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Title: Ran Prieur on Avatar
Author: Ran Prieur
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: ecology, indigenous, media, post-civ, post-left, race, review, technology
Source: Retrieved on January 20, 2010 from http://ranprieur.com/archives/028.html#avatar

Ran Prieur

Ran Prieur on Avatar

January 11. By popular demand, I’m going back to Avatar. First, we

shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives hate Avatar [1] ... unless we

think about the meaning of “conservative”. The movie supports the most

traditional of traditional values: a tribal society living in balance

with nature, and defending its culture through violence. So how can

“conservatives” hate it? Because in practice, conservatism is an

emotional state, and people in that state don’t care what’s traditional

or radical for humans in general — they only care what’s traditional or

radical for them personally. So you can make the most untested and

wildly maladapted society in history, and after a couple generations,

all the traditionalists will angrily defend it and attack the ways of

the previous hundred thousand generations.

It also turns out that leftists hate Avatar, but only a particular breed

of leftists, those with academic training in identity politics. Annalee

Newitz wrote When will white people stop making movies like Avatar? [2]

And David Brooks, a centrist, calls Avatar the White Messiah fable [3].

Their point is that this is one of many films that turns someone from

our culture into the leader and “most awesome member” of an alien

culture, and that it would be more politically correct to show the

aliens saving themselves without our help.

That’s a good point, but it’s hard to count the number of points they’re

missing: A movie must take viewers on a journey, and the journey has to

start from where we are. If the people from the alien culture were the

protagonists, only a few dedicated liberals would go see it. How many of

you have seen El Norte? [4] And any Hollywood blockbuster must make its

protagonist super-awesome. Nobody complained that Bruce Willis was more

awesome than anyone else in Die Hard. Avatar opens the door to that

complaint by putting its hero among another race, but you’d have to be

blind to think that race is the heart of the movie.

Of course, Newitz and Brooks are blind. Newitz is a techie and Brooks is

a huge supporter of “progress”, so they can’t stand the thought that

Avatar has made a billion dollars with a message about ecology and the

human race: that we are not the rulers of a pile of resources but the

servants of a living planet, that an extractive economy is not just

unsustainable but evil, that our place is among dangerous wild creatures

and not our own sterile devices, that it was wrong for us to conquer the

Indians, not because their skin was a different color, but because they

lived better.

Did we conquer the Indians? When lefties say that Avatar purges white

guilt, they are making several questionable assumptions: that we are

white, that we feel guilty, and that white guilt is a good thing. This

is an obsolete view of race. A more helpful view was pioneered in the

zine and book Race Traitor [5]: that “white” is a social class only

loosely connected to pale skin, that thinking of ourselves as “white”

makes us obedient to an unjust system, that the best thing “white”

people can do is not to sit around feeling guilty for the crimes done in

the name of whiteness, but to disown whiteness and take the other side.

Every one of us has ancestors who lived more or less like the Na’vi, and

who were violently conquered by disconnected, resource-extracting

cultures. If we all stop identifying with those cultures, the whole game

is over.

We did not conquer the Indians. The Babylonians, the Romans, the

English, the Spaniards, the Americans conquered us... but not

completely. The reason Avatar is so popular, and so important, is that

it is helping us to remember who we are.

Of course, what to do with that awareness is a much harder question. No

matter who we think we are, we are still dependent on the conquering

system for our survival. We’re not going to voluntarily kill ourselves,

and I think it’s silly to try to limit ourselves to technologies that

existed 20,000 years ago. The important thing is that we make the shift

from an extractive economy to a sustaining economy, and from the made

world to the found world. And we might not be able to make that shift

once and for all — we might have to keep making it again and again.

January 14. Since I’m still talking about space and ecology, I want to

go back to Avatar. Maybe my disagreement with the lefty critics boils

down to ethics vs tactics. It’s disrespectful to indigenous people to

show them being saved by a leader from the invading culture — but the

result is that hundreds of millions of viewers in exploitative systems

are learning the story of shifting their allegiance to nature-based

cultures.

But on another level, Avatar is both inaccurate and tactically

misleading. The inaccuracy is that the Indians win. In The Holocaust We

Will Not See [6], George Monbiot writes:

...engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable

that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans

is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which

a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

Then he goes through a great summary of the atrocities of the European

invaders... and fails to answer the fascinating questions he raises:

What if Avatar had followed history? And why didn’t history happen like

Avatar? To answer the first, I would love to see a movie where the Na’vi

get crushed, Pandora is developed to near extinction, the resources are

wasted on space suburbs, and as the whole system collapses, the avatar

population finally learns to appreciate the ways of the Na’vi. That

movie would have sold about 17 tickets.

It’s the second question that reveals the tactical mistake: no

ecological society has ever won a violent war against an extractive

society, because an extractive society is inherently more ruthless, and

if there are resources to burn, more physically powerful. The Seminoles

held out for decades in the swamps of Florida. Now Disney World is

there. In a hundred years, squid and jellyfish will swim through its

ruins. You cannot defeat the Empire with force — you can only outlast

it.

But then, as any given empire declines, it is defeated with force... by

the next empire. I’m not sure how that story will play out in the

future, with so many resources used up.

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