To be kind rather than to be cruel; a rebuttal of Kenneth Kidd

When I read this today (Oscar the cat and the science of kindness) I was indignant and dumbfounded that someone could be so fucking dense (emph mine): 

"In a world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty, why is there still empathy, sympathy and kindness? There must be some  evolutionary advantage, otherwise those traits would have long since vanished. And yet we are so often squeamish when faced with acts of kindness, as if they were soft-headed embarrassments and signs of weakness. Or worse: mere narcissism and self-interest masquerading as something else." 

WTF?  What has been written here is psychopathic. The implication being that it is advantageous to be 'selfish & cruel', especially 'genetically speaking' - which is another way of saying the best way to reproduce is through rape. The author (Kenneth Kidd) seems oblivious to the fact that humans are social creatures, and that we appreciate those who show us kindness. I mean, reproduction does mostly occur between people who like each other at the time, does it not? I'll grant his position is merely one of argument, and that he's not actually as psychopathic as all this is. However .... 

He uses the cat (quoted below), and the quoted above, as a build up to stating that humans are social creatures. But he doesn't take that as a given, rather, he quotes sources. In other words, 'research suggests' that humans are social creatures, but not movie nights, dating, pub rounds with friends, etc. 

There's no reason at all for the traits of kindness and empathy to have vanished, and every reason for them to have coexisted. What should make us squeamish is that such thoughts could be expressed at all in such a manner. It takes for granted that our society is cruel, as if this is a norm, rather than the aberration. A society of 'overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty' is a failed society, and it used to be termed barbaric. 

Nowadays we tend to look more kindly on barbarism, obviously. 

Further on in the article, he states: 

"Are we naturally kind or selfish egoists at heart? 

Much flows from how you answer that question, how, on balance, you view human nature. 

Consider, for instance, the Christian tale of the Good Samaritan who helps out an injured Israelite, someone he doesn't know, even though Samaritans and Israelites are long-standing enemies. 

This is arguably the pre-eminent tale of Christian kindness. It seems to imply that empathy, compassion and caritas, or brotherly love, are natural human dispositions. But then, as Phillips and Taylor note, St. Augustine happened along with a profoundly different view. Rather than being native to humans, caritas was deemed to be divine, bestowed by God. 

Without God, there could be no kindness or other virtue, because we'd lost the possibility of being naturally good with the expulsion from Eden." 

This to me seems entirely idiotic. (An aside dear reader: I hope you and I see eye to eye, and that you are as dumbfounded as I am. If not, I am left to explain, as I am, why this is shite. But I also feel the need to explain regardless, so that there's some documentation in  future databases that not all hearts had been so eclipsed in our time). 

It is true that the Romans were cruel; and that there was much cruelty in the past. This suggests the so called 'genetic' line of thought which equates optimal reproduction with rape. It was an accomplishment of Christianity (which may have its roots in Buddhism) and a legacy which we used to take for granted (before we once again became blasé about torture) that Western society became more self-consciously gentle, in its abandonment of slavery, torture, and tyrannical government. 

Christian civilization, remembering the torture of the forums, wrote their history to make the Romans cruel and inhumane. However, Christ's story of a stranger helping anoher did not need academic analysis to be made clear to its first hearers; it was in a challenge to hardened hearts, one that Palestinian supporters aim toward Israelis today - treat everyone as you would like to be treated and expand your notion of family to include all, as we are all children of God. Though the Samaritan and Israeli were traditionally enemies, they transcended their tribalism to be brothers of a species. This was clear two thousand years ago and was written down for that reason: It was a call for early Christians to recognize one another as members of a family of God. 

The soul hungers to be treated with respect and kindness, and as such this is quenching a thirst that has gotten used to the dryness of stone hearts. Augustine, a repentant sinner, found his source of kindness in the Church, and he did not know what we know about the history of humanity: that it did not begin 4000 years ago in a garden. Augustine layered that story with a lot of metaphoric meaning, but he also was incredulous to the idea that salvation could happen without God because he himself had been a great sinner and could not understand his transformation into an asexual hermit without projecting that into this myth. Which is to say that Augustine universalized his biography and considered his early years of sinfulness to be an example of normal human life without God. 

With that clear, let's leave Augustine out of 21st Century discussions shall we? 

Kidd's rhetorical question appropriately answered would tell us that humans are complicated, not simple, and that we have the capacity to be both kind and cruel. That we are naturally both kind and egotists, but that we are taught to exagerate our egotism. Our education system - our society - encourages the later; it rewards us when we are cruel. This talk of 'squeamishness' is an example of how it discourages kindness. We could have a society of beautiful gentle people, but we'd have to treat our children better and forgo all this bullshit with regard to grades, sports and celebrity, and really come down hard on them when they mock fat & ugly people. An example of the season: we might stop purposefully decieving them about Santa Claus, only to chalk up their later disapointment in learning the truth as a rite of passage.

Instead we have a society that values ignorance and hatred, that glorifies militaristic discipline as honourable, assigns undue virtue to the symmetrical, and that sorts its citizens into "winners" and "losers". 

The examples Kidd uses to argue for kindness as an achievement of civilization (rather than a repression) come from the rise of the militaristic nation state: after Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (the need to police the encouraged cruelty of a cruel society) he writes "Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — were all fighting to restore kindness and compassion as something natural to the species." Notice that he used the word fighting to describe their work. 

To summarize my point here: people are both kind and cruel: crueler with strangers than they are with family. Throughout the West's recorded history, there was a tendency toward authoritarian governance which encouraged a dog-eat-dog model. Christianity was revolutionary in that it encouraged the kinder side of human nature (until it too became authoritarian). The Western model of the nation-state is militaristic, further encouraging the unkind, and now we've had four hundred years of that nonsense, so that it seems "natural" that the unkind is the norm, whereas the empathic is the un-evolutionary aberration. In a "world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty" there's not enough discouragement of this behaviour in favor of more gentle minds. 

"[Oscar the cat] makes regular rounds, entering each room to smell and look over the patients. If all is more or less well, the white-breasted tabby moves on to the next room. If he instead snuggles up to a patient, purring and nuzzling, the nurses immediately start calling relatives. Oscar won't leave until the patient has breathed his or her last. 

Now, the intriguing question is not so much how Oscar can make such accurate prognoses, but why he lingers, holds this vigil. Is Oscar comforting himself or the patient? If he were upset, sensing a bad situation, wouldn't Oscar be better off elsewhere, getting petted? And if he's not upset, why is Oscar so generous, receiving nothing in return? Oscar not only appears to feel empathy, but to act on it, to show kindness." 

It doesn't surprise me at all that a cat would behave in the way described. What I find surprising is that one feels the need to explain it at all, and to seek a selfish explanation for it at that.

The semiotics of Michael Jackson's aesthetics

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Today's Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on "the creepy painting" of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo's David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.

This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery's The Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson's 45th birthday.

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As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I'd imagine it acquiring the name 'The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson', and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century - something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos. 

CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I've known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir's documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn't surprise me that Jackson's taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he's a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:

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And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

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I found the slide show through a search  for "David Nordahl". The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it's a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn't stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason - consider this painting "The Nordahl Code". Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I'll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.

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Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson's thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as 'the king of pop'. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.

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Jackson as a knight, or as a king ... a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call 'contemporary' has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that 'tasteless' celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.

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All of this came together in the late 90s for his History album, which included the construction of 10 statues, one of which was floated down the Thames. That he seemed to take this idea seriously is part of what made him so abhorrent. 

What is fortunate is that Jackson's megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:

Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos 'in memoriam', that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.

Video Phones

Science-fiction has been the avant garde of industrial design since the 1939 World's Fair, if not earlier. It has been a medium to market strange ideas (aliens from outer space, our minds being computer generated delusions), to forewarn of us of potential dangers (the computers take over, the robots nuke us), but through the pragmatics of using experimental design ideas to build unfamiliar worlds, it serves as both a promotional vehicle and fertilizer of new markets. Science fiction envisioned how computers might be used, which in turn taught us how we might be able to use them, which in turn inspired engineers to make them that way, which led to us using them the way we do. A video-phone in late 20th Century science-fiction television and movies becomes early 21st Century Skype. 

While the idea of a 'videophone' is both old-fashioned and going nowhere as a device, 'Skyping' is alive and well. We are living with 'videophone' technology but it is just is not being mediated by landline telephones that sit on our desks; instead it is being mediated by our computers. Further, the ubiquity of cellphones means that there's currently no market for 'video phone booths' as depicted in 1968's 2001:A Space Odyssey when Dr. Haywood calls his daughter from the space station. 

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Or the scene in Blade Runner, when Deckard called Rachel at the bar. This scene defines the concept of the 'videophone' that I grew up with. In the context of 1982, this is a video-phone call. 

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In 1989's Back to the Future II, Marty gets an AT&T mediated video-call from his colleague Needles (played by Red Hot Chilli Pepper's bassist Flea) on his flat-screen television. Interestingly, the flat screen tv seems the only thing that came true from that projection twenty years ago. (Since 1989, we have not developed flying cars nor a highway system for them, nor are we using fusion reactors for our vehicles, and hoverboards still aren't happening. Nor do we have holographic cinema billboards.)

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Back to the Future II was set in 2015, and imagined the fax machine would have much more prominence that it attained, replaced by computers and heldhelds with their killer-app, email. Blade Runner was set it a post-ecocidal (if not post-apocalyptic) Los Angeles of 2019, where no one had cellphones and CRT televisions printed out Polaroids of their screen-capture.

One thing of note is that all video-phone scenes filmed in the 20th Century included 'end credits':
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2001

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Blade Runner

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(AT&T of course is the network that runs the (20th Century futuristic) iPhone in the United States.)

With regard to video-phones, it is not inconceivable to me now that by 2019, (that is, within ten years) you could have novelty Skype booths set up in bar, and for a few coins ("$1.25") or a credit card swipe, make video-calls to girls you just met and invite them out for a drink. Deckard's phone call may not being as unrealistic as it still seems.

In the meantime, we are already carrying video-phones in our pocket, allowing us such activities as described in this song by Beyonce: