This story also points out another problematic issue, one that is the focus of the entire collection (or indeed, Jemisin’s entire career): Racial Identity. This issue could probably be the subject of another whole essay, and the fact that I would be excoriated up and down for writing it would be a condemnation of the rigidly politically correct conformist turn SF fandom has taken, and greater society as a whole.
The reason Racial Identity fails in Science Fiction is because there are only a few ways to cover the topic, and they are extremely limited in impact. They’ve been done to death, and there’s virtually no way to breathe new life into them without making them even less authentic.
The first is what you see in this story. Race as an utterly unimportant factor. We are told by the Narrator that it doesn’t matter – that racially specific descriptors are still used but they don’t carry the negative connotations they do (or at least that she claims they do) in our usage. But if the race of the one highlighted character doesn’t matter in a postulated SF world, then guess what, it doesn’t matter at all. The story could be told with a character of any race in that role if it truly did not matter in that world. Race would be mere window dressing. The only use of that character’s race in this story was to bludgeon the reader with accusations of racism while being straw-manned into saying that who she is is somehow shocking.
Even worse, this opens up the author (unless she’s a black woman) to criticisms of tokenism, or ignoring racial issues, or whitewashing over them. Our friend the “Social Worker” could be accused of “Acting White” since her behavior isn’t specifically ethnic. (This unavoidable criticism becomes a straitjacket on the writer.) But addressing that leads to the next sort of problem.
The second way that Racial Identity fails in Science Fiction is a current-day parable set in the future. If your story set a hundred or a thousand years in the future has race relations that haven’t changed a bit from the current day attitudes, then what is the point? Are you saying that they will never improve? Is racial equality a futile dream, destined to be sabotaged forever by society? That’s pretty dismal. But it could be worse …
The third way, rarely seen, is that relations could be even worse. I haven’t yet encountered any in my own reading, but I imagine the result would take the form of stories set in some kind of racial civil war. And even if the author takes the side of the Black Union, the result really isn’t that far from the fever dreams of the readers of The Turner Diaries. Oh, I suppose it might find an audience in the self-loathing white SJWs who hand out Hugos who feel they deserve to see themselves destroyed by proxy, or militant racial separatists on the other side. But are either of these really that large of an audience, and even if they are, do you really want to serve them?
I suppose the fourth is the Inversion tale. But given how the audience for the third way to write these things reacts to an example like Farnham’s Freehold, their desire to read a racial revenge fantasy has to be tempered by the risk of being declared a racist by their fellows.
By the way, you could say the same thing for almost any form of identity politics. And while it’s possible to have these as an element in the worldbuilding of your stories, to make them the centerpiece of your tale simply kneecaps your tale from the outset. There are four ways to do it, but all of them are wrong. Social Justice has made it so, and the only way to get a pass depends on the skin color of the author.
Dr. Mauser, “Message Received”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2019-01-30.
May 8, 2022
May 7, 2022
QotD: De Gaulle’s France
Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.
May 6, 2022
QotD: “… the Spartiates were quite possibly the least productive people to ever exist”
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
May 5, 2022
QotD: Critical Race Theory, the “successor ideology”
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, Between The World And Me. He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period”.
The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology”. The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness”, misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy”. And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history”, or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)
And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.
Andrew Sullivan, “What Happened To You?”, The Weekly Dish, 2021-07-09.
May 4, 2022
QotD: Masking a young child
New York, where two-year-olds are forced to wear masks all day in nursery.
I have a single memory – a three second “video clip” of my brother’s fourth birthday – that I can confidently date as having happened before I was three. Humans do not seem to lay down recoverable memories of most of what happens to them before the age of four or so. Yet a child’s experiences in those early years have a profound effect on their later personality. That little boy will probably never remember that he tried again and again to push away the damp thing that made it hard to breathe but that his carers, with pitiless good cheer, always forced it back on. But he will have learned the lesson of the powerless. You are weak, they are strong. Crying and protesting do not help.
I am told that in Muslim societies where women must go fully veiled it is difficult to get the little girls into their coverings at first. But even they wait until the girls are at least five.
Natalie Solent, “The carers”, Samizdata, 2021-09-19.
May 3, 2022
QotD: Every social media platform
Mme D does not do social media. Never has; never will.
This is a little tiresome because she needs to have an active social media presence to promote awareness of her brand new local business. Oh yes, social media is an absolute necessity. All the influencers say so, and we should always do what influencers tell us to otherwise they won’t be influencers any more. And, well, that would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?
I once tried to impress on her the importance of UGC. For weeks afterwards she looked at me in a funny way until we eventually cleared the air by establishing that UGC does not stand for Universal Genital Castration. Given that 25 per cent of user-generated content comprises dick pix, this was a misunderstanding too far.
“Social media is a time-wasting pit of crazies, pornographers, criminals, and perpetually angry nobodies flinging insults at each other,” she replied.
For someone who doesn’t do social media, she has a remarkably strong insight into it.
Alistair Dabbs, “How to get banned from social media without posting a thing”, The Register, 2022-01-28.
May 2, 2022
QotD: Online education
And that’s just college, which now more than ever is exactly what the sententious goobers on the faculty always said it was: A professional football team with a few classrooms attached. They’re memory-holed now, no doubt, but I recall a time over the summer when a few studies on the impact of online “learning” came out. They were worse than even I expected, and I’m cynical enough to give Diogenes wood. Some huge fraction of kids never even bothered logging on. At all. And, of course, they were promoted to the next grade …
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
May 1, 2022
QotD: How Thomas Sowell abandoned Marxism
After completing undergrad at Harvard and obtaining a master’s in economics, Sowell landed a summer internship with the Department of Labor. While there, he researched the impact of minimum wage law on employment. Sowell learned two things, both of which he found startling. First, minimum wage laws create job loss by pricing the unskilled out of the labor force. Second, Sowell discovered that “the people in the labor department really were not interested in that, because the administration of the minimum wage was supplying one-third of the money that was keeping the labor department going. … I realized that institutions have their own agendas and their own incentives.” In short, Sowell found that the Department of Labor did not care about the real-world effects of the minimum wage law. He credits this experience, this search for evidence, with having the “biggest” impact on his thinking.
Larry Elder, “If $15 Minimum Wage Is Such a Good Idea, Why Did AOC’s Bar Close Down?”, TownHall.com, 2019-03-21.
April 30, 2022
QotD: The position of helots in Spartan society
We are very poorly informed about the helots. Our snobbish sources … are, for the most part, singularly uninterested in them, so we’re left putting together a patchwork of information. That in turn leads into situations where students of ancient Greece can can up with the wrong impression if they don’t have all of the sources in mind (we’ll see this is a common trend with Sparta – reading just Xenophon or just Plutarch can be deeply misleading).
First, let us dispense with the argument, sometimes offered, that the helots were more like medieval serfs than slaves as we understand the ideas and thus not really slaves – this is nonsense. Helots seem to have been able to own moveable property (money, clothing etc), but in fact this is true of many ancient slaves, including Roman ones (the Romans called this quasi-property peculium, which also applied to the property of children and even many women who were under the legal power (potestas) of another). Owning small amounts of moveable property was not rare among ancient non-free individuals (or, for that matter, other forms of slavery).
No, what legally separated helots from douloi (chattel slaves in most Greek societies) was that they were slaves of the Spartan state rather than of individual Spartans – this had nothing to do with any sense of greater freedom they might have had. Indeed, Plutarch relates the saying that “in Sparta the free man is more free than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave” (Plut. Lyc. 28.5). He can only be referring to the helots here. Indeed, Plutarch’s statement is telling – the helots were treated poorly by the standards of ancient chattel slavery, which is, I must stress, an incredibly low bar. Ancient societies treated enslaved people absolutely horribly and yet somehow the helot lot was commonly thought worse.
But the final word on if we should consider the helots fully non-free is in their sanctity of person: they had none, at all, whatsoever. Every year, in autumn by ritual, the five Spartan magistrates known as the ephors declared war between Sparta and the helots – Sparta essentially declares war on part of itself – so that any spartiate might kill any helot without legal or religious repercussions (Plut. Lyc. 28.4; note also Hdt. 4.146.2). Isocrates – admittedly a decidedly anti-Spartan voice – notes that it was a religious, if not legal, infraction to kill slaves everywhere in Greece except Sparta (Isoc. 12.181). As a matter of Athenian law, killing a slave was still murder (the same is true in Roman law). One assumes these rules were often ignored by slave-holders of course – we know that many such laws in the American South were routinely flouted. Slavery is, after all, a brutal and inhuman institution by its very nature. The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards.
We may safely conclude that the helots were not only enslaved persons, but that of all slaves, they had some of the fewest protections – effectively none, not even protections in-name-only.
But what do the helots do?
The answer is mostly “they farm” but getting more specific than that get sticky fast. But we may try to keep this brief: helots were enslaved agricultural laborers. Helots were owned not by individual spartiates, but by the Spartan state, where they were assigned – through whatever method we do not know – to work the plots of land (kleroi, see above) assigned to the spartiates who, as noted above, were forbidden from engaging in any kind of productive labor. The helots seem to have lived in their own villages and settlements – no great surprise, as the Messenian helots seem to have been far more numerous than the Laconian ones and the spartiates themselves did not live in Messenia in any great numbers. It does seem that the Messenian helots were gathered in a smaller number of nucleated villages rather than split up as farmsteads, probably to make it easier for the small number of spartiates stationed there to keep watch on them. And they seemed to have produced not only simple cereal staples, but the full range of agricultural products: wheat (Xen Lac. 5.3 – we’ll come back to this), barley, grapes and wine, figs, olives and olive oil, cheese, textiles (wool) and animal products, including meat and fish.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
April 29, 2022
QotD: The Rooftop Koreans
The year was 1992, 27 years ago right about now, and the city was Los Angeles. Several police officers who got into a videotaped brawl with a petty criminal named Rodney King were acquitted of beating him up. The city exploded. It was chaos.
I was a first-year law student, back a year from the Gulf War, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard. My unit was the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, and we got called up early the first night and were on the streets for three long weeks. Making it even more delightful was the fact that the unit was in Inglewood, which was pretty much on fire. They burned most everything around, except our armory – that would have gone badly for them – and the Astro Burger.
My battalion commander grabbed then-First Lieutenant Schlichter, and we went all over the city in his humvee as he led his deployed and dispersed troops. Our soldiers came, in large part, from the areas most effected by the riots, and they were notably unpleasant to the thugs and criminals who quickly discovered our guys had no patience for nonsense. One dummy discovered that the hard way when he tried to run over some Guard soldiers from another battalion; he had a closed casket funeral.
The city went insane. Order simply ceased to exist. It was Lord of the Flies. I remember a cop totally breaking down because everything was completely out of control.
But I had a M16A1 – a real assault rifle – and I had a bunch of buddies with M16A1s. The regular folks … not so much. The decent people of LA were terrified, and with good reason. See, the dirty little secret of civilization is that it’s designed to maintain order when 99.9% of folks are orderly. But, say, if just 2% of folks stop playing by the rules … uh oh. Say LA’s population was 15 million in 1992 … that’s 300,000 bad guys. There were maybe 20,000 cops in all the area agencies then, plus 20,000 National Guard soldiers and airman, plus another 10,000 active soldiers and Marines the feds brought in. Law enforcement is based on the concept that most people will behave and that the crooks will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of officers. But in the LA riots, law enforcement was massively outnumbered. Imposing order took time.
And until then, our citizens were on their own, at the mercy of the mob. Betting that the cavalry was going to come save you was a losing bet.
LA’s Korean shopkeepers knew that. They operated many small businesses in some of the least fashionable areas of Los Angeles, and they were already widely hated by activists, being scapegoated for problems and pathologies that long pre-dated their immigration to Southern California. So, they became targets for the mobs.
Bad decision by the mobs.
See, most of these Koreans had done their mandatory service in the Republic of Korea’s Army. Those ROK soldiers are the real deal – the Norks are not a theoretical threat and the South Korean army does not spend a lot of time talking about feelings. They were some solid dudes. So, when the local dirtbags showed up for some casual looting, they noticed the rooftops were lined with hardcore guys packing some serious heat, including the kind of scary rifles that the Democrats want to ban.
The Rooftop Koreans.
It did not take long for the bad guys to realize that the Rooftop Koreans were not playing games – they were playing for keeps. The mob went away in search of softer targets.
There’s a lesson there.
Kurt Schlichter, “Be A Rooftop Korean”, Townhall.com, 2019-05-02.
April 28, 2022
QotD: The NFL Draft
Every year they draft these big, strong, good-looking guys that can chuck it a country mile. And three years later they turn out to be Joey Harrington or Tim Couch or Jeff George or some other bust who couldn’t lead a hungry lineman to free barbeque, let alone an entire team to a championship.
Dan Wetzel, “Follow the Leader”, Yahoo! Sports, 2006-04-27.
April 27, 2022
QotD: Competition
This was the promise of the classical economists: capitalism will optimize for consumer convenience, while keeping businesses themselves lean and hungry. And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better. Neither the promise nor the warning has been borne out: business owners are often comfortable and sometimes rich. Why? Thiel says it’s because they have escaped competition and become at least a little monopoly-like.
Thiel hates having to describe how businesses succeed, because he thinks it’s too anti-inductive to reduce to a formula:
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.
April 26, 2022
QotD: “Boris Lloyd George”
But more than any other twentieth-century PM, the last Liberal premier embodied the ambition, promiscuity and shameless indifference to rules and conventions that have driven Boris Johnson’s critics mad. Boris might be a mountebank, but Lloyd George was the mountebank’s mountebank.
Had he been prime minister during the Covid pandemic, would he have held parties at Number 10? The answer is obvious. He wouldn’t just have invited you to a party, he’d have sold you a peerage and made a move on your wife while you were still hanging up your coat.
Lloyd George was brilliantly funny. He was patriotic. He had the common touch. He was also, to quote Max Hastings on his modern-day successor, a “cavorting charlatan”, a “bully”, a “rogue” and a “scoundrel”, who “would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade”. And like Boris, he never hid it; quite the reverse. “My supreme idea is to get on,” he wrote to his future wife, Maggie Owen, during their courtship. “I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” He meant every word.
According to one of his own aides, Lloyd George was “mental on matters of sex. In his view, a man and a woman could not possibly be friends without sexual intercourse.” That sounds familiar. Like Boris, he could never be entirely sure how many children he had. Within months of his marriage to the stolid and long-suffering Maggie, he had already strayed, impregnating a Liberal activist known only as Mrs J.
Not content with also impregnating his wife’s cousin Kitty, he also had affairs with “Mrs Tim” who was married to his friend Timothy Davies, as well as Julia Henry, another Liberal MP’s wife. He also carried on for decades with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, whom he forced to have at least two abortions. And there were many more — so many that nobody has ever produced a definitive count.
At the time, people joked that Lloyd George had a child in every town in Britain. The story goes that one day his son Dick went into a pub and fell into conversation with a stranger who looked just like him. The stranger eventually confessed that Lloyd George was indeed his father, and was secretly paying him £400 a year. To cap it all, some biographers suggest that Lloyd George also slept with Dick’s troubled wife, Roberta — and this when he was well into his sixties! By these standards, even Boris seems a paragon of fidelity.
Dominic Sandbrook, “How to bring down a Prime Minister”, UnHerd, 2022-01-14.
April 25, 2022
QotD: The 15th century as a “mulligan”
As I’ve written here before, the 15th century makes much more sense if you consider it a “mulligan” century, a do-over — an attempt to stuff the Early Modern cat back into the High Medieval bag in the wake of the Black Death. One cannot, of course, say that thus-and-such should’ve happened in history — history is the study of what actually did happen — but it’s clear that the Black Death was a giant hiccup in the otherwise “natural” progression from Middle Ages to Early Modern. It was all there in embryo in 1340; had the Black Death not hit the pause button for half a century, the great ructions of the early 1500s would’ve hit in the early 1400s. And they no doubt would’ve been a lot less severe, too — without the Black Death, the “Martin Luther” of 1417 might’ve been one of the great reforming Popes.
Read Huizinga or Duffy, and you get the overwhelming impression of bright children playing dress up. Everything’s cranked way past eleven. Like kids, they know that grownups do these things, and because they’re bright kids they have some idea why grownups do it … but not really, and the nuances utterly escape them. Huizinga tells the story of some churchman who ostentatiously drinks every drink he’s given in five swallows, one for each of Jesus’s wounds … obnoxious enough, but then he goes that characteristically Late Medieval extra mile — because both blood and water flowed from Christ’s side, he takes the second swallow in two gulps.
Knights vow to not open one of their eyes until they’ve met the Turk in battle. Another churchman rails against the kitschy little figurines found in burghers’ homes, a carving of the Virgin Mary with a door in her stomach. You open it up, and there’s the Trinity. Bad enough, but again the Late Medieval twist: He’s not upset at the figure as such (even though it’s the next best thing to idolatry); he’s pissed because you see the entire Trinity there, and not just Jesus, as is theologically proper. Speaking of Mary, academics debate, in all apparent seriousness, whether or not she was an “active participant” in Our Lord’s conception. And so on: Creeping to the Cross, endless novenas and rosaries and vigils, the whole spastically ostentatious public piety of the devotio moderna. The Imitation of Christ is great, everyone should read it, but imagine people doing all that in public, and not in the cloister as Kempis intended.
The old, exhausted, Alzheimery (it’s a word) dregs of a once vital and vibrant spirituality. Sound familiar?
Severian, “Alt Discussion Thread: Sacraments and Superstitions”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-18.
April 24, 2022
QotD: Love in an age of Instagram
I really like the girl I’m dating, except for one thing. On every date, she asks me to take photos of her for Instagram. Afterward, she consults me repeatedly on which will “get the most likes.” I’m starting to get really annoyed, and I find it cuts into my enjoyment of our time together. She even did this on my birthday! — Irritated
Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote, “Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.'” He died in 1980, 30-some years before Instagram-infused love: “I need you, love, because my telescoping selfie stick won’t fit in my cute purse.”
This girl’s far from alone in turning every occasion short of stints on the toilet into a photo op. Social media (and Instagram especially) transformed fishing for compliments into a business model. #admirationvampires
Some young women — especially 20-somethings with a still-murky sense of identity — might feel they don’t exist in any meaningful way if they don’t post pix and videos of themselves to score likes and gain followers. #KeepingUpWithTheInstadashians
There’s also the lure of easy money for those who can rack up an audience: potentially making big “influencer” bucks just by showing up to events in some pop-up shop’s dress and striking a bunch of poses they copied off Beyonce.
Amy Alkon, “The Camera Sutra”, Advice Goddess, 2021-12-25.
