Hugos Weaving
by rsbakker
So the whole idea behind Three Pound Brain, way back when, was to open a waystation between ‘incompatible empires,’ to create a forum where ingroup complacencies are called out and challenged, where our native tendency to believe flattering bullshit can be called to account. To this end, I instigated two very different blog wars, one against an extreme ‘right’ figure in the fantasy community, Theodore Beale, another against an extreme ‘left’ figure, Benjanun Sriduangkaew. All along the idea was to expose these individuals, to show, at least for those who cared to follow, how humans were judging machines, prone to rationalize even the most preposterous and odious conceits. Humans are hardwired to run afoul pious delusion. The science is only becoming more definitive in this regard, I assure you. We are, each and every one of us, walking, talking, yardsticks. Unfortunately, we also have a tendency to affix spearheads to our rules, to confuse our sense of exceptionality and entitlement with the depravity and criminality of others—and to make them suffer.
When it comes to moral reasoning, humans are incompetent clowns. And in an age where high-school students are reengineering bacteria for science fairs, this does not bode well for the future. We need to get over ourselves—and now. Blind moral certainty is no longer a luxury our species can afford.
Now we all watch the news. We all appreciate the perils of moral certainty in some sense, the need to be wary of those who believe too hard. We’ve all seen the ‘Mad Fanatic’ get his or her ‘just desserts’ in innumerable different forms. The problem, however, is that the Mad Fanatic is always the other guy, while we merely enjoy the ‘strength of our convictions.’ Short of clinical depression at least, we’re always—magically you might say—the obvious ‘Hero.’
And, of course, this is a crock of shit. In study after study, experiment after experiment, researchers find that, outside special circumstances, moral argumentation and explanation are strategic—with us being none the wiser! (I highly recommend Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes or Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for a roundup of the research). It may feel like divine dispensation, but dollars to donuts it’s nothing more than confabulation. We are programmed to advance our interests as truth; we’d have no need of Judge Judy otherwise!
It is the most obvious invisible thing. But how do you show people this? How do you get humans to see themselves as the moral fool, as the one automatically—one might even say, mechanically—prone to rationalize their own moral interests, unto madness in some cases. The strategy I employ in my fantasy novels is to implicate the reader, to tweak their moral pieties, and then to jam them the best I can. My fantasy novels are all about the perils of moral outrage, the tragedy of willing the suffering of others in the name of some moral verity, and yet I regularly receive hate mail from morally outraged readers who think I deserve to suffer—fear and shame, in most cases, but sometimes death—for having written whatever it is they think I’ve written.
The blog wars were a demonstration of a different sort. The idea, basically, was to show how the fascistic impulse, like fantasy, appeals to a variety of inborn cognitive conceits. Far from a historical anomaly, fascism is an expression of our common humanity. We are all fascists, in our way, allergic to complexity, suspicious of difference, willing to sacrifice strangers on the altar of self-serving abstractions. We all want to master our natural and social environments. Public school is filled with little Hitlers—and so is the web.
And this, I wanted to show, is the rub. Before the web, we either kept our self-aggrandizing, essentializing instincts to ourselves or risked exposing them to the contradiction of our neighbours. Now, search engines assure that we never need run critical gauntlets absent ready-made rationalizations. Now we can indulge our cognitive shortcomings, endlessly justify our fears and hatreds and resentments. Now we can believe with the grain our stone-age selves. The argumentative advantage of the fascist is not so different from the narrative advantage of the fantasist: fascism, like fantasy, cues cognitive heuristics that once proved invaluable to our ancestors. To varying degrees, our brains are prone to interpret the world through a fascistic lens. The web dispenses fascistic talking points and canards and ad hominems for free—whatever we need to keep our clown costumes intact, all the while thunderously declaring ourselves angels. Left. Right. It really doesn’t matter. Humans are bigots, prone to strip away complexity and nuance—the very things required to solve modern social problems—to better indulge our sense of moral superiority.
For me, Theodore Beale (aka, Vox Day) and Benjanun Sriduangkaew (aka, acrackedmoon) demonstrated a moral version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, how the bigger the clown, the more inclined they are to think themselves angels. My strategy with Beale was simply to show the buffoonery that lay at the heart of his noxious set of views. And he eventually obliged, explaining why, despite the way his claims epitomize bias, he could nevertheless declare himself the winner of the magical belief lottery:
Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go.
He. Just. Is. Superior.
A king clown, you could say, lucky, by grace of God.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew, on the other hand, posed more of a challenge, since she was, when all was said and done, a troll in addition to a clown. In hindsight, however, I actually regard my blog war with her as the far more successful one simply because she was so successful. My schtick, remember, is to show people how they are the Mad Fanatic in some measure, large or small. Even though Sriduangkaew’s tactics consisted of little more than name-calling, even though her condemnations were based on reading the first six pages of my first book, a very large number of ‘progressive’ individuals were only too happy to join in, and to viscerally demonstrate the way moral outrage cares nothing for reasons or casualties. What’s a false positive when traitors are in our midst? All that mattered was that I was one of them according to so-and-so. I would point out over and over how they were simply making my argument for me, demonstrating how moral groupthink deteriorates into punishing strangers, and feeling self-righteous afterward. I would receive tens of thousands of hits on my posts, and less than a dozen clicks on the links I provided citing the relevant research. It was nothing short of phantasmagorical. I was, in some pathetic, cultural backwoods way, the target of a witch-hunt.
(The only thing I regret is that several of my friends became entangled, some jumping ship out fear (sending me ‘please relent’ letters), others, like Peter Watts, for the sin of calling the insanity insanity.)
It’s worth noting in passing that some Three Pound Brain regulars actually tried to get Beale and Sriduangkaew together. Beale, after all, actually held the views she so viciously attributed to me, Morgan, and others. He was the real deal—openly racist and misogynistic—and his blog had more followers than all of her targets combined. Sriduangkaew, on the other hand, was about as close to Beale’s man-hating feminist caricature as any feminist could be. But… nothing. Like competing predators on the savannah, they circled on opposite sides of the herd, smelling one another, certainly, but never letting their gaze wander from their true prey. It was as if, despite the wildly divergent content of their views, they recognized they were the same.
So here we stand a couple of years after the fray. Sriduangkaew, as it turns out, was every bit as troubled as she sounded, and caused others far, far more grief than she ever caused me. Beale, on other hand, has been kind enough to demonstrate yet another one of my points with his recent attempt to suborn the Hugos. Stories of individuals gaming the Hugos are notorious, so in a sense the only thing that makes Beale’s gerrymandering remarkable is the extremity of his views. How? people want to know. How could someone so ridiculously bigoted come to possess any influence in our ‘enlightened’ day and age?
Here we come to the final, and perhaps most problematic moral clown in this sad and comedic tale: the Humanities Academic.
I’m guessing that a good number of you reading this credit some English professor with transforming you into a ‘critical thinker.’ Too bad there’s no such thing. This is what makes the Humanities Academic a particularly pernicious Mad Fanatic: they convince clowns—that is, humans like you and me—that we need not be clowns. They convince cohort after cohort of young, optimistic souls that buying into a different set of flattering conceits amounts to washing the make-up off, thereby transcending the untutored ‘masses’ (or what more honest generations called the rabble). And this is what makes their particular circus act so pernicious: they frame assumptive moral superiority—ingroup elitism—as the result of hard won openness, and then proceed to judge accordingly.
So consider what Philip Sandifer, “a PhD in English with no small amount of training in postmodernism” thinks of Beale’s Hugo shenanigans:
To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.
Simply put, this is past the point where phrases like “bad apples” can still be applied. As long as supporters of Theodore Beale hold sufficient influence in traditional fandom to have this sort of impact, traditional fandom is a fatally poisoned well. The fact that a majority of voices in fandom are disgusted by it doesn’t matter. The damage has already been done at the point where the list of nominees is 68% controlled by fascists.
The problem, Sandifer argues, is institutional. Beale’s antics demonstrate that the institution of fandom is all but dead. The implication is that the science fiction and fantasy community ought to be ashamed, that it needs to gird its loins, clean up its act.
Many of you, I’m sure, find Sandifer’s point almost painfully obvious. Perhaps you’re thinking those rumours about Bakker being a closet this or that must be true. I am just another clown, after all. But catch that moral reflex, if you can, because if you give in, you will be unable—as a matter of empirical fact—to consider the issue rationally.
There’s a far less clownish (ingroupish) way to look at this imbroglio.
Let’s say, for a moment, that readership is more important than ‘fandom’ by far. Let’s say, for a moment, that the Hugos are no more or less meaningful than any other ingroup award, just another mechanism that a certain bunch of clowns uses to confer prestige on those members who best exemplify their self-regarding values—a poor man’s Oscars, say.
And let’s suppose that the real problem facing the arts community lies in the impact of technology on cultural and political groupishness, on the way the internet and preference-parsing algorithms continue to ratchet buyers and sellers into ever more intricately tuned relationships. Let’s suppose, just for instance, that so-called literary works no longer reach dissenting audiences, and so only serve to reinforce the values of readers…
That precious few of us are being challenged anymore—at least not by writing.
The communicative habitat of the human being is changing more radically than at any time in history, period. The old modes of literary dissemination are dead or dying, and with them all the simplistic assumptions of our literary past. If writing that matters is writing that challenges, the writing that matters most has to be writing that avoids the ‘preference funnel,’ writing that falls into the hands of those who can be outraged. The only writing that matters, in other words, is writing that manages to span significant ingroup boundaries.
If this is the case, then Beale has merely shown us that science fiction and fantasy actually matter, that as a writer, your voice can still reach people who can (and likely will) be offended… as well as swayed, unsettled, or any of the things Humanities clowns claim writing should do.
Think about it. Why bother writing stories with progressive values for progressives only, that is, unless moral entertainment is largely what you’re interested in? You gotta admit, this is pretty much the sum of what passes for ‘literary’ nowadays.
Everyone’s crooked is someone else’s straight—that’s the dilemma. Since all moral interpretations are fundamentally underdetermined, there is no rational or evidential means to compel moral consensus. Pretty much anything can be argued when it comes to questions of value. There will always be Beales and Sriduangkaews, individuals adept at rationalizing our bigotries—always. And guess what? the internet has made them as accessible as fucking Wal-Mart. This is what makes engaging them so important. Of course Beale needs to be exposed—but not for the benefit of people who already despise his values. Such ‘exposure’ amounts to nothing more than clapping one another on the back. He needs to be exposed in the eyes of his own constituents, actual or potential. The fact that the paths leading to bigotry run downhill makes the project of building stairs all the more crucial.
‘Legitimacy,’ Sandifer says. Legitimacy for whom? For the likeminded—who else? But that, my well-educated friend, is the sound-proofed legitimacy of the Booker, or the National Book Awards—which is to say, the legitimacy of the irrelevant, the socially inert. The last thing this accelerating world needs is more ingroup ejaculate. The fact that Beale managed to pull this little coup is proof positive that science fiction and fantasy matter, that we dwell in a rare corner of culture where the battle of ideas is for… fucking… real.
And you feel ashamed.
Three Pound Brain 
I think human beings have an inborn capacity for hatred. In “The World Before Yesterday” Jared Diamond made a valuable point in noting that members of ‘primitive’ tribes are much more willing to kill each other in battle and much less inclined to feel guilty about it later than more ‘modern’ people. In a world of scare resources the ability to convince yourself that you and people like you have more of a right to those resources than people who are different than you is a powerful competitive advantage. Hatred both convinces us we have the right to take resources and prepares us for the violence necessary to do so.
My concern is that if hatred and the use of moral reasoning to justify hatred have genetic foundations we can’t ‘get over ourselves’ by our own unaided reasoning. If human beings are built in such a way that we need enemies and tend to create them then our real problem is simply how to point our hatred in a safe direction. If there is a good argument to be made for space colonization that is probably it.
I meant ‘scarce resources’ of course.
Parochialism ain’t going away, I fear. The thing I like about this particular issue is that it demonstrates the way cognitive science has pretty clear moral consequences. Once you have an empirical picture of parochialism, then you can diagnose extreme expressions of it, and so undermine the intuitions underwriting fascism on pretty clear factual grounds. It drags the debate out of the normative swamp–part way, at least.
Ha, I was curious if you were going to weigh in on all the mess…
I’ve been itching to do so for quite some time. I’m a little late for the party, I fear!
Eh, the results won’t be revealed until August, so it’s going to be a looooong party. You’re just pacing yourself.
So, what you’re basically saying is that we all believe that our own shit smells like freshly baked cookies yet at the same time we believe everybody else’s smells like, well, shit.
How dare you!
I’m a unique individual with free will, and I’ve been trained to think critically, so this obviously doesn’t apply to me.
Me too! Now that’s what I call a bleedin’ coincidence…
How do you avoid being the clown? “You” specifically, and generally.
Is acknowledging that you could be a clown by another clown be enough? Seems too small and easy a step to make.
Assuming there is no high ground, what would be the point? Wouldn’t this kind of reasoning just lead everyone to fervently doubt everything, and then you’re back to fanaticism. How can it be determined when enough is enough?
Clinical depression is good first step, apparently. Doubt and self-loathing help. If clownishness (chauvinism) were an all or nothing affair rather than a continuum, then absurdity does follow, but there’s degrees. Knowing you’re a moral idiot is one small way to avoid being as much a moral idiot (think of that quote!). As is giving others, as far as possible, the benefit of the doubt.
Whatever the case, the time has come to close the books on the philosophers and begin seriously listening to the cognitive scientists, who, despite remaining clowns at least hew to an institution with absolutely no sense of humour.
Bah, those pesky philosophers. Forever coming up with questions and answers, but not the solutions in between!
cognitive scientists, who, despite remaining clowns at least hew to an institution with absolutely no sense of humour.
Followers of the no-gag?
Why avoid playing the clown? It’s the traditional “Truth to power” role. Many of the most fantastic fantasy/sci-fi novels have liberal uses of humour to play up the strange quirks of humanity.
And how does fervently doubting things lead to fanaticism? Isn’t fanaticism believing something so firmly it is beyond doubt?
Fervent doubt of everything is no better than believing absolutely only one thing. They are essentially the same thing, or at least equally useless.
equally useless
Must pragmatism be the measure?
Add one step to any decision-making process. “Is it possible I’m misreading this, seeing patterns that aren’t there or attributing motives to others based purely on how I’m feeling?” You’ll still make bad calls while being blithely unaware, but maybe not quite so often.
My guess is that we need to redesign our education system from the ground up, begin, from an early age, to teach kids what is arguably the single most important thing they need to know: themselves, the kinds of mistakes they’re prone to make, the kinds dupes they are prone to believe. A man, as the philosopher said, has got to know his limitations…
Yup :). Then see what they can do with that knowledge (I suspect awe and astound us).
That’s the initial step, yes, but to me it seems not enough, or to be taken to far and gridlock all things.
My point was who’s the clown that gets to tell the other’s that they have risen beyond? How do we know if we made it, and who gets to decide that we did once we get there.
You cant measure doubt with a ruler that has no marks.
There’s no way to ever know, because short of actually tampering with our brains, we can’t ever reach this particular promised land. But we can try to get incrementally better over time. You build a tool then use it to construct a slightly better tool, and so on down the line.
And tampering with our brains, we’d probably just end up like Peter Watts’ scramblers from Blindsight (which I think you should list as a companion piece for your work, Scott).
Wilshire – I think it’s fairly straight forward – any education program for children simply repeatedly reiterates its simply one of many possible education programs possible. They just ended up with the one they got. Call the frame out for what it is.
i haven’t grduated to ‘clown’ yet…i’m still stuck on level ‘mime’.
This is very well written and ties in with numerous fundamental flaws in democracy.
I disagree with the idea everyone has become blinkered by their own moral superiority. If this were the case there would be no such thing as the “moderate” or “swing voter” who make up the largest group of voters, at least in the USA.
The fundamental problem is once someone gains the capacity to hold their own morality on question, the convictions required to remain politically active end.
This leaves politics to extremists who inevitably do tremendous damage, and was the crux of the argument made by dissenters arguing for the preservation of monarchy against the democratic “enlightenment”.
The problem is not so much the vocal minority of extremists who believe their morality correct, the problem is overcoming the propensity of those wise enough to question themselves to silently abstain from the debate lest they’re wrong, allowing the vocal minority to subvert a free society.
“Qui tacet consentit”
The moral superiority research is pretty solid. Moderates are clowns as well, just more wary, or lazy, or indifferent, or what have you.
“The fundamental problem is once someone gains the capacity to hold their own morality on question, the convictions required to remain politically active end.”
I agree. In fact, it’s one the central concerns in my books, the paradox of belief, the way moral madness motivates miracles as well as atrocities. Haidt writes about this too, how the fanaticism of the civil and women’s rights movements was so essential to reform. You can look at the strategy of the anti-climate change lobby, for instance, as one of continually injecting just enough doubt to prevent wide-scale environmental fanaticism from taking hold.
Oh, that’s fascinating (and depressing!), I hadn’t thought about climate change or civil rights from that angle. Damn you, double-edged sword of fanaticism!
To add, it’s also something some communist thinkers have actively defended. For instance Alberto Toscano’s book. Excerpt:
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/fanaticism/
You read book reviews like this – on books devoted to the powers of rational construction – and you can’t help but think, Ugh, are they in for a nasty surprise. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time when so-called radicals have ever been so reactionary, so ignorant of scientific fact pertaining directly to their domain. It’s beginning to seem phantasmagorical, the use of atavisms to critique atavism. Do you know anyone who’s done work on the asynchrony of modern theory, the ‘becoming anachronistic’ of political thought?
I don’t, not yet anyway, or perhaps it is/will be the accelerationists. When I first heard the phrase “folk politics” this is precisely what I’d hoped was coming. If I was a more capable and equipped person I might have tried to undertake it. As it goes, I kind of hope this is one of the directions we move in on syntheticzero. Personally though the political version of the “semantic apocalypse” is the one that makes me uncomfortable, as much as it excites me. I’m a (reluctant) member of an anarchist organization, and I find it harder and harder to go along with all this stuff about desire, voluntarism, and any claims that “people want freedom”.
“The fundamental problem is once someone gains the capacity to hold their own morality on question, the convictions required to remain politically active end.”
I find this confusing, simply because I’m a Model Agnostic that has been forced by new data to re-examine, and quite often figure out, what exactly my moral values are.
That is politically active as a gamble that ballots are better than bullets to achieve my political goals, in service to the kind of world I want to live on.
Are you asserting that people with a fanatical approach are ‘better’ at the political game?
That you have to have some ‘conviction’ merely to play?
Or that political activism proves you have ‘convictions’, (which I’m reading as strong belief in an proposition)?
Strength of belief results in energy and passion. Moderation or doubt of belief results in the person saying “well, I don’t really know what’s best, so I’ll leave that to others to decide.”
Good conversation over on Reddit…
Boom goes the internet. Another good conversation. Big ups from Lawrence, who has only read TDTCB, despite my admonishment to continue on his Goodreads Reviews.
Come out swinging for TUC ;)!
For posterity, Mark’s Review (4 out of 5 stars).
Very cool. Speaking of TUC, my agent says we should have some firm publication dates from Orion and Overlook soon. The wait’s been giving me ulcers, I don’t know about you.
Lol – nothing quite like the life of a double agent.
Orion? Don’t you mean penguin?
Soon is good. Hoping against hope for Q4 2015.
Orion, for the UK. Penguin will be distributing Overlook’s version, and no more. It’ll be tough if I have to wait till 2016.
This post makes the case for acting a certain way (self-critically, etc.). To act that way is to act in a better way than people who don’t. To act that way, then not feel morally superior would be impossible. You can catch yourself in smugness but then you’re immediately self-congratulating (for not being self-congratulatory), catch that and self-congratulate, and so on, forever. I was saying a while back how power is existence, and along those lines, moral thinking is rationalization of power is apologetics for the hideousness of world/power, and the critical faculty that attacks it is anti-power, anti-life. Self-congratulation is re-affirmation of the power that’s just been decimated by critical death-wishing thought and a renewal of the problem, which never actually went away. *pats self on back*
Yes. Which is why the issue isn’t one of becoming a ‘critical thinker’ so much as an ‘honest clown.’ You pat yourself on the back, sure, but only after you slap your forehead.
That distinction doesn’t solve the problem for me. Honest clown sounds better, and, sort of, arguably, is better. But that’s solace, that’s comfort. The self-congratulatory element is still there in the word “honest,” and, change the word how we might, this striving to be better will still be there, along with self-congratulation. Looks to me like ingroupism is just individual insiderness (against a bad outside) writ large. The latter is entirely unavoidable and perhaps every bit as fucked up. I think my outlook might bleaker than yours!
I suspect that my standard for ‘success’ is just that much lower than yours. We muddle, the way we always do, and we resolve this, fuck up that, the way we always do. On the issue of fascism, this way of looking at things provides ground enough to eschew a particularly dramatic way to fuck up. Atavisms, the blind insistence on the universal veracity on our paleolithic toolkit, are a threat, but an avoidable one, I think. It’s the inevitability of ‘akratic society’ where my pessimism comes in. The ability to convincingly trounce fascism does not change the way our technology will render our moral toolkit ever more irrelevant and dysfunctional.
I got a Disney piece coming up on this very issue.
if criticality merges with gnostic moralism in the limit point then i think we should stop calling it critical.
I think one of the reasons why it makes sense to be the particular kind of asshole you describe here is because, as you have said often, we lack information. Maybe the world is so complicated that our information can never be genuinely adequate, which means we can never have justified confidence in the rightness of our actions. If unjustified confidence is the only kind of confidence there is and we need confidence to act, unjustified confidence is better than no confidence.
That having been said, I think you’re right about how the internet, by allowing us to consort only with those who share our biases, causes us to consume less real information (that is to say fewer things we didn’t already ‘know’) and thereby make the informational foundations of our actions even less adequate than they were before.
And not only that, but by allowing us to insulate ourselves from opinions and facts we do not wish to consider, the internet makes us more prone to the thinking errors described in the first link, particularly confirmation bias and the availability heuristic. Thus we become more confident about the rightness of our opinions and actions even as our confidence becomes less justified because the information on which we base those opinions and actions becomes less adequate. Wilshire asked how one might minimize one’s clownishness. A concerted effort to expose ones self to people and ideas with which one disagrees is a good place to start.
“I think one of the reasons why it makes sense to be the particular kind of asshole you describe here is because, as you have said often, we lack information. Maybe the world is so complicated that our information can never be genuinely adequate, which means we can never have justified confidence in the rightness of our actions. If unjustified confidence is the only kind of confidence there is and we need confidence to act, unjustified confidence is better than no confidence.”
I think this is almost certainly the case: this is why so much social cognition consists of simple heuristics (adding parameters to a model in the absence of data actually increases the odds of mistakes), and this is why the technological transformation our social problem ecologies poses such an insuperable challenge.
Scratch “concerted” from the last sentence above. I hate that you can’t edit your comments once they’ve gone up.
“Everyone’s crooked is someone else’s straight—that’s the dilemma. Since all moral interpretations are fundamentally underdetermined, there is no rational or evidential means to compel moral consensus.”
Fire burns. There’s your moral consensus.
Burning to bring warmth, food, comfort… or burning to destroy? I see no consensus here.
Knowing fire burns, you know better than to burn others.
And yet people continue to burn others, and think themselves morally virtuous in doing so. Hmm…
Well… burn ’em.
The argument ad baculum has been the go-to heuristic throughout history, that’s for damn sure.
Scott, in spite of your pessimism, you just successfully framed this whole Hugo situation in a uniquely positive light. You’ve been saying this about fantasy for years and it’s never been more true than it is today. Well done.
I can’t believe I missed the whole Vox Day episode and him discussing his lovable, fertile wife. Amazing how you can incite real life people to talk like a character from one of your books. Or is it the other way around?
It’s just a matter of finding the right context, is all. Otherwise, when it comes to clownishness, people are pretty predictable!
The really interesting thing is that the “Magical Lottery” that we all think we’ve won is actually humanity itself.
There’s, what, 7 billion people on the planet now? That’s a huge number of lotto tickets. There’s got to be a couple winners hiding out somewhere.
If we briefly sketch society’s logical functions in Western Civilization (the consolidation of technology and executive authority in the hands of those with money as a selection mechanism for privilege), it’s not a huge leap to say that the inevitable result of society is a weird chrysalis for the creation of gods (as humans envision them). Men and women who, through the good providence of science, are able to defeat aging and disease, who can interface with technology to wield influence on a scale that no single person could hope to achieve even today, and who will be the ones that reap the primary benefits of our scientific and electronic revolution that we as a race are right on the cusp of.
But, in every lotto, there’s going to be a huge number of losers for every winner. And in the God Lottery of Earth’s 21st century, well… safe to say we can disqualify most people right out of the gate. They’re an inevitable side-effect of over-population.
The only question that’s really interesting, to me, is the result of humanity’s little game of Russian Roulette. How many times can we pull the trigger before we, inevitably, strike the bullet of catastrophe that’s waiting? Does the chrysalis complete before the apocalypse? Or do the inevitable resource shortages and consequences of over-population cause a crisis first? These things are especially related to our water supply, our rare materials, our metropolitan living space, and the general state of the world and national economies. I don’t see it as a question of “if”. When it hits, what will the magnitude be and how far away is it?
Really it’s a bit of a nail-biter. That’s the backdrop to all this nonsense, for me: people are busy arguing about the legitimacy of their freedom to unzip their pants while God’s mathematician is pointing a loaded gun at us and smiling.
No matter how you cut it, the curtains are about to drop on the Show Human. If the techno-optimists are right, humanity is done. If they’re wrong, humanity is done. Only the Butlerian Jihad can save us now!
Intersectionalists believe that; the twin horns of their faith is the gender abolition of Judith Butler and the racialist views of Octavia Butler. Intersectionalists are the Church of Butler and each woman a piece of the one true cross. This is the Third Wave Jihad.
And need I point out that Duke is a committed intersectional gender feminist. It is his religion. Reading the Twitter feed of his Skiffy and Fanty colleague and ideological cousin Cecily Kane is remarkable to say the least, as is that of his other colleague Paul Weimer. A belief in smashing the Patriarchy and its fake male-female relationships created by oppressive men in the Foucauldian mists of prehistory to discomfit women is an exercise in cultural and civilizational suicide. It permeates the SFF social justice community.
Gender feminist, Harvard teacher and PhD. Artemis March writes in an article titled “Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight: Exhibition of Prepatriarchal Old European Artifacts”:
“It’s about undoing the erasure of women, gender-balanced social worlds, the sacred conceived and imaged as female, and of scholars who dare to see and tell Another Story. It’s about countering the erasure of those whose research threatens the monopoly of the patriarchal story and its alleged innateness and universality …by distorting and disappearing our past, they have ravaged and purloined our present and our future. Disappearing acts have gone on for millennia, and they are going on right now, right in front of us. They can be blatant and concrete, as in the absence of women on our currency, our stamps, and the paucity of female statuary in our public life… Male entitlement, sole male authority, and male control over women are not god-given or ‘how things are,’ but integral to an historically finite, socially constructed type of socio-political system that’s been around for only a few thousand years.
“You would never know that Old Europe points to Another Story behind the patriarchy. Instead, they slide it into their one and only Story—the Androcentric Story, in which all societies and cultures are assumed/projected to have been formed by men, about men, for men, and organized around hierarchy and domination.”
This is also reflected in the writing of one of the most influential of all radical feminists, Charlotte Bunch:
“The first division of labor, in pre-history, was based on sex: men hunted, women built the villages, took care of children, and farmed. Women collectively controlled the land, language, culture, and the communities. Men were able to conquer women with the weapons that they developed for hunting when it became clear that women were leading a more stable, peaceful, and desirable existence. We do not know exactly how this conquest took place, but it is clear that the original imperialism was male over female: the male claiming the female body and her service as his territory (or property).”
This is the source of Duke’s linguistic and intellectual gibberish and in fact all of the core social justice movement in SFF. When John Scalzi writes “… what a ‘Social Justice Warrior’ is at this point is something of a moving target, the most consistent definition of which appears to be ‘Anyone left of Ted Cruz’,” we should remind everyone that John Scalzi didn’t at one time ask us to “bone up” on “anyone left of Ted Cruz” but on “intersectionality.”
Yeah, because any fool knows that women control the vast majority of the world’s capital, and that women commit far, far more violent crime against men than vice versa, and that it’s really men who should be afraid walking the streets alone after dark, and the internet is overrun with images of women sexually brutalizing men, not vice versa. The only sex slaves out there are men–I mean come on! And it most certainly doesn’t say in Corinthinians that woman is made for man, not man for woman, nor is it a fact that history is rife with restrictions on female property rights, voting rights, reproductive rights…
Or, maybe, men are fucking clowns. Maybe, just maybe, you can use their inclination to defend their privileges as a way to measure their clownishness.
It really is remarkable how predictable the mechanisms are. That’s what’s being discussed here James, the pattern. You do realize all the serial rationalizations you offer are bullshit, ways for you to coddle resentments, insecurities, interests, what have you. You are giving us a textbook example of what my post is arguing against. The moral of my story is that YOU are an IDIOT, the same as ME. Part of that idiocy is a genius for convincing yourself you’re a moral genius. The myth of the critical thinker is pernicious because it amounts to little more than a moral dodge, a way to disguise garden-variety groupishness as ‘enlightenment.’
I have many problems with academic feminism. One problem is that I think many academics, pursuing their own ingroup imperatives, actually injure their cause by alienating those they should be reaching out to. I think intersectionalist approaches are only problematic to they degree they run afoul piety, present themselves as revealed truth, and fail to acknowledge their speculative nature as such. I also think feminist piety prevents intelligent discussion on the various, problematic consequences of different harm-reduction laws, which do make many men in many relationships with troubled women legally vulnerable. The inability to discuss these problematic by-products without being labelled misogynistic has created a whole subculture of men trading (in many cases very real) ‘atrocity tales,’ a vast, anecdotal stew that has led to a consequent hardening of general attitudes against the very REAL, and very important question of woman’s rights. (Acrackedmoon was recruiting for Vox Day, not vice versa. Those guys loved her.)
And I think the big problem is that most academics are sealed in, they belong to an institution that gives them their livelihood, their friends, even their fucking language. The simply don’t bump into the edges of their ingroup enough to appreciate how inward it is, and how ridiculously pompous and elitist they so obviously are in the eyes of nonmembers.
But I’m just a clown. What do I know? The only thing I can do is engage them on these issues. Muddle through, the way we always muddle.
its a matter of who allocates the resources and for what. all of this stuff really rides on the fact that there are massive subterranean webs of uneleted officials and institutions who technocratically control the allocation of virtually all resources related to technological research and development. this is where feyerabend was coming from with his idea that the public should directly play a role in the direction of science. i even wonder if the doom and gloom narrative surrounding intelligent systems that could eliminate their makers might be different if they werent fundamentally being driven by closed source paranoiac systems of power and control.
Several posts ago I suggested that fantasizing about alternatives to capitalism was probably a waste of time because nobody has a viable path from capitalism to any possible alternative. How could the public “directly play a role in the direction of science” given that most of our society’s most powerful public and private institutions were designed to prevent the public from directly playing a role in any public policy?
Some straw blown my argument’s way, but not much more, unfortunately. It’s actually scary how reliable the pattern is, and how little education seems to matter (something the research bears out as well–hilariously, in some cases!). If you were to go by Duke’s reading, I’m only calling the educated clowns, and therefore, I must be one of those ‘anti-intellectualists.’
@rsbakker
So let me get this straight, Vox and his supporters are crude and are vicious destroyers by attacking mindlessly.
So you prove this by being crude and vicious and attacking Vox and his supporters.
I understand the weird left laughs at logic and your ilk does not grasp logical arguments well but I see a huge flaw in your writings. I would recommend returning any diploma(s) you have acquired.
I called everyone a clown. I called everyone a clown because it is a scientific fact that we always find in our favour. The most clownish among us, I suggested, were those who found themselves so favourable, they thought themselves anything but a clown. Now, I’m a clown, I know that much.
Are you a clown?
Of course you are. The only question is one of just how big a clown you are. And that’s the question I’m pretty sure you’re about to answer for us.
I always suspected that Deep Thought was shallow…
Your work depresses the shit out of me. And not because I think you’re wrong, I agree.
When I read Neuropath all I could think was “Yeah, that’s what I see the neuroscience research saying”. It was a “me, too” moment. And the more I read of your writing on the subject the more of that I see.
And the more I read of research on how brains work, the more I see that they don’t. At least not in the way we want to think they do.
Hi Scott,
I like the savanah analogy – I didn’t understand what you meant by success in previous posts. I thought you’d were saying by showing up all this extremist reaction you’d shown the extremists something and suceeded there. What you mean is you’ve had great sucess finding prey, yourself. A rich valley! That makes a lot of sense – though I don’t know why Philip should feel ashamed – he wanted to express his disgust by promoting ostracism. But here’s another method to use as well – throwing book shaped molotovs into the crowd of people who disgust you, aimed at them yet also to burn them. Perhaps burn off some of the putrescence?
Unless Philip is like another of your savanah predators, like Theo and Benjanun, who (like all predators), are very careful not to get wounded – and anything their size could wound them. They always prey upon predators considerably smaller than they are (if you take herbivores to be predating upon grass). If that’s the case though, I doubt he’ll feel ashamed. Why would a lion feel ashamed at not protecting the bison it hunts?
Of course the followers of Theo and Benjanun think they will be the alphas that will protect their followers. But as neither engaged the other, it shows really they are just predators and their followers are, to them, just a living larder.
What can I say, I really liked the analogy!
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
I read your exchange with Duke. Considering how educated he is, he is frightening. The reason he is frightening is because he is part of an ideology so secure in its rightness it doesn’t even see itself as an ideology.
When Duke is using third wave feminist power-privilege theory – which is itself hate speech designed to dehumanize men and whites – to critique one’s lack of insight, that is driving one’s self further onto the rocks, not away from them.
This isn’t a question of humans being clowns but to what extent some humans at least seek out tools of self-criticism which would expose their own lack of perception or bias to some arbiter outside themselves. People who use straw men or disclaimers like “I know I’m not perfect” or “I’m not always right” need to prove what kind of systemic approach they might use to come to that conclusion and proof of actually having done so.
The problem with using tools of self-criticism is one has to feel they are needed in the first place. It is one thing to imagine humans as clownish and for a human to unwittingly embrace clownishness. Racial-sexual supremacist power-privilege theory is an example of embracing blindness.
An example is how Duke’s intersectional ideology talks about the Crusades, or rather, lies about them, wittingly or unwittingly. Intersectionalism is an ideology that not only regularly complains about Eurocentrism as one of its central tenets, but about colonialism. The Orwellian conflict there is they have no problem with colonialism (or slavery) defaulting to a self-serving Eurocentric view, since intersectionalism is anti-white and anti-Western. That is essentially a person who is blind on blind. Within intersectional ideology, “Eurocentrism” is therefore a word that ceases to have any neutral meaning. It is a tool of bias and propaganda, the opposite of a tool of self-criticism.
Employing a larger historical context reveals the Crusades for what they are: an ebb and flow that lasted from the 7th century until the 20th, not European colonialism and white supremacy acting in some isolated vacuum. Intersectionalism despises that larger context or any hint of “compared to what?” It gets in the way of themselves and their prey. Men like Duke have no real prey; they are unwitting do-gooders who have adopted an anti-white, anti-Western ideology by proxy, thinking of it as “social justice.”
This is the source of the social justice warrior lies about Tolkien being a racist because of his “easterlings” and “Southrons.” In fact Tolkien had every justification to create such a foe based on the ceaseless invasions and probings of Islam into Europe from the 7th to the 17th centuries. However in intersectionalism, there is only one sort of colonialism, and it is only American frontiersmen and redcoats. Mughals, Ottomans and Arabs disappear in a puff of intersectional smoke. That is the institutionalization of clownishness, and only one of many examples one could bring to bear.
The revolving door principles used in examining Beale/Benjanun bring all this endemic stupidity out into full view.
This is not a question of moral certainty but the certainty that failure resides on a human level, not ultimately a racial, sexual or geographic one.
A ‘social justice warrior’ would probably respond to your argument by asserting that it is an attempt to use crimes committed by non-white people against white people in the past to excuse crimes being committed by white people against non white people in the present. I believe that justice, if such a thing can exist, can only exist between individual human beings, not between groups. I also believe two wrongs don’t make a right. They merely make for increased odds of a third wrong.
Regarding the Bakker/Duke dialog, as Scott pointed out, their disagreement regarding the ideological positions of ‘literary fiction’ producers and consumers is one that can be resolved empirically. In fact it might be a research project on which they could cooperate.
If Scott apologizes for comparing Duke and Beale… although fascists and communists do seem to share a taste for human blood.
The above is a joke. I don’t use emoticons and sometimes my jokes get misread. I merely mean that, other things being equal, the more certain you are of your beliefs the more force you are willing to use to defend or advance them. I do not mean to seriously imply that I believe Beale to be a fascist or Duke to be a communist. I think that Fascism and Communism are religions, like Christianity and Islam. All four are similar in that they
Provide compelling pseudo-explanations for human nature and man’s place in the world
Require faith, that is to say belief in the absence of or even in contradiction to the available evidence
Create an in-group that can define itself as superior to some out-group
Provide an eschatology that promises the in-group will eventually and certainly triumph over the out-group.
I think that for the purposes of this conversation the distinction that most matters is between those who have the capacity for faith and those who do not. I don’t mean to imply that this capacity is binary, but I do mean to imply that the extent of a given person’s capacity for faith is innate. If you have great capacity for faith you will find something to believe in…
I doubt there are any human beings who have no capacity for faith. In fact, I think we all have pretty much the same capacity — indeed, the same need for faith. The only difference is what we are willing to put out faith in. By your criteria, even scientific materialism is a kind of faith, for:
(1) It provides pseudo-explanations for human nature and man’s place in the world. It does this by mistaking description for explanation. As Wittgenstein put it, “… people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients in clearer insofar as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”
(2) It creates an in-group that can define itself as superior to some out-group: the out-group being, of course, atavistic, irrational ‘religious types,’ those ‘with a capacity for faith’ — unlike us, rational scientists.
(3) It provides a sort of eschatology that promises that the in-group will eventually and certainly triumph over the out-group — for science and technology are the only path to true knowledge and, ultimately, mastery over nature. Even if the in-group actually succeeds in carrying the out-group along with it, that would only cement its triumph: this faith is so powerful, so true that it needn’t balk at saving unbelievers! It is strong enough to save even them!
(All of which, of course, is believed “in the absence of or even in contradiction to the available evidence.”)
But in order for the Wittgensteinian’s fideistic stance to fly here he has to treat science in the horizon of the irrealist ways of worldmaking, ie as something that primarily pertains to the organization and signification granted to experience rather than as something with interventative potency that extends beyond that, and which is indeed capable of ways of world breaking. This is why the scientific period rather than the religious period is characterized by nihilistic dread and existensial anxiety, because science enables worlds to be broken and rebuilt at a much higher pace on the grounds of the real potency of science to do more than alter a psychological attitude or an ethical or social relation or practice.
But I think there is a real phenomenon of human metacognitive capacities to form ‘identities’ from any hypostatized practice whatsoever. Its legitimate to investigate the worldmaking concommitant with the scientific stance but the scientific practices are not reducible to the worldmaking engaged in on the basis of scientific practices. I don’t think all scientists necessarily fall into the metacognitive identity horizons of ‘religious scientism’ anyone. If you look at cosmology for example, why the laws are what they are in their factuality, is treated as a mysterious lacuna in the theories which people do attempt to propose explanations for.
I also read your exchange with Duke. I’m more convinced every day that a thorough course of Pyrrhonism is the best cure for the champions of critical thinking: a bit of self-purgating a priori medicine seems to be needed before hitting them with the empirical…
I agree. It’s the spectre of quietism that makes the savvy ones uncomfortable, I find. They feel naked without their ersatz implicatures.
[…] mine, here’s a transcript of how the comment thread to Shaun Duke’s response to “Hugos Weaving” (which proved to be a record-breaking post) should […]
Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.
To reichorn:
I’m fine with the idea of scientific materialism as a kind of faith. I think that all people have to have some capacity for faith, just because (as I said elsewhere in this comment thread) we never have enough information. I ought perhaps to have said something more like we have varying degrees of ‘faith in our faith’ so to speak. Is the faith it takes to drink strychnine and handle rattlesnakes under the authority of Mark 16: 17 & 18 (http://holiness-snake-handlers.webs.com/) the same faith it takes to expose ones self or a patient to smallpox because you think your cowpox vaccine is based on sound science? If they are different are they merely different in magnitude or different in kind? I guess the real question isn’t what we believe as much as what we’ll do for our beliefs. Miracles and atrocities, as Scott said.
The other problem with faith is that we sometimes think we have evidence, or even proof, when all we have is faith.
Off topic, but over on concious entities I was trying to argue conciousness was like the shadows in plato’s cave – simply a primitive outline of something else. But then I get told I have to explain the shadow, because ‘it is there’. I say ‘Well that’s how we speak, but it’s lazy speach because shadows don’t exist. It’s merely the absence of something.’
I still get told ‘shadows’ exist.
I asked my woman and she thinks the same thing, resorting to the dictionaries definition of ‘exists’ (even though the definition requires it to be part of ‘objective reality’ but a shadow isn’t on the periodic table. She said not all things that exist are on the periodic table)
So I’m curious as to how upstream I’m paddling on this and to take a micro survey of who else would argue that shadows exist? Hopefully Scott can reply as well, if I could take a bit of his time 🙂
What’s your definition of ‘exist’?
Let’s say that an absense of (in a particular set of spacial co-ordinates) materials/material interactions does not fall under my definition of ‘exist’.
But I guess the whole BBT (BBQ?) thing is about absences that tout themselves as existances. I just didn’t think it came right up to the level where people say, in regard to the concept of ‘shadows’ that they exist. I thought it was far more sunk down than that.
[…] with two very different extremists on the web (both of whom would be kind enough to oblige my predictions). This experience vividly demonstrated to me how dramatically the academic left was losing the […]
[…] years now I’ve been shouting from the fringe, shouting, warning about the political and social consequences of academic ingroup excesses. I’ve […]