Animals, ecology and The Matrix Reloaded

Here's a response to the 2nd Matrix movie I was inspired to pen when it first came out.

It first appeared in www.24framespersecond.com

I've just seen The Matrix Reloaded in a restaruant in Kathmandu, while outside in the streets police beat up communist protesters and slightly further away peasants struggled to make a living by growing rice on the side of the Himalayas... but that's a whole different story.
With it's multiple allusions, it's almost sublime use of green, night vision filters, it's exhilarating action sequences and the presence of Monica Belluci, the movie did to my mind what many women in Thailand were offering to do to my other favourite organ (apologies to Woody Allen).
But one thing troubled me: Why was the Computer program The Merovingian, named for an early medieval Frankish dynasty. French? To me it seemed counterintuitive, not to mention racist. After all, the dominant French philosophy of the last century has been existentialism, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of mechanistic determinism this character was positing. Before that, philosophers like Rousseau and St. Just surely have more in common with the rebels than with the matricians. Add to that the possible argument that the current French government is doing more to resist the seemingly inexorable march of the US military machine in the Middle East than anyone else and you've got a major paradox on your hands.
The way to resolve this paradox may be to remember that Descartes was also French. This philosopher's musings on whether we really exist or not are seen as the major influence on the epistemological world of The Matrix movies (1). But While Descartes is a huge influence on metaphysicians, to ethicists, particularly environmental ethicists, he is somewhat of a bugbear. In Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, for example, he was attacked with a venom which the author could never subject George W Bush. There are two basic reasons for this, firstly, his belief in mind/body dualism is seen as reaffirming the division between humans and the Earth that began with agriculture and is leading us, in the minds of environmentalists, on a course of destruction that will eventually make most metaphysical arguments seem academic, at least to rational people, but more of this later. Descartes is also the man who believed that animals were nothing more than machines, and it's this belief that seems apposite to the character of the Merovingian.
It's important to realize that Descartes was writing centuries before the existence of Darwin's theory of Evolution, which is accepted almost universally in Academia, and among intelligent people generally, if not in the mind of the US president (2). I'm therefore confident that if Descartes were alive today he'd probably be forced to reconsider his beliefs about other animals. It's a theory that's based upon the notion that human beings have a consciousness, which many philosophers believe must have come from some higher, transcendental power. Our Consciousness is often cited by meat-eaters as a justification for carnivorism . Animal rights advocates, point out however, that the scientific community can offer no precise definition of what consciousness is, when it first evolved, and even at what stage in a human's life it first develops, making that particular argument seem rather specious(3). Other philosophers argue that our consciousness is a by-product, or an epiphenomon of our intelligence, arguing that the belief that the existence of our consciousness is evidence of a human soul is akin to the belief of Amerindians that there were horses inside trains making them move. If this theory is accepted, then the belief that eating animals is justified seems extremely tenuous indeed.
As a vegan, I'm often confronted with various versions of this theory nonetheless, and even before the first Matrix movie was made, I used to ask my carnivorous interlocutors if manifestly more intelligent creatures would be justified in eating us. A similar argument is posited on one level by the two opening Matrix films. Presented with a world where humans are controlled by machines that are manifestly more intelligent than us, we are repelled, at least most of us are. It's a film that strives on one level to put us in the position that we put animals in at the moment. It's highly improbable that any animals have reached a high enough evolutionary stage to resist as Neo and Morpheus do, when I read that one animal behaviorist predicted that Dolphins would learn to speak within a generation (of Humans) I thought it was pretty ridiculous(4). But whether one believes that our ÒrightÓ to eat animals comes from a higher power or from our superior intelligence, the Matrix movies should force us to reconsider. It's often argued that, as farm animals know no other life other than the boring, mechanical existence that we force them into that they don't really suffer. It's always seemed an incredibly bogus argument to me, and does even more after watching the first two Matrix movies, in which we are asked to sympathize, obviously with the human characters, who are only ignorant of the real world because they are forced to live a machine-like existence by machines. Frighteningly, we're being increasingly forced to confront the possibility of cyborgism, in which the dystopian visions of the Terminator and Tetsuo movies become a reality. In this vision of the future, explored by James Pryor(5), mechanically enhanced humans would surely take our belief in own superiority over the rest of creation to it's logical conclusion, and enslave the less evolved Homo sapiens.
Pryor argues that living in the matrix represents an evolutionary leap and that Neo, Morpheus & co are "luddites", which seems to me to get the movie completely the wrong way around. While it's possible to argue that as evolution must have started at some point, it must also, logically, have a conclusion, and the idea that believing, falsely, that we're living in an anonymous American city in 1999 forever represents this apex seems a little preposterous. Anyway, evolution is by its nature a continuing process, whatever Marxists and Christians believe. It's even possible to argue that The Matrix dramatizes the moment in evolution when humans evolved a consciousness in the first place, as beautifully, if not as transparently, as Kubrick did in 2001. At the beginning of the first film, the characters are living lives that are repetitive and cyclical, almost machines in the way that Descartes imagines animals to be. Neo is often compared to Jesus, Buddha, and other historical figures that advanced our consciousness, but never to the "one" who developed it in the first place, though we'll never know at which point in evolution that happened.
But was there a "machine" against which this rebellion took place? There are those, led by James Lovelock, who believe that the Earth is a self regulating organism and can deal with any threat, whether external, like an asteroid, or internal, like humans, and that if we pose too much of a threat she ("Gaia" is usually seen as being female) can wipe us out, much as the machines are about to at the end of the second Matrix movie. In this view, the whole phenomenon of human consciousness is as much of a threat to the existence of the Earth as the presence of the rebels of Zion is to the machines in the Matrix movies, and that global warming, rising oceans, etc, are her way of dealing with us. It's an intriguing, if not fully convincing theory, but one which can throw a new night on the Matrix films, especially the second.
However, while hard-core evolutionists believe that evolution is as ineluctable for us as the optical modality is for Stephen Dedalus, the second Matrix movie posits evolution based on random fluctuations of the sort that quantum physicists describe. In the Gaia model human consciousness is just another aberration for the Earth to deal with, making all the choices that we make about the environment or anything else seem fairly academic. In The Matrix Reloaded the possibility that we're not really making choices at all is confronted, that God, Gaia, or whatever sort of higher power we choose to believe in is making the choices for us. As an active protestor against the war in Iraq, the notion that by rebelling one is really conforming is a troubling one to me. I may believe that I may have interpreted these movies in my own way and chosen to write this article, but I'll never really know for sure if this is the case. Watching The Matrix Reloaded won't give me answers but it's forced me to ask the questions again and that's something to be grateful for.
References:1. See Dreyfus, Stephen and Hubert, The Brave new World of the Matrix; www.whatisthematrix.com2. Hollywood, too, is producing pro-evolutionary movies like X-Men and Adaptation3. See Wise, Stephen M., Rattling the Cage: Towards legal rights for Animals4. Morris, Desmond, The Animal Contract5. WhatÕs so bad about living in the Matrix, www.whatisthematrix.com