Full disclosure: I haven't seen Avatar. In fact, I still haven't seen Titanic. Perhaps that ship has sailed, sunk, been lost, and discovered already?
Fuller disclosure: I didn't watch the Oscars; I haven't watched them since 1958, and I wasn't born until 1969. I don't watch award shows. I find them repulsive. But that's just me: I have a real disdain-hate relationship with elaborate, pretentious televised boredom.
Fullest disclosure: I did watch seven minutes of Oprah's pre-Oscar thingamajiggy (thing-uh-muh-jig-gee) on Saturday night. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not going to deny it. I was waiting to watch a re-run of "Castle", which is an underrated and rather enjoyable show (the anti-"CSI Miami" of crime shows) that hasn't been ruined (yet) with guest appearances by James Cameron or Oprah.
Anyhow, Cameron was joined by Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington, and they made deep, heavy observations about Avatar and related topics. So deep. So heavy. Like a book of poetry by Britney Spears:
Read it again: "If we could go and take the perspective of nature and look back at ourselves, that's what the film is doing and by the end of the movie you're rooting for nature." And how is nature doing, James? Does she visit often? Call? Send you birthday cards? Hang with you and the family at the mall on Saturday? Hmmm.
This is what Bruce Thornton calls "romantic environmentalism," and to say that it is philosophically confused and intellectually bankrupt is probably far too kind. Thornton, in his exceptional book, Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (ISI, 2000), completely shreds the sort of slushy thinking and mushy mulling practiced by the embarrassingly self-congratulatory Cameron and Crew. Of course, to be fair, Thornton has never directed or produced a "big commercial movie" with a "message," but I'm not holding it against him. He is a professor of classics and humanities, and has read a lot of books and studied much history, which isn't as cool as zipping around Pandora, but saves a person from saying utterly ludicrous things to Oprah. However, that is probably beside the point, since the Empire of Oprah was built on the backs of celebrities filled with inordinate amounts of self-love and New Age poppycock.
Thornton, in a chapter titled (what else?), "Romantic Environmentalism" (pp. 91-129), notes that an "unholy alliance of scientific authority with Romantic therapeutic irrationalism is one of our most potent sources of false knowledge. The central fallacy of environmentalism is its distortion of the relationship of humans to nature, and its projection of human values and concerns onto an amoral material world." He points out that environmentalists tend to have a warped anthropology, which fails to appreciate the role of reason, culture and religion in making humans, well, human. "What makes us recognizably human, then, is not what is natural about us but what is unnatural: reason and its projections in language, culture, ritual, and technology; self-awareness, conscious memory, imagination, and the higher emotions; and, most importantly, values, ethics, morals, and the freedom from nature's determinism that allows us to choose, whether for good or ill." He highlights three attributes of humans that distinguish them from every other creature (including Hollywood celebrities? He doesn't say.): culture, free will, and consciousness.
A few pages later, Thornton describes this "paradox of environmentalism": "it indulges a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism and anthropomorphising even as it claims that it wants to 'decenter' humans from its ideology and to consider nature in its own terms. But nature has no values, no ethics, no morality." And, a bit later, noting the obvious (well...) point that "nature cannot provide any values for humans," he writes: "Hence most environmentalists, as the books below testify, are necessarily consistent anthropocentrists: they must project human values and concerns onto a nature to which such things are irrelevant. No matter how presumed anti-anthropocentrists try to run away from what they are, every corridor ends in a mirror reflecting their humanity." And:
In the end, if I understand Cameron correctly, he is proud to have created a wildly successful movie for the masses that tells the masses they are the enemy of nature (and everything good), they should feel guilty for being such, and they would, at least in theory, be better off losing to nature—that is, going extinct. Which leads to my concluding quote from Thornton:
• Al Gore's secular clericalism at the service of "human redemption" (March 1, 2010)
Fuller disclosure: I didn't watch the Oscars; I haven't watched them since 1958, and I wasn't born until 1969. I don't watch award shows. I find them repulsive. But that's just me: I have a real disdain-hate relationship with elaborate, pretentious televised boredom.
Fullest disclosure: I did watch seven minutes of Oprah's pre-Oscar thingamajiggy (thing-uh-muh-jig-gee) on Saturday night. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not going to deny it. I was waiting to watch a re-run of "Castle", which is an underrated and rather enjoyable show (the anti-"CSI Miami" of crime shows) that hasn't been ruined (yet) with guest appearances by James Cameron or Oprah.
Anyhow, Cameron was joined by Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington, and they made deep, heavy observations about Avatar and related topics. So deep. So heavy. Like a book of poetry by Britney Spears:
James: I guess I'm most proud of the fact that we made a big commercial movie and it played by the rules of a big commercial movie—we reached a big global audience—but we did it with a message. And I would even argue that some of the success of the film is based on the fact that people are feeling this other level to it. It's connecting them to nature, it's connecting them to a sense of an important cause.When I saw and heard this originally, I instantly had coffee shooting out my nose. My cats fled for their furry lives and my wife started to call the men in white coats. I explained to her the reason for my extemporaneous impression of an instant latte machine in the teacher's lounge at Valley High School. She very reluctantly hung up the phone.
Sigourney: I think that's what so wonderful is that people come up and the first thing they say is, "I've never seen anything like it, and it's so moving."
Zoe: Yeah, I think about a month ago I took my niece and she's only six—and we did talk about this, about how it might not be appropriate for kids under a certain age—but a 6 year old, they get up every 20 minutes to go to the bathroom . For 2 hours 40 minutes, she never got up, never uttered a word. It touched her in such a way that I'm driving her home and I'm like, "So do you want to talk about it?" and she's like, "I think I might need a moment." There was this peace. She got it, it made her feel.
Sam: Well, you listen to a song, okay? The first time you listen to a song you get off on the beat or the way it's put together or the way the band plays it. The first time you see this you get blown apart by the emotion of it, the world that you've created, all the special visual effects. But you only keep going back to the song over and over again if the words actually hit your heart, and people aren't just coming back to this movie twice or three times. We're talking to people who've seen it five or ten times.
James: The film asks us to look at ourselves as human beings from the outside, really if you think about it, from nature's point of view. If we could go and take the perspective of nature and look back at ourselves, that's what the film is doing and by the end of the movie you're rooting for nature.
Read it again: "If we could go and take the perspective of nature and look back at ourselves, that's what the film is doing and by the end of the movie you're rooting for nature." And how is nature doing, James? Does she visit often? Call? Send you birthday cards? Hang with you and the family at the mall on Saturday? Hmmm.
This is what Bruce Thornton calls "romantic environmentalism," and to say that it is philosophically confused and intellectually bankrupt is probably far too kind. Thornton, in his exceptional book, Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (ISI, 2000), completely shreds the sort of slushy thinking and mushy mulling practiced by the embarrassingly self-congratulatory Cameron and Crew. Of course, to be fair, Thornton has never directed or produced a "big commercial movie" with a "message," but I'm not holding it against him. He is a professor of classics and humanities, and has read a lot of books and studied much history, which isn't as cool as zipping around Pandora, but saves a person from saying utterly ludicrous things to Oprah. However, that is probably beside the point, since the Empire of Oprah was built on the backs of celebrities filled with inordinate amounts of self-love and New Age poppycock.
Thornton, in a chapter titled (what else?), "Romantic Environmentalism" (pp. 91-129), notes that an "unholy alliance of scientific authority with Romantic therapeutic irrationalism is one of our most potent sources of false knowledge. The central fallacy of environmentalism is its distortion of the relationship of humans to nature, and its projection of human values and concerns onto an amoral material world." He points out that environmentalists tend to have a warped anthropology, which fails to appreciate the role of reason, culture and religion in making humans, well, human. "What makes us recognizably human, then, is not what is natural about us but what is unnatural: reason and its projections in language, culture, ritual, and technology; self-awareness, conscious memory, imagination, and the higher emotions; and, most importantly, values, ethics, morals, and the freedom from nature's determinism that allows us to choose, whether for good or ill." He highlights three attributes of humans that distinguish them from every other creature (including Hollywood celebrities? He doesn't say.): culture, free will, and consciousness.
A few pages later, Thornton describes this "paradox of environmentalism": "it indulges a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism and anthropomorphising even as it claims that it wants to 'decenter' humans from its ideology and to consider nature in its own terms. But nature has no values, no ethics, no morality." And, a bit later, noting the obvious (well...) point that "nature cannot provide any values for humans," he writes: "Hence most environmentalists, as the books below testify, are necessarily consistent anthropocentrists: they must project human values and concerns onto a nature to which such things are irrelevant. No matter how presumed anti-anthropocentrists try to run away from what they are, every corridor ends in a mirror reflecting their humanity." And:
As with biodiversity, so with all the values that environmentalists, including Al Gore, celebrate in their books—they are none of them created by nature or of concern to nature, and so none of them is "natural." Likewise with the causes of social justice most environmentalist espouse along with their concern for nature: racism, sexism, poverty, inequality: all are meaningless in nature's terms. There is no equality in nature, no justice, "no covenants between wolves and sheep," as Homer said. All of these ideas and qualities—beauty, harmony, awe, reverence, justice, equality—have their origins and meaning only in the human mind and in human culture. This means that our relationship to the natural world must be defined, not in natural, but in human terms—of what will promote human values and well-being, of what will ensure a sustaining environment for those to come after us. Thus we should avoid degrading our environment not because of nature, but because of the humans who need clean air to breathe and water to drink, fertile soil to grow food, and natural beauty to nourish their souls.There's much more, but this brings us back to to the "flaccid pantheism" (to borrow again from Thornton) of Cameron. His babbling about looking at humans from the perspective of nature is, first, meaningless; it assumes the goodness and helpfulness of seeing things from the viewpoint of nature, but this assumption is a projection of human beliefs that do not exist in nature. It is exactly the sort of whacked anthropomorphising that Thornton calls onto the metaphysical carpet. And if you are "rooting for nature"—that is, rooting against humanity—you are either a fool, a traitor, or a suicidal maniac; in truth, you are probably a pathetic mixture of the three: a foolish, traitorous suicidal maniac. Not that Cameron wishes to commit suicide: he is far too full of himself to think of such a thing. But his "message" is ultimately suicidal and anti-human.
In the end, if I understand Cameron correctly, he is proud to have created a wildly successful movie for the masses that tells the masses they are the enemy of nature (and everything good), they should feel guilty for being such, and they would, at least in theory, be better off losing to nature—that is, going extinct. Which leads to my concluding quote from Thornton:
As a variant of the myth of nature-love, deep ecology can perhaps satisfy the yearning for meaning felt by many anxious moderns who no longer find in traditional religion a sustaining narrative that can make sense of their lives. But considered as a practical program for negotiating the impact of humanity on the environment, deep ecology offers nothing but useless and destructive knowledge.I think Thornton is too kind. The environmentalism espoused by Cameron, Gore, and Co. does not satisfy the yearning for meaning, but pretends for a while to fulfill that yearning, all the while distorting further man's understanding of himself, nature, and God. This is why Benedict XVI stated, in Caritas in Veritate, that "the book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society" (par. 51).
• Al Gore's secular clericalism at the service of "human redemption" (March 1, 2010)
Loved this post, Carl! Thank you for clarifying for me what is wrong with all their environmentalist blathering. I notice that in all their moralizing about how bad humans are for the environment, they never volunteer to get rid of themselves -- just other humans that they find odious, like unborn babies and social/political/religious conservatives, for example.
I also detest elaborate, pretentious televised boredom, which is one of the reasons I haven't had cable or watched TV at all since 1997. Oh, and I haven't seen Avatar, either, and probably won't, unless I really, really need a time-filler after it comes out on DVD. *grin*
Posted by: Laura | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 06:01 AM
The Oscars are meant to hype Hollywood and the studio star system. It's one long, elaborate advertisement.
The 'icky' part is that the evil air-heads take themselves seriously. As if impersonating a prophet or a pope and reciting imagined words thereof make one a prophet or a pope.
They live in a faux world both on and off the sound stage. Sadly, they hugely contribute to the cesspool culture in which we live.
Worst: They are rich enough to afford $10 a gallon gasoline and heating oil, and 80% higher electric bills. Being green doesn't hurt them - they can still afford the private jets. Most of their adoring (adoration is the daughter of ignorance) fans are not so affluent. The stars' blind faith in environmentalsim at all costs could unleash hell on earth. They believe it's worth the price. The fans aren't cool. They don't count.
Last movie I saw was the third hobbit episode. It was epic fantasy and everyone knew it.
Posted by: T. Shaw | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 06:36 AM
At first it seemed this post disregarded natural law, but the last paragraph cleared that up. Nature does have an order to it because of teleology, and man is part of it. Man does not exist apart from nature, but, as the Pope said, must be considered as part of it. There is a hierarchy to nature and man and the angels are at the top. Adam was commanded to till and keep the garden. He gave names to all the animals. Man is to care for the gift but use it as well. He is part of the teleology of nature and has a duty to order it towards the greater glory of God. Notice the Holy Father does not speak about rights, but man's duty, and primarily man's duty to other men, that is primary, the rest of nature is secondary - That is a key point that is often missed.
Posted by: Blake Helgoth | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 07:24 AM
From the "viewpoint of nature", what exactly is the entire "carbon footprint" of this movie from the idea, the production, promotion, talk shows, to the hordes of vehicles still flocking to see it? How does nature "feel" about that? What hypocrites. "...you love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces."
Posted by: Stache | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 11:39 AM
"In the end, if I understand Cameron correctly, he is proud to have created a wildly successful movie for the masses that tells the masses they are the enemy of nature (and everything good), they should feel guilty for being such, and they would, at least in theory, be better off losing to nature—that is, going extinct." i think you should see the film before writing stuff such as this...!!
Posted by: Phillip | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 12:09 PM
The award shows are nothing more than all the glitterati of showbiz engaging in collective, um, 'self abuse', if you get my meaning.
In my opinion, this also means that people who watch these things are engaging in voyeurism.
Posted by: Mike in KC, MO | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 12:17 PM
I haven't seen the movie, but I saw someone point out the irony that a movie about human greed and excess had a budget of $500 million (or whatever it was).
Posted by: Mulder | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 12:24 PM
When I heard that it cost $300 million to make this movie, I was stunned; I thought of how many people in the world are hungry and homeless. It seems to me a very extravagant expenditure when so many people are suffering. For what? So we can sit in a movie theatre with our 3D glasses and be entertained? Sad...
Posted by: Gary | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 01:58 PM
Praise the Lord for writing this! Thanks so much Carl for this thought provoking post. I can always count on a something good coming from your site. May the Lord continue to bless you and your family.
Posted by: Mathias Thelen | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 02:20 PM
To understand a bit better why so much money would be spent on a film as Avatar, I think we have to understand that for Cameron, this is cinema as religion. James Bowman has an excellent piece about Cameron and Avatar on The New Atlantis site, and he concludes with this:
I don't really have any problem with Cameron and his investors spending $300-$500 million to make the movie; that is their right and it's their investment. Of more concern (at least to me) is how this film, however brilliantly made, propagates some serious errors about the nature of man, Western civilization, and so forth.
Posted by: Carl E. Olson | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 03:06 PM
I was equally unfortunate to catch Cameron in an interview with Charlie Rose. The self-indulgence was remarkable.
Cameron praised himself for championing the cause of global warming, "that was proved by countless magazine articles". Rose, as usual, peppered the conversation with his usual empty talk. A sad display of the self-satisfied.
Posted by: Kingsmill | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 03:21 PM
Great post. Benedict's call for an "ecology of man" is just so important. He's so brilliant.
By the way, from the sublime to the ridiculous. . . my wife and I enjoy Castle too. You've got good taste. Did you enjoy Firefly? If so, did you catch the episode where Castle wears the old Firefly suit? That was hilarious.
Posted by: Michael Barber | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 03:47 PM
Errr... that movie, "Ativan"... i'll wait till it comes out in the book... books are always better...
Posted by: matteo | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 04:01 PM
I agree with everything said here against Avatar, but I have to add a more mundane complaint, something that the curmudgeonly have been saying for ages now: there just ain't no substance in movies anymore. This movie is perfect evidence: pure, unadulterated technical wizardry. It is the "DaVinci Code" of movies, all flash, no substance, and an ulterior motive which permeates its crafting.
In a word... whatever.
Posted by: Telemachus | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 06:30 PM
hehehe. Accurate and funny assesment. Sad truth right now.
Posted by: Pulchritudo.musicae | Monday, March 08, 2010 at 07:17 PM
I'm STILL trying to figure out why Disney didn't sue Cameron for his BLATANT rip off of "Pocahantas"... I mean, for criminy's sake, it was the exact same movie with a lot more blood...
Posted by: Nicole | Tuesday, March 09, 2010 at 10:47 AM
Hi, Michael: We started watching "Castle" a few weeks ago and have been catching up. I never watched "Firefly", so didn't make the connection. "Castle" is a very well-written and clever show; it's become one of my favorites.
Posted by: Carl E. Olson | Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 10:16 PM