My Lambda Pi Eta

Lambda Pi Eta is the honor society for communication majors, officially sanctioned by the National Communication Association, and back in the 90s I started up a chapter here at Fordham University, together with a colleague who has since moved on, Roger Musgrave.  So that's why I gave this post the title of my LPH (it's H not E because Eta is not Epsilon--the letter in the Greek alphabet for Eta looks like, and is the ancestor of our letter H in the Roman alphabet, oh, and please, no Greek jokes about Eta Bitta Pie or whatever, I was in a fraternity you know, Beta Theta Pi, so that's all old hat to me).

So, I was very pleased when a colleague who is very much present in the department, Margot Hardenbergh, revived our chapter this year after a long period of being dormant, on hiatus, offline, etc.  Way to go, Margot!  

And the first new induction ceremony was held last month.  We were very fortunate to be able to get the respected communication scholar Michael Schudson, presently teaching in Columbia University's Journalism School, to give a talk at the ceremony, which he did, and I was asked if I'd say a few words and also introduce Michael, which I did, and all that was topped off by some remarks by the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Michael Latham.

But don't take my word for it, check out the write-up on our student newspaper's website, The Ram, under the title Lambda Pi Eta Inducts Students for the First Time in Decades.  The piece by Connor Ryan starts off as follows:

Lambda Pi Eta, the communication honor society on campus, lost its name and place of recognition after years of neglect and a history that has dumbfounded even the society's current presidents – that is, until Sara Kugel, last year's United Student Government president, and Dr. Margot Hardenbergh, undergraduate associate chair, inspired Katie Corrado, FCRH '12, and Alison Daly, FCRH '12, the society's co-presidents, to reignite the tradition.


"I volunteered to help start Lambda Pi Eta because I wanted to make a lasting impression on campus and give back to the department that has done so much for me," Daly wrote in an email.  "We want to recognize students of high academic standing for their hard work and dedication to the communication field."

 I'm quite pleased and proud to say that Daly and Corrado are both students of mine.  The article includes a picture of them, Alison on the left, Katie on the right:

So, anyway, back to the write-up:

  The society's first induction in years took place on Thursday, Oct. 27 in Tognino Hall of Duane Library and welcomed the current 37 students that make up this year's collection of the communication department's finest.  Dr. Michael Schudson of Columbia University, Dr. Michael Latham, Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and Dr. Lance Strate, a professor in the department, offered words of wisdom and personal experience at the intimate ceremony, which was attended by prestigious members of the administration, as well as students and their families. 

"The comments by Dr. Lance Strate were an inspiration, and it was a great honor for Fordham to have a distinguished scholar like Columbia's Dr. Michael Schudson address the group," Latham wrote in an email regarding the ceremony's speakers.

Now, that was awfully nice of Dean Latham to say.  Of course, he missed my initial joke about how when we started the chapter in the 90s, I could make a joke about the name being Lambada Pi Eta, and people would know what I was talking about (remember "the forbidden dance"?).  But I did talk about how the three Greek letters stand for logos, pathos, and ethos, which Aristotle identifies as the three forms of proof or three types of appeals that can be made when addressing an audience.  Logos means word, and also logic, and refers to logical proof and the appeal to reason.  Pathos represents the emotions, and emotional appeals can indeed be powerful.  And ethos refers to what today we would call source credibility, how believable you are, which in part can be generated during the communication process, but in part has to do with the individual's prior reputation.  In a more traditional sense, ethos refers to the speaker's character, and the connection to ethics here is quite clear.

This all comes from the first major treatise on the subject of communication, Aristotle's Rhetoric, and I also explained that inherent in the three terms is a model of communication.  Ethos refers to the source of communication, the speaker in antiquity.  Logos refers to the message that the speaker puts together, the argument the speaker puts forth.  And pathos refers to the audience, and the ways in which the message is received, interpreted, and responded to.  All that's missing is the medium or channel, which Aristotle took for granted because in his time the only form of public communication was public speaking.

But I also suggested that we can consider ethos, pathos, and logos as a guide to life.  Logos, being about reason, is linked to intelligence and learning, and by virtue of being inducted into the honor society, the students had already demonstrated their strength in this area.  But while it is important to have a good head on your shoulders, that is not enough.  You also have to have a good heart. And that is what pathos represents.  Reason must be tempered and balanced by passion, to pursue those things you that are really important to you, that you really care about, and by compassion, as we like to say in Jesuit education, to become men and women for others.  And the balance is achieved with the aid of ethos, to be individuals of good character and ethical conduct, because then others will give you recognition and respect, will listen to what you have to say, and will consider your messages with care.  And even in the midst of the most hostile of crowds, with ethos on your side they will at least respect you for your position, and you may yet succeed in providing a little bit of opening to minds that are otherwise closed.

Well anyway, that's my spiel, or sermon, or whatever you want to call it. It's an approximation of what I said at the first couple of induction ceremonies back in the 90s, and what I said last month.  This is the first time I've written it down.   So, enough about me, back to the article, if you please:

Lambda Pi Eta stems from the National Communication Association, and Fordham represents one of more than 400 chapters spread across the country.  With the strength and popularity of the communication and media studies department on campus, students feel that an honor society dedicated to the major would thereby be popular – and with effort, successful.

"As a school with a very reputable communication department, it only seems right to have the presence of an equally reputable honor society on campus," Corrado said.  "Many of the students within the department have completed internships at some of the biggest media companies, have consistently done well in the classroom and are genuinely passionate about graduating from Fordham and making positive contributions to the media industry."

Yes, we are a very, very reputable communication department.  Are you listening,  Dean Latham?

While the society represents high academic achievement and perhaps a powerful networking tool down the road, Latham reminds that the society also provides an invaluable opportunity for students to create meaningful relationships with professors in the field.

"More broadly, they [honor societies] also help create a culture in which students and faculty can have valuable exchanges about personal goals, careers and values outside the classroom," Latham said.  "Honor societies like these give students an important goal to aspire to and set a standard for excellence."

Excellence indeed!  That is very much a part of Fordham's culture.  And as for what's next...

With the much-anticipated induction ceremony in the rearview, the society is looking to host more internal events dedicated to connecting Lambda Pi Eta to communication industries in New York.  For example, the society had a private meeting with "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek when he came to campus last month. 

"By the time [this article] gets published, we'll have held our first event with Jeffrey Salgo, longtime director of CBS," Corrado said. 

Besides the joy of being a part of the society, the private events and specialized attention are what draws most students to Lambda Pi Eta.

So, tell me, how do I join, you may well be asking yourself!  And who could blame you?

In order to gain admission into the society, students whose first major is communication and media studies must complete an application that is released in the spring and meet specific minimum cumulative and major GPA requirements.  Students who are admitted into the society are those who show dedication to the communication industry through course work and extracurricular activities.  Dr. Margot Hardenbergh is the honor society's faculty advisor.

"The biggest perk is knowing that you are among the elite of students within the communications field in this country," Corrado said.  "Academically, being in Lambda Pi Eta says a lot, and I think employers will recognize that when we graduate."

So, my hat's off to Margot Hardenbergh, and to Alison Daly and Katie Corrado, and all of our new LPH members.  Congratulations, we are very proud of you all!

The Supreme Identification of Persons and Corporations

Another recent news item that has generated a great deal of internet and media buzz is the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns.  My friend and colleague Paul Levinson is one of the few people I know who thinks the ruling was correct and beneficial, and you can read his statement over on his blog in a post he called, Why the Supreme Court Decision Allowing Direct Corporate Spending on Elections is Correct.   

Paul is a vigorous defender of the First Amendment, a First Amendment literalist cut from the same cloth as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who, like me, was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity--once a Beta, always a Beta, everywhere a Beta, or so we used to say).

Now, while I don't share Paul's position on the First Amendment, that issue does not concern me here.  Nor do I wish to go into the corrupting potential of unrestricted corporate spending on political campaigns (but see what former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said about the potential for undue influence on the judiciary, on the judiciary mind you, beyond officials elected to the legislative and executive branches of federal, state, and local governments: O'Connor Calls Citizens United Ruling 'A Problem').  These are all very important matters, and all have been the subject of serious discussion, and ultimately these are the issues that matter in this case.

And yet, it seems that the lion's share of the attention, at least as far as I can ascertain, has centered around the fact that the ruling involved the legal decision to grant corporations the legal status of persons.  This was a 19th century decision, traced back to the Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County (home of Fordham University's "sister" school, Santa Clara University) v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company 118 U.S. 394 (1886).  According to the rat haus reality press website, which provides a page devoted to the case, it was the result of a clerical error or unauthorized addition.  Here's what they provide by way of preamble to the actual text of the decision:

This is the text of the 1886 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same rights as living persons under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Quoting from David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism (pp.185-6):

          In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution. 

          Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

          The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

          The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that

          The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

          Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.  

          The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

 And yes, this equation offers up all sorts of confusions, contradictions, and uncertainties.  An article on the controversy in the online magazine Slate bears the title, The Pinocchio Project, and the subtitle, "Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy."  The Huffington Post, another online periodical, ran a humor piece entitled Supreme Court Ruling Spurs Corporation To Run for Congress:First Test of "Corporate Personhood" In Politics.   And here's what the most trusted man in America (since Walter Cronkite, at least in certain circles) had to say about it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Supreme Corp
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

 Now, just to be clear about all this, the legal system does distinguish between a "natural person" (which is what the rest of us mean by "person") and "legal person" (which is the kind of person a corporation is deemed to be, as explained in the wikipedia entry on the subject), sometimes referred to as an "artificial person" as well.  A "legal person" is a "legal fiction" which in a sense means that it's a fictional person, I guess...

 So, person₁ is not person₂ after all.  Longtime readers of this blog (meaning anyone who read my last blog post, Be Very Afraid) may recall that this is an example of indexing, one of the extensional devices associated with general semantics, as a way to help us avoid the problem of identification that our language encourages.  

A legal person is not a natural person, it's all legal terminology that may confuse the rest of us, but not jurists, right?


Well, that's in question here, since the decision seems to be about extending to corporations the legal rights of natural persons.   As explained on the website called The Straight Dope, in response to the question, "How can a corporation be legally considered a person"

What most people don't know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk. (Not to mention the clear advantages corporations enjoy: they can be in several places at once, for instance, and at least in theory they're immortal.) Up until the New Deal, many laws regulating corporations were struck down under the
"equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment--in fact, that clause was invoked far more often on behalf of corporations than former slaves. Although the doctrine of personhood has been weakened since, even now lawyers argue that an attempt to sue a corporation for lying is an unconstitutional infringement on its First Amendment right to free speech. (This year, for example, we saw Nike v. Kasky.)

Unless lawyers and judges have some general semantics education, such as the esteemed Frank J. Scardilli, Esq., a longtime Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics who has discussed just these kinds of issues on many occasions, officers of the court are just as prone as anyone else to make erroneous identifications.  Call a corporation a person and you start to think of it as a person, and even if you started out with the distinction between the legal and the natural.  



Moreover, apart from the legal fiction, the very word corporation constitutes a metaphor of embodiment, the root corp meaning body, incorporation meaning to give the entity a body, to make corporeal.


Ordinary people to do not, ordinarily, think of corporations as persons.  We think of them as businesses, organizations, and several other things I cannot name here because Blog Time Passing is a family blog.  It's folks working in the legal sector that talk about corporations as persons, and are vulnerable to falling into the trap of identification, of thinking

Corporation=Person

when they should be thinking instead

Corporation≠Person

 Legal logic, like symbolic logic, allows us to make equations that make perfect sense in that symbolic realm, that universe of discourse, that deductive system, but that do not match up to the reality that we know through our senses, and our common sense.  

The legal map does not correspond to the territory, and the response on the part of critics has been ridicule, and rightly so.

And so, we find ourselves asking questions, some serious, some laughable.


If a corporation is a person, can it be subject to criminal charges?  Actually it can, at least under some legal systems, although typically it's those natural persons who are corporate officers who are charged with crimes.  Corporations can be fined, and sued of course, but can they be imprisoned?  Can they be subject to capital punishment?  Perhaps by being dissolved?  Can they be arrested?


Can corporations vote?  Can they run for office?  Can they be drafted?  Are corporations citizens of a nation?  (They are, in a sense, the nation and state in which a corporation is incorporated.)  Can they immigrate and become citizens of another country?  

Can corporations marry?  The Jon Stewart segment suggests that the answer is yes, in the sense that they can merge.  So corporations can marry each other, but can they marry a natural person?  Could I marry Time-Warner, or Apple?  Could we have children together?  Well, maybe not in the biological sense, but maybe adopt?  Can a corporation be a parent, or legal guardian of a child?  (Isn't that what happened in the movie, The Truman Show?)

As persons, can corporations be owned?  Clearly they are, but does that make them slaves? Can they be freed?  (Many would say that corporations are our masters, not our slaves.)  We might well remember that there was a time when African-American slaves were not considered persons in this country, or at best 3/5 of a person.  Sadly, we have not always granted the status of person to all human beings. 

If corporations are artificial persons, does that mean that robots can also attain that status?  What is a corporation, after all, but a kind of intelligent machine whose parts include natural persons.  (I get this insight from Lewis Mumford, and for a foundational media ecology scholar's insights on this specific topic, see Peter Drucker's 1946 book, The Concept of the Corporation.)  It's science fiction, sure, but this line of legal thinking opens the question up, after all.

If corporations are, in a sense, fictional persons, can other fictional persons also have rights?  Like maybe Superman, Spider-Man, Mickey Mouse, and the like--except they are corporate trademarks anyway.  Maybe Santa Claus, or Johnny Appleseed, or Tom Sawyer, or Paul Bunyan?


No, no, this will not do, not at all.  I am reminded of a line from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.  In describing a fictional novel by the fictional novelist Kilgore Trout of a fictional future where suicide parlors have been introduced as a solution to overpopulation, he writes

One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said: 'Certainly, honey.' And he said, 'I sure hope so, I want to ask something I never was able to find out down here.' 'What's that?' she said, strapping him in. 'What in hell are people for?'

 What in hell are people for?  It's a question we don't have to reserve for the afterlife, or for God, it's a question we can ask ourselves, right here and now.  

One of our central media ecology scholars, Walter Ong, described his philosophy as personalism, the philosophy of the human person.  And it certainly makes sense to me to say, forget about these categories of natural and legal persons, let's just talk about human persons.  And corporations are nothing more than extensions of human persons, meaning that they are inventions, technologies, media.


Of course, the whole reason why the doctrine of corporate personhood was adopted in the first place was to allow corporations to enter into contracts, to hire and fire employees, to buy and sell property, to be sued (which limits the liability of the stock holders and employees), and later to be subject to taxation.  

So, taking all that into consideration, if corporations are not called persons, what else might they be called?  What other entities, aside from persons, can enter into legal and economic transactions?  

The answer seems clear enough to me:  Sovereign entities.  States.  Nations. Governments.  Just as corporations are incorporated, made into bodies, states (along with other organizations) have constitutions, are constituted.  The parallels are quite clear, but also quite discomforting.  We quite rightly can be concerned, and fearful at the thought of the corporation as a sovereignty.  

But corporations already are states, in effect.  And rather than deluding ourselves with legal fictions of corporate personhood, let's work with the legal realities.  Let's talk about and think about and act upon corporations as nations.  We will be, sooner or later.  We can make treaties with corporations, and we can go to war with them if need be.


This would make for a map that would better correspond to the territory, and it may well mean that we'll need new kinds of maps as well.  A new way of looking at the world that we already are living in.  Korzybski, who was a severe critic of commericialism (see his first book, Manhood of Humanity) would undoubtedly approve.

Sopranos Swan Songs

Speaking of the 2008 presidential campaign, the subject of my previous post, and speaking of The Sopranos finale, the subject of a recent post (Sopranos Extinction Event), it was probably all but impossible to miss the coverage of Hillary Clinton's YouTube video announcing the selection of her campaign song, spoofing the final five minutes of The Sopranos finale. "So what's the winning song?" Bill asks. "You'll see," Hillary answers. "My money's on Smash Mouth," Bill adds, going on to say, "Everybody in America wants to know how it's going to end." And then the sudden cut to black, just like on HBO. But why listen to me, you can review the video right now:




And if you want to listen to the winning song, which is not Smash Mouth, but Celine Dion's "You and I," just click here. Now, I know that musical taste is not a prerequisite for political leadership, but I have to wonder if this song was selected by Hilary herself, or by a bunch of marketing types. I'd much rather hear "And You and I," by Yes, to be frank, but that's neither here nor there. I do think that Bill's choice of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" back in 1992 was genuine, and maybe this is just Hilary's kind of music, but it strikes me as the kind of song that you would hear on American Idol. And I mean that as a pejorative, in case that's not obvious.

But this isn't about the tunes. And yes, the use of YouTube shows that someone in the Clinton campaign has learned the lesson of tapping into new media, viral marketing and social networking and all that. And they tapped into the zeitgeist of a significant portion of America in quickly responding to and producing a take-off of that final episode, all timed to the announcement of the selection of the official campaign song, turning a complete non-event--how many people know that there is such a thing as an official campaign song, let alone care what it is?--into a story complete with ready-made footage that got picked up by the television and cable news programs and stayed alive for what surely was a longer than expected news cycle.

I wonder if anyone from HBO or The Sopranos staff, or David Chase himself, provided the Clinton campaign with an advance copy of the series finale to facilitate the creation of this parody?

There's also something gutsy about the Clinton family, having been accused of some shady practices of their own, to play the part of the fictional mafia family. Maybe they're thumbing their noses at their political enemies, but maybe it's also foolhardy of the Clintons to forge an association, however humorous, between themselves and The Sopranos?

The ending of the series finale evoked a sense of justified paranoia and ever-present potential for violence, and I have to wonder about the presence of such elements here, such as the threatening stare by actor Vince Curatola, who played Johnny Sack on The Sopranos, not to mention Bill's revealing preference for Smash Mouth--yes, I know it's an attempt to be current, but it's still a decision to give voice to a violent image. Does this reflect a worldview where you are always defending against that vast rightwing conspiracy? Where you have had to live with accusations (however unfounded they may be) that extend so far as to suggest that Clinton White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster was a victim of murder not suicide? Where you actually have gone through the ordeal of impeachment?

Of course, the images are mostly bright and sunny, and that counts for much when you're talking about television. And most of the people who watched The Sopranos and would therefore understand the YouTube video would tend to be sympathetic to, if not identifying with Tony and his family. And Hillary certainly wrapped up the New Jersey vote with this one (which I think was pretty much sewed up with Governor Corzine's endorsement, but the lingering effects of his April 12th automobile accident, itself a side effect of the Don Imus fiasco, may seriously hamper his ability to campaign on Clinton's behalf, affecting how she deploys campaign resources, potentially affecting the outcome of the primary). Although I wonder how all of the Italian-Americans who were offended by the ethnic stereotypes perpetuated by The Sopranos feel about the Clinton ad?

But I'm sure that the effort to get this one out is a reaction to the Clinton campaign being blindsided by a YouTube video earlier this year, one that gained massive popularity on the internet and consequently got picked up by the news media, which means you probably saw it already, but oh, what the hey, here it is:



This was a remix or mosh up (as they say nowadays) of the famous 1984 Apple commercial, "Think Different," that introduced the Macintosh, which originally aired during the 1984 Superbowl. It had a devastating effect on the image of Hillary as the Democratic Party frontrunner and establishment candidate, and served as a boost for Obama. Based on what we've seen so far now, I would expect to see political ads drawing on the brilliant Mac and PC guy commercials from Apple at some point during the campaign, and maybe some take-offs on the Geico caveman ads as well.

But enough about politics, and more about The Sopranos. And I admit that I'm not very active in the YouTube social networking scene, but when I did a search for "Sopranos ending" to find the Clinton video, over 300 different videos were listed. Some were recorded from TV, some were amateur productions, some were just videobloggers explaining their view of the finale, and some were mosh ups. In the latter category, here's one that caught my eye:



Here's another with a great deal of finality:



But don't panic, it could happen to anybody. And, now this:




So, this is just a sampling, and I could go on with this ad nauseum, but then again, you can just go to YouTube and see for yourself.

In the meantime, with The Sopranos over and done with, and Hillary's winning song coming from a Canadian (not that there's anything wrong with it), I guess I might as well end this post with an image that my old Beta Theta Pi fraternity brother, Jordan Strub, e-mailed to me along with the suggestion that I "blog this one, eh?"



Honk if you see me on the Turnpike!

Curses, Blogged Again!

Bob Blechman's blog (try saying that 10 times fast), A Model Media Ecologist, which is in many ways a sister blog to this one--wait a minute, is it okay to say sister blog? I know we talk about other Jesuit institutions being Fordham's sister schools, but there's a long-standing tradition of doing so, and alma mater means bountiful or nourishing mother, after all, so schools are coded as feminine. Are blogs gendered? Based on what I've read of Lewis Mumford and Camille Paglia, I think we could view them as such. Are they feminine? Perhaps there is a sense in which they are bountiful and nourishing, a fertile womb waiting to be inseminated by the ideas contained within these posts. Am I getting in trouble here?

Okay, so brother Bob Blechman, a fellow member of the fraternal order of bloggists, Blogga Buncha Posts--ßßπ for all you pledges (with apologies to ßΘπ)--no wait, this is getting problematic, isn't it?

Bob Blechman, in a recent post entitled, Had I But World Enough, and Time, This Blogging, Lady, Were No Crime, wrote

One thing I've discovered about blogging is that, to be done effectively you have to do it often. If you don't post frequently, you aren't really serious about being a blogger. One problem is that posting takes time and something original to say, both of which I have little.

This doesn't seem to be a problem for other bloggers, like my friend Lance Strate over at his eponymous Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing, where he seems to be able to post something new and interesting almost daily. I can only assume that he has abandoned his other responsibilities and devoted himself almost entirely to his blog. (It's an addiction Lance. You can get help!)

So, first I want to reassure Bob that I am ok, I can quit anytime I want to, and if all else fails, I've got some Blogotine Gum™ to get me through the rough patches.

As far as blogging early and often is concerned, as a serious bloggist--and we must insist on being addressed as bloggists to be taken seriously, after all, who would respect a journaler, or pay one a six figure salary to read headlines on TV?)--as a serious bloggist, I have addressed the subject in my seventh post, dated March 12th (seems like another lifetime ago), entitled The Medium Motivates the Content. I will let that entry speak for itself (speak, blog, speak!).

But Bob is not satisfied with commenting on the frequency (what is the frequency, Kenneth?) of my posts. He also says that they're interesting!

Interesting?

Interesting?!!!

Come on now, Bob, we all know about the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. So you're saying that my blog is cursed, now are you?

Does this mean war? Blog Wars? Blog, I am your fodder!

World War Blog? Marvel Comics has a storyline called "World War Hulk" in which the Hulk is tricked into entering a spacecraft that takes him away from Earth to somewhere, far, far away, where he meets a bunch of aliens, becomes a kind of gladiator in an arena, leads a rebellion, becomes the king (shades of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror), brings peace and prosperity to his new planet, and finds love and fulfillment, only to have his new home destroyed when that spacecraft that exiled him blows up, so now he's coming back home to Earth and, payback, this time it's for real.

So, Blog, Smash!

Wait, I've got it, the ultimate revenge:


Bob, I think your blog is very interesting too.

God and the Machines

In a recent post on Bob Blechman's blog, entitled Cylon Monotheism: Religion in Battlestar Galactica, Bob makes reference to my own post here on this blog, in which I praise the incorporation of religious themes in the show, specifically making the humans all pagans in the Greco-Roman mode, albeit with a tendency towards secular humanism, while the Cylons, technological creations of the humans who evolved from robots to some form of biotech human enough to breed with us, are portrayed as monotheists, albeit with a tendency towards fanaticism. Bob disagrees, however, with my own positive evaluation:

I concur that Battlestar Galactica is wonderful, both as Sci-Fi and as television drama of any kind. However, I find the Cyclon's religious affectations confusing and troubling within the total context of the show.

As a model media ecologist, Bob raises some very good, thought-provoking questions. as he goes on to write a bit later on:

If, in spite of being created in the image of their creators, Cylons reject polytheism, how did they stumble across monotheism?

In a 1977 Issue of ETC: The Journal of General Semantics, in an article titled "Alphabet, Mother of Invention," Marshall McLuhan and Robert K. Logan speculate on the possible origin of monotheism:

"Western thought patterns are highly abstract, compared with Eastern. There developed in the West, and only in the West, a group of innovations that constitute the basis of Western thought. These include (in addition to the alphabet) codified law, monotheism, abstract science, formal logic, and individualism. All of these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C. We do not consider this to be an accident. While not suggesting a direct causal connection between the alphabet and the other innovations, we would claim, however, that the phonetic alphabet played a particularly dynamic role within this constellation of events and provided the ground or framework for the mutual development of these innovations."

Perhaps Cylons, while surely literate, as robots are not subject to McLuhan's and Logan's media assertions. One could argue that Battlestar Galactica is not media ecological at all, and therefore need not adhere to the tenants of ME. The humans of BG can develop an advanced civilization without the benefit of alphabetic literacy, or, if their alphabet is phonetic, they can retain their polytheism in spite of it.

Religious robots, while intriguing, remain a problem, especially self-ordained monotheistic robots. I believe that the depiction of Cylons as monotheistic in the absence of human mortality or alphabetic literacy can only be seen as a true leap of faith on the part of Battlestar Galactica's creators.

Now, I admit that the fact that I am intrigued by all this and moved to write about it brands me as an irredeemable geek. So be it!

Bob raises the question of whether Battlestar Galactica is media ecological or not. The temptation, as a fan, a fan of anything, is to defend the program and provide rationales, rationalizations, logical explanations, for all of its inconsistencies and inaccuracies. That's what fans do to shore up the universe that they we want to believe in (this bears more than a passing resemblance to the ways in which followers in any given religion seek to interpret their sacred texts in order to maintain the plausibility of their belief system). But I'm not interested in doing that. Frankly, it seems to me that most science fiction film and TV is more about presenting an engaging narrative (or more often, an engaging set of visual effects) than it is about producing a credible scenario based on scientific extrapolation and/or speculation (SF writing is quite different from the audiovisual forms, however).

And even when they do a good job on the science and technology side of things, the creators seem to know next to nothing about the field of communication, and invariably get things wrong, or simply fail to imagine what nonhuman communication might be like. Typically, the aliens are less alien in their communication than members of oral cultures can be. Then you have something like Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the concept of meaning in communication seems to totally escape him, along with the distinction between the signifier and signified. I remember when the film came out, back when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, and one of my Beta Theta Pi fraternity brothers came back after seeing it, and was marveling at the possibilities of universal communication through music that the film seemed to present. I tried to explain that it didn't matter if the symbol was speech or music, because it would still have to mean something. I didn't get through to him, however, no doubt due to his inebriated state of mind.

Even Star Trek: The Next Generation fell prey to this. I recall an episode that involved contact with a race that the Federation had been unable to establish communication with in all previous attempts, despite the best efforts of both sides, as the alien speech was translatable (through the "universal translator"), but just didn't make sense. Captain Picard finally figured out that the aliens speak in references to stories, i.e., myths, legends, and the like, so that to indicate that I'm in trouble I might say the equivalent of "Daniel in the lion's den." Certainly an original idea, but it makes no sense, because they could not communicate in narrative unless they had grammar and vocabulary, which presupposes the possibility of making novel statements without referring to some story which could only have been communicated through grammar and vocabulary in the first place.

So, it would not surprise me if Battlestar Galactica messed up in trying to conceive of alien communication. Except that the series makes no attempt to do so. The humans all seem to speak English (what a throwback to the good old days of SF!), as do the Cylons. Whereas the Star Trek franchise did make the commendable effort to develop alien languages, notably Klingon, along Sapir-Whorfian (therefore media ecological) lines (as a warrior race, the Klingon language relies on the imperative form of verbs much more than we do, and their imperative forms are much more developed and complex than ours), and Star Wars introduced the amusing technique of using subtitles with alien speech (back in 1977 when it was first seen in the theaters, everyone laughed out loud when they saw it), Battlestar Galactica does not seem to be very interested in languages. In contrast, J. R. R. Tolkien began by creating fictional languages, and based on his "Elf Latin" he created the myths and legends of Middle Earth (I wrote a paper on this once, and it was supposed to be published in an online proceedings, but that never got organized, so maybe I'll post it here, if there's sufficient reader interest--ha ha).

Battlestar Galactica is interested in visual symbols, however, which fits in with the visualism of Greek culture (as opposed to the oralism of Hebraic heritage, a point central to Walter Ong's work, as Tom Farrell explains in the first major book-length examination of Ong's scholarship, Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, and also see An Ong Reader: Challanges for Further Inquiry). And there is some evidence of something along the lines of runes or hieroglyphics as they encounter ancient religious artifacts, I believe (but to be honest I was not paying much attention to these things, so I would have to look at the episodes again to be certain).

But to get back to Bob's post, he essentially raises the question, do they have alphabetic literacy on Battlestar Galactica? The answer appears to be yes. I just took a quick look at the program's website and checked some of the images in the Gallery, just to confirm that the writing "Battlestar Galactica" can be found on insignia on uniforms and mugs, and of course it's also written on the ship itself. Given that the humans are Greco-Roman in their orientation, it is not surprising that they would used the Roman alphabet that we all use, but it's also part of the program's conceit that these humans from a distant part of space are essentially the same as us in the way they speak, dress, behave, etc. And if the humans have alphabetic literacy, it follows that the Cylons, who were created by the humans to serve them, and who are superior to the humans in just about every way, would also have alphabetic literacy.

Now, we can turn to the media ecological thesis that monotheism is a by-product of alphabetic literacy. Bob cites a seminal article by Marshall McLuhan and Bob Logan, published in the general semantics journal Etc. back when Neil Postman was the editor. After McLuhan passed away, Logan went on to write an entire book, now in a revised edition, entitled The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization, and one of the early chapters is devoted to the argument that Moses and monotheism, not to mention The Law, was an effect of the Semitic alphabet, aka aleph-bet. Another book that carries the thesis into controversial new areas is Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (a similar argument about the alphabet bringing about the end of goddess worship was made by Joseph Ashcroft in his doctoral dissertation completed in the old media ecology program at New York University). But the argument that the alphabet led to monotheism was first put forth, I believe, by Harold Innis in Empire and Communications (and see also Innis's The Bias of Communication).

So, from a media ecological point of view, monotheism is all but inconceivable without writing, and appears to be specifically linked to the alphabet. Does this mean that cultures with alphabetic literacy necessarily move from polytheism to monotheism, however? Here, I think the answer is no. As Lynn White, Jr. says of technology in Medieval Technology and Social Change, an innovation opens a door, it does not command. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans developed monotheism on their own, however much they eventually accepted the idea as it spread from the Jews to Gentiles via Christianity. For that matter, while the Semitic alphabet made its way to India in antiquity, where it led to the invention of the number zero and positional notation in mathematics, it did not lead to monotheism per se. What does seem to occur, however, is a tendency towards more abstract notions of the divine, so that the literate elite in ancient Greece and Rome rejected the mythic narratives and personalization of the gods (criticizing Homer), and turned toward a form of religious worship that acknowledged "the gods" as a higher power, and along the way reduced the number of deities, and even moved Olympus from a mountain top to the more distant sky. Hinduism also moved towards more abstract conceptions of the gods, to the extent that they could be seen as manifestations of one divine force. And of course Buddhism is so abstract that there is no god in a personal sense. Along the same lines, in the west the abstraction of monotheism eventually leads to deism, and finally to abstracting God out of existence with atheism.

So, it would be conceivable for the humans on Battlestar Galactica to have alphabetic literacy, but never arrive at pure monotheism. Alternately, it would not contradict anything in the narrative to date if it were the case that they had developed monotheism, but rejected it, much as, for example, in the New Age movement we find people raised as monotheists who have turned to neo-paganism. Battlestar Galactica's scenario indicates that the humans that populated the 12 colonies (whose names correspond to zodiac signs) split from those of us on the 13th colony of Earth some time in the distant past. If the split came during antiquity, before monotheism caught on beyond the confines of ancient Israel and Judah, and the Greco-Romans who split had no further contact with Judaic culture, it would be conceivable that they might never invent or adopt monotheism, and just continue to move towards a more abstract polytheism that eventually yields to secular humanism. This possibility is reminiscent of a Star Trek episode (original series) with the absurd scenario of a planet somehow populated by aliens who are more or less human and followed a similar course of history, except the Roman Empire remained pagan and persisted into their equivalent of 20th century Earth; at the end of the episode, Captain Kirk and company realize that references to "sun" worship were actually about worshiping "the Son," implying that Christianity had just been introduced.

Now for the big question that Bob raised: How could it be that the Cylons are monotheists when the humans that created them are not? Since the Cylons do have alphabetic literacy, they therefore have the necessary prerequisite for monotheism. One possibility is that the humans developed monotheism, but it never caught on among them, and instead was adopted by the Cylons. This would follow the pattern of Christianity originating with the Jews, who largely rejected the new religion, and likewise Buddhism originating with the Indians, who mostly remained Hindus or became Muslims. The alternate possibility is that the Cylons developed monotheism on their own. As they have the alphabet, and appear to be quite capable of independent thought and novel ideas, this certainly seems within the realm of possibility. And this would be, in my opinion, the more interesting scenario.

But what troubles Bob is the idea of religious robots. Now, holding aside the question of whether it was the older, robotic Cylons who embraced religion, or the newer, organic models, Bob wonders whether it makes sense that a robotic religion would emerge if the Cylons cannot die, but rather simply have their consciousness transferred as long as there is a resurrection ship or facilities within range. And he is right in making the point that one of the important functions of religion is to help us to come to terms with our own mortality (see Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which I brought up in a previous post). But however much the Cylons have extended their lifespans by decreasingly the likelihood of imminent demise, they would have to be aware of the possibility of true death should they find themselves out of range of resurrection, or should the technology fail (and media ecologists know that nothing is foolproof and fail safe), and anyway sooner or later entropy will catch up with them and they will die along with the universe. So they still must live with the knowledge that eventually their consciousness will be extinguished, and perhaps the need to deny death may be all the more greater when they are so much closer to immortality than we are? But, apart from this issue, there is the question of whether death is the only reason for religious belief? In the absence of death, might a race of beings turn to religion for other reasons, say to provide a sense of the meaning of life, to provide guidance on how to live their lives, to establish a sense of justice and morality, or simply to provide legitimacy for their social arrangements and actions?

Another possibility I haven't mentioned is the possibility of divine revelation, that God actually exists and revealed Himself to the Cylons. Within Battlestar Galactica this possibility seems to be inconsistent with the fact that the Cylons have committed genocide against the human race. But I don't think there's anything in particular that that the program shows us that actually indicates that the Cylons are deluded fanatics--that is, the program presents the Cylons' beliefs in a neutral manner, and it's only our own incredulity that keeps us from entertaining the possibility that they really are on a mission from God (remember Sodom and Gomorrah?).

Certainly, there is nothing new about violence being committed in God's name, so I think viewers can recognize in the Cylons something very familiar. The obvious connection is to Islamic terrorists, and more broadly to religious fanatics of all stripes and colors, but all major religions, I believe, have taken up the sword at one time or another in their histories, in order to wipe out the infidel. Nor is there anything about alphabetic literacy that is inimicable to violence. McLuhan often stressed the militancy of the alphabet, given its bias towards homogenization. The alphabet was a great technology for military organization. Before the alphabet, battle was basically a matter of running amok and trying to kill as many of the others as possible--that was the way the Trojan War was fought. Jump ahead a few centuries after the introduction of the alphabet, to the era depicted in the recent film 300, and order and discipline, modeled after the alphabet, becomes the rule, one that was intensified by Alexander the Great, and even more so by the Romans--it was all about holding a line (like the written word), uniformity in forming a shield war and phalanx, etc. For more on this, see McLuhan's follow-up to his bestselling The Medium is the Massage, his War and Peace In the Global Village.

Which brings me to a point of great significance for our discussion, the myth of the origin of the Greek alphabet, which McLuhan discusses in both The Gutenberg Galaxy (and see my previous post on Gutenberg!) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. According to Greek myth, the alphabet was introduced by Cadmus, who was a Phoenecian, in fact the son of the king of Phoenecia. This acknowledges the Semitic origin of the alphabet, and it follows that the Semites of Phoenecia, traders who sailed all around the Mediterranean, would be the source of the alphabet's dissemination to Greece. The Greeks called it the Phoenecian alphabet, from which is derived the term phonetic. Cadmus was told by the oracle at Delphi to found a town, which became the city of Thebes. Before doing so, however, he was forced to slay a dragon, and then, following Athena's instructions, sowed the dragon's teeth, from which sprung up a race of men called Spartes (Greek for "sown"). All of them were armed for battle and savage, and Cadmus tricked them into fighting among themselves until only five were left, the ancestors of the five noble families of Thebes, who took Cadmus as their king.

McLuhan felt there was an important insight in this myth, relating to the association between the alphabet and the military. The significance of the teeth is that they occur naturally in a line, looking relatively identical, and therefore are the body's analogues to the letters of the alphabet (alphabet as extension of the teeth); teeth also have much to do with the consonants of the alphabet, as the action of tongue in relation to teeth results in different sounds (e.g., "s" and "t"). Of course, teeth are sharp, they are natural weapons, and again they resemble an army of men, at least an orderly one of the sort made possible by the alphabet.

So, do you see where I'm going with this? The Cylons are Battlestar Galactica's very own Spartoi, they are the new beings sown from the dragon's teeth, they have a Phoenician/Semitic link (again the most obvious connection being to fanatical Arab Islamic terrorists, and note also the Semitic sounding music during the opening credits, as well as the similarly styled rendition of "All Along the Watchtower," which only the final four newly discovered Cylons could hear, in the season finale).

Do I have to spell it out? It's not a question of whether the Cylons have the alphabet, or alphabetic literacy. The Cylons are the alphabet sprung to life, they are what you reap when you sow the dragon's teeth. They are the alphabet as it evolves into the printing press, and mechanization takes command, giving rise to mass production, the multiple, identical copies that, ultimately, are written in the letters D-N-A, so send in the clones. As letters on a page, the Cylons naturally worship a divine Author-ity. Looking at it from this angle, Battlestar Galactica is very media ecological.

A few further thoughts come to mind, however anticlimactic they may be.

A descendant of Cadmus, King Laius of Thebes, was the father of Oedipus. And the Cylons are trying to fulfill an Oedipal fantasy by killing their collective father, the humans, and marrying their mother Earth. Is Battlestar Galactica a Greek tragedy? It certainly has many of those elements.

But at its conception, it was more of a Biblical narrative, of wandering in the desert, of revelation at Mount Sinai, and eventual arrival in the promised land. A perfect theme for this time year! Could it then be that the Cylons have more in common with angels than with demons, being nearly immortal, superior in power, more certain about God, interested in breeding with humans (as angels were early in Genesis), great and terrible (let us not forget the angel of death who slew the Egyptians' first born)? Can anything less than an act of God then save the remnants of humanity? Will the Cylons turn out to be fallen angels? Will a savior arise?

Well, the hour is growing late, and tomorrow The Sopranos are back on, introducing a very different set of issues, so the Cylons will just have to wait.

The Fraternal Community

In a previous post on 3/18/07 I mentioned The Fragile Community: Living Together With Aids by Mara Adelman and Lawrence R. Frey, a book about community formation under the direst of circumstances. This post is about a very different kind of community.

A series of coincidences that occurred during my visit to Colorado make me think back to my undergraduate days at Cornell University, when I joined a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. To begin with, as I was driven from the Colorado Springs Bed and Breakfast where I was staying to the nearby campus of Colorado College, I noticed a sign above a storefront that said, "Wooglin's Deli"! I remarked that Wooglin was a name associated with my college fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. My host, Lian Sifuentes, told me that she had actually planned for us to have lunch there, and that the Deli was started by some of the brothers after the Colorado College chapter of Beta Theta Pi was thrown off campus. Talk about the persistence and adaptability of culture, or in this case, subculture.

Later, when we went to Wooglin's Deli for lunch, it was clear that they had incorporated Beta symbolism into the décor, notably in the form of Beta dragon art that served as decoration. My understanding is that people mistakenly think that the Wooglin is the dragon, rather than the trickster figure I learned about while studying Beta lore as a pledge (I wonder if the character of Woogie from the movie There's Something About Mary has any connection to Beta, maybe through one of the screenwriters?). The people working there were not Betas, obviously, and I was not able to find out whether the place was still owned by Betas. But the Beta presence survives.

Then, that evening I gave a public lecture at Colorado College, "Eight Bits About Digital Culture," and after it was over, various members of the audience came over to speak to me individually. One fellow who looked vaguely familiar asked if I remember him, but I couldn't place the face (I'm not all that good with faces and names). "It's Jordan," he said, but I was still not making the connection. Then he said, "from Beta Theta Pi," and the light went off. Jordan Strub had joined during my senior year, and in fact had been my "little brother," that is, I was the one directly responsible for his transition from fraternity pledge to full membership as a brother. I hadn't seen him in almost 30 years.

In my lecture, I had briefly mentioned the fact that some high functioning autistics argue that being autistic is not a disease to be cured, or a disability to be overcome, but rather a different mode of consciousness. I mention this in the context of arguing that our current digital age requires and in certain ways causes changes in our form of consciousness. So, of all things, Jordan tells me that he has discovered that he has Asperger's Syndrome, which is a form of high-functioning autism; not surprisingly, he was enrolled in the Engineering School at Cornell, and has pursued a career in computer programming. I explained that I have a daughter who has been diagnosed with moderate autism, and that I consider myself to be on the spectrum myself, although I have not seen the need to obtain a formal diagnosis.

It must be more than coincidence that I wound up being his big brother at Beta, but who knew back then about such things?

I had not yet turned 17 when I came to Cornell as a freshman in the fall of 1974. I expected there to be hippies, and was disappointed to find out that there were none, and that most of the other guys in my dorm were rushing fraternities. I knew nothing from fraternities myself, certainly never thought that I would join one, but I received many invitations to attend rush dinners and parties, and figured, what the hell. The fraternity system was just getting back on its feet after almost going under at the end of the 1960s and early 70s, and I wound up pledging Beta Theta Pi, which at that time was a very laid back fraternity, more individualistic, less about conformity and peer pressure than the others. It was kind of like the movie National Lampoon's Animal House, which came out the year I graduated, and which I adored, the difference being that the movie was set over two decades earlier, and was exaggerated of course. Actually, in National Lampoon's Animal House, the "bad" frat, the one that is elitist and conforming, was based on the Dartmouth chapter of Beta, which just goes to show that the character of a chapter differs from place to place, and over different time periods. Anyway, the year I joined, we pledges experienced very little hazing. Interestingly enough, a number of my fellows felt that this was a problem, that it made it seem like membership in the fraternity was of little value, and reinstated hazing the next year; I should add that psychological research does support their argument. But bringing hazing back did not change the fact that our chapter of Beta was far from recovered, and in fact was danger of going under. There were about 10 of us in my rush class, which was one of the best years they had had in a long time, but the next two years we only took in 3-4 new members. So by the time we reached senior year, the future of the fraternity was pretty much on the line. I held the office of Social Chairman, the main responsibility being organizing parties, and fraternity parties were one of the most important criteria freshmen used in making their decision to join. And I take pride in the fact that I was able to analyze what made parties successful, and threw one of the best open parties of the season by signing the most popular band at that time (their name was Zoltan, and they played a lot of progressive rock, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and the like). It didn't hurt that I made sure that the beer was plentiful (drinking age was 18 then, so no carding and free beer was the rule), and that I had drawn on a Visual Communication class that I was taking to design really eye-catching posters. And I also saw an unexpected opportunity when visiting my friend Marty Friedman at SUNY Cortland, and organized an extra private party that we had not planned on holding by hiring a new (and phenomenal) band that a friend of Marty's, Frank Agnello, who is now a member of the highly successful Beatles tribute band, The Fab Faux, had started up, and got a sorority from Cortland to charter a bus and come on over (in part motivated by the fact that the band from their school would be playing). These two events, along with throwing a good homecoming party (a formal affair), made us seem as if we were not a fraternity on the edge, or a bunch of misfits, but rather a really happening bunch, and we wound up pledging another big class (in the teens, if I remember correctly), and in the years that followed, the fraternity more than doubled in size and became, for a time, one of the more successful ones on campus.

Looking back on it all, I think what I found most appealing about fraternity life was the sense of community that was fostered. The creation of maintenance of community is one of the main functions of community, and the study of communication and community goes to the heart of the scholarship of the late media ecologist, James W. Carey, who I very much admire, not to mention my friend Larry Frey. And it is definitely true that the experience I gained with Beta Theta Pi came in handy when the time came to start up the Media Ecology Association, otherwise known as Mu Epsilon Alpha. May the spirit of Wooglin watch over media ecologists everywhere. And to all of you Betas out there, "Oh, you and I can ne'er grow old while this fair cup is nigh, Here's life and strength, here's health and wealth, Here's all in phi kai phi."