How Did We Come to This?
For those of you still wondering why I quit SFWA and why I made as big a public stink about it as I could, please read the following guest post by Fail Burton:
There’s a scene in the film Soylent Green where Edgar G. Robinson looks at a piece of raw steak and some vegetables and says something like “How did we come to this?”, and he starts crying.
Here’s how I see this: anyone who came up the old way reading Heinlein, Asimov, Forry Ackerman, Stan Lee, Ray Bradbury knows the culture, messaging and atmosphere was the complete opposite of a thing like the KKK. There is absolutely no doubt of that.
There was NO INSTITUTIONAL HARASSMENT AT ANY TIME of non-whites, gays or women embedded in those stories, embedded in the messaging. Quite the opposite.
I’m not naive. In the ’60s there was plenty of “liberalism” in that culture. That is not the same thing as hate. I’m not talking about liberalism, or controversial social issues. I’m not talking about people I disagree with about how bridges are funded, abortion, Vietnam, long and short hair, the Watts riots, prayer in schools and a thousand other things I might passionately agree or disagree with. That’s America and I tolerate differences and life goes on. We still got along, we were still Americans, not people who hated.
I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about all those things re-visited, but this time through a scrim of pure hatred based on race and sex. Prayer in schools is one issue. It’s quite another when Muslims can do it and I can’t because of some daffy notion of white guilt and lies about the Crusades. That’s not a principled difference all share in or suffer in. We today have a virtual KKK now sitting at the heart of liberalism. That is far worse in SFF. KKK is where I draw the line.
If anyone had told me 30, 20 or even 10 years ago we’d have a thing like a KKK squatting right in the heart of the culture that has inherited SFF and comics I’d have told them they’re nuts.
I would feel completely different if these folks wrote only occasional articles about white privilege or white-washing covers. That’s when something is a legitimate issue. But it’s not like that. It’s a daily torrent of attacks within the SFF community that are hell-bent harassments of men, whites and heterosexuals.
I don’t know about you, but after Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury, that’s absolutely stunning, and an absolute stunning fall from grace.
I can go on Twitter and find that filth at any minute of any day. And it’s not a fringe. It’s the presidents of the SFWA, their officers, Nebula and Hugo nominees, serial panelists, editors, and magazines. I’m not going to list quotes but there’s this right NOW on Twitter:
“Do we really need more men explaining feminism to women? Do we need ANY? Go explain it to other men if you’re so inclined.” – Steven Gould, president of the SFWA
Men are inferior. Whites are inferior. Heterosexuals are inferior. It never stops. In case you didn’t notice, that’s not about funding a bridge or diversity or politics. That is an attack. It is hate speech. I know that because that same idiot would never in a thousand years put “black,” “women,” “gay” or “Jew” in there, presumably because it would be bigotry. In other words that naive fool actually agrees with me and is too dumb to know it. He is carrying water for insane gender feminists and their phobic hatreds of straight white males. Because of the SFWA, a virtual KKK is dug into our community. Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury would spit on these people.
My question is, how can anyone NOT write about that? How in the hell can anyone NOT write about daily hate speech entrenched in our community? How does boredom enter into that?
How did we come to this?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
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Saturday, November 1st 2014 at 12:58 pm |
Did you have this song in mind when you wrote the title of this post?
Saturday, November 1st 2014 at 3:07 pm |
As with many of these points of polarized difference, I wonder if it may not come down to Inigo Montoya’s famous dictum, “I do not think [that word] means what you think it means.” Mr. Burton notes that there was *no* institutional harassment of women, non-whites or non-straights in SF of the classic era, and I would tend to agree with him because I tend to agree about what “institutional harassment” means.
The problem is that the SJW faction being here criticized does not so agree, on either point: they don’t mean by “institutional” what we mean, and they don’t mean by “harassment” what we mean.
It seems to me that “institutional harassment” is being used by Mr. Burton to mean consciously organized acts of explicit rejection and/or hostility, on the line of published and enforced rules of exclusion driven by expressed and common supremacist opinions. That’s because for “logician” types like us, for something to be “institutional” means it has to be in the rules and formal acts of the institution, and for something to be “harassment” means it has to be active, visible and direct, something that actually happens, that someone does and can be seen doing. If neither of those obtains, then it’s neither institutional nor harassment; a lower degree of stories from minority authors or featuring minority protagonists does not in itself constitute harassment unless it is provably due to an explicit formal editorial policy of rejecting such submissions.
But for the politically-irrational (meaning here, quite literally, that they do not believe politics operate by rational thinking) types of the SJW movement, this is not the meaning they use. For them, “institutional” means simply “what most of the people in the institution do in fact do, say or act, regardless of the rules or absence thereof”, and “harassment” means simply “habits of social interaction, either towards us personally or concerning people like us as a group, that discourage us from full participation and engagement in that institution by making us feel unwelcome, rejected or disrespected, thus condemning us to a de facto if not de jure lesser status; and this can include, most powerfully and simply, passive lack of due representation or invitation to participate“. “Harassment” can thus comprise nothing more than simply not selling as many stories to a magazine, or there simply not being as many non-white, non-male or non-straight protagonists, as one thinks there should be; and if this lack is common to the institution, then it’s “institutional”, however little deliberation or conscious choice goes into it. (If isolated acts of conscious harassment as we mean them do occur, then that only strengthens the perception; the “bad apples” are seen as symptomatic of an institutional attitude that condones them and thus makes them more likely.)
The fooferah that blew up over Mike Resnick’s and Barry Malzberg’s complimenting in the SFWA Bulletin of a fellow editor on her beauty and sexual appeal is a classic example of this formal-status vs. informal-context dichotomy. On the formal rational level, complimenting someone on those traits is simply an act of praise for someone already acknowledged as an equal, and nothing to be upset about. In the SJW perspective, however, such an act cannot escape the historical contextual worldview that presumes any man expressing such an opinion to a woman (a) has no significant interest in anything else about her, and (b) is transmitting a social signal whose primary message is to tell the woman so complimented what her primary value to the group is (i.e. as a sexual partner) and that the speaker wishes to initiate such a partnering. If one truly believes such a thing, I think anger is not an unsurprising response; the problem is that to believe that, one already has to have bought into a level of bad faith about the basic nature of male-female interaction that makes peaceful resolution problematic.
Heterosexual white men, in other words, are not being perceived as “inferior” per se, though that is part of it in many ways. The most important quality attributed to us in this particular mindset is institutional, intractable and dangerous hostility, as a byproduct of (presumed) implacable self-interest in retaining our perceived privilege. That is why nothing said by SJWs in their crusades is seen as “hate speech”, because by definition that means only hostile speech directed “downwards” from the more powerful group to the less powerful, whereas hostility directed “upwards” is only “speaking truth to power”; the moral licitness or illicitness of an act is determined not by its intrinsic character but its extrinsic context in the power dynamic hierarchy.
The fundamental clash between this type of “social justice” movement and actual concerns for justice is that by investing so completely into this power dynamic one essentially reduces the process to a zero-sum game; so long as no benefits for a disadvantaged group can be perceived to be valid unless matched by a tangible and documentable corresponding loss of benefits for the privileged group — if justice for the disadvantaged can only be achieved through acts of retributive injustice for the privileged — all disputes between privileged and disadvantaged will tend towards destructive and irresolveable hostility. Which is fine if what you really want is to keep your cause going and your moral justification for your anger intact, but less so if you want to persuade anyone you really just want justice for everybody.
Saturday, November 1st 2014 at 3:53 pm |
For them, “institutional” means simply “what most of the people in the institution do in fact do, say or act, regardless of the rules or absence thereof”,
Distinguo: I have had this explained to me in words of one syllable by SJWs, and face to face, too. It does not matter what most of the people, or any of the people, do. The ‘institutional’ nature of the oppression simply means that the entire fabric of society is oppressive, even if not one individual person ever does anything that harms the alleged victims or their infinitely precious and fragile feelings. Not one! The mere existence of the alleged oppressor classes constitutes ‘privilege’ for themselves and ‘oppression’ for others.
You give these people far too much credit.
The most important quality attributed to us in this particular mindset is institutional, intractable and dangerous hostility, as a byproduct of (presumed) implacable self-interest in retaining our perceived privilege.
Again, it is our existence that they object to. We are not possessed of any such quality as ‘intractable and dangerous hostility’. The hostility is the institution; it is immanent; it is omnipresent; and if we point out (correctly) that it does not exist, they pour scorn on us and tell us that we are too stupid to see it, because we are blinded by our privilege. If we ask, then, what this privilege consists of, we are told in tones of even greater scorn that it consists of our ability to be blind to the institutional oppression. It is a perfectly circular definition.
We are not dealing here with an ideology, even a rational one; we are dealing with a carefully taught and fanatically enforced form of group paranoia. Intellectually, it is on an exact par with the official doctrine taught to the German people before the First World War, that they were completely surrounded by implacable enemies who would destroy them at any moment, and were therefore justified in attacking and destroying every other nation in Europe. In fact, some European nations allied themselves with Germany, and others opposed it, on grounds of plain old national self-interest – just as you would expect; the same as with any other nation. But the Germans taught themselves to believe that they were uniquely oppressed, and thereby gave themselves (as they imagined) a licence to oppress others.
There really isn’t much else to see here, except for the damage that these people are doing to civil society by their organized political action.