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This book philosophically analyzes Stieg Larsson’s
The Millennium Trilogy [reviewed separately above], i.e., the novels,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (vol. 1),
The Girl Who Played with Fire (vol. 2), and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (vol. 3). It is part of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series. As in other volumes in this and related publishers’ series, this book offers a variety of philosophical perspectives from many contributors, as well as bits of humor and a great love of the subject matter. (The subtitle, “Everything Is Fire”, is a great example of this: It brings to mind both Volume 2 of the trilogy and the philosophical contribution of the great ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus.) Editor Eric Bronson was also co-editor of
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, a book I also enjoyed very much and reviewed here several years ago.
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SPOILER ALERT: Reading this review assumes that you have read all three novels of Stieg Larsson’s
The Millennium Trilogy and/or have seen the three Swedish films. If your only intro to the trilogy is the first English language film, you may want to wait to see the forthcoming Hollywood sequels before reading this. Important plot details are given away here for the entire trilogy.
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PHILOSOPHY ALERT: This review is
very long and under a heavy philosophical burden, so if philosophy isn’t your thing you might want to skip the whole post. But I’m an addict and simply couldn’t put the book(s) down. As always, I do not agree with some of the philosophers and thinkers who write here or are quoted, but I always learn something from them. I call challenges like this “mind-stretching”, good for one’s brain even if it sometimes feels like being physically stretched on the Torture Rack.
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The book’s Dedication is: “To Pippi Longstocking and the misfit in all of us.” If you get that, this book may be for you.
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Editor Eric Bronson’s
Introduction is subtitled “
The Girl Who Kicked the Sophists’ Nest” and his first sentence is: “If Lisbeth Salander is the new voice of reason, then truth ‘can be a moody bitch’.” That five-word quote at the end is from character Mikael Blomkvist’s affectionate-but-truthful description of Salander. Making a comparison of Salander and Socrates, Bronson writes:
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“Like Lisbeth in Stockholm, Socrates saw himself as a gadfly in Athens, an annoying pest who forced the city sophists to look deeper into their own hypocrisies. Before Lisbeth, it was Socrates who was brought to trial and pre-convicted in the court of public opinion. ‘I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility,’ he complained, ‘and this is what will bring about my destruction’. Salander puts it differently. ‘Every time I turn around’, she says in
The Girl Who Played with Fire, ‘there’s some fucking pile of shit with a beer belly in my way acting tough’.” (p.3)
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The book’s five parts are: “Lisbeth ‘The Idiot’ Salander”; “Mikael ‘Do-Gooder’ Blomkvist”; “Stieg Larsson, Mystery Man”; “Everyone Has Secrets”; and, “75,000 Volts of Vengeance Can’t Be Wrong, Can It?”
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Part One: Lisbeth “The Idiot” Salander.
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Chapter 1: “Labeling Lisbeth: Sti(e)gma and Spoiled Identity”, by Aryn Marti and Mary Simms.
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The authors take Larsson’s portrayal of Lisbeth’s social/ psychological stigma as being a dangerously crazy and violent child and young adult, and they discuss it in terms of the works of Erving Goffman (
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, 1961;
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1986).
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Throughout her life Lisbeth is given horrible (and out of context) labels, e.g., as insane, violent, etc. Such labels make it easier for such people to be further labeled and identified as having such and such a pathology and thus guilty of such and such behavior – even if evidence for this is thin or lacking completely.
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As we know, in Lisbeth Salander’s case a sinister conspiracy is using her stigma and labels to bury her in a mental institution for life. She has zero credibility, and the conspirators count on this to silence her. The authors point out that many people in real life face these problems of such easy labeling.
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In one section, titled “The Right to Remain Sullen”, the authors point out that such institutional incarceration can change a patient’s view of themselves (p.9). There are “attacks on the self” (Goffman) involved, including a paper trail of records and personal history
written by others. Goffman is quoted (p.10): “[T]he official sheet of paper attests that the patient is of unsound mind, a danger to himself and others – an attestation, incidentally, which seems to cut deeply into the patient’s pride, and into the possibility of having any.” Goffman’s term, “spoiled identity”, is an interesting and useful concept.
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Lisbeth tried to tell the police, the social workers and the psychiatrists why she has acted as she did, but they do not listen. She is invisible to them (a concept I first learned from reading Nathaniel Branden’s theories of “psychological visibility”).
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(When discussing these novels with a libertarian friend of mine, a physician, he reminded me of the parallels between Lisbeth’s criminal mistreatment by the psychiatric establishment and the anti-establishment work of the longtime renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.)
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Chapter 2: “The
Mis-education of Lisbeth Salander and the Alchemy of the At-Risk Child”, by Chad William Timm.
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(A personal note: I absolutely hated public school, always thinking of my time there as a 12-year prison sentence; this undoubtedly helped formulate my early anti-authoritarian self.)
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Timm asks us, how did Lisbeth, with a phenomenal photographic memory, genius computer abilities and unparalleled research skills, fail so miserably at school? He sets out to explain “the ways school officials use their positions of power to separate and categorize students such as Lisbeth, essentially constructing their identities” (p.20). He uses ideas of Michel Foucault in his analysis.
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Timm focuses on “the recent standards and accountability movement” in the USA. There have been “unprecedented steps to regulate schooling” by the US federal government (p.21). (As a former teacher there, I can only agree with him.)
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In a beautiful line that I cannot agree with more, Timm writes: “The bastard child of the standards and accountability movement was President George W. Bush’s 2002
No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB), recently renamed by President Barack Obama as the
Race to the Top Program (p.22).
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Policy makers construct the standardized tests, thus “fabricating”, through a kind of “alchemy”, the successful student and the “at risk” ones – here borrowing terms from educational philosopher Thomas Popkewitz, who also uses Foucault’s ideas (p.22-3). (I first heard of this whole phenomenon reading a 1960s review of Banesh Hoffmann’s book
The Tyranny of Testing, 1962, in
The Objectivist.)
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Accountability requires that teachers teach to the tests, which are fabricated from on high. “Multiple choice fill-in-the-bubble exams require students to think in certain limited ways, and teachers are forced to teach to those understandings so that students are proficient and their schools don’t lose funding” (p.23).
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Lisbeth did not follow the program and was labeled “at risk.” Yet she was profoundly “gifted and talented”, and no one saw that. Schools are much like prisons, thus “at risk” students, as defined by the school powers, are regulated and watched. Labeling one as “at risk” can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (p.28). (Yes, it can.)
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NCLB accountability disciplines and normalizes schools into conformity. If a school falls below expectations, it is “subject to surveillance, discipline, and punishment” (p.30). Schools pass these actions down to students. (As we used to say in the Marines, “Shit flows downhill.”)
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A quote from Foucault is given (p.31) about “domination” and “authority”. Lisbeth refuses to be disciplined or bow to authority and thus fails at school.
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(I would add that from my vantage point as a teacher in the era of NCLB, I see the system also stifling and destroying
teachers as well as students.)
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Chapter 3: “The Girl Who Turned the Tables: a queer reading of Lisbeth Salander”, by Kim Surkan
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A very interesting chapter. Enough said.
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Part Two: Mikael “Do-Gooder” Blomkvist
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Chapter 4: “Why Are So Many Women F***king Kalle Blomkvist?: Larsson’s philosophy of female attraction”, by Andrew Terjesen and Jenny Terjesen
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Simply summarized, why is Mikael Blomkvist actively bedded so often by so many hot women? They cannot resist him. (And it’s not in any way connected with Daniel Craig – aka, James Bond – playing Blomkvist in the Hollywood re-adaption of volume 1; the original novels show us a Blomkvist that has an even more active sex life.)
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Well, Blomkvist is a strong and decent man with great integrity. He has confidence in himself as well as genuine respect and consideration for his many lovers. They just cannot resist him even if he never makes promises. Also, this is Sweden, which has a reputation as a sexually libertarian culture.
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Chapter 5: “Why Journalists and Geniuses Love Coffee and Hate Themselves”, by Eric Bronson
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Bronson asks, “What’s the deal with all the coffee?” Indeed, our characters are drinking copious amounts of coffee at home, at work, in cafes and while visiting or hosting. Java is everywhere in these stories. Just reading about it all makes me want to run to the john. Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and most of the heroes and villains all hang out in cafes.
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Bronson reminds us of the history of coffee and European intellectuals. The coffee houses of the 18th century were the
in places to talk about ideas. They were known as “penny universities”, because a poor but thoughtful man could learn a lot by just hanging around and listening. Joseph Addison praised them, as did Diderot. Later, Marx and Engels hung out in Paris cafes, and later Trotsky did in Vienna. Other frequenters of Paris cafes were Stein, Hemingway and their Lost Generation; Sartre, de Beauvoir and the Existentialists. (Pp.66-71)
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(I must add that, if memory serves me correctly, coffee houses figured importantly in the story of two great early 18th century libertarians getting together, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of
Cato’s Letters, 1720-1723, one of the most important sources of libertarian ideas for America’s revolutionaries generations later.)
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Bronson sums his essay up with wit: “Lonely, self-absorbed, and socially awkward, today’s coffee drinker is again a sign of the times. That’s not to say everyone is like that. In most societies, you can still find well-adjusted, contented, and calm people completely at peace with themselves and their universe. Those are the tea drinkers” (p.72). Bronson points out that Zen masters drink tea and they see it closely associated with tranquility. But Larsson’s characters “prefer a quick cup of joe in between kickboxing lessons and hacking government websites” (p.73).
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Chapter 6: “The Making of Kalle Blomkvist: crime journalism in post-war Sweden”, by Ester Pollack
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Pollack writes of Blomkvist that he is “the embodiment of the investigative journalist who exposes power and corruption” (p.76). She says that his high ideals do exist, for example, with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, with “journalism as a counterweight to political power” (p.77). She then goes on to trace the history of investigative journalism in Sweden – of which Stieg Larsson was a bold modern example.
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Part Three: Stieg Larsson, Mystery Man
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Chapter 7: “The Philosopher Who Knew Stieg Larsson: a brief memoir”, by Sven Ove Hansson
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Hansson first got together with Larsson because both were into investigating right-wing extremist groups, fascists, racists, neo-nazis, etc. Hansson writes that Larsson “was Sweden’s leading figure in the investigations and exposure of racist organizations and their activities” (p.92).
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Larsson traced the change toward more open and blatant anti-Semitism in Sweden since the late 1980s, along with “an increasing number of right-wing extremist journals, pamphlets, and web pages” (p.96). Larsson also traced “a new strategy” by a leading Swedish fascist, Per Engdahl (1909-1994), to get their movement into electoral politics: i.e., recognizing that biological racism would no longer sell but attacking cultural differences and immigration would work. Thus a new party was born, Sweden Democrats. This copied the same strategy used by Britain’s National Front, led by fascist A.K. Chesterton in the late 1960s (p.97).
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Stieg Larsson also was also famously outspoken against violence against homosexuals and women.
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Larsson also spoke out against pseudoscience of every kind, and he publicized a link between publishing houses that printed pseudoscience stuff and printing of pro-Nazi (and Holocaust-denier) David Irving’s biography of Goring. “Stieg was a skeptic of the paranormal. He refused to believe the unsubstantiated claims of pseudoscience and mysticism, defended science as a road to knowledge, and rejected the ‘postmodern’ idea that all of our knowledge is a social construction. He knew where relativism and irrationalism could lead. The Holocaust was not a social construction but an indisputable historical fact.” (p.102).
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Deterministic beliefs such as astrology leave no room for acting to better oneself and one’s world, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in Larsson’s words, “a stifling form of spirituality” (p103).
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Hansson ends his essay with this: “Stieg Larsson’s ideas and convictions are clearly visible in his novels: his feminism and his contempt for discrimination, his conviction that hidden power structures should be brought to light, his anti-elitism, and not least, his belief in the power of human rationality” (p.105).
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Chapter 8: “This Isn’t Some Damned Locked-Room Mystery Novel”: Is
The Millennium Trilogy Popular Fiction or Literature?” by Tyler Shores.
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Discussing how readers have certain expectations of literature, Shores (on pp.110-111) quotes Nietzsche on who is the ideal reader: “When I try to picture the character of a perfect reader, I always imagine a monster of courage and curiosity, as well as of suppleness, cunning, and prudence – in short, a born adventurer and explorer” (Nietzsche,
Ecce Homo). Ooh Rah! Very well said, Fred! That quote encapsulates my own lifelong relationship with Nietzsche.
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Shores writes that Larsson’s trilogy, highlighting violence against women and corruption in high places, might be, in Sartre’s words, a “committed literature”, meant to inspire change (p.111).
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Chapter 9: “Why We Enjoy Reading about Men Who Hate Women: Aristotle’s Cathartic Appeal”, by Denis Knepp.
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Why do we enjoy reading about such violently sick tragic events?
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Plato wanted to banish the poets – epic (Homer) and tragic (Aeschylus, Sophocles, etc.) – from his ideal (despotic) State. [To me, one of the Western world’s most egregious mistakes was to name Plato’s most famous work as
The Republic; such a wickedly tyrannical regime is best named, as the Germans do,
Der Staat, “The State”.] Plato would censor all violence and bad behavior on the stage or in other literature because of possible bad influences on the audience.
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In Aeschylus’
Agamemnon, the king returns home from Troy only to be killed by his wife with an axe. (Lisbeth Salander also wields an axe against her own father.) In this play’s sequel,
The Libation Bearers, Aeschylus has their son, Orestes, kill his mother to avenge his father. After summing up their story, Knepp writes, “And you thought the Vangers were a dysfunctional family!” (p.122).
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Knepp then focuses on Aristotle’s theory of catharsis in his
Poetics, a book that deals mainly with tragic “poetry”, i.e., drama, and is one of the earliest theoretical treatments of art. (Sadly, Aristotle’s promised writings on comedy are lost to the ages.) Aristotle says that tragic heroes (such as Lisbeth Salander) must be flawed rather than godlike, so that we can sympathize with them and feel “pity” and “terror” over their undeserved suffering. Lisbeth is brutally raped by Bjurman, and it is a horrible scene, but Aristotle wrote of such horrible scenes that we experience “by means of pity and terror a catharsis of such emotions.” (
Poetics)
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“Catharsis” has traditionally been translated as “purging”, as in vomiting, bad emotions. Knepp brings in a different reading of “catharsis” by Aristotelian scholar Martha Nussbaum. She writes that catharsis originally meant “clarification or cleaning up” (
The Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy, 2001). Her application to Aristotle’s theory: “the function of a tragedy is to accomplish, through pity and fear, a clarification (or illumination) concerning experiences of the pitiable and fearful kind.” (Quoted here on p.125.)
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Knepp sums up the above quote from Nussbaum: “When Aristotle wrote that Athenians watching a Greek tragedy had a catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear, it meant that the audience came to a better understanding of these emotions. Art is educational” (p.125). The world can be a fearful and confusing place, “and art can serve to clarify and dispel our confusion” (p.125).
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Knepp now returns to Salander being raped by Bjurman with the added meaning of catharsis as clarification. “It is a function of power”, he writes, Bjurman being her legal guardian who is supposed to protect her (p.125). Stieg Larsson wrote, in the first novel, that: “Taking away a person’s control of her own life – meaning her bank account – is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose, especially when it applies to young people” (p.125).
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Martin Vanger’s serial rapes and murders give him (in Larsson’s words), “the godlike feeling of having absolute control over someone’s life and death.” Again, it is a man of power who preys on powerless women.
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The ancient Greek tragedies have no happy endings, but Lisbeth does get her revenge. Knepp quotes Aristotle, who wrote that it is not tragic to see “a thoroughly villainous person falling from good fortune into misfortune” but it “can contain moral satisfaction” (p.126). Knepp ends his essay by pointing out: “And Salander’s revenge is certainly satisfying” (p.126). Oh, Yeah!
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Chapter 10: “The Dragon Tattoo and the voyeuristic Reader”, by Jaime Weida
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Weida quotes several feminist writers who see Larsson’s presentation of Lisbeth Salander as an object for “voyeuristic pleasure” (p.130). She also quotes a 24-year-old survivor of a violent rape who said: “It was very cathartic reading the books, and when I watched the first movie I was blown away…. It was the first active and aggressive depiction of a survivor I have ever seen” (p.136).
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Weida writes that she is a fan of the books and of Lisbeth Salander, but that we also must admit that the stories may appeal to “prurient curiosity and voyeuristic urge by turning Salander into a sexual spectacle” (p.136).
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Part Four: Everyone Has Secrets
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Chapter 11: “Hacker’s Republic: Information junkies in a free society”, by Andrew Zimmerman Jones
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Jones sums up his essay by writing: “By making his two primary characters a journalist and a hacker, Stieg Larsson has created a new kind of hero for our modern information age” (p153).
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He discusses WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, quoting a WikiLeaks self-description: “We help you safely get the truth out. We are of assistance to people of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and institutions. We aim for maximum political impact” (p.141). WikiLeaks protects its sources, just as journalist Blomkvist does. Their information leaks range from US war atrocities to secrets of government corruption to diplomatic cables to exposes of Scientology to a part in the spread of the “Climategate” email publication.
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Assange became famous early as an “ethical computer hacker” when still a teen (p.142). Jones goes into the evolutions of meaning for the term “hacker”, while pointing out that the term “cracker” best describes those who are primarily destructive, e.g., creating viruses and damaging computer systems (p.143).
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“It is becoming more mainstream to think of science as a hacker enterprise”, writes Jones. “Genetic manipulation is called ‘hacking the genome’.” (p.144). In quoting writers on “hacker ethics”, Jones shows how hacker culture appeals so much to Lisbeth Salander – including the lack of trust in authorities and the hacker call for decentralization of information. “It is self-reliant and rooted in an antiauthoritarian embrace of individuality” (p.145). Jones points out that Lisbeth shares many ethical principles with Assange (p.146).
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One very interesting point made by Jones really explained a lot to me about differences today in libertarian theory. He writes: “Many young people today do not think about ownership the same way that their parents did. The digital revolution and the mainstreaming of hacker culture have resulted in a world where boundaries of ownership are rapidly changing” (p.147). (And the topic of intellectual property is a really hot one in modern libertarian circles.)
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Jones writes: “This belief in free information also has positive manifestations. The most potent single source of information ever created is Wikipedia, the volunteer-written encyclopedia that is accessible, for free, to anyone in the world, with articles that cover virtually any topic imaginable. Wikipedia is the ultimate manifestation of the idea that ‘Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains’” (p.148). (The ending quote here is taken from McKenzie Wark,
A Hacker Manifesto, 2004, and it is of course a paraphrase from Marx and Engels,
The Communist Manifesto, 1848. The creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is a libertarian Objectivist but my personal knowledge of him can still imagine him greatly appreciating this tribute.)
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This Jones’ essay has more rich ideas about transparency, hackers, Lisbeth Salander, and Assange. It is worth the price of the book in itself.
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Chapter 12: “Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: the hidden ‘Section’ in every institution”, by Adriel M. Trott.
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Trott asks if problems with institutions – such as Lisbeth Salander had with the institutions of the secret service and the psychiatric profession (and, one could add, with the police, courts, and news media) – are because of a few bad individuals in them, or is it a case of the entire institution being rotten?
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Trott brings in Aristotle’s thoughts on the Rule of Law (Aristotle,
Politics). Aristotle differentiates the rule of law (“reason without desire”) from the rule of men [which he also said was like the rule of a “wild beast”].
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Trott continues: “Yet he [Aristotle] goes to explain that the law is made and applied by human beings so that even the law includes some elements of human desire” (p.157). [cf. similar thoughts of James Madison, a fan of Aristotle, in
The Federalist Papers]
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Trott writes about Sapo, the secret security police in Sweden: This “institution preserves itself by acting illegally and then justifies this action by claiming self-defense….” (p.158). She continues: “Yet when institutions become biased in favor of themselves and their own existence, they invariably begin to subordinate the powerless, the very ones they are supposed to protect” (p.158).
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Trott touches on a very interesting topic about governmental institutions when she mentions Sweden’s guardianship agency – which legally maintains control over those adults deemed mentally “incompetent”. She writes that the agency’s “desire to maintain guardianship of Salander shows us how the institution’s self-preservation trumps the concern for the individual” (p.158).
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And as one example of the agency’s “doublespeak”, she quotes from the third novel where a guardianship agency official gives court testimony. The official states: “No-one is happier than we who work at the agency when a guardianship is rescinded.” Trott immediately points out that, “If that were so, however, then the agency would be happiest to put itself out of business” (p.159). [cf. Public Choice theory, where governmental officials of all kinds are analyzed as “economic actors” who try to maximize their positions of power via votes, political appointments, etc. Classical liberal James M. Buchanan (b.1919) won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to this theory. His book, co-authored with Gordon Tollock,
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) is a classic work on the theory; again, I first heard of this book through a review in Objectivist literature over four decades ago.]
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A couple of times Trott mentions Rousseau and his famous “will of the people” theme. [I always get uneasy when I hear it because of the depressing uses the concept had later from collectivists such as Marxists and Hitler.]
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Trott mentions Hannah Arendt’s criticism of the concept of “human rights” when it is ineffective whenever an institution does not apply protection to certain people (p.160). People who most need protection, such as Lisbeth, are not recognized by the very institutions that should be protecting them.
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In the discussion of the third volume of the trilogy, Trott frustrates me a bit when she asks a couple of questions: “Lisbeth has believed that speaking to the authorities was useless because they could not hear her. So why suddenly in the courtroom does she think that she can or will be heard? Has the institution been properly cleaned up? Why should Salander think so?” (p.161)
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This amazes me and makes me wonder how closely Trott has read
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest or grasped its spirit. I answer: In the courtroom, a public arena, Salander has proof --
powerful proof – that her adversaries are lying and are far in the wrong. She planned a brilliant defense – aided by Blomkvist, his sister Annika, the Hacker Republic, and a few authorities with integrity – which turned the institutional powers upside down. Yes, it is fiction, but please don’t disparage Salander’s intelligence. She is a heroine, and inspiration.
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Giving both Marx and contemporary feminists their due, Trott writes: “The idea that the structure of institutions and political life in general serves those in power comes from Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx thought institutions serve the rich, propertied class, but feminist thinkers have taken up Marx’s analysis of political institutions to argue that institutions do indeed serve those in power, and men are those in power” (pp.161-2).
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These points are well taken. Marx’s critiques of institutional power structures have merit, although his determinism is too simplistic and ignores the possibilities of individuals’ intellectual independence – indeed, it makes his own experience, of his bourgeois upbringing which is turned into the role of revolutionary vanguard, seem theoretically impossible.
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Likewise, Trott’s marxian-feminist theories are very well presented with some valid points. Still, I think Salander would contemptuously tell her to “fuck off”, to stop whining and to stop acting like a victim. (Lisbeth says a couple of times, “There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibilities.”)
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Really, Trott gives us a good feminist interpretation, although my own feminism is more of an individualist kind. (I could suggest – only half-jokingly – that a male equivalent of radical feminism might articulate itself someday – protesting some of the “female” aspects of governmental tyranny, e.g., the “nanny state” that wants to aggressively mother us all whether we want it or not.)
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Chapter 13: “Secret Meetings: the truth is in the gossip” by Karen C. Adkins
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Adkins writes (p.166) that “The word
gossip has a negative connotation and is conventionally defined as spreading malicious (often false) information about someone who is absent.” She notes that it can be used by those in power to maintain power by destroying the reputation of those threatening the powerful.
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“Knowledge (especially through gossip) is power for Larsson – both for good and for ill” (p.166). “Larsson clearly defends gossip as a legitimate (even necessary) path to knowledge. Adkins points out that “some contemporary philosophers have sought to restore credibility to gossip, defending the possibility of loose talk producing real knowledge” (pp.166-7). She goes on to mention two philosophers who “defend gossip as knowledge producing in part
because of its looseness” (p.167). She writes: “Gossip rests on a bedrock of trust….” The journalists and police in Larsson’s trilogy trade in information and need trustworthy sources. She sees an emphasis on trust in his novels far exceeding what would be found in other crime novels.
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Blomkvist, in Vol. 1, has his reputation shattered. Adkins writes that, “In the American legal context, reputation is valuable in part because it is seen as property” (p.167). Reputations are affected by legal judgments but also through gossip. Lisbeth Salander, the expert hacker, says that, “Everyone has secrets”, but she is very careful about revealing them (p.169). So is her security agency boss, Armansky, who draws a moral line between legitimate business secrets and private lives.
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In her section, “The Grapevine Goes Digital”, Adkins reminds us that in the internet information age, personal diary-type information can be dug up and published widely. She writes that that Larsson’s world of hacker electronic rumor sharing as a resistance tool “is a new historical phenomenon only in its scale and technology” (p.171). She gives examples of oppressed communities that have used gossip against those in power: e.g., in colonial India rumor spreading helped organize resistance, etc.
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One big difference between traditional oral and printed political gossip is that trust is not needed at all on the internet. “Oral gossip and rumor rely on some basic trust in the reliability of one’s source; newspaper gossip carries with it the reputation of the journalist. By contrast, it’s very easy to set up an anonymous website, and forwarding a gossipy link carries with it less ethical freight than does spreading a rumor” (p.171).
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Re: Hacker Republic. It is a closed community with identities vague, but it has “core values”, e.g., not spreading viruses but rather being info junkies.
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Adkins writes about the controlling of one’s reputation as culture moved from the more intimate spoken/oral culture, which is most based on trust, to print culture. She mentions the work of Walter Ong, who wrote that this transition to written/literate culture led to the development of a “private self”, often distinct from the traditional public self. Private diaries were then created. (Walter Ong, 1982,
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word)
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Adkins writes that now internet gossiping and rumor, with its infinite shareability, has no bounds. Therefore: The Grapevine Goes Digital.
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In Larsson’s trilogy, the evil powers use gossip and rumor to convict Lisbeth Salander before she is even captured. Adkins compares this to the medieval witch hunts, where gossip marked a woman as a witch and sealed her fate. The infamous
Malleus Maleficarum (“The Witch’s Hammer”) is mentioned, the Christian church’s manual on demonology, c.1486 (p.173). The police label Lisbeth as a Satanic lesbian cultist, and this gossip goes viral. Adkins likens it to “a modern, Internet-enhanced witch hunt” (p.174). She writes about the dynamics of power politics when it comes down to the usage of gossip.
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She also points out that Larsson mentions “Trust capital” as a fundamental requirement for professional life, especially for a journalist like Blomkvist. If your trust capital is perceived to be high, people will bank on you; if it is low, they won’t.
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Adkins writes of Larsson’s focus on “friendship as a (potentially) ideal space that can transcend power conflicts” where gossip is concerned. She says that this in line with feminist interpretations of gossip that “ground its legitimacy in intimacy – we gossip only with those whom we know well and trust” (p.174).
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Adkins ends her essay with this: “To trust someone fully, to confide in someone fully, requires a reciprocal exchange of sharing secrets. Psssst. Pass it on” (p.175). The trilogy itself ends with a kind of treaty of trust – “he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his” (Vol.3, quoted in Adkins p.175).
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Part Five: 75,000 Volts of Vengeance Can’t Be Wrong, Can It?
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Chapter 14: “The Principled Pleasure: Lisbeth’s Aristotelian Revenge”, by Emma L.E. Rees
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Rees points out Lisbeth Salander’s “brutal revenge on Advocat Nils Bjurman”, and asks if there is something wrong with us for being emotionally attached to someone (Lisbeth) who could do this. Then she analyzes Salander’s revenge in light of Aristotle’s thoughts on the subject (p.181), quoting from his writings on ethics and rhetoric.
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One of Salander’s goals when she deals decisively with Bjurman is to achieve independence from him and from the unjust control he has over her by the guardianship order. Another goal is revenge.
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Aristotle wrote that: “passion and anger are the causes of acts of revenge. But there is a difference between revenge and punishment; the latter is inflicted in the interest of the sufferer, the former in the interest of him who inflicts it, that he may obtain satisfaction” (p.183, from Aristotle,
The “Art” of Rhetoric).
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Rees asks what it says about us as readers when we also take pleasure in seeing Lisbeth get her revenge. She points out that Salander “is avenging herself
and protecting other women (just as Larsson hoped he was doing by writing his books)” (p.183). Rees notes that Aristotle says that for an act to be
revenge, rather than punishment, the person receiving the revenge must know who is attacking him and why (p.185).
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Rees says that an Aristotelian viewpoint would see that Salander’s “brutal act of revenge is the
only rational, logical choice she can make for the sake of her future happiness. Such happiness is impossible in an Aristotelian sense while she’s subject to the guardianship order, because independence is key to emotional security and well-being” (p.185).
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On page 186 Rees writes (including a quote from Aristotle): “The ultimate goal for Lisbeth is to move from humiliation to a state of Aristotelian
eudaimonia (happiness; a life worth living). ‘The very existence of the state [eudaimonia] depends on proportionate reciprocity’, Aristotle told us, ‘for men demand that they shall be able to requite evil with evil – if they cannot, they feel they are in the position of slaves.’ Revenge seen in these terms is a social and moral obligation: we will be condemned to servility if we
do not take revenge.”
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In light of our delight after Lisbeth gets her revenge, Aristotle’s words (from
The “Art” of Rhetoric) ring true: “We praise a man who feels anger on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time.” Delicious!
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Chapter 15: “Acting Out of Duty or Just Acting Out?: Salander and Kant”, by Tanja Barazon
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Barazon examines Lisbeth Salander’s moral standards by comparing them with those of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
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In Barazon’s paraphrase of one of Kant’s important moral principles, “…I should never follow a rule of behavior that I couldn’t rationally will everyone else to follow” (p.189). I.e., you should only act as if that principle behind your action should be a universal moral law for everyone to follow.
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The criminal wants to be protected from any coercive actions against his own self, but his hypocrisy is that he thinks of himself as an exception and that he may victimize others. Laws against coercion protect him, but he thinks he is above the law. Lisbeth shares with Kant a contempt for this hypocrisy of criminals. The villains in these novels are capable of rationality, yet they see themselves as exceptions to rules and laws for ordinary people. E.g., Martin Vanger reasons that he has entitlement to “the godlike feeling of having absolute control over someone’s life and death” (Vol.1).
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Kant elevated “duty” to a high position in his moral system; to him it is far superior to doing anything for self-interest or pleasure. But as Barazon puts it: “Lisbeth repeatedly commits immoral acts for her own pleasure. She didn’t start hacking into people’s computers out of moral duty; she hacks because she likes it”
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Yet Salander occasionally acts toward moral purposes beyond her own immediate self-interest, and Blomkvist understands this. E.g., she throws herself into tracking down a serial killer of women.
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Kant also said that people should each be an end unto themselves rather than being treated as a mere means to achieve the ends of others. Barazon points out that Salander and others in the stories are often treated as mere means to the ends of the villains. E.g., Zalachenko misuses everyone this way, Salander’s mother, his son, etc. In turn, Sapo (the secret police) use him, Gullberg even killing him for the “good” of the Section and Sweden.
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Further, Barazon writes that, “Free will and free choice are two essential elements of Kant’s moral theory” (p.195). Kant valued individual autonomy as a necessity for a person to be considered as a moral agent. Then she startled me by writing, “Kant opposed welfare systems because they limit personal autonomy and treat people as if they were children, unable to care for themselves” (p.195). (I had never before known of this libertarian aspect of Kant, probably because of my early contact with Ayn Rand’s total contempt for Kant, perhaps some of it but not all of it justified.) Barazon writes: “As Kant was, Lisbeth is a champion of autonomy” (p.195).
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Barazon tells us that Kant had stated that we must never lie to anyone and that we cannot morally lie even to a murderer (p.196). She then writes that the great classical liberal Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) responded to Kant’s thesis here by holding that only someone worthy of the truth should put us under obligation to tell the truth (p.196). As Salander had said, “a bastard is always a bastard, and if I can hurt a bastard by digging up shit about him, then he deserves it.”
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Barazon finishes her essay with this: “Lisbeth may not inspire us in the pursuit of moral perfection, but there is something deeply human and endearing about her. She does not offer herself as a paragon of morality. Like the rest of us, Salander is a work in progress” (p.196).
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Chapter 16: “To Catch a Thief: The Ethics of Deceiving Bad People”, by James Edwin Mahon [This is the last chapter in the book.]
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Mahon brings in the ideas of English philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) and some of his thoughts in the late-1950s in the British
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
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Mahon points out that Lisbeth Salander lies while under oath at her trial. She leaves out details that – however “justified” – would leave her vulnerable to prosecution for perjury. Mahon always challenges us to judge these breaches of legality by our heroes/heroines in the trilogy.
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[Rant]: My own position on this is close to Benjamin Constant’s (in Chapter 15 above) – that unjust laws are lies themselves, and they do not deserve the respect of “telling the truth” if that would play into the hands of tyrannical government agents. E.g., in the 1970s I self-medicated myself with several substances that were arbitrarily labeled “illegal” by those in power; if I harm others by my ingestion of these substances then I have trespassed against them; if I have not harmed anyone, let me be! “I’ll tolerate your hobbies if you tolerate mine” (Robert Anton Wilson). [/rant]
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Mahon writes that, “Indeed, it is possible to read the novels as saying that people
may be lied to and deceived, for the right reasons.” (p.198)
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Continuing, he writes that “Both Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander battle against those with power and money who lie to and deceive others. Yet both Blomkvist and Salander repeatedly lie and deceive. Blomkvist lies in order to obtain information, withholds information from the authorities, and deceives those who spy on him and (illegally) monitor him. Salander routinely violates the privacy of others, hacking into their financial records and private communications. She engages in fraud, theft, and assault, and lies about it to the authorities, even when the criminals are being brought to justice. Her rationale is that ‘
there are no innocents’.” (Pp.198-9)
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Mahon asks: “Did Larsson believe it was justified for Salander and Blomkvist to lie to and deceive bad people who are perpetrating crimes, in order to catch them? In any case, are such actions justified? Or, if they are not justified, are they at least excusable?” (p.199) He continues:
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“British philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) argued that when someone is accused of doing something wrong, bad, or inept, there are two ways in which he or she can defend this conduct. The first is to accept full responsibility for the action but to deny that it was wrong, bad, or inept. To do this is to
justify the action, to hold that it was, in fact, the
right thing to do. On this account, the action was
permissible or even
obligatory. The second way to defend the conduct is to agree that the action was wrong, bad, or inept, but to accept only partial responsibility for the action, or even none at all. To do this is to
excuse the action, to hold that one is
not (fully, or partly)
to blame for how one acted. Consider an example. If I shout at a child, then my action may be justified (the child was about to touch a hot stove) or excusable (I have been unable to sleep for days, and the child is making a racket).” (p.199)
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Mahon continues: “The question, therefore, is whether the lies and deceptions of Blomkvist and Salander are justified or excusable – or neither” (p.199).
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Blomkvist lies or allows falsehoods to be understood to get info from Bjorck, a secret service official who has committed crimes and has conspired to violate Salander’s rights. No guilt is felt by Blomkvist. Is his lying and double-cross of Bjorck excusable, or is it, further, justified? In volume three of the trilogy, Blomkvist knows his home phone and cell phone are bugged by the (now villainous) secret police. He feels guiltless, and he feeds them disinformation just as they would do. In a review of Larsson’s trilogy, the great South American writer Mario Vargas Llosa – an enthusiastic admirer of Salander and Blomkvist – calls them “two vigilantes” (quoted on p.206).
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Salander and Blomkvist have great dialogues at times (especially in volume one), debating the ethics of investigative journalists vs. those of hackers. Blomkvist stresses that “we journalists have an ethics committee that keeps track of the moral issues.” (p.205)
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Salander replies that she has comparable principles: “I call them
Salander’s Principles” (quoted on pp.205-6).
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Mahon does a fine analysis of the complexities of her principles and actions, as well as those of other characters. I will not discuss the rest of the good points he makes, but I will recommend his essay highly.
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My Summary of the book: As always, books like this on philosophy and pop culture are very rich, instructive, and enjoyable. My intensive studies of philosophy were decades ago, so these books bring new material to my attention and help keep me in touch with the discipline as an amateur. Finding philosophical minds that enjoy some of the same books and movies as I do is a great pleasure.
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Lisbeth Salander would just leaf casually through this book once and memorize the whole thing, and Mikael Blomkvist would come down hard on the weaknesses of my writing technique in the above review. It is not nearly as easy for me, but for me it was a pure labor of love to read and review this volume.
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Caveat: I have typed this directly from handwritten notes, and due to limited computer time I have not been able to triple check my review draft against the book. The book deserves better. Sorry.
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-Zenwind.
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