Basement Garden

Chapter 5: first preview

shngrdnr — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:32:40 +0000

I’ve had a bit of a chance this week to return to sketching for the next chapter of The Boy. It’s been hard going getting back into it – I’ve had to swop my musical hat for my drawing hat, a process which arses my hair up fierce. Anyway, here’s a sneak preview of the drawings I have so far (click through for a full view).

Wreckage of Dreams: a Miniopera

shngrdnr — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:05:39 +0000

So, I haven’t posted anything here in a while. This is for a few good reasons. First, I got married. Second, we moved house. Third, we got married four days after we moved house. Fourth, the house we moved into was ready only ten days after the flat we moved out of stopped being ready. There’s been other stuff too, but that’s stuff that I don’t want to put on a blog. For my eyes only. Sorry folks. I’ve also been writing some music to enter into the English National Opera’s Minioperas competition. I somehow managed to get two scripts into the final ten, which utterly made my day, week, month. I figured that there was no good reason not to enter the music stage as well, especially as it might encourage me to write an extended piece of music and actually finish the damn thing. So this I have done – and here’s the result, based on my script Wreckage of Dreams. I have to say that the entire contest until now has been absolutely fan-bloody-tastic. I’ve met some really sound people and heard some wonderful tunes – the experience of hearing my words being set to music has been, frankly, and discarding all the fashion of cynicism, joyful. But for now it’s all done – so, it’s back to drawing for the next chapter of The Boy. Busy busy. More soon.

Chapter 5 sketching

shngrdnr — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:40:43 +0000

I’ve begun making the preparations for Chapter 5 – I’ve been ‘walking’ around the 3D model of the town I prepared last year and taking shots in preparation. Working into one of these images with Photoshop gives me a rough layout to work up on the drawing board.

Dear Esther

shngrdnr — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:14:49 +0000

I played Dear Esther around two years ago, I think. Possibly more. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played and definitely the best mod. The game involves no running, shooting, stabbing, driving, flying, blowing up or indeed down, no stomping, belching, inventorying, levelling up or in fact any concrete goals of any kind, save one: explore. You play a character visiting an island in the outer Hebrides. You explore the island. There are buildings and strange landmarks to visit. As you journey around the island, music is played (the music is beautiful, as far as I’m concerned, and worth the price of admission alone) along with a voice over recalling, perhaps, a car crash. Things aren’t quite clear; someone, certainly, is absent, and sorely missed. The mod was so successful that, when the original team decided to re-develop it – expanding the soundtrack into full orchestration, re-building the island in high-resolution – Valve, the makers of Half-Life, decided to give it a full release via Steam, their digital distribution network. It’s out in February – I honestly haven’t been this excited about a game ever. It’s given to be absolutely beautiful.

Evolution: The biggest lie ever told!

shngrdnr — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:57:20 +0000

Earlier today (and, in fact, yesterday too – but ‘today’ gives the whole episode a pleasing unity, so I’ll stick with it), I had an exchange with someone on Twitter about evolution. Their viewpoint could be summed up as, broadly speaking, religious. Here’s a little of the exchange which led up to this post what you’re reading now.

@revivalcebu2013: Anyone who thinks evolution is a fact, then it’s a fact that you have been fooled! Evolution is the biggest lie ever told! @shngrdnr: MT @revivalcebu2013: Anyone who thinks evolution is a fact it’s a fact you have been fooled! <True. Evolution, as a theory, *explains* facts @revivalcebu2013: unfortionately those facts are faked, read neutral papers please, not ones done by evolutionists, they lie! do your research @shngrdnr: I’m guessing any paper that disagrees with your views is non-neutral, right? @revivalcebu2013: do your own research and read the nonsense they write in evolution articles @shngrdnr: Since you seem happy to be ignorant of what evolution actually asserts & discard as ‘fake’ all that disgrees, I’ll pass. @revivalcebu2013: in other words: you have no answers to evolution how it works! let me give you theanswer: it does not work

So I wrote a good long post for revivalcebu2013. I posted it on twitlonger. I haven’t received a response yet, but I thought I’d post my semi-rant here – it’s been a while since I’ve added anything on the blog. Illness, both of my own person and my pc, has seen to that – I thought a short bit about evolution might be a nice way to get back in the saddle. I’ve added a few subtitles and links, but it’s pretty much as it was ranted. (If anyone notices anywhere I’ve gone wrong, let me know.)

Dear Revival

Revival, I hope you’ll forgive the long post. I also hope you’ll read it through – I’m not trying to insult you or patronise you. I simply want to give you a bit of an outline on evolution, and give you my take on your approach to the world it deals with. You’re denouncing evolutionary theory from a position of ignorance. This is fine – you’re within your rights doing that. But disagreeing with something on the basis of ignorance is the weakest way of disagreeing; it’s akin to la-la-laing with your fingers in your ears. You’d be better placed to state your case with some knowledge of what it is you’re criticising. For example, you asked me to show you a transitional fossil between ‘humans and apes’, presumably because you believe that evolution asserts that mankind evolved from apes. It doesn’t. Evolutionary theory asserts that human and modern apes both evolved from a shared ancestor. A fossil skeleton, found in 2004, has been identified as the likely last shared ancestor, and has been called Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.

Fakery flakery

Revival, I imagine you’re going to say that the skeleton of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus is faked. I don’t believe so. If you believe that the scientists who found the fossil would participate in such a forgery without being found out by the body of international scientists who would scrutinize both the evidence and their findings then I feel you’re deluding yourself. To be sure, scientific forgeries have happened. But we know they’ve happened because scientific papers are peer reviewed. You wouldn’t be able to cry forgery without the efforts of the very community you’re decrying as fakers, Revival (see the Chinese fossil entry under the year 1997 at the page linked above for an example). In crying ‘fake’ you’re also not meeting the argument square-on – in a sense, you’re acknowledging that you can’t meet the argument of the evidence, but can only discount the evidence (and this discounting itself on the basis of no evidence – it’s your word versus cold stone). Another example. There is a list of transitional forms in the fossil record available on Wikipedia; I linked it earlier. There are example of transitional species alive today – a lizard in Australia has been found, members of which living at high altitudes have begun giving birth to live young, rather than hatching eggs. Snakes and reptiles have transited from egg birth to live birth in the past; this is another example of that happening now. Evolution doesn’t merely assert that such changes happen, as you seem to believe – no more than a lawyer in court asserts that a murder has happened. The lawyer responds to the murder – which is an established fact, or else the trial wouldn’t be happening in the first place – by explaining the mechanisms by which it happened (and, at the same time, establishing or denying someone’s guilt). Similarly, evolutionary changes happen in nature. They have been observed ‘in the wild’ and produced under artifical conditions in laboratories. Animal species such as the domestic sheep can no longer breed with their wild forms; human intervention has meant that they’ve evolved into different species altogether. Evolutionary theory certainly doesn’t cause these changes, or even simply assert they do happen. Rather, the theory explains the mechanisms by which these changes take place. Think of it this way – disproving theories of gravity won’t for one second stop objects falling to earth when you let them go.

Theory theory

A ‘theory’, as in ‘evolutionary theory’, doesn’t mean ‘a hypothesis’. Check the dictionary. In science, a theory is a ‘a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena’. Colloquially, we do use the word ‘theory’ to mean ‘a guess’ – this is the second listed meaning in the dictionary link above – but in science, where an exactitude of language is necessary to ensure that its practitioners can have meaningful discussions, the word used for such a guess is a ‘hypothesis’. (Again, if you’re going to wade into a scientific debate, take care to learn the most basic levels of language before you do.) If evolution were a guessed explanation, rather than a set of principles intended to explain observed facts (such as the fossils and living species I mentioned above) it would be called ‘evolutionary hypothesis’. That it isn’t speaks for itself. This, ultimately, is the crux: evolutionary theory isn’t a guess without evidence. Evolution, like gravity, is a fact – it has been observed and documented thousands of times in fossils, living species (both in the wild and in the lab) and in simulations. This is to the extent that asserting these facts to be forgeries is tantamount to saying that there is a worldwide conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people across dozens of countries, disciplines and, yes, belief systems (many evolutionary scientists are Christian). If you want to believe this of course that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s a solid argument or criticise others for being ignorant when this conspiracy theory is a position that can only persist in wilful ignorance. Evolutionary theory serves to explain facts that already exist. No amount of arguing will annul those facts; they are, literally in some cases, set in stone.

Aquinas: world as book

Revival, I’d like to suggest respectfully that, if you believe that the world is created by a benevolent creator, which I do not, then surely the most reasonable approach to that creation is to try to find out as much about it as possible, in order to understand the mind of its creator. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church Father, argued that the world was like a book; in reading it, one comes to know its author better. To deny facts of this creation in order to fit your own pre-conception of its nature is arrogant in the extreme. One should seek to understand the world’s creator – which, again, I do not believe in – by exploring the vast, intricate world that has been created, not denying huge swathes of it to fit your own desires.

A page stage by stage

shngrdnr — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:03:32 +0000

End of the week, and it’s been a busy one. I’m in a play that’s on in about a week – A Christmas Carol, and I’m playing Marley’s Ghost, which means I essentially get to be as scary as possible while covered in more chains than a fetishist’s pushbike, which we all know is what Christmas is really all about. I’ve also been writing a short story – 5,000 words in, and I’ve reached a point where I’m uncertain as to whether I’m really going places, or wandering hopelessly off the point in the pursuit of pretty lights. I also finished off a short comic, a four-pager, based on a lucid dream I had about a month or so ago. One of the most intense, vividly-rendered dreams I’ve ever had, in fact. I’ll let the comic tell the story (it’s posted on The Boy with Nails for Eyes‘ Facebook page, and in a revised form on my shockingly neglected Flikr page). In the fullness of time, I’ll sort out a proper home for it. Here, I wanted to show some of the stages the artwork went through as the comic was being put together. I suppose what follows does contain spoilers, but that the point of the comic wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to capture an experience. In that, I guess it is to more narrative-driven comics what poetry is to prose. In any case, spoilers are spoilers; I doubt they’ll spoil the experience of reading, but now’s the last chance not to.

Making a page

As ever, I used Bristol Board paper. I began by pencilling in the images using an F pencil. (I think I heard somewhere that this is an uncommon choice, but I like the fact that an ‘F’ leaves sharp lines but doesn’t smear when erased. Plus I’m willfully wayward.)

At this point the panels all have pencilled borders; however during the drawing process I decided that I would leave the edges of the panels without drawn borderlines. This meant that the artwork would bleed into the paper rather than being sharply divided. This would make the images leach into one another in terms of their flow, hopefully giving them a suitably dream-like quality. The first stage after the pencilling was the application of an inkwash. I use diluted Windsor & Newton Indian ink – it’s waterproof, so I can work over the dried ink with more layers without the first layer running. The next image is what followed after the application of a couple of inkwashes, the first a broad wash using a large brush, using a fine brush to pick out the details afterward.

After the inkwash dries, I erase the pencil lines that are leftover, just leaving the wash and the remaining pencils beneath them (for this reason I tidy up the pencils as much as possible before applying the first wash – afterwards is too late, trying to rub out through the ink will at best fade it or at worst smear it). Then I start working into the inks with progression of pencils, moving through heavier and heavier tones before finishing up around 5B or 6B. Some highlighting with chalk pencil and a little white acrylic follows .

The next two stages happen together, but I thought it’d be interesting to present them separately. In Photoshop, I add a few light effects. I haven’t got images for this bit but, roughly, this is done by creating a ‘light beam’ layer mask. A vertical line of white dots of varying sizes is drawn on a black background. For extra variation in the resultant beam, the dots can be set to 50% opacity and drawn overlapping. Then wind effect is applied, several times, before a motion blur is applied in the same direction. I don’t use a set amount of blur; it depends on the length of the beams I’m after. This mask is then applied to a layer of bright yellow,set to a suitable layer style such as overlay or screen – again, it depends what look’s required. I then free transform the mask to fit the image and mask out the bits that aren’t required, and this is the result.

Following that (or, more accurately, at the same time, but what the hey) colour is added. This is something I generally feel out differently each time, but my general technique is to build up layers of colour with different layer styles, so that their interactions with each other and with the grey tones create a variety of tones, bringing depth to the image. I use layer masks to restrict some effects to certain areas (colouring the trees below with a light wash of green for example), also altering the levelling and saturation of the results as I go.

Finally the text is added. In this case, I began with a typical serif font, but found that the overly neat, ordered look didn’t fit the story. A swift check at dafont revealed PhontPhreak’s Handwriting, which almost perfectly suited my purposes. I say ‘almost’ because I found the stems of letters like ‘d’, ‘h’, ‘l’ and so on to be too short to be easily discerned from the other lowercase letters (the ones that eschewed vertical ambitions), while some letters, such as ‘u’ and ‘n’, were rather small in comparison to the others. This required going through adding longer stems and altering individual character sizes by hand, but the effect of this (admitted slog) was to make the font look still more handwritten than before. I still don’t like it would deceive anyone who looked carefully, but the legibility was improved, which was the central point after all. Anyway, all that being done, the full thing can now be read on Flikr. I (semi-)regularly post things like this to The Boy with Nails for Eyes Facebook group, including preparatory sketches and images-in-progress, so ‘like’ or whatever gubbins it is or will be when the whole system’s replaced, if you want to keep up to date. Cheers!

Chapter 4: planning sketch for the town panorama

shngrdnr — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:40:26 +0000

I’ve been taking a break from The Boy with Nails for Eyes for a few weeks, and I intend to do nothing more on it for a few weeks more, while I work on a few other, shorter projects. So I’ve got most of Chapter 4 planned out, and I’ve started a few preparatory sketches (at root doing anything seems to be a way of avoiding doing something else). The image that the sketch above is a plan for will be large panorama showing the central street-plaza of the unnamed town. In the distance (low-level spoiler alert) can be seen the Bunker, where much of the later action will take place, and to the right can be seen the Bridge. The image will be the biggest of the comic so far, four sheets of A3, so one metre eighteen centimetres long, or thereabouts (that’s over three foot ten inches in the old money). I’m hoping this will be an eyeball kick in the next chapter, which I’m also thinking will be pretty much without text (I’d write ‘silent’, but there will be music). More images as they arrive – I intend a longer post next showing progressive images for one of the shorter projects I mentioned – but then, I’ve made promises about posts before…

Why does it still have to be said that comics are a medium not a genre?

shngrdnr — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:54:51 +0000

In today’s Guardian, an article was published entitled ‘Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood‘. It was written by Rick Moody, whom I presume to be the American novelist and short story writer (the Graun doesn’t provide any details in the byline). In the article Moody discusses the current output of mainstream Hollywood cinema using Miller’s comics, and the films which have followed them, as his focal point – decrying them as ‘cryptofascistic’. Frank Miller is something of a talking point these days, mainly stemming from his blog tirade against the Occupy movement, which hardly needs to be rehashed. Basically, he doesn’t like it. He calls the individuals within the movement “louts, thieves, and rapists”, and deems them traitorous “pond scum” in the face of America’s “war against a ruthless enemy”, that is, the forces of militant Islam. (The ones that, despite the death of their most prominent figurehead, countless drone strikes and often Benny Hill levels of incompetence, are still out to get you, your grannie and the contents of your biscuit barrel.) I was frustrated by Moody’s essay. He made sweeping generalisations. He dressed up mundane points in needless, arch academia-speak. He didn’t actually explore the subject matter he was discussing – Miller’s comics, or Hollywood cinema – in any great depth; he made his points in the way that a stone creates ripples on the water it skims across.

Comics: just for kids

The broader point of Moody’s article is that the current social system found in America – and echoed to a greater or lesser extent throughout the West – requires a propaganda system in order to be maintained. This propaganda arm, Moody claims, is dominated by Hollywood; and Hollywood, Moody writes, is cryptofascist (that is, it only deviates from fascism insofar as it’s afraid of causing offence):

Miller’s hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining.

On the whole I have little quibble with this, though I think it’s glibness does little service to the point Moody’s trying to make. There’s no conspiracy to it: it’s only natural that mainstream Hollywood cinema, in being a product of corporations, will naturally espouse a worldview that is sympathetic to corporate interests – or at the very least not antithetical to them. What Moody doesn’t do is claim that cinema as a whole is similarly fascist-in-denial, only that (monetarily colossal) subset of it deriving from the Hollywood mainstream. By contrast, he has an apparent inability to draw a similar differentiation between comics as a medium and mainstream American comics. I guess they could be called, by analogy, ‘Hollywood comics’ (the same companies make em):

[300 is] a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys. At least comic books themselves are so politically dim-witted, so pie-in-the-sky idealistic as to be hard to take seriously.

To be unable to differentiate between a medium – a method of transmitting information, but in this case specifically a story – and a genre – a category or type of story – is woefully ignorant. Like any other medium, a comic can be any genre its author desires: autobiography, memoir, comedy, tragedy, historical, adventure, thriller, science fiction, romance, westerns, fantasy… That any writer (assuming I’ve identified Moody correctly) can be so misguided about so fundamental a point is pretty damn staggering. Has Moody, for example, heard of Maus, Persepolis, One Bad Rat, Epileptic, From Hell, The Arrival, Britten & Brülightly, Love and Rockets, Mail Order Bride…? Yet Moody’s supposition goes further, revealing even an ignorance about the medium’s origins. Comics were not made ‘expressly’ to appeal to ‘pre- and post-pubescent boys’ any more than novels were ‘made’ expressly to appeal to middle-aged accountants suffering from concussion and a bad case of wind. As I see it, new media arise from the interactions of three components:

the capabilities of technology,
the desires of creators, and
the existence, or otherwise, of an audience.

To suggest that a medium is created for a specific audience smacks of conspiracy nuttery, and implies to me that Moody has allowed Hollywood committee-writing to infect his own thinking to too great an extent. It annoys me when the word ‘comic’ is used synonymously with ‘light’ or ‘immature’; it’s like having sand in my brain. It shouldn’t need saying: comics are no more or less capable of intensity of feeling or elevation of thought than any other form of expression. What’s more it’s a highly democratic medium, requiring unlike film only paper, stuff to make marks on paper and a brain to be created (as with so much else, a computer is a useful but still optional extra). Its freedom from the need for a massive budget means that it is relatively free from the tentacles of corporate influence (in the form of product placement, celebrity sheen and so forth). Anyone can make a comic, should they wish to. Not everyone will make a good one, but all those who can, can; the same couldn’t ever be said of a film. Moody, comics are a hope against the top-down culture promulgated by Hollywood. They deserve not only your respect – no more or less than any other medium – but – insofar as they are offer a potential counter to mainstream propaganda, from the bottom up – your support. It’s easy. All you have to do is read a few.

Capital punishment is only part of the problem

shngrdnr — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:07:41 +0000

Writing in yesterday’s Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill highlighted an apparent hypocrisy surrounding the recent, unsuccessful campaign to prevent the execution in Georgia of Troy Davis. The article is short, and makes its point pithily. Here’s what Brendan had to say:

Yesterday in America, two men were executed, but you will probably only have heard of one of them: Troy Davis, who was killed in the state of Georgia for the murder of a police officer. The other executed man, Lawrence Brewer, put to death in the state of Texas for murdering a black man in 1998, has barely featured in the news at all. Unlike Davis, he did not win the backing of Amnesty International and its trendy supporters.

There follows a little fluff about the lack of activity on Twitter about Brewer in comparison to Davis, by which O’Neill implies a criticism of online activism especially. He soon returns to his central argument:

But if you are opposed to the death penalty on principle, as many of the Troy Davis campaigners claimed to be, then you should be just as outraged by the execution of Brewer as you were by the execution of Davis.

Once again, Twitter comes in for some flack: “Even James Byrd Jr’s son asked for the state of Texas to show mercy to his father’s killer, but no army of bleeding-heart Twitterers backed him up.” The argument is disingenuous; it’s unlikely that the execution of an apparently innocent man would cause equal outrage to that of a man whose guilty has been proved. This is human nature. But, as Brendan says, the principle should remain the same for both, that capital punishment is wrong; if the belief is held on principle, that is.

The airbrushing of Brewer from yesterday’s heated discussions on the death penalty speaks volumes about the Troy Davis campaign. It seems pretty clear that it was motivated, not by a principled, across-the-board opposition to the state killing of citizens, but rather by campaigners’ desire to indulge in some very public moral preening.

O’Neill’s conclusion:

What message should we take from this disparity in campaigning? That Troy Davis did not deserve to die but Lawrence Brewer did? Such moral flightiness, such brutal arbitrariness, reveals much about today’s very changeable campaigners against the death penalty.

On the face of it, despite the partisan manner in which O’Neill addresses the issue (and why not? A writer is entitled to preach to their own choir) the criticism that is raised is in itself a substantial one, and should be addressed. So here goes: As well as the killing by Georgia of Troy Davis, I oppose the killing of Lawrence Brewer by the state of Texas, which happened on the 21st September 2011. Now that I’ve committed myself to this position, I should probably explore the background of the Brewer case. Here we go. In 1998 Brewer, a member of a white supremacist gang, along with John William King and Shawn Berry, tied James Byrd Jr, a black man, to the back of a pick up truck with a length of chain. Apparently, Byrd was known in the local area – Jasper, a town 125 miles north of Houston – as someone who lived on disability support; witnesses testified that he was seen riding in the bed of a pickup truck a few hours before his death. Finding an isolated stretched of road Brewer, King and Berry beat Byrd and dragged him for several miles until he was dead. Billy Rowles, the state trooper who found the body, at first thought he’d encountered animal road-kill. (Here’s an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which deals with the case in more depth). Nevertheless, I oppose the death penalty for Lawrence Brewer. This is not because I consider the crime he committed to be excusable; I think it’s cruel and abhorrent. The outrage the murder caused in the US, and the changes to the law it brought, implies that most people naturally share this opinion. I oppose the death penalty because I simply think that punishing a killing with a killing results from and, in turn, reinforces an image of justice that is shallow, ineffective and, in its focus, essentially nonremedial. In essence, I believe it won’t fix the problem. It’s been said of freedom of speech that, in supporting it, sooner or later you’ll end up supporting the right of arseholes to say the things that arseholes say. The things that arseholes say being, of course, a large part of what makes them arseholes. Likewise, opposing the death penalty on principle means opposing the execution of the guilty as well as the innocent. Many have given solid reasons as to why Davis’ sentence was dubious at best. Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against him later recanted their testimony. Others stated under oath that they had witnessed another man committing the killing; others revealed that they’d been cajoled by police into testifying against Davis, while still others were found to be illiterate, and hence incapable of reading the police statements which they had signed (more here). On this basis, to convict Davis, let alone condemn him to death, is utterly misguided. But I also think to make these points concerning guilt or innocence (however correct or well-intentioned) is to miss the point, and acquiesce to a too-narrow field of discussion. I agree with O’Neill as far as to say that opposing the death penalty for Davis only on the – highly probable – basis that he was innocent is misguided – though very far from, as O’Neill seems to think, unworthy. What is centrally important, to me, about the both cases – Brewer’s and Davis’ – is not a question of guilt or innocence – judgement of individuals – nor the fact that the sentencing of the latter was enacted on evidence that was readily apparent as being flimsy, insubstantial – judgement of the appropriateness of capital punishment in some cases – but rather that the meting out of capital punishment in both cases sought in no way to address the essential problem: the originations of the crime itself. In fact, it’s interesting to me that Davis’ case is, in some ways, a weak basis on which to argue against the death penalty on principle, because the essence of the problem in Davis’ case is not the execution itself, but that it represents the end result of a grievous miscarriage of justice. That miscarriage is, in itself, the essence of the problem, with the extremity of the consequent punishment only adding to the horror, the disgust of it. Brewer’s case, on the other hand, does not appear to have been so miscarried; his guilt is not disputed. But, in respect of the fact that his death will in no way address the causes of the crime, the essential problem to be solved, I think his case speaks more loudly of the issue. The enactment of the death penalty stems from an image of justice that is predominantly retributory: that its ultimate end is to mete out appropriate punishment. A form of balance is sought – crimes of increasing magnitude are met with sentences of increasing magnitude culminating, in some places, in a life for a life. There is a certain logic, a symmetry, to this; but the aim of such a justice system is essentially focussed on addressing symptoms, not causes. Slamming barn doors is no more effective in catching horses than simply shutting them. The issue comes about from a conception of human behaviour – especially with respect to ethics – that places altogether too much emphasis on personal agency and individual choice. A quote by the sister of James Byrd, Clara Taylor, in the San Francisco Chronicle article linked to above is exemplary of this attitude:

“He had choices,” she said Tuesday, referring to Brewer. “He made the wrong choices.”

We live in a society wherein the individual’s ability to exercise choice – especially rational choice – is a central conceptual foundation. As a consumeristic society, it’s perhaps inevitable that advertising and marketing provide a solid example of this. The presentation of advertising to consumers is justified on the basis that adverts – so long as they are governed by standards of accuracy and fairness – provide a means by which individual consumers can make informed choices as to which products to buy. It’s telling that, in a database of commonly-used advertising slogans ‘used by the top ten agencies in London’, the most ‘overworked line’ is ‘The natural choice’. Indeed, the word ‘choice’ itself is reportedly the twentieth most-used word in advertising slogans; other words on the list include ‘best’, ‘better’, ‘most’ and ‘only’ – all terms that, in implying a comparison, also imply a choice-making process on the part of the viewer. And yet, at the same time as reinforcing the notion of individual choice, the producers of adverts make use of techniques that tacitly acknowledge that the decisions of human beings – which products to buy, which brand to commit to – derive from deeper determining factors in the human mind. Ad campaigns don’t focus on essaying the strengths of the product, or even its uses, but rather in constructing the notion of an ideal existence – replete with comfort, leisure and success – to which ownership of the product, by implication, will provide access. Otherwise, why such innovations as product placement, celebrity endorsement, the ubiquity of ‘sex sells‘ (as a wise man once said: ‘They like it. And they’re shagging.‘)? If the rational decisions of the individual consumer are the prime motivator of their buying habits, why employ such suggestive angles of approach? Why not simply state why the product is (a) effective and (b) affordable, and leave it at that? The same principle is applied in politics. Party image, as manifested in the form of the leader, is the selling point, rather than policy. In a situation such as the UK’s, in which the three central parties all agree on the central role of politics – the primacy of the economy and a shared, broad subscription to the goals of consumerism – and differ only in the niceties within this narrow spectrum, how else can parties be sold? I recall, for example, the mild furore over David Cameron’s 2010 NHS campaign posters; a great deal of the commentary was upon the extent to which ‘Call-me-Dave’ (an Ad-man’s air if e’er I heard it) was airbrushed, rather than the content of the policy issue. (In fact, this misguided approach was necessitated by the campaign itself, which provided no concrete policy, but only a glib and, as it turns out, misleading commitment to ‘protect the NHS’. How?) This is why stories that politicians may have, for example, engaged in dodgy activities such as drug use, are seized upon with such glee by their opponents. It isn’t a case of style over substance but, all too often, style supplanting substance, politicians supplanting policies, to the extent that style becomes a focus of criticism equally valid to substance. We are asked to exercise choice between a set of alternatives whose differences are, in the main, vanishingly narrow, while being courted and groomed by the interested parties in ways that cynically acknowledge the inability of individuals to exercise disinterested, rational choice at all. So here, after this wide diversion, I can return to the issue of justice. Again, Clara Taylor’s words, concerning Brewer, her brother’s murderer: “He had choices; he made the wrong choices.” (I feel I should emphasise that I don’t choose to repeat these words because I believe the relatives of murder victims don’t deserve justice – only arseholes could hold such an opinion – but because Taylor’s words serve as a perfect summary of the conceptual foundation that underpins the kind of justice that is applied.) Looking into his background, it’s interesting to note that Brewer, prior to Byrd’s murder, served a prison sentence for cocaine possession and burglary; having been released in 1991, he broke the conditions of his parole three years later and was re-incarcerated (Brewer apparently spent most of his adult life in prison). While in prison Brewer met John King, later one of the co-murderers of Byrd; it’s reported that he, Brewer, joined a white supremacist gang whilst in prison, in order to safeguard himself from other inmates. This is attested to on Wikipedia but the citation is broken, unfortunately, so I don’t know whether to trust the information. Elsewhere, however, it is reported that Brewer’s racist views, at the least, did develop while he was inside. Other sources besides report that King, Brewer’s aforementioned friend and fellow murderer of Byrd, did join a white supremacist gang while in prison, having suffered repeated gang-rapes at the hands of black inmates. The same source states that King’s exposure to this abuse was the result of a conspiracy between the very gang he later joined and the prison’s guards. King was released in July 1997, Brewer in September. In June of the following year, Byrd was killed. Following the discovery of the crime, the house shared by Brewer, King and Shawn Berry, the third murderer, was found to contain a great deal of ‘racial separatist organization paraphernalia‘. Had he not been sent to prison for his earlier crimes, it appears reasonable to suggest that Brewer would not have been exposed to the extreme racism therein; certainly, King would not have suffered the sexual abuse that he did suffer, and perhaps wouldn’t have come to be possessed by racial hatred. It hardly stretches the bounds of credibility to suggest that the murder of Byrd would not, as a consequence, have occurred. That perhaps the suffering of Taylor, of all of Byrd’s relatives and friends, need not have occurred. This is not to say that the earlier crimes that Brewer committed – burglary, drug possession – didn’t warrant the attention of justice but that, when a later, much more serious and horrific crime seems to have been committed as a consequence of earlier incarceration, there may be a wider problem concerning how we view accountability, agency, ‘choice’ and ‘influence’, and what constitutes an effective remedy, that needs to be considered. The three-strike rule currently operating in 24 US states (under which one is required to be sentenced to life imprisonment for committing a felony, no matter how trivial, after two prior convictions) makes sense only by subscribing to the notion that an individual’s repeated crimes derive from repeated choices, not from the wider conditions within which they find themselves lodged. That these conditions can include the penal system itself is a final, cruel irony. The problem with the death penalty is, to me, as said, an extension of a wider problem: that our idea of justice derives from a concept of personal accountability that places all the responsibility for a crime on the person who committed it, without seeking to address the wider conditions that preceded and influenced them. Their choice, we say, without acknowledging that an individual’s choices cannot be unconditioned, but derive from countless influences external to themselves and antedating the act for which they are to be punished. But if we acknowledge this, doesn’t it make more sense to seek to address the conditions that gave rise to the crime – how to deal with minor criminal offences, drug problems, social inequalities – than to slam the door when it’s too late? How to prevent suffering, rather than simply trying to balance suffering out. So, one more time, just to be clear: I oppose the death penalty for both Troy Davis, innocent, and Lawrence Brewer, guilty.

A counterpoint of view: John Gray and religion vs science

shngrdnr — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:41:21 +0000

John Gray’s latest article for the BBC’s A Point of View – Can religion tell us more than science? – begins with an account of the conversion of novelist Grahame Greene:

[Father Trollope, Greene's converter] was a convert who became a priest and led a highly ascetic life, and Greene didn’t warm to him very much, at least to begin with. Yet the writer came to feel that in dealing with his instructor he was faced with “the challenge of an inexplicable goodness”. It was this impression – rather than any of the arguments the devout Father presented to the writer for the existence of God – that eventually led to Greene’s conversion. The arguments that were patiently rehearsed by Father Trollope faded from his memory, and Greene had no interest in retrieving them. “I cannot be bothered to remember,” he writes. “I accept.”

I am struck by the fact that this is an argument from authority – there is no actual content to the story that seeks to convince beyond the status of its protagonist, Greene. The great novelist, Gray seems to say, is impressed sufficiently by his interlocutor’s benevolence that he is willing to abandon – indeed, can’t even be bothered to invoke – rational argument. So why shouldn’t you be? Huh? You and your tenacious need for justification. You reek of effort. What’s wrong with you? The questioning of the validity of rationalism in the debate surrounding religion and science is a thread throughout Gray’s article. The crux of his argument is laid out in short order:

We tend to assume that religion is a question of what we believe or don’t believe. It’s an assumption with a long history in western philosophy, which has been reinforced in recent years by the dull debate on atheism. In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there’s no longer any need for religion.

This is, Gray informs us, the viewpoint of James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough: “[s]tarting with magic and religion, which view the world simply as an extension of the human mind, we eventually reach the age of science in which we view the world as being ruled by universal laws.” Gray takes the trouble to inform us that Frazer was considered by Wittgenstein as being ‘was much more savage than the savages he studied.’ Again, an appeal to authority – something of a Clash of Authorities, in fact. A wrestlemania slugfest between Wittgenstein and Frazer in which we are invited to question Frazer’s assertion of the development of scientific reason out of religious superstition (as if such development could happen in any other fashion) simply because Frazer mightn’t have been, in the estimation of another human being, a very nice person. The moral standing of an individual has no bearing on the accuracy or otherwise of their statements, Mr Gray. This doesn’t mean that Wittgenstein is incorrect; merely that, should he be correct, this doesn’t make Frazer wrong. Gray continues:

The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe. This is where Frazer and the new atheists today come in. When they attack religion they are assuming that religion is what this western tradition says it is – a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.

I would suggest to Gray that the viewing of religion as a credo – a set of propositional beliefs to which one gives assent and adherence, such as ‘We believe in one god, the father almighty’ in the Nicene Creed – is not a mis-step by the advance of rationalism, but an innovation that allows religious doctrine to be assessed from the exterior. The ‘new atheists’ don’t necessarily consider religion to be ‘a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification’; they are employing scientific rationalism to assess religious claims on even-handed grounds. In the past, the debate on religion – I’m thinking specifically of the debate in the Western world – was confined to a juggling of ideas within an arena that assumed the correctness of the basic religious assertions: god exists, has created the world, maintains a day-to-day interest in it, has revealed himself in the form of certain religious texts, entered the world as his son, and so on. The division of science and religion into separate strands de-sacrified these assertions, and made them equivalent to all other propositions in being assessable by the same rational yardstick. This is, to me, a wonderful innovation, rather than a misguided assumption. But, as Gray notes, not all aspects of our lives are so governed by rationality: “Art and poetry aren’t about establishing facts.” This is undeniable. Anyone who sets out to win an argument by painting is in for trouble. Yet, in the context of Gray’s argument, there is something else going on in the background here that deserves to be unpicked. Because certain realms of human activity – the creation of art, literature, music – aren’t governed by rational considerations in their enactment, the line of reasoning runs, why should religion – which is a similarly irrational activity – be subjected to rationality in considering its claims? This is a risky strategy: presuming religion’s irrationality to denote it as being outside the reach of rational criticism. The creation of a work of art – of whatever level of merit – is, at bedrock, a personally-motivated action. It is spontaneous. It is undertaken and directed according to the artist’s own desires and is an expression of her personality, background, and desires. It may take place within the confines of social convention – in its attitudes to the nude figure, for example – but it is not impelled by these conventions; if anything, by the artist’s reaction to them. It is impossible that any work of art should – in its manifestation – be impelled by anything other than the artist. Where it does not is where it compromises. A statement of religious belief, on the other hand, is a statement of assent by an individual to a set of propositions that derive from a source external to themselves; that is, an established religious creed. It’s worth noting that the word ‘religion’ derives from the Latin ligare, ‘to bind’ or ‘to fasten together’; a religion binds or ties together a group of people through commonly-held beliefs and commonly-enacted practices. It’s worth noting that the extract from the Nicene Creed given above didn’t begin ‘I believe…’ but ‘We believe…’. Even Luther, who decried the notion of a priestly mediator between god and the individual believer, emphasised the need for parents and teachers to inculcate and expound upon the tenets of Christian faith in their charges. Religious belief is, therefore, of a subtly different order of activity from art. Art, at its best, asserts and spontaneously reinforces the character of an individual; religious assent subjugates the individual to the demands and strictures of a social group. Mormons don’t refuse caffeine because they feel spontaneously internally impelled to do so; they do so because their external social background has inculcated within them the notion that imbibing caffeine is a sin. Having questionably established religion’s artistic right to escape rational assessment, Gray turns his focus to science:

Even science isn’t the attempt to frame true beliefs that it’s commonly supposed to be. Scientific inquiry is the best method we have for finding out how the world works, and we know a lot more today than we did in the past. That doesn’t mean we have to believe the latest scientific consensus. If we know anything, it’s that our current theories will turn out to be riddled with errors. Yet we go on using them until we can come up with something better.

That Gray can’t see this facet of science in glowingly positive terms rather than, as he implies, a cause for certain doubt about its validity, is staggering. As noted above, because religious statements require adherance to an externally-framed set of principles and propositions, it brings with it taboos – areas into which no inquiry is permitted. It actively works against development, the questioning of base assumptions, the refinement of its assertions, because it hasn’t arrived at those positions on the basis of evidence, but via the barnacle accumulation of tradition.

Science isn’t actually about belief – any more than religion is about belief. If science produces theories that we can use without believing them, religion is a repository of myth.

To liken religion to myth, like much else here, is disingenuous. As noted, a religion is, at root, a set of beliefs and practices commonly held amongst a social group. A myth, by contrast, a form of narrative which embodies an idea or principle concerning natural or historical phenomena. Gray quite rightly states that ‘you don’t have to believe a story for it to give meaning to your life’. This is true. But to find meaning in a myth and not believe in it is not religion; indeed, to argue that one can find meaning in a story without believing in it is, as far as I can tell, an argument against religion. If you’re not a Christian, you can read the Bible as a myth, and take from it what you will. If you are a Christian, the Bible becomes a historical document, varying only in the degree to which it is literal or analogy; a limit is set.

The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories. There’s nothing in science that says the world can be finally understood by the human mind. If Darwin’s theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren’t built to understand how the universe works. The human brain evolved under the pressures of the struggle for life. Through science humans can lift themselves beyond the view of things that’s forced on them by day-to-day existence. They can’t overcome the fact that they remain animals, with minds that aren’t equipped to see into the nature of things. Darwin’s theory is unlikely to be the final truth. It may be just a rough account of how life has developed in our part of the cosmos. Even so, the clear implication of the theory of evolution is that human knowledge is by its nature limited.

Mr Gray, Darwin’s theory hasn’t been ‘the final truth’ for decades. His theory was formulated in the Victorian age; since then, we have had the benefit of advancements and discoveries in geology, paleontology, genetics, climatology and a dozen other disciplines to provide evidence that has allowed refinement of the theory and demonstration as to how it manifests in the natural world. Evolutionary theory is one of the most factually-supported and widely-accepted theories in modern science. To call it a ‘rough account’ is to reveal a throughgoing ignorance of modern evolutionary theory that could be overturned by half an hour in a library or, for the more sedentary, on Wikipedia or various channels on Youtube (I’m thinking of Thunderf00t, for example). To do as Gray does and imply a criticism of the theory on the grounds that it may only be fit to deal with ‘our part of the cosmos’, as if any theory could develop in accordance with events to which it had no access, is simply fatuous.

Science hasn’t enabled us to dispense with myths. Instead it has become a vehicle for myths – chief among them, the myth of salvation through science. Many of the people who scoff at religion are sublimely confident that, by using science, humanity can march onwards to a better world.

Onward, Mr Gray: fatuouser and fatuouser. A myth as in ‘Science hasn’t enabled us to dispense with myths’ is not the same thing as a myth as in ‘Instead [science] has become a vehicle for myths’. The first makes reference to, as already said, a form of narrative which embodies an idea or principle concerning natural or historical phenomena; science hasn’t allowed us to dispense with these in the same way that laws governing murder haven’t prevented burglaries – it’s not their intention. The second reference – science as a ‘vehicle for myths’ – means simply ‘an untrue story or rumour, a fiction or lie’. Essentially, people who believe that science will save us believe an untruth. We know that a myth, a narrative, is untrue, unreal, when we hear it; it is by dint of this that we can find meaning in a myth, without believing in it. This is as you rightly say, Mr Gray. But ‘salvation through science’ is only meaningful if it is believed in, we don’t locate any meaning in it above and beyond the fact that we consider it to be true. This justifies assessing ‘science as salvation’ (as in, whether it’s a myth, a lie, or not) not in terms of whether we find meaning in it, as in mythic narratives, but in terms of how much it accords to the truth of things. I should add that deeming all individuals who disbelieve religion to be, without fail, automatic believers in scientific salvation is a dangerous leap, Mr Gray. I’m not religious, but I still have grave doubts about the ability of scientific progress alone to bring about a better world. But, that said, any branch of endeavour that has allowed me to live a life twice as long as my forebears, with levels of health, leisure and activity well into old age, all previously undreamt of, is doing okay in my book. Take light-bulbs – just consider how much less you could do with your life without the availability of cheap, instant illumination after dark.

Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

This being the case, Mr Gray, surely religion – even when it is not at its dogmatic worst, a subjugation of an individual to a social group’s beliefs and practices – should be avoided as willfully? The sometimes failure, to me, of ‘new atheism’, is its refusal to engage with religion in its more sophisticated assertions or forms, and its apparent desire to jettison myth and spiritual inquiry as keenly as dogma and religious conflict. It is a charge commonly laid against anti-science (specifically evolution – Einstein gets no stick from the dogmatic) religious apologists that they consider overturning Darwin to be equivalent to overturning modern evolutionary theory, without engaging in the true form of evolutionary theory as it currently stands. It is a mistake that Gray has repeated in his article. Yet the stridency of the argument against religion has gone so far as to deem irrational all forms of philosophical speculation; one can make spiritual inquiries without believing in anything so crude as a spirit world. Here, I think Gray and I agree (but only here, I also think). If advances are to be made in the debate – surely, something that all its participants should desire – then respect has to be paid to the complexities and subtleties of both sides; it should be acknowledged that the debate extends beyond wider poles than reactions for or against monotheism, or even theism. I guess I agree with Gray insofar that I think, if you need a religion, you shouldn’t feel bounded by the strength of the atheist argument against theistic belief to refuse all philosophical or spiritual thinking. But at the same time I don’t think, in a scientific age, the fatuity of things like crystal healing or spirit mediums are supportable. But if you feel the need for… hell, call it ‘a philosophy’, ‘a system’. If you feel that need then declaring adherence to a religion is, equally, the last thing you want – and going to the church, synagogue, mosque or temple, as Gray prescribes, will afford little else.