An Argument for More Globalism

If one were to study a map of the Homo Sapien’s migration and settlement of the Earth, one would discover that it took our prehistoric counterparts over one-hundred thousand years to traverse the distance between modern day Africa and modern day North America. Today, if an American businessman needs to meet with his associate in Johannesburg, he can travel from LAX to South Africa in under twenty-four hours. Large and rapid advancements in technology, coupled with an educational focus on tolerance and coalition is transforming the world into a place of synergistic interactions. It is in said interactions that we safeguard our future and survival as a species.

Charlie Chaplin, speaking as a fictitious dictator, put it best, “The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together.” It is within the utilization of inventions such as these that we see globalization in its purest form. Everyday, humans from different parts of the world communicate and meet with each other. In doing so, the population is exposed, both consciously and subconsciously, to the many cultures of the world. The fact that in the year 2015 people are utilizing technologies that depend on levels of global collaboration the likes of which people living in the 1920s would not have been able to perceive, only strengthens the assertion that the world is and has been moving, however gradually, toward total globalization.

There is no aspect of human culture that is not being affected by the increasingly universal nature of the Earth. The global economy is no exception. In an article entitled “Why Globalization is Good” published by Forbes magazine, author Robyn Meredith explains that, contrary to popular belief, globalization is universally beneficial from an economic standpoint. Unlike foreign aid, foreign direct investment remedies poverty in a way that is profitable for all parties involved. “It’s remarkable what a few container ships can do to make poor people better off. Certainly more than $2 trillion of foreign aid, which is roughly the amount (with an inflation adjustment) that the U.S. and Europe have poured into Africa and Asia over the past half-century”

Humans have abandoned convictions of intolerance and put aside petty differences in order to help each other, several times, throughout history. The frequency of these conjunctive occurrences has recently increased, specifically within the past century. At a time when Nazism engulfed most of Western Europe, many of the world’s countries, all with diverse cultures, banded together against the threat of Adolf Hitler and ultimately achieved victory in the bloody conflict of World War II. A speech given by United States president Ronald Reagan reinforces this notion of a “unifying common enemy.” “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world”

How do we continue to build on this cosmopolitan concept? We must look to education to continue the trend of globalization . Humans are not born with prejudice, animosity, or bigotry. These traits are taught. Through proper education these traits can be untaught and replaced by an understanding and respect for the world and it’s ever changing peoples, cultures, religions, and creeds.

Whether one is speaking in economic, social, political, historical or educational terms, the sentiment that globalization is beneficial to the entire planet is incontrovertible. In an era where nuclear annihilation is a very real possibility and said possibility is due to infinitesimal differences between cultures, it becomes essential for the human race to not only understand each other's cultures and traditions but to accept them as well. It is with the establishment of global tolerance that we secure our survival as a species.

The Oscars

With the Oscars just about a week away, it seems appropriate to write a post analyzing the award show. Being that I am currently attending film -school I would be remiss to not share my thoughts on the spectacle. In many ways, this post will be a pseudo-continuation of my previous post regarding the responsibility that goes along with celebrity. The simple truth is that the increased politicalization of the Oscars, due to droves of celebrities using the podium to plug their political agenda, has left many Americans feeling fine with missing the award show that is supposed to be a celebration of the magic of film and recognition that many members of a film crew don’t normally receive.

In an article published in Paper Magazine by Jael Goldfine, the author reports on recent data released regarding viewership of the Oscars. In recent years, the number of viewers of the Oscars broadcast has plunged to record lows:

“Out of a representative survey of American adults, only 20% knew what movie was named best picture in 2018 (the answer, Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water). Between 1-4% of adults thought it was Call Me By Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — but an impressively apathetic 58% had no idea or didn't care to even guess.”

This data is incredibly significant because it represents the true voice of the consumers, or would be consumers, of this content and not the Hollywood elite or the cast and crew that worked on the film, that are normally the spokespeople, biased at that, for the content. Jael continues by extrapolating on the reason for the data results.

“This new data might just reaffirm for the nth time what we already know about the Oscars — that they desperately need to speak to a wider audience if they want to keep their cultural pedestal.”

As Jael says, the Oscars have become incredibly exclusive in both content of the films being showcased and within the content of the award shows and the speeches given by Hollywood big names. With much of the middle of the country in support of the president, you can’t blame those populations for tuning out of the Oscars which has historically bashed Trump unrelentingly. With the Oscars are slated to air without a host this Sunday, it may be a happy return what the Oscars are truly about, the love of film.

The Responsibility of Celebrity

In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, also known as the golden age of Hollywood, a “studio system” was in place that involved actors signing on with studios to star in films made only by that specific studio. This system gave birth to the notion of “star power” or the ability for a signal actor to pull in audiences with their real world persona alone. As a result, actors of that era, such as Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart, were more or less mum on their political views, avoiding saying anything that would alienate, no doubt cultivated by the studio executives in private meetings with the actors. One New York Times article reflects on the persona of James Stewart and explains that it was only later, as he retired from the realm of acting, did he engage in politics openly and even avoided commercial attention when he could help it,

|“Mr. Stewart shunned publicity, but was invariably

good-humored with interviewers. In later years, he

was a leading spokesman for conservative political

and economic causes and a frequent campaigner for

Republican political friends.”|

The author’s recording of the apolitical nature of Stewart here, instantly helps to paint a stark contrast with the celebrities of today, for where Stewart waited until his limelight had more or less extinguished, to fully thrust himself into the political realm, the celebrities of today often use said celebrity to thrust themselves within that political realm and even sometimes use their influence to further advance those affiliations.

Starting in the 1960s, no doubt forming alongside the Civil Rights Movement and the breakdown of the exclusivity clauses within actors’ contracts, actors began to be more outspoken about their socio-political affiliations and agendas. Today, that trend has only magnified. Leonardo Dicaprio, for example, has created an entire foundation that revolves around international relations with the ultimate goal of slowing, stopping, and reversing the effects of climate change caused by human pollution. This initiative is, no doubt, largely evident in Dicaprio’s mention of the issue within his Oscar acceptance speech at the 2016 Oscars. While this effort by Dicaprio seems to be a bipartisan, global initiative, there are many celebrities that, arguably, take advantage of their fame in more subjective, arguably morally irresponsible ways. What variety of celebrity manipulation a star is engaging in depends on the answer to the following question, Is the star using a presently valid celebrity OR are they “dredging” up their past celebrity in order to thrust themselves into the limelight to bellow buzzwords and soundbites in order to plug their thoughts? If it turns out to be the latter option, then a certain suggestion of disingenuousness is immediately established, regardless of the star or the issue at hand. One prime example of this lies within the dealings of actress Alyssa Milano. Milano reached a high level of celebrity when she starred in the show Charmed, which aired between 1998 and 2006. Now, she’s most recognizable as the spokesperson within UNICEF commercials. However, Milano continues to ride the celebrity she gained from Charmed to constantly launch politically bias commentaries. Looking at Leonardo Dicaprio as an example in tandem with someone like Alyssa Milano is particularly interesting because it begins to build a spectrum of celebrity manipulation.

An article published by Huffington Post author David Sable entitled “The Power of Celebrity in Politics” explores this phenomenon through the lens of the 2016 presidential election cycle. In the article, Sable attempts to muffle the political power of celebrities by using the 2016 presidential race as an example of multiple hollywood stars coming out in support of Hillary Clinton with their efforts ultimately resulting in a Clinton defeat. Sable concludes by suggesting celebrity power is often exaggerated,

|A quick search and count will tell you that Clinton out celeb’d Trump

by an exponential factor. From Katy Perry to Jennifer Lopez. From the

Kardashians to Tyler Oakley. From Lady Gaga to Beyoncé. From LeBron

James to Alex Rodriguez... she had all bases covered...age, race, actors,

singers, athletes...all tweeting, posting, hashtagging...even doing thinly

veiled public service announcements across multiple platforms to ostensibly

turn out the younger vote. So what happened? Clearly the millions of views

garnered by the stars didn’t do the trick... it didn’t bring out the masses or

ignite any passion for action.|

While Sable’s suggestion seems valid at face value, he is oversimplifying a widespread occurrence by using one instance as the “end all be all.” Moreover, the last line of the excerpt is false, given that a passionate action was very much taken by masses, the country over.

To suggest that celebrities should not voice their political opinions is incontrovertible a suggestion of lunacy for as citizens of the United States, they can and should be vocal. However, when a celebrity clearly uses their celebrity without being fact checked, retorted, or rebutted in any official way, we run the risk of celebrities, and specifically celebrities that have exited the limelight only to return to spread an agenda, spreading misinformation quickly and widely. As a free nation that depends on an educated, misinformation at that scale should be public enemy number one.

Why do we go to the Movies?

Why do we go to the theater? Whether it be for film or theater, attending a production showcased at a theater offers us, as humans, many desirable things: Experiencing emotion along with other humans, seeing other humans go through the same struggles that we encounter throughout our lives, even vicariously seeing other worlds that we will never be able to visit ourselves, through the human characters, gives us some level of satisfaction. However, what would happen if those experiences were played out by non-humans? What if everything we saw in the movies, and I’m speaking specifically about live-action productions, was computer-generated? What if the human characters we saw weren’t actually human? Would the empathetic dimension or the emotional resonance of the experience change? This would have been the type of question asked by a group of friends, who just saw a sci-fi movie in the 80s or 90s, only to be dismissed moments later as products of technology too temporally far away to concern themselves with. That is no longer true. We are in an age in which the very idea of actors could be threatened and, as the audience, we have the responsibility to assess the importance of the inclusion of real flesh and blood humans, not just renderings, in our stories.

Over the past few years CGI technologies within motion pictures have become so advanced that the parameters and rules of thumb that exist within the film and television industries, as formulas that maximize profitability, are about to be thrown out of the proverbial window. As one example of this, many predict that the theory of the “Uncanny Valley.” A theory within the field of robotics, but can also be applied to the critical study of cinema, that refers to the phenomenal unpleasantness of seeing a photorealistic human rendering on screen, won’t be valid anymore. The Uncanny Valley is so named due to the way the data points of the theory are allocated. As photorealism of a human character created by CGI goes up, audience acceptance of the character as a human goes down, at least that’s how it’s been since the inception of the theory. In this way, three-dimensional animated films such as Disney’s Frozen or DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon features human characters with obviously cartoonish models allowing audiences to accept them as human characters in a fantastical world, seperate from said audience. These worlds also usually require the characters to constantly perform acts impossible for human actors to complete successfully so that animation benefits the story being told and it benefits the animators to give the a sort of cartoonish stylization. However, when animation leaves the realm of big-eyed and vibrantly colored characters and delves into photorealism, the “selling” of the characters becomes harders, unless you can do what the creators of Rogue One did.

The Uncanny Valley’s validity is dependent on the ability of a human to differentiate between the organic and inorganic portrayal of humans. However, an article by GQ magazine writer Stuart Mcgurk showcases the very real concern that goes along with the notion that humans inevitably won’t be able to tell that difference,

| “It raises, of course, interesting questions about the future of acting. CGI is no longer about a thesp playing the odd motion-capture monster, but playing CGI humans. Just last year, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story brought Peter Cushing back from the dead 22 years after he had met his maker. Holby City actor Guy Henry played the role, with Cushing's likeness digitally mapped on later.” |

Mcgurk asserts that soon we won’t be able to tell the difference between human actors and CGI characters created to portray human characters. Mcgurk goes on to question the financial and market decision-making that goes on with something like this. Will actors be able to sell their likeness instead of their talent? An interesting question, but it misses the bigger picture.

Before producers and studio executives engage in the mad rush of figuring out how to take advantage of this surge of technology, I think it would be more constructive for them to consider why people go to the theater in the first place. Moreover, as consumers of this particular brand of media, we alone have the power to shape its direction. When portrayal of different races and sexual orientations was determined, by the masses, to be imbalanced, we as consumers decided to champion increased representation, in film and television, for these groups. Since then, the industry has made great strides in this area. Now, in a time when live-action acting could go extinct, we have the power to bring about that sort of change again. In fact, we have a responsibility to do so.

Public Intellectual Profile - Dr. Michio Kaku

I recently read an article from The Guardian about the decline in UFO sightings that has occured, worldwide, since 2014 (when sightings historically peaked). Although analyzing UFO eyewitness accounts would be interesting, the aspect of the article I wish to focus on is the disposition of the author toward the topic and his attempt to assign meaning to the data point. The author of the article approaches the topic in such a way that seems to suggest the public is moving away from, not just belief in some wild idea of flying saucers or little green men abducting cows in rural America, but from a general interest in space exploration.

|“Perhaps UFO and alien lore is seeming more like a reflection of human
culture, tied to the space age, motivated by conquering new existential frontiers.”|

Setting aside the question of whether extraterrestrials are currently interacting with Earth or not, it is here that the author seems to claim that advancing into space is a romanticized notion, exclusively cultivated during the second half of the 20th century, and that it is now dying out after a prolonged infatuation following space-race era mania. Along with attempting to make the case for unsubstantiated claims about the “progression” of culture and suggesting that a disbelief in the possibility of extraterrestrials is the mark of a more “mature” societal collective (a claim that could be taken as a demonization of imagination and open-mindedness) the author, Philip Jaekl, does simultaneously highlight a potential problem that concerns humanity as a whole. The problem of our priorities, as a species.

When the idea of space exploration is brought up in common conversation, occasionally one will hear a question of justification arise from certain individuals. These are the same individuals who would see NASA funding drastically reduced or the agency expunged completely. From these groups, questions such as, “Why are we worried about space when we have our fair share of problems down here?” are often heard. This reassortment of priorities, at face value, seems rational and logical. However, based on every possible historical example, the sad reality is that humanity will always possess major problems and as long as we, as a species, are unable to exist beyond Earth, we will always run the risk of extinction (one could call that the greatest problem of all). In this way, the truly logical progression is to embrace our advancement into space, and more specifically colonize another planet. This then begs the questions “How do we do that?” and “Where do we go from there?”

These are the exact questions asked by theoretical astrophysicist Dr. Michio Kaku, a man who has virtually dedicated his entire life to the study, contemplation, and search for our future ventures into the vast reaches of space and what they could means for us down the proverbial road. It is from the results of these contemplations and studies that Dr. Kaku has ultimately claimed that our insured survival as a species lies in the stars, as long as we don’t blow ourselves up first. But before the warranted unpacking of Dr. Kaku’s theories on this topic, and some minor critiques of his oversimplified hyperbole and bias against spirituality and religion takes place, I want to briefly shift the focus back to the article from The Guardian.

Jaekl also suggests that this decline in UFO sightings could be a result of an increased indifference, by the public, toward all aspects of life that, he claims, may stem from the current political climate that seems to raise the bar of absurdity on a daily basis.

|“A key factor, however, may be that more people simply don’t care anymore.
As we are accustomed to being inundated with wild claims churned out by
politicians, media and advertisers, the next report of a UFO is no more
believed than the long-range weather forecast.”|

In short, according to Jaekl, people have become desensitised by twitter battles between the President and Speaker of the House that the idea of life on other planets has become stale. Whether it’s the fact that those in office provide the public with a daily dose of discussion material or that the possibility of planetary annihilation creeps ever closer, as world leaders toy with the idea of using their nuclear arsenals, Jaekl is leading his readers to believe that many people, either consciously or subconsciously, are placing space exploration at the end of their list of priorities and if true, that is bad for the future of the species.

Whichever way you feel about this topic, it’s important to remember the promise that space offers us. Our advancement into the cosmos is something that keeps the human machine turning and has since the beginning. Dr. Michio Kaku himself put it best. In a televised lecture, he opened his talk by explaining where the current technological boom, which includes the internet, robotics, and A.I., came from,

|“People call me and they say to me: professor where did the internet come
from? The iphone? All these wonders, it happened so suddenly. It must
have been from aliens from outer space. Nope. It came from the space program.”|

Here, Dr. Kaku illuminates how integral the lasting effects of the space program are for the establishment of an age of unprecedented global communication. If the article from The Guardian is truly any sort of litmus test of the current public opinion of all things space then now, more than ever, we should be promoting individuals among us that make scientific topics, particularly the ones that make our brains whirl, more accessible and easier to see the immediate benefits of and simultaneously make those scientific topics “cool.” Dr. Michio Kaku is one such individual.

Dr. Michio Kaku was born in San Jose California in 1947. As a young child, he became enthralled with science and famously built his own atom-smasher in the garage of his parent’s home (this was later revealed to be a slight exaggeration by Kaku himself). Nevertheless, with the ability and means to carry out the construction of such a machine, it is safe to say that Dr. Kaku was given a generous amount of freedom by his parents. This point is crucially important in order to fully understand the way Kaku thinks. His upbringing evidently allowed for him to be inquisitive, curious, and to seek out the answers to any questions he had, whether it was through reading or through experimentation. It is no surprise then that Dr. Kaku gained notice by his “atom-smasher” experiment and ultimately earned a scientific scholarship to attend Harvard University (where he finished first in his physics class), out of high school. He then continued on to receive his P.h.D. from UC Berkeley where he excelled in the radiation laboratory program. More recently, Dr. Kaku has pursued a life of teaching and publishing, holding a lectureship at Princeton University as well as both NYU and City College of New York over the past several decades, while simultaneously writing several New York Times best-sellers that both tackle complex scientific topics as well as extrapolate on Kaku’s own thoughts and theories that pertain to the future of the human race and what is necessary, often societally, to get us there. One such theory involves placing the human race on a societal scale that Kaku devised himself.

In his book, Physics of the Future, Dr. Kaku explains the criteria for each of these stages. The first stage is one of planetary control, wherein the civilization in question would be able to manipulate every aspect of the planet they live on and harness said planet’s energy completely. The second stage involves the ability to harness the energy of every planet in the solar system. It is here that Dr. Kaku makes an analogy to Star Trek explaining that, as in the show and movies, the characters are interplanetary, just as a stage 2 civilization would be. The third and final stage in Dr. Kaku’s scale involves harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. Here, Dr. Kaku uses Star Wars as an example. As the characters of Star Wars are able to jump to lightspeed at will and traverse solar systems as we would cities, so too would this hypothetical third stage civilization. Dr. Kaku goes on to unceremoniously declare that humanity is currently a stage zero civilization, not even “on the board.” He explains this stage zero to be a sort of crossroads. A test to see if we can even make it onto the board. Dr. Kaku asserts that it is within this era, this attempt to rise to stage one, in which we will either go extinct from self-harm(such as nuclear war or unchecked environmental change that can spiral into uninhabitability) or we will ascend, our survival virtually secure. According to Kaku, at stage one we will be able to deflect asteroids that would otherwise cause extinction and manipulate the weather at will, avoiding any sort of meteorological disasters. While Dr. Kaku’s predictions are grounded in science and reinforced by historical analysis to better understand our societal trajectory, there are times when Dr. Kaku seems to be so damn sure that he begins to express disdain for the institutions that cultivated some of the most accomplished scientific minds throughout human history. The institutions of religion and spirituality.

Understanding that the methodology behind branding an individual as a public intellectual seems to rely on a healthy blend of academic pursuit as well as accessibility with the layman, makes Dr. Michio Kaku a “no-brainer.” He’s most definitely “in the club.” His admittance into the public intellectuals group was never in question. Rather, the issue at question here is one of Dr. Kaku criticizing his fellow public intellectuals. If his public comments, and more importantly his comparisons, involving religion are any indication, Dr. Kaku would most certainly denounce the idea of most people from the theological realm as fellow carriers of the title of public intellectual. While Dr. Kaku’s writings are an impressive blend of scientific jargon and relevant pop-culture comparisons and references that make topics like technology of the future or space exploration more accessible, there are times in both his writing and his publicized lectures that he shifts to extraneous and arguably non-conducive hits on religion. For example, in one mini-lecture, Dr. Kaku mentions that our stagnation toward advancement into a stage one civilization is a product of the archaic savagery and fundamentalisms that we cling onto in the modern day. This isn’t a cut and dried slight against religion, but it is for that reason I chose it as an example. Here, in the same way that Jaerkl navigates the topic of his article with implication, Dr. Kaku claims, indirectly, that in order to ascend to the next stage of civilization we must abandon the rigid ideologies and pillars of thought that accompany religion. It is within these moments that Dr. Kaku both comes across as arrogant of the unifying effect of many religions, as well as negligent of the great scientists, of both the past as well as the present, that have either benefitted from religion or furthered our understanding of it. This is an issue tackled by Dr. Stephen Mack in his essay entitled “The Cleric as Public Intellectual”.

|“One of the great ironies of this debate is that historically, public intellectuals
in America are a product of both our secular and religious traditions.
Indeed, our entire liberal, secular democratic tradition is an extension
of our religious origins.”|

Here, Dr. Mack refutes the assertion that anything involving a religious connotation should be ultimately considered academically invalid, countering comments, like Dr. Kaku’s, that involve baseless and generalizing abandonments of religion as a whole.

Imagine for a moment that humanity had absolute peace. Imagine that all of the problems plaguing the world today were gone. There is no threat of nuclear annihilation. No threat of environmental catastrophe. No hunger. No sickness. What would the logical progression forward be, for our species? In our stagnation we, as curious beings, would incontrovertibly take to the cosmos with full force. Now understand that this reality will never come. One must remember that while the aforementioned problems may one day be solved, new major and global problems would undoubtedly appear. So then how do we break this cycle of solving and creating problems as a species? It doesn’t matter. This very ponder would be moot if a large-enough asteroid struck the Earth right now, for our ultimate problem as a species is our inability to survive an extinction level event. To ensure our survival as a species we have to exist on more than one celestial body, and the way to do that is to have space on the mind, more specifically on the societal mind. Space exploration and planetary colonization must be a global priority and without public interest in space, we will never be a priority. This is why public intellectuals such as Michio Kaku must be championed to the forefront of media outlets and be allowed to make topics like space exploration something to be desired.






LIST OF SOURCES

Freeman, David. “Michio Kaku Foretells Humanity’s Extraordinary Future” .

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/michio-kaku-sees-amazing-things-our-future-

except-those-scary-ncna851226, Accessed 23 January 2019.

Jaekl, Philip. “What is Behind the Decline in UFO Sightings” The Guardian,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/what-is-behind-the-decline-in-ufo-sightings

Accessed 23 January 2019.

Kaku, Michio. “Dr. Michio Kaku”, http://mkaku.org , Accessed 24 January 2019.

Lundman, Susan. “Michio Kaku: Will Mankind Destroy Itself?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NPC47qMJVg Accessed 24 January 2019

Mack, Stephen. “The Cleric as Public Intellectual”,

http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2013/08/index.html. Accessed 23 January 2019.

“Michio Kaku - Immortality, Space, A. I. ”YouTube,

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKjvL6ugpKU&t=568s. Accessed 24 January 2019