Why Kant can't

Enlightenment ethics always fail and yet they never seem to lose their appeal for some people. There is an entire generation out there right now that is heavily invested in the idea of enlightenment. And thus this fascinating claim:

In the climactic speech delivered by Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Pacino does an excellent job of articulating why Kant rejected the pursuit of self interest as an ethical position. In the speech Pacino clearly disavows the pursuit of self interest as being properly ethical.

That is Eric Lutzuk over at Partial Objects. The strategy here is interesting. The point of the argument is not to state Kant's position and then try and justify it. The strategy rather is to say that Kant lines up with our ordinary moral ideas as in this homespun emotional speech by Al Pacino.

And that is always the challenge with Kant. There is an inner coherence to Kant, so much so that it frightens people. The problem is convincing people that this very rigorous and cold-sounding ethics has anything to do with the life we live. (Exactly the same strategy drives Derek Parfitt's new book On What Matters by the way.)

The Al Pacino speech has something of the opposite problem.You can listen to all eight minutes of it at the link above. Pacino doesn't do an excellent job of articulating anything at all. The power of his speech rests on the well-established Hollywood principle that whoever sounds the most self-righteous is right. The moral principle he argues is crass and dubious: that it is always wrong to snitch. Imagine that Charlie had seen not a prank against the dean but four or five of his classmates raping a girl and the stupidity of the no snitching position jumps out at you. But, whatever weaknesses it may have in principle and logic, it speaks to the gut.

Lutzuk's attempt to make Kant seem human comes apart in this telling shift:

Pacino refers to Charlie’s “soul” as intact, and the school risks executing Charlie’s “soul” if they punish him for his silence. What are we to make of this reference to Charlie’s soul? Pacino is here referring to what Kant would have called autonomy. 

 "Soul" is a word that means something even to people who don't believe in souls. As Wittgenstein pointed out, the same is true of "ghost". The Enlightenment move is to try and replace these words with other, more sanitary concepts such as spirit. That is to try and replace a kind of being with a quality of being. You don't have a soul but you could have soul the way a Ray Charles song has soul. So Charlie isn't really losing a thing—his soul—but a quality of life—his autonomy.

But if Pacino's character in the movie  had really meant that, he could have said that. He chose the word "soul" for a reason. He chose it because it means something that no other word means. He could not have said—as some namby pamby modern preacher would—that Charlie could have lost his spirit because "spirit" means something too close to a state of being, something that can be regained with a rah rah speech.

No, the whole thing hangs on—that word "soul" means soul.

And from there we can see where the rest of the argument goes wrong.

Charlie, by rejecting the bribes of admission to an Ivy League school, can be said to have his soul intact, to have retained his autonomy, as we know that his action was freely chosen, and was not the result of self interest as it directly violates what would be in his self interest i.e. getting into an ivy league school. 

Well no. Because his soul is his and keeping it intact is in his self interest. If one choice is better than the other it is not because one choice is in his self interest and the other not but rather because some kinds of self interest are better for us than others.

And here we can see a very deep problem for someone like Kant. For if we pose the choice as being between maintaining an abstract concept such as autonomy and getting what we really want, what we really want is going to win out every time. That is why so many of the people who lecture us about climate change live in giant mansions.

(By the way, it's interesting that Hollywood keeps cranking out stories like this that essentially retell the story of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. For Hollywood's own conduct in those years was endlessly shameful and yet they keep making stories about people who bravely refuse to snitch. It's sort of like the guy who refused to serve in the war making a series of movies in which he plays a war hero.)

Sort of political Monday

Barbecue-people at the gate!
There are some people that John Ibbitson does not want to have a say in the way the Liberal Party of Canada party runs. Who are these people? Liberals! The kind of people who go to community barbecues are threatening to take over and he is ready to man the barricades to stop them.

Mr. Rae is touring the country and consulting what political types like to call the grassroots, though Alykhan Velshi, a former aide to Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, astutely calls them the grasstops. The grasstops are the riding executives, policy wonks, activists and other need-to-get-a-life types who make up the infrastructure of a political party. They’re not the grassroots. You’re the grassroots, and you wouldn’t be caught dead at a Liberal (or Conservative or NDP) barbecue.

Now you might think, "Hey, the party did very badly last election, maybe they should try something new." The particular something new favoured by Ibbitson being a primary system in which any Canadian who registers can vote.

But to conclude that you would need to honestly believe that these party members—the ones Ibbitson calls "grasstops"—were the ones picking leaders in the past. And that is where Ibbitson's thesis falls to pieces. Because he kinda, sorta forgets that letting card-carrying party members choose their leader is something the Liberals have never done. Never!

If there is one thing that Liberals have always done it has been to carefully exclude the people who go to party barbecues from having any say in how things run. Insiders fear these people and have always worked to exclude them from the inner workings of the party. As a former Liberal, I can tell you that there is no party anywhere where riding executives, policy wonks, activists and ordinary card-carrying members have less voice. In the past, the party has always formed its policy positions and has selected its leaders at big conventions. These conventions are easily controlled by insiders. That is with the exception of last time when they skipped even the convention and arranged for a new leader through a backroom deal.

Once in power, Liberals have tended to govern in consultation with various stakeholders from interest groups and industry. Even elected MPs have very little voice or power in the Liberal Party of Canada.

Mr. Ibbitson presents himself as a guy pushing for the radical reforms but if he really is that, it's rather bizarre that his proposed reforms just happen to be exactly what the party's insider elite is proposing. No really.  The very "radical", "bypass the insiders" approach that Ibbitson is proposing is exactly what president of the Liberal party put forward when speaking to the Empire Club of Canada.

Just that name tells you something. "The Empire Club of Canada" sounds like the sort of place where ordinary Jills and Joes can get together and chat about the country doesn't it? Nothing so elitist as a party barbecue here! Why a cynic might think that what is really going on here is an attempt by the elite to maintain their hold on the Liberal Party no matter what.

In that regard, we might go back and reread this paragraph of Ibbitson's again:

People are eventually going to tire of voting Conservative, if not in 2015 then surely in 2019, and the NDP appears to be relentlessly determined not to grow up.  

What he is really describing here is a strategy by which an elite group of people will maintain control of the Liberal Party.

I've written about these people before:

When I think about Canadian politics there is one thought that troubles me and has troubled me for a few decades now (and it is not an issue unique to Canada). And it is the fear of a disproportionate amount of power and influence held by a relatively small group of people who live in Ottawa and Toronto and who have senior positions in the public service, the media and a small set of universities. These people aren’t a conspiracy. They don’t have meetings where they plan their strategy. No, all they have in common is a shared set of values. These values aren’t nefarious or evil and they aren’t a secret. Most anybody could make up a list.

1. They believe that government should be a large and dominant presence in the lives of Canadians.
2. They believe in multiculturalism and in having large numbers of immigrants come into Canada.
3. They believe the arts, universities and scientific research should be heavily funded by government.
4. They hate the idea of a media that is mostly driven by profit and so they support government regulation and subsidization of the media and government support for the CBC.
5. Related to the above, they want government to use its regulatory power to keep existing media from having to face any serious competition particularly from American sources.
6. They believe the government should tax people not just to get revenue but also to decrease what they see as unfair income distribution.

What really disturbs me about this group is not that they believe what they do. I live in a neighbourhood dominated by these people. I live among and like these people and I believe they have every right to believe the things they do and every right to push and promote these ideas.

But one thing that does disturbs me is that they don’t respect anyone’s right to disagree with them. They demonize everyone who does.

The other thing that really disturbs me about this group is that for the last few elections it has tended to feel like it didn’t much matter what Canadians actually voted for, these people got what they wanted anyway. It felt to me like they were using their power to effectively neutralize any opposing voices.

Ahhh, that feels good

At midnight on Friday, while we slept, the bank made its regular automatic mortgage deduction from our bank account. The think that made this Friday different was it was the last one.

That was our last substantial financial debt. I can no longer do an assets to debt ratio for the simple reason that you cannot divide by zero. It took a long time but we're here.

Summertime ...

... and the living is easy
First time we make this mark this year (in the shade):

By the way, this thermometer reading tells us something about micro-climates. We live in a part of the city that is one USDA zone warmer than the rest. It's a full four degrees hotter by my thermometer than the reading at the airport. Even allowing for them having a more accurate instrument at the airport and mine being perhaps off a degree or so, that is quite a gap.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Body Heat Pt2: Some thoughts about women in noir and neo noir films
Most criminals are brutally stupid people who do stupidly brutal things. They don't make for good subjects for fiction. That is why there is so little really realistic crime fiction. Realism is always a series of stylistic conventions rather than actually realistic.

Dashiell Hammett's brilliant innovation was to realize that the only way you could make a story about the irrational people who actually commit crimes interesting was to write a story in which normal people end up interacting with them. In Hammett the normal person is usually the detective. Sam Spade was sleeping with his partner's wife and now his partner has been murdered. That is an interesting moral story. The three nuts pursuing the black bird would not be interesting  all by themselves. If you took characters such as Spade and the genuinely human moral tension out of them, most noir fiction would lose all its appeal.

Thus it is Ned Racine and his moral weaknesses that makes Body Heat interesting. But what about Matty Walker, the femme fatale. What is there for women in a character like this? And to ask that question honestly, we need to take seriously the possibility that the answer might be nothing at all. Obviously I am going to make the case that there is something.

An unreal person living a real life?
It seems to me that the first thing to note about Matty Walker is that the rough outline of her life is actually quite plausible. This is not a life that most people live but a depressing number of people do live lives not unlike it. Here it is in outline:

• She is the most beautiful girl in her high school and dreams of "being rich and living in an exotic land".
• Her unrealistic dreams lead her into bad choices including drugs.
• A guy bails her out, no doubt for less than idealistic reasons.
• Cleaned up and attractive again, she finds a better deal and trades up.
• Initially happy to be married to this wealthy guy, she starts to chafe at the restrictions and to tire of having sex with this "small, mean and weak" man.
• She finds another lover and soon begins plotting how to extract herself from this marriage taking the maximum amount of money with her.
• This new guy soon finds that he too is being used.

All of that is believable enough. What is hard to believe is that the woman who would do all these things could be anywhere near as intelligent, interesting and alive as Matty Walker as played by Kathleen Turner. I don't mean just that she looks better the way even bellboys in movies tend to look a lot better than they do in real life. I mean that she is far too human a person to have that biography. People who slide in and out of drugs and then commit murder are hollow vessels.

If you crave realism, this will disappoint you.

de-Baroquing the story
The key to making any sort of morale for real women out of a story like this is to smooth out the Baroque details and see the real life pattern that has been blown up into something fantastic. Make her,

•  A girl who had exotic dreams whose real life didn't match those dreams and is now in a relationship that she entered into for reasons that may have once felt like love but now feel purely pragmatic. She has lost all attraction for the man she is with and now is repulsed by him during sex. 
• She begins an affair with another man, swearing him to absolute secrecy, but slowly begins to wonder if there isn't some way to escape.
• All the time this is going on, it isn't clear whether she is really in love with this new man or just using him.

If you haven't known someone who did just that, then you haven't been paying attention. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that, even if we haven't done quite that, we would be capable of falling into such a pattern if we just let things slide.

One of the really great things about a movie such as Body Heat is that it rewards repeated watchings. The first time, you can watch his story. The second time, you can watch hers. The merit is not the realism. This is fiction and never pretends to be anything but fiction. But it is fiction in which we can exercise our moral imagination. We can put ourselves inside her just feel like what it would be like.

For example, the sex. Why does she do it? Does she enjoy it? I think yes, but does she enjoy it because it feels good or does she enjoy it for the feeling of erotic power it gives her? Because you can imagine that. You could—if the idea appeals to you—fantasize about it. But what conditions would it take for you to actually enjoy doing something like that?

The answer to these questions are nobody's business but yours of course.

By the way, one of the fascinating things about fiction that doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction is the craft involved. Fans of Jane Austen will appreciate the way the story arc here is structured. The murder takes place in exactly the middle of the movie. There is a perfect story arc just like in an Austen novel. If we started drawing up a list of similarities with an Austen novel, we would find quite a few.


Part 3 is here.

Burying the lead ...

This is from a Toronto Star story about the Sun Media newspapers withdrawing from the Ontario Press Council, a media supported ethics watchdog. Read the first paragraphs and see what sort of feel they give you for the story.

TORONTO—Sun Media has pulled its newspapers out of the Ontario Press Council, complaining about the “politically correct mentality” of the province’s print-media watchdog.

Glenn Garnett, Sun Media’s vice-president of editorial, sent a letter to the council earlier this week saying that the company’s newspapers were withdrawing their membership, effective immediately.

“The editorial direction of our newspapers, especially our urban tabloids, is incompatible with a politically correct mentality that informs OPC thinking, in the selection of cases it hears, and the rulings it renders,” Garnett wrote.

The Ontario Press Council investigates complaints about some of the largest newspapers in Canada, including the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

Got a feeling? Now read the fifth paragraph:

The press council has for years overseen 37 dailies, including 27 Sun Media newspapers such as the Toronto Sun, the Kingston Whig-Standard and the London Free Press.

Doesn't that kinda raise a pretty obvious question that any good journalist would raise immediately? It takes the Star all the way to the twelfth paragraph even to acknowledge the issue:

It’s too early to tell what impact the pullout will have on the press council’s finances, he added.

“We’ve been through a pretty vigorous cost control and cost reduction process for the past year and we’ll have to evaluate what the situation is once we get everything, all the numbers put together,” he said.

Do you what, I don't believe him. When 72 percent of your paying customers stop buying from you, the results will be devastating.  That may not be 72 percent of revenue because we don't know how the Council charges it members. And we don't know that because the Toronto Star is a crappy newspaper that let its bias distract it from the story. But it is very hard to see how the council can face this without major cutbacks ans serious layoffs.

And, come on guys, any time you are reporting on your business rival you need to be five times as careful as you normally would be about this sort of thing. The headline here should have been, Future of Press Council in question after Sun Media pull out.

The question is not what effect will it have but can the Press Council even survive.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Body Heat Pt1
For my money, this is the first real neo noir film. Yes, there were films such as Chinatown but they were too busy being homages to something. This is the first neo noir where the people making it were willing to get a little Gothic about it. They got right inside the conventions and had fun with them. I'll say more about why I think it works so well tomorrow.

(General note: This movie also comes with a heavy does dose* of eroticism. If you really don't like that sort of thing, you really won't like this movie. Your loss.)

* I hate auto-correct.

The manliness lesson
Ned Racine is a familiar type. Here he is:

And here is his car:

This is a guy we all dream of being and all feel some shame at the thought that we might become him. He was an undistinguished student who became an undistinguished lawyer. He just floats through life vaguely hoping that some big break will just land in his lap.

Ned's friend Lowenstein sums him up nicely when Ned asks why a judge he and Lowenstein have just argued a case before dislikes him.

He's an unhappy man, Thinks he should be Circuit Court by now. Here he is in a state with really top-notch corruption and he's stuck with the county toilets.

I'm surprised you weren't in on that toilet caper. Could have been that quick score you've always been searching for.

Except he doesn't really want the big score because he doesn't do anything to get it; he simple feels he deserves it. And this attitude prevails in his approach to women. When he first meets with Matty he has this conversation.

Ned: Me? I need tending. I need someone to take care of me. Rub my tired muscles. Smooth out my sheets.

Matty: Get married.

Ned: I just need it for tonight.

And here is where Body Heat does something that is really profound and perverse at the same time. Matty is the woman who inspires Ned to marry. And she inspires him to give up on feeling entitled and to work to really earn that big break he has always wanted. She also inspires him to be discreet about his love life and to really respect a woman for the first time in his life. And, in doing so, she lures him straight into an unholy travesty of everything that love and life are supposed to be.

In this movie it is Ned's willingness to overcome what he sees as weakness in himself that brings disaster on him.

I don't want to say more because I don't want to spoil what is a a perfect little movie. And I do mean perfect in the same way that The Third Man is perfect. Someone, I can't remember who, once said that that The Third Man is perfect because it doesn't aim too high. That is true here too. But such perfection.

One teaser for those who haven't seen it, there is a magnificent scene where the murder victim inadvertently inspires his murderer into killing him.

The aesthetics of manliness
The movie comes with the same heavy dose of nostalgia for the recent technological past I noted in Palmetto. Note the car above. That is the Corvette Sting Ray from the mid 1960s and not the 1970s model (simply called the "Corvette" because "Sting Ray" was no longer cool) that was apparently designed to resemble a penis. That earlier (non penis-like) Sting Ray used in the film is something only a man, and probably only a certain kind of man, would get but those of us who do get it instantly. The Sting Rays weren't painted but had a gel coat on the fiberglass body that faded in the sun just the way this one has. That is a dream car not a museum piece.

(Lawrence Kasdan brings this motif back in The Big Chill where William Hurt's character shows up in a bondo-grey coloured Porsche. As Ned might say, "It was just, perfect".)

The thing about all this technology is that it was all still around when this movie was made in 1981. None of it was collectable yet but there was a nostalgie de la boue that attached to this stuff for men.

Some of it was quite simple. If you went to a rundown movie theatre in 1981, you would have quite likely seen this popcorn machine.

That is perhaps confusing for some now because if you go to the very newest movie theatres, you will quite likely see a machine that is modeled on that one. In 1981, however, this machine was a sign of a world fast disappearing.

And if you go to a hip lunch place where all the trendy types go to today, it just might look like this.

But in 1981, this sort of place was rapidly disappearing. To find one, you had to go the parts of town trendy people wouldn't get caught dead in.

Again, some hip young executive would probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate this office today. In 1981, you'd find an office like this upstairs from a hardware store downtown where no one wanted to have their business located.

People forget how utterly horrible the 1970s were. Here is a simple background shot from the movie and nothing in it was meant to have special significance.

But note that car. That ugly red piece of crap was what the Ford Mustang had become by 1980. And ugly is as ugly does, no matter how appalling it may look, that is nothing compared to driving one of them. No wonder men rebelled. And movies like this embodied that feeling of rebellion.

Part 2.