Steven Spielberg suggested in his recent film Munich that the Palestinian cause had some legitimacy and that there would be no peace until people (specifically Israelis) of conscience stopped the endless cycle of violence in the form of retaliation and counter-retaliation. Of course, Spielberg studiously neglected to mention the religious and anti-Semitic aspect of the Palestinian cause, and only suggested that Israel's retaliatory use of force is morally different from Palestine's initiation of force in the vaguest, weakest ways---in other words, he evaded the main issues.

In fact, as history shows, Israeli cease-fires and truces and concessions to Palestine will not end the violence (and will in fact only exacerbate it)---and as the recent election shows, the real prerequisite for peace is not democracy, but a constitutional republic that protects individual rights. Whether that takes the form of a new Palestinian leadership committed to those ideals (in which case they might have some legitimate claim to a separate Palestinian state) or the Palestinians accepting Israeli government (which has some room for improvement in these regards as well) doesn't matter. But the prerequisite for that is a complete cultural revolution that would require education and faith giving way to reason. The only other option is the military annihilation by Israel of all violent elements among the Palestinians. Neither option is terribly likely to happen anytime soon, but the latter is probably what will ultimately be necessary.

Unfortunately, similar problems that I have had distributing The Undercurrent (see here and here) on campus have gone unnoticed by The Chronicle (not to mention campus police, who made The Chronicle theft "a top priority"). In an effort to correct this, I submitted the following letter to The Chronicle:

"Paper theft not limited to The Chronicle"

Editor:

I read about the theft of your November 10th issue with great sympathy. However, given your failure to mention it (even tangentially in your article about the theft of your own paper), I wonder if you are aware that you are not the only victims of this type of crime.

The same fate has befallen a new monthly paper called The Undercurrent, distributed on campus near Chronicle newsstands. Just like in last Thursday's theft of The Chronicle, entire stacks have wound up in nearby recycling bins the day they were issued. Granted, it hasn't been a coordinated effort on the scale of the theft of Thursday’s Chronicle, but the basic principle remains the same: is this a free speech campus or isn't it?

In your Friday editorial you stated, "The fact is that stealing--even free newspapers--is a violation of both criminal and civil law." I couldn't have said it better myself. I would just like to remind you and your readers that The Chronicle is not the only such newspaper on this campus.

Andrew Vidrine
Philosophy, senior

Now, I have no idea whether the stolen copies of The Undercurrent are being thrown out by Chronicle distributors afraid of non-existent competition (or bearing a personal grudge against me), isolated students who don't like the content, or simply over-zealous janitors (though they're clearly not trash, and are not left in the middle of the floor in the way of students and others). But that's beside the point. I was told when I inquired last year about distributing a student newspaper on campus that the University was a "free speech zone" (whatever that means) and there would be absolutely no problem with it. And yet, I have been having something of a problem. Hopefully, we will be able to resolve it soon. It might help if The Chronicle prints my letter. I will post an update here if they do.

Robert Mayhew's excellent editing organizes the questions and answers into chapters drawn around broad themes (e.g., politics, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, and art), then into smaller sub-sections. This keeps the reading flowing, instead of jumping around from topic to topic almost at random as would occur in a live Q&A session.

While some of Ayn Rand's answers will be obvious to long-time students of Objectivism, many of them shed new light on her philosophy, and almost all of them give the reader a better picture of Ayn Rand as a person, whether it is her quick wit, her warm benevolence in giving the benefit of the doubt to most questioners and patiently explaining her philosophical principles to them, or her righteous indignation at genuinely dishonest, hostile, or insulting questions. Even her answers to questions on narrow, concrete issues at the time of the session (such as the Vietnam war) are applicable to events today (such as the current Iraq war) because her answers address the deeper abstract principles involved (such as proper foreign policy).

On my first reading, I noticed only two drawbacks. First, a few of her answers leave you wanting more, and you wish that she were still alive and in the room with you so that you could ask her follow-up questions. That's not to say that she doesn't give a full enough answer to the question as asked, given the context of a live public Q&A session, but rather that her intriguing answers leave you feeling sad that you are merely reading a book and not actually in the room during one of those Q&A sessions. Second, if you've ever heard a recording of one of her Q&A's (or were lucky enough to have attended one), you are aware of how much you are missing from the live setting--for example, from the audience reactions, as they audibly gasp in shock or indignation at some remark Ayn Rand makes, but by the end of her answer after she explains the comment, they are cheering. That's an added bonus of the live setting that the book format unfortunately can't reproduce, but if you're a student like me and can't yet afford to spend a few hundred dollars on recordings of all her lectures, this book is the next best thing.

You can now purchase Ayn Rand Answers (along with The Capitalist Manifesto) through our bookstore, or come pick it up at the Ft. Union location of Barnes & Noble in Midvale, where I currently stock it.

The book offers two major values. First, it will help rational people who have not given much thought to this issue fully concretize the evil of religious faith, by providing mountains of inductive evidence. Harris draws his examples from among many different religions and eras, whether it is the Inquisition in Christian Europe's Dark Ages, the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Holocaust (which the Nazis got from the Christians), or the anti-Western jihad of fundamentalist Islam today. Many of these examples are already common knowledge, but Harris imbues them with harrowing detail and weaves them into an unanswerable case for his thesis. Plus, he recognizes and argues that other, allegedly secular movements, such as Communism, are just as faith-based as religion, and that this fact is the only explanation for the crimes they have committed. Why, Harris asks, do people ever resort to force against their fellow man? Leaving aside isolated criminals and considering only (and all) major movements that advocate and use force to resolve their differences, he argues that the motivation is always ideological--and further, that the ideologies in question never have any rational basis. "What do...killers believe?" he writes. "You will find that it is always--always--preposterous." His targets, therefore, include not only the obvious ones already mentioned, but everyone from Pope John Paul II to Noam Chomsky to pacifists, relativists, and Pragmatists. Further, Harris does not simply target "extremists" while apologizing for "moderates," but argues that religious "moderates"--if such a thing is really even possible, since one's religiosity and his "moderation" exist in inverse proportion to one another--are part of the problem, since it is they who prevent us from recognizing the danger of faith as such, and thus properly defending ourselves against those of perfect faith.

Second, he draws on these examples to identify the principle that explains them: faith leads to force, since it is only on the basis of reason that men have common ground to deal with one another peacefully. Of course, Objectivists already know this since Ayn Rand originally made this identification decades ago, but Harris has often entertaining and occasionally enlightening ways of making the point that will no doubt help clarify the issue further for even the most consistently pro-reason (and therefore anti-faith) among us.

However, the book does have some serious flaws, which will unfortunately detract from your enjoyment of it. Despite his sometimes surprisingly Aristotelian advocacy of reason, Harris is at root a Kantian mystic with Eastern influences (ideas he no doubt learned at Stanford). It is frustrating when he talks about putting proper limits on reason, since he must know that he got that from Kant, whose explicit program was to "limit reason in order to make room for faith." How Harris can fail to see how this completely undercuts his argument is anyone's guess. And as if that weren't bad enough, his idea of a proper understanding of human spirituality involves the use of "mind-expanding" drugs, and he holds that there is some rational evidence for reincarnation! But these passages constitute a small part of the book (some are merely footnotes), and one can practice philosophical detection on them or skip them altogether.

In the end, it's simply nice to read an intellectual work that says something that needs to be said but no one else (excluding Objectivists) dares to say. The book is refreshingly philosophical, including an interesting (although badly mixed) chapter on the nature of belief that is straight epistemology. The book is classified as "current affairs" where I work at Barnes & Noble, but it's what you might call "applied philosophy"--and therein lies its virtue and the key to its success: one major reason most philosophy today is so wrong and useless (or worse) is precisely because no attempt is made to derive it from or apply it to the real world. It is this approach of Harris' that makes him able to identify some truths, and makes this book worth reading.

It may take you a while to get into it, as it did me. This is a genre film that mixes sci-fi and western elements, neither of which I am necessarily a fan. But, as Ned Chalmers at The Undercurrent put it, "Serenity follows the pattern of Harry Potter...and some others of the better genre pieces, in that genre is used to enhance its drama and realism, not substitute for it." At first, thanks to several false openings that are interesting initially but get tiresome after a while (on my first viewing, I started wondering, "When is this going to go somewhere?"), I thought that this was going to be one of those sci-fi flicks that attempts to substitute style and special effects for substance--i.e., plot and characterization.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Take, for instance, the relationship between Serenity's captain Malcolm and his friend and refuge-provider Shepherd Book. Shepherd advises Mal about the importance of belief, and when Mal objects to being preached to ("That's a long wait for a train don't come"), Shepherd replies, "When I talk about belief, why do you always assume I'm talking about God?" In fact, what he is talking about is moral certainty, but this is nicely contrasted with blind faith in the character of the Alliance operative, whom Shepherd describes: "Sort of men they like to send believes hard--kills and never asks why." When Mal asks the operative, "Do you even know why they send you?" he replies, "It's not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself." This perfectly illustrates how the acceptance of altruism makes a society ripe for totalitarianism.

Later, Shepherd emphasizes to Mal the importance of moral certainty: "I don't care what you believe--just believe it." Until this point, Mal has been forced to act somewhat pragmatically or perish, since morality has become nearly impossible and thus irrelevant under the rule of the Alliance. (As Ayn Rand said, "Morality ends where a gun begins.") But he has defied the Alliance's force with more and more boldness as the movie has progressed, and from this point on there is no turning back. "I hear a word outta any of you that ain't helpin' me out, or takin' your leave, I will shoot you down," he tells his crew. The movie makes a lot out of Mal only doing what's good for himself and so forth, but by making him the hero, it implicitly denies that egoism is immoral, and in the end it shows that his own self-interest is the moral thing for him to pursue.

Thematically, the film's most interesting aspect is its recognition and dramatization of the principle that faith leads to force, and conversely, that only on the basis of reason can people truly deal with one another in a peaceful, civilized manner. The Alliance, as represented by the operative, poses as the beacon of reason and civilization. But this facade quickly drops when Mal, at his first meeting with the operative, says, "The Alliance wanted to show me reason, they shouldn't have sent an assassin." That effectively shuts the operative's mouth, as he realizes that his opponent knows that he has no right to talk about reason, and finally his only reply is to further threaten Mal with death to him and his crew.

But the film is not pacifistic; it is only against the initiation of force, not its use in self-defense or retaliation. After a moment, the operative resumes his posturing, saying, "I want to resolve this like civilized men. I am not threatening you. I am unarmed--" "Good!" cries Mal, draws his gun, and shoots him. And when Shepherd tells Mal, "I shot them down--I got the ship that got us. Not very Christian of me," Mal replies, "You did the right thing," thus repudiating the Christian exhortation to turn the other cheek.

Further, lest you think that the Alliance is supposed to actually represent civilization and that the film is thus anti-progress, it also illustrates the horrors of anarchy with the Reavers--horrible creatures who were once men but now pillage, rape, and cannibalize the outer settlements of the Alliance. The film compellingly dramatizes the danger to liberty of both tyrrany and anarchy in its climax, as the heroes battle both the Alliance and the Reavers--and even draws an interesting connection between the two.

But the best thing about Serenity is its depiction of man as not merely heroic, struggling against evil in the face of great obstacles, but efficacious, surmounting the obstacles and succeeding. It emphasizes that this is in large part due to moral certainty, as the operative asks Mal in their final confrontation, "Are you willing to die for that belief?" to which Mal replies, "I am"--but then, beating him to the draw, elaborates, " 'Course, that ain't exactly plan A." You don't see that in too many movies that actually have something interesting to say these days--its typically one or the other: successful heroism (as in most summer "popcorn flicks"), or an intellectual theme (as in the more "serious" films), but not both. But Serenity has it all.

Don't miss it!