“Star Wars… Nothing But Star Wars…”

Michael Lind at Salon:

On the left, technological optimists were replaced by Rousseauian romantic primitivists. In the 1970s, Green guru Amory Lovins promulgated the gospel that “hard” sources of energy like nuclear power are bad and that called for a “soft path” based on hydropower, wind and solar energy. Other Green romantics decided that even hydropower is wicked, because it is generated by dams that despoil the prehuman landscape.

The New Left of the 1960s and 1970s longed for small, participatory communities, and rejected the giant organizations that New Deal liberals had taken pride in. In the 1980s and 1990s, new urbanists converted most progressives to their nostalgia for the ephemeral rail-and-trolley based towns of the late nineteenth century. GM foods, which New Deal liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson would have embraced as a way to feed multitudes while sparing land for wilderness, were denounced by progressives who favored “heirloom” turkey and melons that the Pilgrims might have eaten. The increasingly reactionary American left, disenchanted with nuclear power plants and rockets and suburbs, longed to quit modernity and retire to a small town with an organic farmers’ market and an oompah band playing in the town park’s bandstand.

A similar intellectual regression to infantilism took place on the right in the late twentieth century. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, conservatism was defined by big business anti-statism, not by neotraditionalism. The Republican opponents of New Deal Democrats shared the New Dealers’ faith in science, technology and large-scale industry. They just wanted business to keep more of its prerogatives.

Contrast Eisenhower-era business conservatism with the religious right of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other evangelicals and fundamentalists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By 2000, an entire national party, the Republicans, was intimidated by religious zealots. No Republican presidential candidate could support legal abortion or criticize the pseudoscientific “creationist” alternative to evolutionary biology. Hatred of biotechnology, in the form of GM foods and human genetic engineering, was shared by the regressives of the left and the right. First a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, then a Republican, George W. Bush, sought votes by claiming he had been “born again” with the help of Jesus, something that no president before the 1970s would have claimed.

Today optimism about science and technology is found chiefly on the libertarian right. At least somebody still defends nuclear energy and biotechnology. But in libertarian thought, science and technology are divorced from their modernist counterparts — large-scale public and private organizations — and wedded to ideals of small producers and unregulated markets that were obsolete by the middle of the nineteenth century. Libertarian thought is half-modern, at best. To its credit, it does not share the longing of many on the left for the Shire of Frodo the Hobbit or the nostalgia of most of the contemporary right for the Little House on the Prairie.

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval — hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

The Dark Age that began in the 1970s continues. Today’s conservatives, centrists, progressives — most look like regressives, by the standards of mid-20th century America. Tea Party conservatives argue that federal prohibitions on child labor are unconstitutional, that the Fourteenth Amendment should be repealed, and that the Confederates were right about states, rights. Religious conservatives, having lost some of their political power, continue to their fight against Darwinism. Fiscally conservative “centrists” in Washington share an obsession with balanced budgets that would have seemed irrational and primitive not only to Keynes but also to the 19th-century British founder of The Economist, Walter Bagehot. And while there is a dwindling remnant of modernity-minded New Deal social democrats, most of the energy on the left is found on the nostalgic farmers’market/ train-and-trolley wing of the white upper middle class.

Here’s an idea. America needs to have a neomodernist party to oppose the reigning primitivists of the right, left and center. Let everyone who opposes abortion, wants to ban GM foods and nuclear energy, hates cars and trucks and planes and loves trains and trolleys, seeks to ban suburbia, despises consumerism, and/or thinks Darwin was a fraud join the Regressive Party. Those of us who believe that the real, if exaggerated, dangers of technology, big government, big business and big labor are outweighed by their benefits can join the Modernist Party. While the Regressives secede from reality and try to build their premodern utopias on their reservations, the Modernists can resume the work of building a secular, technological, prosperous, and relatively egalitarian civilization, after a half-century detour into a Dark Age.

Cathleen Kaveny at dotCommonweal:

It strikes me that this new two-party system would also leave many Catholics without a home –for obvious reasons, which we DON’T need to discuss here. In other words, THIS IS NOT A POST ON ABORTION.

But the underlying question, which I DO want to discuss here, is what is the Catholic idea on progress?  It strikes me that it is complicated. Any ideas?

Andrew Sullivan

Daniel Larison:

One of the things that Lind’s preferred states all have in common is that they are expansive, bureaucratic, centralized states ruled by autocrats or unaccountable overseers, and they are capable of extracting far larger revenues out of their economies than their successors. Obviously, Lind finds most of these traits desirable, and he seems not terribly bothered by the autocracy. In the case of the UFP, one simply has a technocrat’s utopian post-political fantasy run riot. Indeed, the political organization of the Federation has always struck me as stunningly implausible and unrealistic even by the standards of science fiction. It was supposed to be a galactic alliance with a massive military whose primary purposes were exploration and peacekeeping, and which had overcome all social problems by dint of technological progress. If ever there were a vision to appeal to a certain type of romantic idealists with no grasp of the corrupting nature of power or the limits of human nature, this would have to be it.

Lind’s article is not very persuasive, not least since his treatment of the change from antiquity to the middle ages is seriously flawed. Lind writes:

But few would disagree that the Europe of Charlemagne was more backward in its mindset, at least at the elite level, than the Rome of Augustus or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies.

Nor are the great gains of decolonization and personal liberation in recent decades necessarily incompatible with an intellectual and cultural Dark Age. After all, the fall of the Roman empire led to the emergence of many new kingdoms, nations and city-states, and slavery withered away by the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.

Well, count me among the “few” that would disagree. For one thing, the “Europe of Charlemagne” was also the Europe of the Byzantines, and under both the Carolingians and the Macedonians later in the ninth century there was extensive cultivation of literary and artistic production that significantly undermines claims that this was an “intellectual and cultural Dark Age.” This was an era of substantial manuscript production, and one marked by the learning of Eriugena and Photios. The Carolingian period was actually one of the more significant moments of political reunification in Europe prior to the later middle ages, but it is true that Charlemagne and his successors did not have a large administrative state apparatus at their disposal. The Iconoclastic emperors in the east were hostile to religious images, but in many other respects they cultivated learning and drew on the mathematical and scientific thought that was flourishing at that time among the ‘Abbasids. Obviously, we are speaking of the elite, but it is the elites of different eras that Lind is comparing. The point is not to reverse the old prejudice against medieval Europe and direct it against classical antiquity, nor we do have to engage in Romantic idealization of medieval societies, but we should acknowledge that this approach to history that Lind offers here abuses those periods and cultures that do not flatter the assumptions or values of modern Westerners. For that matter, it distorts and misrepresents the periods and cultures moderns adopt as their precursors, because it causes them to value those periods and cultures because of how they seem to anticipate some aspect of modernity rather than on their own terms.

Ioz on Larison:

I understand that Gene Roddenberry’s retromod vision of the future had Kirk kissing Nichelle Nichols, but even before the stylish sixties gave way to the weird, hierarchical, technocratic dictatorship of The Next Generation, the United Federation of Planets played barely the part of a supernumerary. The governing organization always seemed to be Starfleet, whose motto . . . to boldly go . . . and shoot with lasers . . . Their missions of exploration always seemed to lead to armed conflict, and the bold, interracial, transspecies future had as a model of its money-free, egalitarian, merit-based society something more or less directly descended from the British Admiralty, circa Trafalgar.

Meanwhile, if we must read Star Wars as something other than someone talking that old hack and fraud Joe Campbell a leeeetle bit too seriously, then let me just remind you that the “advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization” was an evil empire run by a cyborg monster and an evil wizard, and that in almost every visual detail its model was not the New goddamn Deal, but the Third fucking Reich.

Ross Douthat:

So here’s my question: What did Lind think of the prequels? Because in a sense, George Lucas addressed nearly all of Lind’s issues with the “Star Wars” universe in movies one through three. (I am bracketing the more creative interpretations of those films …) Queen Amidala of Naboo, Princess Leia’s mother, turned out to be an elected queen, who moved on to senatorial duties after serving out her term as monarch. (How a teenager managed to navigate Naboo’s version of the Iowa caucuses remains a mystery …) The once-mystical Force was given a scientific explanation, in the form of the “midichlorians,” the micro-organisms that clutter up the bloodstream of the Jedi and give them telekinetic powers as a side effect. And the lost Old Republic that the rebels fight to restore in the original films was revealed to be , well, “a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN,” with the Jedi Knights as its peacekeeping force and the lightsaber as the equivalent of the blue helmet.

For Lind, then, I can only assume that watching the prequels was an immensely gratifying experience. And for the rest of us, the knowledge that Lind’s prescription for “Star Wars” helped produce three of the most disappointing science-fiction blockbusters ever made should be reason enough to reject his prescription for America without a second thought.

Don’t Ask The Libertarians To Save The Whales

Kerry Howley in Reason:

I call myself a classical liberal in part because I believe that negative liberties, such as Min’s freedom from government interference, are the best means to acquire positive liberties, such as Min’s ability to pursue further education. I also value the kind of culture that economic freedom produces and within which it thrives: tolerance for human variation, aversion to authoritarianism, and what the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek called “a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.”

But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I encounter among my fellow skeptics of government power. This is the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach of government ends. It was tradition, not merely government, that threatened to limit Min’s range of possible lives. To describe the expanded scope of her agency as merely “freedom from state interference” is to deny the extent of what capitalism has achieved in communist China.

As former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs can tell you, it’s possible to be an anti-government zealot with no interest whatsoever in individual liberty. If authoritarian fundamentalist compounds are your bag, the words personal agency will hold no magic for you, and Min’s situation will smack of social chaos. But libertarians for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun.

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his libertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as “cultural libertarians,” by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.

“True libertarianism is not cultural libertarianism,” the philosopher Edward Feser wrote on the paleolibertarian website LewRockwell.com in December 2001. This statement was immediately preceded by a call for the stigmatization of porn, adultery, divorce, and premarital sex—in other words, an argument for a particular kind of culture. Feser claimed that small government and an ethos of “personal fulfillment” were incompatible, and he argued for the former over the latter. In the guise of an attack on cultural libertarianism, Feser demanded that libertarians espouse different patterns of cultural behavior.

As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We just don’t share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending it doesn’t exist: that social convention is not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content—has nothing to say, for instance, about society’s acceptance of gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state.

Matthew Yglesias links and gives it a sentence:

Tim Lee and Kerry Howley are both making sense, but the upshot is that the most persuasive form of libertarianism isn’t really libertarianism at all.

Todd Seavey in the same group of essays:

Most libertarians would say that once the side constraint of property rights adherence is established, people have a right to engage in whatever social patterns they wish to follow so long as the property side constraints are not themselves undermined. Howley mentions “fundamentalist compounds” dismissively, but isn’t the whole point of liberty that people are free to construct fundamentalist compounds, sexist strip clubs, respectable female-run corporations, gender-indifferent science labs, or all-male hunting lodges as they choose, so long as they do so voluntarily?

If not, we can be forgiven for wondering why someone who thinks like Howley would embrace the basic political stance of libertarianism in the strict property-defending sense at all. If people telling you “fat chicks should be shunned” is as oppressive as being hauled off to jail, why not pass laws banning anti-fat-chick discrimination? Why not endorse affirmative action laws? Why not tell Catholic-run charities they must hire gays? The traditional libertarian answer is that rights violations are fundamentally different from behavior that merely strikes you as narrow-minded.

Howley’s thinking is potentially authoritarian (in a way that being passively bourgeois is not) because other people’s patterns of behavior will always limit your options one way or another and thus prompt demands for redress. Howley singles out a few hot-button, familiar issues such as race and gender, but the truth is that every time your fellow human beings decide, say, to be sports fans instead of talking about entomology with you, or to leave town en masse for the Bahamas (causing you to feel lonely), their actions have altered your life options. Tough luck. That’s called “other people exercising their freedom,” not “people oppressing you.”

Dylan Matthews at Tapped:

There are a few obvious problems here — namely, the fact that Seavey apparently doesn’t know what “voluntarily” means or else thinks that, say, the teen brides at fundamentalist Mormon compounds are freely choosing their own subjugation. More broadly, though, I don’t see how the examples he gives violate the libertarian value of defending property. Banning obesity discrimination does not deprive businesses of property. Nor does it increase businesses’ monetary obligations to the federal government, nor decrease the government’s obligations to protect businesses from harm. To be sure, such laws increase the power of government relative to employers, but that increase is dependent on the actions of the employees. The government only responds to lawsuits and complaints from those discriminated against, which if anything increases the freedom of action of those employees.

Seavey’s argument does make sense, however, if one views libertarianism not as an ideology devoted to personal liberty but to defending existing power structure. Banning obesity discrimination would not decrease individual liberty, but it would decrease the power of business management. Countering patriarchal attitudes more generally would be a great gain for individual freedom of action, but it would endanger the power of the patriarchy.

Why anyone would want to embrace a libertarianism having nothing to do with defending liberty in any real sense, however, I have no idea.

Ioz:

When Kerry Howley made the irrefutable and yet quixotic point that any proper concern with liberty, whether practical or, ahem, merely philosophical, must grapple with the strictures of cultural mores and social conventions, for they affect the lives and freedom of those individuals with whose liberty libertarianism supposedly concerns itself equally to and sometimes more than the official acts and proscriptions and promulgations of the government-même, I made no comment, because honestly, this again? I like and respect Kerry. She is probably smarter than I am. I am sure she looks better in heels. Her efforts along these lines are perhaps noble, but nonetheless doomed. It is not so much that they lack merit–on the merits, she is correct–as that they make a sort of category error. The problem is not that many libertarians are unwilling to consider the broader implications of their philosophy, but rather, that libertarianism is not a philosophy, not even a “political ideology,” as the more careful bet-hedgers might have it.

It is instead a lame, purely American third-party movement that sometimes appropriates the trappings of ideology in order to justify self-perpetuation in the face of a plurality-takes-all electoral system wholely inimical to minor parties. In reality, it is no more an ideology, let alone a philosophy, than is “Democrat” or “Republican.” It is moderately more consistent than either major American political party because it has no constituency. In the absence of a coalition, coherence. This is nothing to brag about.

James Joyner on Ioz’s post:

That about covers it.

Ilya Somin:

To my mind, there is no question that libertarians should care about some cultural values. However, Kerry’s argument could benefit from greater precision on several key issues. First, some cultural issues might well be an appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism – which is, after all, a political ideology, not a comprehensive guide to the good life. Second, it is not clear what is meant by cultural values that restrict freedom. Finally, Kerry may underrate the extent to which there is no single set of cultural norms that is optimal for all people. There are both normative and tactical reasons for libertarians to avoid taking definitive positions on more than a limited number of cultural issues.

[…]

Kerry claims that most libertarians assume that “social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist.” In reality, numerous libertarians such as Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and F.A. Hayek have harshly criticized nationalism for at least the last 200 years — largely because they recognized the close connection between nationalism, statism, and war. The same could be said with respect to patriarchy, which libertarians such as William Lloyd Garrison and Herbert Spencer, criticized back in the 19th century long before it became common to do so, on the grounds that it causes indefensible state-sponsored restrictions on the freedom of women. Today, few libertarians would deny that some cultural values are a proper object of libertarian criticism because they tend to promote government-sponsored restrictions on liberty. Libertarians would also condemn cultural values that justify aggressive uses of private force, such as, for example, sexism that promotes violence against women.

However, Kerry wants libertarians to go beyond this and focus on cultural values that supposedly undermine freedom even without any connection to state power or private violence. As she puts it, “Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun. Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state.”

This claim proves too much. Almost any cultural norm restricts people’s options to some extent in the sense that violators might face social pressure to conform, or that people might internalize the norm to such an extent that they don’t even consider the possibility of going against it. On the other hand, social conventions also increase personal freedom by enabling to people to cooperate in ways that might otherwise be difficult or impossible and to form communities that reflect their values.

Nonetheless, Kerry is probably right to suggest that some extremely restrictive social norms can radically reduce people’s choices and greatly diminish their freedom. However, I think that this problem is unlikely to be a serious one in a modern liberal society that has many different cultures and social institutions. People who feel dissatisfied or restricted by the social norms of their communities can seek out alternative social groups. In the modern United States, any large metropolitan area has an enormous range of subcultures to choose from. Even if you live in a relatively isolated rural area, you can still “vote with your feet” and move elsewhere, as most of the rural population has actually done over the last century. So long as people have exit rights in a liberal society, they are unlikely to be trapped in a set of restrictive social norms that radically constrict their freedom — unless of course they prefer it.

At some points, Kerry implies that people who follow highly traditionalistic lifestyles — especially women in patriarchal subcultures — might nonetheless be trapped without any meaningful possibility of exit. This is a genuine problem in backward societies with little education and mobility. But I’m skeptical that it is true to any great extent in the US or other advanced industrialized nations. Most American cultural traditionalists are well aware of the existence of alternative, more progressive cultures. Indeed, most live near people who adhere to them. If they nonetheless stick to their traditional values, it is unlikely to be because they have no choice. Indeed, the existence of a variety of different subcultures actually increases individual freedom, by giving people more lifestyle options to choose from.

For these reasons, libertarians have good reason to fear state-imposed cultural norms more than privately developed ones. The state can use its monopoly of force to compel all of society to adhere to a single set of norms, including dissenters who prefer a different vision. It is far more difficult for private institutions to do so.

Will Wilkinson:

As I see it, Kerry’s claim is that many libertarians fail to adequately acknowledge the fact (and it is a fact) that people are embedded in and shaped by culture, and that, as a consequence, many libertarians fail to grasp the extent to which cultural norms and social structure can limit individual liberty or work to deny some individuals the opportunity to develop the capacities needed to meaningfully exercise their liberty rights.

Sensibly enough, Kerry is careful to avoid the errors she thinks others are making. So she sees libertarians not as a cadre of uniquely penetrating intellects in communion with a set of timeless truths about the nature of a free society, but as a group of human beings who are, as we all are, historically and culturally embedded. She sees libertarianism not as a single, sharply-defined system of interrelated propositions, but as a syndrome of ideas and attitudes within and responsive to a changing culture around which a political identity and social movement has formed. This will, if she’s right about most libertarians, seem strange to most libertarians. 

Kerry’s argument, at least as I read it, is that if we really care about liberty, and are serious about seeing to it that all are able to enjoy the blessings of liberty, we cannot just assume that everything we need know about cultivating a climate of liberty is already accurately and fully captured by the historically and culturally conditioned ideas and attitudes that have come to characterize most self-described libertarians. Because, again,  many libertarians have tended to underestimate just how thoroughly socialized and culture-bound we all are, and have thus given far too little weight to cultural threats to liberty.

Kerry says nothing that even hints at the idea that libertarianism is “a comprehensive guide to the good life.” Her essay proceeds on the assumption that political ideologies, like people, exist in a cultural context, and that libertarianism, as it has developed in response to the exigencies of history, fails to adequately recognize the influence of cultural context on individual liberty. I think it’s pretty clear that Kerry is arguing that, insofar as a libertarian’s commitment to libertarianism is motivated by devotion to the value of liberty, then cultural constraints on liberty deserve more attention than they’ve traditionally had from libertarians.

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

Jamelle at The League:

As you’re wondering why it is that so many commentators have had a hard time getting Kerry’s core point, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that libertarianism – as a political movement – is overwhelmingly white and male.  We tend to think of the racial composition of a political movement as just having electoral consequences, but it also has a profound effect on the core ideology of said movement.  At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, marginalized voices – racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, etc. – are overrepresented among liberals and as such, the left that has been forced to grapple with the issues and concerns of marginalized communities in such a way as to make liberalism better equipped to deal with these issues.

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers.  Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians.  After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

Kerry Howley responds to some of the comments:

A political philosophy of limited government is a means to an end. For a great many though by no means all libertarians, the end is individual liberty, understood as the ability to pursue one’s singular aims. For some, support of limited government is, as Tim Lee puts it, “one facet of a broader liberal worldview.” It would be beyond pointless to construct an argument about what supporters of small government “ought” to care about. My Reason piece argues merely that supporters of small government who care about liberty ought to care also about culture, in part because culture and individualism are very often at odds.

Ilya says we cannot know what cultural norms are conducive to liberty broadly construed. What are his evidentiary standards? They are clearly far more stringent in the social realm than in the realm of property rights. We can know which cultural norms are conducive to liberty in much the same way we can known which pattern of property allocation is conducive to liberty. Are we sure in either case? No. Also, evolution is just a theory.

Here Ilya again wants precision, but here again bright lines are perilous to draw. It’s hard to say at exactly what age a girl can freely choose to marry. This is not a good reason for someone who cares about individualism to be agnostic on the issue of child marriage.

The Lost Muppet/Wolverine Connection

So how does the blogosphere feel about the new blockbuster, “Wolverine?”

Slate’s Dana Stevens does not think much of it.

Chris Orr in The New Republic pans it.

Ditto Peter Suderman, writing in Reason. And via Suderman’s post at The American Scene, links to Alexandra DuPont at Ain’t It Cool News who gives a what’s good/what’s bad rundown of the film. Some great lines in that piece:

“The filmmakers also, for some inexplicable reason, feel the need to abuse green-screen projection for way too many of the driving scenes. I watched Fozzie Bear drive a real live car down a real live road 30 years ago in “The Muppet Movie.” Is there a particular reason that Hugh Jackman is denied the privileges afforded a Muppet?”

“How about the two or three separate occasions that Hood places his camera above a kneeling Logan so he can look up and howl at the heavens after someone dies — only to have it look exactly like George Costanza yelling “KHAAAN!!!” in “Seinfeld”?”

Her upshot:

“As I’m sure the more seerauber-minded among you already feared, the final theatrical version of “Wolverine” is an overstuffed, chaotic clambake of a mess of a wasted opportunity. The screenplay (by David Benioff and Skip Woods) just wasn’t in any kind of shape to come out of people’s mouths — it’s so full of plotty comings and goings that it never pauses to flesh out a character, turn a phrase, or create a moment that sticks with you.”

John Cole finds us this review.

The film is not universally hated, however. Frederica Mathewes-Green, writing in National Review, found it enjoyable.  And there’s a defense of it from the MSM critics here.

(Some background on Wolverine by Grady Hendrix in Slate here.)

UPDATE: A pan from Matt Y.

UPDATE #2: Thoughts from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

UPDATE #3: Bloggingheads with Matt Y and Matthew Continetti.