The Private Life of Henry VIII

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) is on the surface a partial chronicle of the marriages of King Henry VIII of England, but, underneath, the film is on the human instinctual urge of aggression. With unchecked power, such as in the case of an absolute ruler or in the international arena, the instinct can be quite dangerous. In other words, the film demonstrates just how unsuited human nature is to the political type of absolute ruler and a world of sovereign states sans something like what Kant refers to as a world federation that could provide some check and balance to wayward, aggressive states, which in turn are really just human beings.

The full essay is at "The Private Life of Henry VIII"

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

The full essay is at "Conscience."

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir in the film." Strange. Normally, a presenter of a film would say, "Helen Mirren plays Golda." I contend that a squalid ideology accounts for the difference. Rather than evincing gratitude that such an excellent actress would play an ugly character (in the film, even Golda herself refers to her feet in a derogatory way), the implication obvious to everyone in the room was that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. How dare an actor play a character of a different background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting (i.e., playing characters who are not like oneself) belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. Did the screenings only include films whose actors were Israelis? Golda herself was Ukrainian. Goren also taught Israeli Identity and Culture, which explains why her knowledge of acting was eclipsed. To Goren, a group-identity that monopolizes a person's self-image trumps the craft of acting. I contend that underlying her false-belief or delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) lies a much larger problem: namely, that of the artificial monopolization of one of several group-identities that apply to a given person and can precipitate an exclusivist ideology alone one axis. Each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is artificial and thus problematic. Resulting ideologies tend to be monopolistic and thus too extreme too. 

The full essay is at "Golda."

Harvard and Penn Alumni Revolt: A Matter of Free Speech on Israel's War

In the context of the embroiled hatred violently spewing out between Israelis and Palestinians in October 2023, some rich, very vocal alumni at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania threated to stop donating money in order to pressure the respective university administrations (and boards of trustees) to clamp down on pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel speech on the campuses. Over at Yale, 25,000 signatures were quickly obtained from students in favor of firing a faculty employee for having written against Israel’s violence against residents of Gaza. Yale’s administration backed up the faculty member’s right of free speech, especially as it was on social media rather than in a classroom or even on campus. Tenure itself, it should be noted, exists in part to protect professors from being fired for airing unpopular opinions. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time, so it is only natural that thinkers may have unusual and even controversial opinions. I contend that as respites for contemplation and learning, universities should not be pressured into taking sides on controversial political issues that do not directly affect higher education, and, furthermore, that even rich alumni have an obligation to safeguard their respective alma maters rather than seek to turn them into hotbeds of ideological unrest. Of course, money talks, even if it is not in itself free speech, which, even if unpopular, universities should protect. Hence, the question arises: To what degree are Ivy League universities like Harvard and Penn vulnerable to the threats of even a few rich alumni? Does it make a difference whether the demands of such ideologues gain traction among the rank-and-file alumni? Whereas a university’s administration can usually ignore student protests, those of wealthy donors may be another story.

The full essay is at "Harvard and Penn Alumni Revolt."

Anatomy of a Fall

The medium of film literally consists of “talking” pictures in succession; that is to say, sound and image. Amidst astounding technological improvements, audiences in the twenty-first century could not be blamed for losing sight of what the medium actually is. It is easy to get lost in the “bells and whistles” and miss the power simply in relating sound and visual images. It is perhaps less forgivable when directors allow themselves to get lost in the rarified computerized air at the expense of realizing the potential in relating sound and image. A strong narrative is of course also essential, and it is easy to find examples in which an orientation to creating visually astonishing eye-candy comes at the expense of creating a deeply engaging narrative. Nevertheless, here I want to focus on the power that lies in relating sound and image, both of which “move” in a motion picture (after the silent era, of course). In the film, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), the theory that sound should extenuate image to form a more wholistic unity in service to narrative meets with a counter-example. At one point in the film, the loss of an accompanied visual that goes with the sound (to be replaced by another visual) renders the continuing sound more powerful in triggering raw emotions. The point being made by the film at that point regards the viability of close-contact, long-term human relationships, given our species’ innate instinctual urges to be aggressive. After all, our closest relative is the chimp. It is possible that the “civilized” conception of marriage that became the norm presumably only after the long hunter-gatherer phase in which the vast majority of natural selection has occurred is not as congruent with how our species is “hard-wired” than we might think.

The full essay is at "Anatomy of a Fall."

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1. The Gospel of Mark 10:7-8.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) hinges on the root meaning of passion, which is suffering. In fact, Jesus’ body is reduced to a bloody pulp after being brutally tortured by the Roman soldiers going beyond Pontius Pilate’s order to teach Jesus a lesson but keep him alive. At least there is an order to whip Jesus; the Jewish Temple’s guards earlier took it upon themselves to repeatedly hit Jesus with fists and even with chains, and almost strangle him with a rope while arresting him. That guards, or police, especially of a religious institution, are actually garden-variety thugs might resonate with viewers who need only recall the latest news story about police brutality. The implication is that such police employees who are actually thugs are delusional if they consider themselves to be Christians. In fact, such official thugs can be understood through the prism of the film as beating Christ himself, for what you do to the least of these, you do to me. In the Gospel story, Jesus is an innocent victim, and so too are even criminals who do not warrant being attacked. As in the film, police brutality tends to occur before the victims of the abuse are convicted, and thus presumed guilty before the law. For a human being to make oneself the law incarnate or to presume oneself above the law is nothing short of impious and self-idolatrous.

The full essay is at "Passion of the Christ." 

I Am Cuba

The film, I Am Cuba (1964), consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet, but it is also of tears.  Furthermore, the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed, the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual people.

The full essay is at "I Am Cuba."

Rainbow

Rainbow (1944) is a Soviet patriotic propaganda film about the brutal Nazi-German occupation of a village in Ukraine. Filmed in 1943 while Ukraine was still occupied, the film was shot in the U.S.S.R. in central Asia rather than in Ukraine. The plot centers on the efforts of Nazi captain Kurt Werner to get a resistance (partisan) fighter to reveal where her group was heading. The woman is stark (strong), for she does not budge even as the Germans torture her both mentally and physically. I contend that the film pivots on a few lines spoken by an old Russian man in the village on the nature of power itself. Those lines stand out for being the only philosophical abstractions in the dialogue of the film. The film is about the nature of power. 

The full essay is at Rainbow.

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black. 

The full essay is at "Valley of Peace."

Exposing Yale’s Sordid Side: “The Inner Ring” by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis aptly describes in one published lecture the nature of a very human game, which is really about how soft power, which is often buttressed by institutional position, works in any human organization. To use Nietzsche’s expression (which Lewis would have hardly appreciated), the dynamics of an inner ring is human, all too human, and thus hardly an extractible part of the human condition. Yet it is much more salient, and arguably even dysfunctional, in just some organizations, especially those that have an elite reputation such as Yale, whose essence, we shall investigate here, might be exclusion.

The full essay is at " Exposing Yale's Sordid Side."

European Federalism: Beyond “Sticks and Stones”

Domestic governance is perhaps more difficult than international relations in that real enforcement mechanisms are in force only in the former. Flaunt a UN resolution and that feckless organization is unchanged; if a state official flaunts a federal law, on the other hand, the viability of the federal system can collapse as governors and legislators in other states get the same idea. Before long, the states are once again sovereign. Unfortunately, it is easy to get distracted by political theater and miss such existential threats from the point of view of the viability of a system of public-sector governance. Yet we depend so much on governments, so to tamper with necessary beams (or cards, as in a house of cards) is quite dangerous. Along with the governors of Hungary and Slovakia, Poland’s top official knowingly compromised the viability of the European Union (E.U.) in 2023, but unfortunately I don’t think many people stood up and paid attention to the danger. Political theater staged for election purposes is more tantalizing, which raises the question: who in the E.U. was watching the proverbial store?

The full essay is at "European Federalism."

Yale's Original Sin

I take it as a matter of divine justice that redemption can elude a convenient, belated atonement, especially if the atoning individual or institution does not really grasp the root of the original sin and thus the sin continues under other manifestations even though admittedly they may be less severe. I contend that when Peter Salovey, Yale University’s president, apologized on behalf of the Yale Corporation for having oppressed two Black men nearly two centuries earlier, he was not aware of the university’s underlying exaggerated fixation on the insider/outsider dichotomy that was still salient in 2023. To be sure, Nietzsche wrote that the strong should maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the latter beguile the former into voluntarily renouncing their innate strength. Kant distinguished intimacy from difference as together making up the dialectic of attraction and distance. When a customer with the strength of having money naturally distances oneself from a rude employee of a retail company who is resentful, such distance is hardly artificial. Yet when a university whose administrators and faculty feel the emotional need to distance themselves qua insiders from outsiders to such an extent that even alumni who return to campus to work on academic projects, such as writing a book, are relegated as outsiders—hence not “members of the community”—then the distancing stems from a rather unnatural pathology. I contend that such a pathology still plagued Yale like an invisible blanket in 2023, almost two-hundred years after that university had refused to allow two black auditors to speak in courses at Yale’s theological seminary (divinity school). That original sin, although atoned for, still ran through Yale’s puffed-up veins in 2023, hence intimacy and strength continued quite naturally to elude that university—the redemption of which would require more of a mirror than an apology to two dead Black auditors could provide. Although Yale appeared in 2023 to be self-confident to external stakeholders and the general public, Nietzsche’s advice applied to people considering coming or giving to Yale nonetheless: The strong should not get too close to weak, resentful birds of prey just as a healthy person should not go to a hospital lest  even such a person becomes sick too.

The full essay is at "Yale's Original Sin."

Yale : A Private Police-State on Steroids

Academia is its own sort of community, with its own distinctive culture. A university campus is not akin to a small town. To treat a campus as such, and thus to allow universities to have their own police departments rather than security guards, evinces a category mistake and presents issues of political legitimacy. The U.S. Constitution gives police power to the state governments, rather than to private companies and non-profit private organizations. Secuity guards, not police employees, belong to the categories of companies and non-profit organizations, both of which being qualitatively different than governments or states. Hence the matter of legitimacy should be raised when one organization, such as Yale, presumes not only to have its own private police force, but also to use it (and its security guards) to enforce local laws and university regulations off campus. When a university, again referring here to Yale, saturates its campus with police cars with emergency-alert blue-and-red lights blazing on top and headlights constantly and pensively on, and adds security guards on virtually every corner as if according to a military-style command coverage of the entire campus and beyond, the passive aggression and tacit message of deep distrust subtly undercut academic pursuits and the related psychological stamina of students, faculty, and even alumni who are auditing courses or conducting research as scholars "in residence." The saturated presence of pensive guns and distrustful staring eviscerates an anademic atmosphere of peace and tranquilly, and thus subtly eclipses academic learning and teaching. An academic atmosphere is vital to a college and even a large university so students and faculty can feel free to take ideas to their limits without fear of intimidation and being distrusted so. A pathological weaponizing of distrust is harmful even though the victims don't realize that they are being victimized. I contend that the unbiquitous, constant surveillance is unethical, and furthermore that university administrations that unfairly inflict such an aggressive culture of distrust should be held accountable externally by governments and internally through boards of directors and pressure from alumni.  Paranoia is at the root of this type of dysfunctional organizational culture, such as existed at Yale as of 2023. The extreme distrust backed up by hostile staring, flashing lights, and even guns ought to be flagged as toxic and unethical. 

The full essay is at "Yale: A Private Police State on Steroids."

On Trump’s Eligibility to Run for President: Who Decides?

The 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “bans anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution but who subsequently ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against,’ or gave ‘aid or comfort of the enemies’ of the Constitution from seeking any federal or state office.”[1] Did Donald Trump, when he was President of the United States, engage in insurrection? Furthermore, who decides this and bars him from office?

The full essay is at "Deciding Trump's Eligibility." 

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[1] S.V. Date, “Trump May Need Supreme Court To Say His Coup Attempt Does Not Violate Constitution,” The Huffington Post, September 2, 2023.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence has outdone itself, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

The full essay is at "Oppenheimer."