Jasmine again

[avevale_intelligencer]

I keep turning Jasmine (from Angel season four) over and over in my mind, trying to find the thing she is that is more important than the Season's Big Bad, or Quick Find Gina Torres A Part Before She Kills Me With Her Pinky. Because I am, after all, "one of those people who has their ego shackled tightly to their intelligence, and prides themselves [actually, I don't that much, I think anyone can do it] on the idea that they could, given an afternoon and plenty of tea, finally resolve this whole free will/determinism thing once and for all," or possibly even someone "whose worldview derives from an insufficiently nuanced set of base principles." (Check out this Making Light entry for the source of the quotes, and see if you agree with my self-assessment.)

And I think I've got it. Jasmine is the ultimate answer to the secularist argument, oft propounded by such as Sir David Attenborough among others, that even if there were the slightest possibility that God existed, he would have to be evil or insane and clearly not worthy of worship, because there are worms in the world that eat people's eyeballs and the ebola virus and dandruff and all, plus people do rotten things and say God told them to so that must be God's fault. Also in the Bible people kill each other with tent pegs. And so on.

I really don't mean to trivialise this argument (though it does sound like it; sorry). The problem of evil is one that has bedevilled theologists and philosophers for centuries, and just because the answer appears obvious to me doesn't mean I'm right. How can we say God is all-loving and all-compassionate when he permits this kind of thing to exist, when he seems not to punish people (or worms, and possibly some of the worms are also people) for torturing and killing in his name, or at all?

Joss Whedon, an atheist himself, provides the answer. Jasmine, if we'll have her, is the ultimate interventionist God. She will stop all the anthropogenic evil in the world, and all the rest of it as well. She will end poverty, hunger, war and disease. She will unite all the peoples of the earth and make sure they live happy, fulfilled lives, and you can bet she won't let another worm eat a little child's eyeball. She promises Paradise on earth, and she has the power to deliver, because we all know that if we the human race were once all united in the pursuit of a common goal, with all those disagreements about politics and religion and race and gender and so on ironed out, there isn't a damn thing we couldn't achieve. Jasmine provides that basic unity of purpose. She's the real deal. Yes, okay, she eats people, but it's made clear that as ways to die go it's one of the more pleasant. Apart from that, the only tiny little problem is that if she bleeds on you (or you happen to be her dad) she looks all maggoty and stuff for a moment. Fairly trivial and avoidable, I'd have thought.

And guess what. She is, according to everyone who's commented on my posts on the subject, still evil and insane and not worthy of worship. She's depriving us of the suffering we need to be human, of the exercise of our free will to commit rape and murder and shortchange the checkout girl at Costco. That little boy in Africa with the half-eaten eyeball is being stripped of his basic human dignity by being saved this way, and by gum Angel isn't gonna stand for that, no sir.

Which means that the whole thing about the problem of evil is a smokescreen. Yes, evil is a problem, both natural and anthropogenic, but in the end, whether it's wished on us by a god or just there, it's our problem to deal with and our fault if we don't. I don't think, from what I've read and heard, that an atheist would agree (given the choice) to worship a God like Jasmine any more than the one we may or may not have. I could be wrong, but I don't think some atheists would worship any kind of god at all, even if their existence, their power, their glory and their ultimate benevolence were proved beyond all possibility of doubt. Even if reason compelled the worship of a deity, I think at least some atheists would refuse. And they'd be perfectly within their rights to do so. Reason, as I've always said, isn't everything, and the choice of the soul counts for something.

Whereas I, while sickened and horrified by the worms and the viri and the evil that men do, am still on the whole happy to be alive in this universe. I think that, if it's a vast, intricate and weirdly beautiful system in which each animal, insect and organism plays out its appointed role, then it's still that even if it evolved by the will of a deity. If it's a ghastly, intolerable chamber of horrors in which we are the chief monster, then it's that even if it evolved by pure chance from random collisions of tendencies in an indeterminate something of whateverness. And if not embracing that double standard (universe without God good, universe with God bad) means I have an insufficiently nuanced set of base principles, then on the whole I'm comfy with that. Some things are simple. Me to name but one.

And to those who may have wondered why I've been quiet in here for a while: don't you wish you hadn't? :)

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought I remembered the "she eats people" part.

And you know, I can kind of picture someone who is otherwise good having no choice but to eat people or starve.... but I have to admit that the little prey species at the back of my animal mind keeps saying "ANYTHING THAT MIGHT EAT ME IS BAD; that is all ye know and all ye need to know."

So maybe it's just that part of me that is speaking when some part of me says "well, if something that had to eat people to live was really such a shining example of goodness as to be worthy of worship, wouldn't it be honest about it? Wouldn't it try to persuade people that the good it does outweighs the shortening of some lives, and wouldn't it try hard to choose those lives that aren't being enjoyed and can't be improved, and try to persuade those people to come willingly?" Humans are great at justifying things, so maybe that little shrew or tarsier or whatever is influencing me inappropriately. But I can't help but wonder, if she's so good, why the deceit?

Personally I think we may be overthinking this, at least if we follow the authorial intent fallacy. I think the writers wanted to postulate a foe superficially desirable but in the end both powerful and worthy of being opposed. Hence Jasmine, who seems to offer everything we want, but eats people. The horrific under-appearance, I think, is simply the writer's way of dramatizing and making visible what they expect will be our instinctive revulsion toward a predator who eats us.

And I think someone who is willing to eat me, just like someone who is willing to rob me, or kill me, or rape me, might be viewing me with a certain intrinsic lack of respect I find disturbing.

[batyatoon]

The horrific under-appearance, I think, is simply the writer's way of dramatizing and making visible what they expect will be our instinctive revulsion toward a predator who eats us.

That's probably the best way of putting this that I've ever seen. I saw a lot of people talk about how shallow it is to judge Jasmine based on her appearance, and I kept wanting to say "you're missing the point" except I couldn't quite articulate what that point was.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Good point, and I think you've answered your own question. The deceit is because each of us, as individuals, would (on an instinctive level, and quite apart from any rational thoughts we might have on the matter) rather see the entire world plunge into hell than give up our own lives. I'm reminded of the breaking of Winston Smith (the reason why I'll never read 1984 again): get to the bottom of each of us, and you find ultimate selfishness. Some of us manage to behave as if it isn't there for nearly all our lives, but it's there. And that's why the only way to achieve the good world that we all dream of, using humans as we are at present, is to impose it, either by force through a worse totalitarian dictatorship than we've ever seen, or through mind control as Jasmine tries to. Maybe in time the pattern would become ingrained and the control would be relaxed; we'll never know.

I could be overthinking it, yes, but Whedon's oeuvre (at least as far as Dollhouse, which I didn't stay with) has always said something about the real world as well as trying to tell a good story.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

People choose to die for the good of others sometimes. The classic case is the soldier who throws himself over a grenade, saving his buddies at the cost of certain death for himself. They're not common, but they exist. And I would expect an abstract and far off pleasant death to get more takers, given the phenomenon of future discounting (humans are generally more willing to commit to a future cost than to the same cost if they must pay it today.)

But I am frankly not sure it's possible to achieve a good world by imposing it. If nothing else, that requires a pretty serious power disparity. And power corrupts. You're not going to have a "government seen as illegitimate" problem with Jasmin but that issue of power corrupting--oh, yeah; I think you'll have that. If she *starts* by eating people, where will she finish?

The other thing that concerns me about Jasmine is that I get the impression that she removes people's free will. She walks in the room and everybody worships her. They don't evaluate her good works, consider her less good works, and *choose* to worship her, they just instantly turn toward her, like moths toward a flame.

And I would think any good creature, supposing it couldn't turn that quality off, would try to stay away from people as much as possible, so as to leave us free. Jasmine does the opposite, and seeks to spread her influence as widely as possible.

I talked to Kip about it last night, and he thinks Jasmin isn't good, but might still be better than what we've got, and maybe that's what Whedon meant.

Kip thinks her appearance issues are not so much tying into the predator thing as expressing the danger that she will infect the viewer with Jasmin-worship.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

This is again a very good point. We take it as a given in our society that freedom is the ultimate good, whereas (while I'm very fond of my own) I think it must be looked on as morally neutral, since it necessarily includes the freedom to do evil, or simply not to put ourselves out to do good. If freedom is good, then it's good on a level once removed, a sort of meta-good which has nothing to do with the actual material consequences of freedom.

Suppose my hypothetical child in Africa, sitting by a river and reaching in for a drink, were visited by a nice lady who said "there are two ways this can go. One, if you carry on drinking from that river you'll experience horrible pain and lose your eyesight, and nobody will help you, because to most people you don't even exist and the ones who do know and care and want to help are a hundred miles thataway dealing with a flood and running out of funding anyway. Two, you can have a new well built in your village, a brand new hospital with all the staff and facilities they need to help you and all your people, and while I'm at it I can end the war between your tribe and the one up the river and bring in food and supplies for both tribes. The only thing is I'd have to make people do these things, because they either won't or can't do it of their own accord. Which is more important, their freedom or your health and survival?" (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that the Jasmine Effect is something she can turn on and off, so the child can answer honestly.)

There isn't an easy answer. I imagine that the reason Jasmine is no longer one of the Powers That Be (what passes for the forces of good in the Buffyverse) is precisely because of this proactive approach of hers. She's kind of like the Doctor in that way; she wants to interfere. But if interference is seen as bad because it takes away people's freedom, and freedom is the ultimate good, then how do we justify waging wars to get rid of other people's leaders whom we see as tyrants, or imposing sanctions, or even sending aid packages? Don't we end up in the Time Lord position, sitting back and watching in horror and uneasily justifying our inaction to ourselves on the basis that at least we keep jolly good records of it all?

It's a fine line, and I think it moves. And I wonder how bad things would have to get in the world as a whole before we would accept that something like what Jasmine offers, or the closest human alternative we can manage, really is the only way to stop, or even lessen a little, the actual material suffering that results from our freedom not to do what needs to be done?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I can see your point about the child in Africa. Though I think the presentation on Jasmin's part should really, for honesty's sake, include "and by the way I may eat you at some point, but not until you get old, I promise."

I imagine that the reason Jasmine is no longer one of the Powers That Be (what passes for the forces of good in the Buffyverse) is precisely because of this proactive approach of hers.

Really? You think that the Powers That Be are upset that Jasmin violated a cosmic Prime Directive? You don't think the issues that she eats people, and she deprives them of their free will, might be playing a role?

Now, I have to admit that I didn't like or relate to what I saw of the Powers That Be, and I don't remember very well what they cared about, so perhaps it was the Cosmic Prime Directive that caused the schism. I attribute my dislike to it simply being extremely difficult to postulate "beings with enormous powers" and "the world with all its problems" and come up with some honest way for the beings to be benign. Not only is the problem of evil real, in my opinion, it has never been solved. Stuff like "it's your fault for being imperfect" strikes me as the rationale of an abuser and stuff like "it's yours to deal with so you learn and grow" the excuse of the lazy. And yes, absolutely I believe that removing all our challenges would be a bad thing and absolutely I agree that this is a Catch22 that the gods cannot win.

It's just that this is a Catch22 that arises (in my opinion) from the very fabric of the universe and the nature of consciousness. From questions as basic as what is good and what is evil. And I feel no particular need to turn intellectual backflips to resolve it; I am comfortable with the answer that it's just not possible to have an all-knowing all-powerful all-benevolent being and still have the world as it is, or indeed any mind at all that must face adversity to learn and grow.

Authors have gotten around this problem; the most common solution has been to suggest that the gods are pretty powerless--or sometimes that they have great power, just not in any realm that affects humans. Bujold handled it well in her Chalion books, I thought, by postulating that the gods relate only to the world of spirit and cannot affect or even really understand solid matter. Add in the issue that god ideas of good and evil don't really align with human ideas of good and evil (so in effect they're not reliably benevolent as a human would understand it) and we come up with a world in which we don't need to resort to "it's really your fault" or "you just don't understand My plan." I thought that worked.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. And if Jasmine were not evil and deceitful, she could go into the assisted suicide business, consuming only volunteers.

[ci5rod.livejournal.com]

::applause::

[batyatoon]

Possibly relevant to this argument: have you read John Barnes's books about the Meme Wars? There's Candle and The Sky, So Big And Black and I think one other.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on One True, particularly in comparison to Jasmine.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I haven't, sadly. I'm very far behind on the new stuff, for various reasons. *looks at Wikipedia* Hmm. Anything that begins with the premise "all humans have a technological something implanted in their brains" tends to lose me, because I know I wouldn't allow any such thing (there are five ways of reaching my brain and that should be enough for anyone) and I'm not the most neophobic or squeamish person I know. Apart from that, though, the methods and aims look quite similar (unless the writers of Angel meant us to assume that Jasmine was lying all the time and just wanted to eat humanity, which would be boring and stupid in my view). I'll have to look out for those.

[batyatoon]

Oh, there isn't any "all humans have a technological something implanted in their brains" -- the protagonist of Candle has that, I think, but it isn't universal. The meme doesn't require tech implants to work.

Please do. :)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

*gasp* Wikipedia is Wrong??

"One True operates collectively through the "Resuna", a brain–computer interface implanted in every person."

[batyatoon]

Ahahaha -- not wrong, but unintentionally misleading. The brain-computer interface is essentially a computer virus that can use the human brain as hardware; it's not physically implanted, it loads through optical and auditory input.

[allan doodes (from livejournal.com)]

Quick comment, just to make things clear. I personally am an agnostic, I don't know whether there is a Godhead, let alone its nature (singular or plural, good or evil, involved or indifferent), though the evidence I have collected so far (at least, such of it as is not ambiguous) suggests there isn't a Godhead. I write this so that people will have a clear idea of my biases, and to help people understand my viewpoint.

I must admit that the discussion (and no, I don't wish you had kept quiet Zander; quite the reverse), to me, misses the point. Evil is not a thing, it is an abstract that only exists in our minds (and one assumes, in the mind of any alien species that might also be sapient). If evil was real, eating sheep would be evil, and so would eating apples. Or eating humans wouldn't be evil.

All the examples quoted are "evil" because they are happening to our fellow human beings. They can, and do occur in "nature". If they were happening to a mouse, or a lion, we would consider them cruel (well, most of us would), but not evil, just "nature, red of tooth and claw".

An interpretation of religions is that they are attempts to formalise rules of behaviour for people, to make people do the "right" thing (originally right in the sense correct, nowadays right in the sense of good; and yes, there is a difference). Ultimately, the Problem of Evil (in it's Christian form, at least) is a result of us imputing (rightly or wrongly) a moral code to the godhead (if it exists) that is seriously at odds with the way the Universe seems to work.

Which doesn't mean that I think we should revert to a morality based on the way the rest of the Universe works. Quite the reverse. Our ancestors struggled long and hard to create a world in which we can "be good", and many are, and I believe their struggle was worth it (and still is worth carrying on).

I remember, many years ago, reading a statistic about an English city in the mid fourteenth century (it may have been Lincoln in 1347, but don't quote me), which would probably have has a population of less than 10,000, and yet in one year the authorities record roughly 140 "unlawful killings", nearly a third the number of murders that happened in the UK (population 60 million?) last year.

Some evils are purely a side effect of Nature, disease and famine for example (though there are instances of these being deliberate, eg the distribution of blankets from smallpox wards to Amerindians, and some at least of the famines in in the Soviet Union under Stalin). These are generally not under human control, though the more extreme Christians I have talked to about this seem to think they all are a result of our behaviour (mind you, as the alternative would seem to be to blame God, I guess that is unsurprising).

Then there is "evil" that is done by humans - murder, theft, rape, and so on - and where these come from is more difficult to establish. Maybe it is human nature (evolved or created), maybe social conditioning, maybe physical or psychological dysfunction, or maybe God, or the Devil, does tell people to do these things. Given my agnostic-atheism, my personal assumption is that it is a mixture of the first three, with human nature evolved. But I may be wrong.

So is Jasmine evil because she eats people? Yes, I think she is. Is she evil because she overrode everyone's free will? Yes, I think she is. Do I think that the gains humanity made (freedom from crime, famine, suffering, and so on) worth accepting her rule in spite of her being evil? After some thought, personally, no I don't. And if you assume that Jasmine eats human bodies and souls (which I believe is implied, if not outright stated) then my answer becomes an unequivocal NO!

Go get her Angel! :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

There is a book called _The Better Angels Of Our Nature_ about how violence (using murders as a proxy--and oversimplification, arguably, but murders are most likely to be recorded) has declined over time, and what seems to be causing it. I think it's very interesting.

I will say my view of evil is much less abstract than yours and leave it at that.

[allan doodes (from livejournal.com)]

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep an eye open for it.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

This by you is quick? :)

So would you say that "there's nothing good or bad in life but thinking makes it so"? I'm reminded of the response of the Zen master to his disciple who announced that he had gained enlightenment and now saw that all experience was illusory and unimportant. It's easy with our comforts and our safety and our full bellies to step back and look at the big picture and say "Ah yes, but free will is more important." Removing free will from the picture for the moment, and thinking in terms of "the greatest good of the greatest number," on a purely pragmatic and secular basis, Jasmine's solution works. But then, so does the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks.

I think perhaps the point I'm climbing up to is that if we value free will above all else, then it's the duty of the whole human race to do of our own free will what we don't want to be made to do, to put our own constraints on our freedom and make sure it never becomes an excuse for inaction where action is needed, which is something very many of us at the moment don't do. And I'm going to stop there before I talk myself into going out to dig wells in Africa or something.

Incidentally, if you're agnostic about godhead, doesn't that imply an equal agnosticism about the soul? I did a post waaaay back at the beginning of this journal about that subject and how it's treated in Buffy and Angel. I wonder if it's worth reposting...

[allan doodes (from livejournal.com)]

This by me is quick. At least it was when I started. It sort-of got out of control, the reverse of writers' block, I suppose. Comes of writing as I think about what I am going to say, rather than planning it all first. :-)

Actually, the first paragraph was added last, when it occurred to me that I should clarify my personal stand-point before everything else.

So would you say that "there's nothing good or bad in life but thinking makes it so"? Not quite sure what exactly you mean by this, but if one assumes that there is no outside entity laying down a list of things that are good and things that are evil, then the only entities capable of defining good and evil, or even distinguishing them, is us (and any fellow sapients, of course).

I am afraid that, taken to it's logical conclusion, "the greatest good of the greatest number," argument is in danger of morphing into a varient of the "ends justifies the means" argument. After all, if Aryans outnumber Jews, is it not logical that the needs of the Aryans should override those of Jews? Or, to use a more modern version, if the Han Chinese outnumber Tibetans ...? Or the people of LA who are easily available for eating versus those elsewhere who, during the story at least, weren't easily available.

As for applying the argument to the Elio/Morlock example, unless you assume that the Elio massively outnumber the Morlocks (a questionable claim) or the Morlocks are significantly less intelligent than the Elio (which is probably the reverse of the situation, and quite likely the assumption that caused the split in the first place), then the case doesn't apply.

As for having free will, I am reminded by the comment of a Philosophy teacher who had just became a father I knew - "I no longer understand how anyone who has lived with a pregnant woman can believe in the separateness of the body and mind." I am a depressive and are all too aware that my "free-will", the choices I can make, are severely constrained by factors that are not under my direct control. Even when I am "well", I am limited by social conditioning. For example, as an intellectual exercise, I can contemplate arranging someone's death, in a high state of emotion I might even consider trying to do something about it. But ALL my conditioning since birth is that killing humans is wrong, and only if the most extreme of my emotions were somehow prolonged could I chose to cause someone's death.

I agree with you about our duty to use our free-will, though I admit I fancy going off to Africa to dig wells no more than you do. Someone once - near the end of the 1960s - 'quoted' the line "Freedom is the right to chose one's own slavery", though I don't know where she read it.

Concerning souls, I am agnostic about the soul. Personally, I don't believe that humans, or anything else, has an element that survives the death of the physical body, whether you call it a soul, an atman, or whatever, and regardless of what it might supposedly be - the full mind of (I believe) Christian belief, the deep subconscious of Buddhism, or whatever. Apart from anything else, no American has ever come back and sued their doctor for malpractice (though, thinking about it as I write this, I now realise this merely precludes the full-mind version) :-). However, as with the existence of the Godhead, I am willing to look at evidence to the contrary.

But when discussing Jasmine, I am discussing (at least indirectly) the universe of Buffy/Angel, and humans explicitly do have souls in that universe. So I feel I should assume souls in discussing her.

To clarify my position, if there is a immortal part (soul, atman, whatever), something that destroys that immortal part is evil to my way of thinking, regardless of all other considerations. And that applies to whether the immortal element is found only in humans (the Christian assumption) or in all living things (Buddhism, amongst others, again).

Which could be difficult for me if it turns out that sheep have souls that are destroyed by the act of roasting and eating their flesh. :-(