The Future of the Microstory

In a show or a movie, what is more primary? The plot or the imagery? The answer is, of course, a case-by-case answer: your average mystery relies heavily on plot as it tries to appeal to the viewer's curiosity, intellect, and the satisfaction of revelation (which necessitates build-up and pay-off), but some films are more about presenting stylized imagery with a basic plot that exists only to organize the imagery.

Exhibit A

In many cases, those bare bones plot movies are more beloved and iconic not in spite of their lack of narrative depth but because of it. How many times has Tim Burton ever blown your mind with his storyline? But you remember his visuals and his style. If you have ever known a girl between the ages of 13 and 16 who fancied herself "dark," then you have seen her express all her notions of love and romance by celebrating Jack and Sally. Recall Avatar, which had its plot lifted directly from Dances With Wolves, but left some people depressed, suicidal, and feeling that they were living in a colorless world because Pandora was so beautiful. 

In other cases, even movies have have intricate plots oftentimes have their plots ignored for the sake of their iconic pictures. In Fight Club we learn that an emotionally constipated man with insomnia and an abandonment complex created an anti-consumerist, violent, destructive alter-ego for himself who was everything he couldn't be - and then in the course of the story he realizes that he was a deeply sick and unhealthy person who really just needed to let himself learn to love another person. In other words, according to the plot Tyler Durden is an extreme example of what happens when men who resent being abandoned by their fathers turn their rage on themselves and their world instead of growing up. How is this expressed in our imagery and icons?

We express it by making him a sage, of course

All this is to say that we can extract plot from films and still have something satisfying and meaningful. In fact, we oftentimes discard whatever plot was attached to our favorite imagery and situations for the sake of making them more versatile. What is the implication of this?

Media is now consumed on demand. We have more control than ever on what media we consume and the timeframe in which we do it. Further, we have more capability than ever before to generate our own media, particularly through YouTube. In the domain of comedy it has always been understood that plot was subordinate to situation: funny always triumphed over coherence. We have seen this reflected in the explosion of sketches, of varying quality, that litter the internet. 

How long will it be before it is accepted that the same principal can apply beyond humor?

It is difficult to produce a full and complete narrative, especially for an amateur, but it is completely possible to pour one's heart and soul into a single situation. Why is it that we suppose that this is only appropriate if the situation is meant to be funny? Would it be possible to create a microstory where the payoff is the satisfaction of vengeance? Or the brokenness of a unrequited romance? Or righteous indignation at some offense?

Various pay-offs require more elaborate set-ups, however it seems to be me that it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to expand the domain of microstories to payoffs other than humor. It also seems to me that it is economically inevitable that, due to the over saturation of people trying to be funny on the internet, people will begin experimenting more and more with microstories that offer alternative emotional payoffs. Eventually a few formulas will be found that work.

Or at least one can hope.

This is Not About Believers; This is About Gina Welch

A Review for Gina Welch's In the Land of Believers, written on LibraryThing and Amazon

If I were to rate this book by its stated intention, I would have given it two stars. As an attempt to bridge the gap between the secular world and the Evangelical world, the book contributes precious little of substance. Instead I rated this book on its value as a means to draw someone into an experience that is created through words: most of the book was about as interesting as any other well-written book detailing someone's investigation into some part of the world, but the ending actually gave me the nausea that I imagine she must have felt and made my skin crawl the way I assume her skin crawled before making the big reveal.

But again, I'm judging the book based on how well it told the story of Gina Welch, its author; as an investigation into the 'Land of the Believers,' it offers little. The book begins with Welch's preconceptions of who Evangelicals are - the book then proceeds to confirm most of those preconceptions, but with affection. That is to say, Welch confirms that Evangelicals are every bit as homophobic and ignorant as she initially believes, but now they are taking up prime real estate of her Dunbar Number. She loves them, but yeah they are what you think they are.

The book details the adventure of Californian Gina Welch discovering that her liberal worldview does not exclude her from the kind of prejudice she (prejudicially) assumes to be the domain of the Evangelical Christians surrounding her in the state of Virginia. She decides to take an anthropological journey into Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, going so far as to try to have an experience she can point to as her conversion moment and joining certain smaller groups within the larger church, predominantly a singles ministry. Her heart is progressively won over; her mind remains steadfastly secular. Her journey reaches its zenith in a missions trip to Alaska where she participates in leading 101 people to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, after which she decides that she can no longer continue lying to the people who have become dear friends to her and consequently bows out of their lives without explanation.

The story as a whole tends to drag. Welch adds a lot of details that I believe were included to add flavor and to make subtle suggestions to lead the reader to certain conclusions (X Woman wore too much Y kind of makeup, implying vanity; I painted my nails in good girl pink before heading to church, implying scrutiny; his chivalry was reaching performance art levels, implying chauvinism), which is perfectly acceptable, reasonable, and desirable in a book like this, but after a while the details just feel like they are mucking up the pace. Then there are times when Welch discards the notion that the story is about the church and just begins talking about her day-to-day existence, which leads me to believe that Welch was aware that the fact that she made this journey was more interesting than anything she might have discovered in the course of it. Ideally I think the book could have shaved off a third of its length and been more effective, but that could just be my attention span talking (I would say the same about this review I'm writing, so, hypocrisy).

By the third portion of the book, which details Welch's trip to Alaska, you become certain that this is no longer about Evangelical culture. She tries to keep the spotlight focused: she throws out general observations about Evangelicals based on particular occurrences with varying degrees of shoehorning, but they cease to feel organic at that point. Soon you realize that this is a story  about the lengths this woman will go to to write a book. It's a story about someone feeling so little about an entire people group that rampant deception in the course of developing intimate relationships seemed perfectly acceptable to her, and then falling in love with those people while still holding onto this devastating deception.

I quickly became bored reading about Alaska, but I didn't stop. The mundane events of the Alaskan mission trip are not interesting, but you feel the tension building because you know she has to reveal what she has done to her friends. The spotlight shifts from the group to Gina herself - who is becoming progressively more aware of the gravity of her deception.

Approach it based on what it advertises and you will be disappointed. Approach it as what it is - a story of the depths one will go to in order to tell a story - and you might find yourself intrigued. Further, and perhaps this is the books greatest contribution, it is a cautionary tale about failing to see those who are different from you as still being people. This seemed to have been one of the goals of the book and this goal the book fulfills by virtue of existing. The book itself is the warning.

An Evangelical World

Currently I have been reading In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch, a book that I deem fully worth every cent of the dollar I paid for it at the Dollar Tree. The book details the adventure of an atheist woman who joins Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church and goes undercover as a Christian to immerse herself in Evangelical culture in hopes of understanding the culture and consequently writing a book about said culture that would help bridge the divide between Evangelical America and secular America. Hitherto I see no evidence to suggest that this book will bridge any divides apart from the divides in Welch's own character (divides that seem to have been created by the experiment rather than preceding it), but the book is certainly interesting and promising to the strange breed of atheist like myself.

However, the book did stir one thing in me that I am not sure if it intended to stir, and that I find I need to be reminded of on occasion: that I would not do well in an Evangelical world, that I do not want to see or live in an Evangelical world.

Knowing that skepticism and doubt are integral to my worldview, that I find value in the emotional shades of happiness, despair, pain, and pleasure rather than believing that a sunny disposition rooted in the confidence that in all things God works for those who love him should be maintained and sought at all times, and that I just plain can not imagine seeing the world in that monolithic way that identifies goodness with Godliness and sees all goodness as being derived from the extent to which God's will is fulfilled, assures me that I just could not breathe that air. This last point, goodness being identical with godliness, may have been one of the things that most drove my heart away from Christianity even while my mind retained loyalties; to me it made the world so tiny, although I am certain that there are many who would insist, citing personal experience, that it makes the world more vast.

To be sure, I imagine that most in the Evangelical world are not eager to breathe my air either. I chalk it up to a difference of natures and a difference of what experiences one finds livable. All the same, though faith and religion are of the utmost importance to me (strange breed of atheist that I am), I don't ever want to interact with that faith wrapped in the body of Evangelical Christianity.

Proportions, Nothing But Proportions

Let us be charitable for a moment: what is the likelihood that someone is so lost in irrationality that their point of view completely lacks merit? I think it is slim. We have grown accustomed to erring on the side of cynicism whenever it comes to questions of rationality, knowledge, and bravery. We should keep a little cynicism, of course, but I think we should also have a little good faith, if only when we are dealing with people so moved by philosophical questions that they begin devoting serious time to wrestling with them. The good faith stemming from the idea that if we can wrestle honestly with a philosophical question, then others should likewise be able.

But, then, if we have two honest thinkers who are honestly wrestling with shared evidence and come to two varying conclusions, what can we say? It is tempting to accuse one of the thinkers of cowardice, bias, ignorance, or some other corruption to account for the discrepancy. This seems reasonable to me: it is hard to imagine a man who is not afraid, ignorant, biased, and in various other ways corrupt. What does not seem reasonable to me is the idea that one of the thinkers does not suffer likewise!

This is certainly not an absolute rule, but a general one. If an idea is strong enough that a school of thought can be built around it, it probably has a point. What it lacks, and what accounts for opposing views, is vision. It might have a little insight, but its vision narrows because it focuses too tightly on its insight. Other groups have their little insights too. Conflict occurs because of the appearance of contradiction, however the truth may be that we have two valid insights and we need simply to see how they relate to each other. That is, maybe it is all a question of proportions.

Wherein I Ramble About The Dark Knight Rises

So, I just returned from seeing The Dark Knight Rises, and I want to talk about it. I want to further my enjoyment of it. But I don't have any pseudo-philosophical stuff to say about it, this film does not lend itself to that as well as the previous film did, so I'm just going to make a series of critical remarks about what I loved and what I hated. Maybe after the film simmers in my mind I can try writing something of substance, for now I am just writing because I am compelled to speak about the movie.

All of these should be read in the context of the judgment that this was a good movie. Also, Spoilers.

• Bane was an awesome villain. He was something we have not really seen yet in Nolan's films: a rival for Batman. Because Bane had physical strength and brutality, which Joker, Two-Face, and Scarecrow lacked (Ra's al Ghul had some of that, but Batman was always more physically imposing). Bane was a symbol of a new order, which he established through fear and power, just like Batman established a new order opposed to the mobs through fear and power; the Joker was about anarchy, Two-Face was about perverse fairness and revenge, and Ra's al Ghul was about righteous destruction. Even in the seemingly superficial details Bane is similar to Batman: he is masked, his voice is obscured, he has an underground dwelling where he prepares for his above ground activities, he's at home in the shadows and in obscurity. Bane was not Batman's antithesis, Bane was cut from the same cloth, and was perhaps in some ways the superior between the two.
• But everything that was so great about Bane was ruined at the end when Talia al Ghul came into the picture. I spent that entire movie waiting to watch Batman prevail over Bane; I wanted to watch Batman display superiority over his mirror image, and we never got to see that. Batman damaged his mask, had about a minute of superiority over him, and then was overcome by Talia. At this point, Bane takes on the role of a high-ranking goon, and is dispatched with about that much concern when Catwoman blasts him away with the Batpod.
• The ending felt like a cop-out, but it wasn't. It has the initial appearance of a cop-out, because you become emotionally prepared for Bruce Wayne to die. You realize that this is a gritty, 'realistic' Batman film, and that means that if Bruce has to sacrifice himself to save Gotham, he will, and nothing will change that fact.
  
  But this is not the case. It would be wrong for Bruce Wayne to die in the explosion. Only Batman should die. This is the only proper ending for a Batman universe: Bruce Wayne and Gotham moving beyond Batman. This, coupled with Catwoman's redemption arc make it the best aesthetic choice. However, it will continue feeling like a cop-out, because we are distrustful of heroes who do not really accomplish what they appear to accomplish. 
• This movie addressed what so many fans failed to address at the end of The Dark Knight, which is that lying to Gotham about Harvey Dent was not heroic. The fact that Gordon was taken to task for that, and that he has struggled with it for years, pleased me.
• This film was necessary to tie Batman Begins and The Dark Knight together. It's closer to Batman Begins, but ending on that note sort of ties the whole thing together. BB showed how Batman came to be and why Gotham needed him. TDK showed that Batman could become hazardous by inspiring madness and insanity. TDKR completed this arc by letting Batman do what he was needed to do, and then leave upon fulfilling it, avoiding the deficit of no Batman and the excess of Batman bringing out insanity.
• Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle's romance was handled perfectly. It was unrealistic and utterly undeveloped. This is how Batman and Catwoman's relationships should be: they shouldn't be explored, there should be something raw and unintelligible to them. 
• Revealing that John Blake's real name is "Robin" provided a brief fanboy thrill. A brief one. It dissipates quickly and you're left realizing that it was probably not an improvement on the film. He certainly isn't going to go out using his real name, therefore he isn't Robin the sidekick. Maybe it just highlights the role John Blake plays, but I somehow get the impression that this was a misstep.
• Bane and Talia's motivations aren't interesting in this film. The Joker was interesting because his motivation (if he even really had one) was unusual and fascinating. Catwoman was interesting because she was trying to find redemption through greater sin, and her quest became Bruce's quest. Bane wanted... destruction? But also for the citizens to retake their city. Although that was just because Talia wanted Gotham to suffer, she wanted to destroy it slowly over the course of five months. So, the entire part of the film where Bane acts as a revolutionary feels... pointless. Sure, he did it so that Gotham and Bruce would feel more pain before the bomb went off, but he didn't believe in any of it. And that was the interesting part of his character. Destroying Gotham to help Talia get revenge on Batman and fulfill her father's legacy is too trite.
• The falling out between Bruce and Alfred cost too much in character revision for too little payout. Bruce and Alfred have been through too much, it was out of character for Alfred to walk away like that, even if he had "intervention"-like motivations.
• I know Nolan was criticized for having predominantly male characters in the Batman movies, and for failing to make compelling or strong female characters. I wonder if this is why Talia was shoehorned in as the main villain?
• If I had my way, all fight scenes would play out like the fight between Batman and Bane. The music would turn off, and the characters would punch and kick each other in a somewhat labored, painful, and decisive way. I prefer fight choreography that makes fake fights look like real fights, as opposed to fight choreography that makes fake fights look like interpretive dance.
• When Bane spoke, I thought of Sean Connery. Am I alone in this?
• My biggest disappointment is the way Bane fizzled out at the end. He was not as interesting as the Joker, but he was shaping up to be iconic in his own way. A different motive, and the nixing of the last minute demotion to sidekick, and the movie would be at least 15% greater!

My personal rule of thumb when critiquing a movie is to ask what could have been done differently. For example, with Inception, some people complained about the technology in the film never being explained. So I ask myself if this is something that could have been fixed, and I conclude that it could not. Any change made in this area would have made an inferior film. Is that the case with The Dark Knight Rises? No, there are improving changes that could have been made.

What I Would Have Done

Bane should have been resentful toward the League of Shadows, instead of remaining loyal to their cause of destroying excessively wicked and decadent cities and civilizations. Whereas the League of Shadows was a moralistic organization, Bane should have been an amoral monster who got his kicks from dominating things weaker than him; his role as a member of the League of Shadows was just a place in the world that allowed him to act out these impulses. He was expelled from the League of Shadows for being overly brutal in the course of dishing out punishment, the exact opposite reason for Bruce Wayne's falling out.

To avoid making Bane into too much of a two-dimensional movie monster, references should be made to his being born in prison. He was born into a dog-eat-dog, state-of-nature, nasty, brutish, and short world. He escaped from the prison, but could not change the sort of man his environment made him. Whereas Bruce escaped Gotham and returned to make Gotham better; Bane escaped the Pit and left to make the world worse. These little mirror images will make Batman and Bane's confrontation more compelling.

Brief (very brief, no lectures) remarks could be made by Bane about the importance of nature, evolution, and the strong devouring the weak. Bane has evolved since his expulsion from the League of Shadows: he no longer acts cruelly solely for his own enjoyment, he acts cruelly because he believes only through cruelty can order be brought about. Only through strict hierarchy and fear can humanity stave off destruction. Bane returns to Gotham to prove his personal and ideological superiority over both Batman and Ra's al Ghul by making Gotham the first location to fall to his rule.

But, unlike the Joker, Bane should be a more human character, much like Batman is. Keep the story about Ra's al Ghul's child being born in the prison, and keep it as Talia, but make Bane a friend of Talia and her mother. Bane could grow up trying to protect the two, becoming like a surrogate son to Talia's mother. At the age of, say, ten, Bane is held back while his adoptive mother is beaten to death in front of both he and Talia. They only have each other to rely on. It is here that Bane begins training and building his body, and at his young age begins trying to climb out of the pit. Year after year, he fails to make the climb, gaining more and more scars as the rocks of the pit damage his body each time he loses his grip.

At the age of sixteen, there is a riot, and Bane fights a group of three men. He holds his own, but is soon overpowered and beaten. They move to attack Talia, stating that they will kill her like they killed her mother, but she is saved when a separate group of rioters attacks the first. Within two weeks, Bane attempts to climb the pit without the rope, and almost succeeds, successfully clearing the jump that most others fail at. As he nears the top, Ra's al Ghul invades with a small army of assassins. Bane is knocked to the ground during the initial invasion, breaking his back.

When Talia vouches for him, the League takes him to their temple. He is unable to even feed himself he is so thoroughly injured. He grows bitter because of his powerlessness. He begins a regimen of pain killers, intense training, and steroids, growing strong enough to become part of the League. But he remains driven by that feeling of powerlessness, and must commit acts of cruelty to reassure himself of his own strength and power.

All this should be communicated in an obscured way. Brief stories told by other prisoners, "legends" and rumors circulated among Gotham's citizens picked up from Bane's army. No heavy-handed exposition, brief scenes, especially during moments where Bane is triumphant, to highlight where he is now opposed to where he was.

Talia will remain loyal to her father's vision, but should be in love with who Bane was. Talia was in Gotham as her father's failsafe. When he failed to destroy the city, she began searching for a new way of destroying the city. But because of Batman's activity's and the Dent Act, the city ceased to be filthy and corrupt, and therefore she could not destroy the city because it no longer warranted destruction. Instead, she began investing in the energy reactor as a back-up plan, to be utilized in the event that Gotham fell into old habits. When Bane comes to Gotham, announces himself a leader and a revolutionary, and coerces Gotham into following him, Talia now has cause to destroy the city.

What she did not anticipate was that Bane himself would know about the reactor and would use it to stave off the United States government long enough to solidify his power. With the reactor in Bane's power (also, with the "time-bomb" aspect of the reactor removed), Talia alternately portrays herself as Miranda to those loyal to the old ways, and Talia to Bane, so as to get closer to the detonator and the location of the bomb.

In the climax of the film, Batman has his confrontation with Bane, wherein he prevails by damaging Bane's mask. Bane, utterly defeated and brought down by Batman, will refuse to tell until Talia enters the room and reveals who she is. Both Batman and Bane will discover that she was not loyal to either of them, but that she was working toward Gotham's destruction. Both of them can plead with her not to detonate it, but she can (in Ozymandias fashion for no other reason than because any villain looks that much more determined when they execute a plan prior to talking about it) reveal that she triggered the detonation process ten minutes prior.

Batman can have his suicide flight at that point. Bane will remain alive, but the citizens of Gotham will rise up against him. He will be thrown into Blackgate prison, where he is finally in an environment that suits him. Perhaps the end could show him smiling as three prisoners try to gain credibility by threatening him.

Why proceed in this way? Because giving Bane a vision of the world is more compelling than having him try to fulfill Ra's al Ghul's vision. And because making him self-motivated is more compelling than having him be Talia's obedient lackey. And giving Bane an insecurity that fuels his worldview draws more of an emotional investment than just saying he's a very philosophical guy who just happens to believe very strongly in his point of view. And because giving Gotham back to the citizens has more room for discussion and contemplation if it is done as part of Bane's fascist vision than because Gotham should be killed slowly. And, it allows for a climactic final fight between Batman and Bane where Batman gets the decisive victory that we long for and Bane gets the glorious defeat that his character deserves.

But, then, I'm sure a lot of people have their theories on what should have been changed. Nolan did a pretty damn good job, I think his villains needed work, but the time spent on Batman was beautiful. Nolan succeeded.

Shelf Space

My last post was about how all the tiny factors in an experience make a difference, even if their individual contributions do not amount to much. This post is about a concern I have.

At one time you had to be part of the elite aristocracy to hear innovative music, or you could hear the old, folksy favorites if you knew someone who was good enough at singing with a few pints in him.

Later in time you just had to have access to a radio and/or enough money to purchase a record; of course obscure recordings could be hard to find and it's perfectly possible that you could hear a song once or twice and then lose it for the rest of your life. There was a time when you could really be proud of your music collection, who knows how hard it was for you to find some of those recordings?

Then it became a matter of buying CDs, listening to the radio, and watching MTV. You could record the music videos, you could order CDs through the mail, or you could just go to the store and buy whatever music you happened to like. If it was obscure, sure, it was still hard to get ahold of, but for the most part you had as much music as you could afford.

At this point, you do not even need to be able to afford it. If you go about things legally you can probably find whatever song you like on YouTube, and if you're willing to bend rules you can freely download pretty much any song you hear and like. In the past you have album jackets and CD cases, now all you have is data. Free data. Data that can be acquired in between texting. Even if its secured legally, it's still just data. You don't have a shelf in your room getting cluttered with band logos from the edges of jewel cases.

Books are a more controversial case of the same phenomenon. For me, I love my cheap Craig tablet that lets me carry a small library with me wherever I go. And yet, I never turn and look at a bookcase covered in books that tell people what ideas or emotions I'm attracted to, I don't experience a variety of fonts, paper textures, cover thicknesses, degrading book stiffness, and I can't act proud that I display epic poetry (perhaps read, perhaps not) in my room. It's all been flattened down to a cover image and the text. Data.

The book reading community has some who want to fight this trend. They will lose. Books will become antiques and novelties. Data is just better. There is no real argument to be made against them: authors write content that you want to read, now the paper, the printing, and the ink industry are rendered superfluous and can be removed from the situation. The only argument against them stems from the point I was making in my last post that all the little factors count: reading a book will be different now than it was before, because it was never just about reading text, there was always a little more to it.

The central assumption behind the superiority of data over traditional publishing means is that it delivers what we want with less superfluous trappings that used to be necessary. That makes it easier to produce and cheaper to consume. And this assumption will be seen as correct, and in a lot of ways it does correctly describe how we see those “superfluous trappings.” And yet, I think that our lives will get a little flatter. Our lives will be a little less full without cover art and CD cases cluttering up our rooms.

I'm not saying we should turn around, we shouldn't. I'm not saying maybe we will reconsider this transition our society is taking – we won't and we shouldn't. What I am saying is that while we're gaining cheaper goods, more storage space, and cleaning lives we are losing artistic content and we are changing the essential experience of purchasing books and music in a way that makes the experiences more anemic. Our lives are getting a little smaller – maybe that means we should find a very rich way to use that new shelf space?

How Much is Human - Conservatives and Liberals

This is certainly not an absolute statement on the differences between liberals-broadly defined-and conservatives-broadly defined, but more of a general trend I've noticed in their respective worldviews.

In the course of speaking and thinking, a conservative is more likely to appeal to the immovability of reality. You can see this in conversations about gender, morality, poverty, or human nature. You can more easily imagine a conservative ridiculing someone transgendered for trying to go against the facts (the penis or lack thereof), about morality as something one "goes back to" rather than something that adapts, that poverty is just a result of the nature of wealth - haves and have-nots, and that things like war and crime are inevitable because of the way people are and the most sensible approach to such things is superior force and retribution because anything else does not deal with the way humanity actually is. A conservative is more likely to suggest an approach to life that says most of life is out of our control and all we can do is try to be good and excellent people in our role and leave the universe to work according to its motions. The rules are fixed, things are the way things are, and to act otherwise is to ridiculously try to live against the facts.

This leads to an increased reverence for tradition, traditional morality, and tradition beliefs because this worldview produces a disinclination toward the destruction and recreation of existing institutions and practices. It tends to view existing institutions and practices as just being sensible and moral ways of interacting with the facts of reality.

Liberals on the other hand tend to appeal to the human influence in how we make sense of the world. They are more likely to say that gender is a human construct, that morality can be changed and tailored to fit our needs, and that poverty can be eliminated or minimized by the ordering of society. With regards to human nature they often times take a similar approach to conservatives and say that it just is the way it is, but there seems to be a greater optimism that all we really need to expunge the less desirable aspects of human nature is increased education and knowledge, thereby bringing things back under our control. They too appeal to the facts, but they typically appeal to the facts to destroy something human so that they can build something new in its place. They place more of life under human creativity. A liberal approach to life is more pluralistic, if some given aspect of life is defined by the human mind then they are likely to leave each person to use their mind to create their own definition.

From here, liberals can adopt a method of creative destruction. Human Construct X leads to Undesired Side-Effect Y. By appealing to the real facts behind Human Construct X (the indifferent facts of nature, presumably as revealed by science) they "disprove" the validity of the Construct and are now free to substitute a new Construct or allow for a pluralism of Constructs.

I wonder how much of the differences between the two groups, at least in America, is reducible to the question of how much of life is of human origin.