Star Trek - a review

Warning: spoilers follow

As I said in my earlier post, I enjoyed Star Trek greatly. Despite its length (running over two hours), I found that it never flagged for a moment. Well, the fist-fighting, um, leitmotif did eventually become slightly tiresome, but even that was in keeping with the original 1966-69 series, in which James T. Kirk was always both impetuous and handy with his fists.

I loved the way the look and feel of the original series was recreated, with the characters aboard the starship Enterprise genuinely appearing to be younger versions of those we (baby boomers) knew from our first encounters with the show when we were children. Such touches as the introduction of an ancient Ambassador Spock from the future, played by Leonard Nimoy, gladdened my heart, and the Enterprise itself, inside and out, was everything it should have been ... with just a bit of visual updating to make it a plausible representation for a young audience.

The production also captured the slightly naive and clumsy, but nonetheless endearing, strand of utopian optimism that was so important to the original Star Trek. As ever, we see the franchise offering hope for a future in which all humanity has formed a benign United Federation of Planets. It boldly imagines humanity's survival, maturity, and eventual flourishing in space - a pan-human society on a scale far beyond that of a single world or solar system. It suggests the possibility of a time - not many centuries hence - when technology is employed wisely, and there has been an end to racism, sexism, nationalism, poverty, and gross inequalities of all kinds. As a creative mega-text, Star Trek is the Enlightenment with rocket boosters. It offers the vision of a future to die for, one to wish for, romantically or not, and hold out for if we possibly can, a vision that its loyal fans quite naturally love with their whole hearts, and which gave the classic episodes their extraordinary mystique. The moviemakers - perhaps surprisingly - have absorbed the vision like true fans, absorbed it all the way into their bone marrow.

So many things are right about this production that it seems almost churlish to mention plot contrivances. But I'll mention just a couple anyway. Sigh.

In a movie that was striving for a kind of superficial verisimilitude, the touch of having Kirk chased by alien predators right into the caves where the older Spock had been exiled shortly before was ... just a bit hard to take.

Indeed, the idea that Kirk has been marooned by the younger Spock on the exact same square mile or so of a whole planet where the elder Spock had lately been marooned by the Romulans for quite different reasons was just too contrived, especially as the elder Spock (or Spock Prime) was exactly the person who could give Kirk vital, plot-resolving information. Okay, so perhaps they both had to be near the same outpost for some reason (but why in Spock's case?). That Scotty, conveniently equipped with what amounts to a secret weapon, also happens to be within walking distance of where Kirk landed is just too much. Lots of contrivance is mounted on contrivance in a brief set of scenes that is critical to the good guys' success and the salvation of Earth.

Then there's the motivation of the rapacious, piratical Romulans. They have accidentally gone back a century and a half in time, and they are able to obtain red matter once the elder Spock joins them. Indeed, there's plenty of years ahead for them to work on a plan to save Romulus from destruction in what is now the longish-term future. So why pursue a vendetta against Spock Prime? Nero plots a meaningless, comic-book revenge for events that were beyond Spock's control, when he could be doing something constructive such as contacting the Romulans of the time in which he and his crew have miraculously found themselves. And don't tell me that Nero is deranged with grief and therefore acting in ways that don't make sense. Apart from that being a cop-out, why do all his crew put up with this destructive madness (even if these space-miners are bound by a very strict code of discipline, that's not how they act; rather, they seem to be relishing Nero's mad plans as much as he is, even after hanging around in space for twenty-five years).

Enough gripes for now. There's also the point, of course, that this movie wipes clean almost the entire Star Trek slate, enabling the creation of a new canon for the alternative reality that has now emerged. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I'm not sure I'm all that worried, as long as future movies, following on from this lovingly made reboot, remain just as true to the tone and spirit (as well as the appearance) of the original series. I never became much of a fan of all the TV series that followed classic Trek, but even if I had, events in those series remain canonical in their "original" reality, while enabling a fresh start in this one. It will now be possible to produce new movies involving a version of the original crew, without needing to worry about consistency with the precise events of the 1960s episodes.

Presumably the sequels to come should remain consistent with anything that has previously been established as happening prior to the arrival of the Romulan ship from the future, and broadly consistent with everything prior to the destruction of Vulcan, near-destuction of Earth, and surrounding events in the early 2260s. Up to this point, there's no need for anything to have changed greatly, as seen by much the same group of cadets entering the academy at much the same time.

That seems like a good plan to me, but others may beg to differ.

The extreme social conservatism of British Muslims

There's an interesting thread on this survey over at Gene Expression.

Here are some results for different questions in the survey. For each question, the figures on the left are for the general population and those on the right are for Muslims.

For each question, the top figures are for French (general population then Muslims), middle for Germans (general population then Muslims), bottom for British (general population then Muslims).


% Who say homosexual acts "morally acceptable"
78 ... 35
68 ... 19
58 ... 0

% Who say abortion is "morally acceptable"
78 ... 35
47 ... 19
55 ... 5

% Who say viewing pornography is "morally acceptable"
43 ... 16
58 ... 18
35 ... 1

% Who say sex between an unmarried man and women are "morally acceptable"
90 ... 48
88 ... 27
82 ... 2

% Who say that an affair between married men and women is "morally acceptable"
46 ... 14
24 ... 6
15 ... 2

% Who say that suicide is "morally acceptable"
43 ... 14
29 ... 4
32 ... 2

% Who say that the death penalty is "morally acceptable"
35 ... 24
27 ... 27
50 ... 63

The figures are fascinating, and could entice a lot of speculations, but it would be good to know more. E.g., I'd love to see comparable figures for some Western democracies outside of Europe, such as the US, Australia, and Canada. I'd also like to see the general populations compared to other specific groups, religious or otherwise, as well as Muslims.

It's interesting that Muslims are far more in favour of the death penalty than the general population in Britain, but the reverse is true in France (where support for the death penalty in both groups is much lower than in Britain). With all the other issues, Muslims are far more socially conservative in all countries, but the conservatism of British Muslims looks quite extraordinary, even compared with that of Muslims from France and Germany. Whether this tells us something about the cultures from which the various Muslim populations were derived or something about the cultures of the three countries surveyed, or something else again, is impossible for me to say.

I'm back from watching the Star Trek movie

No time right now, but I'll have a bit to say about this tomorrow after I've slept on it. I enjoyed it greatly - (even) more than I did Wolverine - but it did seem, on reflection, to have a lot of holes in the plot. Never mind, I'll think about it and say more later.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A Review

The new Wolverine movie is dividing opinions even as it rakes in tens of millions of dollars day by day, and obviously makes the fans happy. The critical reviews may be bad to mixed, but the word-of-mouth is very different. Go out into the wilds of the blogosphere and you'll find plenty of over-the-top glorying and raving (much of this from female science fiction fans expressing their admiration for Hugh Jackman's muscled and much-revealed body).

I went along yesterday, and I was moved and entertained, though with some reservations. First, though, let's remember that this is, as the title tells us, a movie about the origin of Wolverine, and indeed of the X-Men. It assumes some familiarity with the X-Men franchise - particularly the trilogy of movies, but some knowledge of the original comics helps - and especially with the character of Wolverine. The main lines of narrative in major action-adventure franchises such as X-Men have taken on some of the characteristics of myth in Classical times: already known to the audience, to a greater or lesser extent, and open to continual reflection and reinterpretation. The interest in a movie such as Wolverine is not so much in "What will happen?", though of course there has to be enough of that to maintain narrative tension, as in "How will they interpret the character and mythos of Wolverine?" Anyone who goes along without a fair bit of prior familiarity with the mythos, and particularly Wolverine's character, will probably miss much of the point.

At that level - as an origins story - the movie succeeds. It portrays the creation of an anti-hero, a powerful, violent man, who, nonetheless, acts in humanity's interests. It traces the forces, internal and external, that shape his destiny, and the main interest is in the balance of those forces as he does, well, questionable things, while maintaining sufficient sense of decency to draw back from the worst. James Logan's path through life is dark and destructive. He is something more than human, and he struggles to fit into human society in any role other than that of a savage mercenary. He is hunted by those who fear him, and manipulated by those who believe they can. Out of all this emerges the character we already know: hurt, tormented, prone to rage, but still with that streak of basic decency.

The movie succeeds because it shows an understanding of all this. It moves us to identify with a character in the process of formation, even though, as Roger Ebert has complained, this character is (almost) physically invulnerable.

All that said, there were points when Wolverine seemed to flag. After a glorious first half, it loses its way. The suspense level drops when Logan is transformed into an even more powerful, seemingly unstoppable and invincible, killing machine. For a while there, I was more worried for his enemies than for Wolverine himself, as nothing seemed capable of surviving encounters with him. Once a hero seems like that, it does become easy to lose sympathy - traditional sound plotting demands some kind of danger (physical, moral, emotional, or whatever) to the characters we identify with, and concern about how, if at all, they'll survive against the odds. For some time in the second half, a sense of moral danger to Wolvie's essential goodness and decency wasn't enough. He appeared set to resolve his problems simply by destroying whatever stood in his path.

After some time, though, the narrative recovers. New plot twists are introduced, and the suspense is ramped up once more, though never (I thought) to quite the level of the first half. Things do not go all Wolverine's way, not by any means, and the ending is more sombre than triumphant. Some of this is very strong, but, taken as a whole, Wolverine is just not as tight as it could have been.

Despite that, the nay-sayers are, indeed, missing the point. All of the movies associated with X-Men are risky. How could they not be? After all, the underlying idea of genetic mutations that create superhuman, almost godlike, powers is silly, if you think about it scientifically. The characters are compelling and often ambiguous, but seldom nuanced. The schemes adopted by the bad guys are complicated and bizarre, typically involving nutty pseudoscientific gadgets. Somehow, we must be coaxed to accept all of this as real, while going further and involving ourselves emotionally in the external and internal struggles. Somehow, we must be brought to accept this as epic, or even as tragedy, rather than experiencing it as farce.

As a comic-book franchise, X-Men has been hugely successful. Translating what has been so powerful and attractive about it to the more literal medium of the big screen is a risky undertaking, and any one of the movies could have fallen flat, cheapened the material, or seemed merely risible. So far, none of that has happened: the X-Men mythos has been tranferred to cinema in a way that retains its essence and sustains its implausible plausibility, no matter what details have been rethought or re-mixed (and there are many).

There are more movies to come in the larger franchise, including a spin-off for Deadpool (who is actually a conflation of two characters from the comics) and, potentially best or worst of all, an origin story for the vastly powerful and strangely noble arch-villain, Magneto. How can they pull that one off, if they can't employ the huge Shakespearian voice and charismatic on-screen presence of Sir Ian McKellen because someone younger is needed?

Following Hollywood's efforts with the X-Men is like watching performers on a tightrope - it's thrilling and dangerous, no one has fallen off yet, and we want to see more, but there's always the possibility that the next bit will be a disaster.

Natural and supernatural again

Once again, the point needs to be made that we don't have clear, agreed, definitions of the words "natural" and "supernatural". This is not a surprising fact. These are ordinary English words, used on a daily basis in informal discourse. We know that the words used in this way, in ordinary language, are typically quite fuzzy. Wittgenstein showed this with the example of the word "game", whose meaning is surprisingly difficult to nail down. It is very arguable - and Wittgenstein makes the argument - that the various things we call "games" have no one feature possessed by all. Rather, they bear a kind of family resemblance to each other. You can find paradigm examples that everyone calls a "game" - chess perhaps - but it might not have any feature in common with absolutely everything that we call a game. Still, most things that we call "games" do have features in common with many other things that we call "games". For most practical purposes, we can use the word "game" without too much misunderstanding.

Discussion of whether science can investigate "the supernatural" often seems to involve one party or another to the discussion assuming that "supernatural" has a clear meaning, when it simply doesn't. There are various phenomena that are commonly called "supernatural", but it's not really clear what they have in common.

Think of ghosts, gods, angels, demons, and astrological influences. You might think that what is involved with some of these is the claim that a disembodied mind exists, but gods are not always thought of as disembodied, and even ghosts are sometimes thought of as having a body of a certain kind - some sort of very thin stuff (the word "ectoplasm" is sometimes used here). In the past, spirits were not thought of as disembodied in the sense of being totally immaterial: they were made of "spirit" or "pneuma", a kind of super-thin material. The idea of a totally immaterial mind seems much more recent. Perhaps it existed before Descartes, but it's not clear where it appears in ancient thought or in mythology. And of course, astrological influences are not usually thought of as involving minds at all, although there is some kind of influence that we (perhaps) don't want to call "physical".

Perhaps some clear definition of "physicality" or "body" can be given, and people who call themselves "naturalists" can claim to be rejecting the "supernatural" when they reject the existence of minds that are totally without any physicality or embodiment. However, it would be unusual to find anyone who believes in the existence of such "supernatural" minds while claiming that they have no power to influence the physical world in ways that can be sensed. If a "supernatural" mind has the power to interact with the physical world, then we can study it. We can't study its physical substance, of course, if it has no physical substance, but we can study its powers, its behaviour, perhaps its motivations. Its non-physicality may limit the conclusions we can draw about it, but as long as enough is asserted about what it does we can certainly study whether there is evidence for or against the claim that it exists.

Thus, on one definition of "the supernatural", it is not beyond science to examine any claims at all about the supernatural.

But "the supernatural" might be defined in other ways. If we define "the supernatural" as "whatever cannot be studied by science", then of course it is true by definition that science cannot study the supernatural. However, this sort of definitional fiat tells us absolutely nothing about what sorts of things actually do exist and what sorts of things actually are open to investigation by science.

If we define "the natural" to mean "whatever exists" and "the supernatural" to mean "whatever is not natural", then we have made it true by definition that whatever exists is "natural" and that nothing "supernatural" exists. It follows that science cannot study "the supernatural" because there is no such thing to study. That, however, does not prove that gods, ghosts, demons, astrological influences, etc., don't exist. Nor does it show that they can't be studied by science. It only shows us that if ghosts (for example) do turn out to exist, then they must be classified as "natural".

In short, you can't determine what sorts of things do or do not exist, or what sorts of things can or cannot be studied by science, simply by definitional fiat. The definitions of words don't control what exists in reality.

Again, say you define "supernatural" as meaning "can't be studied by science". Using that definition, you can then demonstrate (a simple semantic entailment) that "the supernatural cannot be studied by science".

What you can't do is then pretend that you defined "the supernatural" to mean (for example) "ghosts and gods" and conclude "ghosts and gods cannot be studied by science". That's equivocation on the word "supernatural".

When we say that science deals with the "natural", while religion deals with the "supernatural" we need to define our terms (reasonably) clearly, then use them consistently. If we define the "natural" so that it means "everything" then it will turn out to be the case that science can deal with whatever turns out to exist, but that tells us nothing about what sorts of things actually do exist. It leaves open the question of whether gods and ghosts exist, for example. If they do, then it suggests that science can deal with them.

Whenever we debate what can be investigated by science, whether science and religion are compatible, whether the existence of entities typically referred to by religions (such as gods) can be studied scientifically, and whether those things exist at all, it would be helpful if we made a conscientious effort to use the various terms consistently and to take note of how others define their terms if they bother to do so. This is difficult to do - language is slippery, and a point comes where it is too demanding to cross every single "t" and dot every single "i". Nonetheless, it is not playing games. It is important that we do this to avoid trapping ourselves in prisons of words, drawing conclusions that are not justified by the facts. It would also help us avoid a lot of distracting emotional attacks that merely make the debate more difficult to keep under control.

Hanging out to see the Wolverine movie: Alison versus PZ

I still haven't seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but I'm hanging out to. I see that PZ Myers hated it, but my dear friend, the wonderful novelist Alison Goodman, loved it ... as she was telling me when we had lunch the other day. She's now also mentioned it at Inside a Dog, where she's currently guest blogging.

Sorry, PZ, but I'm trusting Alison's judgment on this. I ask my readers ... if you had to choose, would you trust this woman or this man? (Yes, the one with the tentacles is PZ, dealing with a hapless Creationist.)

Writing for Normblog

Last week, Norman Geras invited me to write on a book of my choice for his superb normblog. After agonising about it on and off, I eventually decided to put together some consolidated thoughts on the favourite book from my younger days, Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, about which I've written much in the past.

I'll link to this when it appears, but meanwhile you could do worse than feasting upon the extraordinary range of short literary essays that Norman has already collected , many of them by famous people.

In which Russell encounters an Eaglefish and has one of those epiphanic moments when a few things suddenly "click"

I sort of knew this already, but it had never really come into focus until this afternoon when a lot of things suddenly "clicked".

Here's the deal: among our friends on the political Left - which is where I have my roots - there are people, not just a few but many, who despise everything I hold dear. These are supposed to be my allies, but they despise liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment. They hate the so-called "New Atheism", not so much because they think the doctrines of Christianity or some other religion are actually true, but because they see people like Richard Dawkins as providing a rallying point for ... yes, liberalism, reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment. They see religion as a good thing, NOT just because it can provide a sense of meaning and community, and not despite its frequent opposition to those values, but precisely because of it. It's not some sort of accident or coincidence that their commitments so often have them opposing liberalism and all the values associated with it. They know that that's what they're doing; they actually see those values as disvalues.

They're not ready to move on to a post-religious society. They may not be religious themselves, except in some cultural sense, but the post-religious societies of contemporary Europe are anathema to them. Their preference is some sort of post-liberalism in which the world is re-enchanted.

Okay, I knew such people existed; I'm not totally naive. But I'd thought it was just a few wingnuts like Bill McKibben, or a few literary scholars who are too impressed with second-tier French philosophy. I made excuses for the others. But no. The penny has finally dropped that this is a mainstream viewpoint among English-speaking intellectuals of the Left. Maybe it's not one that's popular among Left-leaning analytic philosophers or scientists, or among Left-leaning people in the science fiction community, or Left-leaning technoprogressives and transhumanists (who must reject it by definition). In fact, it's a view that I almost never encounter in real life, even though I and most of my friends are fairly Left-leaning and many of them belong to the literary world. So it seems alien. It's like I've suddenly realised that there are all these flying saucer worshippers around. Or South-Park-style Crab People. It's odd, but it's there, and it's even commonplace.

I wonder exactly how widespread this viewpoint is within, say, university departments of literature or cultural studies. Someone should do some research.

Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, for example, are not just isolated, idiosyncratic sentimentalists who believe in belief. They really do hate the things that I value, and they see themselves as in a struggle to resist the very things that I am fighting for in all my work. When Eagleton says that Richard Dawkins is standing in his way, he actually means it. What's more, such Eaglefish don't see themselves as expressing a view that their colleagues and acquaintances will find alien and bizarre. They expect their views to seem familiar and attractive to many readers; they expect to find an audience for which such views will have the ring of truth. What's more, they're probably right.

It's a frightening thought, but welcome to the desert of the real.

You can now pre-order Voices of Disbelief

Some folks might like to know that you can now pre-order 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists from Amazon, even though the release date is now in October. If you're planning to buy it, you may as well buy it early - right?

Orson Scott Card shows what we're up against

Unlike Ed Brayton, whose blog brought this crazy rant to my attention, I've been aware of Orson Scott Card for a quarter of a century or more, have read many of his books, and have even reviewed his work quite favourably. He's a popular writer with a good sense of suspense and narrative pace.

He's also an extreme homophobe from way back. In the past, I've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt as far as possible, since he always stays just this side of the line, never, on any one occasion, crossing into territory where he'd be unambiguously stating his hatred for homosexuals and bisexuals. Even this time, he doesn't quite do that. It's a bit like a high-wire performance, a dizzy circus act. But the cumulative effect over the years has led me to believe that, spin and twist it however we may, Orson Scott Card is a bigot. He's a good example of what we're up against if we advocate the cause of freedom and reason. He's smart, articulate, but fundamentally unreconstructed.

Sometimes, you've got to call a spade a spade and a bigot a bigot. Sometimes, you've got to tell it like it is, plain and unvarnished.

This is one of those times.