The Most Important Dialog in the Godfather

The most important dialog in the Godfather series (and for this I only include The Godfather parts I and II) occurs in Godfather II. It is a conversation between Michael and his mother in which Michael asks her whether it is possible to lose his family:

    MICHAEL
Tell me something, Ma. What did Papa think -- deep in his heart? He was being strong -- strong for his family. But by being strong for his family -- could he -- lose it?

    MAMA
You're thinking about your wife -- about the baby you lost. But you and your wife can always have another baby.

    MICHAEL
No, I meant -- lose his family.

    MAMA
but you can never lose your family.

    MICHAEL
Times are changing.

The Godfather is the story of a man fighting to save his family and losing it in the process. The tragedy of Michael Corleone is that he loses his family because he fights for it; or, rather, because of the way he fights for it. For Michael chooses to fight for his family by inverting the moral order of the universe. He treats his family as the highest good for which everything else must be sacrificed. He puts it before his country and even before God. In the end, he suffers the fate that befalls those who put the lower before the higher: Not only does he lose the higher, but he loses the lower as well. He loses his family. The tragic irony is that Michael himself is the means of the destruction of his family. The Godfather I ends with Michael ordering the execution of his brother in law; The Godfather II ends with Michael ordering the execution of his own brother.

The first Godfather film opens with the famous wedding scene at which we see Michael dressed in his Marine Corps uniform. Michael’s uniform symbolizes his submission to the moral order of the universe. He joined the Marine Corps out of duty to his country and in defiance of his father’s wishes. He puts God and country before family. His brother Sonny cannot understand Michael’s decision; Michael fights for “strangers.” Sonny is the pure and unreflective Mafia soldier. He cannot imagine any other system of values than the Mafia system. Michael can imagine both the Mafia scale of values and the natural (that is, true) scale of values and choose between them.

The crucial, and ultimately tragic, decision for Michael comes when he visits his father in the hospital, Vito barely having survived an assassination attempt. During the visit Michael notices that the hospital is nearly empty of attendants and, most disturbingly, of the guards assigned to protect his father. Demonstrating the resourcefulness, courage and coolness under pressure that are among his many virtues, Michael saves his father from certain death by bluffing a squad of “buttonmen” (assassins) who arrive at the hospital. Michael whispers to his father that “I am with you now, Pop”, and Vito smiles in response. But if Vito knew what Michael really meant, he would not have smiled. Vito planned for Michael to succeed legitimately by becoming a Senator or a Governor; he hoped to preserve him from the criminal side of the family so he could lead the family out of the shadows and into the light. But what Michael meant by “I am with you now” is that he has accepted the scale of values by which the Godfather lives. He is no longer the Marine killing under orders from legitimate authority; he has taken the prerogative of dealing life and death into his own hands. Like his father, Michael is now prepared to commit murder in defense of his family, a commitment he will shortly fulfill by killing a Mafia enemy and a police captain in a restaurant. When Vito is later brought home and learns of the murder, he weeps and orders his son from his room. Vito’s worst nightmare has been materialized. Michael has done more than be with him; he is becoming him.

Michael’s tragic flaw is, of course, pride, the most dangerous vice and the one to which a man of his many talents is particularly vulnerable. Michael takes the privilege of dealing life and death into his own hands because he believes he possesses the wisdom to wield it, and the virtue to prevent it getting the better of him. And, for a time, he is successful. His assassinations of Sollozzo and the police captain are tactical masterpieces and strategically shrewd. But just as Tolkien’s One Ring provides great power but inevitably corrupts those who wield it, so the man who takes up murder as a weapon is inevitably corrupted. Michael becomes hard, cold, isolated and increasingly merciless. At the start of the film, he is honest with Kay about the true nature of his family. He tells her a story, a story he reassures her is true, of Luca Brasi threatening to blow a man’s brains out on orders from Don Corleone. “That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me.” But when he embraces the Don’s way of life, it does become him, and along with murder, Michael must adopt a life of fundamental dishonesty with respect to Kay. This dishonesty, among other things, makes their relationship, as Kay later says, “unholy and evil.”

Although Kay comes to recognize the evil nature of her marriage to Michael, her tragedy is that she has already become fatally corrupted through her association with him. Her answer to Michael is an attempt to put an end to the unholy tradition of the Corleone family (this “Sicilian thing” in Kay’s words) by aborting Michael’s son; in other words, she fights Michael by adopting the same culture of death he has accepted. She is right that Michael can never forgive her for this, but doesn’t quite understand why. It isn’t because Michael has a problem with abortion and murder per se (obviously.) This would matter if Michael recognized some higher authority beyond himself and Kay. But for Michael there is no higher authority; he is the final authority on life and death, as ratified by the brutal fact that he is alive and his enemies are dead. Membership in the “family” is contingent on the recognition of his authority; the only sin Michael is not prepared to forgive is betrayal of the family, defined as dealing in death without authorization from Michael. In the Godfather II, there is a moment when Kay sees Michael while dropping off the children; it is obvious from her expression that she hopes for a reconciliation. Her desire for a reconciliation is evidence of her own corruption, for she wishes to be reconciled with a man she knows has an ongoing commitment to murder. Michael silently closes the door in her face; for having become a dealer in death herself, she can henceforth only be his rival and never his wife.

Kay manages to escape her association with Michael with her life, but Michael’s brother Fredo is not so lucky. Fredo is in many ways a more sympathetic character than Kay. Kay is intelligent and perceptive, but degrades herself both by attempting to fight Michael through abortion, and later attempting to take it back through a reconciliation. Michael can have nothing but contempt for her. Fredo, Michael perceptively tells Tom Hagen, is stupid and weak but he has a good heart. Alone among the family he congratulated Michael on his enlistment in the Marine Corps. Knowing nothing else, Fredo attempts to lead the life of a Mafioso but is humiliated at every turn. He fails miserably to protect his father in an assassination attempt and cannot manage his own wife on the dance floor after she publicly insults him. His pride hurt, Fredo tries to conduct some Mafia business of his own independently from Michael’s supervision, with predictable results. Fredo is exploited by some of the family’s enemies with nearly fatal consequences for Michael. But at no point is there any evidence that Fredo actively participates in a murder or a murder conspiracy. When we see him with the family it is either in standard family activities like supper or business meetings concerning things like his future in Las Vegas. He is absent when murder conspiracies are discussed. Now the reason for this is, at least in part, that Fredo has nothing to contribute to such meetings and may even pose a security threat through the possibility that he may inadvertently reveal sensitive information to the wrong people (something he actually does when he attempts to strike out on his own.) It nonetheless remains that alone among the principle characters, including Kay, he is innocent of the attempt to actively and personally use violence as a solution to his problems. His difficulties on the dance floor with his wife are evidence that he may be constitutionally incapable of violence. But beyond that, he simply doesn't think in those terms. This is what Michael means when he says Fredo has a good heart. He is susceptible to exploitation not only because of his stupidity, but because of his tendency to assume innocence in the motives of others, a reflection of his own innocent motives.


Fredo's pride leads him to foolishly strike out on his own, and for a time he rejects Michael's offers of a reconciliation. It is only after Fredo hits bottom, and admits that information he gave to Hyman Roth led to an assassination attempt on Michael, that he comes back to Michael in the form of the Prodigal Son. Unfortunately, Michael is no longer the forgiving father.

 

By this point, near the end of the Godfather II, Michael has degenerated to the point that forgiveness is beyond him. There is little more than paranoia in his heart. Fredo, whose sins were sins of weakness (the type least dangerous to the soul), accepts his nature and is content to live out his life as a kindly uncle. If there is anything left worth preserving in the family, it is Fredo, who maintains a measure of innocence. He poses no more danger to Michael and is not really deserving of the execution Michael orders, for although he consciously disobeyed Michael as the head of the family, he never attempted to betray him as did Kay and Tessio. But Michael's soul is now fully embraced by the murderous spirit he adopted with siding with his father, and he kills the last good thing in his family by "being strong for it." We last see Fredo praying the Hail Mary as a Corleone soldier puts a bullet in the back of his head.

Man at the Center of the Universe

I’m looking forward to reading Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches. From reviews, one of the myths he takes down is the notion that the Galilean revolution destroyed the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe. More specifically, in the classical view of the world, the universe consists of a series of concentric spheres with Earth at the center and the sun, moon and stars situated like studs on various shells rotating about the Earth. This cosmology reflected (so the myth goes) the innocent but arrogant classical belief that man is the most important thing in the world. In the process of destroying the geocentric view of the universe that flowed from arrogant anthropocentrism, Galileo taught man a lesson in humility.

The problem with the myth, as many before Goldberg have pointed out, is that the center of the universe in classical cosmology is not a place of honor. Earth is at the center of the universe in the sense that a drain pipe is at the center of a toilet. It’s where everything repulsive ends up that that isn’t welcome at more august stations in the universe. Even the matter here on Earth is, for Aristotle, of a lesser kind than the matter of the moon and stars. In fact, one of the key discoveries of Galileo that destroyed the old Aristotelian cosmology was the existence of craters on the moon. Celestial matter wasn’t supposed to be “corruptible” the way it is on Earth; but if the moon can get knocked around and beat up just like a something here on Earth, then there is nothing special about it with respect to Earthly objects. In a sense, it could be said that Galileo didn’t knock down man and Earth, but he knocked down everything else.

So Galileo did not destroy the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe, because the classical view did not think of man as the most important thing; there were plenty of things more important, including God and angels. But there is a counter-myth that arises from this understanding; the counter-myth that since the Galileo-proved-man-isn’t-the-most-important-thing myth is false, that Galileo and the Copernican revolution in general did not have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical impact.

In fact, it did have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical effect, one that is even more profound than if the effect had been merely to demote man in the natural hierarchy. For even a demoted man is part of a hierarchy, and hierarchy and order are the essence of the classical view of the world. The Aristotelian view of the world is one of profound unity and order; the hierarchy of the Earth at the center/bottom, with the celestial objects on various spheres, is not only a physical hierarchy but a moral one. The stars are better things than the things on Earth, and the meaning of the universe is wrapped up in its physical structure. Dante profoundly mediated on this in his Divine Comedy. Hell is at the center of Earth, Purgatory is a mountain reaching from the Earth up to the Heavens, and Heaven itself is located among the celestial objects. To travel from Hell to Heaven is to travel a road that is physical and moral, every piece of which bears meaningful relationship to the whole.

The Copernican revolution did something far more serious than merely demoting man in the hierarchy. It destroyed the hierarchy altogether. When the geocentric understanding of the world was undermined, the philosophical, cultural and even social order entwined with it was challenged as well. This is why the Church took such a serious view of Galileo’s publications. They had truly revolutionary implications in a way we have difficulty understanding today. Our view of the world, post-Enlightenment, tends to be fractured and piecemeal. We have political theories, physical theories, social theories, etc. Two men can share identical views of physics but hold opposite political ideas, as we can have both Marxist and Liberal-Democratic physicists. A revolution in physics holds no political implications, and vice-versa. But for classical man, physical revolutions certainly could have political implications, as well as religious and philosophical implications. Galileo did far more than move man down the prison cell-block. He destroyed an entire world.

Or, if we adopt the self-interpretation of the Enlightenment, he destroyed the prison. The elegantly integrated and complete classical view of the world may have been beautiful, but it was also a prison. It imprisoned man philosophically, religiously, scientifically and socially. It is hard not to be swept along with the passion of Enlightenment pioneers like d’Holbach, Bacon and Kant. Man, finally, was coming into his maturity, finally throwing off comforting illusions and taking charge of himself and his destiny in the cold light of things as they are. He has, after millenia, knocked the lock off his cell door and pushed open the creaking door. But what he finds is not what he expected. He encounters no prison guard to usher him back to his cell, or a warden to announce his release and direct him to his home. He finds no one and nothing to indicate what he should do with his newfound freedom. He sees that his prison was merely a cave in which he happened to fall at some forgotten moment in the distant past, and finds no indication of where his home might be or how to build one.

So we should reject the myth that Galileo knocked man off from his privileged place in the universe. But we should not fall into the mistake of thinking that he didn’t do something even more disturbing.

Luke 6:37 and Luke 6:29

Most of us find Luke 6:37 ("Judge not: and you shall not be judged") attractive. It seems to map nicely to our culturally dominant moral sensibility of live and let live, a philosophy always attractive since it simultaneously relieves one of the duty of caring what other people do while justifying a failure to make any moral demands on oneself. Who wouldn't be interested in a moral philosophy that turns moral laziness into a virtue?

But 6:37 only comes after Christ has already spoken 6:29: "And to him that strikes you on the one cheek, offer also the other. And him that takes away from you your cloak, forbid not to take your coat also." We don't find this verse nearly so congenial; this isn't live and let live, but die so that another may live. We may think we can take 6:37 and leave 6:29, but in fact they are logically related and it is perfectly reasonable that Christ follows the one with the other. We may think of 6:37 in the context of John 8 (the woman caught in adultery), and we are not wrong to do so. But if we are not to judge, we are not only not to judge the situation of "consenting adults", but also the unpleasant situation of someone striking us or taking our cloak. Do we take umbrage when someone strikes or insults us? Then we are judging them and not living according to 6:37. Luke 6:37 isn't really about the superficial live and let live philosophy, but something far more demanding and disturbing.

Following Luke 6:37 the way Christ intends it, as it does with everything else Christ commands, leads eventually to the Cross.

A Tax on the Poor and the Stupid

One of my bugaboos is the lottery, recently in the news because its jackpot has reached more than a half billion dollars. I see in the morning news today that there were several winners in the most recent drawing.

Who plays the lottery? Not Donald Trump or Bill Gates. They've already got their millions. Nor people who are smart and have figured out that the state gives you much worse odds than you would get in Las Vegas or even from the local Mafia numbers game. The two kinds of people who play the lottery are the poor (or at least not rich) and the dumb. This makes it, in effect, a highly regressive tax on the poor and the stupid.

The lottery is deeply corrupting. Instead of promoting a work ethic that invites people to better their lives through hard work and education, the state invites people to hope for a quick shortcut to a life of leisure. It used to be that chasing after "get rich quick schemes" was the infallible mark of a loser. Forget about that, it was said; buckle down, work hard and you will find success. Now it is expected that everyone buys his ticket. Those who don't are dismissed as spoilsports. In our corrupt vision, we demonize as "one percenters" people who have had the vision, tenacity and persistence to create products and services that people voluntarily buy in numbers enough to make a man rich. Instead, we celebrate the occasional fool who, through luck rather than hard work and inspiration, happens to pick the right series of numbers. What wealth could be more undeserved than that?

The lottery is pure exploitation, and the defenses of it morally repellant. On Fox News this morning, the hosts praised the lottery because its revenues allegedly go towards "education and social services." Education? Why put all that effort into school when the state dangles a life of ease in front of you for the mere price of a lottery ticket? Anyone with an education should understand how and why the lottery is a scam and never play it again. The fact that allegedly educated people dump their money into the lottery shows the value of the "education" all that money is buying. Social Services? My father calculated that the amount spent on this recent lottery jackpot amounts to $5 for every man, woman and child in the country. Again, it's not Bill Gates who's buying all those tickets. Perhaps if all the lower and middle class people blowing their money on "investing" (Fox News's word) in lottery tickets, there wouldn't be quite such a need for social services? The lottery is classic Big Government exploitation. In the name of "helping the poor" through education and social services, the state encourages the poor to impoverish themselves by feeding Leviathan through the lottery, thereby exacerbating the problems the lottery was allegedly put in place to solve. But, of course, the lottery isn't really about helping the poor or anybody else, but is simply another instance of Leviathan expanding wherever and whenever it can.

GKC on Self-Censorship through Moral Intimidation

Chesterton, from his Illustrated London News column of March 10, 1906:

"A state of freedom ought to mean a state in which no man can silence another. As it is, it means a state in which every man must silence himself. It ought to mean that Mr. Shaw can say a thing twenty times, and still not make me believe it. As it is, it means that Mr. Shaw must leave off saying it, because my exquisite nerves will not endure to hear somebody saying something with which I do not agree."
 

The Metaphysics of Survival

Reading Paul Johnson's Heroes, he has a wonderful turn of phrase with respect to the remarkable 4,000 year survival of the Jews: "They consistently got the physics of survival wrong, but the metaphysics right."

More Trouble With Kant

This is a continuation of this post on Kant.

One way not to argue in support of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic is the way Dinesh D'Souza does in What's So Great About Christianity. D'Souza draws an analogy with a tape recorder, which I discuss in this post and will not repeat here. The problem with the analogy, and similar analogies, is that it is undermined by the very transcendental aesthetic it is meant to support. If Kant is right, and we have access to appearances only and not the reality behind appearances, then we have no way of knowing what is really going on with whatever reality is behind the appearance we call "tape recorder." Whatever thing or things out there in reality give rise to the appearance of a tape recorder, we can't know what they are or are not capable of. They may be capable of all sorts of things we can't imagine; including access to reality in ways we cannot imagine.

The examples generally used to support this sort of argument typically involve animals with different sensory capabilities than our own, like Thomas Nagel's bat (Nagel did not use his bat argument for the point I am making here.) The bat has poorer vision than us, but instead has a highly refined sonar system it uses to echolocate its prey. What must it be like, Nagel asks, to be a bat? What is a "bat's world" like? We can hardly imagine it, but by what right do we claim that our world is the "real world" in contrast to the bat's? If these sorts of examples impress us as support for Kant's views, we should remember that Kant himself did not argue from them. For if Kant is right, then what we call a "bat" is only a construction our consciousness puts on sense impressions. Imagining what it is like to be a bat is just another way of exploring our own consciousness, not a magic way to explore the possibilities of some other consciousness.

There is an illusion involved in arguments like these, as though we can assume for the sake of argument that we do have access to the true nature of things, then argue from there that we don't have access to the true nature of things. If the conclusion is true, then it was true at the beginning of the argument as well as the end. The argument apparently starts with some premises concerning the variety of the nature of things, e.g. the variety between our sensory apparatus and a bat's. What it really started with was the variety in our conscious constructions on sense impressions which, according to Kant, say nothing about any actual variety in reality. So what if the conscious construction we put on sense impressions and call a "bat" has a different character than the conscious construction we put on sense impressions of ourselves and call "men"? Whatever conclusions we might draw from this fact says nothing about the actual sensory capabilities of either men or bats, or the relationship between the two. It is at best about the quirky nature of our own consciousness.

Kant's argument for the transcendental aesthetic is simple and is the only possible one. It starts and ends with the fact that space and time are not conclusions from empirical experience, but the form of it. Kant isn't wrong but, as I argued in the earlier post, we need not accept his conclusions.

But let us grant, for the sake of argument, the natural facts in support of Kant's position to which some of his more naive supporters resort but his philosophy actually doesn't allow. That is, let us suppose that we know bats really do have an excellent echo location system and poor eyesight relative to our own. The argument still does not work. For the bat's echo location system is obviously not intended to discover the true nature of things but merely to help the bat locate its prey; and it serves that purpose magnificently. We see the same thing with the features of other animals. Hawks have excellent vision, but the vision isn't for understanding the world per se, but for tracking prey far below on the ground. The dog's nose is far superior to our own, and the dog lives in a "smelly world", which is perfect for a dog since it hunts through scent.

Our senses, however, and our natures themselves, have no immediate and single purpose the way a bat's sonar is immediately directed toward prey location. We don't hunt by instinct in the manner of a hawk or dog, but must consider the nature of possible prey and how best to capture it. We must understand the world in order to survive in it. Neither are we born with fur like a bear or build nests by instinct like a bird. We must figure out what will work for clothing and how to get it, and what will work for shelter and how to make it. This is why Aristotle says that the relevant distinction with respect to man is that he is rational, which means more than merely the degenerate "thinker" of modern thought, but an animal whose nature is to understand the world.  And since we see that nature doesn't fail in its purposes (the bat's sonar does locate it's prey, the hawks eyes do see the mouse on the ground, etc.), why should we entertain the idea that our nature, uniquely among the creatures, fails to do what it is clearly meant to do - and that is to understand the world as it really is?