culture 15 | unobtrusive lucidity

Artificial Intelligence

In Brian Michael Bendis‘ story arc for Marvel’s 2013 graphic novel Age of Ultron, we are presented with an unexpected present that one would initially guess to be an alternate future. The artificial intelligence run amok known as Ultron has succeeded in destroying most of humanity. The handful of people who have survived in the world’s major cities have an even smaller handful of heroes among them, hiding underground and attempting to form a strategy to overcome Ultron. While Bendis deals with many themes in these pages, one of the most prominent is the need for what we view as progress. Bendis makes us privy to the internal dialogue of Hank Pym, the Avenger known as Ant-Man and the creator of Ultron, as he wrestles with the potential to benefit humanity that he sees in the concept of the Ultron artificial intelligence. The reader is left feeling…skeptical…of what Pym wants to achieve, understanding that his hopes are mis-placed. However, his motivations are clearly pure. He wants to help.

When faced with this extinction of humanity, Wolverine makes a more difficult choice. He wrestles with the decision of whether or not to travel back in time and end Pym’s life before he can create Ultron. The reader is even more dubious of these intentions, but Wolverine sees no other real alternative. The choice between one life or millions of lives is clear to him in that moment.

In the 2015 cinematic version of Age of Ultron, Tony Stark encourages Bruce Banner to assist in exploring the artificial intelligence that will become Ultron. He presses Banner to accept that this is who they are, the “mad scientists,” and must do what they do.

That is the intelligence that I would find artificial.

C.S. Lewis points out a sound philosophical truth: just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Yet, the logical fallacy that “can” must necessarily lead to “do” drives much of what we view today as progress. Humans as a race are always pressing forward, always confronted with our own mortality, seeking to make life more palatable not only for ourselves, but for our successors, our children. Once we discover that we are capable of something that we perceive as good, we feel an overwhelming drive to do that thing, hang the consequences.

Part of the tragedy of the character of the mad genius is that s/he works in isolation much of the time, experiencing an absence of feedback from other people about their plans. No one can see all of the failings of their own plans…everyone needs another party to hear their ideas, to proofread their work, as it were.

I think that our decisions, sometimes very important decisions, are becoming rushed. A desire to help others is a noble thing, but not every wonderful idea to better mankind turns out to be such a wonderful idea. In short, innovation must be checked by wisdom, and that wisdom is in short supply when crowd mentalities rush to gather around what is popular, without giving careful thought to what it is that they might be supporting.

I’ve been accused of being a futurist, because I become excited about the potential of what new discoveries and technologies can offer us. I see the problems that they solve, and dream of how much simpler life might be with that problem solved. Then I have to pause, I have to step back and examine whether or not my excitement is equivalent to Pym’s excitement as he dreams of Ultron. Sometimes I continue to see minimal negatives, and sometimes I feel uneasy, a misgiving that gives pause, and is usually justified when I think the issue through carefully. I’m no inventor…I don’t build exciting new things. I’m certainly no entrepreneur…while I dream of new stories and worlds, I don’t formulate new strategies to change the world as we know it. So, granted, I’m not in a position to truly understand many of these things. I am, however, a critical thinker. I believe in examining things through a lens of close observation. I think of what great science fiction writers have written, warning us of the potential outcomes of some of our innovations, and I recall Tillich’s observation that artists are the prophets of our time, warning of dangers before the rest of us can see them.

And I wonder about the dangers, unseen in the excitement over the good.

I wonder.

Photo, by Pascal, is public domain.

Superhero Role Models and Censorship

When I was in elementary school, society was in the era of “don’t do drugs.” Each generation seems to have its own popular message that all school children must hear, and this was ours. Drugs symbolized all that were evil, and, like all important cultural messages, we entrusted this to our fictional role models to reinforce. I remember the day well. We were in my 5th grade classroom, and the teacher passed out the anti-drug-use comic books. They featured the New Teen Titans. Many of the kids in this classroom hadn’t heard of these characters, as they weren’t what one would really consider mainstream superheroes at the time. Having already developed my passion for the mythology, though, I thought that this was the perfect group to tell us the story that we needed to hear. I wasn’t in any sort of risk group to abuse substances, but eagerly dug into the pages to see how these heroes dealt with the problem.

Comic books provide us with a snapshot of where we are as a culture at any given point. They give us insight into ourselves, both our self-perception as well as our perception of others. They show us that to which we can aspire, an image of a larger truth, something outside of ourselves that is good, something in which we can believe. This is why superhero mythology is so powerful, why it has been so powerful long before the current trend in popular films, and will remain so when this trend has passed.

We need to believe in good. We want to believe in someone good who will defend us from the evil that we cannot overcome ourselves. We need a symbol of a light in our darkness. This is especially true of certain groups and populations that are a bit more deprived of strong, hopeful role models than others.

Because I believe that this is bigger than just pop culture, and gives us a window into that hope…that it contains a theological insight that will only serve to spark positive discussions lasting far beyond mere entertainment value if it is truly engaged…that I become so frustrated when some treat this as a trivial thing, as a problem, as something subject to censorship.

Because I believe this, my shock and frustration are beyond words at the ignorant and narrow-minded reaction of an elementary school who considered a girl’s Wonder Woman lunchbox a dress code violation. I would think that the public education institution…an institution in which I increasingly lose faith (a reaction only strengthened by news such as this)…would choose to engage this, to discuss it, to help students begin to formulate their own reactions and thoughts to the mythology at whatever level they are capable. Obviously, if a student is recognizing Wonder Woman as a strong female role model, which is an excellent choice, then she is already engaging the subject and identifying with positive aspects of the character. I would think that this sort of critical thinking would be encouraged early in education. Obviously I’m mistaken.

And, while I’m particularly frustrated with this situation because I hold superhero mythology so closely, I would have this reaction to the censorship of any fictional character.

Wonder Woman is known historically for her bracelets which defend from attack, and her Lasso of Truth…neither of which are offensive weapons. Captain America’s symbol is a shield, something that stands between evil and it’s victims. Superman, arguably the most well-recognized superhero, is an upright symbol of strength, having no aggressive imagery about him. Batman abhors firearms and refuses to use them. Blanket policies and so-called “zero-tolerance” mentalities, being void of critical thinking themselves, only serve as a barrier to developing critical thinking in an educational setting. In this case, defining (arbitrarily, it seems) all superheroes as violent characters simply ignores too much evidence to the contrary in the literature, to say nothing of examples specific to educational settings.

Certainly, superheroes engage in violent actions. They take extreme actions to handle situations that cannot be handled otherwise. The actions of superheroes would place them on the wrong side of many viewpoints in our modern culture, as a well-respected comics author points out.

Would the gun advocates mock Batman's position? Would liberals decry the existence of the JLA or Avengers? I think they would.

— Gail Simone 💙💛 (@GailSimone) September 2, 2015

The value in this is the healthy ideas and discussions that come from engaging in the material, from thinking it through. None of this can occur when we prohibit our children from engaging their role models.

It seems that the public education system would have larger priorities.

Image of the actual lunchbox, from Imgur.

Blogging Nostalgia

Perhaps it’s my age, but I’m prone to nostalgia lately. More, in fact, than I would care to admit over the past couple of years. It’s not just music, mind you, although I’ve pined my share over that. It’s not just old Saturday morning cartoons, or even old breakfast cereals, though I’ve certainly found myself drawn to those quite often of late. No, the chronology of my longings isn’t nearly so narrowly defined. In fact, other things, things from barely a decade ago, have piqued my reflective longings recently.

And yes, I do realize just how much I’ve dated myself in that last statement.

Is there a point to this? Yes. The point is this post from a blog that I began following years ago when I was writing prose more than code (and beginning the novel that I swear I’m going to finish at some point). As the comments poured in over the subsequent weeks, it became obvious that I wasn’t the only reader with whom Mr. Bransford’s thoughts had resonated. I’ve enjoyed reading those thoughts. I always have enjoyed reading others’ thoughts. That’s what was always so powerful about the blog.

I began writing a blog as an experiment back in 2005, and, although I rarely read that first post, when I do, it makes me pause to think about what’s changed about the writing and the writer over that decade. The purpose of this space changed as my focus and interests became more defined (“faith, art, and culture” came more than two years after I began blogging), an epiphany that happened in large part because of my writing here. I found my voice as a blogger…so different from that first post…along with that focus. Simply, I came to call myself a blogger, to take this seriously. Certainly, I’ve waxed and waned a bit in my frequency of posting over the years, but I’ve never left. I’ve waxed and waned in my reading of others’ blogs, as well, no longer finding the time to peruse my feeds every day, but more likely once weekly.

I initially found these blogs through a bit of a curated experience, of course. I began, as many bloggers did, with Blogger (I was writing there before it’s acquisition by Google), and, like many bloggers, I outgrew it. Like many bloggers, I used blogrolls to discover and be discovered. I was always looking for a new blog to add to my reading list, because the things that you discovered, the things that you learned, by reading the thoughts of people from all over the globe, was so amazingly enriching, so profoundly important.

I met friends through blogs. People passionate about blogging, and passionate about writing. People passionate about faith and theology, about the arts and so many of my other interests. Some faded away over the years, and I’ve lost touch. Others I’ve met in person and continue to communicate with to this day.

I commented on posts. I subscribed to comments. My posts received comments. We interacted, those other bloggers and I. We discussed, almost always civilly, and, in doing so, we learned things and grew.

This wasn’t just about entertainment. It never was for me. It’s more important than that. More profound.

So, nostalgia. Nostalgia because I miss what it was. I’m not saying that blogging is no longer existent, or no longer important, or that it’s only on the fringes and important to only a few writers who refuse to accept change. There are those who say that, and I couldn’t disagree more. Blogging isn’t the only option, now, and it isn’t the only way to discover other people and discover their thoughts. I don’t comment nearly as much as I used to, nor do my posts receive as many comments, even though the number of you reading these posts has only grown. That’s okay…it’s the evolution of the medium. I sort of miss it, though, because the discussion is what made this so special, so different from the streams of consciousness that are social networks, for better or worse.

What feels most void is that I miss the discovery of other’s blogs. I miss going looking for new blogs. I miss not having the discovery process dominated by the algorithms of Facebook or Twitter. To be honest, I miss having the time to do this discovering.

Many of the blogs that populated my feed years ago are no longer active. They exist, but with most recent posts of two or three years past. Some no longer exist at all…they’ve been taken down, domain names now belonging to others. I’ve no intention of doing that for some time to come, although I’m not nearly naive enough to believe that this medium will never be replaced by another and that this will never cease to exist at some point, replaced in the evolution of technology. There are, however, a lot of very active blogs out there, and I don’t fall into the “it’s over and I’ll always miss it” sort of nostalgia of many of the commenters on Bransford’s post. There are fewer personal blogs, perhaps, as more have become focused on what we do for our livings as professional and personal are tragically forced to meld beyond healthy boundaries. But there are still blogs, good blogs, waiting for readers with the time to engage in the writers’ thoughts.

Not just their in-the-moment impulses. Their thoughts. The stuff that makes us grow, that expands who we are as people, that helps us to know each other better…and hopefully even, in an ideal circumstance, hurt each other less.

That’s why this is so important, and why I’m nostalgic for what it was, even while being fascinated by what it becomes.

Polar Opposites

One of the things that Karen and I try to take advantage of since moving to the Southeast again is visiting friends that we didn’t get to see while living in New England. We’re within a two-hour drive of many old friends in most cases, and we make every attempt to take advantage of the opportunity to visit them.

A couple of months ago, we went back to the city in Virginia where we met and married, and where we lived for some time after. We had a wonderful, if all too brief, weekend, in which we saw as many friends as we possibly could, as well as driving by the landmarks…the old apartments, old workplaces, the memories that accompany a life lived.

When we were planning our trip, we began organizing and arranging times to meet with our friends. Our closest friends sprang to the forefront of my mind, and I began contacting those who I was looking so forward to seeing again, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in nearly two years, occasional social media interactions notwithstanding.

One of our close friends is an author and professor. He and I became friends while acting and directing in a theatre ministry at our local faith community. Theatre forms a sort of fox-hole experience. There are long nights, intense debates and emotions, and sets of experiences that no one who hasn’t been involved in practicing that particular creative pursuit can truly understand. This is a friend with whom I had spent the long hours and held the passionate debates, with whom I had celebrated the publishing of his book, and who had graciously read some of my own manuscripts. This is a friend whom I met at a restaurant in the wee hours of the morning for coffee when something tragic had just happened. His daughter would babysit our daughter. Even with distance between us, we’re close.

What’s surprising about this is that, in several ways, you couldn’t get more opposite than he and I are. Yes, we’re both odd creative types. He, however, is a scientist by day and at heart, and I have always been quite the opposite of that, immersed in the humanities. Politically, you really couldn’t imagine two more opposite perspectives, as he leans far to the right of my own views. He eschews Mac computers on principle, and I use them exclusively.

We regularly engage in Twitter banter that makes others assume we can’t stand each other, and yet we know that we have each others’ backs.

When I think of how opposite we are, I think of how some say that opposites attract, but, more importantly, about how, despite our polarizing differences, we’ve always respected each other, always known that we’ve had a friend in each other. We’ve seen what we’ve held in common more prominently than we’ve engaged our differences. I think that this is a standard to which I need to live up to more, something that only has good results. If I generalize this, after all, I become a kinder person, less prone to anger and frustration with others, less prone to bitterness that clings long after I wish it gone.

Sometimes there are insurmountable differences between two people. I’m not so optimistic or naive as to think that this isn’t sometimes the case. I think, however, that the things that we see as insurmountable are, in fact, often not. The minutiae of our theological bent, our political views, our subcultural associations…more of these than we care to admit are autobiographical preferences at the end of the day. I wonder how much less prone we would be to anger and violence…and how much more prone we might be to healing…if we took the time to focus on our similarities instead of becoming so increasingly, arbitrarily polarized.

Because I think that it takes both sides of many of these perspectives to form a holistic truth, perhaps one of which none of us are capable of realizing on our own.

Well, except for the part where some people don’t like Macs. That’s just wrong…

Shared Waves

Last weekend was a family weekend, as we were able to slip out of town for a bit and see some family that we hadn’t been able to see in person for quite some time. The fact that we were on the coast for the trip, instead of depressingly inland…well, that was just a wonderful bonus.

The last time that I saw my nieces and nephew, they were young. Very young. It’s strange, isn’t it, how that last encounter with someone becomes the fixed image of that person in your mind, even though you know, logically, that they have changed significantly since you last met? This weekend, my nieces were as tall as me, and that is when the realization dawned that it had been nearly five years since I had seem them.

Five years, four major moves, one daughter and two deceased grandparents in between our encounters…and that’s just on our side of the divide.

I often feel trapped by time. That is, I feel as though time is moving so incredibly slowly for me, yet so briskly for everyone else. I always feel that I am being left behind, that I’m somehow chronologically arrested. When I see the evidence of this much change during what I have felt to have been such a brief period of time…and almost non-linear experience…I begin to truly appreciate how briskly life charges forward. Somehow, despite an almost deja vu sensation as this occurs over and over in my life, I’m always surprised by it.

Along with this, I always feel so isolated in my own experiences, to the point of being astounded when I discover how shared our lives are with each other, how much more we hold in common than we hold separately.

Friday evening after dinner, we were walking along the beach. This was a fun area, with lots of shops and restaurants, yet quiet, not overly commercial…a very nice area in coastal Virginia. About eight of us altogether, catching up on what we had missed over those years, and enwrapped in our conversation as will happen in these sorts of reunions. Someone was holding a wedding reception on the beach, and the revelry was contagious. As we walked and talked and laughed, I noticed a man with a camera to our left pointing his lens toward the rocky shoreline to our right, where a young couple was standing. That was when I noticed that he had taken a knee, and that she was in tears, nodding her head in an emphatic “yes.”

We had just walked past a proposal, inadvertently interfering with the photograph of the moment, but experiencing it nonetheless.

We applauded and cheered. In that moment, I remembered Karen’s expression years ago when I revealed a ring over dinner. I saw the man’s face, all smiles and exhausted, nervous relief, accepting our applause in a surreal moment, and I remembered how I felt that evening, when our waitress approached our table in the instant after I had proposed and realized what had happened.

I know nothing of that couple, other than the fact that they are beginning a new adventure together after that night on the beach. I’ve imagined text messages of a ring shared with friends, congratulations and libations shared all around, and I’ll always have the memory of her tearful face and his broad smile in my mind. For that split second, we shared our experiences. I had a privileged glimpse into that couple’s life, and I understood that moment at some level because I had been there. I didn’t talk to them, and likely never will, but I know something of them, and will cherish the fact that we unwittingly encountered that amazing moment.

I feel sort of bad that we messed up the photo, though…