16

The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.

Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue.  Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form.  But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution.  Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth.  It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property.  It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship.  A colonizing mission.  A merger and acquisition.  This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting.  The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire.  It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best.  With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.

But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar.  Just to see what would happen.

Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.

To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids".  Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it".  That's just how reductionism works.  To understand something, you take it to pieces.  But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again?  Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits?  Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism.  A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules.  Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon.  It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul.  It is something people name, and build towns around.  Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people.  It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen.  Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not).  Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property.  Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress.  It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock.  Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".

This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum.  There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules.  That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman.  It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.

In truth, as Light realises to his horror...

"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."

The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes.  Everything does.  The catalogue can never be complete, by definition.  The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity.  He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system.  Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.

Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him.  Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old.  He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.

"I will not change," says Light.  And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation.  He's that reactionary.

"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."

29

Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it's not the sort of place the old Midge would've visited.  The old Midge would've been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

"Waiting on the Sarge?" he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  "He's been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you."

This is a lie.

"I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I'd share it with you."

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He's been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed... not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that - one senses - is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of 'fuck you, I'm all right'.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

"It's common sense, right?  It's just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest."

And he's right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher's Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It's in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It's in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It's in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It's in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn't matter that it's one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn't because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

"Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me."

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

"Do you hear what I'm saying?" he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that's what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room.  They'll do as they're told.

When the Sarge gets back, he'll find plenty of fighters, as ruthless as he always said they should be, none of them unwilling to send the weak to the wall.  He should be proud.

Punishing Viewing

Something I wrote a while ago, somewhat rewritten.  I'm re-posting it to mark the release of 'The Mind of Evil' on DVD.  In brief, being in colour doesn't make it any better.

There is a very old idea about ‘human nature’, that we are born with certain social characteristics already implanted or programmed in our brains, usually inherited from our parents and ancestors. You will find this idea laced throughout the whole of modern Western culture. Ruffians and villains in Conan Doyle are often said to have "vile antecedents". Oliver Twist is incapable of being a pickpocket because, despite being raised in a pauper's orphanage, he is a middle class child displaced amongst the scum classes. Similarly (because J.K. Rowling is nothing if not studiedly unoriginal) Harry Potter is filled with love just like his late mum, despite being systematically emotionally and psychologically abused up to the age of 11.  I could go on at great length.

This conception of human nature (please take the quote marks as read whenever I use that phrase) is directly and inextricably linked to class, and to questions of social role, crime, etc. It is still claimed today that people end up in prison because they have inborn tendencies which lead them there. These days we use the language of genetics. Before genes, people used the language of blood. Before that, people used the language of the Bible. The medieval church claimed that drastic and dreadful social divisions were justified because people were born into one category or the other, based on their bloodline. They were the descendents of Cain or Seth, and thus carried the blood of a vile murderer or a goody-two-shoes. Of course, the idea that the peasants were peasants because they had murderer's blood doesn't account for the massive amount of warmongering and killing and torturing and executing done by the supposed descendents of Seth (i.e the Kings and Dukes and whathaveyou). Of course, even today a great deal of chin-scratching cogitation goes into deciding what genetic factors might be causing black urban gun crime... while nobody wonders if the carpet-bombing Prime Minister must have killer genes. And, as John Ball pointed out, if we're all descended from Cain or Seth, that also means we're all descended from (non-murdering) Adam and Eve... so how does that work?

As many thinkers have pointed out, being in prison isn't necessarily a mark of violence or evil (or even, in many cases, actual criminality) so much as a mark of refusing to play your assigned social role. It starts in childhood, with kids medicated for personality disorders for such heinous sins as "disrespecting authority" etc. Also, prisons are a massive system of social control and punitive reinforcement. Vast numbers of people in the American prison system today (which increasingly resembles a kind of privatised system of gulags) are there for non-violent drug crimes. There are many examples of, for instance, disabled people sent away for life because they were caught with a few ounces of weed that they obtained to use personally as a palliative. Meanwhile, the captains of finance who devastate our world and societies, or the politicians who demolish populations in the Middle East, somehow mysteriously avoid trial and incarceration.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I don't like 'The Mind of Evil'.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that we're born without any innate characteristics. We're all born with the grabbing reflex, with "face recognition software", possibly with syntax (if you believe some people), etc... and we're probably capable of being born with the innate set of mental aptitudes that can lead to, say, musical ability, etc. But the tendency - even amongst people who, for instance, edit the journal Science or flog lots of popular science books - is to talk about "genes for homelessness" (which wouldn't be the only silly thing that Matt Ridley believes) or "genes for crime". "Crime" is artificially essentialized into something called, say, "aggression" or "anti-social behaviour" and all sorts of varied and contingent social behaviours are artificially lumped together under this term, while others (the warmongering of leaders, for instance, or the drug dealing of big tobacco firms) are mysteriously ignored, presumably because they are seen as inherently non-criminal.

There's a very interesting (and largely amicable) discussion about this stuff between Richard Dawkins and Steven Rose, here. I particularly like the fact that Rose is wearing a long, multi-coloured scarf.

It’s been pointed out to me that there’s nothing in the story that directly implies that the prisoners are ‘born bad’. They might, it is suggested, just as well contract the evil via their experiences. Well, okay, but that is still hugely reductionist. I’m no fonder of environmental or social or economic determinism than I am of genetic determinism. And the serial depicts prison simplistically as a place where violent, selfish, ruthless, brutal thugs go. No other perspective is even nodded at. We have to confront the text as it stands, and that is where it stands.

Plus, in a story that features an American ambassador during the time of the Vietnam war... well, the show seems completely unaware of any idea that an American ambassador during the Vietnam war (or a Chinese ambassador during the reign of Mao, for that matter) would probably be directly or indirectly complicit in more murder, destruction, violence, rape and torture than all the crims in Stangmore combined. Imperialism is even namechecked at one point... as a bit of rhetorical Maoist flim-flam for the Brigadier to smirk at.

None of this would be quite so bad if the story didn't also revolve around a dirty big nuclear missile. The cumulative impression is the standard bit of wishy-washy liberal twaddle about "oooh, the darkness of mankind... oooh, there's violence in us and that's why we have nukes and stuff...". Crime can't possibly stem from alienation caused by hierarchical and unjust societies, nor is it something that leaders do too... these notions are completely beyond the story's ken.  Crime is something that people with Evil in their heads do, and people like that go to prison. If you're in prison, you're Bad. It's that simple. This is implicit. Also implicit is the assumption that humans are clockwork oranges.  Use technology to remove the Evil from the brain and the brain will function properly again.  A 'properly' functioning brain, at least for the working class, seems to be a brain that makes you mild, quiet, childlike and inclined to doglike obedience.

If the story was intended as a 'homage' to A Clockwork Orange, it seriously misunderstood that text.  Whatever its faults, Burgess' story understands that behaviour is more than just mechanistic conditioning.

Also implicit is the notion that the weapons of mass destruction with which imperialists threaten the planet are not economic phenomena, or chips in a power play, or actualisations of the conflict inherent in capitalist competition between states, but expressions of our collective guilt, our original sin as a species. My question, as ever, is: who's "we"? 

Judging by the story's racial and gender politics, 'we' are the Westerners, lead by proper male, ruling-class authority.  Chin-Lee, being both Chinese and a woman, is a puppet.  Meanwhile, the ultimate horror - at least as far as the American Senator Alcott is concerned - is that this deadly combination of sneaky otherness - the Eastern, the Communist, the woman - will bare its fangs and burn 'us' all with its breath.  If 'we' have to worry about the working class getting uppitty as well, 'we' are in serious trouble. 

In other words, this is a classic bit of reactionary Cold War ideology, albeit mediated through the Doctor's occasional bouts of scepticism. 

Still, at least it looks colourful now.