New-World-Order Movies

According to Thomas Hobbes, in a state of nature, each man was a sovereign individual who could do as he pleased. The price of complete liberty, however, was the war of every man against every other man, making life nasty, brutish, and short. For that reason, men agreed to give up some of their freedom in exchange for the security that would come with a state ruled by a sovereign. Though we do not believe this fanciful theory of the origin of society and government, yet we all agree that we are better off with a social contract in which we submit to the laws of a government in exchange for the benefits that government can provide.

Just as there can be such a thing as too much liberty, so too can there be such a thing as too much government. Conservatives especially feel this way. They are more comfortable with power belonging to the states than the federal government, and they are very suspicious of the United Nations as a world government that threatens American sovereignty. Liberals are more comfortable with federal power, but they also find themselves apprehensive about global agreements they fear will put profits ahead of workers, such as those concerning free trade.

These apprehensions are especially aggravated by such things as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bohemian Grove. It is feared that within these groups, powerful people get together in secret and conspire to rule the world. Defenders of these groups argue that they just want to get people together to help smooth things out, to promote better relations among nations, improving economies and reducing the chances for war.

What most everyone agrees on is that a one-world government would be a bad idea (except when George H. W. Bush slipped up and referred to the “new world order”). Hardly anyone forthrightly declares that countries should give up their arms, with only the United Nations having weapons that will enable it to impose its transnational laws and regulations on nations no longer sovereign. The difference is between those who fear such a new world order, and those who say such fears are unfounded.

There are two good things about fear: first, it motivates us to avoid danger, and second, it is often the basis of a good movie. As for the latter, there are, of course, numerous dystopian movies about totalitarian world governments. In Rollerball (1975), corporations have replaced governments, so this is a left-wing nightmare movie in which individualism is suppressed for the sake of corporate power and profits. In Hunger Games (2012), Panem might not be a world government, but it is a totalitarian federal government run by a bunch of decadent elites, which makes it a right-wing nightmare movie.

There are a few movies, however, that actually promote the idea of loss of sovereignty as a good thing, that portray totalitarian power in the hands of a few as desirable, as conducive to peace and prosperity. In Gabriel Over the White House (1933), President Judd Hammond (Walter Huston) is a small-government conservative who thinks crime and unemployment are local problems, best left to the states. Then God intervenes and turns him into a fascist dictator who disbands Congress under threat of martial law. He presides over a command economy that puts everyone to work, and establishes a police state along with military tribunals that allow for the immediate execution of criminals. Discovering that other nations have not paid back their war debts, he tells them they will have the money to pay off those debts right after they get rid of their armies and navies, allowing America to rule the world. When they balk, he puts on a display of America’s “air navy,” in which he threatens to annihilate them all if they don’t do what he says. They capitulate. Having eliminated unemployment, crime, and war, God calls him home, as his job is done. Because America does not have to give up her sovereignty, a lot of neo-cons might like this movie about an imperial presidency ruling over an American empire.

On the other hand, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) takes loss of sovereignty to the next level. In this movie, a flying saucer lands bearing an alien named Klaatu and his robot bodyguard named Gort. Klaatu says this is a goodwill mission. He refuses to talk to the president of the United States by himself, insisting on the need to talk to all the world leaders at the same time. As it turns out, however, he ends up addressing a body of scientists, because in a left-wing film, scientists are better than politicians. He tells them that he represents an interplanetary government of the universe, and that earthlings must give up their violent ways, or robots like Gort will destroy the entire planet. This is like the conservatives’ worst fears about the United Nations stripping the United States of its sovereignty raised to the next power, with the entire Earth losing its sovereignty to a federation of aliens. The attitude of the movie is that this is a good thing.

I have always fantasized about a sequel, in which Americans capture the flying saucer and subdue Gort. Then they reverse engineer them until we have an army of robots and a fleet of flying saucers of our own, which we then use to destroy all those arrogant aliens who presumed upon us. At the end of the movie, with America triumphant, the president gives a victory speech, saying that our new manifest destiny of the universe has been accomplished, because we are a God-fearing people.

But Things to Come (1936) is the ultimate new-world-order movie. Made before World War II, it envisions the coming war, which wipes out much of mankind, followed by a plague. It spreads throughout the land, and there is nothing doctors can do, because there is no medicine left. A man takes charge, ruthlessly killing those infected and staggering around, until the plague is finally wiped out in 1970. He becomes the leader of Everytown, and is called “Chief” or “Boss.” He wears a coat made of furs, looking like a barbarian warlord, and he is intent on waging war against the “hill people,” just like a typical conservative.

Suddenly, John Cabal (Raymond Massey) lands in a futuristic airplane in a futuristic flying outfit. He tells Dr. Harding, whom he knew before the war, that a bunch of engineers and mechanics have banded together to form the “brotherhood of efficiency, the freemasonry of science.” Once again, we have the left-wing prejudice in favor of scientists over politicians. When Dr. Harding enthusiastically embraces the idea, saying, “I’m yours to command,” Cabal replies that neither he nor anyone else is in command, that there will be no more bosses. Rather, “Civilization is to command.” Saying that this world government has no leaders makes us suspicious, reminding us of Marx’s communist ideal in which the state withers away. Denying that anyone has power, asserting that one is merely executing the impersonal will of the organization for the good of mankind, sounds like a way of disguising its totalitarian nature.

The Boss is portrayed as a brutish anti-intellectual, who thinks it is just as well they don’t print books anymore, because they muddle thoughts and ideas. He doesn’t trust scientists, but he needs them for his war effort, to make fuel and poison gas. When Cabal goes to talk to the Boss, Cabal tells him the war will have to stop. In the course of their discussion, Cabal says, “our new order has an objection to private aeroplanes” (because airplanes represent power, this is the equivalent of denying individuals the right to bear arms). And when the Boss says that his territory is an “independent sovereign state,” Cabal says, “We don’t approve of independent sovereign states.”

Eventually, the air force of Wings over the World drops the gas of peace on Everytown, which merely puts everyone to sleep, except the Boss, who conveniently dies. Then what follows is a montage of futuristic industry, in which everyone is hard at work. In fact, everyone seems to do nothing but work. We don’t see people playing games, singing and dancing, or going to the movies. We begin to wonder, What is it all for, if all everyone is going to do is work? In fact, my chief objection to a command economy is that it might command me to work a lot harder than my natural preference, which is as little as possible. One thing about free enterprise, a lazy man like me has the option of working less in exchange for lower wages.

In the year 2036, someone called Theotocopulos begins to protest this way of life, arguing that life was more merry and vigorous in the old days. Now, if he just wanted people to be able to have more fun and not work so hard, that would have seemed reasonable. But this movie naturally has to make him into a Luddite who opposes all progress. He addresses the people, who seem to agree with him, but since this futuristic civilization does not appear to be a democracy, what the people want is irrelevant, and they are thwarted.

Oswald Cabal is the great-grandson of John Cabal. Even though supposedly there are no bosses in this new civilization, Oswald Cabal seems to have a lot of hereditary power as president of the council. When an acquaintance says, “Oh God! Is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?” Cabal dismisses this concern for happiness, and says rest comes soon enough with death. “It’s the all the universe or nothingness,” he declares. Looks like they’ll be putting in some overtime on that one.

Though all three of these unusual movies try to put the idea of a new world order in the best possible light, yet they still come across as creepy. They don’t make movies like this anymore (in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), we only lose our technology, not our sovereignty). I don’t think this is because the country has shifted to the right in this regard so much as, left or right, people are more suspicious of power than they used to be.

On the Question of Fetal Pain

Planned Parenthood has had some bad publicity of late. Doctors who work for Planned Parenthood have been videotaped discussing the selling of aborted fetuses for medical research. There seem to be several aspects of this that people find objectionable.

The first is that what the doctors did or were offering to do was illegal. If it was illegal, then that is a matter for prosecutors to pursue, not me. Apart from the legalities, it would not bother me if the doctors were trying to make a profit for their organization by selling the fetuses. I realize that Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization, but you get the idea. Call it “fund-raising” if you like. Whatever words we use, if selling the fetuses would help Planned Parenthood with its finances, and the fetuses that were sold would benefit medical research, I’m all for it. After all, if they make enough money selling fetuses, then maybe the government will no longer have to fund Planned Parenthood, which should make Republicans happy.

Moreover, it wouldn’t bother me if the women who have the abortion get a cut of the take. If it were sufficiently remunerative, some women might purposely get pregnant in order to sell their fetuses. That might strike some as being venal, but if it would be useful for medical research, then it’s all right with me.

The second problem that some people have with this is that what the doctors were describing was gruesome, what with all that talk about crunching and crushing the fetuses, which reminded me of some of the Grand Guignol lines in the movie Re-Animator (1985), as when Dr. Hill demonstrates the removal of the scalp while comparing it to peeling a large orange. This is mostly a matter of being squeamish, analogous to the way we feel about corpses. Most people will treat the dead body of a loved one with tenderness and respect until they get it buried. We know it will soon rot, but we don’t want to even think about that, let alone see it happen. One reason a person might be reticent about donating his body to science is the thought of that body being hacked to pieces by a bunch of callous medical students.

But even if we are squeamish about how our own body or that of a loved one will be treated after death, it is none of our business if someone else is willing to let his body be used for medical research after he dies, however much we might be repulsed by a description of what happens to that body when he does. And so, if the woman who has the abortion is willing to let her fetus be crunched and crushed for the greater good of mankind, that is no different from allowing her own body to be subject to its own form of gruesomeness for similar reasons.

Some people further objected to the fact that one of the doctors was seen enjoying a hearty meal while discussing the manner in which the fetus would be handled. There are those who are sensitive to disturbing thoughts while they are eating. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer tells of what a pity it was that the cook had an ulcer on his shin, because cream pudding was his best dish. But others would not be bothered at all by the similarity in color and texture of the pus from sore and pudding in the bowl. Furthermore, long experience had probably inured the doctor to the crunching and crushing, which was probably for the best, because if she could eat while discussing such matters, she could probably perform abortions without flinching, which would be better for her patients.

Third, there is the question of the pain that might be felt by the fetus during an abortion. And let me pause here, by way of parenthesis, to comment on a somewhat paradoxical fact about human nature. The feeling of sympathy that we experience when someone is in pain is part of our social nature, its primary function being to motivate us to tend to his needs, to alleviate his pain if we can. But there are some people who care only about eliminating the disturbing feeling of sympathy, and care not one whit about the other person’s suffering as such.

I knew a woman once who was bothered by mice and had set out mousetraps. One night while she was home, the trap sprung. As so often is the case, the trap did not kill the mouse immediately, and it started squealing in pain. She couldn’t stand it. She said she became hysterical and started screaming, so much so that her neighbors came running over, thinking she was being assaulted. As far as she was concerned, that was the end of the story. “What happened to the mouse?” I asked. “Oh, the guy from next door threw the mouse in the trash can in the backyard,” she answered with indifference.

Out of sight, out of mind. It reminded me of my parents. We had mice in the house where I lived as a teenager. I suggested they get one of those traps that does not kill the mouse, but only captures him in a cage. Then he could be released in a distant field the next day. But that was too much trouble, my parents averred, and so they put out the usual sort of traps. Whenever a trap caught a mouse, however, they would hear it squealing and go berserk, running out of the room while yelling at me to get rid of it. Their idea of getting rid of the mouse was for me to put it in the trash can, just like the woman in the story above. But that would mean the mouse would still be in pain for who knows how long. Rather than allow for that, I would cut off its head. My parents not only did not understand why I did that, but they even thought it was cold-hearted of me to do such a thing. In short, there are people who do not mind if a person or animal suffers, just as long as they do not have to see it or hear about it.

Recently, the possibility of fetal pain during an abortion has become an issue. In general, those who are pro-life want to use the possibility of fetal pain to make abortions illegal after, say, twenty weeks of pregnancy. They could argue in favor of mandatory anesthesia, but I figured that they did not want to simply require that fetuses be anesthetized during the procedure, because that would be conceding too much to the pro-choice camp. They would rather use the pain of the fetus to make late-term abortions illegal than have such abortions become more palatable by making them painless. However, I was perplexed that people who were pro-choice were not advocating anesthesia themselves.

Now I know why. Montana considered a bill that would have required anesthesia for fetuses after twenty weeks, which sounds good to me, but a lot of people who were pro-choice objected to this becoming law. They saw it as another instance of politicians coming between a patient and her doctor, of unnecessarily adding to the cost of the procedure, and as based on the unscientific notion that a fetus can feel pain.

As for the part about the existence of fetal pain after twenty weeks being unscientific, that is partly true, but partly beside the point. There is something intrinsically unscientific about pain or any subjective state, because we cannot observe such states directly, save in our own individual case. This fact was the basis for behaviorism: since consciousness could not be observed, it was reasoned, it should be left out of psychology altogether, if that discipline had any hope of being scientific.

We can reason by analogy, of course. If my pain correlates with certain neurophysiological states, then if those same neurophysiological states occur in someone else, we may infer that he is in pain too, especially if he says, “Ouch!” But the more difference there is between me and some other organism, the less confidence I have in the analogy. For a long time, it was thought that babies did not feel pain and thus did not require anesthesia for surgery, only a paralytic to keep them still. It has only been since the mid-1980s that anesthesia for infants has become universally standard practice in America. In centuries past, vivisectionists experimented on animals by cutting them open without any kind of anesthesia either. No matter how much that animal struggled or cried, many vivisectionists maintained that animals did not feel pain, that their responses were merely reflexive. In other words, if you cannot utter the words, “I am in pain,” you may be in for a rough time.

Ernst Mach once noted that in studying physics, one ingests a lot of metaphysics. He could have said that about science in general. Many a metaphysical belief has been mistaken for a scientific fact, and claims about whether an animal, a baby, or a fetus can feel pain is just such an example. In some cases, assumptions of convenience may play a role. People tend to assume as true whatever suits their purposes. When Congress was considering the banning of incandescent bulbs, to be replaced by CFLs, which contain mercury, the question arose as to whether the disposal of CFLs would result in a harmful accumulation of mercury in landfills. The answer given to this concern was that people would take the burned out bulbs to a recycling center. Oh sure! Some people may do that, but most do not. The only reason anyone would believe something so unrealistic is that it was convenient to assume as much.

I fear that many people who are pro-choice believe that fetuses feel no pain during an abortion because it is a convenient assumption. Just as pro-life people don’t want to say that abortions are all right if fetuses are anesthetized, pro-choice people are afraid that certain abortions will become illegal if they concede that fetuses can feel pain. What we are likely to end up with is a standoff, in which neither side gives way. The losers may be the fetuses that are denied the anesthesia they deserve.

Always (1985)

At the center of the movie Always (1985) is David (Henry Jaglom), who will make your flesh crawl. He is whiny, icky, and creepy. He likes to wallow in his feelings, and worse than that, he wants to share. When the movie begins, David does not understand why his wife Judy (Patricia Townsend) left him and wants a divorce. We, on the other hand, do not know how she stood it as long as she did. But then, she is not much better than David, nor is anyone else in this movie, and so for almost two hours we suffer through watching a bunch of people who want to hug, feel, and communicate. By the time the movie is over, you will want to spend time around some real men, who don’t even know what feelings are, let alone talk about them.

When the movie begins, David’s wife Judy comes over to his house to sign the divorce papers. Right then, we know something is wrong with that setup. This is the sort of thing you do at your lawyer’s office. In any event, David has decided that he will surprise Judy by fixing dinner for the two of them. At first we wonder why he didn’t realize that she might have other plans, but we soon discover that he does not care if she does. When she finally relents and agrees to stay for dinner, she says she wants to call someone and let him know she won’t be able to keep their date. But he doesn’t want her to do that, because this is their special divorce dinner, and he doesn’t want it spoiled by her making a phone call. Although this is incredibly selfish and immature, the movie does not want us to react to it that way. We are supposed to think it is warm and cuddly the way he wants to have their last dinner together be just so.  We know this because in addition to starring in this movie, Jaglom also wrote the screenplay and directed it, so he obviously wants us to agree with David.

By the time the notary gets over to the house for the signing of the divorce papers, David and Judy are acting like two people who have just fallen in love and cannot get enough of each other, cuddling, kissing, and whispering sweet nothings. The notary tells them to think it over and leaves, figuring they really do not want to get divorced. After that, people start showing up at David’s house for one reason or another, culminating in a barbecue on the Fourth of July, and we get to witness the many different ways people can be obnoxious, blathering pop-psychology and superficial philosophy.

The only good thing about this movie is that it is just a movie, because if you have ever had the misfortune to wind up around a bunch of people like that, you know that they want you to discuss your feelings too.

200 Motels (1971)

Apparently a lot of people think that the movie 200 Motels (1971) shows what it is like to take LSD. If so, I’m sure glad I never dropped any acid, because then I would have been bored.

Alternatively, some people say that this is the movie to watch while you are tripping out on acid. Well, if you have to watch a movie like this to enjoy being on LSD, it’s not worth it.

Speaking of drugs, if you have ever been around some people who are drunk or on drugs and think that everything they say or do is just hilarious, then you know what it is like to watch this movie. The problem is not that the potty-mouth humor is not funny, which would be bad enough, but that the people in the movie obviously think they are being so cute and clever and witty, and that makes the movie especially irritating.