Anthony Gottlieb, the perspicacious man who first hired me to work at The Economist, has made the New York Times for his violent hobby:
It’s not an obvious leap from “The Sopranos” to the Sci-Fi channel, but a friend who was bereft after that HBO series ended was steered to the new incarnation of “Battlestar Galactica,” a cult series about a fleet of starships seeking to escape the robot race of Cylons and find refuge on a fabled, lost colony known as Earth.Science fiction is one thing: “Battlestar Galactica” has intellectual cachet.
“The humans are pagan polytheists and the robots are monotheists, whose divine jihad is against the humans (even though the former know that the latter created them),” Anthony Gottlieb, the author of “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” explained off the top of his Blackberry from an airport baggage claim. “There’s a curious mix of high-tech and superstition and scriptural fundamentalism (which interestingly suggests that religion is ineradicable, as today’s theorists of secularism are increasingly saying).”
Mr. Gottlieb likes the philosophical puzzles (“Some of the robots think they are human, and some of the humans fear they may be robots”) as well as the way the show switches sympathies back and forth from democracy to dictatorship. He really had only one objection. “There’s lots of romance, though this bores me,” he typed. “Less kissing, more killing is a frequent internal refrain of mine.”
Jaysus. He's like Jonah Goldberg with a third digit in his i.q.
Better keep the scary bacon'n'Play-Doh away from Gottlieb.
It's just a TV show. Screw Gottlieb, I like the romance.
We are all just hommuncului sitting in our Chinese rooms shuffling symbols around and pretending we know something.
Maybe we should look to "Ghost in the Shell" for answers?
Well, romance is a good thing, especially when it ends up in, well, good old Harry Met Sally practicalities.
Noen, I can't find a reference to the "Ghost in the Shell," so maybe you can help me? It's gotta be better than that antiquated old I Ching that says everything, but nothing.
Ghost in the Shell
But I was thinking in particular of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
It's an Anime Dir by Mamoru Oshii. It deals with the general subject of where one draws that line between man and machine. A lot of Anime does. I think it is a more interesting question than Gottlieb's.
Whether or not religion is ineradicable is certainly not suggested in Battlestar Galactica. If it is it isn't of primary importance at all. It would seem to me the question of identity and what it means to be human is pretty central to the entire series. It is in fact the very first issue raised in the beginning of the show.
What are you? Are you human? Are your actions "free"? How would you know? In Ghost in the Shell Batou's body has been replace bit by bit with mechanical parts. At what point do you cease being human possessing a soul or "ghost"? Does it make any difference?
To get back to Battlestar Galactica, I think the cylons represent the Nephilim whose duty is to teach humans righteousness. That appears to be what they are doing.
Many thanks. BG I'm fuzzily aware of, bud didn't know squat about he Anime. Holy good gol dang! That is pretty incredible, and fine directing by Mamoru Oshii. Just a little toe in the water makes me interested in learning a bit more about it. Generally, I prefer reality (Not the Reality Shows, however!), so I didn't even look sketchily at it before.
When I lived in Japan, they had anime, but I was too heavily focused on a couple of other aspects of Japanese culture to pay attention to it. With animation it is much easier to play to some of the conditions and questions we (humanity) face now, and not the standard Star Wars/BG side of the shows, intellectual cachet or not. Ok, the Cylons have their enimatronical use, with the inhumane side trying to subjugate this slowly decreting population of humans, and very sinisterly, too, I might add.
Think I'll go stop at Starbuck's.
And we will eventually learn that Bob Dylan is God in that series.
Can't we have more guns and more kissy stuff? Not like they're mutually exclusive.