*Why Movie Criticism?

Why is movie (and pop cultural) criticism such fertile ground for popular political analysis? It’s certainly something I engage in whole-heartedly.

You may have read about sportswriting becoming a liberal profession, and while that is interesting too, this is a fairly different dynamic. Sportswriting has long produced far-ranging criticism because it’s such a Rorschach blot. Sports is so empty and so chaotic (and so emotionally charged) that what we read into it says a great deal about ourselves. Like financial opinionating, there’s a lot of information and little hard theory, so it’s the perfect sea for projecting your ideology onto. (It’s hard not to see the ideology in the hilarious Fire Joe Morgan.) This is not entirely a good idea.

Movie-criticism-as-political-analysis doesn’t come out of the same tradition, especially when you devote thousands of words to decade old movies. There will always be a market for adding to the hype of an upcoming movie by saying How One Actress Is Racist or Defending The Casting Of A Racially Charged Role, but that’s not the same as thumb-suckers about movies past.

In fact, presentism is always a problem in philosophical writing (and no there’s not a hard line between political and philosophical.) Bloggers write essays on timeless subjects, people ooh and ah over them for a few days... and that’s it. If you’re very lucky you get as remembered as Tolerance For The Out Group, but usually such insight porn gets no more than a few days shelf-life. Who links to Less Wrong or The Last Psychiatrist posts anymore?

Instead, virality demands insight-porn about ongoing events. Tell us how your theory of anomie explains Trump. Look at feminism through the lens of a gamerbro’s bad breakup. Explain how Hillary Clinton is the perfect incarnation of the posthuman subject (oops I need to write that one.)

However, as most comedians and philosophers know, fuck topicality. Your “insight” is now trapped in a context that will seem over-rated and over-discussed next week, and completely foreign and opaque in five years. You’ve given your deepest thoughts a shelf life, and a very short one at that.

(This was much of the drive behind Vox’s “explainer journalism card stacks” where topical content could be evergreen and easily refreshed for whenever a subject comes to the fore again. I think history has given that approach a resounding “eh”.)

So no one’s going to read your dry thesis on social cliques and judgment, or they’re going to forget your fragile hot-take on Mencius Moldbug once everyone stops caring what Lambda Conference is. What are you to do.

The answer is movies (or, if everyone has read it, some books. Or a play if for some reason everyone in the country becomes obsessed with a Broadway hit.) If you write a political analysis of the themes in a movie - not whether a certain actress is in political trouble, that’s just gossip, but about the movie itself - then it feels like a live story. But it’s also a story people will understand decades later, as one they know the details of and can even immerse themselves in by rewatching the movie.

Fear and Terror

Dictionary.com defines fear as:

a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc.,whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

and it defines terror as:

intense, sharp, overmastering fear:

Ie, just more fear.

This seems incorrect. Not just in my personal parlance, but in how these words are used by people. For instance, from a TUOC post the other day about small towns dealing with opiod epidemics.

When a town mishandles its overdose deaths by criminalizing addicts and harassing people who call in overdoses and beefing up a police force with a record of violence, then I’m bothered by the senseless tragedy of the subsequent deaths but there’s a sense of ‘okay, we know what to do about this’. But when we’ve done all the things we know to do about this and things are still getting worse, then that’s just kind of terrifying. 

Fear is this anxious dread that something is coming to get you, that could be avoided or prevented. It's the worry that your boss dislikes you so he's going to ignore your effort and find some reason to fire you. It's the anger at puritans who are treating a drug crisis like a morality problem rather than a health problem. It's the anxiety that someone hates you and you're going to have to spend a whole party being in the same room as them. It's thinking someone has been trailing you this night for hours and no one will hear you if you scream.

Sometimes fear is overwhelmingly strong causing you panic attacks, and sometimes it's just a background presence that adds subtle anxiety to your interactions, ergo "size of effect" is not the way to define the boundaries of fear. It's more about the specificity of the emotion, and the belief that the bad outcome could be avoided if only people didn't do bad things. If only the small town bigots had listened to you about the costs of prohibition, if only your boss wasn't sexist, if only everyone had listened to you when you said a serial killer is loose...

Fear then serves a powerful purpose: it motivates you to fix things, and provides you with a visible emotion to get others on board with your goals. This doesn't mean that it isn't real, it is very, very real in your head, as real as love or hunger or anger. As they say, fear is the mindkiller.

Terror is even worse, but also more true, and therefore in some ways better. It's when we transition from an uncertain dread to an overpowering certainty. Certainty that something is wrong, and everything is wrong. Even if everyone in town had the most enlightened attitude, drugs would still destroy your community. Even if this stalker is thwarted, death will take you some day soon. Even if your boss relaxed about you, the entire industry is dying and you hate your job with every fiber of your being. Terror is the moment in a horror movie when a giant hand comes out of nowhere and smashes the brave hero.

Terror is realizing you never had a chance. It's no one's fault and there's nothing to do, because those options presuppose that other outcomes were even imaginable.

Fear is worrying Satan has a devil set aside for you. Terror is looking upon the glory of all Creation and realizing how small you are.

Fear is being upset that your children won't honor you in your old age and after you die. Terror is contemplating how long the universe will go on after you and everyone you know has died.

You get the point. Terror either drives us into depressive nihilism, or insanity. It is not nearly as helpful an emotion at accomplishing our goals as fear is. But it is more accurate. Fear is usually an illusion, often of self-importance, that covers up the true terror of the situation.

If you press through the terror, and accept it, then you can come out the other side with a realistic assessment of your situation. You can make actual choices. That is very powerful, and what more, is the cure for the original fear. Once you've accepted something a thousand times worse than what you were worrying about, then the original anxiety has less hold on you.

You could stop being afraid of Green Party voters who sabotage the Democratic candidate. The really terrifying prospect is the millions upon millions of voters who chose an idiot fascist, or who couldn't be bothered to choose at all. And that they are a tide sweeping many nations. Where is your anxiety at Jill Stein compared to all of that?

It is very hard. There's no denying that. There is a comfort in the old fear, that there was one really evil and ignorant bad guy who polluted the whole town into dealing with drugs badly. And pushing through something that looks for all intents and purposes like insanity, is not ever socially or personally pleasant.

But the true reward of existential freedom that is your sole birthright, lies on the other side.

Accelerationism: Dos and Dont's

Accelerationism is the word for the political tendency among radicals to encourage the worst among their enemies, and to be dismissive of short-term material gains that fall short of a revolution. It's a form of logical argument, and you can see this form replicated among many political movements with different concrete values.

It's leftists who argue that Trump will be good for revealing the ugly face of nationalism; it's right-anarchists who thought the ACA would be so bad it would undermine support for all of big government liberalism; an environmentalist would rather a park become polluted and ugly and get people to focus on corporate actors who contribute to climate change.

The current society is mired in a capitalist ideology dedicated to making everyone miserable. It cannot be redeemed or purified. Should measures like increased Medicaid funding, or a cool black man as President, be supported as making lives better and the oppressed happier, or should we withhold our support because they distract from the only goal that will get us out of this system: anti-capitalist revolution?

That's the question of accelerationism in a nutshell. Things are getting bad, do we make them get bad faster to bring about the inevitable end state sooner? It's an accusation that gets through around between center-leftists and far-leftists a lot.

But we are really talking about two different things, and that is key.

***

In purely material terms, should you help the worst off, or should you refrain in order to stoke the fires of their anger?

This is obviously a dumb question.

There is no guarantee the revolution is coming. There might never be a revolution. Or the revolution might just empower a totalitarian dystopia. Or your neglectful immiseration of people might be entirely irrelevant to that revolution.

The world is very large, and very complex, and incredibly uncertain. Especially when it comes to political tactics. Who the fuck knows what works. Who knows if your long-term goal is really a good idea. We're not talking "a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush," we're talking "a bird we're about to catch is still better than two thousand birds in a bush on top of a high mountain in another country that someone told you about once."

Your ethical responsibility is to proximate results. Help the people you can, do things that you know will work and that you can see the results of. Resist ideologies and political theories that say "actually doing this mean or easy thing serves the greater good in the very long term" and who never seem to actually pay out the greater good. Focus on specificity.

So yes, increased Medicaid funding is great. No ethical left should oppose it.

***

But there's a difference between helping everyone, and making a situation smoother and more pleasant.

For instance, David Simon, creator of the Wire which dramatizes amazingly well how the drug war hurts black communities, is opposed to marijuana legalization.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed. 

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

(Yes, I'm assuming everyone who reads this is pro-legalization, at least in terms of ending the brutal Drug War.)

If you think Simons is being too blinkered here, let's imagine a more extreme scenario: What if we legalized heroin and instituted addiction-rehabilitation programs for the families of Congresspeople?

Now, the families of Congresspeople are people too. Their pain is real. If one of them goes to jail for possession, that is bad. And if they are addicted, humane and effective rehabilitation is better than jail. So from a pure harm reduction stance, how can you object to this?

But we of course know the incentives it sets up. It is good that Congress labors under the same laws as the rest of its citizenry. They should pay the cost for these laws like the rest of us, so that if the laws are cruel and unjust they will notice and get rid of them. A world where their kids don't go to jail for possession is more pleasant to them, but it's not beneficial for everyone.

That may be absurdly extreme, but it's not very different from "legalizing the drug white people do." The Drug War is cruel, invasive, and counter-productive - exempting some upper classes from it allows them to forget that experience, and to Other the people who do experience its vicissitudes.

This is, for instance, the problem with tax deductions for employer sponsored healthcare. It guarantees healthcare to the people our ruling class interacts with, leaving out and isolating the people our rulers avoid anyway, making it even harder to get any help for them. This is why universal programs are so important.

That accelerationism, to pull down the benefits some people enjoy that allow them to ignore the pain of the larger masses, is good and just. It is right to pull off the pleasant mask of capitalism or state violence, so that everyone sees its obscene underneath.

So, when faced with the question of, "do I want to make things worse in order to encourage far off radical solutions", we need to figure out whether it's a policy that helps everyone, or a policy that merely covers up the existing harsh reality, and then decide our accelerationism.

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@balioc replied:

I strenuously object to this framing. 
The “actually helping” versus “just making things smoother” dichotomy is not a real thing.  Or, rather, it is – but, seen for what it is, it is not a thing that you would support as a foundation for ethics or policy.  I certainly don’t.   

***** 

The examples of “anti-smoothing” policies that you support, on an abstract level, function exactlythe same way as the examples of “just causing pain” policies that you despise.  They hurt people unnecessarily, on the grounds that the hurting will spur the world to productive action, while relieving the hurt would lull the world into a sense of undeserved complacency.  As you say yourself: the white stoner kid, and the heroin-addicted Congressman’s child, are enduring real and morally-salient suffering at the hands of the legal system.  By choosing to let that happen to them rather than patching the system to prevent it, we are saying “we care less about your suffering than about some hazy unknowable distant prospect of greater systemic change.”  We are deciding that “allowing the upper classes to forget [the systemic problems],” which is a very abstract sort of problem that may not result in anything concrete at all, matters more than the ruination of kids’ lives.  Calling it “anti-smoothness” is a hypocritical fudge.  It is accelerationism, pure and simple.   

And on the flip side…well, if you really want to ensure that the rich-and-powerful aren’t allowed to forget about the big systemic problems, the best way to make that happen is to get the non-rich-and-powerful to riot.  Which works better if you take away all their stuff.  It doesn’t have to be a vague, heighten-the-contradictions “maybe things will hit rock bottom and then start going up again” kind of plan; it can be very tactical and very concrete.  This is the strategy espoused by all manner of radical groups back in the ‘60s, and today.   

***** 

So…what is the actual difference between the examples on your first list and the examples on the second list?  Who the victims are.  That’s it.  In the “unacceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “worst-off.”  In the “acceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “powerful.”     

You’ve reinvented the concept of privilege here.  You have divided people into classes and said “these people’s suffering is deontically unconscionable, but these’s people’s suffering doesn’t matter as much, it can be countenanced for the greater good.”  Bad universalist, no biscuit.   

***** 

The actual answer that yields the result you want is something you’ll like a lot less.  It’s not a Supreme Ethical Principle; it’s a calculus.  It’s the rationalists’ “shut up and multiply!”  Usually accelerationism is bad, sometimes it’s good, and the difference is (a) what the costs are and (b) what the expected payout is.  If we’re talking about laws that apply only to save Congressmen’s kids, well, the costs of not implementing them are (relatively) low and the amount of acceleration that you gain is relatively great.  If we’re talking about laws that give much-needed healthcare to millions of poor people who are not right this moment in the process of fomenting revolution, the costs of not implementing them are almost certainly too high.  

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So if you only paid attention to the two (point five) examples, and not to the abstract description, then yes I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion. It is in fact wrong to go “haha, the suffering of privileged people like Congressional kids, white UMC dope smokers, and employed people (??) does not matter.” That would not be ethical, and so you can be pretty sure that’s not what I meant, especially as it also contradicts the thesis (which you didn’t directly address, except by noting the absence of applicable examples.)

I should provide more examples then. But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Accelerationism is an attitude we see frequently in political disputes. (Even Trump today is rejoicing that the AHCA failed, because its explosion will create pressure for future repeal.) It comes up often enough that saying accelerationism is always wrong (or always right) seems overbroad. There are too many cases of sick systems that need to be broken, rather than given short term balm. We need a differentiator.

Your solution is to “do the math.” But our ability to make these sort of cause and effect calculations is incredibly bad. And all attempts at making the sort of super-complicated predictions this requires just open our thinking to the sort of biases Less Wrongers know so well. We’ll choose the most comforting narrative and tell ourselves we are doing cold, hard math.

Consequentialism is hard, yo. If you’re talking trolley problem thought experiments where you know the probablistic outcome of all actions to the third significant figure, yeah go do that. But we don’t usually know it, but must usually make decisions anyway.

The different option I offer is an aesthetic differentiation. Is the harm you are preventing (or not) primarily material deprivation, or is it just a disruption of harmony? Is it unpleasant?

An example might be the election of Trump. Besides the possibility of nuclear oblivion, most of the histrionic liberal reaction to him was how unpleasant he was (at least relative to most other Republican candidates.) He said racist things, he said sexist things, he was cavalier about assault, he lied blatantly, it was just an endless parade of obscenities. And so when evaluating “Trump vs Cruz” (or even Kasich) we have to ask will he make the policy results that much worse, or will he just make political life more unpleasant, uglier, and rough?

And if we admit it’s the latter, is that really inaccurate? It’s more likely that Trump represents the truth of Republican positions (contradictory idiocy motivated by gut feeling that flatters white, rich Christians as the center of the world), and will accelerate the proper reaction to that. Not Trump as “easier to beat in the general”, but Trump as an acceleration President. The commentators who predicted that Trump would be hugely offensive but on material consequence not very different from a responsible, moderate Republican… have so far not been very wrong.

As @redantsunderneath mentioned in his film taste recently (which I share), the great thing difficult and visceral movies can do for us is to teach us to lean in to discomfort. We can differentiate between something that is actually hurting us and evil, or something that is disgusting or disharmonious. 

Sometimes this aesthetic improvement means “we have cleaned up the area around the powerful decision makers”, like kicking the homeless and porn shops out of Times Square, or legalizing drugs their kids are using. Even if there is some material component to that, we can tell the difference between what the primary vector is: actual broad harm reduction, or adding rosy tints to the windows of the subjective actors.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking “is that friend or commenter who I am very annoyed at hurting me, or just making me uncomfortable?”

To return to one of my original examples: I am not actually saying “repeal the employer-based tax deduction for healthcare to see what universal program Congress passes in its place.” We know the harm that would come from that. It was just an example of a policy that reduced harm, but did even more than that by reducing all the harm of being uninsured within sight of the wealthy and influential, and so also stalled further progress. We can understand this dynamic, and in the future try to build our programs around the dispossessed rather than around the affluent and hoping they work their way down to everyone.