Vikings, Dragons and Arabs

I wrote this probably over a month ago, but I intended it to go here so go here it will.

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So I've just seen this film, and I'm kind of bowled over by how perfectly it seems to encapsulate my new general political attitude. Properly speaking, it is another one of these familiar exercises in bland, knee-jerk liberalism, but somehow it still managed to strike a chord with me, and even to seem to pertain specifically to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a really good film, and I hereby formally dispatch you to watch it, but I'm going to talk about it freely, without worrying about spoiling things. Mainly because this movie proceeds in precisely the way you'd expect it to - its plot's not the attraction - but here you are warned anyway. SPOILERS ahoy.

How to Train Your Dragon tells the story of Hiccup, young Viking boy in a village regularly ransacked by dragons. Hiccup can't quite get his Viking thing going. He's small and clumsy and generally inadequate in terms of dragon-hunting macho-macho-man-ness, and when he more or less accidentally comes across a wounded dragon and gradually makes his acquaintance, he begins to have second thoughts about the attitude he's supposed to have towards these creatures. 

So yeah, we've already seen this story anywhere from Pocahontas through Shrek to Avatar, and often in sharper terms, but this movie seemed to highlight for me in a much more powerful way the ideology, collective passion, and societal convention that facilitate and enflame this kind of stubborn, hate-filled, and mind-bogglingly blind aggression.

To reiterate the point I've been making and this film has been strongly implying possibly without fully realising it - nationalism is a disease. It poisons our psyche and corrupts our souls, divides us into tribes and has us see monsters where humans exist. Usually deeply flawed humans - often humans with whom we've shared a checkered past and that we have good cause to be wary of - but humans towards whom having a poisoned, hysterical and demonising attitude contributes absolutely nothing at all.

Before I go on conjecturing and allegorising this film out of all proportion, I want to mention a scene: Enraged Viking village leader Dad tells exposed-as-traitorous-dragon-fraterniser Hiccup "You are not a Viking. You are not my son."

Yes, unpleasant, and the pain is what this scene's mainly about. But, there's an obvious implication many (most?) people even in the genuinely advanced Western World don't see here; you don't have to continue being Jewish any more than you have to become a carbon copy of your father. These are things you are born into, and that your surroundings would be glad to see you carrying on, but, with respect, fuck the surroundings. Fact of the matter is I'm not my dad, and even less than that am I my "people" and their history. Nothing wrong with either of them, but contrary to popular confusion, they are quite simply entities that are distinct from me. They just are. I didn't promise anybody to be my dad and I didn't promise anybody to be Jewish. These things are too important to be determined at birth, and the fact is they aren't. They are artificially preserved by social constructs, because society is fucking stupid when it's not very carefully engineered not to be.

The truth is Hiccup isn't a Viking, and neither is he is father's son the way that marauding explosion of violence intends. The movie takes both these sentiments back later on in the proceedings, but it is a kids film after all. Part of the tragedy of real life is that sometimes your surroundings can't deal with who you are and what you're not. The confrontation can be ugly, but it's unavoidable if you ever want to truly "break out" - step out of the shadow of your predecessors and come into your own.

There's more to this, though, than just fulfilling your individuality. As bland as the message is, it's not really obvious, at least not in Israel. When you tell an Israeli we don't have to be at war with the Arabs you're likely to get much the same reaction as a Viking's when you tell him there could be peace with the dragons. Both of the conflicts didn't just spring out of thin air. In both it is somewhat counterintuitive to learn which of the parties is responsible for by far the greater amount of devastation and death. Both the Vikings and the Israelis are fighting what is at its core a war of self-defence, but they're doing it so zealously, so excessively, that they begin to lose both their moral compass and their ability to think straight about their own interests.

The most potent bit of symbolism in the movie, which appears to have been created more or less by accident and to serve for plot rather than thematic purposes, has to do with how the conflict was created:

The dragons live in a large cave. Down in its depths lives a kind of quasi-queen - a titanic, astronomical beast that makes all the others look like flies. When the dragons don't feed it stolen produce or livestock, it eats them. The movie implies that only together can the Vikings and dragons stop it, but before that it briefly toys with the idea (being a kids movie, again) of the catastrophical consequences the premature and frankly unnecessary rousing of this largely pacified giant might have.

This works for both sides of the long-going war. If we're not careful - if we keep on with these superfluous violent, repressive, and brutal adventures - we could awaken the rage of the humiliated post-colonialist Arab and Muslim world that originally started this conflict to such a level it will no longer be possible to hold it back and prevent a full-blown psychotic culture-war. The effort of "deterrence", though doubtless working, is also bringing the bad blood constantly closer to its boiling point. We are playing with fire.

Conversely - and this is more a dangerous musing than an actual opinion - the giant that is Israel has in many ways already been awakened. At the end of the movie the dragons join forces with the humans to kill this huge beast despite it being one of them, because (presumably), though just like them it is only acting in self-preservation, it is simply causing too much damage. Now, I am not disputing Israel's claim of always acting ultimately in the interests of self-defence, but as well as being a nuclear power Israel is the world's fourth largest exporter of arms, so what does that mean? I'd like to think that all of Israel's destructive international (non-Arab-related) behaviour is the result of evil, callous individuals whose actions weren't truly necessary for Israel, but what I'm worried about is this - what if they were? That's not a rhetorical question. I don't know what to think about this.

What I do know is that tribal identification is irrelevant. I don't think you can really start seriously thinking about these things without that.

Historical Overview (of Western Civilization)

My historical knowledge is fairly limited, but it appears that traditionally, we regular folk have had our shit ruined by the monarchy, the Church, and the aristocracy.

For some sort of bizarre reason we thought it sensible to give our allegiance to the king, our fealty to the Pope, and our deference to those of bluer blood and larger stacks of cash.

The innate idiocy of this can be readily recognized by most in at least the free parts of the world today, but I'm not entirely sure we as a society have fully internalized this understanding.

I still see the aristocracy ruling through capitalism, the Church through the way we assess morality using terms like "appropriate", "unnatural" and "vulgar" rather than exclusively equality, and the monarchy through patriotism.



This last point probably needs elaboration. The monarchy doesn't even exist in any real way in the Western world any more.
I think most of us can agree that the reason to support the monarch - if any - was pragmatic rather than romantic or idealistic. A king must rule not because of his "divine right" but because in his absence we'd have anarchy and people would eat each other.

But when you think about it, what more reason do we have to support "the country"? What is "a country" anyway? The land and the people who live on it. To love your country is to love your countrymen and a patch of soil up to some arbitrarily decided line. I'm all for fraternity of man (which is here suffocated into fraternity of citizen), but other than that all the things we get excited about - flag, symbol, anthem - are abstract concepts as arbitrarily invented as the divine right of kings.

This leaves us with ethnic identity - and granted, history, language and culture are not (entirely) arbitrarily invented - but I still can't see how you can love them. I don't even see how you can be proud of them, seeing as you weren't personally responsible for any of them, but never mind that. There's all this love and passion and allegiance going on, and it's unclear whom it's directed towards.

Some would say that it's directed towards your countrymen, but I don't buy that. "Your countrymen" aren't an interested power - they're not the ones who instituted this attitude - that was the government. To love your country is to love your government. Maybe not even this specific incarnation of the government - but the government in general, when it comes into conflict with any out-of-state element, regardless of the legitimacy of the actual claims of either party. You side with the one you love.

Instead of a royal "office" to swear our undying loyalty to, we now have a democratic, rotating bureaucracy to which we do the same thing. What once was justified in the name of "the divine right of kings" can now be justified in the name of "the divine right of nations", and patriotism has become the new royalism.



I realize this isn't being entirely fair, as democracy of itself gives a government incomparably greater legitimacy than any autocracy can hope
for - but what bothers me is the almost holy aura surrounding "national missions". I can accept (reluctantly and tentatively) that a nation might have needs, but to imbue this with quasi-religious, supernatural significance is akin to mistaking the monarch's role of maintaining order for a divine right to do whatever the fuck he wants to the country.

And as for that fraternity of man argument I shrugged off a little too quickly earlier - that seems to me akin to deciding that Church-directed religious coercion is necessary for people to behave decently towards one another. We're not children. We're civil to one another because we have internalized principles of behaviour. We can love each other through understanding we are all brothers - all - not just those within the state borders. Nobody's claiming we're there yet, but the enforced national distinctions certainly aren't helping.

To summarize my point - in what might have been the fifth paragraph of this entry - it seems that in order to be free men and have a chance to advance spiritually, we must free our moral judgement from organized-religious notions like obedience, our politics from knee-jerk chauvinism, and our assignation of value from attributes of money and property.

Where does this leave us? With a Marxist revolution, so it appears. If we are to be free from repression, it's certainly not enough just to go vote every few years. It's not sensible to not be political if you're not completely free. The advantage of living in a liberal democracy is that it allows you to be political at very little risk; not that it erases the need. It may not be strictly necessary to take up arms and revolt, but it becomes patently ridiculous to be even remotely indifferent to political developments.

Being an Adult

There's this vague subject that's kind of been troubling me for the past three days. That is to say, it troubled me greatly and acutely three days ago, until I'd resolved to write about it here, and then I never got around to it and it kind of hung on. It is this: Adultness. Responsibilities. My duties towards others.

It's too long after the fact for me to remember precisely where this very broad subject met me, so all I can do is try to take this on in an organized way, chronologically. So, context:

As most people who know me know, I've been inside of variants of clinical depression ever since four and a half years ago. "Been" rather than "am" because (since probably not much more than a month ago) I now consider myself to be out of it completely, at least as far as I'm concerned.
But I was definitely in it for quite a long time. My depression could probably take up more than a few blog posts all by itself, but I want to address a very specific thing that happened during it; it was The Shedding of Obligations.

Everything was becoming exceedingly difficult to do, and I decided to focus most of my efforts on just getting through the day to the night. I felt, and thought (and I still feel and think this was right at the time), that there was need for some urgent prioritization as far as my mental energy was concerned, and I stopped doing things. Quite early on I stopped going to school. I stopped hanging on to the vestiges of what very technically constituted my "social life". I stopped a bunch of the more ritualistic "binding" religious activities, without at the time doubting for a moment that they were indeed incredibly important. I stopped even trying to do housework. I stopped worrying about hygiene to some extent, but even just mentioning it like this is probably already a little TMI. And I stopped even trying to care about matters that did not immediately concern me - by which I mean my life-long obsession with ethical philosophy and politics. It's not that I washed my hands clean of these things completely - more that I indulged in them occasionally when it took my fancy, without feeling any sort of responsibility towards it.

It is, obviously, this last "shedding" that is on my mind lately. I have, largely, started again all these things that I have stopped, but my - let's call it "ideological passivity" remained curiously stable. It has kept on the level of a hobby, rather than that of a duty.

Now, a part of me says this is nothing to worry about - it's normal - nobody obsesses about abstract concepts and the dealings of their government, because they're all too busy trying to eke out their own living. But another part of me says bullshit; the fact that "everybody does it" never makes anything right and it doesn't necessarily mean it's even advantageous or sensible in any way. And it's simply untrue that I'm too busy to care. These issues - mainly violations of human rights and casual (and complicit) indifference to suffering - genuinely boil my blood. I'm not not caring. I'm just not doing.
I'll break the suspense here. The second part is right. My apathy towards the affairs of those not in my immediate vicinity is a distant relic of a bygone era.

Which is wonderful, and an observation I expect of myself to act on in the near future, but it seems only to touch the tip of the iceberg.
I have thought a lot in past months about being a citizen - voting in my first elections, etc. I feel that a state of democracy and freedom confers a duty upon the citizen to do what is in his power to ensure that his country is doing what he believes is right, as what the government does is now his responsibility. This is a very sound concept, and it may be why my present total inaction is so patently absurd, but I wasn't a citizen at 16 when I stopped caring. I hadn't stopped doing my "citizenly duties" - I had stopped doing something else.

I suspect that what's brought this on was my recent reacquaintance with Doctor Who. I was a fan before, but I'd just found a site where I could download full episodes, and I think the good Doctor has been knocking about in my brain ever since.
The Doctor seems to me a kind of spookily flawless moral prototype. He has his very clear ideas of right and wrong, which fairly often seem to me to err on the side of kindness and empathy - that put trust in what are very clearly untrustworthy people - but the fact is he walks the way he talks. He walks. He's a man of action. Men of action inspire me as a rule, complacent and inert overthinking slob that I am, but The Doctor somehow towers far above the rest.

I think I know why. It has occurred to me, that what is striking about The Doctor is the way he treats everybody he meets like human beings, even when they're aliens. Which says it all, really. The Doctor sees people, wherever and whenever he meets them, without prejudice, without anger - without even fear getting in the way. He is always forcefully aware of the humanity of the person before him. I'm not. Most people aren't, but that is simply not good enough. It's the coward's way out. We deal with people in our day-to-day. If we can't come to grips with that then we've never really become adults. We're still impulsive, self-centred children.

That's what I'd stopped doing. I found the strain of dealing with people too much to bear, so I both limited it and diluted it. It is possible that this was justified at the time - if doubtful - but it certainly is not justified any more. I should be aware of the fact that a human being is standing before me even before it is somehow emphatically illustrated to me. It's not that I'm insensitive - trample over people and humiliate them and insult them and whatnot - I'm probably too passive in my dealings with people to even be able to do that. It's just that I forget about their existence when they're not in front of my eyes talking to me very candidly. Generally speaking, if I can't see you, deeply - if I can't penetrate into the depths of your soul - you might as well not be there.

So that's the problem - overlooking my responsibility to recognize a person's humanity in fact always no matter what. Everything else is derived from that. From my interactions with friends and acquaintances to any kind of political activity (including mere discussion) I might feel compelled to take part in. It should all follow naturally. If I want to truly be able to call myself an adult - a basic decent human being - I'm going to have to learn to recognize the constant and continual existence of people outside of me. Once you realize that they get inside of you anyway, but that's metaphysical babble again, and while enjoyable it's probably not the best thing to do if I'm actually trying to communicate something discernible here.

It feels like this post is badly missing all of the reasons why it's good to be a child. That's what I think about most of the time. It's probably most of what this blog will eventually be about, though who knows. Generally speaking, I believe we need to be adults towards each other and children towards ourselves. I don't doubt I will elaborate on that later. The stuff I've been talking about in the previous two entries is to do with "being a child".

The holiday went perfectly well by the way. I didn't feel like I was lying to anybody this week about anything. I didn't do much, as it happens. I've been rather sick, and that's been occupying most of my time and energy. Here's hoping healthier and more eventful times are coming.

The last thing I want to mention, apropos of this recent inactivity, is that the fact that I hadn't watched a good movie in ages was really bothering me, and finally today I took action and went to see Gran Torino. It was awesome. I feel a need to pass on the word that it is indeed awesome.
I've also just watched the latest episode of 24, and that's completely ridiculous.