Stereotypes

The film portrays the ruthless conqueror, hungry for gold, against a peaceful and harmonious native communities. This idealistic view of native tribes, the noble savage, presented by Rousseau and other enlightenment figures simply does not hold up to inspection. Many studies of indigenous tribes demonstrate very high levels of violence. While resource hungry conquerors have many crimes to account for, they also bring technology, medicine and new ideas.

Through the alien world, Cameron clearly hopes to help us realize the nature of our crimes. Placing people and events in a new setting can sometimes help us see their true nature; however, most Avatar viewers came away with little new morality. Cameron has changed the world, but he keeps pushing a known stereotype. The average person knows modern civilization abuses nature and minorities and the sensitive native is in touch with nature. This is well laid out in films such as Dances with the Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas and others. Emphasizing the most known characteristics of a people simply reinforces the stereotype instead of dispelling it. If we really want people to realize our common societal problems (pollution, health-care, violence..), we need to show them the unexpected in both the dominated and the dominator.

Reality

Avatar fails to enlighten us because its story conflicts with our history. On earth, when the weak fight a vastly superiour force they rarely emerge victorious. When they do, it is not through a head on battle on the conquerors terms – but rather through guerilla tactics (Vietnam), non-violent protest (India, Civil Rights in the US) and this always takes a long, long time. There are examples of David vs Goliath, but perhaps it does not happen like Avatar – take for example, the fight against South African Apartheid.

In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “A Long Walk to Freedom”, he recounts his childhood in a traditional african village with a benevolent ruler. He both confirms and dispels the tribal stereotype through the description of rituals and injustices between people in these villages. Still a young boy, Mandela, leaves the village and enters the oppressor’s system of schools and institutions. After years of admiring the white man for his technological advances and institutions, he eventually realizes the true nature of South Africa. It is a country where the blacks are servants to the whites. Their submission to the whites is not due to any particular inferiority; the whites simply arrived and overwhelmed them militarily, politically and economically.

After his studies, Mandela embarks on a struggle against white rule, and quickly realizes of the odds he is facing. He struggles through both non-violence and violence, ending up in jail for over twenty years. Throughout the struggle, he never compromises his morals, always indulges the enemy in patient explanations of the struggle and eventually shows the world why white rule is bad. The story of Mandela is similar to other freedom fighters – King, Gandhi, and others before them. To defeat a vastly greater opponent, one must be patient, stubborn, and infinitely resourceful.

Avatar denies the challenge of freedom struggles by compressing the Naavi’s struggle in time, emotion, and complexity. Story book endings with the natives rising up, confronting the oppressor and emerging victorious never happen.

Whenever a guerilla force fights against an overwhelming power, it takes two things to succeed – time and effort. Never does a frontal assault work. By portraying this tactic as victorious, Cameron reinforces completely unrealistic expectations that play to the advantage of the dominant force. The dominant power wants you to play be their rules, but the only way to beat them is to change the playbook.

Avatar is an amazing feat of engineering and art, but it fails to convey the message Cameron wishes us to understand: Our insatiable thirst for resources is consuming the world.

Two possible endings would have been far more instructive to the world. In one scenario, the natives are annihilated and we mine the resources, this is a sad, but common reality on earth. In another, the natives embark on a long and treacherous fight using non-violence and violence to show to the human population their own faults – eventually converting them to the cause. Though those endings may not be typical crowd pleasers, perhaps they would have been more instructive.

Dispatches from the future is a collection of essays by young scientists on the cutting edge. The topics vary from dark energy, to linguistics to neuroscience. All the essays are interesting and reveal young fields which will surely develop in the next decade. Some of the essays offer little major revelations, they simply explain a phenomenon or area of research.

Of the fifteen essays, two stuck out for the implications with respect to social interactions and behaviours of societies:

* Mirror Neurons and whether our ability to mimic others enables us to be more compassionate and ethical. (A similar article found here)

* How our mother tongue affects the way we think about objects, people, and our place in the universe.

A bunch of these essays (I think) can be found on the amazing website, http://www.edge.org

Buy the book here:

It could have stopped there, he could have comfortably rested on his practice, made a good living by African standards and turn a blind eye to the inequalities of the society around him. Instead, Mandela gave everything up – his practice, his family and his loyalties to fight for equality between whites and blacks. His struggle spanned four decades and culminated in the end of apartheid. His decision to use his privilege and status to help others, without hope for compensation, is what makes him stand apart. The noblest human action may be the personal sacrifice for others without expectation of compensation or recognition.

J.K. Rowling gave an amazing 2008 commencement speech at Harvard, where she says among other things,

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

If anything, that is the crux of Mandela – his ability to fight for others, to give his life for the benefit of his fellow citizens.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

With countries like England, France, and Germany undergoing an identity crisis, this book brings a breath or relief and a new way of looking at our own national identity. Saul argues that the european nations are built around monolithic cultures while Canada does not hesitate to embrace its diversity and does not insist on suppressing it as was done with Gaelic culture, Bretagne, Basque, and other European minorities. By adding aboriginal philosophy in our image of Canada, we see how and why we are different from the US and Europe. All Canadians should take a look at his ideas and reflect on their implications for the Canadian spirit.

A globe and mail review pretty much summarizes my feelings about the book, so I will let them speak for me.

In Canada, the government has copyright over its publications, paid for with your money. The copyright extends to laws, regulations, and other documents. A copyright makes it difficult for companies and non-profit organizations to reproduce government information without their explicit permission. This slows innovation, reduces transparency and adds bureaucracy.

As part of the ongoing copyright, intellectual property and information technology consultations in Ottawa, Crown Copyright is being discussed. It is very, very important for the future of Canadians and their government that the Federal government change the existing structure. Please take 1 minute of your time to sign the petition found here at Visible Government, a non-profit organization for the transparency of government.

Over-consumption of natural resources is the topic du jour. The current popularity of environmental sustainability has birthed the notion that countries go to war for water. This is simply not true. While we do fight wars over resources, we do not fight over water – principally because water is not a resource.

In nearly all cases, water has led to peaceful agreements, even amongst warring nations. Nations fight over resources; including, but certainly not limited to, natural resources (oil, metals, coal), human resources (slaves, religious disciples) and land. Water is fundamentally not a resource, it is a requirement. The dictionary defines resource as:

resource |ˈrēˌsôrs; ˈrēˈzôrs; riˈsôrs; riˈzôrs|
noun
1 (usu. resources) a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively

However, water is not something that can be drawn upon, water must be drawn upon to survive – this is a fundamental difference that too many people overlook. We do not require oil, metal, religion or (much) land, yet we must have water.

The Trojans fought for Helen, the Romans for salt, the Europeans for gold, spices, and cotton, and the Americans for oil. However, no one fights for water. In large part, this is because humans around the world commonly recognize water as an essential ingredient for life; cruel as we might be, we seem to have the fundamental dignity to not desiccate our fellow man.

There is no need to take my non-expert word for this, Wendy Barnaby, a science journalist set out to prove that we fight over water and came back with just the opposite conclusion. She was tasked with writing a book about water conflict, but when she could not find the evidence, the book was cancelled (who wants to read about peace?) and she turned her work into an article for Nature. Here a few examples of existing conflicts and the role water might play in them.

Sudan is often cited as an example of conflict over water. It is claimed that the northern Arab Sudanese attacked Darfur for the fertile land and water supply. In some respects this is true, but the conflict over the fertile land is primarily due to the West. During the colonial period, the Brits redistributed the land according to tribal roots – trying to emulate our property system by creating definite borders and ownership systems. The nomadic tribes were excluded from the land allocation and these new borders constricted their mouvement between regions.

The droughts of the 1970s pushed the Sahara desert 40km into the fertile land, displacing people who now had fewer places to go. Neighbouring conflicts in Chad and elsewhere – often proxy wars of our cold war – placed further barriers to mouvement on the inhabitants of Darfur. Before these barriers were erected, the people of southern Sudan had a perfectly adequate system for dealing with droughts and lack of water – mouvement.  Now, the once nomadic tribes who moved with the water were trapped in a sandpit. This understandably led to violent conflict.

The Kashmir region of India and Pakistan has been at war since partition in 1947, but they have nevertheless managed to sign the Indus Water Treaty in 1960 which has allowed for the distribution of water between the two countries. Gwynne Dyer’s book Climate Wars, outlines a scenario where India and Pakistan launch nuclear missiles over water rights. Remarkably, the Indo-Pakistani conflict has remained relatively dormant for 60 years despite the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks, religious terrorism and longstanding historical conflicts. In light of this, water seems like an unlikely candidate for military escalation. Though Kashmir is still at war, it is not due to water.

Israel and Jordan are separated by the Jordan River and have a mutual interest in its waters. Each Palestinian is allowed to consume 1/5 the water of an Israeli. Israel withdraws far more water than its Arab cousins. Despite this apparent conflict, Jordan and Israel they have maintained the peace since 1992 and water issues are not seen as a major hurdle to a two-state solution. Syria might still be at war with Israel, but it is not fundamentally over water – though the Golan heights do allow for the control of much of the region’s water supply.

The list of agreements over water rights is long, the list of conflicts is very short. The cynics among us believe man fights for power without much consideration for life. If this were true, water would be the ultimate leverage over a population. Yet, over and over again, conflict over water leads to diplomatic agreements – not armed conflict. If anything, I see this as demonstration that despite our differences, we recognize each other’s right to live and have access to water.

An article in Foreign Policy claiming there will be more conflict

Good summary of Wendy Barnaby’s article

Interview with a geologist about water wars

Wendy Burnaby in Nature (paid – 32 $)

Another take on water conflict

Since I have too much time on my hands, I wrote to the magazine and they published my letter along with a response from the author. Pick up this month’s Harper’s to see it (edited) on old fashion pulp and paper. Either way, Harper’s has some great articles and the subscription is a paltry 20$, I do recommend you check it out.

My response:
Last summer, I travelled to Ethiopia to speak with the people setting up the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (ECX) and I can assure you that the goal of the program is not to encourage speculation. No one imagines an uneducated rural farmer becoming a sophisticated commodities trader. Currently, produce is mostly sold locally (within 10 kms of production) and is subject to huge fluctuations in supply and demand, as farmers in a region tend to produce the same produce, flooding a local market at harvest. In fact, a marketplace for agricultural commodities will in all likelihood help stabilize food prices compared to the huge variations currently seen in villages across Africa.
I encourage readers to consult Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin’s (the CEO of the ECX) TED talk where she explains the logic and purpose of the ECX. Also, the ECX will set-up numerous warehouses throughout the country to stock food – not a unique one in the capital as Mr. Frederick Kaufman claims. Currently, farmers are unable to reliably store food for future sale; they lack the knowledge and infrastructure to do so, unsold food rots and goes to waste. By delivering the produce to climate controlled warehouses, stocks will be built up – ensuring a consistent flow of food.
The Chicago Board of Exchange helped build the united states and the midwest into a world power – delivering cheaper and cheaper food to drive innovation in the cities that in turn helped the country prosper. Cheap, reliable sources of food is essential to the growth of a nation – and regulated markets are the best mechanism to deliver that food.
Markets are not the only solution to world hunger, but Mr. Kaufman is incorrect in his conclusion that they will not help alleviate it. Money can feed people and with farmers comprising 80% of Ethiopian population, it is high time they gain access to a stable and transparent market for their produce.

One thing that stood out was how little he knew of the bible. I am no expert, but I could certainly remember parts. Jehova’s witnesses are fundamentalists and crazier than I originally thought. They believe that the bible is the word of god and that it should be followed literally. From Wikipedia:

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that after the current world order is destroyed, righteous survivors and resurrected dead individuals will have the opportunity to live forever on a paradisaical earth, ruled by Christ and 144,000 people raised to heaven.

Despite this, we both agreed that parts of the bible are no longer relevant (stoning adulterers for example). Aditionally, Dan claims that since Jesus came to being, Mosaic law not longer needs to be followed in its entirerity. Instead, they extract a series of “principals” from the old testament that they follow in addition to rules set out in the new testament. I tried to get him to specify what they were or how they are chosen, he waffled like a professional politician. My guess, is these principals are determined by their “Elders Council” (see wikipedia). Slowly, and surely I tried to get him to contradict himself and poke a few cracks in his world view. As you might imagine, not much luck.

What is difficult to comprehend is how an apparently normal, fit person living in a modern liberal society can convince themselves of all this nonsense. When you abandon rational thinking, it is amazing what you can rationalize.

At the end of our discussion, I tried to give him a conflicting book (The God Delusion by Dawkins), which he refused. I don’t think I got through to him, but hopefully I planted a tiny little seed of doubt in his mind. He said he would stop by another weekend, so we shall see – only god knows.

Here is a recent ted talk from a former cult member who broke free and turned de-programmed: