Random Collection
I have had some kernels of potential insight over the past month, but none of them have grown into full-fledged ideas.
Since there was some confusion about this before, and since this seems like an unusual thing to do, I shall explain my motives here more fully. I am doing this because I hope that perhaps one of you can help clarify my thinking on one of these kernels. I also do this to create a catalog of such half-formed ideas so that I can refer to them later, rather than simply forgetting them as has been my wont. Spoiler warnings apply wherever an artistic work is mentioned.
#1) I watched the movie Saved! when it first came out on the movie channels. At first, it struck me as a silly comedy, poking almost too-easy fun at the overly righteous among us. But for some reason I felt mildly uneasy about it, and a while ago I figured out why. Satan isn't mentioned at all, as far as I could remember. He certainly wasn't mentioned prominently. And all of the dramatic tension in the movie, as well as the nature of the resolution, stems from this lack of acknowledgment of such an obvious piece of theology.
This is weird. I'd think that there could be a lot of humor-value in the exploitation of the fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity. But it's nowhere to be found. So what if, in a strange way, that's the real point of the movie? Seen from this angle, the movie is the story of Satan's triumph over the godly forces of a Christian high school. It's like they said in The Usual Suspects, "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist."
#2) I've been reading some H. P. Lovecraft lately, namely At the Mountains of Madness. Its good stuff, though I'm not really sure if I can recommend it. See, the thing with Lovecraft is that it isn't really horror, though it's billed as such. The stories that I've read have all been in past tense and laced liberally with foreshadowing. Worse, in some sense, is that the themes have been used so much in derivative works that it sometimes seems cliched (like what I remember John saying about his experience with Tolkien). So not only do you know that the main character survives, you can kind of see most of the plot coming from a long ways away.
So, then, you might ask: why do I consider it "good stuff"? Because, at heart, I am laced with self-doubt. It's the price of intellectual integrity - the haunting fear that you might actually be wrong about everything. Well, as far as I can tell, Lovecraft's basic plot is the slow realization on the part of studious, scholarly, scientific folks that the world is not what it seems to be. Man is not alone on the Earth, man is not at the center of the universe and everything you know is wrong. Some react to this with madness, some with denial, and some embrace the new rules with everything that they have - in the end costing them their very humanity. The idea itself is way creepier than anything else I can think of. Especially since the way that it is presented leaves a slight doubt that maybe, just perhaps, the stories are as real as they purport to be. It's crazy to think that, of course, but in the stories it always seems crazy until you're led further down the path toward the horrible truth.
#3) The best history book I've ever read, bar none, is Albion's Seed. In it, David Hackett Fisher explains where America comes from through the novel (to me) yet thoroughly obvious approach of studying where the Americans came from. It was a mind-blowing experience reading this book, when it started answering questions - good, important, obvious questions - that I'd never even thought to ask. For example, how did the sons of Pilgrim farmers in 1630 (from the traditional vision of Thanksgiving) become the coonskin-capped Davy Crocketts of the 18th and 19th centuries? The answer: they didn't, because westward expansion didn't happen in the gradual, concentrically expanding circles I had envisioned. The pilgrims were middle-class family men from East Anglia and the backwoodsmen were the hardy men from the rough-and-tumble border between Scotland, England and Ireland. Thus Kentucky is, and always has been, different from Massachusetts.
Anyhow, the best tidbit I got from this book - sparked by the argument to this effect in the epilogue - is that the American Civil War was really the continuation of the English Civil War of 200 years prior. The reason for this is that as the fortunes of war turned, the losers would escape to America. King Charles' brave Cavaliers held out in Virginia longest of all of the English dominions, and when Charles II came to Restore the crown, Virginia was the first to heed the call. Meanwhile, many Puritans flocked to Cromwell's banner and helped him to win the day for Parliament. When the Lord Protector died and his son failed to hold things together, the most devoted of the Roundheads fled to the friendly grounds on the Massachusetts Bay and fiercely defended their colonial privileges.
If you think about how this could be true (wasn't the Civil War about slavery, tariffs and constitutional theory?) then it hits you that the world is really, really old. Maybe character is fate on a civilizational level. But that raises obvious questions which I have no idea how to answer.
#4) In something of the same vein, work is teaching me how ridiculously complicated the modern world is. They teach you about abstraction in school, but it doesn't hit you how incredibly powerful the idea is until you see it taken to its logical conclusion. The very moment you can treat a component like a black box, you can go on to think about using that component for other tasks. But when it breaks and you have to dig down into the layers to figure out what went wrong, it's staggering to see all the stuff you never noticed because it just worked.
I used to believe that if aliens somehow destroyed a lot of the physical plant and most of the scientists on the planet, their successors could pretty quickly take up the work and continue pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. After all, science and technology are almost always obvious processes - the next step is clear once you've taken the previous one. But now I'm starting to learn just how much knowledge is buried in the structure behind the cutting edge. Two quotes from Alpha Centauri come to mind (the technologies were ridiculous, but the quotes were awesome):
There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we nonetheless yearn for the latter.
Academician Prokhor Zahkharov,
Address to the Faculty
Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process and all of the steps must be taken.
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang,
Looking God in the Eye
I don't know what to make of this observation, other than a certain awe at the ingenuity of man.
That's pretty much it for now.
-Nick
Since there was some confusion about this before, and since this seems like an unusual thing to do, I shall explain my motives here more fully. I am doing this because I hope that perhaps one of you can help clarify my thinking on one of these kernels. I also do this to create a catalog of such half-formed ideas so that I can refer to them later, rather than simply forgetting them as has been my wont. Spoiler warnings apply wherever an artistic work is mentioned.
#1) I watched the movie Saved! when it first came out on the movie channels. At first, it struck me as a silly comedy, poking almost too-easy fun at the overly righteous among us. But for some reason I felt mildly uneasy about it, and a while ago I figured out why. Satan isn't mentioned at all, as far as I could remember. He certainly wasn't mentioned prominently. And all of the dramatic tension in the movie, as well as the nature of the resolution, stems from this lack of acknowledgment of such an obvious piece of theology.
This is weird. I'd think that there could be a lot of humor-value in the exploitation of the fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity. But it's nowhere to be found. So what if, in a strange way, that's the real point of the movie? Seen from this angle, the movie is the story of Satan's triumph over the godly forces of a Christian high school. It's like they said in The Usual Suspects, "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist."
#2) I've been reading some H. P. Lovecraft lately, namely At the Mountains of Madness. Its good stuff, though I'm not really sure if I can recommend it. See, the thing with Lovecraft is that it isn't really horror, though it's billed as such. The stories that I've read have all been in past tense and laced liberally with foreshadowing. Worse, in some sense, is that the themes have been used so much in derivative works that it sometimes seems cliched (like what I remember John saying about his experience with Tolkien). So not only do you know that the main character survives, you can kind of see most of the plot coming from a long ways away.
So, then, you might ask: why do I consider it "good stuff"? Because, at heart, I am laced with self-doubt. It's the price of intellectual integrity - the haunting fear that you might actually be wrong about everything. Well, as far as I can tell, Lovecraft's basic plot is the slow realization on the part of studious, scholarly, scientific folks that the world is not what it seems to be. Man is not alone on the Earth, man is not at the center of the universe and everything you know is wrong. Some react to this with madness, some with denial, and some embrace the new rules with everything that they have - in the end costing them their very humanity. The idea itself is way creepier than anything else I can think of. Especially since the way that it is presented leaves a slight doubt that maybe, just perhaps, the stories are as real as they purport to be. It's crazy to think that, of course, but in the stories it always seems crazy until you're led further down the path toward the horrible truth.
#3) The best history book I've ever read, bar none, is Albion's Seed. In it, David Hackett Fisher explains where America comes from through the novel (to me) yet thoroughly obvious approach of studying where the Americans came from. It was a mind-blowing experience reading this book, when it started answering questions - good, important, obvious questions - that I'd never even thought to ask. For example, how did the sons of Pilgrim farmers in 1630 (from the traditional vision of Thanksgiving) become the coonskin-capped Davy Crocketts of the 18th and 19th centuries? The answer: they didn't, because westward expansion didn't happen in the gradual, concentrically expanding circles I had envisioned. The pilgrims were middle-class family men from East Anglia and the backwoodsmen were the hardy men from the rough-and-tumble border between Scotland, England and Ireland. Thus Kentucky is, and always has been, different from Massachusetts.
Anyhow, the best tidbit I got from this book - sparked by the argument to this effect in the epilogue - is that the American Civil War was really the continuation of the English Civil War of 200 years prior. The reason for this is that as the fortunes of war turned, the losers would escape to America. King Charles' brave Cavaliers held out in Virginia longest of all of the English dominions, and when Charles II came to Restore the crown, Virginia was the first to heed the call. Meanwhile, many Puritans flocked to Cromwell's banner and helped him to win the day for Parliament. When the Lord Protector died and his son failed to hold things together, the most devoted of the Roundheads fled to the friendly grounds on the Massachusetts Bay and fiercely defended their colonial privileges.
If you think about how this could be true (wasn't the Civil War about slavery, tariffs and constitutional theory?) then it hits you that the world is really, really old. Maybe character is fate on a civilizational level. But that raises obvious questions which I have no idea how to answer.
#4) In something of the same vein, work is teaching me how ridiculously complicated the modern world is. They teach you about abstraction in school, but it doesn't hit you how incredibly powerful the idea is until you see it taken to its logical conclusion. The very moment you can treat a component like a black box, you can go on to think about using that component for other tasks. But when it breaks and you have to dig down into the layers to figure out what went wrong, it's staggering to see all the stuff you never noticed because it just worked.
I used to believe that if aliens somehow destroyed a lot of the physical plant and most of the scientists on the planet, their successors could pretty quickly take up the work and continue pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. After all, science and technology are almost always obvious processes - the next step is clear once you've taken the previous one. But now I'm starting to learn just how much knowledge is buried in the structure behind the cutting edge. Two quotes from Alpha Centauri come to mind (the technologies were ridiculous, but the quotes were awesome):
There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we nonetheless yearn for the latter.
Academician Prokhor Zahkharov,
Address to the Faculty
Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process and all of the steps must be taken.
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang,
Looking God in the Eye
I don't know what to make of this observation, other than a certain awe at the ingenuity of man.
That's pretty much it for now.
-Nick