We Are Really Post-John Paul II Now

As I watched the introduction of Pope Francis to the world, I realized that we were really past John Paul II for the first time. As an on-again, off-again Catholic, I felt a lot of things as I watched the unexpected changing of the popes through the last month. None of it was the juvenile bullshit that amateur atheists spout about one scandal or another. Even if I became a fervent hedonist and atheist, I would still admire the Church as something ancient and beautiful. Its roots extend deep into the historical subsoil and I do not resent that there is bad mixed in with the good. Its history is much more beautiful than the atomized and hopelessly immoral landscape ahead of us that many modern intellectuals seem to be so eagerly contemplating.

This realization about John Paul II was not much more than nostalgia transforming into something else. Memory becoming history. As long as Benedict was pope, there was a connection to John Paul II and the world that he came from. Maybe I was realizing, once again, the growing distance between the world that I grew up in and the new world of post 9/11 America.

The terrorist attacks on September 11^th had a similar effect on me. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, that should have meant the end of the Cold War but, in my mind and perhaps in the minds of many others, the former defining division of the world that existed between US and USSR still served as a reference point. As my peers and I drifted dreamily through the 90s, going to college when it was still economically imaginable but letting credit cards creep almost unnoticed into our lives, our philosophical grounding was still in the Cold War era. We happily considered new avenues of thought and contemplated the end of history as all nations merged into one, happy semi-capitalistic orgy of materialism and non-aggression.

After September 11^th, I realized that my world was forever changed. My eyes were opened to the fact that we were not all going to be so happy. The America that I had always been so proud of let me down when it invaded Iraq without provocation. The dirty deal between Bush, Obama and the bankers in 2008 and 2009 opened my eyes even more, to the point where I felt I was suffering that possibly mythical torture system in which your eyes were propped open with toothpicks. I didn’t want to see anymore.

The death of John Paul II had a similar effect. I watched the beautiful, unforgettable funeral more than once but was moved primarily by the realization that another remnant of that old world was gone. At the time, I didn’t know how to put the experience adequately into words. Watching Pope Francis emerge from the Vatican, I realized that memory was becoming history. With Benedict as Pope, it was easy to remember his predecessor and, from there, recall that nearly forgotten world of my youth.

As Pope Francis is quoted in the press and government drones circle over Americans, though, I am moved by loss and by the repeated recognition that childhood is over. Whenever I see the new pope, John Paul II and the world in which I grew up become a little more ossified. It becomes harder to recall what erroneously seemed to be a simpler time.

Another step into the future leaves the past farther behind. I suspect a similar but attenuated emotion will manifest itself when Benedict finally expires in his cloister. Memory becomes history. A young man turns 40. We are really post-John Paul II now.

Compliance: It's Easy to Cross That Line Now

I suggested to my soon-to-be ex-wife (long story) that we watch Compliance on Netflix because I had read somewhere that it was infuriating. I thought that was an interesting way to describe a film. Reading the blurb that Netflix supplies, I learned that it was inspired by true events about a fast-food manager who was convinced by a prank call to detain, interrogate and ultimately humiliate one of her teenage employees.

I assumed that it was based on the same psychological principles developed by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in the 1960s after he conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. This psychiatrist discovered that people willingly engaged in oppressive and authoritarian behavior when told to do so. He also discovered that others were unexpectedly willing to endure this treatment.

The Plot of Compliance

The story is simple and the film is not an action thriller. The majority of the film takes place in a storeroom in the back of a fast-food restaurant.

A middle-aged manager in a fast-food restaurant is frustrated with the irresponsibility of her mostly teenage staff. She receives a phone call from a man who identifies himself as a police officer. He lets Sandra, the manager, know that one of her young employees, a particularly annoying little blond, is wanted for a theft that occurred just an hour before in the restaurant. The voice on the phone asks this frumpy, portly woman to help him by detaining the girl in her office until police officers arrive.

Once Sandra and Becky, the teenager, are in the room, the man on the phone begins to ask for more help. The police are delayed. Will Sandra initiate the interrogation?

Sandra is willing to do so. She is, in fact, willing to do much more with some help from other employees and her fiancé. By the end of the film, Becky has been assaulted and raped by people with no previous criminal records. As it turns out, the man on the phone was an impostor. Soon the detainers are being detained for unlawful arrest, assault and more.

Disbelief

My wife had to be convinced to continue watching, even long before any of the really difficult-to-believe events occurred. She could not imagine agreeing even to be detained. She could not imagine that the dowdy little manager would agree to do so. By the time the fiancé was showing up to take a turn watching the girl, she was completely disappointed with the movie and unable to suspend disbelief.

Me: I’m Totally Buying It

She continued watching because we had nothing better to do and because I kept telling her it was believable. There were segments which I thought were exaggerated. Eventually, after the manager’s fiancé spanks Becky, the man portraying himself as a police officer convinces the girl to repay the man for her bad behavior with oral sex. I assumed that this was tossed in by the screenwriters to stir the pot and get some attention by way of scandal, if not for any other quality in the film.

The characters seemed believable. Later, reading the Netflix commentaries of people who had apparently not read about the underlying incidents, I saw how people found it impossible to believe that the manger would do what she did. That part of the movie I had no trouble believing.

Women Like Sandra

There is a certain species of woman in this country just like Sandra. She is not educated but neither is she uneducated. She may have “some college”, as they say on job applications or she may just have graduated from high school.

However, there is one thing that unites this group of women. They have been saved by authority. They typically work for large corporations. These economic bastions have given these women positions of moderate authority over the peons whom they dread resembling.

In exchange for their obeisance to rules and regulations, they receive a moderate income and the opportunity to advance a short distance up the corporate food chain. Along the way they will acquire associate degrees in accounting or business. They are worshippers of power. The police are to be obeyed mindlessly. People like school principals and teachers are unquestioned pillars of society. What is important for Sandra is maintaining the fabric of the society into which she has woven herself.

Sandra’s philosophy is revealed when Becky protests her innocence. She simply says, “Then why am I on the phone with the police?”

Why, Becky, Why?

My wife also found Becky hard to believe. When Sandra is guided through a strip search over the phone, my wife kept reiterating that she would never have agreed to that and would have refused or simply walked out. I was not so shocked. Having taught high school recently, I could believe it.

Thirty years ago, few if any girls would have submitted to such treatment. I am not suggesting that women 30 years ago were blushing virgins who would never take off their clothes. Young girls today, though, are much more used to the objectification of their bodies. They sext boys while in class and blithely accept that their boyfriends are looking at porn.

It was not her willingness to sacrifice her rights that distinguishes Becky from girls of generations past. The Stanford Prison experiment showed that this tendency is always in us. Instead, she stands out for her willingness to disrobe in front of strangers.

The abolition of the taboos surrounding sex will make it easier and easier for people to take advantage of girls like Becky for generations to come. While she was probably disturbed at being asked to perform oral sex, I doubt that she felt the same level of revulsion that most women once felt at such a suggestion. It was this revulsion, not their personal sense of rights or honor, that kept women safer in previous times. After all, there is nothing wrong with oral sex between consenting strangers, so the incident in the back room of that fast-food restaurant only required Becky to cross one little line.

      

The Truth

Even I was shocked to read about the incident after the movie and discover that everything, even the rape, was real. I was simultaneously disappointed and pleased that my speculations about the degeneration of morals in modern society were supported.

Compliance is not a great movie. If you have Netflix and are already paying for the streaming service, it might be worth 90 minutes of your time. It is, at least, revealing and it does not have Keanu Reeves in it.

Three Traditions in American Political Thought

There is a lot of talk today, especially in conservative circles, about how much we have changed since the early days of the republic and how much the view of the Constitution has changed. I thought it would be a good idea to examine the identifiable political traditions which existed at the time of the Revolution and the subsequent Constitutional Convention. Scholars name three important belief systems that different Americans espoused in one degree or another: Liberalism, Republicanism and Ascriptivism.

Liberalism

Liberalism is a set of beliefs that have their genesis in the ideas of John Locke. In the 17^th century, this British philosopher posited that government was an artificial construct which men placed over themselves in order to secure certain individual rights. This emphasis on the individual is what makes liberalism stand out from other pertinent political philosophies, such as Republicanism.

The language in the Declaration of Independence - about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – is derived directly from the Liberalism that was embedded in the early American psyche. Liberalism speaks of rights of individuals and their necessary defense.

Republicanism

There was another strain of thought that was also powerful among Americans at this time. Some people consider the philosophical tenets of Republicanism to be at odds with those of Liberalism, though they are nevertheless expressed and adored by many famous Americans simultaneously.

For a republican, government and public life in general were inextricable from the concept of liberty. Government, from this point of view, was not seen as the necessary evil exactly as Liberals conceived it to be. Instead, it was the achievement of the common good. Government was the sacrifice in which men engaged to fulfill human potentials. Obligations rather than rights were the primary concerns of Republican thinkers.

Ascriptivism

Some scholars might draw the line there and leave it at that. Two central philosophies, liberalism and republicanism, both joined and divided the first Americans. However, there was a third philosophy which dwelled in American hearts and was either explicit or implicit in their words and actions. Philosophy may be too strong a word for Ascriptivism. It may be likened more to a religious belief. It merits mention here primarily because it has overshadowed these other philosophies.

Ascriptivism is the term applied to the apparent belief that Americans felt about the destiny of their fledgling nation. They saw themselves as possessing distinctive traits which separated them from other men. These characteristics were derived largely from their Anglo-Saxon background, the seeds of democracy planted by the Magna Carta of 1215 and the resulting centuries of English Common Law.

Most importantly, ascriptivism suggested that America had a destiny to fulfill. This would be the guiding feelings behind Manifest Destiny, the impulse to seize the so-called virgin land from the savage Indians and build a New World that was free of the encrustations and corruptions of the Old.

Where Are They Now?

These three sets of beliefs, none of them contradictory but each with its own agenda, would fuel the war against Britain. These philosophies would free thirteen colonies from centuries of older European traditions as they replaced them with the newer politics of men like Locke and Rousseau.

The question for us today regards whether these philosophies have any meaning to modern Americans. The concern for individual rights does seem to have gained predominance. Some feel that this has altered the way that Americans see the Constitution. The evolution of that document is a good topic for another essay.

The Singularity Is Here

People often make note of how fast things seem to change with regard to technology. Often, they take for granted that things have always been this way and always will be. During the 20^th century, though, the leaps forward in technological capability seemed unusually prodigious. In the First World War, men had still fought from horseback and some troops had gone to battle with pikes. Less than 30 years later, the Germans tried to forestall defeat with jet fighters and the United States clinched global victory with nuclear weapons. 

  

Technological advance, it seemed to some observers, was not advancing in linear fashion. Rather, progress was occurring in exponential fashion. As computers came into use after World War II, Moore’s Law was defined. The speed of computation, generated by the number of transistors placed on integrated circuits, appeared to be doubling every two years. In fact, this speed was itself subject to acceleration and computers began to double their capacities in even shorter periods of time as the 21^st century dawned.  

Even as this recognition of accelerating progress was dawning on scholars and scientists around the world, some had already recognized that this would have profound and incalculable effects on the future and on mankind in general. If technological progress was happening after shorter and shorter junctures, then it would someday, naturally, approach infinite acceleration. Obviously, should that happen, the days of wondering at the advances in modern technology would cease. There would no longer be any change to look back on because change would be infinite. We would be in the Singularity, according to some of these thinkers.

It sounds ridiculous to our ears. However, 3D printing would sound like magic to people from a hundred years ago. So might travel to the Moon and the Internet.

What Is the Singularity?

There is not a lot of agreement on the singularity. It is easy to mistake it for the kind of apocalyptic nightmare that some people like to see in movie theaters. The usual scenario involves robots “waking up” and turning on their human masters. In fact, many people envision the Singularity positively as a juncture in which everything will be possible and death will come to an end. Some such groups have been accused of a form of millennialism, like those Christians that quit working and sat contentedly waiting for Kingdom Come when the year 1000 approached.

Most thinkers who spend time on the topic tend to see the Singularity’s primary characteristic without regard for how that moment in history will turn out for mankind. Instead, they are concerned about the mysteriousness of the time period after this event. It is called the Singularity in order to compare it to the singularity at the center of a black hole. Beyond the borders of this small region, the physical laws of the Universe purportedly break down. Beyond the arrival of a technological singularity, no one can be sure what will happen.

Impact of the Singularity

Some thinkers, such as Ray Kurzweil, see a bumpy road on the way to a Singularity that will eventually result in bliss for the survivors. You must use ominous terms such as survivors in Kurzweil’s scenario because there will undoubtedly be struggles along the way. He foresees potential problems such as widespread and chronic unemployment before the culmination of the event sometime around 2045.

Since automation will take over more and more jobs, there simply will not be a lot for people to do unless they have highly specialized skills. The closer we get to the Singularity, the fewer jobs and trades that will be safe form automation. Ultimately, when the Singularity arrives, there will be no jobs. Machines will have become more than human equals. They will surpass us and no longer need us.

Preparing for the Singularity

Kurzweil sees a way to survive and enjoy the Singularity. As it approaches, he suggests that people begin to incorporate technology into their fleshy substrates. When the Singularity arrives, people will be part of it rather than simply endure it.

The Singularity Is Here

Some doubters scoff at the idea of the Singularity. They accept that the world has undergone rapid change since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Some of these opponents of Kurzweil’s suggest that the progress will halt or falter as integrated circuits near the molecular limit for the walls that separate them. We are, in fact, approaching this point already. Other opponents simply put Kurzweil’s and others’ ideas on the same pile of predictions about the future that have failed to come true for millennia. 

However, in a final defense of the Singularity’s reality, some would suggest that we are already in it. After all, how many people have metal and plastic limbs or organs already? As for chronic unemployment due to automation, the current economic crisis presents itself as a possible precursor to Kurzweil’s vision. Perhaps we are already on the edges of the Singularity, like a boat caught in a whirlpool, doomed for the mysterious vortex of forces in the center.