Rise of the Batman interpretations

---MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE---

The Dark Knight Rises is a film centred round a prison, possibly in Morocco, a place several times compared to hell; it is an awful pit deep in the ground with a huge circular tunnel leading straight up to the light of day and the world of free men. This escape route is treacherously difficult to climb; when Bruce Wayne arrives there, he is told that only one person has ever achieved it before.

The prison is symbolic for many of the film's themes. Bane claims that the taunting potential for escape makes imprisonment there so much more horrible, because hope, when crushed, creates a despair worse than any other. But the most striking element of the prison is the chant that the prisoners take up each time one of their number attempts the escape. It is a crescendoing, pulsating cry of "Deshi basara", which is Moroccan Arabic for "He rises". The entire populace of this hell gathers and watches in tremulous excitement, the chant growing among them, as the escapee does in fact rise up the tunnel. But, as Bane foresaw, their hope is inevitably crushed when the individual crashes back painfully into the pit.

The Dark Knight Rises is a story about one who did not crash, about an individual who rises to the very summit of the tunnel and actually fulfills the fantastical hopes of the prison's inmates, ecstatically shouting their joy. It is Batman who achieves this feat, and it is Bane who stands as his nemesis, whose life and philosophy is structured on the belief that Batman's act is (as he says when he gazes on the burning bat symbol of return) "impossible".

The film is a story about a man, who, on losing his one hope for a normal life with the death of his beloved Rachel, falls back into hopeless seclusion, failing to achieve anything worthwhile, as Bane again correctly observes, other than that which was based on the lie of the murderous Harvey Dent's heroism. This is a man who fears nothing from death, because he has nothing in life he cares to live for. But just as he rises from the hellish prison, conquering crushed hope, so he is able to rise into a new life of meaning and import. He is no longer happy simply to sacrifice himself for greater good; he regains a will to live, a powerful fear of death that compels him to true heroism.

The Dark Knight Rises, in short, is a film about rising. It is not a film about politics, other than to the extent that it shows how we can rise above politics.

This major point was missed, unsurprisingly, by many commentators, who rushed in this week to share their political insights on the film's "message". The opinions have varied (Rush Limbaugh believes it to be a liberal conspiracy to slur Mitt Romney, of course), but most see the film as an "anti-Occupy Wall St" fable, whatever that means. The logic goes that Bane is a villain, and Bane uses populist rhetoric to cripple society and attempt to destroy 12 million lives, therefore the film is telling us that populism is evil, and Occupy Wall St is somehow linked to this because it's a movement which is, you know, popular. The right-wing blog Breitbart has several fine examples of this argument, e.g. here and here.

There are many fascinating and challenging themes regarding the political status of Batman in general, and as depicted in the Nolan trilogy especially. As a vigilante, Batman seeks to establish law and order outside the official channels, meting out his own justice in whatever he deems is the most morally justified fashion. He refuses to kill anyone, but uses torture, spying and brute force to achieve his ends. He attempts to inspire powerful dread in his enemies in order to further destroy them. Yet he is the champion of the weak and innocent, loved by little children, a symbol of justice and good in a world of violence and evil. Plus he stops baddies from killing loads of people. So is he, politically speaking, good or bad? Is he a conservative paragon of crime-fighting or a liberal crusader against corruption of power and money?

These are in some ways simplistic and petty questions, and the genius of the Dark Knight Rises is to, yes, rise above them. The film moves into themes that are so much more fundamental to human life than mere politics and morality. Comparing Bane's actions to those of Occupy Wall St or any left-wing attempt to combat economic inequality is, frankly, silly. Nolan himself has stated:

"I'm not being disingenuous when I say that we write from a place of 'What's the worst thing our villain Bane can do? What are we most afraid of?' He's going to come in and turn our world upside down. That has happened to other societies throughout history, many times, so why not here? Why not Gotham? We want something that moves people and gets under the skin...We're going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things. It's just telling a story."

Let's be clear here: Bane is a terrorist who eliminates a city's police force and contact with the outside world, holding it hostage with a nuclear bomb. He then releases the violent inmates of a major jail, arms them, and tells them to attack the wealthy. Sure, he claims that he is giving Gotham back to the people, but this is patently not the case; the people have nothing to do with it. They hole up in fear in their houses. Hiring a band of thugs to deliver violent retribution whilst nihilistically trying to raze an entire city to the ground has about as much in common with the aims and methods of Occupy as contained cold fusion has with conceivable physics (*relevant science joke*).

It's a ludicrous argument, and also a tragic one, because it misses the whole, glorious, epic point of the film. It's not about whether capitalism's downfall is good or bad, it's about life having meaning beyond the constraints of such petty politics. Originally, Batman aimed to fight against "evil" in general, and "crime" in particular. He was driven by the anger and remorse over his parents' death. In this sense he was essentially nihilist; a futile attempt to destroy his own grief by creating a better world. With Rachel's death, there was no longer anything to live for beyond the realm of this all-consuming mission. Thus, with the mission complete, Batman disappeared and Bruce retreated into the depths of seclusion. From this state, in the events of the new film, he rises. Batman's kiss and subsequent life with Catwoman at the film's end at first seems cliched and unnecessary. But it's actually symbolic of a spectacular re-emergence of life, of the ability to live and love again. If anything, this resonates with the political view that money, say, constrains free life and free love as much Batman's self-imposed exile. But we don't need to make this point explicitly. It is only one of many more concrete interpretations we might draw.

The real message of the film comes, as ever, from Alfred. He is missing for the majority of the story, but he sets the tone at the outset with his pleas to Bruce to abandon the hard-hearted, self-denying strictures of Batman and take up a real, fulfilled life instead. And his return at the film's conclusion shows us exactly how Batman was eventually able to take this advice to heart. By not sacrificing himself, by cultivating our most important human faculty, the fear or aversion to death, Batman rises to become humanity's true hero, rather than merely the hero needed by a corrupt Gotham City in the first two films.

You can't just take a film like that and claim it supports your political opinions. Like the prisoners in their pit, we should treat the film as a beacon and source of hope, an ideal towards which we can attempt to rise, out of the shackles of partisanship and enmity, refusing to let our setbacks forever crush our hope of a better life.

Zombiescape

This article about zombies was just published in the fabulous Cambridge Humanities Review, which unfortunately is not yet online. I'm sharing it here with kind permission.

I'd really love to know what you think of my (over)analysis - especially if you disagree with it! Please leave comments below.

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Zombiescape: the real reasons why everyone is looking forward to the rise of the living dead

Everyone agrees: the early 21^st century is the age of the zombie. The walking dead have saturated popular culture and the entertainment sector. Respectable universities and even schools offer zombie-inspired curricula. Activists flashmob government offices demanding preparedness in advance of the outbreak, which – a host of subcultures assure us – is clearly coming any day now.

As with any pop culture phenomenon, it's easy to spew armchair theories about the meaning of the undead infestation. In 2008, Simon Pegg, whose 2004 “zom rom com” Shaun of the Dead paved the way for the genre's current popularity, complained in a Guardian editorial about a new upstart: running zombies. For Pegg, zombies must shuffle morosely or they would fail as effective metaphors for the inevitability of death. Meanwhile, critics of the classic Romero oeuvre tend to toe the standard line that the ghouls of the 60s-90s represented public fear of nuclear war or even terrorist-related catastrophe. Then, of course, zombies are also a synonym for sheep: symbolic of lack of individuality and the victory of mindless consumer ideology in modern times. After all, Dawn of the Dead is set in a shopping mall – it must be about shopping!

These analyses are fine if we want to restrict ourselves to how certain zombie films work as pieces of art. Romero himself has confirmed that much of the symbolism alluded to is intentional. But they do not in any way explain the pervasive mania for zombies in Western culture today. Zombie films are not effective because of any latent symbols or metaphors. The zombie zeitgeist did not emerge from appreciation for unoriginal messages about the state of modern society or our fear of death.

So what did it emerge from? When a youthful pop culture nerd watches Dylan Moran being disemboweled or Woody Harrelson unloading several cartridges of ammunition into the screeching hordes, what makes him or her think “phwaor - awesome!”? What makes them buy a zombie-themed video game, stage real world zombie battles, or create a market for genre mash-ups with 19^thcentury romantic fiction? My answer is threefold: zombies are fun, zombies hold rich imaginative potential, and zombies bring us together as humans.

I should also point out that many of these arguments are not exclusive to zombies. They also explain some of the appeal of alien invasions, superheroes and velociraptors, among other favourites. In fact, I want to start my zombie tale with a quote from a film that ostensibly features large monstrous aliens, but is in most respects indistinguishable from your standard zombie survival film: Joe Cornish's 2011 Attack the Block. Towards the end of the film, two main characters, Pest and Moses, are in a (temporarily) safe room, contemplating their approaching doom. Pest summarises everyone's feelings:

Pest: I'm shitting myself innit', but at the same time...

Moses: What?

Pest: This is sick.

There's no better way to capture the feeling of zombies. The sheer, fantastical fascination of horrific death and bodily destruction encroaching from all sides, and the sheer thrill and excitement at the prospect of dealing with it. To paraphrase Heath Ledger's Joker, people like zombies because they're just so much fun. Consider 2009's Zombieland, the highest grossing zombie film of all time and one of the few to gain more than a cult popularity. The very premise of the film is zombies as a theme park (“Fasten your seat belts. This is going to be a bumpy ride.”). Why are zombies fun? Because they're a game, of course.

Zombieland structures itself around a series of rules (e.g. Rule 31: always check the back seat). Perhaps one of the most common manifestations of the zombie craze in general culture is the famous zombie “plan”. Extensive discussion forums across the internet endlessly dissect the best ways of surviving (winning) in the coming apocalypse (game). What kind of weapon is best? What kind of shelter? What are your general tactics – flee first or find team mates? Even before Zombieland, the basic rules are clear: zombies only attack the living and they're attracted to your movements. If you get even a small bite, you're dead. Only headshots kill. Weapons, food and shelter are the most vital elements.

The ideal of type of the Plan is established in Shaun of the Dead. As soon as they realise the situation viz. zombies, the protagonists Shaun and Ed immediately set out a course of action. They will rescue their loved ones and hole up safe. After considering several options, they elect their local pub (and what is a pub is not a symbol of fun?) as the best choice of shelter after asking themselves “Where's safe? Where's familiar? Where can I smoke?” In contrast to previous scenes, our heroes here are confident, determined and in control. The blood on their faces and weapons attests to their experience and clear ability to carry out what they are suggesting, as do the short, clipped, idealised images and fast, beat-driven music that accompany this recipe for unrealistic happy ending (“and wait for all this to blow over”). Their casual talk of doing away with Shaun's stepfather - “Sorry Philip!” - shows how, despite their seriousness, they are treating the whole thing as a game, something that doesn't really count as real life.

This brings us to the second part of our quest for what constitutes zombie appeal, namely its imaginative potential. This part has two key elements, escapism and identity-formation, both of which are also key to the Planning Scene. There's a reason Shaun takes place in a pub, and Zombieland in a theme park/millionaire's mansion. As well as representing fun, both are places where inhibitions are lost. The most important part of the zombie apocalypse's appeal is that social barriers, norms and other restrictions are voided. It is the allure of social collapse. Not complete anarchy, of course, which would be genuinely frightening. As we have seen, the apocalypse is surprisingly well ordered and has its own rules. But the everyday structures of our lives as they are currently experienced are demolished in the most satisfying fashion.

The result is a fantasy land which is not just fun but decidedly surreal. In escaping our ordinary strictures, we must emphasise our separation from the old order of life by focusing and revelling in all things foreign to it – ludicrous quantities of gory violence being the main example. You can kill humanoids without guilt. Removing the head or destroying the brain are both activities that are about as far from thinkable as it's possible to get in the real world. Zombies let us escape; they let us finally do whatever it is we feel like – the perfect antidote for a culture where everything is regulated by social approval. This is explicitly highlighted in Zombieland, when the protagonists, finding themselves in an empty shop, spontaneously decide to destroy it for no reason. The commercial setting makes the casting off of the shackles of capitalism as crystal clear as the shards of glass that whirl randomly through the air in slow motion to the joyous cadences of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The scene is also replete with Native American objects (Little Rock is even wearing a feathered headdress), as if to stress the characters' return to a primitive state of ancient and simple freedom, generally constructed as the antithesis to the overbearing modern condition.

I am paying special attention to Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland in this essay because they – by far – are the two films which most latch on to (and create) the zombie appeal as it is enacted in mainstream popular culture. But other films have clearly been influential in this appeal. One successful film is 28 Days Later, which seems at first to undermine my point about escapism. The film is set in a military base, the paragon of modern order and constraint. And yet it is the soldiers themselves who become the enemy. It is only with the defeat – and zombification – of military order that the survivors can truly escape to their idyllic countryside retreat where they are found at the end of the film.

In the climactic moments, with the soldiers dying in unpleasant ways to the sound of heavy guitar music, the hero Jim has clearly found himself. He is in control of the carnage, shirtless, covered in blood and rainwater, the epic mis-en-scene and soundtrack driving his glorious charge. Lost and aimless since the start of the film when he awakes in a world he does not recognise, his full identity finally breaks the surface when his love interest, Selina, hesitates for “longer than a heartbeat” – a pure act of recognition – and the two passionately kiss. In the same way, Shaun is able to establish his own sense of self only after killing his first zombie, and Colombus from Zombieland becomes a functional human only after all his dreams are destroyed by the apocalypse, as symbolised by the reanimation and killing of his fantasy girl “406”. Zombie films typically take those who are marginal or do badly under the normal system (and who does not see themselves as limited in such a system?), and allow them to flourish, build a proper sense of identity, and take control of their lives. Even in Romero's films, it was often the woman or black man who were pointedly the only survivors.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who has extensively studied and theorised globalisation, claims that the contemporary world is driven by imaginative possibilities. Mass migration has left many peoples out of place, with shattered social identities. Global interconnections, especially in the form of electronic mass media, have provided these “diasporic public spaces” with a vast source of new and diffuse cultural elements, allowing people to reconstruct hybrid identities out of the circulating fragments to which they are exposed. Cultural material in these global “flows” passes through different “-scapes”: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes and so forth. These are inherently interactive and overlapping, making identity or group construction slippery and almost impossible to pin down in any one arena.

Zombies are the ultimate solution to global identity crises. While it still provides a huge amount of imaginative material for building identity, the zombiescape has no difficulties with unclear boundaries or slippery self-definitions. It is single and clearly defined. In it, we can imagine ourselves as projections of unproblematic social categories. Like the displaced nationals in Appadurai's diasporas, zombie fanatics are active appropriators of this imaginative potential. They are intentionally and creatively using zombies to help construct who they really are. Zombies are excellent proof of Appadurai's argument that religiosity, spontaneity and play are not constrained but rather thrive in today's mobile, globalised world.

The final part of the zombie appeal is community. To use again one of Appadurai's points: modern fantasies are not private or individualistic or even just about thought. They entail purposeful collective action and group imagination in public space. Just like other fan groups, zombie nerds regularly meet and form societies in the real world. But more important than this is what the zombie apocalypse, as depicted in the films, represents. In the 1960s, Victor Turner proposed a theory of social history in which groups cycle between states of “structure” and “communitas”. Structure is the standard state in which people functionally plod through ordinary life by dividing themselves into categories and following restrictive social norms or interaction. It fundamentally relies on a conception of difference among groups. Such a state is necessary for the long term stability of functional social order. But every now an again, it is equally vital that its counterpart and polar opposite, communitas, makes an appearance. Communitas is a state of pure undiluted connection between all people. It is invigorating, freeing, spontaneous, immediate and concrete. Boundaries and rules are dissolved for a time so that the connection can be as strong as possible. This state is necessary on a temporary basis in order to prevent structured existence devolving into pathology and crime. Turner gives several examples, including Benedictine monks, the hippy movement and the ritual practices of tribes he studied in Africa.

What is the apocalypse if not the ultimate transition from structure to communitas? It is zombies that finally shore up Shaun's relationship with his family and girlfriend. The first thing he does is collect them all into a team to deal with the zombie situation together. While his team does have major tensions and conflicts, these are spectacularly resolved by the zombies themselves when they seize and devour the principal troublemaker. Shaun even quotes Bertrand Russell: “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation”, perhaps the definitive motto for the zombiescape. The same goes for the other films. For all their talk of not forming attachments, the quartet in Zombieland become a tight-knit, harmonious social group by the end of the film, as do the trio from 28 Days Later. Again, Romero's willingness to use “minority” actors represents not just the potential for success of such marginal groups, but also the overcoming of group distinctions altogether. When 90% of the world is a reanimated corpse, your ties to the living, whatever their type or category, are automatically extremely powerful. In the words of Robert Brockway, author of Everything Is Going To Kill Everyone:

In every post-apocalyptic story, there's always the one crazy old man with the wacky helmet muttering about Revelations, and all the heroes take pity on him - "look at the poor soul, driven mad by all the death he's witnessed." But that's bullshit: We weren't driven mad at all. We were like this way before Armageddon, we just weren't allowed to show it because of all those damn people everywhere with their precious "morals" and "laws."

This is exactly the point. Zombie communitas lets us be who we want to be, and bond with whom we want to bond (even if that's no one). Unfortunately, Brockway misses the value of his own insight when he argues that apocalypse stories appeal because of our innate arrogance, our belief that we would be among the survivors and therefore the winners:

[It] all comes down to simple playground logic: The apocalypse is just a big game of King of the Hill with no other players left alive to retake the mountain.

While I have also argued that zombies have a game-like appeal, this alone could not possibly account for their astonishing popularity in recent years. Rather, it's the imaginative potential of the game world, which provides forms of escape and empowering self-creation, and the sociality this fosters, that makes us want to take part so badly. Zombies don't divide us, they don't bring simply out our competitive side, and they don't even create a Hobbesian state of nature. In this sense they affirm our humanity, allowing us to build ourselves a utopia of human happiness and harmony, even while we're meting violent destruction to the outsiders, the enemies at the gates who are so non-human that they finally provide an Other against which to define the species as a whole – one big family – ending the depressing system of having small parts of it defining against each other. And we can take this utopia and set it up as the fantastical alternative to the world we live in today. Or even as the solution to it.

Anthropocentricism

Today Chris T-T, a musician with a great twitter account, tweeted an article by Paul Kingsnorth from a few months ago in Orion magazine. The article is very long, and mostly eulogises lost nature - the standard romantic narrative about how machines, industry and general humanity are increasingly encroaching on and destroying beautiful and inspiring landscapes and wildernesses. It's beautifully written, very touching, and I basically agree that such destruction is a sad state of affairs.

However, the article also has a political point, namely an attack on the "environmental" and "green" agenda for caring too much about climate change, carbon, sustainability and so forth - all things that essentially try to improve the living conditions of humans with little concern for pure ecology and untouched nature, its beauty and wonder etc. In the name of carbon emissions, we wreck yet more land (and sea) with wind turbines, and deserts with solar panels. When Kingsnorth expressed concern about this, his "green" friends attacked him as a reactionary romantic. Clearly, Kingsnorth says, environmenatalism is no longer about the environment, but about human comfort. Thus, to differentiate himself, he adopts the label of "ecocentric", someone who puts ecology and nature at the centre of his philosophy and politics, as opposed to humans.

Christ T-T originally tweeted the article with this claim:


If you're remotely eco-friendly or green this @PaulKingsnorth piece is important, challenging reading:

So the article is supposed to challenge me? I consider myself eco-friendly and green, in that climate-related issues are among the most important of any modern issue to me, I've spend a lot of time and effort volunteering with climate change NGOs and projects, I tend to vote green, and I follow green issues in the media very closely (etc). But I was not challenged by the article. If anything, I found the article very easy to dismiss. As far as I could tell, Kingsnorth cares a lot about the literal environment, about pure nature (whatever these things are), about flora and fauna you can genuinely touch. He thinks these things are more important than humans and society. Given that this is what he thinks and cares about, it's hardly surprising that he feels the "green" movement has betrayed itself.

But I do not think these things. I think that humans are more important than "nature". I am not ecocentric; I am avowedly anthropocentric. As far as I can see, this is a simple difference of opinion, that our subjective concerns, values, beliefs happen to be different. If anything, I'm a little insulted at Kingsnorth's insinuation that my position is somehow inferior or less worthy than his. Why should support for the environment over humanity be better than vice versa?

Similarly, I tweeted these points at Chris T-T and he responded, saying

aha. I'd be interested to read why you believe that [he's referring to a statement I made: "I prefer to save lives more than wildernesses"]

Now that's a challenging question. Why do I have the opinion I do? I'd never thought about it before. Let me do some introversion here.

I suspect a lot of the answer comes from my experiences, most significantly the fact that I am a student currently finishing a degree in anthropology. Now, I wouldn't say that anthropology defines everything I do, not by a long shot. I'm actually quite bored with it by this point - it's just the subject I have to do to get this godforsaken degree. Anthropology isn't my philosophy, it's not at the centre of my value system. But things I've read in studying it certainly have affected my beliefs and opinions. 

Most of all, anthropologists love to deconstruct things. Bring up any idea or notion that we cherish or live our lives by, and your typical anthropologist will chuckle gleefully and then tell you why said notion/idea is entirely contingent, nothing more than a transient product of the specific cultural context that happens to have shaped you. They love to show that big things we take for granted - gender, economics, science etc - are not essential, ahistorical or universal, but that different cultures, and the same culture at different points in history, actually have very different notions of what such things are. We assume that pink is naturally a girly colour, but - aha! - go back 150 years and we find that it was considered masculine. See! Everything you believe is just a product of your culture's ideology. There is no truth.

Unfortunately, the smug anthropologists are basically right. They have strong evidence to support their deconstructionism. "Nature" is a classic case. As soon as I started reading Kingsnorth's waxing lyrical about Wordsworth and Indonesian rainforests, my anthropology senses started tingling. What we have here is your bog standard reification of a contingent cultural concept. Western culture tends to essentialise "nature" as a pure, untouched space free of all human ills. Hence how our beloved nature documentaries purposely play up the pristine, isolated jungles and oceans where man is entirely absent, despite the fact that almost no such places exist. But anything that complicates the picture is excluded from the documentary. 

Real life does not consist of separate spheres of humanity and (vs?) nature. Not that Kingsnorth would deny this - his whole point is that these separate spheres should but do not exist. But more importantly, the term "nature" on its own is entirely meaningless. It means whatever we happen to think it means at a given point in time. Some cultures don't even have a conceptual divide between nature and society. It is also as important as we happen to think it is - it has no inherent importance of its own.

So that's why I don't belive in ecocentricism. But why do I believe in anthrocentricism? Surely all the same problems apply - "humanity" as a concept is just as vague and contingent as "nature". I don't deny this. There's all kind of philosophical justifications that I could invent to claim that humans, as the site and source of subjectivity, are inherently more significant than anything else they subjectively think about, but this is not what I particularly believe. 

The truth is, I don't have a good reason that I'm anthropocentric. I just don't like other humans to suffer. I'd much rather nature suffers than humans, if indeed we can separate the two. I don't believe nature can feel suffering the way a person can. I'm an atheist and I believe in science. I don't like like climate change purely because it might disrupt human lives in a negative way. This doesn't mean that I think "progress" or "human comfort" justify environmental destruction, it just means that I'm opposed to whatever makes people suffer, and I'm in favour of whatever stops them suffering. Mine is a basically negative value system, and I think this goes for the middle class West in general. I don't fight for freedom or equality or nature, I fight against climate change and poverty and discrimination.

Because of my desconstructionist training, I no longer believe in objective truth, so the question of why I believe in something like anthropocentricism is indeed extremely challenging. I can't give a full-proof answer, but then I don't think Kingsnorth is capable of justifying his ecocentricism with anything fool-proof either. But I'll end with some more concrete thoughts on the issue.

Why I am anthropocentric:

All of my friends are human. Silly, but....well, I like my friends.

Most of my interests are human or human-generated, such as arts of various forms, thinking, reading, sports, games, chatting, eating cooked food (raw food is less yummy).

I've been raised within a moral code that is essentially anthropocentric. I can't justify it as better than other moral codes, but that's the one I've got. Its main points are things like "be nice to others", "share with others", "don't harm or deceive others" etc. There's very little in my moral code that I've inherited about being nice to inanimate things like nature.

While my culture in general does tend to romanticise "nature" as a good thing, it also romanticises things like money, egocentric success and certain forms of death, so I don't really trust its romanticisations.

The subcultures I'm most involved with are not very concerned with nature; much more with being cool and having fun with your friends.

Frankly, nature bores me. It enchants some people, and bores others. I happen to be bored by it. I've seen a lot of nature, I go to national parks (especially in the US and Europe) and hike and so on. Sure, it's pretty but it's not got much else to hold the attention. If it disappeared, I'd be sad but not devastated. I'd be devastated if 100 million people die from climate change.

While looking at nature bores me, scientific investigation of it excites me. I love reading about neuroscience, space exploration and colliding particles. I think the excitement here comes from the fact that people are finally figuring out amazing secrets that seemed so impossible to discover in the past. It's a very anthropocentric kind of excitement. Plus then there's the other kind of more practical science where the excitement comes from its applications to humans - eg internet technology, cures for diseases or new forms of transport.

I'm also anthropocentric for the simple reason that I interact intimately with humans constantly every day. I love thinking about how these interactions work, how different people behave around me and each other, how I can influence these interactions for the better, how I can create a world with high quality interactions. These kinds of thoughts occupy about 90% of what I do and believe. I'm defined by society, a social animal. It would be bizarre for me to be ecocentric when I'm so social.

People live and have real lives and I care deeply about that. While I care about other things too, anything without a conscious mind is simply a much lower priority for me. I can't justify this, and I'm sorry if it offends any ecocentrics reading it, but that's my position. I really care about humans and their happiness and I care much less about non-sentient concepts like nature.

A final caveat, if it wasn't already clear: While I believe humans are the first priority, nature has a big impact on humans - so big that the two categories are not really separable when it comes to things like actual policy.

Kony2012 - just when you needed another analysis

Wow. Today was extraordinary. I had never heard of Joseph Kony when I woke up. My sleepy head was immediately inundated on all sides by *by far the most massive instance of online activism/discussion on a single issue I have ever encountered*. People were going crazy for this new campaign that promised to save thousands of children from slavery and death. By lunchtime I'd spent a couple of hours researching the issue, and had decided that the situation was a lot more nuanced than the campaign made out. I went back on facebook and said so. No sooner had I refreshed my feed, however, than just as quickly as it had arrived, all the hype had miraculously vanished. Suddenly the only thing anyone was talking about was how misguided and problematic Kony2012 was. What started as euphoria had melted into cynicism in a matter of minutes, but still on an absolutely unprecedented scale, like nothing I've ever seen. Inevitably, this second trend quickly relapsed into a yet more cautious aftermath in which people (myself included) said things like "well at least everyone's talking about it".

At the end of this article, for reference, I will briefly present the pros and cons of today's incredible events, as I see them. But first I will draw a largely unrelated point of interest from the whole thing.

Today has demonstrated in no uncertain terms the awesome twin powers of trend-following and trend-bucking in public debate. I've never seen it so clearly and breathtakingly displayed. Think of this: every year, hundreds of thousands of social change campaigns are started around the world, probably a few dozen on any given day. A surprisingly large proportion of these have access to excellent social media strategies and inspiring videos that have all the right proportions of hard-hitting info and emotional appeal. So what on earth made Kony2012 stand out? Why did this one go viral? It's not particularly large or narrow in its scope, and it's not focusing on an issue that's any more inherently interesting for western audiences than other campaigns.

In my opinion, its success lies in the way in managed to portray itself as a massive movement. The message I got from the video was: we will do this because everyone believes in us. Everyone wants us to succeed. Everyone cares about this - the only tragedy is that they don't know it yet. Hence the amazing impulse we all felt to hit the "share" or "retweet" buttons immediately afterwards. Basically, the video made me really really want to join in with a massive movement of, well, everyone. An imagined community incorporating every decent human. The only place I've ever seen this to the same extent before was Obama 2008, but that took months to reach the same pinnacle of trend-following, not hours.

So why the fall from grace? If it was such a powerful, successful movement, why was everyone against it by teatime? Because of trend-bucking. The same as when your favourite band doesn't seem so appealing when they finally make it. The same as how, in the Republican primary elections right now, each candidate's momentum is their own albatross - any candidate seen as doing well suffers a massive voter backlash, so that the one furthest ahead in the polls a week before the election always does worst. No one wants a predictable or easy outcome. No one wants to feel they're following something too popular.

It's tempting to say that those who abandon their favourite bands when they get famous are shallow - they were never in it for the music but only for the social status that comes with it. The inherent coolness in being different. This misses a basic point about music, as well as everything else we use to define ourselves - its obviously a social tool. Of course we're in it for the social status. Music only sounds good if the right people are listening to it. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a way to build your own identity, same as humans have done since they were invented. Equally, when Kony2012 went sour, this was because of a backlash against populism. Suddenly everyone noticed the massive trend, and they couldn't bail fast enough. The sneaking suspicion that supporting the campaign marked you out as an intellectual dope or a cultural sheep was creeping up on us all. And equally, this wasn't a bad thing - in fact it led to a lot of productive information-spreading and discussion.

I was far from immune to these processes. I normally like to think of myself as engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful and uninfluenced by the mere fluctuations of popular opinion. But sure enough, as soon as I'd seen the video I decided that I would be the one to buck the trend and fly in the faces of everyone else. I read the tumblr before I'd seen it posted anywhere. I posted my own "provocative" facebook update. I remember the strong feeling of dismay when I suddenly discovered that the tide had already turned, and I'd been part of the turning - I wasn't different or unique after all! I hastily returned to facebook and added a statement about how actually Kony2012 wasn't all bad, but by this point it was hopeless, any opinion I could possibly muster was already common currency, diffused a thousand times through the endless comment threads growing like bamboo everywhere you could look. Only then did I truly stop and reflect, leading to this blog post, which even still I expect anyone could have written.

The fact is that if the morning had started with the onslaught against Kony2012 (which actually came in the afternoon), my first post would have been one of support for the campaign, not one of disapproval. There's no way I can deny it. My opinions were almost entirely shaped by (and in reaction against) what I perceived as the mainstream. I didn't give a full and balanced appraisal of the issue, I merely stated the side that I felt needed extra weight to achieve equilibrium.

This common reaction to public opinion is not necessarily an unhelpful one. For example, in dinnertime conversation, if someone states an opinion, you don't reply by giving all the pros and cons on both sides of the issue. You either agree with them, if you want to be polite, by adding arguments that support their own opinion. Or you disagree with them, if you want to have a discussion, by giving arguments that undermine their position. I'm always catching myself arguing against my friends on issues that we basically agree about. Being truly balanced is boring and a bit weird in most social situations. One feels it's one's duty to redress the scales if one perceives imbalance, but not to tilt them if they're already balanced, which is never. This is all fine and good. In fact, I think Kony2012 demonstrates the wonderful Habermasian nature of the internet as a public sphere - a realm where we can have free and informed debate that, given enough participants and time, ultimately arrives at balanced and useful perspectives for everyone, through a reaction of one opinion off against another.

The process to get there, especially on the internet, is often tenuous and unpleasant, because as I've just described, it necessarily involves everyone being very opinionated, at least to start with. On old issues like religion and economics we tend to develop these positions very little because they're already so entrenched as a part of who we are; thus debate can be self-defeating and make you want to strangle yourself. But when a new issue that no one's been exposed to yet - be it Coldplay, Newt Gingrich or Joseph Kony - comes along, well then the good old trend-following vs trend-bucking dynamic comes into play, and as we saw today, this can be harnessed on the internet to generate something truly glorious to behold.

In case you were wondering, here are my general, non-specific opinions about Kony2012 after the dust has settled:

Pros

• At least it got everyone talking (ha!) about an important issue.
• It has almost certainly brought the career of Joseph Kony to a more rapid end (though probably not a smooth one, possibly with unpleasant side effects, and probably not much more rapid).
• It has raised awareness about the power of grassroots activism for achieving positive results on important issues.

Cons

• It misled people by portraying the situation in Central Africa as straightforward, both morally and pragmatically.
• It has not suggested any practical solutions to the problem it identifies without major flaws.
• It has presented the issue as if it were a unique case - as if child soldiers and related horrors have not been a major focus of international diplomacy for many decades in many different parts of the world. This could mean that many people will become less willing to take on and seek out other instances of similar war crimes because they feel that Kony2012 has taken care of them all. In reality, of course, Kony is a relatively minor cause of suffering within the general conflict of his region alone.