G A T T A C A

If you’re doing not much else on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you could do worse than watch Gattaca.

Gattaca is a great film for a number of reasons; but first and foremost is the sentiment of the underlying tagline that “There is no gene for the human spirit”. The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with this sentiment and the film is nothing but a wholehearted expression of the idea that there is a more powerful thing beyond the physical genes which dictate how our bodies work. However the term ‘spirit’ is perhaps not the best choice for a word to represent that which is beyond the physical. I mean, a few hundred years ago folks were burned at the stake for their evil ‘spirits’ and so there are negative connotations with it which another word does not have. Of course, that word is ‘Quality’. There is indeed no gene for the human quality and I’d struggle to create a better movie than Gattaca to represent this idea.

Other great things about the movie :

The Probable Science Fiction Future – It would be hard to find another science fiction film which represents the ‘Not too distant future’ better than this. While it has made one predictive error since it was created in 1997 (Laser eye surgery exists now – instead of either an eye transplant or contact lenses as claimed). Designer babies, prevalent solar power, electric cars and ubiquitous space travel are all becoming more probable than less as the years roll by. Furthermore, only the best Science Fiction gives cautionary moral tales about possible futures knowing that as a result of watching them we are made wiser and can hopefully avoid these unpleasant scenarios in the future.
The Heroes Journey – The film follows Joseph Campbell’s universal heroes journey narrative very closely.
The Cinematography – Beautifully crafted shots which feature a pristine palate reflecting, perhaps, the artificial world in which the ‘Godchild’ Vincent inhabits.
The Sets– Featuring the ‘Marin County Civic Center’ by Frank Lloyd Wright. Plenty of circles which are pleasant to the human eye too..
The Soundtrack – Beautifully crafted piano pieces by Michael Nymann.

Robert Redford On a Sailboat

> “[In this film] there’s nothing but the elements. Nothing but the weather, a man, a boat – that’s it.” > **Robert Redford**

In a new J.C. Chandor film Robert Redford ‘plays an unnamed solo sailor woken by a collision with a drifting shipping container that rips a hole in his 11-metre yacht. Taking on water, and with his navigation equipment and radio broken, he is stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with a violent storm approaching.’

In Lila, Robert Redford made a cameo appearance as the person to romance the sailing narrator before he sold the rights to his previous book – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Interestingly, in the book the narrator mentioned Redford’s value of the Victorians:

“Those Victorians seemed to light Redford up too. He’d made a lot of films about that era. Something about them probably interested him as it does many other people. The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously. Something about their rigid convictions about what was right and what was wrong might appeal to anyone brought up in laid-back Southern California of the forties and fifties. Redford seemed to be a rather Victorian person himself: restrained, well mannered, gracious. Maybe that’s why he lives here in New York. He likes the Victorian graciousness that still exists here in places.”

And in the press conference Redford also talked about the losing of values:

“As I can look back now.. I can see America in kind of a series of sections where change happened as America moved from one place to the next. As it moved from one place to the next, certain things got lost, got dropped. Our belief system began to have holes punched in it.. But I was raised at a time when a belief system was what you lived on.”

Three Myths of Behavior Change.

Jeni Cross who is a sociology professor at Colorado State University, talks about the three Myths of Behavior change. In these notes below I’ve ignored the SOM jargon and instead written about how the research applies to values. I could find five main takeaways from the 3 Myths.

MYTH 1. Information is enough to change behavior.

1. If we speak to what folks value by making things tangible, personalized and interactive this is far more likely to change their mind than simply supplying them facts.

2. Also, because folks are also loss averse, that is, they don’t want to lose value they already have, they are far more likely to change their behavior if it means they won’t lose value.

MYTH 2. Changing attitudes changes behavior.

3. You can actually set qualitative behavioral expectations to change behavior and attitudes.

4. You can also change behavior by speaking to what folks already value.

MYTH 3. Folks know their values.

5. Social norms influence behavior far more than folks give credit for. If you speak to folks value of social norms, then you’re far more likely to change their behavior than they give credit for.

Morality in politics..

“Lying just beneath the surface of (political) arguments with passions raging on all sides are big questions of Moral Philosophy.. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our Politics”
Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel has a great series on Justice which explains the currently competing philosophical theories of social justice that exist in the world today. Unlike anyone else I’ve seen he’s bringing the problems of Moral Philosophy to the public at large in an easily accessible way.

In the TED Talk above, Sandel gives a passionate plea to bring some of this intelligent philosophical discourse to our political dialogue. I share his frustration and it is heartwarming to see someone make such an argument in a public setting. Of course, the Metaphysics of Quality provides us with a vastly improved language with which we can discuss morality and it brings with it coherence and evolutionary context to these discussions where there previously was none.