Ten Years Later: in Case You Still Don't Understand *Inception*.

 Inception: what is going on?

 

Question One: what are Inception and Extraction?

 

Extraction:

 

The film Inception takes place in a fictional modern-day universe wherein the science of shared dreaming has been perfected, producing some morally dubious possibilities for certain agencies.

Extractors essentially make their living by doing to a human mind what hackers do to a personal computer. By connecting a sleeping subject to a mysterious and unexplained device via wires, they are able to enter into the subject’s dream. Such devices are often transported in briefcases for purposes of secrecy.

The extractor’s work requires him or her to delve into parts of the dreamer’s subconscious mind wherein the dreamer stores secrets of which even the dreamer may be unaware. Often, this is a risky enterprise, since the subconscious mind, in this fictional interpretation, has a built-in defence system akin to an immune response system.

 

Why the Dream Hates You:

 

Once the extractor has infiltrated the dreaming subject’s mind, he or she is liable to be detected as a threat. This is manifested most clearly as suspicion and aggression on the part of the dream characters, who might go so far as to unify against the extractor in an attempt to eliminate the invading agent. For this reason, extractors are valued not only for their know-how but also for their ability and willingness to function expediently and efficiently under stress. It is also implied that some dreamers have more developed subconscious defences than others do.

 

Inception:

 

In case all of that was not hard enough to wrap one’s head around, there is a theoretical variation to this practice called “inception”. Whereas an extractor functions as the sort of hacker who simply “extracts” sensitive information, the inceptor’s work is to “incept” information, meaning that the inceptor plants an idea WITHIN the Unconscious Mind of the Dreamer.

Given the dangerous and puzzling nature of this enterprise, it is usually marginalized as only theoretically possible, even theoretically impossible. Even seasoned extractors, such as the film’s supporting characters at the story’s inception, (pun intended) doubt that inception is possible.

 

Leonardo DiCaprio Does the Impossible:

 

Be that as it may, the leading hero, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, insists upon inception’s possibility. The reason for his conviction is explained near the film’s climax in the extended flashback recounting his life with his wife.

Both the protagonist and his wife partook in shared dreaming, using the technology to build a Virtual World together. The consequence of this was that his wife did not wish to leave the Dream World to return to “Reality”. In an attempt to cure her fixation upon their Shared Dream World, the protagonist incepted an idea in her mind. By spinning a top in a safe within her unconscious mind, he instilled within her the notion that the Dream World was not real. The top itself was her “totem”, an item meant to help her discern Reality (Waking Life) from Dream. So long as the top would not fall, she would question her own Reality, since the top is supposed never to fall in the Dream World.

Tragically, the result of the hero’s groundbreaking experiment worsened his wife’s condition. Unable to shake the persistent feeling that her world was not Real, she ended up concluding that her surroundings, in Reality the Waking World, were a falsehood, and she concluded that by committing suicide she would wake up.

 

Question Two: Who is Fischer?

 

The advantages to extraction in corporate warfare may be inferred. There is no theoretical limit to the breadth and depth of information which may be extracted from a corporate executive and used by his or her rivals. Keep in mind that this film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who explored similar power dynamics in The Dark Knight (also therein using Asian business moguls as the rival agents, for nebulous reasons we have yet to extract.)

That is all well and good. But simply IMAGINE how powerful one would be if one could PLANT an idea in the C.E.O.’s head as well!!

While the rival corporation’s business interests remain vague and nebulous, they are also secondary to the story’s themes. This is all we need to know: they want Fischer to dissolve his father’s company.

Fischer’s reasons for refusing to end his father’s legacy are explained fairly early on. Haunted by the thought that he had disappointed his father, Fischer is motivated to prove his father wrong, perhaps hoping subconsciously to make his father proud. It is this emotional motive which lies at the root of an entire Industry’s obstinance. In Christopher Nolan’s epic, even multinational corporations may bend to the will of one man’s father complex.

It is for the purposes of reversing this complex that the Inception Team is assembled. Spearheaded by the protagonist, this team’s task is to plant an idea in Fischer’s Subconscious Mind: that Fischer’s father wanted Fischer to individuate, to become “his own man”, and to leave his father’s legacy behind.

As the team navigates Fischer’s military-grade psychological defences, (an imaginatively satirical incarnation of the powerful man’s Caesarian insecurities,) attempting to instill within him a notion which even therapy fails to convey, the protagonist must come to the same conclusions about his own life. While Fischer is haunted by the psychological ghost of his father, the protagonist is haunted by the memory of his wife, who takes on superhuman power in his own dreams. Ultimately, both men must come to terms with their pasts and to put the past behind them; the protagonist’s ability to see through the illusion created by his grieving memory enables him to successfully incept Fischer.

 

Dreamers are Like Cakes:

 

We have almost universally had the experience of “false awakenings”: episodes in a Dream wherein we believed we had woken up, only to discover that, like many members of the millennial generation, we were not as awake as we believed we were.

The phenomenon of “false awakenings” of this kind is often explained by analogy to architecture (hence the parallels to architecture are predominant throughout Nolan’s narrative, as they are throughout most of his most successful films). In this interpretation of the Subconscious Mind’s Structure, Dreams have “layers”, and in waking up from one Dream one simply ascends by one level.

When the Inception Team first infiltrates Fischer’s Mind, they have to incept him yet AGAIN, entering into a Dream Within a Dream, so as to gain access to his Deeper Mind. It is only upon this Level that an Idea, once incepted, might be considered practically irretrievable. At the very least, it will satisfy their quota.

The dramatic impact of this trope cannot be overstated; as the would-be Inceptors dive deeply and more deeply into Fischer’s Unconscious Mind, defences become more developed and battles longer. This is in large part owing to temporal displacement.

 

Why It Takes So Long:

 

It is well-known that we tend to experience longer stretches of time in a Dream than it takes for us to dream that dream from the perspective of Waking Life; a few minutes of sleep in Reality may be experienced as years of Life to the Dreamer. (This theme is also explored in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.)

In the case of Inception, especially the inception of Fischer, the deeper you go, the more happens. While only a few minutes pass on a higher level, as many as ten years pass deep down. In the time it takes for one van to finish its transit from a bridge to the underlying water body, the Inception Team fights an entire war and comes to psychotherapeutic terms with a widower’s grief and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

 

The Inceptor Comes Home:

 

The protagonist’s motivation for joining the Inception Team is as part of a deal with the business moguls. If he succeeds in his mission, he is permitted to return to his home country without being extradited for his illegal activities as a former extractor, thereby reconnecting with what little family he has remaining in the Real World: namely, his children.

 

This threshold is past without incident, but one snag continues to haunt viewers. The film’s closing scene shows the aforementioned top spinning, yet we don’t see it fall, though it appears ready to. This is commonly misinterpreted as a “cliffhanger” ending. Will the top fall? Did the hero return home? Is he still Dreaming?

 

Why the Top Doesn’t Matter:

 

Fixating upon the top is tantamount to the protagonist fixating upon his wife. Why? Guess.

 

You guessed it: the top was NEVER HIS TOTEM. It belonged to his wife, and, if he has truly moved on, then that top holds little meaning for him. Similarly, if WE have moved on WITH him, then we should be able to shrug it off as a red herring. However, Nolan’s genius is in this: that if we continue to identify the hero only by analogy to his wife, then we confuse the top for HIS totem, the crowning factor in whether or not HE returned to THEIR family.

 

So: what was the hero’s totem?

 

The prevailing theory is that it's his WEDDING RING. Though it is never alluded to verbally, viewers noticed that he only wears it while he is in a Dream.

 

When the film’s closing shot shows a close-up of his hand spinning the top, the top itself is a decoy. What is significant is not his wife’s totem, which he promptly abandons, but rather his ring or, more specifically, the lack thereof. The ring has vanished. Our Hero has come to terms with the fact that his wife is dead. He is free to live.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Read More Books:

When someone like Derrida advises his students (the entire world) to read more, he is not saying that one will get more information out of books, but rather that, in books, one will get out of information. It is in this specific, phenomenological encounter that the illusions created by popular forms of media are most effectively shattered; even personal experience functions as merely a mouthpiece for propaganda until it is written down and incisively analyzed.

It follows that I am terrified in meeting millennials who piously insist that they can get the same sorts of “information” out of internet articles as they can out of books, and my dread is aggravated when these same upstarts label me a “Luddite” as I fumble to articulate my flabbergasted indignation. The pejorative is not even as injurious as that trend which it represents, one which is content to pass ignorance off as intelligence, to seek “information” at the expense of “knowledge” and “wisdom”, and, even in blatantly ignoring these distinctions, to profess that they are no worse off, simply because they disown their superiors and, by so doing, suicidally surrender their access to superior powers of mind.

What does it mean to say that books are at most tantamount to articles online? It is not only to ignore the modes of distribution, the institutions which empower them, and the natural strengths and weaknesses of each form of technology, past and present. Already we can see the intrinsic contradictions in an argument which pretends towards consistency: the institution isn’t criticized, but ignored, as though one could rebel against it by pretending that it does not exist, thereby invalidating the rebellion; the technology of the present is presumed to be superior to that of the past, though the term “Luddite” refers to a specific history.

Yet the true tragedy is in the margin by which one falls short of even modern developments in thought itself. If, for instance, we were to acknowledge the rather recent adage that “the medium is the message”, we should be forced to conclude that, insofar as such an adage is valid and true, the simple fact that books are NOT computer articles means that their respective messages are mutually nonexchangeable. The tradition of reading books is specific unto itself, as is the tradition of writing them; how can a mind, then, conceive of the experience as something so easily substituted?

[({DM.A.A.)}]

The Next Level Down: the Author Praises his Own Autobiography. (The Birth of the Speculative Metafiction.)

The Next Level Down:

 

By beginning with a fictional account of nonfictional, autobiographical events, I set the stage for a new form of metafiction, one wherein both the fictionality of the account and the author’s own fictionalizing bias are redeemed as one, since it is in the ACCOUNTING of the events, rather than the events themselves nor the quality of the account, that the work takes on serious philosophical implications. Whether or not Drake is a reliable narrator is just as dismissible as whether or not I am; the integrity of the work is not in the point of view but in the clash.

If I may attempt to simplify this by expounding upon it at greater length, it is so: that there are several layers to a metafictional narrative. In this instance, the base layer, which has its life and death outside of the work itself, well before conception, is comprised of the Facts Themselves: Events within My Life. These events become Experiences which are “mine”, and upon them I might comment, albeit subjectively. Then there is the author’s attempt to represent those events, More or Less As They Happened, as events within my fictional narrative. These are conveyed, for the most part, through the voice of my Protagonist, (Drake Andersen) who presumably shares my point of view and acts as mouthpiece for my ego, yet since he is quite clearly an invention of the fiction he absolves me of responsibility for voicing them.

Beyond these layers of abstraction we arrive at the first truly “fictional”, however realistic and inspired, facet: the Conversation. By setting up the play as a Dialogue betwixt my fictional Protagonist and a nebulous Deuteragonist, the latter at least as dubious as the former, I create a world which can bend to my creative will. Because it is a work of fiction, since the Dialogue never transpired as I have transcribed it, I am absolved of accusations of libel, even as I expound upon Events from My Life. Yet the genius herein is not confined to the mere masterful concealment of autobiography. By setting up a fictional dialogue about nonfictional Events, I resolve a conflict between two warring extremes alike in dignity and in futility.

The autobiography, as well as the transparently autobiographical fiction, come under a storm of contemporary derision owing to their presumably “biased” nature. They are also considered more symptomatic of neurosis and maladjustment than of craft and vision; not only is the writer reduced to a mental case, but the act of writing itself is treated as though it were the foremost symptom.

On the obverse end, there lies the realm of Pure Fiction and Fantasy, one which is so surpassingly synonymous with neurosis that the critic does not even bother to laugh. Once the Author ceases to write “what he knows”, it is presumed he knows nothing, and his flights of fancy are deemed irrelevant to practical and ethical life.

In this way, all modern fictional forms are ostensibly doomed, unless they become artillery for popular propaganda and/or vehicles for subversive information. Fight Club can be read in the same manner, in this sense, as the Anarchist’s Cookbook or the Communist Manifesto, and Harry Potter is “about” slavery and elitism.

Yet something is redeemed in my metafiction, though it never pretends to serve any “practical function” and it cannot be convincingly accused of being a mere “vehicle” for (anti?-)Marxist Propaganda. As I have said, and as I shall now decode: it is not in the QUALITY of the ACCOUNT that the narrative redeems its fidelity, but the ACT of ACCOUNTING. It is ironical and paradoxical, though satisfyingly and brilliantly so, that the single most objectively redeeming aspect of this layer-cake of context is that top layer which was prepared, as icing is, in nearly utter independence of the Facts Themselves: the Conversation.

All of the play’s remaining contents might be presumed to have “happened”, though perhaps “not as the Writer or the Hero have recounted them”. Yet about the Dialogue no contest can be made except for an aesthetic plaint, which in itself appeals to bias on the critic’s part. The Author never seeks to convince you that either Drake or Jackson EXISTED, nor that they ever met at a café and reflected upon these autobiographical Events, nor that this meeting serendipitously carried them, by an invisible hand, through a misadventure which in itself connected the History to the Present and left them both as self-aware protagonists in the very Drama they were analyzing. What I have achieved is transparently not the ACCOUNT of such a relationship, but rather an extraction of its essence from SIMILAR Relationships in EDUCATED Life. The Conversation could never have transpired between uneducated men, nor educated old men; it HAD to be between college dropouts. It is precisely for this reason that the Dialogue appeals to my target audience, composed almost entirely of such youths.

Ergo, the problems of fiction are resolved at the very height of fiction. Drake’s constant musings upon his Life, more or less a direct report about Events from My Own Life, are in and of themselves dubious, as are Jackson’s counterpoints to his musing. Yet it is precisely BECAUSE these takes upon the same events contradict, coupled with the fact that Jackson barely has a public story of his own, (though he clearly demonstrates the agency necessary to produce one) that their dialogue is Rich with Context and Subtext; I can praise it without praising myself, for I have simply dreamt up this Dialogue, and I cannot claim to have produced it in Actuality. Even as the Author, I act as an astonished witness, though I don’t pretend towards humility in BEARING witness to the process. The verisimilitude and factuality of either my take or Drake’s take on the Events is beside the point, as are the clearly improvised events of Pure Fiction; what matters is that everything is ACCOUNTED FOR by SPECULATION, and that Speculation serves a transcendental purpose outside of the work.

 

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

Art, Life, and Reality:

I find it incredible when people say, “oh, video games are not REAL. They are simply an escape.” It’s not just video games which are subject to this sort of treatment. Films, television shows, and even books fall under similar attack. One might even drag music into this, given its recorded or synthesized nature; after all, many of those media I’ve listed often INCLUDE music, far more often than not. One can hardly hope to become a professional musician yet to avoid those dramatic forms.

So, the question naturally arises: if these things are not “real”, then what IS Real? Morpheus insists that Reality is more than sensory perception, as does Plato, but supposing we disenfranchise the heroes of both film and philosophical treatise, what remains, and who remains to speak upon it with authority?

The plainest and most redundant response is: “well, Life. LIFE is Real.”

Oh? “Life?”

That I cannot contest, since I only recall that which I’ve seen whilst I have been alive, or so I think. Yet what sort of a “Life” is one devoid of Art? Certainly, it’s not one that I would have known, but if I had to fathom it, perhaps I could.

What Life, then? Would it be that “Life” wherein my ability to reproduce depends upon the size of my triceps? Or that “Life” wherein my right to eat is governed by the expediency with which I can clean some stranger’s plate of leftovers? Is it that “Life” wherein I lose a thousand dollars’ worth of musical equipment in one day, all because I stored it in a locker on a college campus?

Maybe that is not YOUR Life, but I have no reason to think YOUR Life is governed by a higher Cosmic Order. You might say, regarding Life, that I’m a “loser”, yet that only serves to prove my point: you see Life as a Game. To you, Games are not mere “escapes”; they are the ESSENCE of Existence. Your mistake is in believing this: that since LIFE is the Game, then Life goes on without games, and it’s far more satisfying AS a Game than games are in and of themselves. Yet this is false and foolish. Life is not a Game, but rather it’s a sum of games; if it is greater than this sum, it’s only by their virtue that it can be.

Do not get me wrong: I do not mean to say that Life is “boring”. Life, even at its most banal and absurd, may be considered exquisitely interesting, yet it is only AS interesting as our means for EXPRESSING it. The life of the skinny dishwasher who lost his trumpet to a crook might certainly be transformed into a fascinating interactive experience, but only with sufficient Craft and Vision. It is Art which RENDERS Life rewarding, and whenever Life is INTRINSICALLY rewarding, it is only rewarding insofar as that reward can be consummated within its representation in Art. Art is not an “escape”. Life is not something to BE escaped, and Art is an integral pillar of Life which renders attempts to escape unnecessary and futile.

What would such an escape attempt be? One such attempt would be to burn one’s copies of World of Warcraft, publically, as a testament to one’s “newfound freedom”. Freedom to do what? Certainly: not to play World of Warcraft. Yet why presume that Life will automatically offer anything of surpassing value, reward, and “reality” in Warcraft’s absence? One might always give up the simulation for that Reality which it seeks to simulate. Yet if Adolf Hitler had been addicted to World of Warcraft, perhaps we would never have seen a second World War!! (Let us just assume, for the sake of argument, that that was, as the Russians might put it, an “unfortunate” sequel.)

The simple fact that games appeal to an Intrinsic Drive does not ensure that their alternatives will satisfy the Human Soul more fully. Often, it is not the war game which is an alternative for the war, but rather the opposite is so. The true escapists are not those who collect virtual achievements, but rather those who seek achievements in the “Real World”.

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature by contending that Human Life was intrinsically absurd and that we ought to live “without appeal”, whereby all activities are theoretically neutral. The professional World of Warcraft player and the professional gymnast are relative in Camus’ view. His conviction was so pious that even as a Nobel Laureate he maintained that his Life had no overlying Meaning. He even went so far as to prophesy his own premature death; the story goes that he declared a car accident to be the most absurd way to die, weeks prior to his fatal crash. That this might indicate that there’s a God is not out of the question; that such a God must surely have a Camusian sense of humour is unequivocal.

Life is a Joke; that’s why we have comedians to celebrate it. Yet to live a Life in protest of comedy is to sap it of its intrinsic humour. So it is with Art, and so it is with games. The ascetic rejection of video games is merely a neurotic sublimation. It is tantamount to those violent protestors who, in the name of Justice, Peace, and Non-discrimination, slay police officers with prejudice. They may be indiscriminate in WHOM they kill, but WHAT they kill is the target of their own prejudicial hatred.

Yet this is not even the root of the problem: the root lay in the notion that one COULD have “Justice” outside of a Justice Department. Oh? Is that so? Can one find Meaning outside of Literature and Language? What sorts of Achievements did Camus unlock before it was Game Over for him? If Life is LIKE a Court, a Novel, or a Video Game, or if, as Jordan Peterson contests, those are “like” Life, then it is poorly written.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

BLOWHARD:

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU

It’s somewhat ironic that Blow concludes his lecture with an Alan Moore quotation about the magical quality of language, especially written language, only to subtly deride the discipline beforehand and far more explicitly so afterwards. I am reminded of what the late Roger Ebert said of Blow’s writing for Braid: that it read like a fortune cookie. For the first time, I agree with Ebert, whereas I did not bewail his passing at first, the latter chiefly as a result of Ebert’s insistence that video games would never become an Art Form. Jonathan Blow disproved this with his own work and these lectures, yet the nostalgia which I feel for both is only as strong as my nostalgia for the time within my life wherein I encountered them, a strange period of Soul-searching wherein the works of J.K. Rowling, Alan Watts, and Kahlil Gibran did far more than Braid did. If ever I loved Braid, (a love which might be substantiated by Steam’s testimony that I ran it for 133 hours total over the last seven years, more so than any other product I purchased through the service) it was only because I felt that games COULD someday rival books.

The limitations and the “linearity” of language are hardly absent from any other mode of human expression. Video games themselves may be atomized as lines of code, and if computers attained sentience they would probably see them in that fashion. Coding, in itself, is an extremely linear task, both for the programmer and for the computer, regardless of how many while loops and function calls are woven into it, and this fact accounts for the tendency for the most skilled programmers to become some of the least flexible personalities alive. The term “linear”, of course, was a misquotation of Blow, one of several ham-fisted and naïve attempts to equate him with the late David Foster Wallace. The term that Blow uses, however, is even more incriminating of the fact that Blow is a natural programmer, albeit an unusually flexible one, and that his approach to language is so rooted in programming language that he has mistakenly reduced the former parent to the latter child: “serialized”.

This at first ambiguous term may be translated fairly simply to refer to two qualities intrinsic to the use of language: its conformity to grammatical laws and its conformity to trends in usage. Every word is understood by reference to a number of denotated meanings, each of which may invoke a spectrum of connotated meanings, and each meaning is inferred by a sort of process of elimination which takes place, largely subconsciously, according to the context of the usage. For instance, the word “bus” means one thing in the phrase “come and ride the bus” and another in the phrase “please bus your own dishes”, and yet another in the phrase “be sure to bus your reverb to a separate audio track”. In each phrase, the denotative meaning of the word “bus” might be inferred from its juxtaposition with other words, such as “dishes”, “ride”, and “reverb”, and it is from this context that we might infer its connotative meaning as well. Yet this atomization of language is only a superficial reduction of it, and to insist that these are the confines which doom literature to an archaic obsoletion would be tantamount to saying that anything produced on a computer can never amount to the Heights of Music, since Music is composed of twelve notes whereas code is only a series of ones and zeroes. It must be immediately obvious that the very simplicity of binary code is precisely what lends it its diversity, since any positive integer, including 12, (1100) can be expressed as a sum of values, each of which is an exponent of two. So it is that the very simplicity of the word “bus” lends this word its efficacy as a vehicle for meaning, even within this present sentence, wherein I boastfully but subtly advertise this fact. Not only is it convenient that the word “bus” contains only three compartments, each of which is a different letter, the sum of which swiftly convey one syllable, by avenue only of the lips, throat, breath, tongue and teeth. It is also uniform in all of its meanings, so that beyond any denotative avatar its Spirit remains the same: a vehicle for transporting something.

At this juncture, we arrive already at two salient facts: one is that a single word, by manifesting as multiple avatars, can carry multiple meanings at once, thereby illustrating multiple dimensions which operate in tandem. The second fact is this: that if one wished to reduce any word to its most basic, quintessential meaning, stripped of all incidental definitions, it would require MORE words in order to define. Splitting the atom which is a word, we release literally untold energy. By blowing up the bus, we release a fire upon the road along which it travels.

Consider thus this phrase: “I had to find another means to bus because the server was down.” Who or what was or is “the server”? Does that word “server” refer to a waitress who would not bus my food because she felt too “down” to work, or was this simply a device used to host internet connections, the result of whose malfunction I could no longer use an online synthesizer to bus my audio? If I wished to infer the meaning of “the server” by reducing it to “one who serves”, I have simply expanded the field of meanings to include anyone or anything who or which, for any reason, “serves”, presumably my purposes.

This analysis may in itself corroborate Blow’s claim that language is “serial” in nature, though it also establishes its use beyond its merely mechanical utility. The apparent vagueness of poetic language, as opposed to scientific language, ensures that, insofar as we attempt to “express that which cannot be expressed”, we end up expressing only that which had YET to be. Even the phrase “express that which cannot be expressed” expresses a contradiction which computers cannot compute, simply because it is NOT as literal as the mind of a robot or a jilted programmer. Even a machine which can calculate the probabilities for any sum produced by rolling a six-sided die, an eight-sided die, and a twenty-sided die, within mere minutes, cannot “express that which cannot be expressed”, nor can it comprehend that expression, in itself an expression of itself, without returning an error message. Poetry does not conform to the laws of non-contradiction, nor to the principles of theoretical physics.

Furthermore, it is precisely the vagueness of certain phrases which contain layers of overlapping meaning, such as “the server is down”, that renders language that much more rewarding once its meaning is unriddled, like a puzzle in the game Braid. When Hamlet delivers a monologue or Joyce depicts an otherwise banal scene in Finnegan’s Wake, the mind is accosted at once with multiple layers of meaning, interwoven artfully and alliteratively, and it is precisely this musical juxtaposition which creates, in Huxley’s words, the impression of “living in multiple worlds at the same time”: a believable summary of the Human Condition. If Braid meets Huxley’s standard for High Art, then so do Shakespeare and Joyce, and that is why Ebert would sooner have sacrificed the works of Blow than the works of the Bard of Avon.

It may be true that the number 432 may be reduced to multiples of 3 and 2, only the first two prime integers. It may also be true that 432 waves per second, expressed as sound waves traveling through air and hitting the human eardrum, can be summed up, in musicological terms, as the characters “A4”. Yet critics contend that the more recent definition for “A4”: 440 waves per second, is the more “modern” definition, and audiophiles would retort that this “modernity” only underscores the loss of an ancient harmony which was embodied within the mathematics of Pythagoras. This note, henceforth called “middle A”, may be heard in theoretically infinite contexts, but it would only be within the confines of very particular constraints that even the most modern human beings might recognize it as “music”. These constraints do not deprive the pitch of its value; they lend it that value, and to operate within those constraints masterfully is to compete with the finest programmers and Chess Masters. The same can be said of any word in any language, though this is especially true of English, for reasons too expansive for me to go further into. While the word “bus” might, outside of English, mean something else, (in Latvian, for instance, it means “will be”) we are not concerned with what it might appear to signify for Martians, and unless we are writing in Latvian it will probably retain its proper applications, though beyond that its applications may again appear endless. Now that our bus is packed, it can transport us anywhere in the Known Universe.

David Foster Wallace might have distrusted language for its “linear” presentation, yet the fact that he wrote in English to address this problem, not just as a thesis but as a poetic exercise which in itself tested the thesis, proves that language can express anything which the writer intends to, presumably because it is out of language that the intent arises to begin with. That his novels lack classical coherence might be a testament either to his literary genius, one which he shares with literature, or to a lack of cohesion in his life, which would certainly explain his suicide.

It may be true that games and films can simulate bodily experiences in a manner which requires far less abstraction and imagination. Yet it is precisely because they require less of imagination, that internal technology which has now been supplanted and usurped by external technology, that they are subject to far more critical confinements. Watching a film may feel like being “trapped” within the setting for the scene; playing a game, I might just as easily be motivated to conclude a level as to start it, especially if by concluding it I escape an environment which no longer interests me. While any of these complaints might just as easily be applied to a peculiarly boring passage in a novel or treatise, the fact remains that I can change my impression of the book’s contents by thinking about them; I cannot, however, do that to an image on a screen or a sound in the stereo, and while the words on the page retain their constancy, my imagination may nonetheless lend them a realism to rival that of the video game or the film, yet this internal World I have created from the Words retains a malleability the other media surrender.

It is perhaps for this reason that books are seldom adapted to other media, and when they are adapted the original outshines its adaptations. The Harry Potter games are fun and at times exquisitely interesting, but they hardly stand out as testaments to what video games CAN be, and alongside the books they seem like a sickly parody; most children, if they had requested the book and received the video game instead for Christmas, would be devastated. The movies are a bit better, but nothing beats the books. The same can be said even of The Lord of the Rings. It may be true that Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King won el(e)ven Oscars, and I would contend that it deserved them. Yet even one of the best films of all time cannot capture the rewards of penetrating Tolkien’s prose; even to the child, the Shire feels more real on paper than it does on screen, and I doubt that even a trip to New Zealand would reverse this. While it may also be contended that The Godfather was a poorly written novel but a magnum opus on film, the shortcomings of a writer do not reflect upon writing. It is only when we see both literature and film at its greatest, such as in The Lord of the Rings, that we must confess that one greatness does not eclipse the other, and the more recent interpretation could never take the place of the original manifestation. Blade Runner may be a lauded science fiction film, but it will never blow my mind in the manner that seven of Philip K. Dick’s books did, and though Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? might have been the least impressive of the eight books I have read by him, it pales only before those other seven.

The magic is not in the limitlessness of the medium, but rather in the ability to work within the limitations of the medium, thereby transcending expectations. One does not EXPECT to be dazzled by print on a page until one has read Harry Potter, and even then how can one know that the ending of The Man in the High Castle would put one in a state of couch lock that even psychedelic drugs could not produce, though they might have inspired the writer? Even Prince Hamlet, a play, is sometimes best enjoyed on paper instead. The genius is not even confined to the native tongue. Rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Spanish, I am constantly impressed by how well I recall the story, so much so that even in a language which remains foreign to me I can unriddle what is going on according to what little Spanish I know and what I can recall when my memory is jogged. The limitations of any ONE language’s grammatical forms are often overstated. Though not all puns hold up in translation, some work almost better in Spanish, and in reading the translation I feel as though I am mediating between two worlds; just as the Hogwarts Express conveys students to and from school, the train of translation conveys me between two Schools of Expression, yet the Fictional Universe remains the same, alive with its renewed mystery now that it can no longer be reduced to comprehensible English prose and poetry. While I do not have the satisfaction of slaying robots or flaming Gnorcs, the wonder is incomparable, and let’s not forget that, no matter how well-designed Nier: Automata and Spyro the Dragon were, they were as much imaginative simulations as a novel is. (Anything more would be terrifying.)

Not all ideas must be expressed linearly, but all narrative ideas will be understood linearly. When I began writing this essay, I already knew what I wished to say; the task was in organizing it. Yet nearing the end of it I revisit my first paragraph, and what was at first a fairly arbitrary introduction makes narrative sense as foreshadowing a thesis, only because I understand it now in the context of what follows it. Human beings always must do this, for in spite of our transcendent aspirations we are caught within time’s constant flow. Perhaps Braid successfully simulated a system which could bend the rules of time and space, yet I still remember it as a story in six chapters, just as King’s Quest VII was; fate has a way of ending up linear. Braid did not achieve more in terms of defying common sense than James Joyce did in Finnegan’s Wake; both works take advantage of familiar patterns redefined in unfamiliar ways, leaving much to the manipulation of the puzzle-solving mind, though ultimately the puzzle must arrive at a solution and the story must go on. The difference: Joyce’s prose remains Mysterious afterwards. Even if Joyce’s only motivation for writing was to show the world his own facility with language, the seventeen years he spent developing Finnegan’s Wake was no mistake. As for that moment wherein Blow claws at Heaven in mockery of the “misunderstood Artists” who bewail the stupidity of their audience, I must only say that I relate with the Artists. In discussing respect for players and the role of Artists, let us not forget how disrespectful it is to disconfirm someone’s most fervent and unique Vision of the World and how it ought to be. Its uniqueness serves its legitimacy.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Addendum to Second Retort to MacIntyre:

The comfort I derive from this realization about MacIntyre’s flaws is augmented by the fact that I have no personal stake in exposing them. Were I at all interested in my own genealogy, enough at least to warrant an investigation into my family history in search of some “inherited sin”, I would have no reliable means by which to go about it, and it would not take long to expose the absurdity of the venture.

Consider me as I stand now. As a White American cis-gendered Male living in Suburbia, I might easily attract hostility from those who underestimate the social difficulties inherent in such a cloistered lifestyle. Yet none of this hostility would render me the rightful inheritor of the sins of the Home Owners’ Association, members of whom I routinely avoid out of a mutual enmity between us whose historical precedent has markedly less to do with ancestry. Therefore, any attempt to implicate me in a collective sin, perhaps to explain a run of bad luck by reference to group karma or something like the Yelnats Family Curse, would have by necessity to address my identity as a Russian Jew borne at the end of the Soviet Era. Immediately this should entitle me, in theory, to the benefaction of my fellow Americans who happen to be German, and the jury is still out upon whether or not such a debt is equally binding upon my fellow Americans who happen to be Arabs, or perhaps whether the opposite is the case. (Incidentally, the question of whether we ought to be “pro-Jewish” or “pro-Arab” is in itself practically insoluble owing to the same fallacious line of reasoning.) Furthermore, it might be argued that the average American, especially the average Conservative American, owes me the payment of certain reprations on behalf of the Cold War, which, coldness notwithstanding, took the lives of many Soviet Spies during the Red Scare, as well as, presumably, various Russian Americans who may or may not have been subject to hate crimes. Yet if I should seek payment from any number of these aforementioned cultural debtors, I might swiftly find I am out of luck in collecting, either because my fellows have limited means or because they have strong, individualistic ethics.

This would, of course, put me at a disadvantage in paying my own debts to the Armenians, in theory. However, already I can point out that one of the reasons for the Cold War, as well as one of the evils of the Soviet Union, was precisely in how much separation there was between the State and the People it represented; whereas democratic society aspires to “Government by the People, for the People”, Soviet Society was notorious for pursuing the latter by abolishing the former. In this sense, I was as much a victim of the Soviet Union as a whole as the survivors of the Armenian Genocide are its victims; our mutual creditor, dissolved within my year of birth, is nowhere to be found. In another sense, I might only be considered party to the Armenian Genocide insofar as I am a Communist, unless of course one were to maintain that the Soviet Union of my birth was only TRULY incarnate in the year 1922, since the Bolsheviks came to power two years AFTER the Armenian Genocide. In this narrative, I can only collect from my Republican (and some Democratic) sponsors for the Red Scare insofar as I pay my debt to the Armenian Survivors, and my choice to identify as a Communist will be entirely contingent upon which strategy is most economically lucrative.

Then we should have ample discussions with my fellow Americans who happen to be Cubans, Spaniards, Koreans and Chinese, in order to determine how best to split our growing debt to the families of those innocent victims of radical Marxism. In the process, it might very well be discovered that my ancestors had even less power under Tsar Nicolas II than they did under Vladimir Lenin, and in the process of absolving my own debt to the Armenians I should have finally to conclude that Communism was never a mistake in my case, though my fellows might shoulder the debt.

In any case, it might just as easily be argued that, if the Soviet Union was an attempt to settle all karmic debts, and if it succeeded for some time in doing so, however painfully and tragically the avenger became corrupted, then nothing in my ancestry prior to the year 1917 would be binding in any way, and any lingering debts accrued by Soviet officials thereafter will have died with them, for the State assumed full responsibility for its People prior to its collapse, for which we might blame Capitalism.

At any rate, the moral of the story is obvious: that just as any other inheritance might be interrupted suddenly by the end of a bloodline, (no morbid puns intended) so too could any karmic debt be interrupted, and the reallocation of the inheritance as well as the debt would be so arbitrary then that it might be called corrosive. At that point, seeking to turn anyone who might otherwise have “rightfully inherited” either the wealth or the debt of his predecessors into a debtor would be malicious and unjust, especially because such a would-be debtor, never having received the wealth, might have not the means to pay the debt. The Myth of White Privilege, one which haunts me no less than my fellow Americans who happen to be Republicans, is a prime example of this Absurdity in modern thought.

Worse still, we must consider that assigning blame to any mass of people ensures that no one will accept responsibility, so that blame will only be deferred further by reaching more deeply into the murky well of history. Did Americans abuse the Africans, or did Africans doom the World by inventing Slavery? If the Bible is to be believed, then by being Jewish I should be collecting from the Africans!!

Not only do we lose all sense and sensibility in abstracting away from the concrete individual in reducing him to his national or family history; this abstraction also acts as a transparent vehicle for only the most vicious of instincts. It is neither uncommon nor surprising, however shocking its extent, that when men and women speak in terms of such collective debt they often do so vengefully; I have heard a Debate Coach say of one hate crime towards white Americans that it was justified because “they did it” to African Americans.

Yet does any debt justify such an offence? The reason that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are honoured alongside Tenzin Gyatso is that they resisted this impulse. Gandhi uttered that “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”, yet contemporary Leftism turns a blind eye towards this, as if to say, “if you were Indian, this would be more than merely an appropriated excuse”.

Yet I might just as easily expose the hypocrisy intrinsic in the adage that “one ill turn deserves another”. After all: what constitutes an “ill turn” is not MERELY that it disadvantages a private interest but that it hurts Society. As such, far from justifying further errors, the direct witnessing of one ill turn by its victims, while it might require the aggressor to ATONE in some manner consistent with the needs of the victims, in fact REQUIRES the victims and all other witnesses to AVOID repeating the mistake, for only by so doing can we all learn collectively while remaining free in taking whatever turns we will in exploring the available possibilities, rather than simply taking turns repeating one another’s mistakes and destroying one another, rendering the whole world blind in the process. One ill turn requires no more, and he who repeats someone else’s mistake is more foolish and evil than he who innovates the mistake in the pursuit of a Common Knowledge.

It follows logically, therefore, that vengeance is one of the furthest things from Justice, just as cocaine is distinct in its effects upon the mind-body from flour, though one might resemble the other in appearance. More often than not, holding someone to a debt which that person cannot pay is nothing more than an attempt to assert one’s power, yet any “unpredictable”, innovative Society, the likes of which MacIntyre espouses, must always produce unpayable debts.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Second Retort to MacIntyre:

“For I am never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual. This is partly because what it is to live the good life concretely varies from circumstance to circumstance even when it is one and the same conception of the good life and one and the same set of virtues which are being embodied in a human life. What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a seventeenth-century farmer. But it is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone's son or daughter, someone else's cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity.

This thought is likely to appear alien and even surprising from the standpoint of modern individualism, From the standpoint of individualism I am what I myself choose to be. I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence. I may biologically be my father's son; but I cannot be held responsible for what he did unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. I may legally be a citizen of a certain country; but I cannot be held responsible for what my country does or has done unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. Such individualism is expressed by those modern Americans who deny any responsibility for the effects of slavery upon black Americans, saying 'I never owned any slaves'. It is more subtly the standpoint of those other modern Americans who accept a nicely calculated responsibility for such effects measured precisely by the benefits they themselves as individuals have indirectly received from slavery. In both cases 'being an American' is not in itself taken to be part of the moral identity of the individual. And of course there is nothing peculiar to modern Americans in this attitude: the Englishman who says, 'I never did any wrong to Ireland; why bring up that old history as though it had something to do with me?' or the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries, exhibit the same attitude, that according to which the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses. And the self so detached is of course a self very much at home in either Sartre's or Goffinan's perspective, a self that can have no history. The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear. For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. Notice that rebellion against my identity is always one possible mode of expressing it.”

 

MacIntyre, Alasdair.

After Virtue.

Chapter Fifteen.

Pages 219-220.

 

This is perhaps the least intelligible part of MacIntyre’s Narrative, and it is thus ironic that it follows his most poetic and precise exposition upon the Intelligibility of Human Life and Narratives. Furthermore, it is yet another passage wherein he most clearly and obviously expresses a Christian bias, the likes of which I have found in a fanatical street preacher who, simply by looking upon me in passing, identified me, upon the Authority of Scripture, as a “low-level Edomite”, insisting, in spite of all the innovations and gifts of contemporary genetics, upon a Global History whereby male individuals possessing eumelanin inherit God’s Love and Favour because their distant ancestors were oppressed by the ancestors of male individuals possessing pheomelanin, automatically putting all members of the latter class in debt to the former class because the Judeo-Christian God equates any father, whatsoever, with his son, and just as surely as the homely details of one’s complexion might be passed down through breeding (as they surely will be, so long as people are much too shallow and prejudiced by history to interbreed) so too can the “sins of the father” reflect upon his otherwise innocent children, simply for the utility of those vengeful instincts which the father’s enemies retain. To call this peculiar fragment of MacIntyre’s otherwise airtight philosophy a demoralizing conceit would be a comical understatement, since it entirely undermines his project of reconstructing virtue and responsibility.

Consider Andy Bernard from The Office. Undoubtedly, Andy exhibits a number of heroic qualities in abandoning his post at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Incorporated in order to take an impromptu journey South, from Pennsylvania to Florida, if I am not mistaken in my recollection, in order to win back the heart of his beloved Erin. That his flight might have endangered operations at the Company only serves to fit MacIntyre’s thesis even more snugly; the conflict between virtues, one which MacIntyre insists upon as an improvement (and perhaps a subconscious attempt to one-up) Aristotle, is right there in broad daylight, and it certainly invokes a quality of character in Andy which, in spite of his general foppish clumsiness, can be called Courage. By endangering his position as Leader of a Company in favour of redeeming the identity of Erin’s Lover, Andrew Bernard lives up to the idealism he might presumably have inherited as a Cornell Graduate and a member of the Bernard Family Bloodline, even though neither his fellows at Cornell nor his living family members exhibit such virtues. Furthermore, he exhibits the same Courage when he confronts, with all due honesty, Erin’s new associates, though they hardly reciprocate the courtesy. When he finally returns to find that the lecherous and manipulative Nellie has usurped his post, he exhibits unwavering loyalty in reporting her to David Wallace, even though he endangers his popularity with his coworkers by so doing, again exhibiting Courage and even, one might easily argue, Fortitude coupled with a strong sense of Justice. This Justice is not, however, untempered by Mercy when he has the opportunity to fire Nellie, who, being portrayed by Catherine Tate, resorts to reciting a monologue from Shakespeare which moves him, almost against his will, leading him to ask the thoroughly MacIntyrean question: “Why did you have to play the Bard Card?” The scene is unequivocally consistent with the Scot’s ethos; Andy, confronted with the facts of tradition, a tradition with which he is familiar by avenue of his education and upbringing, or perhaps simply his faith in both or either of them, feels he has no choice but to forgive Nellie and to spare her job the axe, in spite of his personal interests and feelings towards her, including those of righteous and legitimate indignation.

Now: consider the consequences of these thoroughly virtuous choices. At the start of the following season, the unchanged Nellie, purely on a whim, decides to circulate false rumours about Andy Bernard’s ancestry. By the end of the day, the entire Office of credulous automatons is utterly convinced that Andy’s ancestors owned slaves. Oscar Martinez, ever the liberal preacher, insists that Andy owes money to his black coworkers, since the Bernard Family’s wealth was partly acquired at the expense of African American blood, sweat, and tears, against the consent of those same African Americans. This remains the general attitude of the Contemporary Left in its theory of White Privilege and its influence upon socioeconomic disparity within the United States, leading sociologists, apparently estranged from psychology except at its most banal and unimaginative, to equate monetary disadvantage with oppression, thereby rationalizing the murder of innocent affluent people in the film Parasite. Now, of course, it does not take long for Nellie’s hoax to become exposed, yet by this moment Andy has already made a spectacle of the affair (with plenty of help from his accusers) and contacted his family by phone, instinctively, before a makeshift jury of his peers. Incapable of a lie, he reveals that, in fact, (or to the best of his present knowledge) his ancestors did PARTICIPATE WITHIN the Slave Trade, yet they did not own slaves. Famously, he remarks that they were “moral middlemen”, an assertion which does not go over well with his colleagues or subordinates, and probably far less the casual viewer.

Be that as it may, from a Kantian standpoint, for instance, Andy was right in defending his ancestors and, as a consequence, himself, though I maintain that the former was no prerequisite to the latter. From a Kantian standpoint, the “mature” adult, of which there are very few in any contemporary society, and probably far fewer now than in Kant’s age, is capable of subordinating his or herself to the social machinery of his or her Society while at the same time retaining personal convictions to the contrary, the outward expression of which, far from appearing hypocritical to one’s fellow mature and Rational adults, would be instrumental in the eventual reformation of Society, which could only be carried out effectively so long as all such reform passed through this channel and not through personal acts of social deviance.

While MacIntyre rejects Kant numerous times, one cannot deny his similitude to Kant; in practice, they are two thoroughly Earthbound Christian Rationalists seeking the same basic goals by nearly indistinguishable means. Kant’s ideal of the mature man is not at all out of place in MacIntyre’s illustration of the virtuous man, nor vice versa. Both conform to the standards of their respective Societies, among whose practices there is included the institution of the Public Forum wherein Reason directs the telos of Law and its transformation of Society as It Is into Society as it Ought to Be. Both assume the burden of tradition and social pressure, almost as beasts of burden do. The only difference lies in this: that whereas Kant’s ideal is that of an Individual Agent whose own Reasoning contributes to the Future Salvation of Society, creating integrity within the life of an automaton akin to a Ghost in the Machine, MacIntyre presupposes that all genuine Reasoning will lead back to a sort of Collectivism which reduces that Individual completely to the PRODUCT of that Society’s Past Sins.

Yet is this fair? Is this Justice? Clearly, in The Office, it is not. Andy exhibits nothing but honesty, loyalty, and courage to the same extent as his alleged creditors and accusers exhibit duplicity, carelessness, and self-entitlement. This is further reinforced by the character foil of Darryl, a former aspiring Unionist from the Warehouse who expects to earn Michael Scott’s former position (and Andy’s present position) simply by “being black”. Even the revelation of Andy’s history, provoked by a lie, is in itself dubious, and the lie which provoked the revelation underscores this dubiousness; we literally do not know whether or not, perhaps, some ancestor of Nellie, hundreds of years ago, circulated lies about the Bernard Family with the hopes of someday avenging herself upon them. There is literally as much, and no more, evidence to substantiate the narrative which Andy confronts with such a pale face (if you will pardon the play on words) as there is to suggest that Nellie’s ancestors lied about the Bernards, a fiction which might be induced from the equation of the new generation’s imminent and obvious sins with those of previous generations; if Andy can inherit his ancestor’s sins, can we not infer the sins of Nellie’s ancestors from her own, by the same token? Our only refuge would be in fetishizing oral tradition in place of real genealogical research, supplementing it with Oscar’s generalizations about history and probability, and while MacIntyre’s romanticization of ancient cultures might make such primitive customs look good, it is contrary to his epistemological method to defer to them at the expense of modern scientific methods, which in themselves embody the product of a teleology which, having found its consummation in the prosaic annals of Analytic Philosophy, becomes in MacIntyre’s view tantamount to a Godsend.

It ought to be a matter of Common Sense that, as Watts said, assigning blame according to History is as ridiculous as making the tail wag the dog. While I contend with Watts in asserting that an INDIVIDUAL Life might be understood and judged in toto, from beginning to end, as a musical composition whose every note is as significant as the closing cadence, (to borrow Watts’ own charming and accurate analogy, even if only to appropriate it, as Watts often did to others’ work in the same playful Spirit) I agree with Watts that displacing blame upon the parents is often (though hardly always) a mistake, and so too would one be mistaken in assuming blame for THEIR mistakes as one seeks not to repeat them and to become independent of their consequences. It is not simply “all too convenient” to forget one’s ancestors; sometimes, it is essential to do so, and when it is imperative to remember them it is only to pride one’s self in having transcended them, working constantly to learn from their triumphs and tragedies. This can only be done so long as one recognizes that what they did to provide a better future for their children was the “mature” course of action AT THE TIME, and the very nature of any sort of Progress, Aristotelian, Hegelian, or otherwise, is such that their personal reservations about their own Age could ONLY have found its consummation in Reform at a much LATER time. The Bernards, even if they worked on slave ships, might have had as much to do with Emancipation as Abraham Lincoln did, though it is impossible to say for certain, just as we cannot with CERTAINTY determine what their occupations were nor how they treated their African American passengers, as “occupants” or “cargo”. So it is too, though the fact is rarely addressed, in my experience, except by Right-wing Radicals with reformed tendencies, in spite of being known near-universally, that whereas Human Rights, as they are understood today, originated very recently in Europe, slavery originated most probably on the African Continent thousands of years ago, precisely as a product of that way of life which MacIntyre relishes when he says, “I inherit from the past of […] my tribe […] rightful expectations and obligations.” It is precisely within the Tribal Mind that slavery finds both its conception and its justification, and it is out of this vestige of Early Man that we inherit not “racism” but the ability to project racist qualities upon police officers and pizza salesmen. By deferring to such abstractions such as “Racism” on one hand and “Human Rights” upon the other, we unmistakably and unequivocally engage within a theological discussion: a sublimation of the Jungian Religious Instinct in Godless Postmodern Society. The same superstitions which drove the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials can be ascribed to the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bill Cosby trial, the Rodney King riots, the Floyd riots, the Papa John’s scandal and the fact that Mattel released a Zendaya Barbie doll with dreadlocks. Simply substitute for “God’s Will” the abstraction “Human Rights” and for “Witchcraft” “Racism”, and you can see history repeat itself with pitiable accuracy, even within the twenty-first century. It is disappointing, therefore, though not altogether surprising, that after so effectively laying Inherent Human Rights to rest, alongside Unicorns, in a previous Chapter, legitimizing as a result all legal practices and institutions as the very avatar of Justice, merely one Chapter ago, MacIntyre then feeds directly back into the superstitiousness of the New Left in siding with the enemies of “Racism” in America. One has to wonder: if Human Life can be understood as a comprehensible and unified Narrative, how does one comprehend THIS?

Clearly, the evils of Slavery amount to nothing more than this, as previously stated: that slaves do not consent to their servitude. Yet, according to MacIntyre, neither do heroes in ancient myths, citizens in ancient Greece, nor the sorts of virtuous neo-Aristotelians whom MacIntyre made it his project to produce. White Americans such as Andy Bernard do not consent to the alleged sins of their ancestors, yet they still assume the debts, even as the Bernard Family secretly goes bankrupt. Young men in remote African tribes must still be subordinate to the Ritual of One Thousand Cuts (if I am to trust my source, an amateur expert in bizarre tribal customs) whereas their South African counterparts attain manhood by attending their classes and hearing Derrida lecture them on the sins of THEIR fathers, placing them at risk of suicide whereas their black brothers might die by bleeding and gangrene. Neither wretch is at liberty to deliver the other from his fate, even though the Leftist position presents that as a burden and MacIntyre preaches moral objectivity. Because MacIntyre shies away from Kant’s Universalism, all evils are permitted. Denying certain evils is as much an appeal to “self-evidence” and a conceit to Intuition(ism) as the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps this is precisely what MacIntyre, even in his eighties, ought to embrace, that he might ascend to the Universal Plane of Thought before he gives up the Ghost.

I should note the irony, therefore, that in resisting modernity so piously MacIntyre falls right in league with the postmodernists in his rival school: Continental Philosophy. Derrida, even having successfully deconstructed race in the tradition of Nietzsche, holds South African students responsible for Apartheid according to a very pre-Nietzschean historicity. MacIntyre, disavowing Nietzsche in an attempt to distance himself from the entire Continental School, would likely turn the other cheek in Derrida’s lectures; just as in Ancient Greece, the Goat and the Crab are Father and Mother, containing their children within their bounds. While such visionaries as the Aquarian Individualist Martin Luther King Jr. profess a Future wherein all men are practically colour-blind, judging by character instead of colour, both Derrida’s philosophy and MacIntyre’s philosophy lend themselves expediently and unscrupulously to a society which equates birth with identity in a manner that is not only logocentric but vicious and divisive. Hence both the project of transcending logocentricity (or, in Deleuze’s case, postponing it, since transcendence is implicitly illusory) and the project of returning from liberal individualism to virtuous collectivism fail. The consequences of defining a man by a remote history are such that the excuse is too tempting to kill that man on behalf of a vendetta and then to pardon his murderer on behalf of a special interest group. The sheer disparity of affect between black Americans and white Americans following the O.J. Simpson verdict stand as a testament to the real-world travesty that MacIntyre’s “objective”, “unified narrative” becomes.

One mustn’t forget Alan Watts’ parable, whereby he appropriates the Garden of Eden myth in order to illustrate the absurdities of this sort of historicity. If I wish to blame my parents, my parents can blame theirs, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, until our genealogy would inevitably lead us back to the Garden of Eden. Therein, we would question Adam as God did, and he would defer to Eve. Then we would question Eve, and she would defer to the Serpent. Then God would question Satan, and Satan would make no excuses, because he is an Angel.

Simply dressing this tendency for blaming the past in a coat of righteousness does little to either legitimately exonerate O.J. Simpson nor to condemn Andy Bernard in The Office or the Park Family in Parasite. Clearly, if I cannot blame my parents for my shortcomings, (except according to actual impacts their actions had upon my mind-body during my formative years, for which Rowling jibes that there is, in fact, an “expiration date”) then neither can *I* be blamed for THEIR shortcomings. Either I am the product of my history or I am not. If I assume no excuse, I assume no responsibility; without the power, there can be no burden, even if some economic history, in its nebulosity, would imply that other powers have come to me by ostensibly illegitimate means called “privilege”.

The utmost virtue belongs to the man who sees not “privilege” but rather the very consummation of a teleological project, that even in poverty that man might have the basic human kindness to delight in his fellows’ prosperity instead of envying it. It is, internally, only this delight which drives men to do good things for good reasons, and if, as MacIntyre attests, behaviour is inseparable from character, then it is only this quality of character which can rightfully direct behaviour, and, as Watts loves to quote the Ancient Chinese in saying, anything else would amount to the “wrong man using the right means”, which then must “work in the wrong ways”.

It must also not be forgotten that the chain of blame functions the same way in MacIntyre’s historicity as in Watts’ fable. If I go back far enough, I can blame Africans for their own enslavement, since Africans invented slavery. Yet by so doing I only enslave both myself and my black brothers to perpetual, hopeless, and ignorant despair.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]