Lord of War
Published 10.04.2006 by ~mattg
I watched this one a while ago, so I’d better get a quick review out the door before I forget about it. The problem with this movie is that I want to forget about it. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very high quality film with a good script, a poignant message, and pretty good acting throughout. But while the trailers depict a somewhat lighter look at gun running, the film itself is the grim tale of guns and violence.
Guns and violence have much the same relationship as the chicken and the egg. The same philosophical question is typically asked of both: Which came first? Being a humble software engineer, I will not try to answer said question as it relates to either pair, but Nicholas Cage’s character Yuri Orlov seems to shut it out of his mind as he delivers his goods (ranging from pistols to tanks) to the various war-torn countries of the world. Although he sometimes reflects on the morality of the situation, he’s quick to explain it away, a behaviour I would expect in any gun runner.
The movie was just incredibly depressing. It’s an excellent film, one that could have easily been the basis for one of my communication arts papers in college. But it wasn’t really my idea of entertainment. That being said, I am glad I saw it, but most likely would never sit down and watch it again, if only to refrain from being depressed for the rest of the day.
Filed under Movies
You mention that age-old question that has vexed philosophers from the beginning: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Well, contrary to popular belief, philosophers have made some progress in answering some questions. And the question you ask has indeed been answered, with much thanks to that strange inversion of reasoning known as Darwin’s dangerous idea.
From the Guardian:
Brilliant!
And who says philosophers don’t do anything? I can see the logic in that statement, although it seems more an arguement for the semantics of the question. I guess the next question would be “How does a non-chicken lay a chicken egg?”
Well, thanks to recent developments in genetics and evolutionary embryology, we are able to have animals of one species gestate and give birth to an animal of a similar but nonetheless different species. This only establishes that there is enough continuity between different species, such that it is possible for a non-chicken (which, after all, is really just the ancestor to the chicken proper, and is very very very similar to the chicken proper, but just different enough to warrant its being a different species) to lay a chicken egg. How this happens in nature is whatever the precise story evolutionary paleontology, embryology, and other relevant life sciences would tell.
Of course, this just goes on to show that there is a lot of ambiguity and arbitrariness involved in deciding when one species becomes another species. (But make no mistake, there are good reasons for making such distinctions, reasons which are always open to reconsideration in light of new evidence and arguments; that’s just the beauty of science!) The apparent paradox is shown through the question of the Prime Mammal. Here’s an argument to prove that not only that you and I aren’t mammals, but that there are no such things as mammals:
1. Every mammal has a mammal for a mother.
2. If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only a finite number of mammals.
3. But if there has been even one mammal, then by 1., there have been an infinity of mammals, which contradicts 2., so there can’t have been any mammals. It’s a contradiction in terms.
(This is taken from Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, Viking: New York 2003, p. 126)
Of course, this is silly. There are mammals, which descended from therapsids, which are the now-extinct bridge species between reptiles and mammals. So just as there is a way for the reptiles to become therapsids to become mammals, there is a way for the non-chicken to become a chicken. The problem such a question like “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” thrives on our wanting to draw a line that essentially marks off one thing from another, preferably without question. Evolution has shown us that such lines and such essences don’t exist. What to do then? Dennett suggests that “We should quell our desire to draw lines. We don’t need to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that…there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years and eventually produced undeniable mammals” (Ibid, p. 127).
So there’s the short answer to your question of “How does a non-chicken lay a chicken egg?” The really short answer: there was one small change that amounted to the straw that broke the camel’s back, distinguishing one species from another.
How do we get from Lord of War to a lecture on the philosophy of the chicken and the egg? I think you have too much time on your hands.
Do you have your own blog yet? You really need an outlet for all these pent up thoughts…
No. There’s no time. I wouldn’t have the time for these entries if not for the massive amounts of caffeine I ingest on an hourly basis.
Worse yet, this is the sort of crap I do to take a break from what I really ought be doing—which is. frighteningly enough, the very outlet for all these pent-up thoughts…..