, we are playing a time-honoured role. Indeed, the Stoics (or certain of them) gave a “compatibilist” answer to the question of whether outcomes can be up to us, in some sense – despite there also being some truth about what we will decide – way back in Hellenistic and Roman times.

The issue of free will in the specific sense that I mentioned in the third paragraph above becomes important in debates about whether God could be absolved of responsibility for evil actions by us. If some sort of spooky free will exists, it’s thought by some theologians and philosophers that this creates a gap between the creative activity of God and the evils perpetrated by us, thus solving the ancient problem of evil.

Others may try to argue for spooky free will in an effort to preserve moral responsibility. They think that we can’t be (morally) responsible for our actions unless we are somehow responsible for them all the way down. Thus, they want to create a gap, not between our actions and God but between our actions and whatever events formed us as we are. Indeed, this issue has become central in the contemporary debate about free will among professional philosophers. It’s now largely a debate about whether and when we are responsible for our own actions.

But once again, compatibilists who are involved in this debate are not engaging in any dishonest or contrived reasoning. It is strongly arguable that no spooky gap between us and the events that formed us is required for us to, quite rationally, hold each other responsible for our choices and actions. You may disagree with this, but it’s inevitable that a question like that is going to require both sides to engage in attempts at conceptual clarification. This is not “changing the subject”.

Jerry Coyne rightly points to these – i.e. theodical reasoning and arguments about moral responsibility – as two areas of discourse where a spooky gap is invoked. Since he evidently thinks that spooky gaps are needed for moral responsibility, he denies, if I read him correctly, that we have moral responsibility.

Let’s set aside the theodical arguments. I agree that the free will defence is unpromising as a solution to the problem of evil. But what about (moral) responsibility? Surely getting all this clear requires that we examine what the concept really amounts to – and that is a non-trivial exercise in conceptual analysis, since the concept of (moral) responsibility, as it appears in everyday discussion, does not look straightforward, or even coherent, and it is tied up with many other difficult concepts, such as concepts of fairness, justice, and desert. There’s conceptual work to do here, and the best approach is simply not obvious.

Modern Art and its Alleged Evils

(I'm reposting this from Talking Philosophy (2012) - since there have been some problems with that site, and I'd like to keep some of my favourite posts from there in a place where I have more control of them. Enjoy!)

This post is adapted from one I made on my personal blog a few days ago – hopefully, it might attract interest here. The issues spin out of current debates in Australia (which are similar to some debates elsewhere) about freedom of speech and expression. During the discussion, I was referred to an article by Ben Hourigan, published by the Institute of Public Affairs – a more-or-less libertarian think tank that I often disagree with (but like the Cato Institute in the US, it also takes some stances that I find intellectually attractive).

This piece by Hourigan goes back some years to a controversy in 2008 about the work of a celebrated Australian photographer, Bill Henson, which can be controversial because of images like this (warning: the image is not, in my view, an example of pedophilia, child pornography, or anything remotely of the kind – but there are people who disagree). I posted on this issue on numerous occasions in June 2008 (e.g. here), if you want to follow up on my personal blog.

Hourigan makes some comments that I agree with:

Australia’s most recent dramatic controversy over freedom of artistic expression centres on veteran photographer Bill Henson’s images of nude and semi-nude pubescent boys and girls. Following a complaint by Hetty Johnston of the anti-child-sexual-assault organisation Bravehearts, in May 2008 police seized photographs from a Henson exhibition due to open at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Just under two weeks later, police dropped all charges after the Office of Film and Literature Classification gave nearly all the images in question a rating of G (general). The sole exception, the image of a naked thirteen-year-old girl circulated on exhibition invitations, received a rating of PG (parental guidance recommended). Receipt of any rating at all is enough to quash charges of child pornography or indecency, but the awarded ratings are the broadest recommendations of suitability for any audience available under the Australian scheme, and mean that the Henson photos are subject to no legal restrictions on their exhibition or sale.

When professional, government-appointed classifiers place Henson’s images so clearly within the law, it’s astonishing to see politicians whip up such a media storm and inspire such heavy-handed action from police. The moral panic went all the way to the highest levels of our political system, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd telling the Nine Network that he found the image of the thirteen-year-old girl “absolutely revolting.” NSW premier Morris Iemma called the photographs “offensive and disgusting.” The politicians’ foray into amateur art criticism continued when Art Monthly Australia used a photograph by Polixeni Papapetrou of a naked-but relatively modestly shot-six-year-old girl as its cover in July 2008. This act of defiance against the attitudes that had victimised Henson prompted the prime minister to comment: “frankly, I can’t stand this stuff.”

Hourigan goes on to say various useful things about this particular episode in Australian social and political life and others, such as the exhibition at an earlier time of the famous Andres Serrano photograph “Piss Christ”. Most notably, he sums up at one point:

The Prime Minister shouldn’t be intruding on civil society by parading his uninformed opinions of contemporary photography in the mass media. The police shouldn’t be confiscating artworks and tarnishing Henson’s reputation with charges relating to child pornography when they should have been able to tell how clearly the images in question fall within the law. Crazy people should have more respect for private property and not go smashing up artworks with hammers, and newspapers shouldn’t do so much to feed a public perception that the art world is impossibly depraved.

However, Hourigan segues into his own rant about the evils of modern art and the culture within which it is created and promoted. The attitudes of hostility to Henson and others are understandable, he thinks, because: “Whether they see it as a way to turn a profit or, more nobly, as their moral and artistic duty, the core of their art practice is the activity of violating, however subtly, mainstream reasoning, taste, and morality.”

So far, so good. Some artists, especially more avant-garde ones, doubtless do consider it their duty to challenge and trangress mainstream reasoning, taste, and morality. That, however, seems to me altogether a good thing as far as it goes. Mainstream ideas and values should not go uncontested, or so I think, and we do rely on artists to contest them. The result may not always be pretty, and sometimes boundaries that should not be crossed will be – or at least that is a risk. For example, contrary to the moral panic in mid-2008, Henson’s photography does not demean or blatantly sexualise its subjects, but what if it did? At some point, images with certain similarities could cross the line and become child pornography, even though that never actually happened in Henson’s case (and the images were ultimately given G-ratings, or in one case a PG rating).

The point is that there are some limits, even if broad ones, to what can be (acceptably) done even in the name of high art. There is an edginess about much serious art, and it is, indeed, understandable that it makes many people uncomfortable.

At the same time … within those broad limits, art plays a valuable role, and it is one that requires defence all the more because of the edginess aspect. Without that defence, it is very easy to imagine the boundaries closing and constricting, as populist political leaders like Kevin Rudd appeal to the wider community’s prejudice and ignorance.

And this is where Hourigan’s emphasis is all wrong. His ultimate point seems to be that the messages conveyed by transgressive art are banal, and that this makes it more difficult to defend art and the artistic community. He makes much of the claim that Henson’s message can be reduced to “puberty is a time of uncertainty, and that even though we might want to treat teenagers as children, their bodies are capable of carrying an adult sexual charge” OR even to something so simple as “puberty is difficult and thirteen-year-olds have a budding sexuality.”

Now, there is something right about this. Perhaps these are (the?) messages conveyed by Henson’s photographs, and the second formulation in particular sounds rather trite. But it won’t work to reduce any artistic production to a message that could equally be expressed as an abstract proposition. Imagine where most popular art and culture would stand if we did this – much of it could be reduced to simple propositions such as “hurting people is bad and romantic love is good”. Hey, by stating this proposition I have now saved you the trouble of reading numerous books and watching numerous TV shows and movies.

That is not how it art works, of course, though exactly how it does work is a complicated issue for critics, philosophers, and artists themselves in their introspective moments. It’s not that we can really expect modern art to embody more surprising, or arcane, social, moral, or philosophical insights. The power of any artwork is not going to depend on these but on its ability to move and provoke through mastery of technique. If we are moved by Henson’s work to think thoughts along the lines of, well, “puberty is a time of uncertainty, and … even though we might want to treat teenagers as children, their bodies are capable of carrying an adult sexual charge,” the experience cannot be substituted by my writing those words in a blog post.

The beauty of Henson’s work is that it provokes these thoughts, and doubtless others, perhaps many of them uncertain or mutually contradictory, through the power of its composition and other aesthetic qualities. The thoughts are not merely stated abstractly, perhaps in a dogmatic way, perhaps supported by arguments, but are brought home to us through surprise (but not surprise at an abstract proposition) and emotion, delivered by the artist’s mastery of his chosen medium.

Saying much more would lead us into controversial and intellectually murky areas of philosophical aesthetics, a subject on which I claim no specialist expertise. But it is obtuse and unworkable to demand of artists that they convey more profound and surprising messages. At the time of the Henson debacle, Hourigan found some useful and even incisive things to say, but his final admonition to artists misses the point.

Don't shoot the messenger when confronted with inconvenient ideas

[By Russell Blackford, University of Newcastle. Republished from The Conversation, 15 March 2018]

In August 2017, James Damore, a Google software engineer, was fired for writing an internal memo that offered views about sex-related differences in interests and emotions.

Damore had suggested that part of the over-representation of men in software engineering at Google might be due to psychological differences between women and men: not intellectual differences, but differences in what activities the sexes find attractive and enjoyable. He argued that Google should focus on equality of opportunity for individuals, without necessarily expecting equality of outcomes across its workforce.

Damore’s firing from Google was an example of an increasing intolerance of inconvenient or controversial ideas within democratic societies. Here, then, is one great moral challenge of our time. Once an issue becomes politically toxic, we may reject inconvenient viewpoints out of hand. We may reject opponents – viewing them as ill-disposed people – without listening to them, and we may even try to punish them for their views.

The memo

Damore’s memo cited a body of mainstream, though often controversial, scientific research. The research suggests that women tend, compared to men, to be more willing to please others, more anxious and susceptible to stress, more oriented to feelings and people (rather than to solving and using impersonal, rule-bound systems), and more attracted to life balance (rather than status).

Damore explained that these are statistical differences, discernible at the level of populations, and that there is a large overlap in the distribution curves for the respective sexes. For example, many individual men might be more oriented to feelings and people than most women. Thus, he emphasised, these findings should not be used to stereotype or prejudge individuals.

Social psychologists Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt have since attempted an assessment of Damore’s specific claims.

Though Damore expressed his ideas thoughtfully and mildly, his memo is often referred to online as a rant or a tirade. Its tone is unemotional, but it evidently stirred passions in others. After the memo was publicly leaked, Damore was shamed on social media platforms, then promptly fired. Throughout these events, his opponents blatantly demonised and misrepresented him.

A compassionate, feminist response

In the aftermath, the high profile psychologist and feminist author Cordelia Fine made some remarks worth taking to heart. Fine has long been a critic of research into sex differences in cognition and emotions. She regards many claims based on this research as scientifically doubtful and socially troublesome, insofar as they can be used to undermine activism for gender equality.

Though she criticised Damore’s knowledge and reasoning, Fine also stated that his summary of the extant research was “more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature” and, indeed, that some of his ideas were not especially controversial.

Fine added:

So there was something quite extraordinary about someone losing their job for putting forward a view that is part of the scientific debate. And then to be so publicly shamed as well. I felt pretty sorry for him.

This shows a level of human decency that is often missing from public debate. Fine expressed compassion for an intellectual opponent who was poorly treated.

Moral challenge

We can all be tempted to reject inconvenient ideas, whether or not they turn out to be truths. So we face an urgent moral challenge to overcome this tendency and address ideas on their merits rather than how well they accord with our pre-existing beliefs.

The stakes are high. There is plenty of evidence that our tendency to dismiss ideas with potentially unsettling implications for our worldview is hampering our ability to deal with pressing issues, like climate change.

In their 2016 book, Asymmetric Politics, Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins argue that the Republican Party has shown a distrust of the scientific consensus on biological evolution and anthropogenic global warming, but that this is not the consequence of an underlying hostility to science itself. Rather, Republicans tend to reject science where its findings are inconvenient.

Because they dislike government intervention in economic markets, Republicans baulk at proposed solutions to climate change. They begin here and “work backward” to reject climate science itself.

Often, indeed, the situation is even worse. Once an issue has become intensely politicised, we may interpret others’ views as evidence of their overall ideology, which then sways whether or not we regard them as fundamentally ill-disposed people who are not worth listening to.

In a recent article, Neil Levy presents evidence that this is now the case with global warming. For many American conservatives, acceptance of the scientific consensus has become a marker of untrustworthiness. It’s a cue to stop listening.

Such reactions are not new, nor are they found on only one side of politics. Hostile and dogmatic reactions to ideas can be found across the political spectrum. When combined with social media shaming, they can produce cruel outcomes for well-meaning individuals.

New ideas

All too often, we automatically dismiss ideas with potentially unsettling implications for our worldviews. We may go further in rejecting, and even attempting to harm, the messenger.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but it has become so common that it frustrates good-faith efforts to discuss and solve the large problems confronting humanity in the 21st century. Such rejection of messages and lashing out at messengers blocks useful discussion across moral and political divides.

To make progress, we will need to reboot our thinking. We need to focus on evidence and arguments, and on ordinary fairness and compassion to others, even when we disagree.

Vale Peter Nicholls

My old friend Peter Nicholls died on 6 March 2018, just two days short of his 79th birthday, as a result of complications from Parkinson's disease. Although we all knew the end was coming, it ultimately happened quite suddenly, as these things often do. The funeral took place in Melbourne on 15 March, so Jenny Blackford and I flew down for a hit-and-run visit to the city where we lived for three decades.

We'd been close to Peter, especially during the late 1980s and through the 1990s, before he began to slow down and become more reclusive after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2000. Jenny was especially close to both Peter and his wife, the fine editor Clare Coney (who was employed by Gollancz, back when she and Peter lived in London, a generation ago now).

Peter and Clare were regular attendees at the (sometimes slightly crazy) parties Jenny and I used to host on special occasions - particularly each New Year's Eve - at our Port Melbourne house in the late 1980s, and subsequently at our big old Victorian terrace in Albert Park, where we moved toward the end of 1989. (We shifted interstate, to Newcastle, almost exactly 20 years later, at the end of 2009.) For their part, Peter and Clare were known for their generous hospitality, hosting many lavish gatherings, large and small, at their grand home, with its vast private library, in Surrey Hills.

I dedicated my most recent book (Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination; Springer, 2017) to Peter, knowing that it would at least be meaningful to Clare and the rest of Peter's family, even if Peter himself could not entirely comprehend it (by this point, he was at a very late stage of Parkinson's). In the book's Acknowledgments section, I state: "I have dedicated this book to Peter Nicholls, the great encyclopedist of science fiction. For four decades, no one has engaged meaningfully with the [science fiction] genre without benefiting from his scholarly work." This sums up one aspect of his life.

Peter wrote numerous books and other works about the SF genre, setting a particular style and standard - clear, straightforward, and accessible, but deeply scholarly - for his contemporaries and those of us who followed after him. In particular, he was the creator of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, editing its first edition and establishing the template for its subsequent editions for which he was co-editor and later editor emeritus.

Clare Coney bravely MC'ed the funeral service herself - very competently indeed - and she spoke movingly of Peter and their life together. Among others there from the Australian science fiction community, I should mention Janeen Webb and Jack Dann; Sean McMullen, Catherine Smyth-McMullen, and Trish Smyth; Carey Handfield; Paul Collins and Meredith Costain; and Justin Ackroyd. This is not meant to be a complete list, and apologies to anyone obvious whom I've overlooked here. Peter's close friend and collaborator, the author and scholar John Clute, did not make it from overseas, but Peter's son, Jack Nicholls, read a speech that John had sent for the occasion. Neil Gaiman, another of Peter's closest friends, sent a recorded speech that vividly told the story of their friendship.

The venue was full - standing room only for latecomers - with Peter's numerous relatives and old friends. All four of Peter's sons (Saul Cunningham, Tom Pollak, Jack Nicholls, and Luke Nicholls) gave generous and emotional speeches about their father. His daughter, Sophie Cunningham, was not able to make it back from the US, where she'd flown just days before Peter's death, but she sent an especially beautiful and moving speech, read by her wife, Virginia Murdoch.

Peter was proud of his five children, and he'd have been especially proud at their portraits of him and their expressions of love, and what he meant to them. Peter's sister, Meg L'Estrange, read a lovely tribute, and his old friend from his university days, the poet and literary academic Chris Wallace-Crabbe, read a poem that he'd composed.

Strangely, I learned things about Peter that I hadn't known when he was alive, including things that we'd had in common: both of us were very sickly as young children, forced to spend much time in our beds, which was one reason why we developed our immersion in books, and our love for them; and like me, Peter had recurrent nightmares about huge tidal waves. Who would have guessed?

Afterwards, Clare hosted a wake back at the Surrey Hills place. It was in the usual Nicholls/Coney manner, with no shortage of food or wine; it was easy to expect Peter to wander in at any moment, waving his wine glass and telling some anecdote in enthusiastic or scandalized tones.

Peter was a physically imposing man with a splendid girth, a magnificent voice, and a big personality. He lived with gusto, and on a large scale, with more than the usual number of wives, lovers, children, cigars, fast motor vehicles, and countries that he called home at one point or another (I've borrowed some of this wording from Sophie's Facebook page).

He has left behind an important legacy of scholarship and literary criticism, as well as his wonderful family.

The funeral service, organised and managed so well by Clare, painted a three-dimensional picture of the man, his personal style, and his contribution to the world of letters. He'll be much missed, as he would have wanted.

"Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends" (W.B. Yeats). 

Vale!

Jerry Coyne on "Don't shoot the messenger..."

At his Why Evolution is True site, my good friend Jerry Coyne has a post about my recent piece ("Don't shoot the messenger when confronted with inconvenient ideas") at The Conversation.

Jerry's post is entitled: "When offense trumps truth: the demonization of 'inconvenient ideas'" - check it out. He has some good, supportive things to say. Feel very free to spread the word and/or to comment there. (I have comments here, on this blog, permanently turned off, as I don't find it easy to moderate threads without using up a lot of time and energy, but quite a long thread has built up underneath my original post at The Conversation. By all means comment there if you wish.)

New post at The Conversation ... "Don't shoot the messeger..."

Over at The Conversation I have a new post "Don't shoot the messenger when confronted with inconvenient ideas". Check it out!

I comment on a range of issues from the James Damore case to denial of climate change science. My point is to deplore the strong human tendency not only to reject inconvenient messages but to view the bearers of certain kinds of messages - disliked messages on intensely politicised topics - as therefore ill-intentioned people who are not even worth listening to (and who perhaps should be punished in some way).

Hugo Award nominations close soon - please consider SCIENCE FICTION AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

Nominations for the Hugo Awards close very soon - on 16 March 2018.

This year, I have a book, Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics, that is eligible in the "Best Related Work" category. If you are eligible to nominate work for the Hugo Awards, please consider nominating Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination.

Only do so if you genuinely think it is worthy of appearing on the shortlist - I'm not asking for favours from people who don't actually think that. Nor, sadly, do I have any bribes to offer. On the other hand, I don't have a big enough name (or enough of a network of relevant people) that I am one of the usual suspects when the time comes around for these awards. A book by me from an academic publisher, even an excellent international publisher like Springer, won't immediately come to a lot of people's minds.

So ... this is your reminder that the book exists, has been getting good feedback so far (though I have yet to see any formal reviews, i.e. other than Amazon reviews), and might reasonably be thought up to the required standard. I'm nudging you to at least consider it.

First successful reproductive cloning of primates

An article in the peer-reviewed journal Cell has announced the successful cloning - carried out by a research team from China - of macaque monkeys using the somatic cell nuclear transfer technique (SCNT) (also see a brief report here). In principle, this takes us one step closer to the possibility of cloning by SCNT as a method of human reproduction. Over the past twenty-one years, since the creation of Dolly the Sheep by SCNT, some of the moral and political heat has gone out of the issue, partly because of great difficulties experienced even in cloning non-human primates. It was starting to look as if human reproductive cloning was as far away as ever.

The article in Cell should not be taken to mean that human reproductive cloning is just around the corner. It isn't. Nonetheless, this is exciting research. Before anyone panics about the implications for humans, note the success rate. The researchers were able to use the SCNT technique to produce 2 healthy macaque monkeys from the DNA of fetal cells, after 6 pregnancies from attempts involving 21 surrogates. They were also able to produce 22 pregnancies, after attempts involving 42 surrogates, leading to 2 babies that were short-lived, using adult somatic cells (specifically cumulus cells). This is impressive. All the same, despite great efforts, the team failed to produce healthy clones of adult macaque monkeys.

We should, I think, conclude that researchers in this area remain a long way from being able to create clones of adult (or other fully-formed) human beings at will, using SCNT.

I'll be interested to see whether the slightly closer prospect of human reproductive cloning, as a result of this research, revives the moral panic of the late 1990s, following the announcement, in early 1997, of Dolly's birth in 1996. Perhaps the lengthy passage of time just to get this far will dampen down the degree of panic, though the Cell article is only just becoming widely known.

Black Panther review

(Note: mild spoilers in what follows. There is nothing that people who are interested in Black Panther won't already know.)

First, I completely enjoyed Black Panther. I thought it had almost the look and feel of a Star Wars movie - rather than a typical superhero movie - with its depiction of dynastic struggle, shaky and shifting alliances, and advanced weaponry and transportation, all set mainly in a series of vast, visually stunning landscapes and high-technology cityscapes.

The evident theme, as so often in science fiction movies and superhero movies, relates to the use of power - in this case technological power - whether to protect yourself, to help others, or to overcome and oppress others. The latter might be motivated by personal ambition or by political zealotry.

Science fiction and related genres return to this again and again. Indeed, the justifiable and unjustifiable uses of great power provide the key theme of these genres. That is so all the way back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it's as true of the work of H.G. Wells as the work of E.E. "Doc" Smith.

For X-Men fans, the main antagonists of Black Panther had something of a Xavier-versus-Magneto vibe in what they, respectively, sought to do with the extraordinary power available to them. At all times, they acted against a familiar background of ongoing injustice on a very large scale.

(All X-Men fans know that Xavier and Magneto are themselves often interpreted, with just a touch of revisionism, as analogues for someone like Martin Luther King vs someone more radical like Malcolm X ... or the Black Panthers if it comes to that. Note, however, that the Black Panther Party came into existence some three years after the creation of the X-Men, and a few months after the creation of the Black Panther as a Marvel character. Its founders were inspired by, among things, the writings of Malcolm X.)

T'Challa, the Black Panther, was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in mid-1966, and there was some controversy at the time. It was a big deal, back then, for Marvel to create a black superhero. It made a strong political statement in the circumstances of the mid-60s, though some questioned why he had to be an African king, not a more grounded African American character, such as the later Luke Cage (who dates from the 1970s).

Similar questions will doubtless be raised this time, and they'll merit discussion. Meanwhile, Black Panther is an interesting and spectacular movie with large, perennial, themes about power, large-scale injustice, and political zealotry, themes that inevitably speak of, and to - even as they are by no means confined to - American race relations.

What do I mean by that? In current circumstances, and for the foreseeable future, any production from Hollywood that deals with the themes of power, large-scale injustice, and political zealotry will be open to interpretation as at least allegorizing American race relations, and as addressing them in some way. Race need not be thematically explicit, as it is in Black Panther. Thus, the mutants of the X-Men mythos, including the current TV show The Gifted, are, in part, stand-ins for persecuted people of colour.

At the same time, the themes of power, large-scale injustice, and resulting political zealotry are not confined to racial issues. It follows that a movie such as Black Panther can reference specifically racial issues, yet have a resonance far beyond those issues. It thus connects with the rich legacy of narrative, especially SF narrative, that engages with questions about the responsible uses of power.

Cordelia Fine on the James Damore case

I'm bookmarking this long article about James Damore in The Guardian from back in November 2017, because I want to return to it. When I initially read the article, I was especially struck by the remarks attributed to Cordelia Fine, who has, for some years, been a patient and unrelenting critic of much sex-difference research. She sees this research as scientifically dubious and socially dangerous insofar as it undermines feminist efforts to advocate for gender equality.

While Professor Fine could be expected to criticise Damore's views on sex differences in interests and personality traits - and indeed, she does so - it's notable that she adds that his summary of sex-difference research in his now famous memo was "more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature" and that some of his ideas were quite familiar to her and not even especially controversial. As quoted, she goes on to say, "So there was something quite extraordinary about someone losing their job for putting forward a view that is part of the scientific debate. And then to be so publicly shamed as well. I felt pretty sorry for him."

Here, Fine is showing a level of common decency and reasonableness - and is expressing a degree of compassion for an intellectual opponent - that is all too often missing from public debate about controversial issues. Too often, the response is not only to distrust any message that contradicts our prior beliefs and commitments, but to go even further. The response, that is, is often to reject, demonise, and attempt to harm the messenger. Cordelia Fine deserves praise for taking a different approach to a message that clearly goes against some of her core attitudes and beliefs.

My purpose here is to praise Fine's approach (at least on this occasion) to public controversy, not to defend the substance of Damore's memo. You can go here for one even-handed attempt (by Jonathan Haidt) to assess its merits or otherwise. My larger concern is not with the science of sex differences but with the widespread tendency to shame opponents in public, and to call for them to be fired (as Damore was fired from his job at Google in August 2017). This is, of course, something that I've been objecting to for a long time now.


Edit, 17 February 2017: The National Labor Relations Board has since publicly released a memorandum of advice from its legal counsel on James Damore's application to the NLRB to consider his case. The advice memorandum itself strikes me as extraordinary, claiming that Damore's dispassionate and reasoned discussion of the science of sex-related psychological differences was comparable to such blatant stereotyping and hostility in the workplace as referring to "jealous ass ghetto people"; the memorandum even claims that parts of Damore's memo amounted to sexual harassment, notwithstanding that the content was entirely clinical and analytical rather than in any way sexualised. That said, any employer enjoys a very broad discretion under American law to dismiss employees for conduct that could potentially cause workplace disharmony. It was always doubtful, therefore, that Damore could have won this case or even that the NLRB genuinely had jurisdiction to deal with it. I also have doubts as to whether other legal action commenced by Damore since his dismissal from employment can succeed.

For all that, the reasoning in the NLRB advice memorandum is troubling, and it appears to me to be wrong in fact and law, even if the legality of Google's action in firing Damore could have been upheld, all things considered, on the basis of less controversial reasoning.