The great British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks recently discovered that he has terminal cancer. A rare tumor of the eye that left him blind in one eye metastasized and now occupies a third of his liver. Sacks is the author of several books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and Awakenings (which inspired the moving, Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro). Perhaps as a kind of farewell, he penned a wonderful article in The New York Times. He writes,
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.” …I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished…I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well). I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends…I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
I look forward to his forthcoming work and wish him and his family the best. May his precious few moments be as exciting and joyful as he hopes for above.
Note: This piece is cross-posted at Junior Ganymede because I think they are awesome and they said I could.
Almost all of the many articles and blog posts in the lead up to the 50 Shades of Grey release last weekend have been negative, so I had some hope that better sense would prevail and people would stay home rather than prove that controversy and porn are quick and easy paths to profit. That just goes to show you that my sense of cynicism has room to grow. “Box Office: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Explodes With Record-Breaking $81.7 Million,” reads the headline at Variety, with the first paragraph providing the depressing details:
“Fifty Shades of Grey” sizzled at the weekend box office, setting new records for the highest-grossing Presidents Day holiday opener of all time and ranking among the biggest R-rated debuts in history.
Let’s start with some background. 50 Shades of Grey started out as an erotic Twilight fanfiction called Master of the Universe. When the book became massively popular online, E. L. James (who had written Master of the Universe under the penname “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”) rewrote it as independent book to avoid charges of copyright infringement. Apparently, she did this by basically using “find and replace” to change the names, because the supposedly stand-alone 50 Shades is more or less identical to the Twilight-derived Master of the Universe.[ref]Stephanie Meyer hasn’t sued yet, but then again she of the ostentatiously chaste vampire romance novels may be just as happy as E. L. James to downplay the connection.[/ref]
Fanfic is universally derided for poor quality compared to the source material, and Twilight is hardly great literature to begin with. Thus Sir Salman Rushdie: “[50 Shades of Grey] made Twilight look like War and Peace.” These books are truly, irredeemably bad. [ref]In case you’re curious: I did read Twilight. I have read many excerpts from 50 Shades, but not the entire thing. I’m willing to sacrifice for you, dear reader, but I have my limits.[/ref]
Poor quality didn’t hurt sales, however, and by 2014 50 Shades had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. In June 2012 when sales were at their peak, “nearly one in five adult fiction books purchased for women in June were from the 50 Shades Trilogy.” (Yes, world, there are two more: 50 Shades Darker and 50 Shades Freed. There will be movies. I’m sure we’ll all do our best to quell our rapture and maintain a decorous façade.) That quotes is from Jo Henry, by the way, who is the Director of Bowker Market Research which described the 50 Shades audience as “more likely to be women, live in the Northeast, and have a significantly higher household income.”
Actual 50 Shades movie poster with actual 50 Shades book quote. (the6thsiren)
And this is where we come to a real puzzle. It’s not that 50 Shades is popular despite being awful. There’s no accounting for taste, after all. It’s not even that 50 Shades is popular despite being pornographic. That is, tragically, just a sign of the times. It’s that 50 Shades is popular specifically with women (80% of the audience) despite being (according to a plethora of writers) deeply and irredeemably misogynistic. The series is basically a tale of how one powerful man grooms one vulnerable woman, isolates her from her family and support network, stalks her, assumes domineering control over her life (the classes she takes! the clothes she wears!), and eventually abuses and rapes her. And then they get married and live happily ever after. (Sorry, spoilers.) Who says romance is dead?
I am, of course, not the first person to hazard an explanation for 50 Shades’ popularity, and I think many of the extant explanations have merit. One of the best comes from Kirsten Andersen who explains the story’s appeal this way:
All we know about each girl [Bella from Twilight, Ana from 50 Shades] is that she’s ordinary – like, so ordinary that if you looked up the word “ordinary” in the dictionary, you would find their pictures – only you wouldn’t; you’d find a little mirror reflecting your own face back at you, because that’s the entire point. You’re meant to insert yourself into the story, and suddenly it’s you, in all your banal lack of glory, who has proven irresistible to these powerful, godlike, beautiful, deeply damaged men, and only you can help them find their humanity again. The best part? You didn’t have to do anything to capture their undying devotion but be yourself.
The wish fulfillment angle is especially ironic given the reactions of the stars who play Christian and Ana in the film. Jamie Dornan (who plays the abusive billionaire) found his role “a massive challenge” compared to playing other characters who were “sick dudes, serial killers.” For her part, Dakota Johnson (who plays Ana) said simply “I don’t want anyone to see this movie.” The people who come closest to having fulfilled this particular wish don’t appear to have enjoyed the experience.
Andersen certainly has the voyeuristic narcissism pegged, and she also explains the appeal of “damaged men” by a need to be simultaneously saved and savior. Despite all the filth, she insists this reveals that the “core” of the story is “about unconditional love and redemption.” Not that Andersen has been beguiled. She points out that “in reality, Christian’s all-consuming “love” would warrant a restraining order, and Ana’s refusal to leave him would eventually land her at a battered women’s shelter or dead.”
I like Andersen’s explanation a lot, but there’s one aspect it doesn’t resolve. Christian is not just a damaged man in need of saving. He is a dangerous, abusive, manipulative rapist. What’s the appeal there?
It may be that there is some reality to conventional wisdom that girls prefer the bad boys and that nice guys finish last. Last year a Newsweek article reported on a study that determined that heterosexual men view kindness (measured as emotional responsiveness) as a favorable trait when evaluating potential mates. Women, by contrast, were less attracted to men that they rated as more responsive. One of the researchers speculated that “women may perceive a responsive man as… less dominant.”
The idea of dominance cropped up in another study, this one reported in the Telegraph, which found that marriages are stronger when one partner is dominant. The study also found that in more than three quarters of cases, the dominant partner was the male partner. A German study covered in Psychology Today reached more nuanced conclusions. According to that study, women prefer more aggressive men (“who often embody the Dark Triad, a personality constellation that encompasses Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.”) for short-term relationships, but preferred “less masculine” men for long-term relationships. The authors theorized that this strategy allows women to “maximize their reproductive success” because “appetitive-aggressive” violence (commonly found in stereotypical bad boys) might actually “be an advertisement of good genes.” If that’s the case, then a short-term relationship with a (genetically superior) bad boy followed by a long-term relationship with a (more reliable and supportive but genetically inferior) good guy could be the optimal evolutionary strategy.
Now, I’m not going to try and draw a straight line from popular journalistic accounts of a few academic studies to the sales figures for 50 Shades. If that worked, the best-seller lists would be dominated by professors cashing in on their expertise. Human nature is too complex for that and evolutionary psychology is particularly vulnerable to tendentious etiologies. At the same time, however, it would be foolhardy to presume that millions of years of evolution suddenly ceased to have an effect on human sexual behavior in the last few tens of thousands of years.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what the dominant feminist theory of today days. Christina Hoff Sommers identified this strain of feminism as gender feminism in Who Stole Feminism? She contrasted it with the older school of feminism she calls equity feminism. Equity feminism is about equal legal rights for men and women. Gender feminism is dedicated to ending sexism and defeating patriarchy.
Steven Pinker identified gender feminism as a part of the larger project of denying human nature in The Blank Slate. He wrote that this denialism is “entrenched in intellectual life” and specifically described gender feminism this way:
Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive—power—and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups—in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
The reason that gender feminism is so compelling is that it has such a simple story to tell. If all the differences between men and women are socially constructed and artificial, then the path to equality is obvious: eradicate those socially constructed differences. Furthermore, because gender feminism sees society strictly in terms of power and dominance, the assumption is that any difference is not only an unnecessary impediment to equality, but an instance of oppression.
This is why gender feminists fixate on differences in gender representation, quickly assuming that whenever there are fewer women this is proof of successful male domination. This seems credible when we’re talking about fewer female CEOs, political leaders, or academics in STEM fields. It’s less clear how gender feminism’s belief in universal male domination holds up in the context of some other discrepancies, however, such as fewer women in prison, more women in college, fewer women unemployed, more women winning custody of children, and fewer women dying in workplace accidents.
Equity feminism, with roots in individualism and classical liberalism, is much more flexible. An equity feminist can examine gender differences on a case-by-case basis to determine when differences are the result of sexism or discrimination and when they might be the result of individual choices. But, where equity feminism may win on nuance or flexibility (not to mention compatibility with basic science), the conceptual simplicity and ability to manufacture unlimited amounts of righteous indignation make gender feminism perfectly adapted to our viral, outrage-addicted society.
The end result is that the most dominant form of feminism is also the one that is dogmatically opposed to any and all gender roles. Combine that with the fact that biology and anthropology both reveal that gender roles are a part of our innate human nature, and we have a recipe for trouble.
Of course, claiming that gender roles are innate is not one of those things that you’re supposed to do in modern discourse, so it’s worth pointing out that Pinker includes a bullet-point list of the evidence in The Blank Slate that is impossible to summarize because it goes on for five full pages. As a couple of highlights, for example, he notes that “All cultures divide their labor by sex, with more responsibility for childrearing by women and more control of the public and political realms by men. (The division of labor emerged even in a culture where everyone had been committed to stamping it out, the Isreali kibbutz.)” He also observes that “many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what an evolutionary biologist who knew only their physical differences would predict.” He concludes by saying that “If that [social constructionism] were true, it would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way.”
So, going back to the research stated earlier, it is entirely possible that many women are attracted to men who show stereotypically masculine traits like aggression and domineering. The mistake that drives many people away from an understanding of evolved human nature is to erroneously assume that if we have innate characteristics then everything is pre-determined. That’s not true, because in many cases our innate characteristics conflict. The most important reason for being open-minded and accepting about the science of human nature is that—far from reducing us to impotent fatalism—it provides more control.
This is particularly true of maladaptations. Citing Pinker again:
The study of humans from an evolutionary perspective has shown that many psychological faculties (such as our hunger for fatty food, for social status, and for risky sexual laisions) are better adapted to the evolutionary demands of our ancestral environment than to the actual demands of the current environment.
So, in an ancient setting where calories were scarce, a hunger for fatty food made sense. In a modern setting where calories are plentiful, the same trait is one reason why obesity is a leading cause of death. And yet many techniques for combatting this maladaptation work by tapping into other innate characteristics. Think of a dieting group like WeightWatchers; it taps into our innately social natures and allows us to leverage mentor and friend relationships to win the battle against our drive to eat fatty food. Innate characteristics is not the same thing as genetic determinism.
So in a world where innate characteristics and gender roles are openly discussed and considered, it is possible to bend them in useful directions. A lot of this already happens without any conscious direction on our part. Organized sports, for example, can form a more civilized, pro-social alternative to violent aggression between men.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where gender feminism is categorically opposed to all gender roles, and therefore overt, potentially beneficial, and healthy avenues for exploring female attraction to male aggression and dominance are categorically ruled out. Men are actively discouraged from enacting these roles, and women are actively discouraged from appreciating them. Dating and courtship are dead, long live the hookup culture.
In simple terms: if you see huge demand for an inferior good, the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that there must be a dearth of the superior good. There are some major works with overt and pronounced depictions of gender roles (Twilight was one of them), but by and large any major book or movie has to go out of its way to apologize for, downplay, or offset any appearance of traditional gender roles. If you want to unabashedly celebrate gender roles, you’re going to run afoul of the gender feminism dogma police. It is therefore absolutely no surprise to find the pre-eminent example (50 Shades) coming from the margins of our entertainment ecosystem. There just aren’t enough dogma police to patrol every pornographic, self-published, fanfic out there.
In a healthier environment, 50 Shades would face competing models of male leadership, but gender feminism’s take-down of gender roles has left 50 Shades as pretty much the only game in town. It represents the collision of deep human desires for gender roles with an ascendant political ideology that is dedicated to eradicating them. It’s possible that the rape, abuse, and general misogyny play no role in attracting women to Christian Grey, but when it comes to finding someone to represent that aggressive male role there just aren’t a lot of options. When gender roles become monstrous in the eyes of society, only monsters like Christian Grey are left to enact them.
Actual 50 Shades movie poster with another actual 50 Shades book quote. (the6thsiren)
EverydayFeminism.com would like you to know that healthy relationships come in all shapes and sizes. The image starts with a monogamous couple (albeit gender-neutral) and then depicts a variety of relationships including:
Asexual (“We don’t have sex… but we sure enjoy cuddling!”)
Mixed Sexual/Asexual (“She fills her sexual needs with other people.”)
Open (“We also have romantic and sexual relationships with other people. That doesn’t make our love any less valid.”)
Polyamarous (“We do have to take turns for who gets to sleep in the middle” / “Tonight it’s me! I’m going to get all the cuddles.”)
BDSM / Kink (“Who’s a good boy?” / “ruff”)
None (“I’m happy flying solo.”)
The one thing that all of these relationships have in common is that they are defined exclusively in terms of their utility to the voluntary participants. Once you accept that premise, the rest follows. If relationships exist for the pleasure, security, comfort, and fulfillment of the parties to the relationship, then any relationship that meets those needs is an equally valid relationship.
It’s a nice picture, but it’s leaving somebody out. This is a worldview for the privileged and the powerful. Not in terms of gender or sexuality or class distinctions, but in terms even more profound: adults vs. children. Children have no vote about the relationships they enter into. They get no say in the circumstances of their conception, nor do they have any influence over the environment in which they are raised. They are truly and completely powerless and vulnerable.
Because children are held hostage to the behavior of the adults who care for them, they will face the consequences–for good or ill–of how adults choose to manage their romantic lives. Regardless of how effective polyamorous, asexusl[ref]Yes, I’m aware of where children come from, but just as someone in a homosexual relationship today might have children from a past relationship, so might someone in an asexual relationship[/ref], etc could be at providing a good home for children, that only works if children are in the picture to begin with. How can a theory of romantic / sexual relationship that doesn’t even admit to the existence of children possibly serve to protect their interests? It can’t.
As positive as it may attempt to be, what this image implies (but does not show), is a world where the needs of children come a definitive second to the adult pursuit of happiness.
Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced). The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect. Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration. Abstract reasoning and scientific thinking are the crucial cognitive skills at the foundation of all morality.
His evidence?:
“Numerous studies from the 1980s onward, for example, find that intelligence and education are negatively correlated with violent crime. As intelligence and education increase, violence decreases, even when controlled for socioeconomic class, age, sex, and race.”
“[N]ewer evidence that shows a positive correlation between literacy and moral reasoning, most particularly between reading fiction and being able to take the perspective of others.”
Negative correlation between high cognition and low demands for punitive punishment.
Positive correlation between high intelligence and classical liberal views.
“Positive correlation between the IQ of British children at the age of 10 and their endorsement of anti-racist, socially liberal, and pro-working women attitudes at the age of 30, holding the usual potentially intervening variables constant.”
The latest issue of Econ Journal Watch has papers from the Mercatus-sponsored symposium “Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don’t Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other?” The issue features articles from economists like Robert Higgs, Arnold Kling, and Scott Sumner. However, the two that seem the most interesting to me are the articles by Swedish economist Andreas Bergh and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I’ve referenced Bergh’s work elsewhere due to his dispelling of several of myths regarding the Swedish welfare state (from both the Right and Left). His symposium contribution argues that a Hayekian welfare state can exist in theory by combining “low regulation with social insurance schemes that are not terribly vulnerable to the knowledge problem.”[ref]This might go well with philosopher Erik Angner’s view on Hayek and redistribution.[/ref]
In Haidt’s paper (with co-author Anthony Randazzo), the two surveyed economists and “found a relationship between views on empirical economic propositions and moral judgments.” Furthermore, in footnote #3, it says that Haidt is working on a book on capitalism and moral psychology. I imagine it will look something like his Zurich.Minds presentation.
Today’s elite is a long way from the rotten lot of West Egg. Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties. It is not a place where one easily gets by on birth or connections alone. At the same time it is widely seen as increasingly hard to get into.
The rest of the article tries to explain why this is so, citing assortative mating as one big reason. Perhaps because of the same social attitudes that have led more women into the workplace and to getting college degrees, “between 1960 and 2005 the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25% to 48%, and the change shows no sign of going into reverse.” These pairs are much more likely to be correlated in terms of intelligence and other genetic factors that help people be successful, for one thing. But even if you set aside the genetic component, successful people are likely to raise successful children because they value success and they obviously understand what it takes to be successful. So the more you have assortative mating, the more a meritocracy ends up looking a lot like an aristocracy after all.
So… what do we do about? The Economist article has nothing to suggest.
But, writing nearly three years ago, David Brooks did. In Why Our Elites Stink he argues, similarly to The Economist that “today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined.” Although wealth is obviously a factor, he argues that “the real advantages are much deeper and more honest.” So, are meritocracies just fundamentally flawed? Brooks doesn’t think so:
The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.
Brooks’ argument is definitely not a popular for a lot of reasons. First, he doesn’t want to overthrow the meritocracy. He wants to work with it. I don’t think that this is because he likes it. I think it’s because he has that conservative tragic vision of the human condition: that life is fundamentally unfair and the only way to combat that unfairness is to recognize it. Some people are born smarter, stronger, and better looking than others. That will always be true. So life isn’t fair. There will always be elites. If the elites know they are elites, they can actually respond to that in appropriate ways (e.g. by being more service-oriented). But if we deny the fundamental unfairness of life, then we’re saying that people who have all the advantages don’t have to take any particular special care to help others.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.
Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.
If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.
Although it wasn’t a focus of his, I think another major element to this is the problem of America’s obsession with individualism. We have gone overboard in rejecting our collective, social nature. That is why modern hotshots have no sense of being “guardians for an institution the world depends on.”
Life will never be fair. There will always be elites. Saying that terrifies people, because they immediately think of racial or cultural or religious bigotry. But we can’t be so paralyzed by fear that we fail to heed reality. Also, the fear are largely unfounded, as The Economist observes that elites “included people with skin of every shade but rarely anyone with parents who worked blue-collar jobs.” So here we are, in a world that is unfair where elite people will pass down their elite traits to their elite kids. We can either try to redistribute everything (which will kill all incentives and lead to total social ruin) or we can instill an ethos of service and humility in elites. It’s not a perfect solution, but it seems like the best one.
Andrew Sullivan is a man of many beard stylings. They are basically all awesome.
Andrew Sullivan recently announced that he’s quitting blogging. That’s a big deal, especially if you were around in the early 2000s when blogging got started. (I once asked Megan McArdle about becoming a professional writer after reading The Up Side of Down[ref]Which is incredible. The subtitle is “Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” You should buy it.). She told me that the only shortcut she knew of was to start a blog in 2001. Oh well.)
I wasn’t around and blogging until 2006, when I launched my first (now abandoned) blog at Blogspot, so I’ve only come across Sullivan more recently, and I respect and admire him more for his political views (e.g. here) than as the god father of blogging. But I’ve read with interest the reaction of other elite bloggers to his news, like this Vox piece by Ezra Klein: What Andrew Sullivan’s exit says about the future of blogging.
Klein’s basic premise is that blogging is hard to scale. To some extent, this doesn’t matter to me very much. Klein notes that Sullivan “was trying to make his blog — and its sizable audience — into a business.” I, at Difficult Run, am not. I’d like to pay for hosting, but I have no interest in profiting substantially from DR. But Klein’s observation about why it’s hard to scale a blog is important to what we’re trying to do at DR. Basically, blogging is the antithesis of social networking:
Blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral… Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”
My thoughts: some of this is about the low quality of blogs back when there was no competition. You could afford to assume your readers would do background reading on you because there weren’t many bloggers to compete with. This is also why Klein talks about how in the good ole days blogging was “unedited,” which is basically a polite way of saying poor quality, I think. The connection between having a more direct, personal tone and editing is just not that strong. You can edit and still sound like a blogger: casual, informal, and with a distinctive style. I’m not impressed by that.
But when it comes to social media: I absolutely agree that blogging is hard to scale. It’s long-form writing. Social networking is about memes. And I don’t mean the technical term, I mean annotated cat GIFs. Social networking is also about tribalism, echo-chambers, and outrage. Sure, there’s a lot of that in blogs too, but in a blog you have time for nuance if you want to. In a meme? Not so much.
If we’re going to realize the potential of the Internet, we’re gonna need writers who are willing to write with some depth and readers who are interested in reading it. That’s what we’re trying to do here. Slowly but surely, we’re committed to carving out a little space where important social and economic and technological and religious ideas get discussed at greater length (and with greater context and civility) than outlets like Twitter or Facebook tend to foster. The reasons Klein thinks blogs are on the ropes, in short, are precisely some of the reasons I’m committed to staying the course.
Which, btw, is not at all a dig at Sullivan. I’m not sure Klein’s analysis was really correct. I think Sullivan’s business was largely successful and take him at his word that his real reason for hanging up his hat is to unplug and get back into the real world. That I can understand.
Larry Correia decided that twice was enough for him, but this year Brad Torgersen (friend of Correia, albeit a more mild-mannered conservative) took up the torch instead. So you’ve got a lot of blog posts from folks like Correia, Torgersen, John C. Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and others on what the Hugos have come to be about versus what they should be about.
One of the major flashpoints is a short story called, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” To the conservative contingent, this story represents basically everything that is wrong with modern sci-fi. John C. Wright wrote that It “was a story I could — and did — do a better version of in one sitting, in less than an afternoon,” ridiculed it for ripping off If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and called it neither a story nor science fiction. (I haven’t read his version, The Queen of the Tyrant Lizards, yet.) Sarah Hoyt attacked it at great length, writing that “It… could have been written by me at 12 and would have got, from my middle school teacher, exactly the sort of praise it got from science fiction professionals.”
In terms of substance: both Wright and Hoyt have a point. Even folks who have praised the work, like Ana Grilo, point out that there’s not really anything science fiction about it. Hoyt’s argument goes beyond questions of genre or quality, however, saying that “it’s the ideas packed into the story that are truly disturbing.” She goes on:
A story that reveals a total lack of knowledge of an entire class of people (manual laborers) and instead others them as sort of scary all purpose evil that will beat to death anyone who doesn’t look/act like them won an award voted on by – supposedly – adult professionals. Not only that, but adult professionals who keep claiming their tolerance and love of the “other.” What’s more, adult professionals who would almost certainly embrace “Marxism” as a good or at least correct idea. When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class? And admitting it?
Hoyt is not wrong. Want to see for yourself? The full text is online, and the whole thing is less than 1,000 words. Give it a read. I only read it after reading Hoyt and Wright trash it and my response was, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Don’t get me wrong: it’s melodramatic and a little manipulative, but I’m kind of a sucker for that.
The Sad Puppies crew is far from unanimous in anything, but to the extent that there is a consensus, it has two parts. The first part holds that the Hugos shouldn’t be merit badges for doubleplusgood duckspeak. I’m on board with that. Intentionally or not (could just be an offshoot of standard clique behavior), the Hugo process has come to be dominated by a small, ideologically uniform faction. And that’s a bad thing.
The second part of the consensus holds that the Hugos are bound to be a popularity contest, so you might as well make the a popularity contest with the widest possible fan base. Which boils down to pretty much one concept: fun. Again and again the central complaint of Correia, Torgersen, and others boils down to this nostalgia for sci-fi as pop entertainment. I’m not on board for that.
The three books that defined sci-fi for me as a teenager were Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead. All three won the Hugo, and Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead remain the only two books to win the best novel award for the same author in back-to-back years (1986 and 1987). Ender’s Game is an easy, fun read that has come to be marketed as YA in subsequent editions. I don’t know how many times I reread it, but it was quite a few. But Dune and Speaker for the Dead were not fun. They were grim and a little disturbing to the incredibly idealistic young man I was at the time. I didn’t reread either one until I was in my 30s, although when I did I found that they had aged much better than Ender’s Game (although I do still love Ender’s Game, don’t get me wrong!) If I had to pick one word to describe these books, it would not be fun. It would be great. Not like Tony the Tiger great, but like “great work of art” great.
I don’t think we have any better chance of finding objective criteria for greatness than we do for funness, but it’s still an important distinction. A great work can also be a fun work, and I don’t think that a Hugo award winner should ever be a slog to read. But a great work doesn’t have to be a fun work. A great work is a work that is reaching beyond fun, which may (or may not) come along for the ride.
I’ve read a good proportion (about one third, I believe) of all the Hugo-winning best novels. They do not come close to living up to the standards of Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead, but the decline in quality is not some sudden, new problem.
The first winner ever, from 1953, is The Demolished Man. It doesn’t hold up very well, but it’s clearly an attempt to be a meaningful, significant book even if the psychological theories are dated to the point of quaint. But if you look at books like They’d Rather Be Right (also known as The Forever Machine) which won in 1955 or Waystation (also known as Here Gather the Stars) which won in 1964, you’re going to see message fiction so didactic, awkward, and transparent that Ancillary Justice (which won in 2014) appears downright subtle by comparison. Let’s be honest: lecturing the reader may be most closely associated with Robert Heinlein, but it’s been a tradition in sci-fi since the beginning. If you want to fil in the gap between the 1950s and the 2010s, look no farther than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which got a nomination in 1994 and a win in 1995 and 1997. These books are basically just the mirror image of Ayn Rand. (On Mars.)
The fact that message fiction is winning in the 2010s is not news. Message fiction has always been a part of the tradition of sci-fi. That’s just the baggage you carry with you when you’re “the literature of ideas” (as Pamela Sargent referred to sci-fi.) Whether the ideas are political or technical, there’s always the risk that they are going to steal the show and ruin your story. Hugos have gone to books like Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama which are nothing more than flimsy, slipshod excuses to show off clever inventions. It’s not exactly message fiction, but it’s the same basic problem: a story that exists as an excuse for someone to tell you this really neat idea that they had. It’s like listening to someone describe their dream to you: shoot me now.
Nope, what is different about the 2010s is not fun-vs-message. It’s that the message has never been so dogmatically uniform. Heinlein and Robinson will both frustrate you with their philosophical meanderings (although Heinlein could also write), but at least they are polar opposites. Being frog-marched through a tour of someone’s neat invention might make you weep for the English language, but at least you’re not going to be labeled as a bigot if you find fault with Niven’s ringworld concept. (For the record: the concept really is stunning.)
The current crop of social justice message writers imagine they are the first on the scene to explore gender or write sympathetically about LGBT characters, but the only way it is possible to think that is if you have not actually read the masters who came before, folks like LeGuin and Bradbury that should be household names even if you don’t read a lot of sci-fi. The philosophies and minority characters of contemporary social justice writers have been an integral part of the sci-fi community for literally decades. There’s nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants, but it is galling when a writer looks down from their lofty perch and thinks they made it up there all alone. That’s not the real problem, however. The real problem is that these writers are not only interested in expressing their message fiction in their writing, but also in enforcing conformity to it outside of the writing through (e.g.) control of the SFWA and domination of the awards process. The risk is not that we will get stuck with award-winning, unreadable message-fiction dreck. We’ve had a half century of that (off and on). The risk is that genuine intellectual diversity—which has been one of sci-fi’s greatest contributions—may finally be stamped out. That is an existential threat to the genre.
Which is why, as I said, I am basically on board with Sad Puppies. I am particularly happy that they went out of their way to put some authors on the slate who are liberal rather than conservative, as an expression that sci-fi should welcome intellectual diversity. Bravo. Let’s fight back against the homogenization of sci-fi. Down with echo chambers and three cheers for cognitive dissonance and multi-party conversations!
But when we do all that, I’d rather shoot for greatness than for fun. When I think of greatness, I think of a work where a great idea and great writing come together. Not necessarily a great story, however. Wright knocked “If You Were a Dinosaur” for not being a story, but I wonder what he would think of LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” This work is also arguably not a story, since it has not a single named character, no dialogue, and—strictly speaking—no plot. It is also, without doubt, one of the most powerful short stories ever penned in the English language, and it won the Hugo for Best Short Story in 1974. Once again, I urge you to judge for yourself. Here’s the complete text. It’s a little longer than “If You Were a Dinosaur,” but it’s also much better. Be warned, however, it might break your heart. Which is to say, it is not fun. But it is great.
This is why I can’t hop on the populist bandwagon that wants to dismiss literary sci-fi. Literary sci-fi, when it fails, fails miserably. You have fiction that is neither fun to read nor great. Case in point: Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series. The first book in that series, Shikasta, was literally unreadable for me. (That didn’t stop her from winning a Nobel in literature. Go figure.) But when it is good, it can be really profound. I didn’t like every single story in The Secret History of Science Fiction (an anthology of literary sci-fi), but I did like a lot of them. I also found a book like Never Let Me Go incredibly powerful. I don’t care that The Handmaid’s Tale is message fiction because the writing is incredible and the story is also really, really compelling. I know The Road is trendy, but when I read it last year I decided it deserved the accolades.
I don’t have anything against fun fiction. Every time I start a John Ringo series, I find my self-control vanishing as I pony up for the sequels in Audible instead of waiting for my monthly credit because I just can’t restrain myself. (Side note: no one can tell me with a straight face that Ringo doesn’t have a political agenda loud and clear in his books, either.) Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series doesn’t do it for me, but his Grimnoire books were amazing, and contained some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever read in any genre. Jim Butcher is my favorite living author, bar none, due to his incredible Dresden Files series which is definitely some of the funnest reading I’ve done in my life. Nor am I discounting fun fiction as merely fluff: both Ringo and Butcher have brought tears to my eyes. (That might seem a bit odd, especially of Ringo, but I dare anyone to read the first chapters of Islands of Rage and Hope and not wipe their eye at least once. If you pass the test, congratulations: you have no heart.)
But let’s be honest: the reason most franchise fiction doesn’t get nominated (despite its popularity and despite a lot of it being fun) is that most of it is dreck. There, I said it. It’s mediocre writing just one notch above fan fiction designed to milk diehard fans who would pay money for a book containing nothing but the ingredient lists from breakfast cereals if it had Star Wars or Star Trek on the cover. And let’s further stipulate that if the Hugos were really just a broad-based popularity contest we could skip the whole nominating / voting hoopla and just use pick the best-seller for the year. Then the problem just reduces to data availability and politics are out the window (except as they pertain to the aggregate purchasing behavior of fandom). Nothing says “popular” more loudly than “sales,” am I right?
The trouble is, we don’t need an award for best-seller status. We already have that award. It’s called “best-seller status.” What the Hugos should try to be, in an ideal world, is the best guess of people who are smart and educated (about the sci fi canon in particular) of which of the stories that came out this year are going to be the stories that will still be powerful, relevant, and important in the future. In short: which of this year’s stories are great.
Sometimes, the awards have done a pretty good job of that (as with Dune, Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and several others). Sometimes, the awards have done a lousy job at that. But, until now, the awards may have been very uneven, but they were not hijacked and used as a tool in an ideological war. I’m rooting for Sad Puppies. If the Hugos just went back to their regularly scheduled unevenness: that’d be great. But hey, as long as the topic is open for discussion, I’m pulling for us to aim a little higher.
“Heart of Africa” is a feature film set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country consistently misrepresented. We will show it in its dignity and beauty. The film is based on experiences of missionaries there, both African and Anglo. One of the missionaries is a Congolese former revolutionary and another a young man from Idaho who has heretofore not seen black people. Aime Mbuyi, who was a revolutionary before he became a missionary, has provided the screenwriter with full descriptions of the revolutionary meetings, including the songs sung at the boarding school where the revolutionaries lived.
The film will be bi-continental, much of it filmed in South Africa using the “Out of Africa” production team, with portions shot in Kinshasa, DR-Congo. Our director is one of the best in the nation, Sterling Van Wagenen.
The initial goal of the Kickstarter is $30,000, but they can do a lot more if they raise the funds.
At the $400,000. level, we can move into filming beyond the preliminary and do full principal photography. With another $100,000–making a total of $500,000–we can do editing and post-production, and we can integrate the music as well. (Music will be one of the most compelling aspects of the film.) Were we to raise $1.8 million, we could not only complete the film but move into wide distribution.
That’s a long way to go, but this is a project that is well worth supporting. The faster we help them get to $30,000 the better shot they have of getting to the higher goals, and the early days of a Kickstarter campaign can be the most crucial. Check it out and if–like me–you think that this is a story worth supporting then lend a hand. Backer levels start at $5. Here’s the link again.
Nathaniel recently pointed to a new study that reported the drop in unemployment benefit duration in 2014 led to an increase in job creation.[ref]This type of evidence goes hand-in-hand with the research from the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan.[/ref] An NBER study[ref]New version found here.[/ref] toward the end of 2014 on minimum wage hikes complements this research.
The abstract reads as follows.
We estimate the minimum wage’s effects on low-skilled workers’ employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a “target” group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a “within-state control” group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers. Lost income reflects contributions from employment declines, increased probabilities of working without pay (i.e., an “internship” effect), and lost wage growth associated with reductions in experience accumulation. Methodologically, we show that our approach identifies targeted workers more precisely than the demographic and industrial proxies used regularly in the literature. Additionally, because we identify targeted workers on a population-wide basis, our approach is relatively well suited for extrapolating to estimates of the minimum wage’s effects on aggregate employment. Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.
As shown above, the study found that minimum wage hikes “significantly reduced the employment of low-skill workers” as well as their “average monthly incomes.” Furthermore, low-skilled workers (especially those without a college degree) experienced “significant declines in economic mobility” over time. As entry-level jobs decreased, so did the chance for low-skill workers to gain the work experience and skills to move up the economic ladder. As economist Arthur Brooks put it, there are no dead-end jobs: each one brings more experience, more skills, and consequently, more economic mobility. We should stop promoting policies that make entry into the job market that much harder.
The great British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks recently discovered that he has terminal cancer. A rare tumor of the eye that left him blind in one eye metastasized and now occupies a third of his liver. Sacks is the author of several books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and Awakenings (which inspired the moving, Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro). Perhaps as a kind of farewell, he penned a wonderful article in The New York Times. He writes,
Science writer Michael Shermer argues that we are in the 
[ref]Which is incredible. The subtitle is “Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” 
